As for Oswiu, Bede is equivocal. Oswiu ruled for 28 years, which was an exceptionally long reign for the time. However, unlike his elder brother, Oswiu had to scrabble for legitimacy and to secure his throne, and he was not above employing murder to do that.
His reign was also troubled by strife with his nephew, Œthelwold, and his son, Ahlfrith. It was, in sum, a reign disturbed by the usual problems of dynastic politics and the short-term solutions that men employ to deal with these. But it was a reign that ended with Oswiu dying of natural causes in his bed, in his late 50s, rather than on the battle field as had been the case with all his predecessors.
As such, it was the reign of a flawed but shrewd king in difficult times, a reign threaded with all the political compromises and betrayals that were necessary to ensure such a long reign. Hard to present such a man as the ideal of Christian kingship, although there might be a case for saying Oswiu came close to an ideal of practical kingship.
In Bede’s history, Penda plays an unusual role: he is the killer of Christian kings, most notably Oswald, Bede’s exemplar of Christian kingship, but Bede never evinces the same dislike for Penda as he does for Cadwallon or even Rædwald.
For Bede, Penda was an honest pagan who allowed the preaching of the new religion in his kingdom even if he did not follow it himself. Penda’s own son converted to Christianity when he married Oswiu’s daughter. (Politics was a complicated and bloody family affair, made more complex and bloody in this case when Oswiu’s daughter murdered her husband.)
Bede’s true scorn was reserved for Cadwallon, whom he saw as a traitor to Christianity by his warring on Edwin and the newly converted Northumbrians. Similar scorn he poured upon Rædwald, who hedged his religious bets, keeping altars to the old gods as well as the new god. For Bede, this hedging of religious bets was worthy of despite.
Penda was the last of the great pagan Anglo-Saxon warlords, the culmination of a succession of men who had completely changed the face of the country in the two centuries following the end of Roman rule. The deathless fame that their court scops (Anglo-Saxon bards) promised them in their halls as they gave out gold proved illusory: most of these kings are completely forgotten, the songs sung in their praise falling to silence as they fell into their graves.
Genealogical king lists provide lists of short-lived kings for the better-known kingdoms, although these men have left little more than their names to posterity (and it’s by no means certain that the names that have come down to us were all actually kings, particularly since at the head of most of these king lists is one of the old gods, most often the god of the slain). The battle fame they earned proved as short lived as their kingdoms.
But Penda’s name does live on. It lives on through his place in the history of Bede proving that attracting the notice of the greatest historian of your day is the best way to ensure post-mortem fame.
Seeing his enemy unprepared, Oswiu attacked, catching Penda and his army in disarray, the army split and caught with its back against the flooding river.
Bede was a monk. He was not interested in giving details of how a battle was won or lost on the battlefield but in this case he does record that more men were drowned than killed in the battle. This suggests an army caught by surprise and routing, with panic-stricken men chancing the water rather than the mercy of their enemies, only to find the river was less merciful.
We don’t know what precipitated the rout but given that Penda died in the battle, it could have been that when his men saw their war leader, the king killer, himself struck down that the running dogs of panic were loosed and the army broke.
The battle is recorded as taking place on the banks of the River Winwæd. The river name did not survive so its exact location is not certain although candidates include the River Went near Doncaster and Cock Beck outside Leeds.
Confession of a laggardly book reviewer: I finished this book several months ago but I’ve only now got around to writing a review. Unfortunately, sitting down to write my review, I realised I couldn’t remember anything about the book. So, cheating, I looked up some other reviews. And I still can’t remember the story.
So I think we have to chalk this novel down as one Koontz’s misses. However, since I do know that I whipped through the book in pretty quick time when I read it, it can’t be all bad, just forgettable. So maybe a three-star read.
When I was growing up, I would sometimes hear my mother talking to my Nonna and be completely baffled by what they were saying. They were speaking dialect. My mother’s family comes from a little village in Piedmont, Italy called Pavone and my mother’s first language was not Italian but dialect. The dialect of her village lay midway between Italian and French. So, for instance, hot and cold in dialect were cald and fredd but in Italian they are caldo and freddo and in French chaud and froid.
But to give an idea of just how specific these dialects were, there would sometimes be words I overheard that completely stumped me. I asked my mother once what they had been talking about and it turned out that my Nonna had been using a dialect word from her native village, which was about 20 kilometres away from where she lived once she got married, and that word was completely different from the Pavone dialect. That’s how regional Italian dialects were.
Which brings me on to Pinocchio. When Carlo Collodi wrote the story in 1881, Italy had only been unified into a single country for ten years. The problem was, while it was now politically one country, most of the country could not speak, nor understand, most of the rest of the country. Everyone spoke their own dialects of Italian, with many of these so different from each other as to be mutually unintelligible.
It’s hard to maintain a country where people don’t speak the same language. Italian nationalists had decided that the Florentine dialect, in which Dante, Boccaccio and Manzoni had written, was the purest and best form of Italian, the one to be elevated to the status of national language. But Dante and Manzoni are not exactly classroom texts – and still less Boccaccio, whose tales in the Decameron can still make the readers’ eyes widen in shock at their sheer rudeness; certainly not acceptable in 19th-century classrooms.
Which was where Carlo Collodi stepped in. His tale of the wooden boy, crafted by Giappetto the carpenter, who comes to life but has an unfortunate tendency towards nose-lengthening lying, became hugely popular when published and immediately found its way into Italian classrooms up and down the land.
So it was Pinocchio, the wooden boy with the big heart but spectacularly poor judgement in friends, who taught generations of Italians to be able to speak to each other in the same language. Very few stories have been so crucial in a nation’s history. Indeed, without Pinocchio, there’s a good case for saying that the always fissiparous elements of Italy would have split apart into their constituent republics, duchies and kingdoms, all of which had longer histories and more deeply ingrained loyalties than the Italian state.
A little wooden boy became the father of modern Italy. Che sorpresa!
As none of us have much of it, let’s cut to the marrow: this is a book about time as understood through the equations of special and general relativity. So it’s to do with frames of reference, the speed of light, and lines of causation. It’s not a philosophical history of time, still less a mythical or religious view. But if you want a clear and concise formulation of what Einstein’s equations tell us about time within the constraints of relativity, then this is your book.
There is a memorial plaque screwed to a bench in my local park. “John Townson, greatly missed, never forgotten.”
I remember John Townson. I do miss him. But the plaque would be more honest if it read: “John Townson, greatly missed, will be utterly forgotten in 80 years.”
The vast majority of us make our way through this world and then leave it, to some regret, some tears, and protestations of eternal remembrance. But the truth is that most of us will be completely forgotten within two generations of our deaths.
Writers hope to escape this forgetting, that by their books they might achieve an immortality that their bodies cannot. Unfortunately, a visit to any second-hand bookshop will show this not to be the case: shelves of unread books by forgotten authors.
Which is where Christopher Fowler came in. For a decade he wrote a newspaper column in which he revitalised the work of a forgotten writer, and these columns are collected in this book. The majority of the writers, like Fowler himself, write in the detective/thriller genre and most I had indeed never heard of (although one glaring exception is Georgette Heyer: I would be delighted for my work to be as ‘forgotten’ as hers).
The book is a collection of lives and Fowler’s sometimes waspish, sometimes warm, assessments of their work. At the end of it, any bibliophile will be left with a list of writers to investigate.
And I was left with the hope that when I am dead, some other writer of Fowler’s talent might come along, take my dusty books from a forgotten shelf, and introduce them again to new readers.
It had been a wet November. Rivers and streams were swollen with run off from the hills. Penda’s army was wet, miserable and, for reasons that are not entirely clear, disgruntled.
Unlike his elder brother, Oswiu received no saintly dream visitor telling him to attack, even though he had given oath to give his daughter, Ælfflæd, to the church and to found many monasteries should he win victory. So it was most likely his perception of a sudden tactical advantage that decided Oswiu to attack.
When report came back from his scouts that Penda’s army was struggling to cross a swollen river, with some of the army on the far bank and the rest stuck on the near bank, Oswiu saw his opportunity.
After 13 years of choosing discretion, Oswiu had decided that the time had come for valour. Quite why Oswiu made the decision when he did, we don’t know. He may have simply been following Penda’s army to ensure that they really were leaving his realm but then, seeing an opportunity, he decided to take it.
Or he may have decided that his own rule would be fatally weakened if he did not finally confront Penda. A weak king could no longer attract warriors to his warband, and Oswiu’s supporters, fleeced again to pay for their king’s survival, might have indicated that they would give no more to save his skin.
Whatever the reason, Oswiu decided to place his life and future into the scale of battle. The old gods had sustained Penda through his reign as he threw down the newly Christian kings around him. Although the monks of Lindisfarne had translated Oswald’s death into martyrdom, for the battle warriors of the time the gods, or the God, had to deliver where it mattered most: on the battlefield.
