Yes We Khan

A brief update from the damps of February. This week I considered writing something about romance (not Romance), or Forty Seven Medieval Ways to Neck a Bottle of Wine, but today is a special anniversary for two very special people. That’s right: on this day in respectively 1294 and 1405, Kublai Khan and Timur the Lame both died. Two out of three favourite medieval warlords rate today as the best day to die!

It is a bit weak to talk of the ‘achievements’ of men who ruled over substantial parts of Asia, oversaw vast construction projects and whose empires could scarcely survive them. In part it is a question of scale and ambition. Both men seem to have modelled themselves on Genghis, with all the ruthlessness and brutality that entailed. In another part, they simply feel unreal as historical figures.

Bro, do you even pillage?

What I know of these men I know primarily from European sources. Specifically, from the Livre des Merveilles du Monde of Marco Polo and Kit Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. In many ways, this is like exploring medieval history using only the Arts and Crafts movement and Game of Thrones – or, precisely how most people explore medieval history.

The mythic quality of the historical figures easily spills into depictions of them. Rustichello’s Kublai is a King of Kings, with vast wealth, vast lands and a vast court, a latter-day Cyrus whose historical truth is more than a little tainted by legends of Prester John. Marlowe’s far later creation is an orgulous tyrant, crushing rivals and burning cities in scene after scene. Handel’s Tamerlano is pretty dreadful, with its three hours of da capo arias. Netflix’s Marco Polo is almost worse. Somehow, every one of them has a ring of truth.

The moral: enjoy your warlords in moderation.

Heckles Raised

In the interests of politeness, self-awareness and feminist solidarity, I try as much as possible to avoid saying that other women are silly, attention-seeking, hysterical, or ‘letting the team down.’ In fact, in the interests of politeness and self-awareness, I try to avoid saying these things about most people. It can be difficult to sympathise with someone’s outlooks or conclusions – and it’s extremely hard when something someone says is plain wrong – but since, according to the Electoral Roll, I am an adult, I do honestly try to give leeway and some consideration for the context that nurtured someone’s opinions and sense of self. This may be perceived as me ‘checking my privilege’.

That said, Margery Kempe really gets my goat.

Norfolk’s second-most-famous fifteenth-century non-saint, Margery was a member of a large merchant family in King’s Lynn, and dictatrix of the English language’s earliest autobiography. The discovery of the unique manuscript in the 1930s raised hopes that a new Julian of Norwich or Bridget of Sweden had been uncovered. Such hopes were, I am sorry to say, dashed rather quickly. The Book of Margery Kempe, finished by a faithful but anonymous scribe in 1436, details its subject’s visions, unconventional marital arrangements, pilgrimages around Europe and to the Holy Land, and the enmity drummed up by her public fits of weeping.

Putting the ‘fun’ in ‘fundamentalist’!

A few days ago, apropos of nothing, I took down my copy of The Book (ed. by Barry Windeatt), flipped through the pages, and was surprised to see a veritable scar-tissue of graffiti. Now, last year I said my piece on the act of scrawling on books, and concluded that, though helpful to later generations of scholars, it was mostly A Bad Thing. It feels not unlike heckling a comedian, but more cowardly, because the comedian died centuries ago. My feelings about Margery were clearly strong enough to break this resolve. Some of it was merely an interest in factual correctness:

‘When this creature with her companions came to the grave where our Lord was buried, then, as she entered that holy place, she fell down with her candle in her hand, as if she would have died for sorrow.’ Not a thing.

‘When you hear of them, you give me thanks with crying and weeping for the grace that I have showed to them, and, when you see any lepers, you have great compassion on them, giving me thanks and praise that I am more favourable to you than to them.’ You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Some notes showed how in awe I was of Margery’s, shall we say, strongly-held convictions.

‘Sometimes she wept for an hour on Good Friday for the sins of the people, having more sorrow for their sins than for her own, inasmuch as our Lord forgave her her own sins before she went to Jerusalem.’ Natürlich.

‘Here is your name, written at the Trinity’s foot.’ Back yourself.

‘If ever you’re a saint in heaven, lady, pray for me.’ Now at Hotel Back Yourself…

‘There is no clerk who can speak against the life which I teach you, and, if he does so, he is not God’s clerk, he is the devil’s clerk.’ Woop, there we go.

It is difficult to insert oneself into the mind of someone so religious that they annoy other late medieval Catholics. Margery is the antithesis of a cake-or-death Anglican, and manages to tread on all sorts of toes in the pursuit of personal religious revelation. Some of her contemporaries were more sympathetic than others. I had precisely no sympathy.

‘Then the parson stopped for a little while from his preaching and said to the people, “Friends, be quiet, and do not complain about this woman, for each of you may sin mortally in her, and she is not the cause, but rather your own judgement.”’ ‘If you weren’t so sinful, she wouldn’t be so annoying.’

‘And then, as they came homewards again, they met women with children in their arms, and the said creature asked if there were any male child among them, and the women said no. Then her mind was so ravished into the childhood of Christ, for desire that she had to see him, that she could not bear it, but fell down and wept and cried so intensely that it was marvellous to hear it. Then the priests had the more faith that all was indeed well with her, when they heard her cry in out-of-the-way places as well as public places, and in the fields as in the town.’ This actually sounds pretty unreasonable.

‘Nevertheless, on this day he preached a great deal against the said creature, not mentioning her name, but so conveying his thoughts that people well understood that he meant her.’ I like this friar. He seems quite reasonable.

The people of Bristol get a bit fed up with Margery receiving communion ‘with plentiful tears and violent sobbings, with loud crying and shrill shriekings’, and ask her to be quiet.

‘Then she wept sorely for her sins, praying God for mercy and forgiveness for them, saying to our Lord, “Lord, as you said, hanging on the cross, for your crucifiers, ‘Father, forgive them; they know not what they do,’ so, I beseech you, forgive these people all the scorn and slanders.’ Or you could just stop crying?

My biggest problem with Margery is that she is utterly lacking in that modern construct, self-awareness. She has a dream where the Virgin Mary tells her only to wear black; some time later, the Virgin reappears and tells her only to wear white. Margery complies, and then wonders why everyone not party to her dream – i.e. everyone else – is confused by her sudden volte face. She goes on pilgrimage to Rome and cries every time she meets a handsome man, because he reminds her too much of Jesus. ‘Those who saw her were greatly astonished at her, because they did not know the reason’, as if that would definitely clear things up. She fasts for one day each week, then has a dream where the Virgin tells her not to bother any more, reasoning that her emotional turmoils are both physically taxing and more pleasing to God. It’s impossible not to be snarky, and I feel impolite just thinking about it.

Margery was like an X Factor contestant who pursues a literal childhood dream of performing, and whose chief talent is her ability to shut out the ‘haters’ with her bludgeon-like personality. But nothing charms an audience like a sob story, and by god, did Margery like to cry.

Elf and Safety

Ever on the brave frontline of journalism, the Mail Online has in the last month run two stories revealing in shocking detail how innocuous, Photoshop-illiterate housewives have been minding their own business, photographing their Labradors on idyllic country walks, only to find upon closer inspection that A FAIRY is lurking in frame. ‘I was really shocked and freaked out at first’, said a Northamptonshire mother-of-two, whose inspiring story hit the headlines on May 7th. As well you might be: the thing she photographed was distinctly mosquito-sized while, as any fule kno, fairies are at least of a height with humans.

That’s right: fairies are more like the Dutch than the Daddy-Long-Legs.

Of course, they’d have to be, if changelings were to pass for human babies, which they seemed to fairly often in The Past. The Past itself was clear about this. Shakespeare may suggest that Robin Goodfellow has superhuman speed, but Mistress Page has no doubt that ‘urchins, ouphes and fairies, green and white’ are the size of human children, the Queen of the Fairies scaled up, bee-fashion, to the dimensions of a teenage girl. Martianus Capella’s Longaevi and Adam of Bremen’s Husi – probably one and the same – are of vaguely sylvan appearance, but without even a hint of titchiness. The Aes Sídhe of Irish myth read as human in appearance, inasmuch as they have any dimensions at all.

That’s not a fairy…

There are countless medieval representations of fairies, Lamias, Wild Hunts, and they all hinge on the same idea, fundamentally lacking in the Daily Mail’s otherwise heroic coverage of supernatural phenomena: nobody seems to have believed that they occupied the same earthly dimension as humans. Hence the various portals to their realms: barrow mounds, tree rings or caves; even dreams, as we see in the BBC’s stunning adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The Middle English reworking of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend shows Dame Heurodys possessed by the stone-crowned Faerie King as she sleeps under a graft-tree at midday. She is spirited away (no/pun intended – delete as desired) under the nose of Sir Orfeo’s entire army, is found hunting by her husband after a decade in the wilderness, and followed through a rock.

When he was in þe roche y-go,
Wele þre mile, oþer mo,
He com in-to a fair cuntray,
As briȝt so sonne on somers day,
Smoþe & plain & al grene
Hille no dale nas þer non y-sene.

In this two-dimensional landscape, a castle stands, glowing day and night like the Heavenly Jerusalem, or Minas Morgul. And like the White Witch’s castle in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, its courtyard is full of corpses.

Sum stode wiþouten hade,
& sum non armes nade,
& sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde,
& sum lay wode, y-bounde,
& sum armed on hors sete,
& sum astrangled as þai ete;
& sum were in water adreynt,
& sum wiþ fire al for-schreynt.

Far from pressing flowers and making organic porridge, these fairies pass their eternity in collecting the victims of violent deaths.

THAT’s a fairy.

Both Lewis and Tolkien lamented the association of volatile warrior-demigods with the imaginings of Cicely Mary Barker, and you could do worse than to read On Fairy-Stories or ‘The Longaevi’ in The Discarded Image. [I recommended Lewis’s chapter in particular to my students – and in grand old style, precisely one of them read it.]. Beings that are, in Lewis’s definition, ‘stronger, more reckless, less inhibited, more triumphantly and impenitently passionate’ than humans have become the patron saints of seed cake and elderflower cordial. As an analogy, I suppose it’s not unlike the use of pirates as learning aids. For those of us who prefer Black Sails to Captain Pugwash, this spiritual and physical shrinking stands as an emblem of sanitisation and creative decline.

Naturally, I blame Arthur Conan Doyle – or I would, if I weren’t so busy blaming the Daily Mail.

Roman Holiday

Like those proverbial buses, birthdays always seem to come in groups. This current eight-day period sees the birthdays of sixteen Facebook friends, five actual friends, my housemate, my sister, my mother, my godmother, my late grandfather and great-grandmother, and Iggy Pop. But it’s not all about me, and today is the grandest birthday of all: Rome.

Of course, it isn’t possible to know precisely when Rome was founded, settled, called Rome, or countless other matters that mark the beginning of its status as the most historically important city in Western Europe. So today’s commemoration becomes a bit like the Queen’s Official Birthday – her actual birthday, as if by magic, also being today. Nor is it possible to describe Rome’s colossal influence on the formation of medieval Europe, linguistic, cultural, religious, or poetic. The medievals themselves were well aware of this. Writings and artworks of the high and late Middle Ages explore Rome’s foundation myths, emulate the style of her histories and celebrate the spread of Christianity as it consumed Rome’s pagan practices and appropriated her artefacts.

Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 753 B.C.

It may be a surprise to read that Rome often overshadowed even Jerusalem, for whom centuries of wars were fought and where the holiest places of Europe’s dominant religion were recalled in countless itineraries. But overshadow it did. Alexander Neckam, the late-12th-century Augustinian academic and administrator, wrote of Rome,

Primitus Europae mea pagina serviet, in qua
Roma stat, orbis apex, gloria, gemma, decus.
[My page will first treat of Europe, where stands Rome, the pinnacle, glory, jewel and honour of the world.]

He creates a picture of a city filled with churches and inhabited by the ghosts of great men – from Caesar and Cicero to Peter and Paul – and beautiful, lost artworks. Earlier books on the marvels of Rome write of the changing ground of the city, where cathedrals grow from the rubble of demolished temples. The impressive and impressing power of the Roman church pervades these books, and others that depict the lives (or, more properly, deaths) of Christians in Rome before it was Christian. It’s all too much and too varied to cover in a career, let alone in something like this.

There is an interesting side-channel to this narrative of conquest and appropriation. The books of the Church and churchmen can be, surprisingly, tinged with regret at the beauty the Church destroyed. Now, regret is not an emotion for birthdays, and birthdays aren’t a concern of the medieval Church. If you intend, like I do, to celebrate Rome’s birthday, Titus Pullo is nearer the mark.

An Indian Summer

In a manuscript compiled around 1525 by the Venetian Alessandro Zorzi, we read that, several decades earlier, an Italian monk had been travelling in Ethiopia, and had encountered or heard a description of the city of Barrara, capital of Abbasia, near the source of the Blue Nile. This city is found on the extravagantly beautiful Fra Mauro map, completed in Murano in the Venetian lagoon around 1450 – and both accounts note that Barrara is the primary residence of the local King, Presta Jani. In the same manuscript, an itinerary from Venice to Ethiopia via Jerusalem, made around 1400 and recorded in Latin, describes how a local ruler is called Presto Johannes, and has twelve lesser kings under him – these are helpfully listed .

Later, in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius describes the whole of his masterful image of East Africa as a ‘Description of the empire of Presbyter John, or of the Abyssinians’. Now, the king himself is called David, which might indicate one of three things: in the European imagination, the territory is called the land of Prester John much as Britain was said to be named after its Trojan founder Brutus; or that European commentators realised that the king of Ethiopia had a name, and were using a title analogous to Dalai Lama; or that, much as in continental and insular French texts pagan idols were called mahomets, so non-specific foreign kings are called John: literally, Johnny Foreigner.

In various medieval traditions, from the 12th to 15th centuries, Prester John is the all-powerful king of a colossal empire somewhere near India – which, confusingly, can also be Ethiopia – and is explicitly a Christian. Though Marco Polo thought he was a recently-conquered Kerait warlord, Ong Khan, the majority of European medieval sources, from the famous, spurious Letter of 1165 to The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, asserted his Christianity, which carried with it the hope of alliance with a Christian superpower in Central Asia against a heathen enemy, be it the Seljuks or the Timurids.

Denial: Not a river in Egypt.

I cannot comment as to whether the desire to render the stranger in our own image is an exclusively European trait. Somehow I doubt it. But the case of Malory’s Saracen-knight Sir Palomides is symptomatic of the longstanding approach taken by European writers and artists to admirable or notable foreign figures: despite being always described as ‘Saracen’, Palomides has no physical descriptors and even talks to himself in English. Oroonoko, Omai, recent depictions of ancient Egyptians, even Marlowe’s Tamburlaine – European writers and artists have historically imposed European, or ‘civilised’, characteristics over other, more reasonably accurate ones. This is obviously problematic, and would rightly not be tolerated (or, in social media speak, ‘called out’) in the twenty-first century.

On the other hand, what should our modern response be to historical works of art, theatre, literature, or music, which are at odds with our sensibilities but which were representative of a legitimate attitude or artistic movement at the time of their creation? This week, Mark Rylance said that he would not be happy with school-aged children reading the more anti-Semitic bits of Shakespeare. Whose responsibility is it to censor or redact Shakespeare? I’m currently reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree (1950); its vocabulary is very much Of Its Time, but it would be quite idiotic to infer any cultural or racial chauvinism on Fermor’s part from this. The episode of the disappearing ‘chinaman’ statue in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day raises questions about both language and art: would we decry the chinoiserie style today, and do we accordingly despise the interior decorators of the 1750s?

Last night I watched the ENO’s new production of Purcell’s The Indian Queen, unfinished at the time of his death in 1695. Purcell had written three acts of music, including dances and several arias, and the safe assumption is that his finished work would have served as musical interludes for John Dryden’s play The Indian Queen. The two had previously collaborated on King Arthur, first staged in 1691. Dryden’s play revolves around the warring Peruvians and Mexicans in the period before the Spanish invasions, and focuses especially on a complex love-plot involving Montezuma, rightful heir to Mexico, now employed in the Peruvian army, the Peruvian princess Orazia, the Mexican usurper Zempoalla (the titular queen), and her son Acacis. Zempoalla is Boudicca, Phaedra and Dido in a single unit. Her suicide takes the dramatic place of an averted human sacrifice, and Montezuma is restored, Guiderius-style, to the throne of Mexico. It is a baroque imagining of a foreign civilisation, where all characters adhere to standards of theatrical courtesy, like Handel’s Tamerlano or Nahum Tate’s infamous rewrite of King Lear. Said would no doubt hate it.

The ENO went in an entirely different direction. The programme triumphantly declares that Purcell’s work has been ‘completed by Peter Sellars’, the prolific American director. This feat has been achieved by splicing Purcell’s surviving music (described as a ‘torso’ by Sellars) with re-worded songs from the Greatest Hits of his Orpheus Britannicus, his choral pieces setting the words of the penitential psalms, and diegetic monologues from The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma by the Nicaraguan author Rosario Aguilar. Now, this is hardly the place to address the patronising attitude Sellars holds of Purcell and Dryden (he has described Restoration London as ‘a vision of hell’, called Dryden’s play ‘bizarre fantasy’ and said ‘there was no such thing as opera in England in the seventeenth century’). Dryden’s plots, settings and characters have vanished, to be replaced with a practically single-strand narrative concerning the marriage of Aztec princess Teculihuatzin (the titular queen, now somewhat demoted) to a conquistador, and her shifting fortunes as her people are slaughtered and her daughter is brought up as a Spaniard.

Aguirre, Wrath of Codpiece.

It has been amusing to read reviews over the past few days and see how professional critics struggle to reconcile their disappointment at its disjointed structure and gimmicky staging to their sense that this, as ‘event theatre’ by a renowned director, ought to be understood as visionary. The soloists were for the most part wonderful – especially the countertenor Vince Yi and the soprano Lucy Crowe – while the orchestra, conducted by Laurence Cummings, was excellent. The troupe of dancers, following Christopher Williams’ choreography, beautifully interpreted a set of masque-like sequences to suit the graffiti wasteland of the stage – according to the elderly gentleman behind me, perhaps a useful dovetailing of Sellars’ aesthetic and the ENO’s much-publicised financial tribulations.

Nonetheless my problems with the production are manifold, and the majority can be summarised thus: there was no nuance, no subtext, anywhere in the production. From the long dramatic pauses inserted into the choral pieces, to the farcically literal miming of the chorus, to the gun-toting, camouflaged Spanish soldiers, to the Guantanamo Bay imagery, the effect was to bludgeon the audience with Sellars’ interpretation of Purcell’s music: colonialism is bad and you should feel bad. Thus the most interesting aspect of Sellars’ additions was the casting of the Puerto Rican actress Maritxell Carrero as the narrator-self of the displaced Teculihuatzin and her daughter Leonor, the voice of a Spanish-speaking actress superimposed on the confessions of an Aztec princess and her estranged, Spanish-speaking child.

Yet the narrator’s presence was symptomatic of Sellars’ leading of his audience. She served mostly for narrative exposition, and broke up dramatically compelling scenes in the manner of cinematic voiceover, too often falling into the ‘little did I know’ formula. Elsewhere, she stood next to the ‘action’, as it were, and effectively explained, even as the singers staged the marriage consummation, that the characters were having sex and were enjoying it. These sections – of which, if I remember correctly, there were three – were in effect Aguirre, Wrath of God if crossed with Fifty Shades of Grey. The narrator could be seen as the only real character, and appeared in every scene. The singer playing Teculihuatzin, soprano Julia Bullock, was given correspondingly little to do – all the more surprising since the role was created for her.

I found myself thinking, perhaps I didn’t enjoy it because I didn’t understand it. But I fear I understood it all too well, and the intellectual get-out clause that I’ve since created – that Sellars plunders and marginalises Purcell’s music as an ironic reflection of the plunders and massacres of the period of the Spanish conquest – would, if true, be a statement of such overwhelming artistic hyperbole that even Pseud’s Corner wouldn’t take it. Such was the overt presentation of Sellars’ themes that what I mainly took away from it was a feeling of being patronised, and a crushing disappointment at the treatment of Purcell’s music. I adore Purcell, his dramatic, orchestral, vocal and choral music, in many contexts and stagings, and still remember fondly the ENO’s 2006 production of King Arthur, where the Cold Genius emerged from a fridge. I wasn’t expecting gold-plated armour and elaborate Sun King sets. I did expect Purcell.

Be My Valentine

Famously, today is the sexiest day of the year – but beyond the lukewarm cava and scentless roses, it is important to keep in mind what we’re really celebrating: motivational torture! For there is surely no sight on this earth more glorious than a pouting twink being tied to a post and filled with long, pointy objects as an example for his team mates. Except perhaps a passionate young man being stripped and roasted, whilst inviting people to eat him. Or a beautiful young woman lying in a bath all day while a moody civil servant tries to get her hot. Or two brothers giggling whilst being whipped. Or a tempestuous young king being impaled with phallic objects held by glowering lumbersexuals.

I’m sexy and I know it.

All this and more can be found in the Legenda Aurea. True, Jacobus de Voragine mightn’t have envisioned sexual gratification as the primary function of his martyrology, but heaven knows anything goes. And if the brothel adventures of Saints Chrysanthus and Daria fail to get you hot under the collar, you might try actual self-flagellation.

Discomfort and Joy

In this season of over-eating, over-drinking and over-sleeping, spare a thought for some of the more sombre holidays of the medieval church calendar. The week immediately following Christmas holds the Feasts of St Stephen and the Massacre of the Innocents, and the anniversary of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. So after a day of larking about and singing to

Capons ibake with the peses of the row,
Reisouns of corrans, with oder spises mo,

you’ve several in which to contemplate sticks, stones, and broken skulls.

Stephen the Protomartyr, whose death by stoning is noted in the Acts of the Apostles, is commemorated on the 26th of December. The saint himself has some pretty nice associated music, although he is naturally overshadowed in this regard by Christmas. You may know the Victorian classic Good King Wenceslas, which celebrates the charity of the 10th-century Duke of Bohemia ‘on the Feast of Stephen’. St Ambrose of Milan wrote a hymn Stephano primo Martyri, ‘to Stephen the first martyr’, in which

Iste paratus vertice,
Gaudens suscepit lapides,
Rogans pro eis Dominum,
Gaudens tradidit spiritum

[He, upright and fully-prepared, received the stones joyfully, praying God on their [his killers’] behalf, and joyfully gave forth his spirit.]

Others exist by Adam of St Victor and numerous anonymous composers, but my particular favourite (and I have to have a favourite) is a fifteenth-century English and Latin carol, part of Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.3.58, where we hear how

Stonyd he was wyth stonys grete
Fervore gentis impie.
[By the people’s impious violence.]

Since the high point of the Christian year was the commemoration of Christ’s violent death, the hasty move from Christ’s painless birth to Stephen’s agonising martyrdom perhaps made thematic sense to the medieval worshipper. The Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents, on the other hand, is ‘set’ (if you will) three days after the birth of Christ, and commemorates something that happens surprisingly often in the Bible: the murder of new-born children.

The murder of a child rival is a literary motif that probably reflects the realities of absolute monarchy and the need to eliminate potential future rivals: consider the death of Astyanax in legends of the Fall of Troy – although it’s worth noting that various medieval and early modern traditions tried to save him, usually by substituting him for a non-royal child. The large-scale murder of children posing no apparent threat to future regimes is, one would hope, more literary than historical. But it is certainly biblical. It happens in the book of Exodus, and since (in the medieval scheme of biblical typology) Moses is a prefiguring of Christ, it also happens here. A Latin play for the Feast, written in Fleury in the twelfth century, also uses the Old Testament figure of Rachel as the archetype of the mourning parent, and looks to passages from the Apocalypse for reassurance about the children’s fate.

Herod, a Bad Thing.

The motif of mass infanticide, as horrible as that sounds, finds its way into medieval literary works in a variety of guises, but perhaps the most famous is in the Arthurian cycle. Arthur, discovering he has impregnated his half-sister and she has given birth to a son, commands that all the new born boys in England be put into a ship and set adrift. When the unmanned ship hits a rock and sinks, the target Mordred is naturally the only survivor. Whilst not a perfect analogy to the biblical Massacre – not least because Mordred is a baddy – it is both a grandiose, gruesome gesture towards how far a king is willing to go, and swiftly removes any solid sense of Arthur’s moral exemplarity. Why it was introduced to the cycle in the first place, I have no idea.

Finally, tomorrow is the anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. The details are well-known, and speak as much to the complex political influence of the Church as they do to the almost customary violence of the period: the leading churchman in England, and former Lord Chancellor, was murdered in his cathedral by four knights, ostensibly on the orders of the King. Practically overnight, shipwrecked sailors were attributing miracles to the archbishop, hagiographies were being written left, right and centre, including in Icelandic, and within fifty years a shrine had been consecrated in the new Cathedral, near to the site of his death.

Along with the Shrine of the Virgin at Walsingham in Norfolk, it was one of the great pilgrimage sites of Northern Europe, and the toll of pilgrims’ knees on the Cathedral’s steps can be seen today. The popularity of the shrine shaped parts of south east England for centuries: the Pilgrim’s Way still runs through parts of Surrey and Kent, while the Tabard Inn, of Canterbury Tales fame, stood in Southwark until the 1870s. Thomas, meanwhile, was a fixture of litanies right up to the Reformation, and many a manuscript shows his name hastily scribbled over, in an attempt to erase connections to the Catholic past.

With these cheery commemorations, it could of course be suggested that everything in the Middle Ages was governed by reference to, and fear of, death. But one must assume that a certain degree of comfort was drawn from these observances, even from the Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents. By comfort, I really do mean that, even if one cannot assimilate into a culture that supports such extremes. And what extremes: as we read in British Library, Sloane MS 2593,

Wolcum be ye Stefne and Jon,
Wolcum Innocentes everychon,
Wolcum Thomas martyr on,
Wolcum yol.

Wolcum yol, thu mery man,
In worchepe of this holy day.

Sesoun of Mistes

Autumn is the perfect time of year for stereotypically medieval pursuits: lighting fires, boozing, grazing pigs, wearing velvet. Being an unapologetic pyromaniac oenophile with an excessive number of velvet jackets, and liking the colour orange, I feel the medieval English themselves afforded autumn, categorically the best season, rather short shrift. For to those who live cheek-by-jowl with nature, it is synonymous with coming crapness. As the Gawain-poet writes,

Wroþe wynde of þe welkyn wrasteles wit þe sunne,
Þe leues lancen fro þe lynde and lyȝten on þe grounde,
And al grayes þe gres þat grene watz ere.

An angry wind wrestles with the sun, and doubtless wins. All very well in a world of central heating and pumpkin spice lattes [get behind me, Satan], but not for those without.

Þis litel pygge, he to þe market ywent.

At risk of over-simplifying, medieval English meditations on autumn were more often than not meditations upon death. Despite the proliferation of excellent Saints’ Days in the run-up to Advent – not least of which is Michaelmas, the Feast of the Archangels Michael, Raphael and Gabriel, slayers of dragons, patron saints of ill people, and general badasses – autumn is the season in which to remember that you, like that leaf over there, will soon die.

The incomparable MS Harley 2253 contains a famous lyric set by Arnold Bax, in which

Winter wakeneþ al my care,
Nou þis leues waxeþ bare
… Al goþ bote Godes wille.
Al we shule deye þaȝ vs like ille.
Al þat grein me graueþ grene,
Nou hit faleueþ al bidene.

Which is all about as cheery as a hernia, and a far cry from barrèd clouds that bloom the soft-dying day. The early-13th-century Oxford, Bodleian MS Rawlinson G. 22 reassures us that everything is A-OK in summer, but

Oc nu necheþ windes blast
And weder strong.
Ey ey what þis niȝt is long,
And ich wid wel michel wrong
Soreȝ and murne and fast.

One almost wonders about the prevalence of S.A.D in medieval East Anglia. The blowing of Boreas the Northern Wind, which heralds the coming of cold, snow and man-flu, may be the playful refrain of a love lyric in the Harley 2253 collection, but it is incidental, miles away from the instrumental Western Wind (Zephyrus) of the celebrated 16th-century song:

Westron Wynd, when wilt thou blow,
The small raine doune can raine.
Cryst, if my love were in my armes,
And I in my bedde againe.

One reopens the heart with thoughts of love; the other concentrates the mind on sin and decrepitude:

Nou shrinkeþ rose & lylie flour
Þat while ber þat suete savour
In somer, þat suete tyde.
… Þah þou be whyt and bryth on ble
Falewen shule þy floures.

In this, as in many other things, we see that the medievals ruin something perfectly gorgeous because of their crippling fear of death. Having recently met a Fairly Monumental Landmark on the birthday front, I would be tempted to join with this panic. But think not of them, thou hast thy music too; and I have a wardrobe of velvet jackets to stroke.

Going Places

Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.

Birthdays are the most selfish day of the year. They are for many people ‘all about me’, and whether one forces others to do shots and dance or sits and wallows in a piteous remembrance of ever-approaching death, they impart a brief, mythic importance to the celebrant. And the things we do for our friends, relatives and colleagues, however ordinary, take on the same mythic importance. A round bought in a pub? No big deal. A round bought FOR YOUR BIG DAY, WOOOO? Stressful. A four-hour train journey would most days be an inconvenience, but when it’s on the way to see The Birthday Girl it becomes worse than treading on Lego. But we do things that irk us for the people we love. I love Marco Polo, and today he is 760.

Details of the man’s life are well-known because extraordinary – a Venetian merchant at the court of Kublai Khan – and because they are briefly recounted in his phenomenally popular Livre des merveilles du monde, written while in prison in collaboration with the romance author Rustichello of Pisa. The veracity of his account of the Far East has been a matter of academic debate for generations, but it is generally accepted that he must have lived amongst the Mongols for some time. His journeys through Asia by land and by sea have been estimated at around fifteen thousand miles.

Polo gave accounts of lives in the cities and amongst the rulers of central Asia. We read about household shrines, the Tartars’ colossal units of horsemen, wine made from rice that ‘intoxicates more speedily than any other wine’. He records the names and relative scales of their measurements, describes the burning of coal, and attempts to explain the intricacies of the lunar calendar. He goes into particular detail concerning Kublai himself: his military victories, his harem, what colour liveries his retinue wear; his descent from Genghis is set as a matter of great importance. Genghis was probably known to his European readers, but so was the mythical figure Prester John, whom Polo attempts to associate with the historical warlord Ong-Khan.

I bet Francisco López de Gómara doesn’t have his own game…

Throughout the Middle Ages, Polo’s book was linked to and in competition with The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the fourteenth-century travelogue that combines reliable descriptions of Jerusalem with the more lively legends about the East and even Polo’s own material on the lifestyle of the Khans. A particularly beautiful manuscript made in the 1410s for John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, contains both books alongside accounts of the East by the Franciscan Odoric of Pordenone, the layman William of Boldenseele, and the Dominican Ricoldo of Monte Croce. These three, like Polo, almost certainly did travel to the places they describe – as missionaries or papal envoys – and the Mandeville author’s appearance in their midst casts him as the ultimate interloper in a genre that frequently fell prey to a European thirst for the thrillingly weird. The Mandeville author wrote about giants and griffons; Polo knew that real crocodiles have curves.

Marco Polo was by no means the greatest traveller of the Middle Ages: this was undoubtedly the fourteenth-century Moroccan Ibn Battuta. But it isn’t Ibn Battuta’s birthday. So how best to celebrate the great man? Heading to the pub and attempting to buy horse milk with cowrie shells.

Northward Ho!

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.