So … to be Seamus Heaney about it, we continue to be snowed in or under, whichever you prefer. I, like you I’m sure, have been struggling against its annoying aspects and enjoying others. Such as a good excuse to go out and about in a woolly hat clicking away with a digital camera. This one was taken not long after sunrise. It does not really capture the crystal brilliance of the moment. The woodland was like a fairy tale which put me in mind of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I wondered what those pagan Anglo-Saxon folk thought about a sun so full of light and yet lacking warmth. Did they, as some undoubtedly think, seek to rekindle it, with some kind of fire ceremony. And was the sun reborn or reinvigorated with life as a result? It is easy to view this sun as both corpse-like and radiant.
I have read much of that T.S. Eliot favourite, The Golden Bough, by James Frazer, which I know is now considered hopelessly out of date, in comparative anthropological circles, and even, I have read, imperialistic and seeking to impose some kind of patronising European ‘mindset’ on the world. Frazer, certainly, was a product of his times. Exactly as contemporary anthropologists are. Imperialist or not The Golden Bough is still a source of fascinating speculation. Much of the voluminous ‘evidence’ is anecdotal and it is difficult in many instances to see how it applies to the hypotheses advanced. The simple formula: Magic-Religion-Science as an evolutionary concept is certainly flawed. Many anthropologists now consider the central ’sacral king’ thesis very iffy, particularly with regard to the origin of diverse myths. This does not mean that sacred kings did not exist but that the entire history of religion and magic is highly unlikely to boil down quite so conveniently. Indeed I think it has been shown that the priest of the golden bough at the temple of Diana was very unlikely to have been such a king. One can hardly blame Frazer. Despite being supposedly more advanced in our approach, scholars still have a natural propensity for pouring a quart into a pint pot of their own making.
It is quite apparent that religion contains a great deal of magical thinking and that science is clearly capable of operating as a means of explaining phenomena or solving problems that are conceived as being ultimately divine in origin. Such simplistic linearity is patently false. Whilst it is often repeated as some kind of chattering mantra that science has steadily replaced religion, a quick glance around the globe shows that science has really replaced magic or aspects of religion which seek to affect in some way personal outcomes and can therefore be seen as kinds of magic, rather than religion itself. Science seeks to understand the physical world and uses an evidence based method in order to accomplish this. The rather neurotic need to apply this method to the whole of human experience is not science but scientism.
Frazer himself drew a comparison between science and magic which still seems reasonable to me but then followed it through untenably. As magic was replaced by religion so religion would be supplanted by science, presumably the advanced form of magic based on real evidence rather than some kind of supernatural knowledge. Which of course it is. This ignores the obvious fact that science also has been with us from the beginning even if it was indistinguishable from magic by its practitioners. Chemistry had its magical aspects right up until Newton. The great scientist was an enthusiastic alchemist and not above mixing up his approach with magic. However, this ‘civilised’ development appeared obvious to a person of Frazer’s time. In the same way man moved from superstitious savage to sophisticated scientist. It is interesting that while Frazer’s idea of primitive savage to civilised European is today rather embarrassing the comparison he drew and thinly veiled between Christian ritual and earlier more ’savage’ rites is still happily employed by those essentially antipathetic to Christianity for the very same reasons. Not that such comparisons are necessarily invalid but that the meanings allied to them are almost always prejudicial in some way.
Iced rose hips. Looking at these red berries among the branches puts one immediately in mind of embers in Mother Nature’s fire or of drops of blood around the crown of thorns or perhaps less hysterically but more boringly, of lovely spots of colour on a muslin cloth. To me they are beautiful but to a pagan Anglo-Saxon or a Gerard Manley Hopkins or even somebody with a connection to a quasi-religious ‘deep ecology’ they are profound. To appreciate this profundity, to try and touch it, is to draw closer I think to the characters of The Rune of Ing. We come back to The Golden Bough. What is certainly profound is the irony that while Frazer’s theories have been more or less discredited as science, as a largely anecdotal encylopedia of folklore, magic and early custom TGB is staggering. It seems to inspire a religious outlook on the world rather than undermine one. Especially of the Robert Graves neo-pagan variety. As a work of literature masquerading as a scientific thesis it is indubitably one of the most influential works of the Victorian mind. Rave on Sir James. Rave on.
Frazer’s work might just be the closest a scientific treatise has come to Tristram Shandy in terms of its endless digressions and parentheses. And I have only read the huge ‘abridged’ version. The full twelve volumes? I do have a life you know.
Shortly by a combination of science and magic, not to mention a great deal of praying, The Rune of Ing shall appear.
Happy New Year!
England’s green and pleasant land heavily fortified. I was prompted to write this post after seeing the ‘Time Team’ special. Good old Tony Robinson. I enjoy his Dan Brown debunking excursions too. As we have all been buried under snow drifts for the past week and Britain seems more like Siberia at the moment it’s nice to include a photo of Henry II’s aggressive pile taken on a summer’s day. The academics on the programme were at pains to point out that it was really a kind of ’show-offy’ status symbol for Henry. It looks pretty aggressive to me, however sumptuous the hangings in the king’s hall. Or perhaps I should say ‘defensive’. It is a thin line.
You will have picked up perhaps, on the tenor of this post which, as it is penned by somebody with an Anglo-Saxon interest, not surprisingly, betrays equivocal feelings about this castle. I was going to say ‘mixed’ but ‘equivocal’ does for it better. Feel free to interpret that howsoever you may. I think this peculiar feeling I have about the castle is similar to the one I have whenever I wander into an old English church and see the heads of all the statues smashed and a few dabs of fading colour. It is a feeling of wonder tainted with pointless regret. It is not even ‘regret’ because the ‘what might have beens’ are part of the richness. As I say it is peculiar.
I know Dover quite well and have visited the castle on more than one occasion. It was impressive as an empty shell but now it seems that English Heritage has done a wonderful job in restoring the interior of the ‘Great Tower’ to something like its twelfth century vividness. You can check out the virtual tour here. I fully intend to visit when I won’t need a snow-plough to reach it.
Henry II was William the Conqueror’s great-grandson and was an empire builder in the usual self-aggrandizing way. I do not necessarily mean his character, which I have read as being measured, learned, not to say sober and restrained. Possibly the latter virtue goes too far in that I believe he had several illegitimate children. Although this cannot really be held against him seeing as adultery has been a more favoured sport among the aristocracy than hunting. The two pastimes, as you might acknowledge, are not a million miles apart. When I say ’self-aggrandizing’ I mean it more in terms of his annexing ambition and obsession with status. Thanks to his marriage to the interesting Eleanor he acquired Aquitaine as well as England, in addition to Normandy and Anjou. In a tediously familiar Norman and Plantagenet pattern he pushed into Brittany and Wales and attempted with some temporary success to control Ireland and Scotland. Eleanor of Aquitaine, btw, ranks highly on my historical most like to meet for ‘friendship, maybe more’ list. That must be something near a history geek’s equivalent to the sci-fi buff’s Princess Leia fantasy. For the record my idea of Eleanor is nothing like Katharine Hepburn.
Moving on then …
Henry is one of England’s great kings although he spoke French, is buried in France, and was French. C’est la vie. For me, you can forget the Angevin Empire, by far the most interesting thing about Henry is the Thomas Becket story. One of the most memorable, English history has to tell. Almost by accident this king of the Norman line, the first Plantagenet, turned Canterbury into one of the most revered shrines in Europe. Even in these days of enervated faith, it still is. Go and stand in the Becket chapel at Canterbury. If you feel nothing you might as well go and get into one of the tombs. The cathedral has plenty. One marvellous bonus of the conquest was our firm inclusion in the great flowering of Gothic architecture which began in France. Later, of course, we tried hard to smash it all up.
Dover may have been built for many reasons but there is no escaping the fact that these bluff and square-shouldered Norman castles, which history has veiled as characteristically English, were instruments of oppression. Most of them were built to defend against attack from within England as much as from outside it. These castles shout their ownership of the lands they survey and dare the cowed population to question it. They are wonderful and at the same time hateful. This point appeared lost on the enthusiastic historians and theatre/stage set designer of the English Heritage project at Dover Castle.
I found the discussion of the faux-Bayeux tapestry particularly revealing. The tapestry was stitched by the Royal School of Needlework and it is a wonder of craftsmanship, something it shares in common with many of the beautiful objects made by talented people for the project. Incidently, you can meet a hologram of Henry II at the castle, something that seems faintly ridiculous but which I’m sure will be popular. Actually thinking about it as a kind of haunting, a kind of Banquo’s ghost, why not? The tapestry, which now decorates one of the cavernous halls, tells the story of 1066. The victorious exploit of Henry’s great-grandfather. Not unreasonable to imagine such a tapestry hanging at Dover or indeed it may be known that such a tapestry did hang there. Like a twelfth century movie Henry and his barons would never tire of. It is most appropriate also because some historians think that the original Bayeux may have been the product of skilled Kentish needlework. What struck me was the, dare I say, almost glee, with which it was talked about. One panel shows the English sinking a few jars the night before the battle. The theatre designer seemed extremely pleased with this little vignette. As Tony Robinson, to his credit, pointed out, actually Harold and his men were on a route march down from Stamford Bridge immediately prior to the battle. The designer merely shrugged. He was pleased with it. I assume it represents the sanctimonious Norman viewpoint of William of Malmsbury. The purpose being to show the English hopelessly mired in sin and William’s essential righteousness before God. As far as I know the Bayeux tapestry itself shows no such thing. In fact it depicts a scene of William and his knights having a good old nosh down before the battle.
None on the programme seemed to appreciate the irony of celebrating such an abject defeat and its horrendous aftermath. One which is described tersely and grimly in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Because really this is what the English Heritage project is doing in choosing to spend such a sum (£2-3 million?) on a keep built only 100 or so years after 1066. It is a gorgeous endeavor but as I said earlier it gives me a peculiar feeling. When William was crowned on Christmas Day 1066 in London it began a long and now venerated tradition but overturned the Anglo-Saxon way of doing things. William and his heirs, including the king of Dover Castle overturned much. It was left to the common people to hold onto whatever they could. You can say the Normans initiated a slew of political changes that were the foundation stone of England’s later success. I suppose it depends on how you define ’success’. One might legitimately say that it involved us in a messy entanglement with France which led to continual war and misery over many centuries. Not to mention the blitzkreig of the conquest itself. From this point on all the kings of England assumed as a matter of course that they were rightful kings also of France. Wales too, Scotland, if they could ever manage it, which they never quite could, and Ireland. The word rightful is important since the rapacious kings of the Middle Ages liked to cover their naked ambition with the cloth of God’s will.
Interestingly, English Heritage, the government quango, sorry ‘agency’, entrusted with the care of the nation’s most cherished monuments and historical sites refused to look after Sutton Hoo. This amazing burial ground of the earliest English kings crept under their radar. They must have had their reasons but it is striking that this Anglo-Saxon heritage site of worldwide archaeological importance was of small interest to them. Yet they are the caretakers of Stonehenge. What a strange nation. This absence of ambivalence towards Dover Castle by the academics on the programme, and obviously by English Heritage, seems in itself quintessentially English and perhaps political, in a very middle class way. It is not the melancholy-tinged remembering of adversity and defeat characteristic of other nations. Melancholy, regret, or even as I say, a certain ambivalence, are entirely absent. It seems similar to preferring always to go out on penalties rather than endure the embarrassment of winning.
Merry Christmas!
At this point the season of ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ (if I remember my Keats correctly) is well and truly over. The evenings draw in quickly and the woodland and heaths are sodden and dismal. These days we have much to distract us but for the medieval folk of these river meadows it can be imagined that this time of year filled them with dread. I have touched on, in an earlier post, the impossibility of really getting inside the mind of the Middle Ages. The major difference it seems, and a person well-schooled in philosophy, which is certainly not me, could describe it more accurately, is one of compartmentalisation. A long and ugly word and one which in itself seems suggestive of the modern mind. In short we are today pretty certain what is inside us and what is outside us. Anybody claiming otherwise is likely to be dismissed as a suspect crackpot. I am not talking here of eastern mysticism. I have no intention of getting all George Harrison on you. Life flows on within you and without you. I’m sure it does but I guess what I’m getting at is the uncertainty.
To take the Anglo-Saxons as an example it is reasonable to assume that in common with all ‘unenlightened’ peoples they would have been far less ready to separate the physical from the metaphorical. Darkness, the absence of the electromagnetic radiation known beautifully in English as ‘light’, is a physical reality that lends itself well to metaphorical modes of thinking. And we all know what these metaphors are because they are used all the time. ‘There is something of the night about him’ is a favourite. Anekin Skywalker turns to the ‘dark side’. I shall call these metaphors ‘commonplace’ rather than cliches. These commonplace metaphors still have plenty of legs if they are used in the right way, which is of course the key to all effective writing. More than this such metaphors have weight. Like autumn and the Fall. Those who eschew them simply because they are well-worn risk swapping the familiar for the instantly forgettable. But I have strayed …
To be ‘benighted’ is to be in ignorance or under the spell of an unshakable demon. The author of ‘John’, one of the greatest creative writers of the last 2000 years, was well aware of the power of this metaphor. The motif runs right through his gospel. Nicodemus comes to Jesus ‘in darkness’ and is ‘enlightened’ although probably not in the way most people in the West would think of it today, and during the Last Supper, we are told that Satan entered the heart of Judas Iscariot. The author of ‘John’ caps the exit of Judas from the room where Jesus is sitting with his disciples with a single pithy sentence: ‘And it was night.’
An Anglo-Saxon woman sits at her needle on a chill winter afternoon. She gets up and closes the shutter against the dark. Still it seems to creep into every corner of the house and overcome the light, except near to the flickering resistance of her candle. She pulls her cloak around her shoulders and sits closer to the candle but cannot escape the feeling of dread which has overtaken her. It sits like a stone in her stomach. She goes over to the door and calls loudly for her son to bring in plenty of wood from the store. Needs be they must kindle a fire.
These feelings are still very much with us of course, although we are liable to dismiss them as an unwelcome relic. After all, there is good reason to stoke a fire against the cold and we all need light to see what we are doing. It is most unlikely any of us would even imagine darkness resolving into a black shape which takes us by the throat. It is more certain still that such an occurrence was not unusual in the Anglo-Saxon winter.
Bede tells the enlightening story of Christianity, in a way I’m sure that would have appealed also to John, healing this fear of cold unknowingness. The famous sparrow flying through the warmly lighted hall. The new faith helpfully explains the origin of that humble bird before it entered the room through a gap in the gable and more importantly what happens to it when it leaves the hall of this world for an, at best, dimly lit afterlife. Death is no longer dark, it is light. Except that old fears die hard and perhaps with good reason.
There is much difference between winter dark and summer dark. The latter communicates a living presence to us, abundance, and the harmless magic of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, whereas the former speaks either of absence or of evil. For the Germanic tribes of a Northern Europe that is gloomy for long stretches of the year, both cold and dark were the most dangerous of adversaries. At least even to me this is apparent and it might be a small glimmer of candle with which to catch a glimpse of dark age thinking. Occasionally, walking across a deserted countryside, still far from home as the light begins to dwindle, I have momentarily experienced a feeling which seems very old, and then, like the low winter sun, it is gone. Let’s hurry back and put up those Christmas lights.
This is the view today of the scene immortalised in Constable’s probably most famous painting ‘The Hay Wain’. The cottage is much as it was but the trees in the painting have gone, together with the view across to the river meadows where folk are at hay making. The mill pool is also deeper today. Constable’s painting shows a hay wagon or wain heading toward the ‘flat ford’ across the river to collect another load.
What a beautiful picture this is. It hangs in the National Gallery in London. Some decades ago Constable had a reputation for ‘chocolate box’ painting. Today this has largely changed thankfully, seeing as it was completely undeserved. In fact compared to the tradition of the Royal Academy his work was considered rather ‘out there’ and it was quite some time before he was accepted despite his obvious talent. Today we can see that such was his talent that his pictures are among the most popular and well known in the world. This same scene or various along the valley have been painted by many different painters since. Check them out on the web. If you find one as good as this I am a Dutchman.
Current taste is nothing if not peculiar and nowadays many people prefer the rapid oil sketches he made in the open air as preparation, sitting before such scenes as these. A considerable time before the French Impressionists. Sketches of The Hay Wain are at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The really nice thing about this is, to quote the American poet Robert Lowell when asked about two different versions of his poem ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’. ‘Well they both exist.’
Constable’s father was a wealthy man and owned both the mill and the cottage. Flatford Mill is at our back as we look toward the cottage. I think Constable and other members of the family are buried at East Bergholt.
The tenant farmer of the cottage was a Willie Lott who it is said never spent more than four or so nights away from it in his entire 80 years. A National Trust notice pinned to the wall of Flatford Mill suggests (a little sniffily IMO) that in Constable’s day it was known as ‘Willie Lott’s House’ and they insist that it is properly described as such. It is known the world over as ‘Willie Lott’s Cottage’ however, which seems pretty harmless to me. They are quite right probably that the notion of a quaint cottage became entangled with the whole English Constable chocolate box caboodle. That they should say so is rather ironic. I mean they have kept the mill ‘working’ as some kind of ecological field study centre. One can hardly be against such a thing but it does amuse me that the Trust have to defend the preservation of such a beautiful place. After all if you have travelled long and hard from America or Japan you do not want to find Willie Lott’s Cottage crouching under a motorway flyover. Should you endure such an English pilgrimage you won’t be disappointed thanks to the NT. Though if you want an icecream on a hot summer bank holiday you might be trampled underfoot.
The whole Stour Valley is staggeringly picturesque in an understated southern English way. I use that adjective on purpose. Our impression of this whole countryside is informed by Constable. In a way he has created it even at the same time he was created by it. It is interesting to reflect that the image of England that it conjures was already passing even in his day. But should Willie Lott’s Cottage be flattened tomorrow it will still exist in two dimensions thanks to John Constable.
It is, and I make no bones about it, a source of quiet personal pride that on my mother’s side I am related to Willie Lott. Apparently you can book to stay at the cottage. When I was there I felt like rapping loudly on the door and telling them to get out of my house.
In a heat haze. Yes you can believe it. This is where the River Deben meets the North Sea. The river mouth is certain to have altered considerably in 1500 odd years but a royal gateway is a royal gateway. Sutton Hoo is about seven miles upstream. In Raedwald’s time if the Deben was a royal river then the Orwell just around the coastal corner might be considered the tradesmen’s entrance.
It is quite clear that the Anglo-Saxons of this period had horses and probably used them to get around as well as for carting but there is no mistaking that boats were the transport of choice. As they were for shifting goods to market right up until the age of the railways. If Raedwald’s thanes had access to a couple of jet skis, which were much in evidence yesterday, they could have crashed a party at the royal hall in next to no time.
The shingle spits that longshore drift has made in this part of the world are home to a number of beautiful and tenacious plants. Rubbery sea kale is everywhere. Here is a snap of a yellow horned poppy.
Those with an inclination for unwinding rainbows might like to analyse it for its Darwinian adaptations.
There are a couple of Martello towers balanced on the lip of the river. These are dotted all along the coast of the south east and are a defensive remnant from the Napoleonic wars. Certain people with a circular view of history like to live in them. Not in this one though, at least at the moment. Watch out for it though on ‘Grand Designs’. There is a very famous one in Dublin where the opening scene of Ulysses takes place and in another life I paid a visit to it. It was wild, wintry and bloody windy that day on Sandymount strand. The James Joyce museum was closed. It was closed because I had made a special effort to visit it. If anybody suggests that I might have checked the opening times I will poke that person in the eye.
What else? Hmm… Across the river is Bawdsey Manor which used to be a place of hush hush RADAR research in the Second World War. It is hardly stretching it to say that it was a modern sophisticated Martello tower. Whoever had charge of the Romano-Britons when Raedwald’s kin came calling had no such defence it seems.
St Felix was a Burgundian monk who took his mission to the East Angles around 630AD and founded a monastery up the coast at Dunwich. By this time Raedwald was sleeping soundly in his death ship. There is loads to tell about this place. Well worth a visit. Felixstowe Ferry rocks. Take it from me.
Laters…
Click on the gold buckle for a link to the British Museum website. A nice readable book telling all about the treasure found in the Mound 1 ship is the one by Angela Care Evans called simply ‘The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial’. Available through the British Museum Press. It has excellent photos. There is a small but arresting black and white one of this very belt buckle lying in the soil of the dig next to the equally amazing purse lid with its cloisonne garnet settings. The date of the photo is 22nd July 1939 only a couple of months before Britain entered the Second World War. It captures a watershed moment in the study of Anglo-Saxon culture.
I won’t go on about the intricate decoration (two snake-like animals are highlighted on the above photograph) or its ingenious design. The object, which archaeologists like to call ‘material culture’ speaks for itself. Before Sutton Hoo the generally received opinion about the pagan Anglo-Saxons was that they were uncouth barbarians who grovelled in dirt pits under crude wooden shelters. Work at West Stow has shown that this impression was probably erroneous even for the lower eschelons let alone the nobility.
Much of this inherited classicist Renaissance snobbery was due to a nation moving towards a pompous idea of itself. The pompous idea is still with us but it has faded.
The idea survives nicely in the popular movie ‘Gladiator’. We find ourselves in sympathy with the aims of the civilising Roman Empire despite its shortcomings. The philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, played wonderfully by Richard Harris, sits well with the dark forests of Germania but of course he has no business there really. How ignorant and uncivilised seem the barbarians of Germania in that first action battle scene (which is excellent of course).
Yet the discovery of the Nebra Sky Disk with its evidence of scientific as well as magical knowledge of astronomy shows how different things may have been even in Bronze Age Central Europe. Many people immediately concluded that it was a fake. When it was shown to be genuine it was considered that its makers must have had access to Mediterranean learning. I think this too has been shown to be unlikely but I am no expert on the sky disk. It is, however, a deeply symbolic treasure emblematic of an evolving consciousness not dependent on writing for its formal means of communication.
Of course the Nazis were fond of bigging up barbarian culture. How they would have loved that sophisticated sky disk. As we know a spin can be put on anything. But then the Nazis were the dark apotheosis of the pompous idea.
In this there is a lesson it seems to me.
It is doubtful whether the lyre of the Anglo-Saxon scop could have competed with the Funk Brothers of Hitsville USA and it is doubtful whether he could have played it with his teeth like Jimi Hendrix but you never know. What is probable is that he would have related to the idea of some kind of soul journey which can be seen as a happening both in life and after death. And seeing as soul music has its religious dimension in gospel as well as the Christian beliefs of some of its greatest exponents perhaps the analogy is not as inappropriate as first appears.
Raedwald’s ancestral kin, whoever they were exactly, were a sea people, and they sailed the coasts of Northern Europe with a stoic not to say talented determination. The sea seems never to have been very far from their thoughts. It can be imagined that to them the ridges in the fallow were like those in the sand at the sea’s edge.
The seamanship of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Friesians is often overshadowed by that of the Vikings, glamorous and bloodthirsty as they were, but of course it was the same seamanship and thirst for blood and sometimes it seems forgotten that the pagan Vikings were close relatives of the Christian Anglo-Saxons they plundered.
Bronze Age intimations of ship burial are to be found in Scandinavia in the form of upright stones laid out in the form of a ship and smaller boat burials are also found from the fourth century AD on the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic sea.
Such islands put me immediately in mind of Heorot. Scyld Shefing was set adrift in a funeral ship, piled high with treasures, in a manner remarkably similar to the rite of the Mound 1 ship at Sutton Hoo with the obvious difference that Scyld was floated literally on the sea to a destination that seems mysterious even to the Christian poet of Beowulf.
It is generally assumed that this journey entailed a crossing of garsecg, the sea surrounding the known world, the implication being that whatever lay to the other side was non-mortal. A bit like the Americas to the Old World before Columbus.
It is here that we run into difficulties because of the tightlipped nature of pagan Anglo-Saxon England. All of the poetry and prose we are fortunate to possess is highly coloured by Christian thought but it does contain tantalising glimpses of the pagan mind. The famous funeral of Scyld Shefing is but one of many examples. The difficulty lies in the determined silence of Christian Anglo-Saxon poets and writers when it comes to pagan specifics. Seeing as several of the most famous were monks it is hardly surprising. It is a matter of drawing splinters from the text.
Proper ship burial where a clinker built ship bearing an illustrious body is buried under a mound seems to begin in the early seventh century at Sutton Hoo. It may have been done first at Valsgard in Sweden but the burials are contemporaneous. The cultural link with Sweden is thought by certain experts to be significant and ship burial was practised in Sweden for the next four hundred years. In East Anglia of course it was brought to an abrupt halt.
Whether ship burial at Sutton Hoo had any political significance is a matter of opinion. It might well have. It is certain that it had religious significance but what exactly this significance was nobody can say for sure.
Our modern age cannot bear unknowingness. In the dark space of ignorance we put speculation. And lots of it. Some, seizing on the passage in Bede, that tells of Raedwald’s altar to both pagan gods and Christ, see a kind of transitional burial in the cargo carried by the Mound 1 ship. There is no doubt that the ship burial is a powerful metaphor that has applicability for many beliefs. It is a monumental symbol that dovetails nicely with many ideas not all of them necessarily spiritual.
The idea of a ship sailing souls toward God goes back to the very early church. In Mark’s gospel we are told how the disciples became alarmed when a storm got up on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus, being the kind of useful person he seems to have been, calmed the winds with a gesture. The men were astonished. The fishing boat might be a symbol of the fledgling church buffeted by the gales of circumstance and Christ the figurehead leading them safely to the shore of salvation. There is evidence that the author of ‘Mark’ certainly intended it so.
Is this really the symbol informing the burial at Sutton Hoo? There is Byzantine treasure among the grave goods. I am unconvinced there is anything Christian about the ship burials at Sutton Hoo. Martin Carver’s argument that ship burial was commonplace in Sweden into the Viking age is compelling. These were not transitional burials; they were pagan burials.
This does not mean that Raedwald himself was not transitional in a religious sense although once again we have to be careful. It is impossible for us to realise, that is as a reality, the faith of the Middle Ages let alone that of the Dark Ages. I think though that the coming of Christianity brought with it a new partioning of religious ideas that had not really existed before.
‘Oh build your ship of death, your little ark
and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine
for the dark flight down oblivion …’
In this wonderful poem by D.H. Lawrence we have the symbol come full circle. Once more it seems in pagan hands.
‘… upon the flood’s black waste
upon the waters of the end
upon the sea of death, where still we sail
darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port …’
Yet it is perfectly possible to shine a Christian light on this poem. That word ‘darkly’ takes me straightaway to ‘through a glass darkly’. The phrase is from the King James Version of St Paul’s letter which Lawrence knew as well as anybody.
In the end it seems that everything inherits everything and to me that is no bad thing.
It is inevitable I suppose when a superstar poet (if there is such a thing) decides to translate a classic that it is hailed as a major success. The translation is now a decade old and on its anniversary I have re-read it. I remember being excited that a poet of Heaney’s stature should have come up with a new translation. It was more interesting still perhaps because a lot of the impetus seemed to have been informed by a Catholic Irishman’s ambivalent feeling towards the English language. It is a famous ambivalence that has produced some of the best writing in English that now exists. This desire to absolutely master and then if possible transcend the language of colonisation. It is of course personified in James Joyce. Seamus himself goes into his personal experience of this in the introduction to the Faber edition. It is significantly not an ambiguity faced by English writers. And my exemplar is a contemporary of Joyce’s, D.H. Lawrence.
English writers though may clearly be ambivalent in their feelings towards England itself, as Lawrence himself was. And there is clear evidence that English writers now experience some of the same feelings as those writers from previously colonial nations. I can do no better than direct you to a brilliant essay by Heaney himself called ‘Englands of the Mind’ in his collection ‘Finders Keepers’. The essay describes three different views of England from three of its finest 20th Century poets, Hughes, Hill and Larkin, all filtered through the interested lens of an observing Irishman.
What of this gifted poet’s Beowulf?
From the first I was provoked into being slightly against by the decision to use the Old Norse patronymic ’son’ as opposed to the Old English patronymic ‘ing’. So we have the famous ancestor of the Scyldings as ‘Shield Sheafson’. It seems more appropriate to an historical novel funnily enough than to a serious poetic translation of Beowulf. Then, illogically, we meet the ‘Shieldings’, presumably because ‘Shieldsons’ sounds stupid poetically in addition to being incorrect. Scyld Shefing may sound silly or obscure but it has one essential ingredient. It is accurate. I think we can all cope with the perceived oddity.
The first word ‘So!’ is a translation of the infamous Anglo-Saxon ‘Hwaet!’, a modern gloss of which might be ’stop gassing and listen up!’, and it is highly dubious. Heaney draws a comparison with the way the ‘Big Scullions’ (friends of his father) used to sit around the kitchen table and signal the start of a declaration or a story with a booming ’So…’ . I don’t doubt it was an imperative to listen rather than a casual beginning but for me at the very outset a wrong note is struck. To be fair nobody has sorted this problem; but I don’t think Seamus has succeeded I think he has failed like everybody else.
The real difficulty I have with this translation is precisely the quality underlined by a misty eyed reviewer from the Irish Times on the back cover. I quote: ‘…a miraculous mix of the poem’s original spirit and Heaney’s voice’. It is indeed too much like Seamus himself however fine that might be.
Heaney uses a loose modern alliterative method appropriate enough to the formalities of Old English verse which used a four stress per line non-rhyming alliterative system where all vowels alliterated. My favourite verse translation is the one by Michael Alexander, who was Professor of English Literature at St Andrew’s University and for all I know might still be. It is available in Penguin Classics. The construction expresses the slowed advance of Anglo-Saxon oral poetic practice and seems to me more convincing of dark age feeling than the sacrifice for pace that Heaney makes. Here I quote again the same person from the Irish Times, ‘its energetic, relentless driving forward…’ This sounds like a review of an up to the minute thriller. It is calculated to attract and I’m sure does so.
Nothing wrong with that; except it is not Beowulf as the Anglo-Saxon scop probably intended. The Anglo-Saxon audience seems to have delighted in imaginative delaying tactics that were a matter of oral poetic necessity but out of which developed a characteristic style. The delay not only took the form of digression but was a part of the language itself. To paraphrase Michael Alexander the poetry was a mirror of the the knotwork seen in the decorative arts.
Professor Alexander has also the advantage of being a scholar of Anglo-Saxon rather than a fine poet struggling ’scriptorium slow’ as Seamus so memorably puts it. Heaney himself admits to oftentimes ignoring more learned advice and this is naturally forgiveable in the licence of making poetry; but the result is a chimera perhaps more pleasing to fans of Seamus Heaney than to fans of the old poem.
Not that any of this really matters, except perhaps to Penguin Books who brought out an updated edition of Michael Alexander’s excellent verse translation, in order to compete and gain sales in the publicity bruhaha surrounding the Seamus version. I believe the great poet himself came to Sutton Hoo as part of the marketing.
Translations of this Old English epic are legion. There is even a Brazilian comic book adaptation which may well be superior in every way to a digitally enhanced Ray ‘what xxxx can I punch next’ Winstone thinking he was part of a ‘Viking’ epic.
Ah well, each to his own. I leave you with a short extract from Michael Alexander.
… The door gave way,
toughened with iron, at the touch of those hands.
Rage inflamed, wreckage bent, he ripped open
the jaws of the hall. Hastening on,
the foe then stepped onto the unstained floor,
angrily advanced: out of his eyes stood
an unlovely light like that of fire.’
And Seamus:
… The iron braced door
turned on its hinge when his hands touched it.
Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open
the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,
pacing the length of the patterned floor
with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light,
flame more than light, flared from his eyes.’
Heeeeeere’s Grendel! (c’est moi).
Buttrum’s Mill, Woodbridge, Suffolk, built 1836, retired 1928
Sentinel of the past and still point in a turning world
Among the ruffled oaks and meadow green of June
You stand, quivering a potential of energy and
Grinding time between your petrified stones
A pastoral quietus you make beneath blue or starlight
No longer oaring at wind or batting at moons or
Sailing wildly before the madness of sunsets
Suffering brother Andrew up to heaven
All your ladders are centripetal, so that a dreaming
Jacob climbs your angled ribs to enlightenment
One small oblong of sky at a time
Perhaps a bit unlucky for this fine brick windmill that the rich flour merchant who owned it was called Buttrum. But there you go. A rose by any other name… you know the rest. I have snapped what might look like a rear view in honour of its name but as a babe in arms knows the sails move to face the wind. So this is actually the front. Tours are available at certain times throughout the summer and I can vouch for the view from the top floor window. This windmill has a quiet dignity that seems to belong to the best of the Victorian age. I think it finally fell victim not only to more industrial methods of milling but also to a process of centralisation, a process that is still very much with us.
In the rain…
Well I might not get many plaudits from the Ipswich tourist board but I promise to snap it in the sunshine some time. This is a sky though all too familiar. The view is looking towards the brand new university building. It’s an impressive bit of kit. After all there was nothing there before except dirt and broken glass.
Not many people even in England seem to know much about Ipswich. It gets a bit of a bad press. Some people seem to think of it as some sort of ‘new town’ when in fact it is England’s oldest Anglo Saxon town. It is also a port which still has a bit of shipping but post containerisation this is all at Felixstowe by the mouth of the Orwell.
The waterfront has shifted considerably since Raedwald’s time. This shot would have entailed a serious risk of drowning. Upstream the river is still called ‘The Gipping’ and it is here you will find some of the main characters of the Rune of Ing.
Gipeswic is not far pronunication-wise from Ipswich. The ‘G’ was probably sounded as a ‘Y’ which over time has been lost or conflated with ‘I’ and the ‘wic’ part was pronounced ‘wich’ which in Old English simply means a port.
The fledgling port probably dates from the time of Raedwald or a little earlier but only began to really flourish in the 8th rather than the 7th century. It was obviously an important locus of exchange. In Ipswich it is possible to see where the English people came from, what they have been through, and where they are now, for good and for ill.
There are several wonderful medieval churches in the town, as many as four only a stone’s throw from the waterfront and two of these used to be on the dockside. They are now separated from the river by a choked up one way system.
In the town centre around a couple of the churches there are stone tombs where if you are lucky you might spot an enthusiastic contributor to the nation’s obesity problem tucking into a Macdonalds and using the tomb as a convenient table.
