Vaguely Medieval Books Review’d, No. 3.
In a patch of mild insomnia, I finished two vastly different but vastly entertaining books with a Viking theme: John Buchan’s The Island of Sheep (1936) and Cressida Cowell’s How to Steal a Dragon’s Sword (2011). Now obviously neither of these was written for People Of My Age, and it may seem strange to draw parallels between Tintin aux Faroes and Five Go Berserk, but it’s not often I get to read novels, so I tend to mix and match.
The How to Train Your Dragon series needs no introduction. After two beautiful films, only very loosely based on the books, the characters Hiccup, Fishlegs, Stoick the Vast and Toothless are at least familiar to tweens and juvenile adults. Despite the steampunk elements, their medieval credentials are without doubt – at the very least, almost everyone speaks Norse – and the stories joyously combine their central bildungsroman with saga-derived vendettas and touches of magic. Yes, I have nearly finished the series. No, I am not an eight-year-old boy.
The Hannay novels may be familiar to an older generation, not least due to Hitchcock’s iconic, if loose, 1935 version of The Thirty-Nine Steps, but the four sequels have fallen out of favour, as has much of Buchan’s other literary output. Proto-Bourne narratives, Bond before Bond, they have car chases, political intrigue, trench warfare, cunning disguises, and plenty of moustachioed villains.
At the beginning of The Island of Sheep we again meet General Sir Richard Hannay, miraculously unscathed from his mountaintop duel with the dastardly Dominick Medina in The Three Hostages (1924). After a long-ago adventure (of the sort he’s always having then forgetting about – this one involves a shootout in Matabeleland) comes up in conversation, Hannay is reminded of a promise made to one Marius Haraldsen, possibly a racial supremacist, definitely a maniac, and recently deceased. A mixed bag of Essex financiers, Portuguese ruffians and an effete French aristocrat are after Haraldsen’s son, the heir to a colossal fortune. Our hero and his usual gang are called upon to help. This is fulfilled, seemingly, by Hannay insulting a stockbroker and heading to a number of friends’ castles to engage in blood sports. Sandy Clanroyden, Hannay’s partner-in-stopping-crime, spurs the action on by way of a couple of letters to The Times. It’s that sort of thriller.
Joking aside, both Haraldsen and his son are mad-keen on sagas, feudalism, and generally Being Nordic. Before the shootout on the veld, Hannay recalls,
Haraldsen said nothing. He had no weapon so I offered him my rifle. But he preferred to take an axe which Peter had insisted on bringing from the camp, and he swung it round his head, looking like some old Viking. (Part I, ch. 4)
His son Valdemar, named for the thirteenth-century conqueror-king of Denmark, sees eddic significance in the flight of geese and mourns that he couldn’t name his daughter after favourites from the sagas. And that daughter Anna presides over a reconstructed mead hall in a white silk gown, scattering largesse like Wealhþeow at Heorot.
Coming-of-age themes dominate the end of the novel, with the younger Haraldsen beginning to shoulder his responsibilities against the backdrop of a burgeoning tweenage romance. His twin obligations to the crime narrative and his father’s ethnic posturing are fulfilled when he falls into a berserker trance and throws the archvillain off a cliff. This perhaps owes far more to a Victorian literary fetish for hand-to-hand dénouements (cf. The Final Problem, or Lorna Doone) than to anything overtly medieval. But it is attached to the idea of blood feud that runs deep in the book and drives what narrative The Times can’t reach: while Clanroyden tries to tie up unfinished business with the slippery D’Ingraville, the younger Haraldsen muses:
Read in the Sagas, and you will see how relentless is the wheel. Hrut slays Hrap, and Atli slays Hrut, and Gisli slays Atli, and Kari slays Gisli. My father, God rest him, punishes the old Troth, and the younger Troth would punish me, and if he succeeds perhaps Anna or some child of Anna’s will punish him. (Part II, ch. 10)
This being literary mumbo-jumbo, Hannay chiefly ignores it.
Like Mr Standfast (1919), which traces The Pilgrim’s Progress and ends with one of its most famous passages, The Island of Sheep is a book about books. Both Haraldsen men see themselves as inheritors of a literary tradition, and as needing their actions to fit within one. The Island of Sheep itself, though named in the novel for its wool industry, is the safe haven of the St Brendan voyages, and the monk’s cell by the Haraldsens’ house is both a reminder of this foreign (to them) literary tradition and, in its ultimate destruction, a symbol of the sublimation of such external traditions into a single-minded Nordic narrative. Clanroyden informs us of the elder Haraldsen,
[He] had got into his head the notion that the Northern culture was as great a contribution to civilization as the Greek and Roman, and that the Scandinavian peoples were destined to be the true leaders in Europe. (Part I, ch. 3)
Unlike the racial supremacist Dominick Medina, the Haraldsens are not the villains of the piece, but rather the victims of unscrupulous greed. After the clear-cut politics of the wartime novels (The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle and Mr Standfast) the identity of Hannay’s opponents is no longer so regimented, and nor is national affiliation necessarily indicative of any trait. All the same, the elder Haraldsen’s ethnocentricity only avoids being an uncomfortable reminder of the rise of European nationalism because he is dispensed with quickly, the younger’s mumbo-jumbo being stomached because it is literary.
Draw me like one of your spear-maidens.
Being merely British, I am not legally afforded a say in what happens to a part of my country, and I often wonder where the Perth-born Buchan would have stood on the issue. He advocated a Scottish Parliament as early as 1932, but in the same speech also stated
It would be a bad day for Scotland if Scottish Members [of Parliament] ever came to support a measure which was for the moment good for Scotland, but was demonstrably bad for England […] I believe as firmly as ever that a sane nationalism is necessary for all true peace and prosperity, but I am equally clear, and I think we all agree to-day, that an artificial nationalism, which manifests itself in a barren separatism and in the manufacture of artificial differences, makes for neither peace nor prosperity. (24th Nov., 1932)
Literary nationalism, as dealt with also in that 1932 speech, was harmless to Buchan, and perhaps even a little amusing. In The Island of Sheep the Haraldsens never really move beyond the swinging of axes and quoting of sagas, the elder being too intent on finding treasure and the younger being largely unbothered by anything outside his library. The sudden arrival of dozens of riled and bloody islanders at the novel’s climax is also treated in literary terms:
[A] nightmare-army of blood-stained trolls […] Like Haraldsen they had gone back to type – they were their forebears of a thousand years ago making short work of a pirate crew. (Part III, ch. 16)
The novel’s plot necessitates axe-swinging, marauding and the adoption of false identities. Buchan’s constant reference to the literary background of Nordic identity, of the African coloniser’s treasure-fever, even of the car chase, nods to the narrative inevitability of both the sagas and the earlier Hannay novels, whose structure can seem as formulaic as a Bond film. But literary nationalism itself is based on adherence to stereotype. Could Buchan’s story exist outside such a history of storytelling? Emphatically, no.
How medieval was it? Tennyson’s Battle of Maldon. Or maybe Ivanhoe. Yeah, Ivanhoe.
Verdict? That’s a pleasant yarn. It had the right sort of ending.
noon auctoritee 