Few writers have been as well served by their editors as JRR Tolkien. If it wasn’t for the almost lifelong labours of his son, Christopher Tolkien, we would never have had the posthumous publication of The Silmarillion, let alone the extraordinary unveiling of Tolkien’s sub-creation that we read in Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth, which presents his father’s writing as it developed, revealing far more of the depth underlying it than we would have seen with just the work the Good Professor published during his lifetime.
With Christopher Tolkien’s death in 2020, we might have feared that Tolkien’s subsequent editors would not have the same dedication, nor the expertise, that allowed Christopher Tolkien to uncover the depths of his father’s work. It looks like that fear is unjustified. Brian Sibley has proved just as deft a hand here, in his presentation of the history of Númenor, as his predecessor in the editorial chair. Perhaps not so surprising, as Brian Sibley was responsible for what remains by far the best adaptation of Tolkien’s work, the BBC radion production of The Lord of the Rings. So if you have ever wondered how the kings of Númenor rose to power, and how they fell from that estate, this is the place to find out.
The DCI Ryan detective novels set in my beloved Northumberland have been huge bestsellers so I thought I ought to read the first – besides, Lindisfarne is wonderful and I wanted to spend some time there, albeit in story rather than in person.
Well, I can see why the books have been such a success: I missed my stop on the tube because I was so engrossed! There’s no higher praise from a Londoner.
I’ve also discovered a new genre: crime romance. While ostensibly a crime novel, it’s mainly a female fantasy romance, where the brooding, handsome, rather damaged Detective Ryan is not only opened up, put back in contact with his emotions, and taught to love again by the female protagonist, Dr Anna Taylor, but to show it’s the ultimate wish fulfilment, Anna also turns her future mother-in-law into a new mother for herself, in place of her own dead mum.
So basically it’s a female wish fulfilment fantasy dressed up as a crime novel. Sadly, the Lindisfarne location didn’t come across too strongly either.
I’d not heard of this book before but apparently it’s very well known in America. Having read it, I can see why. It was published in 1969. The author dedicated it to Martin Luther King. It’s basically the Civil Rights’ Movement as a children’s book, arguing for integration of the races through the story of a white boy and an old black man cast away on an island in the Caribbean. In that respect, it seems slightly old fashioned in its insistence on Martin Luther King’s old dictum, that people be judged by their character rather than their colour, when set against today’s fractionated landscape where people are judged precisely by their position in the current victims’ hierarchy.
The castaway boy, Phillip, isn’t particularly prejudiced but he judges the old black man he is cast away with through the eyes of the 1940s, when the story is set. Then, in a nice twist, Phillip loses his sight and has to rely on old Timothy for his survival. It turns out that Timothy is prepared to go further than Phillip would have had any right to expect to ensure the boy’s survival. It’s a moving turn to the story, and gives it a seriousness that it would otherwise lack.
I’m not sure that it’s particularly relevant today, at least not in Britain, but it serves as an interesting testament to where people were coming from when it came out.
By the end of the Synod of Whitby, Britain had become for the most part a Christian country.
The last pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdom was on the Isle of Wight. Its inhabitants clung to their beliefs. Shortly before the Whitby Synod, in one of the ironies of the pagan conversion, King Wulfhere of Mercia, who was Penda’s son, invaded the island and baptised the islanders by force.
To this point, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons had been peaceable, at least within the context of the power plays of rival kings. But with all the country now Christian, the last pagan holdouts began to appear unconscionable, and even more so when the islanders on Wight reverted to paganism.
The islanders held to the old gods until 686, when the king of Wessex, Cædwalla, brought his army across the Solent. Cædwalla did not give the islanders the benefit of the doubt: he killed King Arwald, the last pagan, in battle, executed his heirs and either killed or deported the islanders, settling the Isle of Wight with people from his own kingdom.
The Romans carried the day at the Synod of Whitby. Oswiu ordered that Roman practices should be adopted throughout his realm. Not all the monks of Lindisfarne were willing to abandon the customs of their father. Those that would not, withdrew from Lindisfarne, returning to Iona.
The church in Northumbria spent the next decades delicately balancing integrating the old Irish elements into the new church while trying to prevent the more zealous advocates of Rome denigrating the achievements of its founders. Much of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is dedicated to achieving this balance.
The Irish claim that their method of calculating Easter came to them via St Columba from the Apostle John himself carried great weight.
But the proponents of the Roman practice of dating Easter hit back. They first pointed out that the Irish method of calculation was confined to Ireland (and even there some of the southern churches had switched to the Roman method) and the Church of the Britons whereas the Roman method had become universal.
But the card that carried the argument for Rome was their assertion, that the Irish could not deny, that Peter had been given the keys to the kingdom of heaven and, as Rome’s chief apostle, his word carried the greatest weight.
Given the sins that lay heavily upon Oswiu’s soul, this was a key consideration for him.
The calculation of Easter is not easy and the arguments are highly technical, involving astronomy, mathematics and the application of Scripture. No doubt these differences were rehearsed at some length during the Synod but, in the end, the argument for Oswiu came down to one of authority.
Both the Irish and Roman practices were hallowed, in the eyes of their proponents, by their apostolic progenitors. The Irish said that they had their method of calculation from the Apostle John himself, this method having been passed on to the great saints of their own tradition and finally down to Columba, Iona’s founder.
The Synod of Whitby resolved the differences between Irish and Roman practices. The decision, as presented by Bede, was as much that of King Oswiu as the church men present at the council.
The key difference lay in Irish and Roman traditions having different methods of calculating the date of Easter which could lead to Easter being celebrated on different Sundays. This was a particularly difficult matter for the royal household as Oswiu followed the Ionan practice of his youth whereas his queen, Eanflæd, Edwin’s daughter, kept to the Roman custom, leading to a situation where half the royal household was still keeping the Lenten fast while the other half was enjoying the Easter feast.
Such a visible sign of disunity was not tenable in a royal family and, indeed, it appears to have been one of the reasons for the strife between Oswiu and his son, Ahlfrith.
Well, what can I say? Dan Abnett is the reason I ended up writing 40k and his Ravenor novels was the second series I read after Eisenhorn. It’s no wonder I was hooked. The man is an absolute master, both at plotting (how does he keep all those separate strands in his head until he ties them all together?) and building worlds with single, perfectly chosen, words.
As to the perennial Eisenhorn vs. Ravenor question… er, can I sit on the fence? Say they’re both equally brilliant but in different ways? I know that’s a cowardly ducking of the question and… alright, yes, I am avoiding an answer. Oh, I don’t want to. It’s like being asked to choose between children. All right, all right, if I must…
Ravenor. Right, I said it. By a tiny tad, and largely because more of his crew survive, but I give it to Gideon Ravenor. But I’d prefer to have dinner with Eisenhorn. At least I could see his face.
Thanet isn’t even an island now, just a spur of Kent sticking out into the Channel.
But for a thousand years it was the hinge upon which England’s history turned. Then it really was an island, separated from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel, a tidal channel that separated the high chalk of Thanet from the rest of the country.
The Isle of Thanet was also one of the closer points to the continent. The Wantsum Channel, by cutting it off from the rest of Britain, acted in effect as a moat, providing defences for anyone holed up on the island. This was something eyes watching from across the Channel noted so that, when Julius Caesar arrived in 55 and 54 BC, he set up a fort on the island. Indeed, he might have landed on it too when first arriving. When the Romans returned, they set up their initial fort at one end of the Wantsum Channel and, once Britain was secure, turned that fort into the most important fort/port in the country, Richborough.
They also established another fort, Reculver, at the other end of the Wantsum, showing clearly how strategically important this channel was.
Then, after the Romans left Britain, the Anglo-Saxons arrived and, according to legend, Hengist and Horsa were given the Isle of Thanet by a foolish King Vortigern in return for their mercenary help. He should have remembered his history: no good could come of giving men with swords such an impregnable base. Sure enough, Hengist and Horsa overthrew Vortigern and set themselves up as kings of Kent. Once again, Thanet had been the hinge upon which England’s history had turned.
And this was not the end. During the Viking era, Viking armies realised that the Wantsum Channel was the ideal place to moor their longships while the isle provided them with a secure base to overwinter before better weather allowed them to resume their customary raiding and pillaging.
In 865, the Great Heathen Army, that came within a single battle of conquering all England, overwintered on Thanet. The isle’s inhabitants must have been becoming a little tired of being the providers for so many passing raiders. Nevertheless, the soil was so rich that the Isle had the highest population density in Kent a while later.
It was only the silting up and closure of the Wantsum Channel, turning the Isle into the tip of Kent, that ended its hinge role in history.
Gerald Moody’s excellent book gives all the archaeological detail of these few extraordinarily important square miles and sets them into their historical context.
