H. Rider Haggard and the Venerable Bede

** This is a cross-post from my personal blog, Ask Nicola **

Yesterday I was feeling torpid and decided to actually read some of the free books I downloaded a few weeks ago, last time I was feeling ill.

I read King Solomon's Mines by (Sir) H(enry) Rider Haggard. I'd always assumed I'd read it before. (I read a bunch of his books as a child. My favourite, easily, was She, though I don't remember much--we're talking forty years ago--apart from the power and glory that was Ayesha. Yum. Echoes, for the child me, of Jadis of Charn, aka the White Witch.)

Anyway, I'm reading along, not recognising anything--apart from the tropes. After all, Haggard pretty much invented the Lost World genre. It's all here, the full-bore colonial overkill: adventure, wild riches, characters who are More Than They Seem, manifest destiny, etc. Jolly good fun if you can cope with the wholesale extermination of game, women as chattel, and adult Africans as either cruel or naïve. (It displays the full panoply of -isms, with the exception of homophobia. Haggard seems touchingly innocent regarding the admiration of manly men. Or maybe he was having fun. He was clearly having fun in other ways.) After about fifty pages I adjusted, and settled in for the happy slaughter.

Once I relaxed, I began to recognise chunks of prose. Haggard was obviously delighting in ripping off the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, and a whole host of other vaguely recognisable Classics.

One passage that struck me particularly was a scene wherein the intrepid explorers debate whether to undertake a risky journey across the desert to find the fabled diamond mines. One of their number, Umbopa, asks the leader of the expedition, Sir Henry (is the name a coincidence? I think not) Curtis, "What is life? [T]ell me, white men, the secret of our life--whither it goes and whence it comes!" Then he answers his own question:

"You cannot answer me; you know not. Listen, I will answer. Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere."

Now look at this passage from the Venerable Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People--I'm using the Project Gutenberg translation, whose author I don't recall, offhand), in which one of Edwin's thegns is arguing in support of a conversion to Christianity, on the grounds that Christ alone knows what's what, while we, as puny human beings, do not:

"The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad ; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm ; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant."
(HE II.13)

Haggard adds some Africa-specific stuff to Umbopa's speech: "Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the Hand with which we hold off Death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset." But it's Bede in essence.

I love the notion that something written in the eighth century (concerning events in the seventh) is here being applied to the nineteenth century and read in the twenty-first. It's yet another indication of the influence of Hild's time (and Bede's work) on the present day.

Speaking of which, Hild is calling. Time to get back to her.

an update

Perhaps this will surprise no one but I like the novel I'm writing. I've spent a 100,000 words taking Hild through childhood and am now poised to introduce her to young womanhood. Not a moment too soon.

Don't get me wrong. As I've said, I'm enjoying this novel--delighting in it, in fact. But writing that many words about a child has been a challenge. For one thing, there's no sex. I'm not used to parsing a character's world without the electric tightening of sexuality running through it. It's odd. Lots of people around Hild have been having sex--they're human, after all--but she notices this from the perspective of a person who doesn't know, on a visceral level, what that means. And then there's been the difficulty on getting the most basic information: where did they sleep? What did they eat, exactly, and when and with whom? How did they feel about dogs? Naturally, all this complicated by Hild's ever-changing status. She begins as the second child of an Anglisc prince-in-exile in the forest land of the British people of Elmet. Then she's in Deira, at the brand-new court of Edwin, her uncle. Then she's playing rag-tag-and-bobtail with a warband travelling north of Hadrian's Wall. And so on. Every time I work out one set of details, everything changes. I've lost count of the halls, camps, wagons, vills, ruins, settlements, wics (etc.) I've had to invent and then discard after ten pages. Then within each, say, vill, there's the byre, the dairy, the hall, the weaving huts, the smithy, the kitchens, the temple enclosure, the well or spring, the kitchen garden, the new church... And then different people use these places differently: the wealh and the gesith, the women and the men, the nobles and the priests.

However, I've reached the point where Edwin has been king of Northumbria (Deira and Bernicia), and then overking (of the Angles, and possibly some Saxons, and the probably-Jutish Kentishmen--and, y'know, women), for well over a dozen years. Hild is beginning to return to places I've described before, travel in wagons I've already mentioned, take ship in vessels previously encountered. I can sometimes write as many as fifteen pages before I have to go look something up (and then spend an entire evening getting crosser and crosser trying to reconcile radically divergent scholarly opinion or, worse, stare at nothing, just an empty hole where the data should be).

By now I've mostly worked out how to keep one foot in the not-contravene-what-is-know-to-be-known (particularly regarding gender roles) camp and one foot in the I-can-make-exciting-shit-up! camp while finding a good narrative through-line. I'm happy with my solution to the competition between my need to make Hild extraordinary and to give her agency, and for her to be absolutely representative of her time (and a child, and female).

So now, for a while, I get to play. Now I get to take Hild back to Elmet--the area around present-day Leeds. I was born and bred in Leeds. I love it on a DNA level. Now I get to imagine it fourteen hundred years ago, before cars and roads and train tracks, before power lines and grown-for-product forestry monoculture, before the wolves and the bears were all killed and the cloud systems were never formed by contrails. All that and sex too...

I'm deeply excited.

I just got a fabulous grant!

The Authors' Foundation, administered by the UK's Society of Authors, have just given me a grant. Now I can do my research in England in person.

Can you spell Bedes World?

I'll be in Yorkshire and Northumberland mostly--Bebbanburg, Goodmanham, Sancton, York (again), Whitby (again), hopefully Yeavering... Any other suggestions?

Oh, this is going to be awesome! Just wish I could have got it earlier--I'd have been at Leeds, drinking beer in The Stables, talk talk talking up a storm about Hild. Hey, maybe next year!

2,000 year-old carnelians

*** This is a cross post from my daily blog because I feel guilty about not posting anything here for weeks. ***

photo by Jennifer Durham

Around my wrist I wear a set of 73 carnelians cut and faceted in Roman workshops in the first century. They were a present from Kelley for our tenth anniversary. I am passionately attached to them.

I use the plural, workshops, because it's obvious that they are from several different times and places--different colour and clarity, different sizes, different wear patterns. Some, I think, might have been worn for a couple of hundred years; some for only a generation. They were dug up from Bahariya Oasis in Egypt, a centre of Greco-Roman winemaking around the third and fourth centuries. In other words (though no one at the gallery would admit this), they are grave goods.

I don't know the provenance, the chain of custody, of my beads. All I can tell you is they came from a respectable gallery in Australia. I prefer to believe that they were properly excavated, recorded in context, and then legally sold. But I honestly don't know. All I know is I won't give them up, and they've sparked much daydreaming.

They are part of the organising matrix of my fiction about Hild. Originally, I thought I'd write one longish novel about this fascinating woman. But then I found that she wore my beads. And then I wanted to write about a woman of the 3rd century CE who also wore the beads, and a woman of the 10th century, ditto. (Rather thrillingly--at least to me--the tenth century woman is Aud the Deepminded, the historical namesake of Aud of The Blue Place and two other novels.) And the Hild novel grew in my mind to two or possibly three novels. So I have a four or five novel sequence laid out in my head: the Carnelian Sequence.

They look particularly beautiful in the sunlight. Over the years I've tried to catch their fire in photographs, and been driven to despair. The picture above, taken by FoAN Jennifer Durham, comes the closest to how they look in real life. (I believe she used tungsten lights to mimic sunlight.)

So my creative dance card is pretty full, just with the Carnelian Sequence. And yet, as always, I have ideas circling, waiting to land, like a skyful of planes running low on fuel: movies, tv series, stories, novels, graphic novels. Some will crash before I can land them safely, but, wow, it feels marvellous to watch them all tonight, twinkling away up there.

pewter Hild

Medieval stocking stuffers! What a cool idea. (Via Heavenfield.) Pewter whatchamacallits from Aebba Art Gallery. I've always been very fond of pewter--though I hated polishing it when I was a child. It was always my job before Christmas: rub rub, polish polish, tuh. It was the old-fashioned kind of pewter, too, with lead; hand-hammered. Beautiful in candlelight. I hadn't given it much thought, but I wonder if Anglo-Saxons used pewter much. I know there was a lot of tin in Britain. That and a smidge of copper and antimony (and lead) are all you need. I don't know how people got antimony, though I do know its sulphide is kohl. So if the women were into cosmetics, no doubt they had access.

No, I'm not going anywhere in particular with this. Just noodling. These things would make awesome Christmas tree decorations...

most heinous use of a musical instrument--so far

I know very well (that is, I think I know) that 'harps' in Hild's time were essentially lyres, like this:

reproduction of Sutton Hoo lyre at the British Museum

However, story-wise my notions of 'harp' are so strong that I've taken the liberty of giving Anglo-Saxons gut-strung lyres, like the one above, and the British--especially the Irish--more traditional twelve-string beasties like this one from the Winchcombe Psalter:

11th c winchcombe harp (from The Winchcombe Psalter, c. 1030-1050 AD), photo from Simon's Anglo-Saxon Harp page

In addition, I've strung the British harps with bronze rather than sheep gut. Their singers are better, too. (Some cliches one simply shouldn't mess with: Celtic harps glittering in the firelight; supple, trained voices, etc.)

To make up for their not-great harps:

I've given the Angles pipes and whistles (though I haven't bothered describing them--too many things to fret about: pan pipes? antler? bone? wood? how many holes? how tuned?) and drums. The Britons would have had these, too, of course, but it's just simpler to divide the spoils. I often wonder whether they had some kind of idiophonic, glockenspiel/marimba-type instrument: bells, wooden blocks, chimes. But this isn't a novel about music, as such, so I elected not to chase down those details in my research. (Naturally I'm eager to hear from those who might have the info at their fingertips.)

One thing I would really like to know more about is plainchant. I know James the Deacon accompanied Paulinus to the north and spent the rest of his life there. But I'm trying to imagine what it must have been like for Hild to hear that kind of music for the first time and fall in love with its cool clarity. Right now she thinks, It was the music stars might sing. Were it water, it would turn any bird who drank of it white. But I'm prepared to accept she might just think it sucked.

Then I run into the difficulties of resonance: plainchant only works in stone buildings. So immediately I have to make the basilica at York still standing, and I have to clear it of hangings and furniture and floor rushes. I have to cover the newly dug fire pits with hard board, which makes the place really, really cold... But it's lovely to imagine Hild standing there wreathed in her own breath, lost in the music. Then, of course, I send her back to the firelit halls of Yeavering with much meatier, rowdier music, perhaps something like this:

and, in the end, I know where my heart lies. But the heart in question is Hild's. Lots of decisions ahead...

Update on Hild, plus Where do they sleep?

illustration of 10th century (I think) sleeping arrangements

I've been working on my Hild novel for a year now. She is twelve. I have 75,000 words. (To put that in context, most novels are around 100,000.) If you believe Bede's suspicious symmetry, she lived to the ripe old age of 66--so this is turning into a huge project, much, much bigger than I'd anticipated. I'm enjoying it enormously.

Right now in the narrative Hild is about to witness the assassination attempt by Cwichelm's man (yes, I know his name, but don't want to give it away to my primary--non-historian--reader, who reads this blog). She's met Paulinus, and heard James the Deacon lead his first group of half-trained choristers in plain chant (the only suitable venue was the ruined basilica at York, stripped of all furnishings to improve the acoustics). Æthelburh is pregnant. I've gone against received wisdom and have already married Hereswith off to Æthelric (also known, it seems, as Egric to his North Folk, where he rules as prince while Eorpwald is king proper of the East Angles).

One thing that I find I'm fudging, though, is the issue of where Hild sleeps. She's with Edwin, so she travels from vill to vill: York, Bebbanburh, Sancton, Goodmanham, Barton perhaps, somewhere near the Derwent perhaps--I'm positing a new vill built upon some Roman remains near Stamford Bridge--and so on. I've done a little reading on the archaeology of as many of these places as I can and, well, it's not helpful.

If Hild were a warrior-type, a gesith, no problem: she'd bed down in the mead hall with all her fellow sword swingers. But where does a royal relative, a 12-year-old girl, sleep? Looking at the Yeavering evidence I'm tempted to say there was a family hall, or women's hall, not far from the main hall, and Hild could sleep there safely. At other places I've imagined a women's quarters screened off from the main hall but in the same building. I've pictured her with a real bed, which comes to pieces, in a pinch, for travel. But I'm aware that I've taken this notion from funerary practice and it may be inaccurate for daily life.

Anyway, I'm punting here. I'd love to hear some educated opinions (or total guesswork; it's all welcome) on the matter. Are there good sources anyone can recommend? (Preferably online, but I'll take print if that's all there is.)

As always, thanks in advance for your help. I know I'm always asking for stuff, so...is there anything I can do for you in return? Anything of my process/progress you're curious about?

dogs in the 7th century

I don't know much about dogs; my sister had one when I was seven, but I'm a cat person. Nothing against dogs, I've just always lived in cities, which I think is a hostile environment for large dogs (and small dogs, in my experience--small though it is--tend to yap). So, regarding dogs: utterly ignorant. I've been researching the 7th century for a while now (for my Hild novel), but find I still don't know much about it. So, in this regard too: utterly ignorant. Now I'm faced with writing about dogs in the 7th century and my mind has gone terrifyingly blank.

Here's how I imagine the dog situation in the north of England circa 627:

• There are herd dogs--large, loyal protectors of flocks (sheep, cows, goats, maybe even geese) that run with the flock to protect it from predators but don't herd the flock under commands from the shepherd/cowherd/goosegirl. These dogs (sometimes just one, occasionally a pair) would spend much more time with the beasts than the humans. They eat, sleep, even play with the cows/sheep. Perhaps they were imprinted as puppies and mostly think they *are* cows/sheep.
  

• There are sight hounds, coursers and so on, like deerhounds--probably largely under royal or at least 'noble' control.

• Bulldogs would control large animals going to slaughter.
  

• There are hounds of war: huge things that perhaps wear spiked collars and are trained to do one thing: kill. These would most likely be kept in royal kennels because they might not be safe to allow anywhere else.

• Perhaps isolated farmsteads or small settlements would have a couple of dogs-of-all-trades.

• Perhaps people would form bonds with some of these dogs. Perhaps that would be discouraged. Perhaps not.

I read about Cuchulain and his hound, and I wonder, Did they care for each other? Or was the dog just a tool--an important and precious tool, like a sword, but not something to devote feeling to? If dogs were, to some degree, pets, how would they be trained? Would women be allowed to keep dogs? Would they want to?

Hild has basically had a puppy forced upon her by the queen, Æthelburh, who wants a dog for herself (I've yet to work out why) and thinks that if at least one other female at the royal vill--even a child, like Hild--has a dog, Æthelburh won't seem like such a foreign weirdo.

So now I'm trying to figure out how it all works: what would the dog (a bitch, I've decided) look like? Would it have a leash? How would it be trained? I'm thinking a cross between a wolfhound and a Molossian-type herd dog--big, but not as heavy as a Molossian or as tall as a wolfhound--that has protective but not herding instincts, with an urge (though not an overwhelming one) to chase prey. It would hit maturity around 18 months.

So my question for both dog-lovers and medievalists is: does any of that make sense? Do you have suggestions?

anachronism!

I'm wondering how people feel about anachronisms in historical fiction. Last week I came across a startling instance in a new paperback reprint of a well-received historical-type fantasy (perceived level of tech maybe 2nd or 3rd century CE). This is from a very respectable publisher, lots of critical attention, etc. Yet I hurled it across the room after reading for three minutes. Why? Because on page 5 a character feels a "thrill of electricity." Electricity. In the 2nd century. In a fit of pique, I tossed it in the recycling.* And then tonight, rereading one of my all-time favourites, Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave, I found a fish "jackknifing." It bothered me. Not enough to throw the book, but enough to pop me out of the story for a moment.

I'm working really hard while writing this novel about Hild to be rigorous with the language, probably to an excessive degree. For example, in one dreamy, other-wordly passage I wanted to talk about aconite, the poisonous purplish blue flower--but that name wasn't around until the Normans. Okay, I thought, I'll call it Monkshood. But, no, that makes no sense in a society with no monks (we're in Northumbria, pre-Paulinus, pre-Aidan; no doubt there were some Brittonic-speaking priests skulking about but I can't quite imagine monks). So, okay, how about Wolf's Bane? Good--except apparently that usage wasn't known until the tenth century. If I've done my research properly (and, as always, I welcome corrections), the Old English term for aconite was probably thung (þung), a generic term for poisonous plants. But, really, thung? Tuh. It's not poetic at all. So I compromised and called it 'the thung that people call Wolf's Bane'--and one minute later deleted it. I can't bear that level of clumsiness in fiction. So, despite all my efforts, the flower is now Wolf's Bane and I just hope all the botanists and medievalists will not fling the book at the wall.

And I haven't even begun to work out how to deal with the place name problem....

So, your thoughts? Will anyone even notice my (attempted) rigour? Am I being too fussy?

* Yes, I know, I should have recycled it via a loving home, or the library, or something, but it was a freebie (publishers send me a lot of stuff), and I suspect they sent out so many, and it's such rubbish, that soon all potential loving homes will be inundated.

scriþan

I've come across this verb four times in Crossley-Holland's translation of Beowulf. Shrithe (scriþan). I can't quite triangulate on its meaning. I imagine something between slither and slide and slink and slip but it's irritating not being able to pin it down. I know that in most languages there are no exact equivalents of many words but, still, it's beginning to bug me. I'm not sure if it's a word from which I'm supposed to infer magnificence and/or inevitability, awe or disgust. Is it more 'slither' or 'sail majestically' or what? At etymonline.com I found this:

SHRITHE - Bruce Mitchell's "Invitation" gives this account of the word: "The [Beowulf] poet uses the verb scriþan four times -- of hellish monsters, of shadows, of Grendel, who is both a hellish monster and a sceadugenga 'shadow-goer' and of the dragon. The word seems to imply smooth and graceful movement (it is used elsewhere of the sun, clouds, and stars, of a ship skimming over the sea, and of darting salmon in a pool) and an element of mystery (other poets use it of the coming of May, of the beginning and ending of the day, and of the gradual passing of human life). In Beowulf, there is also a suggestion of menace and danger which is echoed in other poems, where the word refers to the spread through the body of a disease which could be cancer and to flames raging unchecked. Had it survived, poets would have used it as a rhyme for 'writhe' and sports writers would have turned it into a cliche applicable to footballers, cricketers and baseballers, tennis-players, and boxers."

If not for the 'darting' salmon, I'd go for something like 'steal' as in 'stealing up to the door'--a sense of stealth, and smoothness, and movement. Any better suggestions?

brave Beocat, brood-kit of Ecgthmeow

In honour of it being a holiday, I thought I'd post this poem by the Beowulf scop's cat, that is, Henry Beard. Illustration by, well, me. (It's an old pic; if I were doing it now I'd add a little boar, with bristles along its back, on top. Possibly some engraving on the sides.) Anyway, enjoy the poem--I'm particularly fond of "Hrodent slayer."

Grendel's Dog, from Beocat

Brave Beocat, brood-kit of Ecgthmeow,
Hearth-pet of Hrothgar in whose high halls
He mauled without mercy many fat mice,
Night did not find napping nor snack-feasting.
The wary war-cat, whiskered paw-wielder,
Bearer of the burnished neck-belt gold-braided collar band,
Feller of fleas fatal, too to ticks,
The work of wonder-smiths, woven with witches' charms,
Sat upon the throne-seat his ears like sword-points
Upraised, sharp-tipped, listening for peril-sounds,
When he heard from the moor-hill howls of the hell-hound,
Gruesome hunger-grunts of Grendel's Great Dane,
Deadly doom-mutt, dread demon-dog.
Then boasted Beocat, noble battle-kitten,
Bane of barrow-bunnies, bold seeker of nest-booty:
"If hand of man unhasped the heavy hall-door
And freed me to frolic forth to fight the fang-bearing fiend,
I would lay the whelpling low with lethal claw-blows;
Fur would fly and the foe would taste death-food.
But resounding snooze-noise, stern slumber-thunder,
Nose-music of men snoring mead-hammered in the wine-hall,
Fills me with sorrow-feeling for Fate does not see fit
To send some fingered folk to lift the firm-fastened latch
That I might go grapple with the grim ghoul-pooch."
Thus spoke the mouse-shredder, hunter of hall-pests,
Short-haired Hrodent-slayer, greatest of the pussy-Geats.

From Poetry for Cats, by Henry Beard (Villard, 1994)

Playful mating with another woman

Thanks to Lisa, I've been apprised of a 'lovely tantalizing bit' of woman-on-woman sexuality. It's from the tale of Niall Frossach (a king in the mid-eighth century, High King from 763 CE), from the Book of Leinster, folio 273b-274a, lines 35670-35711 (Vol. 5, p. 1202). Also, apparently, in Liber Flavus Fergusiorum and a late version in Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe (c. 15th century):

There was a fine, firm, righteous, generous princely king ruling over Ireland, Níall Frassach, son of Fergal. Ireland was prosperous during his reign. There was fruit and fatness, corn and milk in his time, and he had everyone settled on his own land. He called a great assembly in Tailtiu once, and had the cream of the men of Ireland around him. Great kings and wide-eyed queens and the chiefs and nobles of the territories were ranged on the stately seats of the assembly. There were boys and jesters and the heroes of the Irish in strong eager bands racing their horses in the assembly.
While they were there, a woman came to the king carrying a boy child, and put him into the king’s arms. "For your kingship and your sovereignty," said she, "find out for me through your ruler’s truth who the carnal father of the boy is, for I do not know myself. For I swear by your ruler’s truth, and by the King who governs every created thing, that I have not known guilt with a man for many years now."
The king was silent then. "Have you had playful mating with another woman?" said he, "and do not conceal it if you have." "I will not conceal it," said she, "I have." "It is true," said the king. "That woman had mated with a man just before, and the semen which he left with her, she put it into your womb in the tumbling, so that it was begotten in your womb. That man is the father of your child, and let it be found out who he is."
(translated by David Greene in the Swedish journal "Saga och Sed,"1976)

The implications are intriguing, to say the least. Though it seems the king might reasonably expect a woman to lie about having sex with another woman (and so can assume there was some stigma in such sex), the phrase 'playful mating with another woman' is far from judgemental. In fact, it all sounds very jolly and uncomplicated: just a casual tumble, grins all round.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the matter? (Does anyone have any further tidbits? I'm learning a lot...)

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.