Chapter three of the Story of Vortigern. 'Adolf of Gloucester goes to the Wall'

https://brazen-head.org/2021/06/09/adolf-of-gloucester-goes-to-the-wall/

Chapter three of the Story of Vortigern is now on line at the link above. The Prologue and Chapter One have appeared in Long Poem Magazine. Chapter two is also online at the Brazen Head.

(Adolf is an oddity. He has a very German name for a British Hero.)

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The Problems with 'Epic'.

I’ve been reading William G. Carpenter’s Eþandun for a review in the next issue of the Brazen Head. There’s a quote on the inside of the dust jacket that intrigues me. It describes the book as ‘A war epic in the tradition of Homer and Virgil, Eþandun (eth-an-dune) paints Western Christendom in its darkest hour.’

Leaving aside the inaccurate hyperbole in the second part of the sentence, I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to write ‘a war epic in the tradition of Homer and Virgil’ in the twenty first century.

My tentative answer is probably not, however….

David Jones was probably the last person to do it successfully. In Parenthesis works because Jones was describing a war that he’d fought in which his readers had either fought in or knew about and could recognise the accuracy of his descriptions. Secondly, he was able to blur the distinction between autobiography, history and fiction. And thirdly his heroes are believable men in extra-ordinary situations who are raised to the status of legendary figures by the way Jones presents them. Though his language, though his habitual blurring of the past and the present, he was able to raise the story of the historical assault on Mametz wood into the realm of legendary activity, while holding on to the historical event. 

Having said that Private Ball is hardly heroic. He crawls away from the battle field and abandons his weapon. But you can believe in Private Ball in a way you never believe in Achilles.

If this sets up the criteria for a successful ‘war epic in the tradition of Homer and Virgil’ then perhaps we could split the question into two parts. Firstly a war epic about a modern war, and secondly one set in the distant past. 

A modern war poem in the tradition of Homer or Virgil, assuming such a thing were desirable, could be written by someone who had fought in one of the many wars in the past fifty years. It would be realistic. It’s central character would be an ordinary soldier like Private Ball. It would blur the distinctions between autobiography or report. And then you’d wonder why bother? If it’s a narrative why trade the powerful effects of documentary prose for the inevitable fictive effect of poetry? How would it struggle free from all the films and books that are already issuing from these conflicts to claim the necessary seriousness an epic requires?  

 Difficult but possible? 

 For a story set in the past the differences between what Virgil was doing and what a modern poet could do might be too great.

 His audience were trained in the use of weapons and accepted combat as a natural part of their lives. That might be the crucial difference between a Roman Aristocrat who has fought in the Empire’s wars listening to or reading the final combat in the Aeneid, and a modern audience reading that same passage. 

 In a patriarchal, military society geared to colonial expansion, warfare might be a fine subject and Aeneas a role model for men. but women have walk on parts in Virgil and Homer, and they are usually dead or grieving at some stage. Today, wars are things most people hope to avoid, not a highly anticipated career opportunity for every young man.  

 To compound the problem, sword swinging heroes have been conscripted by various fantasy genres. There is something enjoyably adolescent about them. If only your problem were so simple you could pick up a sword and belt it. If only the messy life that confuses and defeats you could be reduced to a simple binary proposition and personified in one opponent you could hack to pieces. If only beautiful members of the desired sex just threw themselves at you because of your ability to wave your phallic symbol around. It’s a nice idea for the frustrated and lonely adolescent lurking in everyone. But its hopelessly simplified and unrealistic. Moreover, familiarity with such fantasy exerts a gravitational pull on what was once meant to be taken seriously. 

 Perhaps the idea of the hero who wins a war or changes history on his own has always been unrealistic. Even In the first century AD Roman armies were victorious because of the ruthless discipline belted into their infantry during training. But for that original audience of Homer and Virgil, the past was also a very different place to their own present: gods interacted with humans while larger than life heroes stalked about the earth. 

 In the 21st century we split History, which is (hopefully) evidence based and factual, from a thing called Fiction which is a culturally sanctioned form of lying. The split is very recent, certainly post-medieval. By a process of historical evolution poetry now belongs firmly in the category of fictive literature. It’s impossible for a modern reader not to read the Aeneid as fiction; a high-class Roman Marvel Comic with suited superheroes and bickering gods. The suspension of disbelief we’ve learnt from reading and watching fiction automatically takes over and the effect is amplified when we see the lines don’t go all the way to the right hand margin.

 So is the essential problem that Virgil and Homer weren’t writing fiction? 

 Today, anyone attempting a story set in the past has to assume that the poem will be treated as fictive. No matter how accurate the details, the minute King Athelstan speaks to his troops before Brunnaburgh, the story has slid into the comfortable and comforting world of make believe. 

 No one to day has donned armour, mounted a horse and charged a line of archers. No one has stood his ground behind a line of shields while a bunch of sword whirling Britons tried to take his head off. There’s not much evidence to tell us what it was like, either. As you go back in time, first person accounts of battle become non-existent and descriptions of battle become increasingly rare until they disappear. They are almost non-existent for pre-Conquest England.  

 If you stay this side of 1800, where there are eyewitness accounts and increasing amounts of first-hand information to draw on, than the days of the individual hero are already long gone and war is a brutal, increasingly mechanised, increasingly impersonal affair which essentially redefined heroism. 

 So my tentative answer is I don’t know how anyone could overcome the problems inherent in the fictive nature of the enterprise. To write about a modern war in narrative poetry would fictionalise the reading experience and inevitably mute the effect. A poem telling a story set in the more distant past is inevitably an historical novel written in short lines. It might be historically accurate, but focus it on warfare, and it’s going to read like a fantasy novel.

 

Maurice Scully's 'things that happen'.

things that happen, Shearsman Books, 2020.

The first complete publication of a project that has lasted 25 years.

Maurice Scully’s ‘Things that happen’.

Maurice Scully’s ‘Things that happen’.

It’s that time of year. At the time of writing, the T.S. Eliot prize shortlist has been announced and soon we will be treated to the usual critical contortions as judges, journalists and those in the know reach for the usual terms of praise; ‘Ground breaking’ ‘Innovative’. ‘Original’, ‘Genre bending’ and so forth and so on to try and distinguish one book of well written poems from another.

Shearsman’s announcement in 2020 that they were publishing a one volume edition of ‘Things that happen’ should have been hailed as one of the publishing events of the year. Of course it wasn’t.  But if you want to see what genuine ‘ground breaking’, ‘original’ ‘innovative’ ‘sui generis poetry’ is like, you need to read this book. 

It’s fascinating and baffling, endlessly enjoyable, and it raises all kinds of questions about what you do when you read, and the problems of verbalising the pleasure given by a poem that refuses to do the box ticking manoeuvres of the kind of poetry and poems that win the T.S.Eliot prize.  

I first encountered Maurice Scully’s work by accident. I bought a second hand copy of Livelihood. I was fascinated because it was like nothing else I’ve ever read. There were echoes, similarities, there has to be, but the thing itself was unique in my experience. It was also compulsively enjoyable. 

A few years ago, as part of a PhD, I read as many as possible of the book length long poems, narratives or sequences that had been written since the beginning of the last century.  Most of the works shared a great deal in common, most were what you’d call ‘well-written’, some were enjoyable, many I would never bother to read again and some I wondered if my presence as a reader was necessary. But I quickly discovered that my initial impression about Livelihood was sustainable. It is one of the few books on that ridiculously long bibliography that is unlike anything else.

I didn’t know anything about Scully the Poet. Over the years, I made desultory attempts to find information but to this day I haven’t met anyone else who reads him. I am happy to believe that he is a fictional character, dreamed up by Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett who had become bored by the afterlife and had entertained themselves by designing a truly modern poet: indifferent to biography, they had only sketched in suggestive details: there was a house, and a wife called Mary and children. The house was in Ireland, then Africa, maybe somewhere else, Italy? 

In the best Beckett tradition though, their story was about a penniless poet who spent his time in a tin shed writing poetry. The fact that the shed was made of tin was crucial. It should have the complete works of De Selby lying scattered on the floor and a fractured map of eternity on the roof. The poet listened to the rain and the birds and the rust forming on the roof and made it all into poetry. 

And he kept writing. For 25 years, issuing the product in hard to find pamphlets and books. And now the whole thing is between one set of covers and easily available.

Almost as exciting was Shearsman’s announcement that there would be a companion book of essays devoted to the poet. Hopefully there would be erudite insight and enlightenment on offer. Maybe someone could explain why this is so enjoyable?

And while I have nothing intelligent to say about ‘things that happen’ except that anyone interested in modern poetry should read it, the essays require a longer post all to themselves.

Jeremy Hooker's Selected Poems 1965-2018

 

Jeremy Hooker: Selected poems 1965-2018 (Shearsman 2020)

It’s a strange feeling to hold a man’s writing life between two covers, and it would be presumptuous to pretend to be able to ‘asses’ it on such short acquaintance. But the book is very good. One of the great joys of interest in poetry is that there are always so many fine poets to discover. Ignorance is a fine place to begin, as long as you take it as a place to leave. 

My prior Knowledge of Hooker is limited to the fact he was the author of a ‘pioneering study’ of David Jones, which I admire.( ‘David Jones, an exploratory study of the writings’ (1975).

I bought the selected because the blurb named David Jones and George Oppen as formative influences and I was having difficulty trying to imagine how anyone could combine those two very different writers.

The poems in the selected are grounded in places and things. They epitomise what Donald Davie called ‘a poetry of right naming’. In full knowledge of the slipperiness of words, or the slippage of the signifier if you want to be French, the poet doesn’t ‘Flinch’ into language or in it (to misquote Seamus Heaney) but tries to be as precise as possible. 

What I love is the fact of it. 

A channel kept open, shipping
stone for the cathedral;
blue Cornish slates;
coal from Woodmill
to Blackbridge Warf. 

A channel used, disused,
restored, until the last bridge
passed under the railway bridge
now abandoned, framing
water that is going nowhere, 
but silts, with passages 
the colour of stonedust
and boys rowing, a surface
silver and boiling
where blades dip and turn. 

from Itchen Navigation p. 102 (last stanza omitted)

The resultant poetry is lucid and compulsive. I can’t remember the last time I read a selected poetry from start to finish and then went back and read it all again. Although Hooker discusses the idea of Ground in the essay at the back of the book, and in more detail in his recently published essays , ‘Art of Seeing: essays on Poetry, Landscape painting and Photography’ (Shearsman 2020), the places in the poems shift: the Solent, Wales, Holland, The Holy Land. The poet is not so much tied to place as exploring places.

The book also provides on answer to a writing conundrum.

What kind of poem would you arrive at if you avoided a regular rhyme scheme and the predictable rhythms that gave melody and memorability to so much poetry in English written before the 20th century?

And then went further. If you avoided the tricks of the Avant Garde: no pyrotechnics, no disordered syntax or paratactic clauses? If you refuse to treat the poem as some kind of puzzle that the reader is invited to solve? If you were to avoid ‘clever’. 

If you avoided the thesaurus, and choose words you’d use in normal speech placed in normal order. If you avoid the temptation to be ‘poetic’, not pretending to thoughts and insights no one ever has in any given situation? And if you avoid the temptation to show off your considerable reading by dropping in allusions to other poems and poets? 

 If you avoid the selfie poem, where the words on the page are the debris left by your incessant scratching at your private itch, hoping your readers will sympathise with your pain for the length of time it takes them to scroll down to the next offering?

Take all that out and how might you end up with anything worth reading? 

One answer would be Hooker’s selected  poems. It’s the absence of the usual tricks of the trade that make them hard to discuss.  What to praise in words used carefully with a respect for the thing described. An unobtrusive control of rhythm. Poem as record of an intelligence moving through a landscape and recording its impressions, inviting the reader to not only look at what is being presented, but to look more carefully at the world he or she is moving through where-ever that might be?

Reading the selected reminds me of reading Ruskin’s Modern Painters. After reading Rusin on clouds, or light on water, you may never paint a picture, but you from time to time you find yourself paying attention to the detail in what you’re looking at. 

Hooker’s poem have the same effect. As he wrote about R.S.Thomas: 

We have heard his voice.
It will not be unheard. 

We have looked with his eyes.
What he has seen
will colour our seeing. 

                        ‘Eglwys Hywyn Sant, Aberdaron’  p. 251

 And that is a gift gratefully received.

Merion Jordan's Regeneration

Merion Jordan 'Regeneration’

White Book/Red Book Seren 2012

This is the second book I’ve been reading which retells stories from the Mabinogion. If Mathew Francis’ ‘The Mabinogi’ (see previous post) raises the question of how to retell the stories, Merion Jordan’s ‘Regeneration’ poses the questions of what C.S. Lewis, in his discussion of Obscurity in Poetry, in his introduction to another writer’s revision of Arthurian matter, called ‘Privatism’ and ‘Unshared background’.

Warning…confusion in Progress.

Jordan’s book is a very ambitious take on the stories in the Mabinogion and the Arthurian story, split into two discrete sections.  

If you are reading Regeneration/Red book, you arrive at page 68 to be confronted on the facing page by upside down text and page number 84. Turning the book over, and starting at what was the back, you can now read the White book from page one to page 84.  Two front pages, two lots of ‘front matter’. This is cute.

Whether it was worth the publisher’s effort to print a book like this is a different matter. It’s hard to see what would have been lost by presenting it as a single volume split into two discrete parts.

It also seems indicative of the overall problem the book has: it’s been over thought. Concept has been privileged over execution and the result is intriguingly uneven.

Regeneration Red Book

Regeneration Red book has short poems responding to the stories in the Mabinogion. These short poems are split into four ‘books’. They are lyrical responses to the characters and incidents, aslant and non-narrative. The writing is lyrical, taut and impressive. 

Because these poems are responses to the story, they raise the inevitable question of what C.S.Lewis called ‘unshared back ground’. If you don’t know who Goewin was, the poem on page 32 isn’t going to tell you, and whether the poem ‘makes sense’ without that knowledge is a moot point. Whether it will reshape your reading of her story if you know it, is another.    

In his preface to Regeneration Red book Jordan writes: 

The tales’ ‘…reading, I think, depends upon an involvement not only with the space and shape of the stories but upon a landscape that is half real, half imaginary, a kind of Britain that is centuries out of reach-so interspersed with these characters and wonders I have attempted to map some of the insular localities they sought to define, the discarded components of a Britain that never was, except in the minds of the British’.  

The four ‘Insula’ sections which alternate with the four ‘books’ contain some of the best poems in a book of fine poems. 

In terms of concept and achievement the red book is superb. I would have raved about it at length if I had come across it as a single collection.

However, I’m not so sure about Regeneration White book.

Regeneration White Book

For a start its link to the White Book of Rhydderch seems very tenuous. Perhaps too tenuous to justify the split upside down halves.

It’s a sequence of poems each what might loosely be described as monologues spoken by a range of Arthurian characters. Although Malory is being leant on heavily, the familiar Englished names have been Welshed and the characters drift in and out of versions of the legend. This works as a reminder of the fluidity and variety of Arthurian stories.  There are after all, only versions.

But I find it difficult to hear a difference in the voices or to care about them or their perspectives. Given a life long obsession with Malory, this is surprising. The condensed lyricism of the Red Book has given way to something much more diffuse and while there are localised moments of linguistic interest, they get lost. 

To complicate matters further, Jordan writes in his preface:

‘Where I have found some point of contact between the inevitable shape of Arthur’s story and the shape of my own memories, I have tried to bring them together through annotation.’ 

These annotations, presented as foot notes, link the figure of Arthur to Jordan’s memories of his family, and especially his grandfather. 

‘I suspect that too much precision would risk obscuring the reader’s relation to Arthur in favour of my own. Fitting my own notes to the main text, in short, was my attempt to identify Arthur and bring a grief deeply felt but tenuously experienced to light: I have tried to leave room for the reader to do the same’.

It’s a very ambitious aim, and ambition is no bad thing. But it doesn’t work in execution. The footnotes, which are Jordan’s family memories, intrude, interrupt, distract. 

My copies of Malory are scrawled with maginalia. If you annotate your own books, the annotations are your personal response to the text. If Jordan’s footnotes are his equivalent, then in making such annotations public he’s claiming they are of interest to a third party, without making an effort to make them interesting or coherrent.  It’s a strange way of muddying a public act of self-revelation. 

In rewriting the story Jordan has already privileged his relation to the Arthur story. It is the writer’s privilege to do so; to offer his or her version for the reader’s consideration. It would have been enough to do that and leave it there.

The footnotes seem far too arbitrary. Too personal. They are examples of what Lewis called ‘Privatism’, the links are not often obvious to a third party and leave the writer and reader stuck between two stools. 

For example, Poem 12, Le Chevalier Mal Fet, begins:

He coughs up blood
She sleeps alone
Dreams of the fire
The love that melts bone
  To the blackened bone.

There is footnote on the first of the two ‘bones’. It begins…’You see it’s sometimes hard to reconcile my memories of my grandfather with the man he clearly was….’ There’s nothing in the rest of that footnote that links Grandfather, Jordan’s inability to imagine him as a school boy, and what’s happening here in the poem. 

Regeneration White book is an ambitious approach to the Arthurian story, but its conceptual underpinning seems ill conceived. It’s possible that I haven’t reread it enough times or I’m missing something. But I think it’s more likely that on one level the sequence is too private to work for a reader, and on the other the various voices aren’t differentiated enough to hold a reader’s interest.

Mathew Francis 'The Mabinogi'

Enthusing in progress….

Mathew Francis. The Mabinogi, Faber 2017

This is an excellent performance. I read praise of it that stated it ‘Does for the Mabinogion what Heaney did for Beowulf’. This is unfair to Francis for several reasons: if you need a comparison it might be more accurate to compare it to what Logue did for Homer. And as far as narrative poetry, retelling an older source, that’s about as good as it gets in term of praise. 

In the version of ‘The Mabinogion’ that you buy as the standard prose translation, there are 11 stories. The collection is not coherent, and splits itself into three groups. There are three ‘Romances’ which read like Welsh versions of stories by Chrétien de Troyes. There is a cluster of ‘native tales’ which range from the elliptically odd to the sprawling magnificence of Culhwch and Olwen. And there are the ‘Four Branches’, the ‘Mabinogi’ which stand at the head of most translations and are rightly regarded as the jewels in the crown.

They are four uniquely strange and beautiful tales. 

Francis retells the four stories, shifting poetry to prose. He admits he can’t read the originals and that perhaps frees him from their syntax and means this in not a translation but a version. If you don’t know the Four Branches you are not at a disadvantage. If you do, the act of selection and emphasis implicit in any retelling will provide readers with much to think about. 

His basic unit is a fourteen line stanza organised syllabically.  To help the reader follow the story marginal ‘signposts’ are included. 

As poetry, the collection shows an unobtrusive verbal inventiveness which muscles along in service to the story. It rewards frequent rereading, from the small details:

The trunks of birches are like ‘Nobbly moonbeams’ (p.54) Efynysien is ‘unhorsing a king/one cut at a time’ (p.28). 

To larger descriptions of setting and character: In the first branch, Pwyll, disguised as Arawn, enters the latter’s bedroom: 

The room is many rooms, coming and going
At the whim of its flames. The red fire 
Utters yellow, and magics

A bed out of dark,
A cave hewn from curtain where they lie
In the candle’s buttered light (p.6)

 

Or the description of Branwen, seen through her half brother’s eyes:

And his swan of a sister, who seems to walk
Without moving her feet, nudged at times 
To right and left by currents 

Only she can feel…

But the world of the stories is also richly sensuous with the presence of the physical world; woods, rivers, coast lines, hills, contrast with halls and rooms. It’s one of the ways the story world differs from the contemporary one. These characters are very much at home and part of their landscapes. Francis allows this into his writing, and keeps it in view, so that the book begins:

Here at the turn off the leaf a horseman is riding
Through the space between one world and another,
Warm in his company of noises. (p.3)

The third line being particularly good.

Throughout we are reminded of landscape and its natural inhabitants.  Later, in the third branch, when Dyfed is under enchantment

The land managed without them. Woodpeckers ratcheted,
A beetle cantilevered from a soft log,
Spangled flies twitched between slants of sun
That tip toed across the ground
Marking the non-hours. (p.5) 

Retelling these stories presents a modern writer with a host of problems, and Francis acknowledges some of these in his introduction. ‘Stories’ unavoidably evokes modern prose fiction. But if you approach the four branches looking for character development, plot coherence, thematic unities, you might be disappointed if not confused. Pryderi may be the one character who appears in all four branches but there’s no noticeable ‘development’ of his character from one to another.  

Attempts to make them into modern stories run the risk of killing off what makes them special. (This point deserves its own discussion.)

While Francis does streamline the stories, the effects of his cutting and rearranging are positive. 

He moves his narrative swiftly, which in the case of the third branch’s repetitions is something readers should be grateful for. In the fourth the speed doesn’t give anyone much time to stop and wonder at Lleu’s stupidity. (He not only tells his flower wife the unique (utterly improbable) way in which he can be killed, but willingly demonstrates how it can be brought about. Inevitably he’s speared during his demonstration).

There has been much discussion about the relationships between the four branches. And these versions bring some of the links alive. Changes made to the first story affect the third. Cutting the ‘badger in the bag’ incident isn’t a great loss to the first, but it does mean we don’t get to see how smart Rhiannon is, and by removing the incident Francis removes the motivation for the malicious enchantment in the third tale. Modern coherence demands Francis alter the reason behind the revenge since the original motive has been removed; medieval narrative would have ignored the problem. 

The major changes seem to be to the fourth story. But the changes pay off. The story is in some ways the most famous:  it’s the one where Gwydion the magician magics a wife out of flowers for his nephew, but while that gets quoted and remembered so much more happens and the beginning of the story is tangled. 

Long before we reach the the flower wife, Gwydion and Gilfaethwy, two men at the court of Math the King, plan the rape of Goewin. However,  to get to her the two men have to get Math away from the court. Gwydion uses his powerful magic to steal Pryderi’s pigs (yes) and start a war. This leads to Pryderi’s death and their punishment. It’s only after this that the tale of the flower wife begins, and she is only the last of Gwydion’s attempts to side step the last of the three curses placed on LLeu by his mother.  

Francis cuts the rape of Goewin, the planning that goes into it, and Math’s uniquely appropriate and repetitious punishment of Gwydion and Gilfaethwy.  Scrapping Goewin’s story frees him to shift the death of Pryderi to the end of the book. Since the first tale includes his birth, his death now brings the stories to a close. 

His other major change is to make Gwydion into a storyteller who is entertaining his hosts. Instead of a 3rd person tale about him, the fourth branch becomes a first person tale told by him. This alters a tale about magic into a story told by a great storyteller who claims to be a magician in the story he’s telling.   

Francis hints that all the stories in the four branches are told by Gwydion. The link between the magician who can make a ship out of sea weed or dogs out of mushrooms and a poet who constantly presents one thing as another seems a fair one. But the idea seems to appear in the final branch rather than be a consistent motif all the way through. 

Rereading this book over several weeks, I haven’t found anything to dislike. There’s so much to admire.

 

Strangeness and Power, Essays on the Poetry of Sir Geoffrey Hill

Strangeness and Power: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill
Edited by Andrew Michael Roberts. Shearsman books 2020

The common response to the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, acknowledged by the contributors and editor of this volume, is that Hill’s poetry is ‘Difficult’. Most readers, encountering his poems for the first time, would admit to their ‘strangeness’, though many might question their ‘power’. 

The blurb  claims that Hill was ‘by common consent one of the finest poets in the English language in the second half of the twentieth century and early years of the 21st’. ‘Common Consent’ erases his many critics and detractors but flags the writers’ assumption in this volume that whatever they write that might suggest the opposite, Hill was a great and important poet.  

What characterizes this volume of essays is this odd paradox: the authors acknowledge the problems readers face. Several of them lay out a detailed explanation of why readers might not be impressed or convinced by aspects of the poetry. At the same time, this does nothing to shake their faith that he was a great or an important poet. In presenting the ‘case against’, they do such a good job that the assumption of his greatness seems ever more fragile.   

In any general collection of essays on a single author there should be a core of essays of interest to any reader of Hill’s poetry, and then a few for those with more specialised interests. This book meets that criteria successfully.

In the first Category,  Martin Dodsworth takes on Hill’s difficulty; Alex Pestell discusses Hill’s  engagement with Philosophy; Mathew Sperling chronicles Hill’s relationship with his publisher and Stephen James writes on Hill’s later poetry.

Of the more specialised studies, the aptly named Tom Jones takes on Hill and the eighteenth century  while Steven Mathews explores the relationship  to Eliot and Jones.  

There are other ‘specialised essays’ on Hill’s relationship to Denise Riiey and J.H. Prynne, his affinities with ‘Radical landscape Poetry’ and studies by Natalie Pollard and Samira Nadkarni of ‘Materiality and design’ and ‘Speech! Speech!’ respectively.   

It’s a fine spread of essays.

Before I read this collection, I would have counted myself amongst the admirers of Hill’s work. That admiration is qualified by my inability to see the value of the Day Books, but up to the publication of Clavics, he was the only living poet whose publications I bought as they appeared. The essays I read left me far less certain about Hill’s achievement.  

For example, Martin Dodsworth tackles the problem of Hill’s difficulty. This is an honest attempt to confront the problem most readers face. With the (probably unknown) ghost of C. S. Lewis looking over his shoulder[1]  he identifies three aspects of Hill’s difficulty for the reader: allusiveness, indefiniteness of relation, and ambiguity, pointing out there are others. 

Choosing a poem to anchor his discussion of allusion he does a masterly unravelling of allusion, but demonstrates convincingly that even when the allusions are explored and explained, the poem doesn’t become any more clear than it was two pages earlier when it was quoted. 

As Dodsworth’s essay unfolds, his scholarly explanations seem increasingly at odds with a different response. Compare the first two sentences of this summing up of the first part of the essay with the third sentence. The first two sound like a Professor performing a poetry reading. 

‘The reader follows the poet in searching for meaning within the language of the poem and within the world to which language is a mode of access. In this search, bafflement signifies failure, but also a kind of success, that of a sustained attempt at truthful utterance. Some readers however, may with reason, find this success difficult to accept.’ P185

The status of these unidentified readers, and their justifiable reluctance to accept the value of the poems, is acknowledged but brushed aside.

What is perhaps disturbing about this essay, which runs from p174-202,  is that having presented such a convincing ‘case against’ the value of the ‘difficulty’ he discusses,   Dodsworth does not balance the argument. Instead he writes:

At one or two points, this essay had suggested a resistant response to one aspect or another or the poems, and sometimes to a poet whose sense of the poetic invitation is often absent and (implicitly) to a nascent expository tradition that has too much of the inert about it. But it would be wrong to conclude without acknowledging that Geoffrey Hill has a place amongst the greatest of our poets……I should like to conclude with a list of some of the poems and volumes for which I am most grateful…….These are justification for Hill’s difficulties.[2]

If ‘At one or two points’ is understatement, then in terms of an essay collapsing into itself, this ending is a positively stellar implosion. After all the careful exposition, the justification of the difficulty, promised at the end of the first paragraph of the essay, is a list of the writer’s favourite poems.  

The best essay in some ways is Mathew Sperling’s short discussion of Hill’s relationships with his publisher. It doesn’t do him any favours either, he obviously had a very high opinion of himself from the start, but it does open an interesting window on Hill’s attitudes to his own work and reputation.

I bought this book specifically for Steven Mathew’s Essay ‘Felt Unities’, on Hill, Eliot and Jones.  Jones has 1 entry in the index to Hill’s collected critical writings, in which Hills lists Rosenberg, Gurney and Jones as ‘three of the finest poets of that war’. While Rosenberg and Gurney get a full essay each in the CCWs, there is nothing else about Jones.  I was intrigued by this. 

I’m not in any position to critique Professor Mathew’s argument, and I’m sure I’ll be reading this essay for some time, but it did send me back to reread Mercian Hymns. Having recently been stuck in quarantine rereading ‘The Anathemata’, the result of rereading Mercian Hymns was surprisingly unpleasant. Beside Jones, Hill suddenly seemed lightweight and self-regarding.

I was startled the first time I wrote those last two sentences because they were so unexpected. 

For all the ponderous seriousness of Mercian Hymns: ‘Then is now’, but so what? Against Jones’ intent, scope, and subtlety, reading Hill’s work is increasingly an exercise in over hearing someone talking to himself, and my presence as reader becomes increasingly redundant, except to applaud another performance.

This was not what I had expected.

It made me think of several of his critical essays, where I have the feeling that G. Hill is wrestling with the problems of communication while working out his thoughts on the topic. Which is what a first draft can often be. I wish, perhaps naively,  that he’d finished the wrestling match and discovered what he’d been trying to say in the draft, and then written a final copy which was as close to what he wanted to say as he could get. Too often it’s like listening to a medieval historian writing about the difficulty of accessing a manuscript and the difficulty of reading it, without ever getting to the point of saying what she learnt from the manuscript she had been struggling to find.

What also hangs over this collection is the vexed problem of the Author Function. Would these critics give so much time to an anonymous poet if he or she produced poems which can be so easily and thoroughly criticised on so many counts? The answer is obviously no. The evidence goes one way, but the conclusion, which was also the starting point, remains unaltered: Hill is a great/important/ fine poet. But no one takes on the task of explaining what was so great/important/fine about his work.

If a good book of critical essays should send you back to the subject of the collection and see him or her or it in a new light, this one is highly successful. 

It also raises some fascinating general issues, not least the whole problem of obscurity, intentional or otherwise.  Which would lead back to C. S. Lewis. 


[1] In his Conclusions (chapter vi) to ‘Williams and the Arthuriad’ in ‘Arthurian Torso’ (1948). A piece known to David Jones. Lewis’s  ‘Conclusions’ is a fine example of a critic trying to explain why he thinks a poet is good while mapping out different types of ‘obscurity in modern poetry’.    

[2] The body of the essay is followed by two dated post scripts, postscript 2017 and post postscript 2019 respectively. One wonders what professor Dodsworth would think of a student who treated essay writing as live performance and didn’t simply rewrite the first draft to bring it in to balance and focus. 

Vortimer meets St.Germanus and extra ordinary social change is contemplated.

(This is the second post about St Germanus in the Legendary History)

Vortimer is the eldest son of Vortigern. He has a very small part in the Legendary History. After Vortigern marries Rowena and begins to show favouritism to both Hengist’s people and his religion, the Britons rebel. They choose Vortimer as their leader. As is usual in the Brut no reason is given for the decision, and no evidence is provided prior to the election of his character or actions.  However, he immediately demonstrates his abilities by defeating Hengist. He offers a bounty of twelve silver shillings per Saxon head. When Hengist has been driven out after four battles, and Vortigern has fled, Vortimer asks for help from Rome to re-establish the church. This is the context of St Germanus’ visit. 

There is no mention of heresy.

When the saint arrives Vortimer makes a speech to greet him. The speech is not in Wace. He begins by introducing himself. In the standard way of the Brut this means naming his father, which gives him the opportunity to twice say Vortigern has been led astray by the German woman. Vortimer then boasts of his victories over Hengist. And there’s not much that’s startling about anything in this until the speech suddenly shifts gears and becomes extra-ordinary. It’s one of the minor eruptions in the Brut  which are easy to miss.

& we scullen an londe; luuiæn ure Drihten.      

Godes folc ur((o))frien; & freond-liche hit halden.      

wurðen mils liðe; wið þa lond-tilien.  

churichen we scullen hæhȝen; & hæðene-scipe hatien. 

Habbe alc god mon; his rihte ȝif Godd hit an.    

& ælc þrel & ælc wælh; wurðe iuroeid.    

& here ich bi-teche eou an hond; al freo ælc chiric-lond. 

& ich for-ȝiue ælchere widewe; hire lauerdes quide.  

& þus we scullen an ure daȝen; aniðeri Hengestes laȝen.    

& hine & his hæðene-scipe; þæ he hider brohte.      7408-7417

(source is the superb ‘Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse” https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/LayCal/1:75?rgn=div1;view=fulltext)

‘& ælc þrel & ælc wælh; wurðe iuroeid.’  And free every slave and thrall? The promise to free people is absent from Cotton Otho. I’d like to consult the various translations to see what has been made of these lines but that will have to wait.  Slavery was an integral part of both Classical and Old English society. It came to an end in England with the Norman conquest and the development of new ways of tying people to the land. Here is a fictional king with a dream of freedom, who cares for all of his people. And is willing to enter into some sort of contractual arrangement with the Church as institution. 

The Brut rarely admits the non-heroic poor. Kings and their retinues are the focus of the story. But not only are the non-Heroic being admitted, they are being promised freedom and the implication is that this is the Christian thing to do. Widows too are being forgiven their husband’s debts. Laȝamon's ideal kings are ruthless war lords, and Vortimer is no exception. But here is something that looks like an attempt to imagine a Christian society. 

Nothing comes of this because Vortimer is about to die, a victim of English Literature’s first wicked step mother. Here in Quarantine, a long way from my books, I can’t check this, but I wonder how many of Laȝamon's King’s share such an ideal? I’m reasonably sure that the answer to that is very few or none. I don’t remember anything similar in Arthur’s reign.

In the Prologue to the Brut, Laȝamon is identified as a priest. This explicit identification has exercised its own gravitational pull on scholars, sometimes in a detrimental way. But whatever you know about ‘Author Functions’ and the danger of succumbing to them, it’s so very tempting to see this insertion as our Priest’s attempt to imagine what an ideal Christian King would do: Not only would he trash his enemies; he would establish a contractual relationship with the Church; he would look after widows; he would care for the poorest and least powerful of his people. 

It would also be tempting to then go one step further and read this as the author’s reaction to the church’s ongoing problems with the Angevins…particularly with Henry II and John, with some of the clauses of Magna Carta echoing around to confuse things.

Did the garbled story of the historical Germanus, which I’ve been tracking here, give him an opportunity to suggest what a genuinely, radical Christian King might do? Did he put his own ideals into Vortimer’s mouth? 

    

 

St Germanus of Auxerre or 'How the Legendary History Works'

If we think of medieval writers as first and foremost, writers, facing writing problems, and dealing with their problems within the framework of their understanding of narrative, the results can be illuminating. Rather than looking at theories of practice, one can observe practice at work. 

From Gildas to Bede to Nennius, from Nennius to Geoffrey to Wace, from Wace to Laȝamon, the Legendary History can be imagined as a Work in Development, with successive writers shaping the material. It’s not the same as successive versions of history, with each one getting closer to ‘the truth’. It’s a developing narrative where what controls the development is how the writers understood the art of storytelling. 

While Saint Germanus of Auxerre plays a very brief role in Vortigern’s story, the incident illustrates how The Legendary History worked as a process. It also suggests something positive about Laȝamon as story teller.

First the history, the problem and the process, then the result, because one of the more startling moments in Vortigern’s story, or in the whole of Laȝamon's Brut,  occurs when Vortigern’s son, Vortimer, meets with the Saint and delivers a speech that is probably Lawman’s invention. 

Who was Saint Germanus of Auxerre?

St Gemanus of Auxerre is an historical character. He’s as real as anyone can be in the fifth century. There’s more evidence for his existence than there is for Vortigern, Hengist or Arthur (which isn’t saying much). One commentator even extends that list to include Saint Patrick#. 

He visited Britain, from Gaul, in the early fifth century to combat the Pelagian heresy, possibly twice, at the request of the British church. While there he did not meet anyone called Vortigern, but he did lead a British force to victory over a mixed army of Picts and Saxons. Modern historians debate the reality of a second visit, and contest the plausibility of the ‘Alleluia Victory’, but the majority accept the historical reality of the Saint. His life was written in the late fifth century, and there are independent chronicle references to his visit, placing the first one in or around 429. He died on the continent before 450.

A writing problem.

Imagine you’re writing The Legendary History. Germanus presents you with three problems.  

1)    The purpose of the visits 

2)    The timing of the visits

3)    The visits are too well known to ignore.

 

1)    The purpose of the visit was simple: to combat the Pelagian heresy. There is no suggestion that the visitors were also asked to combat Paganism, or back sliding Christians. And there is no mention of any King. 

2)    The problem of timing is equally simple. Germanus visited in 429. According to Bede’s calculations, the Saxons (Hengist and Horsa) don’t arrive until 449/450.  

3)    In his note on this incident in Laȝamon, Madden pointed out that Geoffrey of Monmouth simply couldn’t leave such a famous figure out of the narrative. Bede tells the story of the visit at length, in his History of the English Church and People. It takes him five chapters (17-21) in book one.  Vortigern is nothing more than a name, Hengist and Horsa and Arthur aren’t even that. 

Germanus later appeared in Nennius (though ‘Nennius’ may have got his saints confused). He tries to convert and redeem an incestuous Vortigern and failing, prays him to death. 

By this point Germanus’s story had already slid into the world of folk tales. His miracles have become less Bede’s muted proof of the saint’s holiness and more the extravagant actions of a powerful magician. 

Germanus, therefore is a fine example of what happens when you try to reconcile the legendary history with Bede, or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle let alone with ‘history as we define it. Quite often, you can’t.

But if you take up the challenge to incorporate this incident into the narrative, then you have to try to make it meaningful within the narrative.

The process.

Madden may have been right, and Geoffrey may have felt that Germanus had to be in the story. But Geoffrey’s treatment is almost dismissive. And his placing of the incident doesn’t make a lot of sense.

He knew why Germanus had come to the country. ‘It was in this time [Vortigern has just married Rowena] that St Germanus, the Bishop of of Auxerre came, and Lupus Bishop of Troyes, with him, to preach the world of God to the Britons; for their Christian faith had been corrupted not only by the pagans but also by the Pelagian heresy, the poison of which had affected them for many a long day. However, the religion of the true faith was restored to them by the preaching of these saintly men. This they made clear almost daily by frequent miracles, for through their agency God performed many wonders which Gildas has described with great literary skill in his treatise.’ P160 

The throw away reference to ‘Gildas’ (he means the text we ascribe to Nennius) might be sarcastic as the miracles in the Historia Brutonum are exaggerated. But Just as Geoffrey has removed the incest motif in Vortigern’s story, he has left out the Saint’s dramatic role in Vortigern’s end. If Geoffrey knew the Britons had asked for help he doesn’t mention it. The incident is pointless in this version. It’s wedged between the wedding of Vortigern to Rowenna and evidence of Hengist’s growing influence over Vortigern.  It could be cut out and the story would not be affected.

But the narrative is already exerting its pull. There’s nothing in Bede, or the life of Saint Germanus, about combating paganism. The theological enemy is heresy. But If St Germanus arrived after Hengist, and if Hengist was corrupting the Britons, then it’s logical that the saint would need to do something about that. It’s also logical, in narrative terms to get rid of the saint as the divine killer of Vortigern. For Geoffrey’s narrative, it’s necessary for Aurelieus to kill Vortigern. And the incest motif can be dropped as well. 

The Variant version of the Historia, which is probably Wace’s source, moves the story to later in the narrative, after Vortimer has defeated Hengist and become King. And this might suggest the Variant is later than the Vulgate rather than earlier. If Geoffrey, for all his narrative sense, moved the incident earlier he was having a bad day.

Perhaps the Vulgate’s writer could not understand why Geoffrey had a holy man sorting out the church under such an unholy King.  But the move makes narrative sense. Having got rid of Hengist, his legacy has to be erased. 

The Variant is just as confused as to what the Saint was doing. In this version, the saints (plural) have come to stamp out ‘the Arian or Pelagian heresy’ as well as the impact of Hengist.    

Either Wace doesn’t understand Geoffrey’s reference to Pelagius, or the Variant’s ‘Arianism and Pelagianism’; he thought it uninteresting, or it just seemed out of place. Germanus is sent by ‘Saint Romain ‘ (Sainz Romainz) which looks like a dramatic misreading of ‘the roman pope’. Religion is restored and the people returned to the faith. However, even though the faith is restored, ‘Hear what devilry was perpetuated’.

Lawman must have picked up on the potential significance of the episode for his portrayal of Vortimer. He will expand it in a surprising way (see next post) giving the episode a significance it does not have in his sources. 

The initial narrative problem is one of chronology and it is simply ignored. It is impossible to   reconcile Bede and Geoffrey, and since Wace is committed to following Geoffrey, or the Variant, or both, he didn’t need to waste time in the attempt. 

It’s easy to forget a medieval author had very limited access to information. It wasn’t possible to ‘evaluate the sources’ as a modern student learns to do. Once the incident becomes embedded in the story, the process begins which sees the incident changing as the writers make it fit into the narrative and answer the question:  Why are you telling us this?  

For Laȝamon's answer, see next post. 

Differences between Medieval and Modern narrative?

My working theory is that I can learn about Laȝamon and his process by rewriting his text. The process is steadily illuminating aspects of his work that I would not notice if I were approaching it from a literary critical/historical/academic perspective. 

One of the major differences between Laȝamon as a writer and his modern descendants can be seen in the way he retells the story of Rowena. What he did, and what I feel obliged to do, are very different. 

 General consistency. 

 Medieval authors can appear inconsistent. Sometimes this might be the result of inaccurate copying. Sometimes, however, I think it points towards a much more interesting difference in their practice. 

 In Geoffrey of Monmouth, Ambrosius launches into a diatribe about the sins Vortigern has committed. It’s excessive in length. It’s also inaccurate. What he says doesn’t match up with the story we’ve just read. Ambrosius accuses Vortigern of betraying both Constantine and Constans, the father and brother of Ambrosius and Uther. 

 The second charge is indisputably true. But nowhere in Geoffrey’s text, describing the brief career and death of Constantine the father, is there any mention of Vortigern. Constantine is knifed by a Pict.  

 If this diatribe had been written by Robert Browning we might see this as a subtle way of suggesting hatred has unhinged Ambrosius. But inconsistency seems not to have bothered Geoffrey or his subsequent translators.

 Wace, following Geoffrey, has Constantine stabbed by a Pict, who had been in his service but had begun to hate the King: ‘I do not know why’. But when he comes to Vortigern’s death, Wace repeats the accusation that Vortigern has slain both father and brother. He refers to it twice. Once ‘in text’ and once in words that he gives to Ambrosius. Had he flicked back a few pages, he could have checked and seen that this is wrong.  

 Laȝamon does the same. He expands and dramatizes the initial treachery, giving the Pict a name and lines to speak. He describes the assassination. Wace’s ten lines became 21 long lines (or 42 short lines in Madden’s edition). 

 The scene obviously caught his imagination. He makes no mention of Vortigern. 

 When he gets to Vortigern’s death, Laȝamon leaves out the long speech. No Robert Browning effect here. Instead, Ambrosius makes a grim joke about keeping warm. Then Laȝamon follows Geoffrey and Wace in repeating the accusation that Vortigern killed both father and brother. 

 Either they couldn’t check what they’d read, which is unlikely; they had forgotten what they had written, which in Laȝamon’s case seems improbable, or it wasn’t important. 

 Considering why it wasn't important, points towards an essential difference between Medieval and Modern writing 

 

What are the differences between Early Medieval and Modern Writers part 2

 Background

 Geoffrey, Wace and Laȝamon all seem to make the same mistake in allowing Auerelius or Ambrosius to accuse Vortigern of having murdered A’s father. 

If you have an obvious contradiction in a story, then the writer might have overlooked something, was doing something very clever, or was simply inept. When you have three writers ‘making the same mistake’ something different is happening. 

 So backtrack a bit and begin with 2 well-known examples.

 What our three early medieval writers didn't do.


At the beginning of Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago and Roderigo move onto the stage. They are in the middle of an argument. 

 It’s a simple, effective trick to make us imagine that the conversation started before the play did. And that illusion is an essential part of modern, post-Shakespearian, assumptions about how fiction works.

 This illusion, that characters are more than just words on a page and can be known as real people, reached it critical apogee when A.C. Bradley asked ‘How Old is Macbeth’ or ‘Did Lady Macbeth really faint?’  This, and similar questions, have been the subject of subsequent critical derision: epitomised by L. C. Knight’s famous ‘How many children has Lady Macbeth?’ but they are a testament to the power of the illusion that Lady Macbeth is a ‘real’ person.  

 If they are no longer considered ‘credible’ critical questions, both New Criticism and Post Modernism having rendered them suspect, they are exactly the kind of ‘character background’ modern writers are encouraged to develop while writing their novels. 

 Pace the critics, we remember Lady Macbeth because she does seem real. Literary conventions and learnt reading practices combine to lead us to wonder why she does what does and why she is the way she is. The illusion is that something happens between the Banquet scene and the sleepwalking scene, to bring about such a radical change in her state of mind.  She has a life off stage that we can somehow access and discuss. Or argue about.

 As I’m rewriting the story of Vortigern and Rowena, I feel obliged to treat her as a coherent character, with a biography that stretches back before the story starts, and comes to some kind of conclusion in her death. Childhood? Upbringing? Hengist pitches her at Vortigern but how did she feel about that? What does she even think of Vortigern? What did they talk about on their wedding night? How did they talk, given that they don’t speak each other’s language? What is her relationship with her father? Does she have any kind of relationship with Vortigern beyond the contractual sex of their marriage?  And if she does, how is it affected by her murder of Vortimer?

 What our Writers Did.

 None of these questions seems to have interested Wace or Laȝamon as they revised Geoffrey. And I think that suggests something different about their attitude towards the story.

 Rowena is not a ‘fully rounded literary character’ in the modern sense, whose biography we might expect to follow to its conclusion as though she were a biological entity. She is a proper noun accumulating verbs and nouns, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions. All that is important is what she does, relevant to the downfall of Britain. 

 She has no life off-stage. She only exists in the words that describe her speech and actions. Bright shards of incident and dialogue. This is strictly true of modern fictional characters, but the illusion of modern fiction is that these are just the visible parts of the life and a reader can fill in the gaps. Modern writers work at making that illusion work.

 In the ‘Brut’ there are no ‘gaps’ for the audience to fill. Asking ‘Why is Vortigern evil, what motivated his career before he is first mentioned’ is an irrelevant question. He is his reported actions and nothing more. 

 It follows from this that there is no character development and no sense that characters are able to learn from their ‘experiences’.   

 Laȝamon's imagination sees Rowena in focus in the scenes where she is important, but that’s all. She has no opinions, no feelings, and no attitudes that can be explored.  She is a noun, the subject, object, even indirect object of sentences.  It’s not that her death happens ‘off stage’. 

 There is no ‘off-stage’. She doesn’t die. She never lived. She is simply no longer part of the linguistic event. 

 And this, to return to the previous post, explains the ‘inconsistency’. It’s not inconsistent because the process doesn’t acknowledge, let alone aspire to consistency. Constantine’s story exists only in the words and phrases used about him at a particular stage of the text: not in the past of the story. Not five pages back. There is no coherent ‘biography’ to disrupt. The rhetorical and emotional possibilities of Aurelius’ anger take precedent. 

 Which is strange. And different. And has multiple implications for the way a story works. 

 And leads towards a confrontation with Laȝamon’s attitude towards /use of numbers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Susan Watson’s ‘The Time of the Angels’ (in 'Long Poem Magazine' issue 21)

Susan Watson’s ‘The Time of the Angels’ (p.61-68 in Long Poem Magazine issue 21, spring 2019.)

 

Warning: Enthusing in progress…

Susan’s Watson’s poem, or sequence, is divided into pieces of varying length and form, each with its own title. The prose introduction states that in 1979 its author was writing an honours thesis on Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’. It also refers to ‘the‘end of an era’ marked by the election of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979. The poems are written in third person ‘because I wanted to distance myself from the nameless young woman reading.’

Literary criticism and autobiography made into public art.  It’s a very impressive balancing act.

Of all the poems in the magazine, I read this one first for a very superficial reason. If I were to take one book to a desert Island, I’d take an untranslated Malory. This is the only book I’ve written poems to and about. So, there’s an element of envy in the admiration that follows.

There’s also a personal irony; in 1980, I was planning to write an honours thesis on Malory. I was gently but firmly told to do something else. Had I been allowed to follow my obsession, A Presentment of Englishry (Shearsman 2019) might be about Malory, Lollards and the War of the Roses and not Laȝamon, Anarchy and the legendary history.

I start with this because I recognise the quality of Watson’s reading of Malory.  There are other fine poems in the magazine, but this one stands out. 

The first poem in the sequence is called ‘Why she began to fall in love with the works of Sir Thomas Malory’.

It stands as an overture to the rest of the sequence. Each of its irregular, short stanzas presents a reason ‘why’, but each introduces ideas and images that are picked up, extended and passed on as the sequence unfolds. This means the intelligence is there, in the architecture, where it should be if a sequence is to be more than a collection of random pieces.

This first poem begins:

 

Because of the narrative voice
a plain voice threading beads

 The first two lines announce the validity of the reading, and the writer’s skill: the unobtrusive metaphor is effective as a description of Malory’s style.  The idea of things in sequence, like beads on a thread, how they can be similar and yet vary, how repetition can be a form of variation, are all important ideas in what follow in the poem.

As a reading of Malory, the sequence provides interesting ways of rethinking the book. Malory’s knights eagerly fewter their spears and charge at each other before the hat has time to drop. Sir Thomas obviously loved to write about their endless foynings and slashings. But as Watson points out the ‘customary moves’ of this ‘courtly love dance’ repeated so many times, like those almost identical beads on the thread, lead up to the sudden shock of their disappearance in the combat between Mordred and Arthur.

 

At one point Watson describes the act of academic writing:

She’d already explained all the things
That blood meant and means
In those customary terms that she had borrowed  

which felt like a great sheet of iron
preventing things she really thought and meant

 

But the poems, not being essays, have the freedom to move around those sheets of iron, to explore and suggest possibilities, to make their own links.  

Initially, Maying reads like a reflection on one of Malory’s most famous passages, alternating its long lines, some about the passage, some evoke the physical reality of reading, but then the piece bends gently to suggest something about Malory himself while perhaps also suggesting something about the poet’s life and choices at that time. To get that many things happening coherently in a poem is a tribute to the writer’s skill.

Guinevere is perhaps Malory’s great creation. She is his great contributions to English literature. It’s hard not to wonder where she came from. And it’s hard not to occasionally feel the author is suddenly speaking in his own voice about things outside the story. In the post-modern world of dead authors and author functions one might feel awkward advancing such an idea in an essay,  but the Maying opens a space for reflection:

‘Also she likes

the sudden subtle taste of cinnamon in the raisin cake, this voice, this brief scenting of a voice: Sir Thomas Malory Knight

Her idea of essayists:

men sitting in towers looking down, judging, but not like this. What had happened, what made those lines flow out just then?’

 

As Watson writes, ‘Contrition and sorrow lie lightly under the surface of those words’, leading to the final line, ‘ So he had forgiven her then’.

It’s done lightly, and well. The cinnamon in the raisin cake is another one of those metaphors you might miss if you weren’t paying attention.

The danger is that if the reader isn’t interested in Malory, the poem could sink. However that is not the case here because the sequence is more than just ‘a reading of Malory’.

Even in Maying there’s a feeling of life choices being considered by the narrator: ‘Adventures’ or the quiet of books; a withdrawal into the library or the risk of riding out.

People fall in love with a book. The academic essay rarely manages to capture the untidiness of recognition and obsession but ‘The time of the Angels’ as a whole, effectively conveys the way a book inflects the world of the reader, providing new ways of thinking and seeing, while the world inflects the reader’s way of seeing the book.

In ‘New year 1979’ the gothic arch on gothic arch, leading away down the corridor, is both a physical description of a place, but also an image of Malory’s narrative. Since everything is predicted at the start, the story leads inexorably to its final point, like the vanishing point in a drawing of perspective, but the doors leading off, opening and shutting, are like the strange sub texts that bubble under the stories.

The world in 1979, in England, was cold, and threatening. The poem is dusted with snow. Margaret Thatcher was about to come to power. Although Woods didn’t quote it, her description of going to the polls, and her feeling of frustration, evokes Malory’s denunciation of the English: Alas! Thys ys a greate defaughte of us Englysshemen, for there may no thynge us please no terme.

What I initially thought was my only criticism of the poem, on reflection, might be an example of how good it is.

The sequence ends:

‘Was Merlin there in the polling booth?
He’d never have told her 

She’s taken the aventure
set out on a quest, without knowing,
chosen the man she’d marry.’

 I initially thought the last two lines are the only point in the sequence where an ambiguity suggests something hidden and personal. ‘The man she’d marry’ has made no appearance in the poem, unless we’re still with metaphors and the man is Malory. But on reflection the stanza underlines the difference between the book and lived experience and allows the subject to exit the sequence.

In Malory you know how the story ends from the start:

 

Because of the prophecies
Like setting books down on a table
Those things must happen[…]

 

But life isn’t like that. Merlin doesn’t turn up at the polling booth (though political pundits would like to pretend they have the power of prophecy). There’s no one to tell you how the story ends. Encounters are random and meaningless until they are given significance in retrospect.

The paragraph introducing the sequence says that ‘this is part of a longer poem’. I would very much like to read the whole thing.

 

End of enthusing

David Jones’s ‘The Grail Mass and Other Works’.

David Jones’s ‘The Grail Mass and other Works’. Edited by Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Collision. Bloomsbury, ‘Modernist Archives’, London etc 2019

This is a publication by ‘Modernist Archives’. The editorial statement claims Bloomsbury’s ’Modernist archives’ series ‘makes available to researchers at all levels historical archival material that can reconfigure received views of modernist literature and culture’. 

This book cost me over two hundred Australian dollars, so I have to wonder what that ‘at all levels’ means. The first question to address then, is that if you’re not an institution, but an admirer of Jones’s work, and you save your pennies or cents to buy a copy, is it worth it?

The answer, in this particular instance, is an unqualified yes.

Firstly, it’s a beautiful book. Nice binding, boards, good paper, good font. It sounds daft, but there are familiar fragments in here, and they are much more enjoyable to read on good white paper in a clean font than in the slightly slurred font on stale paper that is my Faber copy of ‘The Sleeping Lord and other fragments’ (To save time, hereafter TSL).

Secondly there is a lot of material here and some of it is in the ‘not seen before category’. ‘The Grail Mass’ is reconstructed as a coherent sequence/poem from Jones’s manuscripts into approximately 126 pages of text. Some of this has appeared before as published fragments, some was integrated into ‘The Anathemata’, but the presentation of the whole realigns the fragments. More on this later. 

There are two further sections of writing: one called ‘A True fragment, an Extraction and A Variation’, and the other ‘Origins and Endings’.  

In total something like 200 pages of Jones’s writing.  

There’s also a critical apparatus detailing how the text was put together from manuscripts, how the versions here differ from other printed versions, and a guide of sorts to the grail mass. My previous experience of critical writing on David Jones lead me to ignore all this the first time I read the book. This was probably unfair. Without the painstaking work of the editors I wouldn’t be reading the book but Jones tends to exceed his exegetes far more thoroughly than most writers.

However, quite unintentionally the ‘Guide to the Grail Mass’ does raise one of the defining problems of reading David Jones. The editors identify the speakers in the first three segments. It’s hardly earth shattering.

But the effect of this simple piece of information on rereading the poems is like walking through an opened door into a realigned landscape. The question, which I have no answer to, is given that the ‘dramatic monologue’ is the basic form of several of these pieces, what did Jones gain by not indicating who is speaking, so the reader was orientated from the start?  

The next question: Given that Jones himself was unsatisfied with the project, and didn’t feel it was ready for publication, does rifling through his files and reconstructing it, do his memory justice. 

And again, the answer has to be yes. 

The editors claim that ‘It is our contention that the parts forming the Grail Mass…can be read as continuous and unified whole that can be judged on its own merit’.

I think they’re right. The Grail Mass, as presented here, stands comparison with both In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, with two qualifications, that it is unfinished, and his speakers: Judas, Caiaphas, his Roman Soldiers, humanise the material in a way that’s missing from The Anathemata. It’s funny in places, recognisably human, with all the poetry intact.

So you’ve got a copy of ‘The Sleeping Lord and other Fragments’, or ‘The Roman Quarry’. Do you need this book?

I’d say yes. Although Jones quarried the unfinished project and published fragments, they take on a new life when re-contextualised, presented in the sequence they grew out of. High Priests, grumbling squaddies and troubled tribunes add to, confirm, contradict and redefine each other’s views of the world in a structured movement that mimics the layering of detail Jones used in some of his paintings. Bunting’s ‘Then is now’ has rarely been taken so seriously and dramatized so thoroughly. 

And, again, it sounds daft, but the reading experience is much more enjoyable moving through the sequence, rather than reading the isolated fragments. 

The versions published here are also different from those previously published, which allows insight into Jones’ working methods.  Some of which I find baffling.

The irony of the book’s price is that you could give this Grail Mass to any reader of poetry, let them know who is speaking, and it could win Jones far more readers than those who have shipwrecked trying to read The Anathemata.

If you are a devotee of Jones’ writing, and there must be one or two more out there, you probably need a copy of this book. For once the content is definitely worth the daunting price of admission 

'Casket' by Andy Brown

Casket by Andy Brown. Shearsman Chapbooks, 2019. (31 pages)

I like this short collection very much.

The Casket in question is the The Frank’s Casket, a ‘whale bone’ box dating from the eighth century, covered with Runic inscriptions and almost cluttered with intricately carved and often enigmatic scenes.

For readers interested in Old English Poetry, the Casket is accidentally iconic. The cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Michael Alexander’s ‘The Earliest English poems’ (1966), which contained those ground breaking translations of Old English,  was a slightly blurred image from one of its panels. It is a pleasure to see the thing in the British Museum. And astonishing to see how small it is.

Brown’s chapbook consists of five poems, or five short sequences, one for each of the side panels, one for the lid. It’s very good.  I like the way it ghosts Old English.

Each poem begins with the relevant runic inscription and takes off from there. A note from the author explains the runic alphabet. Each rune has an equivalent letter and what Brown calls a ‘pictorial’ value… the word for Fish in runic script also contains the values for ‘wealth’ ‘ice’ ‘sun’ and ‘torch’’.  ‘To write the following poems I determined the sequence of images yielded by each runic word, and then used these images or variants of them, to write the poems’ (p.5).

As a concept, it’s interesting, but it puts conceptual intelligence into the architecture of the poems, where I think it should be. Whether or not you can map the runes directly onto the poems, and how much latitude Brown allowed himself in that ‘variants of them’, would require far more time than I’m willing to dedicate to the effort of finding out. The poems stand as poems.

The collection is thematically linked by the last line ‘…this shared and ever constant now’. The chapbook presents ‘the place where I live’ (coyly unspecified in a book about place)  as a palimpsest: modern golfers play where Britons and Saxons fought. On the water, New Foundland cod boats set sail and pass Danish raiders and ‘Dunkirkers’ coming home, while Flemish privateers have landed to burn the town.  Glimpses of history mingle with scenes from the present, graffiti’d bridges and frozen allotments, trail bikers and fishermen.

The poetry itself is skilfully written. The first sequence, ‘Whalebone’ picks up the echo of Old English alliterative verse. The Anglo-Saxon line with its triple crash and bang doesn’t sound good if sustained in modern English, so Brown’s handling of it here is skilful, evocative of Old English, giving the poem an onward movement but without sounding heavy handed:

This unforgiving trade, when the ice
Of February frets the core and fingers
And the sun’s declining disk smoulders
Barely bright enough to light the creek. 

The nod towards Old English is also beautifully done towards the end of the fifth section. One poem, beginning ‘I sing’ blurs the distinction between the Casket, its maker and the poet, since all three are ‘singing’:  the lines evoke the epigrammatic mood of Old English. 

This leads to that most Old English of poems, ‘the thing speaking’….(’prosopopoeia’ is not a word I get to type very often.)

Snatched from the creature’s warmth
And brought into the sun
I’ve made this voyage to artful box 

This sounds like the beginning of one of the Exeter book riddles. But ‘For month’s I knew the workman’s hands’ leads into the bone’s description of how it became a casket and we’ve moved from riddle to something more affecting. My candidate for ‘the best piece in the book’.

The last fourteen lines in the chapbook seem to offer some kind of conclusion, but I think they are perhaps the least convincing piece/s of the collection. The tendency of OE to epigrammatic, generalising is captured in

We have the measure of our lives all wrong
it’s not this time of flesh and blood alone,
but the slow millennia of dissolution,
when skin and bone return to whence they came

But the sudden shift from the previously specific ‘I’ to the vague ‘we’ and the equally generalised statement which slides off the fact the Casket has, after at least a thousand years, most definitely not returned to whence it came, might be the only flaw in the collection.. 

My only reservation may be irrelevant and whether you see it as criticism or observation depends on what you want from the poems you read.

As a reader of poems, and buyer of poetry, there are thousands of books to choose from. But increasingly I feel it doesn’t really matter. There are varying degrees of technical competence but at the end of some collections I wonder if life would have been any worse for not reading them. 

The problem facing writers and readers of contemporary poetry is that lurking, ‘Nice.. but so what? ‘

Bunting wrote ‘Then is now’ and produced Briggflatts . Eliot spun whorls with time past and time present being simultaneously present in time future. David Jones started with the idea of a past permanently present in the language and built In Parenthesis and The Anathemata. The idea of ‘a shared and ever constant now’ has been the starting point of some major poetic writing.

If you read Casket, you’ll never look at the Frank’s casket the same way again. Which is a good thing, though looking at the Frank’s Casket is not something most of get the chance to do very often.

If you live in England and don’t realise you are living in a place with a deep and varied history, some of it still visible around you, the collection might wake you up to that fact.

But if the last fourteen lines offer a conclusion, they are perhaps the least convincing piece/s of the collection. For all the verbal skill, there’s a step not taken, and ‘so what?’ is doing a passable impersonation of Grendel, lurking on the edges of the reading. Whether you let him or not depends on you. If you let him in, the effect is disastrous.

 I don’t know if this is an observation or a criticism.

 

'Three stories by Gerald of Wales' new poems

Three poems from A Presentment of Englishry are in the translation section of this month’s ‘The High Window’. Takes a bit of scrolling, I’m the ‘medieval Latin’ contributor, but the first of Gerald’s stories is worth the scrolling effort. And should you ever be in that position, you’ll know the correct answer.

https://thehighwindowpress.com/category/translation/

A Presentment of Englishry will be published by Shearsman books in March of 2019.

New Book: A Presentment of Englishry

A Presentment of Englishry will be published by Shearsman in the UK in 2019.

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The book is a series of narrative poems, relating incidents from ‘The Matter of Britain’. The three main stories move from the prehistoric tin trade to the Fall of Roman Britain.

A presentment of Englishry was the offering of proof that a dead man was English in order to avoid the fine that would be levied if the body was Norman; ironically a requirement to prove the insignificance of the dead man due to his nationality.

A Presentment of Englishry began as an attempt to rethink three of Laȝamon's stories.

Laȝamon is not one of medieval literature’s most well known writers: you can find an introduction to his work by clicking on this link and below on this blog.

Pierre Michon, 'Winter Mythologies' and Faking the Middle Ages.

 

 ‘Winter Mythologies’ contains two collections of very short stories by Pierre Michon: “Three Miracles from Ireland’ and ‘Nine passages from the Causse’.

Michon is a fascinating writer and there is so much to admire about these stories.  But what intrigues me is the way he fakes the middle ages, provoking the question: how to retell medieval stories, or stories set in the middle ages when it comes to dealing with matters of belief. 

Yale University Press publishes the English version, translated by Ann Jefferson, as Winter mythologies and Abbots. In the French ‘Edition Verdier’ Mythologies d’hiver the first three stories are called Trois Prodiges En Irlande. While prodige can be translated into English as miracle, it can also mean prodigy, which can apply to a thing or event as much as a person. ‘The fervor of Brigid’, ‘The sadness of Columbkill’ and ‘The levity of Sweeney’ are all prodigious. But none of them is a miracle in the religious sense of that word.  

At first glance they mimic the brevity of the medieval chronicles Michon purports to be using. But on closer rereading, it becomes obvious that Michon tells them from the view point of a skeptical modern sensibility, within the framework of modern understanding and belief and this leads to what I will call, for want of a better term, faking the middle ages.  

Medieval miracle stories are commonplace. Read Bede, or Gerald of Wales, read any early medieval chronicle, they are full of stories of the miraculous.  So are saint’s lives and the records of their cults and shrines. People went on pilgrimage in the honest belief that the Saint’s relics would cure them.

We know there were fakes and we know there were skeptics even in the early middle ages, but the evidence suggests that the majority believed in miracles; in the ability of saints to intercede on their behalf and the fact that while the world worked to laws that existed but were not well-understood, God had the ability to alter those laws to show His favor, displeasure, or power. It should also be remembered that there are still people who hold these beliefs.

Michon’s three Irish Stories refigure belief as a prodigious type of desire in search of an object. But this is a desire for something more than the tactile world can provide. It is an innate yearning that can never be satisfied.

In the first story, Bridgid wants to see God’s face. She is in earnest, so much so that she will kill herself and her sisters for the chance of seeing him. In the second, Columbkill wants a copy of the Psalter he has read. Denied his copy, in what’s sometimes called the first copyright case in Europe, he goes to war in order to own the original.

Both Brigid and Columbkill want, in both the older and more common usage of the word. In Michon’s perfect phrase, Columbkill discovers ‘The book is not in the book’ :‘Le Livre n’est pas dans le livre’.  We can’t know if Brigid saw the face of God. Having killed her sisters and committed suicide, her story ends: “They are implacably dead. They are contemplating the face of God’ (P.11). The lack of any grammatical link between the two sentences does not inspire confidence in the idea that one leads to the other or that the first is not a comment on the second.

Columbkill however, got what he wanted only to discover that the thing he gained is not the thing he wanted. ‘He searches the text for something he has read and cannot find, and the picture for something he has seen and which has vanished. He searches long and in vain, yet it was there when it wasn’t his’ (p.16).  Learning his lesson, he throws away the book and his warrior’s paraphernalia and, ‘…on the bald island of Iona he sits down, free and stripped of everything, beneath a sky which is sometimes blue’ (p.16).

If a defeated Columbkill learns to become ‘stripped of everything’ and accept the world as it is, then in the first three stories only Sweeney is happy with who he is and what he does. He is happy being a king. When Finbar curses him, he takes to the woods and lives as though he had become a bird. He is happy being a wild animal. Michon doesn’t say whether Sweeney’s acceptance of his life is a kind of sanity bordering on sanctity, or proof positive he’s mad.

While Michon is prepared to believe in the desire for what is not present, his attitude towards medieval faith is that of a modern skeptic.  At first sight his pared back prose seems to imitate the style of the medieval chronicles. But on closer inspection the stories are told in three voices. There’s the flat style which sounds like objective reportage. Brigid and her sisters go swimming:

‘All three girls run through the spring dawn. They reach the bottom of the embankment and throw their clothes under the foliage’ (p. 5).

But the reportage is often disturbed by Michon’s adjectives. When Columbkill gives up everything and moves to Iona he crosses the ‘loathsome Irish Sea’ (p. 16). Why is the Irish sea ‘loathsome’?  And who thinks it’s loathsome: Brendan or Michon?  Brigid, swimming, sees that her flesh is ‘excessive’. Later when Patrick sees the sisters in the water, we are told ‘they are flagrant and excessive’. What is flesh in excess of? The similes that follow, ‘Like a dreaming King’ in the first example, ‘like Grace itself’ in the second, are not helpful. What does ‘Implacably dead’ mean?  

If the adjectives disturb the reportage, Michon’s third voice is the voice of the knowing modern skeptic. People in the past believed in Miracles, and gave witness to them. Michon translates that belief into a desire for the non-existent: there are no miracles, only things that can be explained away.

When Saint Patrick is introduced in the first story we are told that to convert the pagan Irish, ‘il suffit de quelques abracabras druidiques’ which sounds even more contemptuous than the English translation’s ‘all it requires is a few druidic spells’. Patrick is a fake who knows he’s a fake: a conjurer who is growing old.  ‘He would like a real miracle to occur, just once’ (p. 5). This desire explains his treatment of Brigid as does the sublimated sexuality between them which is hinted at in the story.

Because they are juxtaposed in the one book, it’s possible to read the story of Saint Enimie, which runs through five of the Nine Passages on the Causse, as an elaboration on a form of dishonesty. If people can suffer in varying degrees from a prodigious desire for something that is absent, then religion is what you get when that desire is given an object. Inherent in that idea is that manipulation and exploitation are inevitable. Those who desire can be manipulated and exploited by those who can supply and claim to control that object. It’s how advertising and propaganda work. It is hardly an earth-shattering observation until it is applied to religion and Medieval faith.

What Michon does not say is that today Saint-Enimie is a place, and that her existence as a historical person is dubious. She doesn’t warrant an entry in the standard dictionary of saints and unless your knowledge of French Kings is very good, it’s easy to miss the fact that centuries pass between each of the episodes in the development of her cult.

The saint is first mentioned in passing at the beginning of the second ‘passage’, ‘Saint Hilere’. ‘He has founded a community of brothers no one knows where on the banks of the River Tarn, doubtless on the spot where Enimie, the saint with Merovech’s blood, will later come’ (p. 28).

Enimie's own brief story: 'Enimie', comes next. It reads like a small fable. She is the daughter of the King. She becomes the abbess of a priory ‘on a river called the Tarn, in a place with an unpronounceable name’ (p. 32). It’s a joke. She never goes there. Her position is merely an administrative convenience. She has sex with the major of the palace. He drops her for someone else. She dies. ‘It is said to be leprosy’ (p. 33). 

Three centuries later, the monks of a small community on the Tarn need a saint to substantiate and defend their claim to ownership. The process of creating a posthumous career for Enimie, first writing her vita in Latin, then again much later translating that story into the vernacular, runs over three more stories. The difference between the stories  'Enimie' and 'Sancta Enima' are commentary on the process.

Sancta Enimie is a fake: her posthumous career is created by the shifting needs of the monks and their literary abilities.

If people can suffer in varying degrees from a prodigious desire for something that is absent, then religion is what you get when that desire is given an object. Inherent in that idea is that manipulation and exploitation are inevitable. Those who desire can be manipulated and exploited by those who can supply and claim to control that object. It’s how advertising and propaganda work. It is hardly an earth-shattering observation until it is applied to religion and Medieval faith. Accept the desire; deny the reality of the object of that desire.

And that’s where the modern mind and the medieval one part company.

Christianity has a bad press. Fundamentalists make the headlines.  The deviant behavior of some of its clergy is used to damn the whole of the Catholic Church. Modern knowledge, from Biology to Medicine to Meteorology, can supply convincing explanations of many miracle stories. Atheism is trendy.

Whether or not a modern writer believes in saints and miracles, people in the past did. The question is then how to deal with this belief if writing about the past.

Michon translates those beliefs into a narrative underwritten by modern skepticism.  We know the church as an institution became corrupt. We know its beliefs became easily exploited by the greedy and unscrupulous. There were enough fragments of the true cross in Europe to build a decent house and some of John the Baptist’s many fingers looked a lot like chicken bones.

But that doesn’t mean it was all faked. Bede and his audience expected miracles both from dead saints and living holy men and women. Miracles were the visible, tangible proof of an invisible power or an exceptional grace. When the Pagan priests and the Christian missionaries faced off in post Roman Britain, it wasn’t the equivalent of a conjurors’ Ok Corral. Writing it as though it were is entertaining and comforting to the modern mind, but another conjuror’s trick. 

The Laȝamon Project: using poems to think, or revisiting Pound's 'scholarship poem'.

‘Laȝamon remembers Ireland’ is a small part of a much bigger project. 

You can read the poem here:

 http://www.meniscus.org.au/Vol6Iss1.pdf  (on pages 72-73)

There’s an introduction to Laȝamon's Brut on this website here:  http://www.liamguilar.com/articles/#/lawman-lived-here/

I’ve been reading and then reading and writing about the Brut since about 1981, when a disgruntled undergraduate, me, was told he couldn’t use Malory for his Honours thesis but should ‘do something with Laȝamon’.

The questions that interest me now are ones that a conventional academic approach, confined by the discipline of whatever methodology, cannot answer. This is not to denigrate scholarship. Without scholarship, mine and others, what I’m trying to do would come untethered and drift off into pseudo-historical fantasy-writing.

If writing a poem can offer a unique way of thinking through and in language, then writing poems, retelling stories, can lead beyond the various walls that hedge academic scholarship to suggest ways of thinking about the Brut, its author and their time. A question as simple as, ‘Why does Locrin put Aestrild in an ‘earth house’ with ‘ivory doors’? lead to the Bronze age tin trade. Whatever the poem suggests can then be tested against the evidence. It’s a fascinating process because it leads into areas logic and reason might not consider.   It’s Pound’s ‘scholarship poem’, or Graves’ ‘poetic method’ taken seriously.  

I set out to retell four stories from the Brut. But as the project developed, it became a many-sided conversation with a strange variety of textual participants: the history of Dark Age Naval power, tin trade in the Bronze age, Homer, Virgil, Herodotus, the archaeology of post Roman Britain, the history of early Medieval Wales and England, the English Parish clergy in the 12th century, the writings of Gerald of Wales…and while trying to translate the prologue, I found I’d started writing about Laȝamon himself. 

The Poet

First question: Should I conscript a name and hang a set of beliefs and values on it that probably weren’t his, or should I try to recreate the man and risk gagging on his alterity. 

Answer: the second option, though it’s much riskier to attempt to strip back the associations that Priest, Poet, Poem, Literature have accumulated. 

As soon as I write ‘Laȝamon is one of the first named English poets’ or ‘he was a priest’ I have activated a series of responses which unavoidably muddy the discussion. 

What we know about Laȝamon is contained in ‘The Prologue’: the first 35 lines of the poem. He was a priest, at one time living at Aerely Kings. He decided to tell the noble deeds of the English. He went looking for books and then started writing. Other than that, his French was good.  

The current church at Arely was rebuilt in the 19th century. The Norman Church may have been small, about thirty-five feet by fifteen according to Tatlock. Though Laȝamon calls it a church it was probably a chapel. It is about ten miles from Worcester, not ‘the middle of nowhere’, there was a ford crossing the river on a road to Wales and a ferry at Redstone, but it was a small living. In the later 13th Century the income of the church was valued at £5.13s.4d when the national average seems to have been about 10 pounds.

Call him a poet and you can imagine him coming up with the idea of his poem and then scribbling away at his desk in the evening after a hard day’s priesting.  But he couldn’t just go to the local shop and buy paper or notebooks or go online and order a copy of Wace from the Book depository or pop into the local library and ask them to organise an interlibrary loan.

Areley was not the kind of place where those resources were available. Although he claims it was his idea, if he were the priest at Areley, then someone told him to write this and they were prepared to fund the necessary materials. Who that someone was, whether individual or institution, and why they wanted him to do it are unanswerable questions given the lack of evidence. Nor is there any evidence to suggest he’d written anything previously:  the Brutstumbles at the beginning as though he’s learning as he goes along. It may be the only ‘poem’ he wrote.

Using poems as a way of thinking about all this, I found I’d attached Laȝamon to Gerald of Wales. (you can read the poem, ‘Laȝamon remembers Ireland’ here: http://www.meniscus.org.au/Vol6Iss1.pdf on pages 72-73)

J.S.P Tatlock had suggested Laȝamon had been in Ireland. His argument has been dismissed not because it was implausible but because of the evidence he used to support it. Playing with the idea, I sent him to Ireland with John, not yet a King. But why would he have been there? He would have been useful; possibly trilingual and able to write. He could have gone as a clerk in the retinue of one of the lords, he could even have been attached to John’s household. But the main source for John’s expedition is Gerald of Wales, and his name fitted the rhythm of the line. A scribe in the household of Gerald of Wales, worked whereas ‘A scribe in the household of John, not yet King…sounded naff. 

Everything else in that poem can be footnoted EXCEPT the essential premise that Laȝamon was there.

But the idea seemed worth following.  Focussed on the scarcity of ‘English poetry’ in this period, it’s easy to forget how much writing does survive from the 12th Century. And the comparison with Gerald is revealing.  

Gerald is visible in ways Laȝamon is not. Over the twenty or so works he produced, he tells his readers enough about himself to produce a biography. There’s even something that can be called his ‘autobiography’. He was born into a marcher family with connections to many of the Welsh nobility. His grandmother Nest, had been Henry 1’s mistress. He was educated in France and had lectured in Paris during the great academic explosion of the 12th century. He held a  position at the Angevin court and had direct contact with the King and his family. He was sent with John to Ireland; his family, the FitzGeralds had played a major part in the Norman conquest of the Island. He visited Rome more than once. 

Gerald remains a vital if contested source for the history of Ireland and Wales in this period. He fought verbally with Kings and Archbishops and wasn’t averse to correcting the Pope.  

Unlike the priest at Areley, Gerald had the financial and institutional resources to be able to decide that he would devote time and materials to producing books. He had the independence of the well-connected and relatively well-off that enabled him to choose his own topics.

Ironically, because he wrote in Latin, Gerald is, unlike Laȝamon, much more recognisable as an ‘author’ in the modern understanding of the word. As a writer, he had a powerful sense of the tradition he was working in. He knew the church fathers and the Latin poets. His writing is scattered with quotations and allusions to both. He also seems to have had a sense of himself as a participant in that tradition, as a creator of literature and perhaps he saw himself as on a par with those glorious dead. He certainly believed his writing would win him posthumous fame. 

Perhaps career is the wrong word, but he had a sense of the trajectory of a dedicated writing life: I have written; I will write. The well- known books he describes as juvenilia: the great work was where it usually is, somewhere in the future at the end of the rainbow. 

He tried to use his writing as a way of gaining preferment, his prefaces flatter the great men he dedicated each work to and are the usual combination of self-advertisement, flattery and hope for reward.

He died an old man, hopefully at peace amongst his books. 

Gerald is an antidote to the idea that writing ‘literature’ was a way of gaining advancement or that the church automatically rewarded talent. In the 12th Century there were great men whose careers went from modest beginnings to positions of wealth and power: William the Marshall and Hubert de Bugh are the obvious examples. But ‘poetry’ and ‘literature’ were not a career path to wealth and prestige, a fact Gerald often bemoans. 

I can’t see Laȝamon writing the Brut as a way of advertising his talents to the church hierarchy. Nor can I accept the once popular ideas that the poem is Angevin propaganda and/or an example of popular literature offered to the lower orders. 

In a world of patrons and power, someone wanted this done. Who that was is now unknowable. But why it was done has, I think, a boring answer. Our mysterious patron, whether person or institution, had the resources and wanted the story in English. And Laȝamon was the man who was given the task. Why he was given that task is another intriguing mystery. 

My educated guess is that the Brut is an example of the small scale, localised production of texts, which has left little trace in the record because the odds were against the survival of one or two manuscripts in a language even the most educated would struggle to read until the 19th century. Such writing, as Christopher Canning has argued, would have been idiosyncratic by our standards, varying from writer to writer because there was no English tradition as fixed and glittering as the Latin one: no named glorious dead to quote and emulate.   

Laȝamon wrote the Brut because he was the best man available for the job. I think it makes sense to see it as a job and him as a jobbing writer. I don’t see either description as being in any way belittling. 

Unlike the essay marching to its preconceived conclusion, the poem opens up the conversation.  It lead to Pierre Michon's "Winter Mythologies' and the problem of writing about the Middle Ages. Which should be the next post.