The king’s hall was an open space. Access to it was not limited to the king’s retinue. The king, by necessity, had to remain available to his subjects, and there were also the servants and artisans, and the women and children of the long retinue that followed the king on his progress through the kingdom.
All of these would gather during the long nights to talk, listen, play games and generally pass the time. Apart from anything else, it was warmer in the hall than outside, and the food and ale were plentiful. One of the principal requirements of being a king was to provide for those he had responsibility for.
With such a mixed audience, the tales told were tailored for all sorts of ears, from the old to the young, from the experienced to the enthralled. But they were not just stories of war and battle.
The Penguin, the Riddler, Catwoman and the Joker from the 1966 Batman film.
The Anglo-Saxons, and particularly their warrior elite, were very fond of riddles.
A riddle was, in essence, a competition between the person posing the riddle and those attempting to answer it, so it fit well into the competitive milieu of the king’s warband. But it was also a demonstration of wit and a chance to indulge in early examples of the enduring English love for the double entendre.
Not all riddles were filthy, but a significant sub-section of recorded riddles are – and these were riddles written down by monks. One might suspect that there were many more that the monks chose not to record.
The Anglo-Saxon warrior had to exhibit unflinching, potentially suicidal bravery as well as guile and strategic insight. In The Battle of Maldon, an incomplete Old English poem describing the titular battle, the leader of the English, Byrhtnoth the ealdorman, confronts a band of raiding Vikings confined on Northey Island in the Blackwater Estuary. There is a causeway linking the island to the mainland and Byrhtnoth, in his ofermōde, accepts the Vikings challenge to battle and allows them to cross to the mainland – a decision that proves disastrous.
The English engage the Vikings in battle but one of Byrhtnoth’s men absconds, riding away during the fighting on Byrhtnoth’s own horse. The English, thinking that their ealdorman is fleeing the battle, are thrown into confusion and panic. Byrhtnoth himself is hacked down and killed by the Vikings. The poem breaks off as Byrhtnoth’s loyal men determine to fight to the death alongside their fallen lord.
The poem captures perfectly the conflicting ideas at the heart of the ideal of the warrior, hinging upon the word ofermōde. The poet gives this as the reason for Byrhtnoth’s decision to allow the Vikings to cross to the mainland. Its literal meaning is ‘overconfidence’ or ‘high spirits’, but it can be used to signify pride or arrogance.
So, the disaster of Maldon was due to Byrhtnoth’s pride and arrogance, but his courage in what becomes a lost cause is held up as ideal, as is the doomed determination of those warriors who choose to fight to the death alongside him. Thus, the ofermōde that led Byrhtnoth to accept battle from the Vikings also led to his defeat.
While somewhat overtaken by more recent scholarship (the book was published in 1895) The Age of the Condottieri has the great virtue of making the most confusing era in Italy’s history, when everyone fought everyone else, changing sides as they went, comprehensible. As such it’s a good starting point for anyone trying to understand the complex history of 15th and 16th century Italy.
In this history of the German occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II, Duncan Barrett takes on one of the most difficult of all literary and historical tasks: to weave a coherent and compelling narrative out of a heap of individual and unrelated stories – and he succeeds remarkably. Barrett manages to make this collection of tales a book that is almost impossible to put down, as well as a portrait of what might have happened had the rest of Britain fallen to the Nazis. It’s an excellent history but an even better story, woven from individual threads expertly interlaced. Highly recommended.
Although the concept of the warrior was glorified and held up as an ideal in the songs and stories of the scops, these keepers of the Anglo-Saxon imagination also sanitised and curated the concept of the warrior. Many of the Norse skalds were warriors, and there’s no reason to suppose that that was not true of Anglo-Saxon scops too. But we don’t find in surviving Anglo-Saxon poems anything like the unadorned battle savagery of the Iliad.
The reality was grim, dark and bloody. It was the work of the men listening to the scop’s verse, and the scops chose not to amplify that aspect of their lives. Instead, there’s an autumnal feel to Anglo-Saxon verse, a sense of the loss of things, and the long defeat.
Photo by Rachel Claire: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-under-sky-full-of-stars-5531048/
For our ancestors living in an uncertain world, a world in which death might strike at any point, life was precious and never dull. But even so, the winter evenings were long, and dark. Writing this just after the winter solstice, the sun has set by 4 p.m. Two thirds of each day is dark. I sit in a pool of artificial light – the light sustained by an incredibly complex series of interlocking systems – and defy the night.
But without artificial light, winter nights were long indeed. The fire grumbled in the hearth, maintained throughout the winter months, banked through the night and fed into new life in the morning. To fill the dim months, tasks that might be done as much by feel as sight – tablet weaving, carving, sharpening, splicing, the thousand and more tasks necessary to sustain life when almost everything had to be made locally. And as accompaniment to these tasks, there were stories and songs.
We are a visual culture, drowning in pictures and images.
Our ancestors were aural, drunk on words and sounds. And stories.
Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths created work of astonishing complexity. Looking at the finished work that survives from that time, we are left awestruck by the precision of what they did. For us, today, it’s virtually impossible to create anything similar without using magnification, but we know they did not have access to magnifying glasses.
We don’t understand how they did it. Some people have suggested the goldsmith had children doing the detailed work under his supervision, but we don’t know. It’s possible that a goldsmith taught his children how to do the work and they did it until their eyes went and younger eyes that could focus tighter had to take over, but we just don’t know.
A good friend of mine, Yossi Brain, died in an avalanche. He was climbing El Presidente, a 5,700-metre mountain in Ecuador’s Apolobamba mountain range with a climbing client, Dana Witzel, and two other climbers when an avalanche caught him and Dana. It wasn’t a big avalanche. Not one of those tides that sweep half the mountain away, just a slide of snow. In fact, it was so negligible that the other two climbers were unaffected. They scrambled over to Yossi and Dana as fast as they could but it was too late: they were both dead.
In the mountains, you can do everything right, take all the recommended precautions, and still end up dead. Just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was what happened to Yossi. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Silent Land is about a husband and wife who are also in the wrong place at the wrong time. Skiers, they wake for the early snow, only to be caught in an avalanche. They survive, however, but when they return to their village they find it entirely empty. There is no one there. Nor are they able to contact anyone outside. And their attempts to escape end with them circled back to where they started from.
They are good couple: Jake and Zoe love each other. In some ways, The Silent Land is a portrayal of a marriage, a marriage that works. Yes, there are the usual compromises and irritations, but it’s a marriage that is the making of both of them. And then it is tested – and found strong.
The Silent Land is a story of love, and loss, and the silence between the worlds. It’s a mystery and an unveiling and an invitation. It’s a story that stands on the borders of dream and verity, where we stand too although we think ourselves on solid ground. It’s a story that lingers long after the reading.
To make interlace jewellery, Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths ran the beaded gold wire over and under other threads of gold wire and soldering them into place as you went, creating the interlocking patterns that we see.
For the cloisonné, the goldsmith fashioned individual cells from flattened wire to accommodate each garnet and then cut and filed the garnets to shape. Once the garnets were shaped and sized, but before they were finally fitted into the design, the goldsmith backed each garnet with a layer of gold foil. The base of each garnet was indented into a shallow pyramid, and this the goldsmith fitted onto a pyramidal extrusion punched into the backing plate and foil on which the garnet would sit. So, each garnet sat upon a small golden pyramid, catching and reflecting the light and making the garnet glow a deeper red.
