Photo by Samuel Kalina: https://www.pexels.com/photo/rock-formation-in-the-middle-of-body-of-water-3800084/
Anglo-Saxon warriors travelled. In Beowulf, we hear of a Geatish warrior, Beowulf, fetching up at the court of Hrothgar, king of the Danes, to help him in his fight against the monster Grendel.
There was clearly nothing outlandish to the audience that first heard this poem in a warrior setting off to a different country in search of adventure, renown and an enemy against whom to pit his sword. It was quite common for a warrior to travel to another kingdom and offer his fighting skills there.
Indeed, the most renowned of all the kings of Northumbria, Oswald, took refuge in the sea-spanning kingdom of Dál Riata as a boy and fought for its rulers as a man. While there, he learnt the language of the Dál Riatans, heard their stories, sang their songs. There were many stories for him and his men to tell when they returned to Northumbria.
I read Anthony Hope’s most famous novel, The Prisoner of Zenda, more years ago than I care to remember but I only recently found out that he’d written this sequel. Although its titled for the dastardly villain, Rupert of Hentzau, Rupert doesn’t really appear in the book as often as one would like, as he really is a thoroughly good villain, but Hope does ramp up the conflicts of the first book hugely. In the Prisoner, our hero, Rudolf, has to impersonate the king of Ruritania. In the second, he has to become the king, while impersonating the king, because the king has gone and died, after faffing around in a humiliated tiff that everyong preferred Rudolf as king to him. It’s a book of its time, and I mean that in a good way as it manifests the best of that era while showing few of its failings. A worthy sequel to the original.
I was a little non-plussed on first picking this book up: I had no idea that Pink Floyd’s guitarist had so intense an interest in Italy that he’d written a book about it. But then, I remembered the famous Pink Floyd concert at Pompeii and it all made sense. After all, having made ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, Dave Gilmour would have had more than enough money to buy a house, or houses, in Italy. But I did expect some sort of mention of Pink Floyd somewhere in the text.
Then I realised that it was a different David Gilmour, a journalist rather than a musician. I was, at first, a little disappointed as I was looking forward to learning how an extended Italian lunch had been the inspiration for ‘Comfortably Numb’ (at one family lunch in Italy when I was young I was reduced to tears by the refusal of my uncle to believe me when I said that I was full and I really, really, really couldn’t eat any more). However, it turns out this other version of David Gilmour is very knowledgeable, and opinonated, about Italy, so I gave up on hoping for Pink Floyd reminiscences and settled down to read his tour through Italian history.
Italy’s history is famously long but Gilmour only takes half the book to get to the 19th century: this is swift run through a rich story. It turns out, Gilmour is most interested in the Risorgimento, the movement in Italy that forced unity onto an Italy that was previously divided between different states, and what has happened since. My mother is from Piedmont so it’s interesting to see the Piedmontese, and in particular King Vittorio Emanuele, cast as the villains of the piece for straitjacketing a reluctant assortment of independent cities and statelets into a unified state.
Gilmour’s basic point is that Italian loyalty is more local and regional than national (except when the Azzurri are playing) and in this I think he’s right. Other countries spent centuries unifying, slowly assembling the sentiments and assembleys necessary to make a truly unified country; in Italy, they did this all in a couple of decades. As such, it’s no surprise that Italy remains a collection of regions forced into a country. And Gilmour’s book is a very good place to understand how that happened and its consequences.
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.
