retconning beowulf

I've been reading Beowulf again, this time Crossley-Holland's translation. I'm struck by its similarity to episodic television drama. (Radio drama too, of course, but apart from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, radio serials were before my time.)

For example, halfway through, around line 1270, we get a recap, a Previously on Beowulf the Grendel Slayer moment:

...one of them, Grendel
that hateful outcast, was surprised in the hall
by a vigilant warrior spoiling for a fight.
Grendel gripped and grabbed him there,
but the Geat remembered his vast strength,
[...] thus he overcame
the envoy of hell...

In daytime soaps characters often announce things the other characters already know. So we'd get some awful piece of dialogue such as, 'Hello Susan, identical twin to my amnesiac foster mother'. In Beowulf, starting around line 1335, we have:

...she has avenged her son
whom you savaged yesterday with vice-like holds
because he had impoverished and killed my people
for many long years...

Why does Beowulf need to be told what he did yesterday? He was there. This is for the audience, because some of them might have missed the earlier installment.

But the biggest swerve of all, for me, was the retconning of Grendel. (Retconning is a fan term, meaning 'retroactive continuity', basically putting a sudden new spin on the information we thought we had about a character, or event, in a long-running series.) Think of all the daytime soaps you've ever watched (or just read about--because none of us have ever stooped to that rubbish, oh no), or that moment in Tootsie where Dustin Hoffman's character pauses dramatically and announces 'the hospital administrator you thought was a nice girl actually turns out to be A MAN!' In Beowulf we find that our good old-fashioned monster turns out to be THE OFFSPRING OF CAIN!

I'm not a scholar. I haven't studied Beowulf at any level. Perhaps this is all old hat to the literary historians out there. But it's new to me, and extremely interesting. I've been under the impression that Beowulf was meant to be an epic, one-night performance, like an uncut Shakespearean play, but clearly it's an episodic drama. Why else would the scop put in reminders, rewinds and retcons? (Yes, I know the Anglo-Saxons drank a lot--but so much they couldn't follow one poem over the course of an evening?) It's pretty clear to me that this piece was designed to be performed over several nights; Yule, perhaps, or during the multi-day visit of the king or ealdorman.

Thoughts?

wonderful research resource

I've just found this (thanks to Lisa Gold, researcher extraordinaire):

http://www.intute.ac.uk/ Intute is an annotated collection of web resources for education and research, created by a network of UK universities. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites and write detailed descriptions. This site contains over 120,000 resources in the arts and humanities, health and life sciences, social sciences, and science, engineering, and technology.

Typing in 'anglo-saxon' led to an overwhelming list of links. I could spend a month here...

anglo-saxon in the round

Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum is holding an exhibition, "Anglo-Saxon Art in the Round." For all of us who can't actually get there, here's an audiovisual introduction to the show.

I think it would be marvellous to hold something like this in one's hand.

One of my most treasured possessions is a string of 73 Roman carnelians (first century AD). I wear them all the time, wrapped around my wrist. Most people don't notice them, but I smile to myself because I know I'm wearing jewellery two thousand years old. I positively lust for something gold from times past. A gold thrymsa would delight me beyond measure. Actually, a little sceatta would thrill me, just something the people I'm writing about might have touched.

Coins are on my mind because I've been thinking about money, and trade. Here are my current assumptions: that the economy of north of England, specifically Northumbria, would be still based largely on barter, or payment in kind, with hack silver being a rough and ready exchange where necessary. Coins were much more common in the south, particularly in Kent, with its Frankish trade, and East Anglia, with its brand new king's wic at Gipswic. So I've imagined Hild let loose at Gipswic with two small chest of hack silver, and then tried to work out what she could buy. And how.

First of all, she'd change some of her hacksilver for coin: gold and silver, which for convenience I'm calling shillings and pennies. I'm imagining the gold shilling is a biggish coin weighing about 4 grams and the silver penny is tiny and about 1g. I'm imagining gold was around eight times more valuable than silver, so one shilling = 32 pennies. I imagine you can buy a prime male slave (young, healthy, strong, well-mannered, and skilled) for two shillings, and for a penny a suckling pig or two dozen big loaves of bread. (A lot of work, too tedious to go into here, has gone into those assumptions so if anyone has better figures please--please!--share. I don't want to look like an idiot when this book is published.)

Then I had a lot of fun imagining the goods at Gipswic: the slaves, the imported glass goblets, the honey cakes, the Rhenish wine, the tiny perfume bottles, wheel-thrown pottery, cunning knives, ivory combs, gilt-bronze buckles... Then I had to figure out what it would all be wrapped in, and who would carry it, and how. And of course only a paragraph or two will actually make it into the book, but I feel hugely satisfied.

Hadrian: his show, his wall, his boyfriend

I just got the latest edition of British Archaeology, which is stuffed with wonderful articles on Hadrian, Hadrian's Wall, and the Antonine Wall. I was also thrilled to find a free DVD in the magazine, short films of Roman frontiers from all around the world--then crushed when I found it wouldn't play in my whatever-this-region-is DVD player. Pah. So now I'm going to fork out $70 for something I should have bought a long, long time ago: a region-free DVD player.

Mike Pitts, the editor of the magazine, writes a wonderful article on the British Museum's new Hadrian exhibition, Hadrian: Empire & Conflict, which, he believes, sets a new standard for public archaeology. There are many misconceptions about Hadrian's Wall--it's the border between England and Scotland, it was built to keep the Picts and Scots out of civilised, Romanised Britain, it's as far as Roman influence stretched in the early second century AD--which this exhibition (and the BA article) should quash. The most interesting notions, though, are one, the parallels the show's curator, Thorsten Opper, draws between Hadrian's times and today's world politics and, two, the role his wall may have played, geopolitically, and the role other more modern barriers play.

For example, he points out that one of Hadrian's first acts on accession as Emperor was to withdraw from Iraq (Mesopotamia). He ponders the Israeli West Bank barrier, how, although it was described by its creators as a defence against Palestinian terrorists, its actual effect is to break up communities: to destroy land, property, access to history and culture, and more. Hadrian's wall probably did the same nearly nineteen hundred years ago: its influence would have been huge north of the so-called frontier.

The show also isn't shy about proclaiming clearly, "Hadrian was gay." The exhibition features the Warren Cup:


and beautiful representations of Antinous--Hadrian's boyfriend --as Osiris and Dionysus. (I'm dying to know who will play Antinous opposite Daniel Craig's Hadrian in Boorman's adaptation of Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian.) BA's cover image shows the "Mondragone head."

So why is all this relevant to Hild? Because if Opper is correct in his supposition that the wall functioned culturally very like the West Bank barrier, the impact on northern British society would have been huge, rippling even into Anglo-Saxon times. I'll have to give some thought to this. Hopefully the DVD, once I can watch it (grrr) will help.

The Beautiful Sin

Hild is still prepubescent, but I'm already turning my research attention to sexuality. (In writing terms, I need to have facts about four years ahead of character and plot development so my unconscious brain can be knitting things together without having to worry about taking things to places my conscious brain later finds impossible.) So a couple of weeks ago I started asking around regarding academic opinions of how people in early 7th C. Northumbria might have regarded women and their sexuality.

A friend of mine, who used to be a medievalist before turning her attention to queer theory and film and literature, contacted an expert in the subject. We'd all read the usual suspects (both medieval and queer studies texts*) but, really, there wasn't anything specific about the people and times I'm interested in. As with a lot of my work, I have to just take a lot of guesses and then make shit up. At least I'm not contravening what is known to be known.

Anyway, between the three of us we decided that the most likely scenario was that all women (that is, royal women before the founding of nunneries) got married, and that if they then wanted to have sex with other women no one would much care as long as they were discreet. After all, the point of marriage was alliance, household management, and the provision of heirs. Married girls loving other married girls wouldn't have any impact on any of these points.

So Hild will marry, she will have children. But if I want, she can also notice women. What she'll do after she notices them I haven't yet decided.

Anyway, one of the books I read while pondering this subject was the Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (Garland, New York and London, 1996). In that book I came across two pieces that I thought readers might enjoy. The first is a poem:

Etienne de Fougeres. Livre des manières

translated by robert L.A. clark

There's nothing surprising about the "beautiful sin"

when nature prompts it,

but whosoever is awakened by the "vile sin"

is striving against nature.

Him [sic] must one pursue with dogs,

throw[ing] stones and sticks;

one should give him blows

and kill him like any cur.

These ladies have made up a game:

With two "trutennes" they make an "eu," **

they bang coffin against coffin,

without a poker to stir up their fire.

They don't play at jousting

but join shield to shield without a lance.

They don't need a pointer in their scales,

nor a handle in their mold.

Out of water they fish for turbot

and they have no need for a rod.

They don't bother with a pestle in their mortar

nor a fulcrum for their see-saw.

They do their jousting act in couples

and go at it at full tilt;

at the game of thigh-fencing

they lewdly share their expenses.

They're not all from the same mold:

one lies still and the other makes busy,

one plays the cock and the other the hen

and each one plays her role.

** The meanings of the words trutennes and eu are unknown and unattested to elsewhere.

The second is an anonymous letter between two twelfth-century nuns:

translated by peter dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the Euro­pean Love-Lyric, II. 479.

To C——, sweeter than honey or honeycomb, B—— sends all the love there is to her love. You who are unique and special, why do you make delay so long, so far away? Why do you want your only one to die, who as you know, Icves you with soul and body, who sighs for you at every hour, at every moment, like a hungry little bird. Since I've had to be without your sweet­est presence, I have not wished to hear or see any other human being, but as the turtle-dove, having lost its mate, perches forever on its little dried up branch, so I lament endlessly till I shall enjoy your trust again. I look about and do not find my lover—she does not comfort me even with a single word. Indeed when I reflect on the loveliness of your most joyful speech and as­pect, I am utterly depressed, for I find nothing now that I could compare with your love, sweet beyond honey and honeycomb, compared with which the brightness of gold and silver is tarnished. What more? In you is all gentle­ness, all perfection, so my spirit languishes perpetually by your absence. You are devoid of the gall of any faithlessness, you are sweeter than milk and honey, you are peerless among thousands, I love you more than any. You alone are my love and longing, you the sweet cooling of my mind, no joy for me anywhere without you. All that was delightful with you is wearisome and heavy without you. So I truly want to tell you, if I could buy your life for the price of mine, [I'd do it] instantly, for you are the only woman I have chosen according to my heart. Therefore I always beseech God that bitter death -may not come to me before I enjoy the dearly desired sight of you again. Farewell. Have of me all the faith and love there is. Accept the writ­ing I send, and with it my constant mind.

I like the second better than the first, perhaps because I've always disliked the nod-nod wink-wink style of poetry, perhaps because the first is all about what's 'missing'--an irritatingly phallocentric view of lesbianism--and perhaps because one is by a woman in love and the other isn't.

* I can't be bothered to list them all. I've read dozens and dozens, and they all have such grindingly long and dull titles. But here's a random sample (the ones that came to hand first when I went to the shelf):

- Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, John Boswell (Vintage, 1995)
- Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900, ed. Leslie Brubaker and Julia M.H.Smith (CUP, 2004)
- Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: The King's Wife in the Early Middle Ages, Pauline Stafford (Leicester University Press, 1998)
- Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints' Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (SUNY, 1996)
- Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, Bernadette J. Brooten (University of Chicago, 1996)

Heroice Age

A new issue of Heroic Age at last. Yay! Lots of ruminations on Arthur and folklore, leading off with a piece by C. Scott Littleton on parallels between two tales which may or may not have a common origin:

Abstract: In this paper we consider whether the Norse story of the "Sword in the Branstock" and the Arthurian tale of the "Sword in the Stone" may represent two variants of a tale about a celestial event that occurred 2160 B.C.E

Plus there's the usual assortment of reviews, letters, forum articles, etc., and what looks to be a promising new collaborative column from/with the Babel group. Good stuff.

visualising dairy buckets

Over on my Ask Nicola blog I had another question about writing. I answered it at length, but thought those who have been following my Hild-writing process might enjoy a snippet:

Sometimes I can have a good writing day yet not write much. This is happening more than usual at the moment, and it's related to writing historical fiction. Writing mainstream fiction is easy--everyone knows what a bed is like, what people eat and wear, how things work. For the seventh century--unlike, say, Regency England (the rake, the dandy, the ball, dance cards), or WWII (the Blitz, rationing, grey skies filled with barrage balloons, weak tea)--there are no handy plug-ins. I have to invent everything, every single thing, from scratch. If Hild walks into the dairy, what does it look like? (Would there be a dairy? Cows were most likely milked in the field, sheep in a pen.) How do you make cheese when there is no stainless steel? What do you store the milk in with no glass, no refrigeration? (You don't; you turn it into cheese and butter and whey.) How many women/girls does it take to milk how many cows and sheep? What are the buckets made of? (Sycamore, because it doesn't leave a nasty aftertaste in the milk.) And that's just process and artefacts. Social relationships were different, too. I've never written anything full of slavery before, never dealt with a heroic society without literacy. (That changes later, of course.) So a good writing day can be a good inventing/visualising day but a not-many-words-on-the-page day.

The rest can be found here. And now back to reading JLA.

Journal of Late Antiquity

I've just opened today's mail, and found volume 1, number 1 of The Journal of Late Antiquity.

"The Journal of Late Antiquity (JLA) is the first international English-language journal dedicated to the study of Late Antiquity writ large. The journal provides a venue for multi-disciplinary coverage of all the methodological, geographical, and chronological facets of Late Antiquity. All of Late Antiquity will be represented--from the late and post-classical world up to the Carolingian period, and including the late Roman, western European, Byzantine, Sassanid, and Islamic worlds, ca. AD 250-800. JLA is essential, not only as a space for scholarship dealing with practical and theoretical issues, but, in particular, to bridge the gap between literary and material culture scholarship. One of the primary goals of the journal is to highlight the status of Late Antiquity as a discrete historical period in its own right."

I note that the second article is by someone I've actually had dinner with, Edward James. (A first for me. Most medievalists--late antiquarians??--are just photons and electrons floating in the ether. Very kind, helpful, knowledgeable photons, it's true, but not entirely real to me.)

The journal looks wonderful. I can't wait to dig in.

charty process porn

I've been asked twice in the last week (once over at my Ask Nicola blog, once during a discussion with an Oregon book group about my most recent novel, Always) about charts: do I use them? What are they like? Are they on the wall? So I thought I'd talk a little about my process for this novel.

For my (still untitled) Hild novel, I am keeping a close eye on every single one of the sixty-six years Hild lived (614-680, according to Bede). I'm tracking the movements and changing mores of various dynasties (Deiran, Bernician, Kentish, East Anglian, Dalriadan, Pictish, and so on), doing my best to trace shifting alliances and geographies and beliefs--and building techniques and clothes and literacy and language and technology, and so on (and on and on).

I track all this stuff using the web--listservs and online journals and blogs--the library (I don't know how I would have coped without interlibrary loan; I have no academic affiliations whatsoever), bookshops (oh, these books are *expensive*), and occasional personal correspondence. I've been doing this for years, with the most intensive phase being last year.

My notes are extremely disorganised. When I first began, for example, I used yellow legal pads and a fountain pen. I discovered that fountain pen ink will pour right off the page if you knock a cup of tea over everything. I lost a year's worth of careful notes on jewellery and farming technology. I haven't had the heart to redo that work. By the time I came to researching food, I got canny, and used 3x5 index cards that I could, woo hoo, *sort alphabetically*. (Sadly, yes, this really was an exciting discovery for me. I'm a seriously crap researcher, no technique at all: I've never had to learn before this.) So now my food notes are safe: written in ballpoint and in a snap-closing plastic box. Family trees, most of them highly speculative, are all over the place: Wikipedia printouts, photocopies from library books, hasty scribble in the margin of a shopping list, intensively doodles-on curlicued 3x5 cards... I stuff them in folders, then lose the folders, or misfile them, and start another. I have a pile of print-outs on names, including handwritten--again, highly speculative--names of generations on either side of known names

On my wall are two maps: Britain in the Dark Ages, north sheet and south sheet. They're from different editions but I don't mind. It helps me understand the way information would have been gathered piecemeal in the seventh century. The 1964 edition is cleaner and simpler, but the 1934 is prettier, and more effective aid to imagination (though stinky with mildew and someone else's cigarette smoke).

I work from two desks. One in the corner of my office, taken up entirely by electronics--well, there's enough space to balance a notepad, too. (The wall maps are on the right hand corner wall.) The other desk takes the centre of the room. This is where my Big Chart lives. It's divided into 66 boxes, one for each year of Hild's life. This is where What Is Known to Be Known is written: the births, deaths, marriages, accessions, murders, baptisms, wars and so on. As I am about to begin each new section of the book, I study my chart, then write out two or three pages of notes, this time including highly speculative possibilities: after Raedwald's death, Hild travels to Gipswic and encounters her first abacus, or Hild's (fictitious) half-brother gets his first sword (which he will then use in a year or three to defend Edwin during the assassination attempt by Cwichelm's man, Eamer). Then I write the story, trying to pull in environmental detail (when are the lambs sheared? when do the moths fly? where will the moon be? how high the tides?). It's a slow, but joy-filled process.

I want this novel to have a kind of wild magic running through it, the magic of history and nature, of people and their triumphs and failures. I want it to be stately and inevitable. I want it to be exhilarating, heart-pounding, gut-wrenching. No doubt as I proceed I'll to make sacrifices here and there, privileging one state for another, but right now I'm still aiming for the Platonic Ideal of a novel: thrilling, educational, thought-provoking, morally uplifting.

no comparison

Today I got my copy of British Archaeology (May/June 2008) in the mail. On p.30-37 there was a wonderful, detailed article, "The Lost Royal cult of Street House Yorkshire," on the finds at Street House Farm, near Saltburn, North Yorkshire, the 'possible cult centre' graves with the fabulous jewellery. Everything is now beginning to make sense.


However, reading this article hot on the heels of the one in Discovery News makes me even more disgusted with the 'reporting' in the latter. In British Archaeology, Stephen J. Sherlock and Mark Simmons explain carefully the reasoning behind the possible Christian repurposing of the iron age coin (basically, the coin had a sort of cross-like pattern on the reverse, and the piercing of the coin meant that it would hang with that cross properly oriented). They also make clear the timeline of the inhumation: probably while Hild was founding Whitby.

Given that this site is only about ten miles from Whitby, my connect-the-dots fictional engine has been working overtime. I've decided who the powerful, high-status woman in that grave was and why she was there. I know why her jewellery and that of her cohorts is such a mix of Angle and Merovingian and Iron Age. And I'm having a marvellous time inventing it all. I'll do another, longer post on all that another time (when it's all set and sorted and written). For now I'll stick to the reportage aspect of all this: I only got to this thrilling (to me) new fictional place because the journalism in British Archaeology was honest, it made sense, it didn't contradict what is known to be known. Unlike that piece of rubbish in Discovery News. Tuh.

I am appalled

A friend just sent me this link to a Discovery News article on the recent excavation of a royal Anglo-Saxon grave. I'd read about it a few months elsewhere (thanks to links provided by a variety of blogs, for example Carla Naylund Historical Fiction) and this article wouldn't rate a mention but for its truly appalling inaccuracies. It's really, really bad. Either the reporter is misquoting Stephen Sherlock, or Sherlock is ignorant (or letting his publicity-seeking gene warp his judgement), or the editor had a total brain cramp and made stuff up. The article speculates that the 'stridently pagan' grave at the centre of the dig is of a royal woman, probably because of the truly striking jewellery found:



The reporter goes on to say that Sherlock believes the most 'likely suspects' for the identity of this well-provided-for body are 'Ethelburga, the wife of King Edwin,' or 'Eanflaed, the wife of King Oswiu,' or 'Oswiu's daughter, Aelflaed'.

I saw red. For one thing, if Bede is to believed, all three royal women were securely Christian. For another, Æthelburh is assumed to be buried in Kent, and Eanflæd and Ælfflæd at Whitby, where they were co-abbesses. Another leap, involves 'iron age coins':



These are said to be pierced 'to hang as if they were crucifixes' and therefore suggest 'at least one member of the [buried] group was interested in Christianity'. Since when is a piece of coin jewellery anything like a crucifix? This is a very, very sad piece of journalism.

So now I'm wondering, what's the worst bit of medieval sensationalism you have seen?

Most Heinous Use of an Historical Character (So Far...)

Time to confess: I've been taking unconscionable liberties with a well-known historical character.



I took a very brief and most definitely dubious mention of a possible siege of Bebbanburg by Fiachnae mac Báetáin of the Dál nAraidi, turned it into reality (well, fiction). But that's not the worst of it: then I had one of the hostages captured by Edwin turn out to be Fursey, aka Fursa, an Irish prince-monk who later in life spent time in East Anglia doing his best to bring Christianity to the godless heathens. (In my opinion, he didn't do a spectacular job.) Saint Fursey was known as an ascetic, but in my novel, he's a wine-swilling, foul-mouthed, sinfully proud, louche kind of fellow--but extremely well-educated. He spends a few months as Hild's tutor. He is about to travel with her to East Anglia where he'll see opportunities for the future, and then return to Ireland, go through a character volte-face, and return with his brother.

So if I know Fursey's saintly character is utterly unlike the picture I'm painting in my novel, why am I using his name? I'm not sure. For some reason, I feel compelled to. I think it's my Catholic upbringing; I am very (very) suspicious of 'saints'. I've spent too much time with Religious who use their religion as a political tool. In my opinion, those who end up being beatified have worked entirely too hard at becoming well known. Seriously good people tend not to bring their deeds to the public's attention. But, no, that's not the whole story. There's something about both kicking over stones, and about tying things together with familiar names that appeal to me.

Hild herself in my novel will have no unearthly, god-given powers--unless you count preternatural intelligence and a will of adamant. She has an innate sense of fairness but this will, of course, be tempered by her royal heritage: she's been raised to believe some people are more equal than others. But I'm not actively going against anything known to be known about Hild. I can't honestly say the same for Fursey. (At least I'm doing my best to make him likeable, in a bad-tempered kind of way.)

Anyway, I just thought it was time to admit my trespasses.

General Update

I now have 37,000 words. Hild is ten. She has just deliberately assumed the uncomfortable mantle of lightbringer, per her mother's prophetic dream. She knows she has no otherwordly gifts, but she knows this is the only way to persuade the king to do certain things she--being a very bright and observant child--believes to be necessary. She is very, very lonely.

Naturally, all is about to change: Roman Christianity is about to come to Northumbria, in the persons of Æthelburg, a princess of Kent, and Paulinus, a bishop. Hild, still very much alone, will find herself between a rock and a hard place. But she'll also be exposed for the first time to patristic learning. It should be interesting...

Edwin's banner, Edwin's family name

According to Bede, Edwin was preceded by a standard bearer, carrying a 'tufa'. My assumption has always been that this was a Roman-style standard, or perhaps a staff. At some point I'll need to work out what that looked like. But another assumption I'm making is that he didn't assume such pretensions until the late 620s, after he'd remarried and brought Paulinus's Roman Christianity to Northumbria. What did he use before then? A banner with a typical Anglo-Saxon animal totem, such as a wolf, eagle, raven, horse, or boar? I don't recall any mention of such a thing.

Does anyone have any references they can point me to? Failing that, any guesses?

Also, while the family names of several A-S dynasties are known, for example the Wuffingas, did Edwin's Deiran royalty have a dynastic name? Again, I've never noticed in my reading, but I often don't notice things until I need to notice them. So I'd appreciate any help, including educated guesses. Wild, blue-sky guesses would also work :)

Arbeia/Tinamutha (?)

I've got myself into a bit of a muddle, a plot hole involving time and geography: I need to get a warband from Galloway to Bebbanburg lickety-split. If they were only a few people, I'd put them on a boat to Solway Firth, then send them galloping along the Roman road to Arbeia-that-was, then taking ship up the coast to Bebbanburg. It looks good on paper, but I simply don't know enough about wind and tide and current, etc., to know if it makes sense. (Or how long it would take.) Also, for plot reasons, I need a small group to get diverted south, down the east coast, and end up in Streanæshealh.

Let me add that this is around 623, and it's Edwin's band, out on its usual summer ramble: looking threatening, picking up the usual tribute. (I imagine a big, very well-equipped band which prefers to offer overwhelming superiority in order to get the booty without fighting. But they're perfectly happy to fight if necessary. It's just that few groups at this time would be willing or able to even think of matching them, so they'd smile in public, chew their mustaches in private, and dig up the hoard.)

But then Edwin finds out something scary and has to hot-foot to Bebbanburg to protect it. (I'm on very thin ground here, historically. I read once, somewhere, that one of the Irish annals mentions Bebbanburg being beseiged by Fiachnae mac Baetain as a result of his on-going dispute with Edwin over Vannin/Mann -- but I haven't been able to remember where I read that, or which annals. All I've found is a very vague reference in Wikipedia.)

And then when I started thinking of Arbeia/Tinamutha, I remembered Osric. Given that Oswine was supposedly born there, it might be reasonable to suppose that Osric was living there at this time. But what would his relationship with Edwin have been? Would he be living quietly under the radar? Would he be part of Edwin's warband? Would he be a kind of coastal Ealdorman?

I'm feeling muddled. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Seeking OE reader recommendations

I've finally become wholly exasperated by the blank verse translations of my elderly edition of OE poetry. Can anyone recommend a really good collection? Bilingual would be best. I need all the usual suspects--Widsith, The Ruins, Wanderer, Fight at Finnsburgh etc., plus a few riddles--and the more I come to understand of OE, the more I realise what I have really won't do. In fact, I think it deserves a place in the dustbin...

place names/etymology

I need to decide what to call a fortified camp south of Carlisle, that is, what the people of Rheged in the early 7th C might have called it. It's known these days as Brougham; the Romans called it Brocavum (it was the base of Danubian numerii) but now we're a few centuries on. I know nothing of Brittonic etymology. However (because, y'know, I'm always willing to take a guess), going by the change of Eboracum to Ebrauc, perhaps Brauc or Broauc might not be too far off the mark. Thoughts?

Imagery

I spent a while yesterday morning sitting on a bench overlooking Puget Sound and was struck by how, although the water looked the same as it must have looked for thousands of years, the sky was very different. It was full of contrails--not just the sword-like slash of a just-cut trail, but also the gauzy cloud that such trails turn into. How long is it since I saw a trailless sky? Probably six or seven years (Sept 12th, 2001). It would be easy to fall into the unconscious trap of describing sky in terms of the twenty-first century.

But I'm writing about the seventh century. Skies were different, then. The smell of the air was different: no deodorant, no plumbing, no clean gas heat; no petroleum-based combustion engines, no Indian or Thai spices (not in the time and place I'm thinking of). No aniline dyes. No plastics. Lots of dung and disease. Lots of wet wool. Lots of delicately-scented weld, and the aromas of malting and oasting barley. Peat smoke. Baking bread. Bad teeth. Freshly tanned leather. Dogs. Horses. Unwashed hair.

And then there's the imagery. People can't pop up from behind a wall like balloons. They would have to pop up like, hmmn, like laundry with the air trapped in it pops from the water, like a piece of wood from a ship breaking up on the bottom of the sea. A horrible sound couldn't be like fingernails on a blackboard, it would be, well, uh, ask me later.

I love this part of the writing discovery process. It's not just about politics, or gender roles, or character or story, it's about building a world. I'm living in another time and country, and I don't need to pack.

Slavery, language, cultural annihilation

After a careful reading of Richard Coates' Invisible Britons (thanks, Marisa) I was pondering upon slavery, language, and cultural annihilation and, frankly, getting nowhere at the speed of light. And then in the Economist this week, I encountered an article about the evolution of language that ended (in typical Economist style): "As Noah Webster, the compiler of the first American dictionary, put it: “as an independent nation, our honor [sic] requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” In other words, if you don't speak proper, you ain't one of us." It was my way in.

Britons, I've decided, disappeared because their culture disappeared. Their culture disappeared because their language disappeared. Their language disappeared because they were slaves. Speaking Brittonic was forbidden or at least frowned upon by those with the power over life and death and to grant favour. If you wanted to belong/get fed/escape punishment/better yourself, you learnt Anglisc and used it. As those in power did not use a written language, no records were kept of interesting snippets of legends or songs. Brittonic was obliterated, just as in the twentieth century, with the advent of radio and television, many UK dialects and accents began to wither away. In the twentieth centure, if you didn't speak with something approaching the BBC accent (received pronunciation), you weren't quite the thing. You didn't belong.

I grew up in the north of England, surrounded by sturdy Yorkshire accents. My father, though, was from London, so at home I grew up using a long 'a', saying 'baath' and 'fahst' and 'grahs'. When I got to school, those around me assumed I was stuck up and trying to act better than they were because they used a short 'a'. 'Oooh,' they said, 'Miss hoity-toity.' They didn't like my being better than them--which is what they believed, simply because of the accent--but looking back it's clear I was treated differently because of it. (Sometimes this was an advantage, sometimes it really, really wasn't.) But my accent marked me. It's powerful stuff.

Coates' thesis makes complete sense to me. Brittonic died because it was not only dangerous to speak it but also painfully uncool. I'm going to have to go back to beginning of my draft and reimagine a lot. But now at least I have a way to approach the slavery issue. All very exciting.

Tribal Hidage

Today I started flipping through Barbara Yorke's Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England and I came across her discussion of the Tribal Hidage which, she asserts, was most likely put together for use by Mercia as a guide to expected tribute payments. The thing is, this doesn't make sense to me. Why would a king of Mercia want to list his own territory in terms of tribute? The way I see it, tributary payments of subject peoples would have been the responsibility of their king. So a king would only list the kingdoms, or peoples, of kings who 'owed' him. Or have I got the wrong end of the stick altogether? This is not making sense to me...

So if this wasn't drawn up by and for Mercians, was it a Northumbrian document? (And are some of the hidage amounts, e.g. only 600 for Elmet, indicative more of the friendliness of the overlord towards those territories than of the size/ability to pay of same? If so, why such a whopping amount for Kent?)

And if Barbara Yorke is wrong about this (and of course I'm quite prepared to be corrected in this regard), what else in her fab book (and, apart from the hidage thing, it is seriously fabulous--I wish I'd found it sooner) should I be wary about?