The new issue of All About History is on sale, in shops and online, and I’m proud to say that I wrote the cover feature on the great Spanish hero, El Cid. My interest in Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar was sparked by watching the great Charlton Heston/Sophia Loren film, El Cid, when I was a child: the real man was, if anything, even more extraordinary than the Hollywood version. Get issue 153 of All About History and learn about the knight who never lost a battle.
There’s a secret hidden in plain sight on the Sutton Hoo sword. The pommel was on display at the British Museum for 70 years before Sue Brunning, the curator of European Early Medieval Collections at the museum, noticed something interesting about it.
There is a string of wound gold wire running around the pommel. Looking carefully at the wound wire, Brunning noticed that, at one end of the pommel, the wire was worn, the clear ridges of the rest of the wire smoothed down to little more than undulations.
Gold is a soft metal. A hand resting upon one side of a pommel will wear gold wound wire smooth.
Brunning realised that the pommel of the Sutton Hoo sword had the wear it displayed because the man who had worn and wielded the sword in life had habitually rested his hand upon its pommel when the sword rested in its scabbard.
It was one of those details that suddenly draws back the veil of years and brings us face to face with the real, living man who had worn the sword.
An Anglo-Saxon king was caught in a cleft stick of expectation and necessity: to attract warriors to his warband, he had to distribute gold and gifts to his men. As the Staffordshire Hoard demonstrates, one of the main ways of acquiring this gold was by defeating enemies in battle.
But the constant need to acquire treasure led to further conflicts with more kings, inciting blood feuds and the sort of reckless hatred that must have fuelled the assassin King Cwichelm sent to kill Edwin: the unnamed assassin knew that, even if he succeeded, he was embarked on a suicide mission. That he was willing to die to kill Edwin suggests the assassin had reasons of personal vengeance to accept the commission of King Cwichelm.
The legends of cursed gold suggest an uneasy understanding on the part of the king’s bards and the warriors themselves of the price in hatred they paid for taking blood-wet treasure – and the likely consequence for themselves in taking it.
Very few of the kings of the sixth and seventh centuries died of natural causes. Even those who rose to the greatest power – Æthelfrith, Edwin, Oswald, Penda – were brought down by the turning of fortune or the alliance of enemies united by their hatred for the high king. In the warrior culture of the time, there was little way to disentangle gold lust and power politics, for the two were intertwined. The legends of cursed gold hint at the consequences of this fateful linkage.
People go missing. People go missing all the time. In most cases, they are found again quickly. But some disappear.
Most of the disappeared are people who chose to disappear; people who walked out of ther lives. I suspect most of us, at some point or other, have faced that temptation: the open door, the road ahead, the train journey or the plane flight: a chance not only to leave a life behind but also the opportunity to become someone else entirely.
Most of those who disappear fall into this category. Then there are the tragic cases, the people abducted, kidnapped and killed. Many of these are found, eventually, their remains allowing a measure of closure to those that mourn them.
But there are other disappearances. Disappearances that stud the tales and folklore particularly of the ocean swept shores of northern Europe. In these stories, people walk out of this world, wittingly or not, into another realm that runs somehow parallel and somehow perpendicular to our own.
Otherworld, the land under the waves, the land of the living, Faerie, Avalon; these are just some of its names and, according to these tales, some of the people who disappear do so because they find the door to this otherworld.
The Mysteries is about people who disappear – and the people who search for them. It’s a story of loss and finding, weaving a detective story into a fairy tale and a fairy tale into a detective story. It switches from Turnpike Lane (an area of London which, I can attest, is about as far from Faerie as it’s possible to get) to the shores of Loch Sween in Scotland, which I can also confirm lies on the border between this world and… somewhere else.
It’s a story of losing and finding, and the perils that come with both. If you have ever walked down a suburban street at night when no one else is moving and the light pools around the street lamps and it becomes clear that it would be all too easy to turn onto a street in a different city entirely; if you have ever walked lost in mist on a hillside to suddenly find a stone standing in front of you, cold dripping from its face, then this is a book for you.
In firelight, garnets glitter. You need to see garnets in the shifting light of a fire to appreciate the life such light gives to garnets.
Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths mounted garnets to accentuate this facet of garnets. They mounted the garnet on a thin gold backing into which little pyramids had been pressed. The base of the garnet was filed into shape to fit the gold pyramid and then mounted on it. Light, passing through the garnet, hit the base pyramid of gold and then was reflected back out of the garnet, giving it a sort of double glow.
Looking at some of the intricate cloisonné work of Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths, such as the shoulder clasps excavated at Sutton Hoo, one can only marvel at the detail of the work that went into making them.
The Staffordshire Hoard has transformed our understanding of the 6th and 7th centuries. Before Terry Herbert’s metal detector went beep, we had found 13 gold pommels in the British Isles of contemporary date. The hoard has 74.
While the burial at Sutton Hoo had an exceptional sword interred with the body, the norm for warrior burials across Europe was much simpler swords, with their furniture made of base metals. Working with these findings, archaeologists had assumed that swords such as the Sutton Hoo sword were truly swords fit for a king, exceptional blades fitted out exceptionally.
However, the hoard demonstrates conclusively that, at least for the period between 570 and 650, swords fitted with the richest of hilts were the weapons of the warrior aristocracy of Anglo-Saxon Britain and not just their ruling kings.
The subtitle tells the book’s theme: the greatest U-boat hunter of the battle of the Atlantic. Frederic John Walker, inevitably nicknamed ‘Johnnie’ after the brand of whisky, was a captain and commander of the small boat squadrons, largely consisting of corvettes and frigates, that were given the task of protecting Britain’s merchant-fleet convoys from German U-boats. Churchill famously said that the Battle of the Atlantic, that long, cold, patient, largely silent conflict that was fought on and under the ocean, was the only battle that kept him awake at night with worry.
Johnnie Walker did as much as any single individual to win the battle. From his revolutionary tactics, where he turned his patrol vessels into the hunters, seeking out and destroying the German submarines, to his unflagging devotion to duty that kept him on the bridge hour after hour, day after day, Walker led the way.
The book is, in some ways, a military hagiography. There’s little in the way of criticism but then, there was little criticism warranted, particularly when you reach the end and read how Walker’s devotion to duty quite literally drove him to an early death. Walker worked himself to death, dying in 1944 when the battle was mostly won but the war not yet over. He also lost his younger son during the war.
The Walker family, like so many others, sacrificed so much that we might live. It is good to remember, and honour, him. And it’s also a thrilling read, conveying well the cold and tension of the long nights when the corvettes searched for the wolf packs, knowing that at any moment a torpedo might come barreling towards them.
OK, you could write a shorter history. It is possible. But if you did, it would be of the nature of here’s the Romans, long bit where nothing much happens but there’s a lot of fighting, Renaissance!, another long bit where there’s a lot of fighting, Risorgimento!, Fascism (hiss! boo!), fashion. What Ross King does particularly well in this book is fill in the bits where, apparently, nothing much happens apart from a lot of fighting. In this, he’s helped by Italy having a lot of really interesting history. So if you want to learn more about the history of Italy, and in particular the bits apart from Rome and Renaissance, then this is a good place to start.
Don’t lend out the precious books of your childhood – at least, not if you expect to get them back. I can count on the fingers of one thumb the number of books that, having lent out, have been returned to me. Unfortunately, one of the books that I ‘lent’ was this one, in a fine hardback edition. I have no recollection to whom I lent it but, if you should happen to read this…I was going to say, please give it back. But now, that’s no longer necessary. For as memory turns back to the books that most formed me, I have started searching them out and rereading them.
The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights was one of those books. I must have read it before I was ten and long, long before I read any other books by John Steinbeck. As a bookish teenager, I borrowed Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and other Steinbeck novels from the school library (imagine having a school library that stocked such books!); impressive, immersive books, worthy of a Nobel-prize winner.
But none of them moved me – made me – as much as The Acts of King Arthur. Reading the introduction to this new edition, I learned that Steinbeck was given a copy of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur as a child. Rather than being repelled by the strange version of English in which it was written, he found it fascinating, relishing the aura of age and faerie that lay in the very words on the page, complementing the tales the words told.
As an adult, Steinbeck set about retelling Malory’s Arthurian legends but, sadly, he never completed the task. However, after his death, what he had written was published. It is remarkable. Undoubtedly the best retelling of these stories I have ever read. Steinbeck finds the language to set his stories in the same semi-legendary world in which Malory wrote, a world suspended between our own and the realm of quests and wizards and giants and dragons, a world where the temptations and virtues of chivalry are laid bare in a way that makes it, for a child such as me reading it, an invitation to emulate those virtues and follow those ideals.
It really is the most wonderfully written book but what sets it apart is the deep wisdom that supports the words on the page.
Having read Steinbeck’s version of Malory, I set about reading the original myself, both volumes in the old and much missed Everyman series. While I enjoyed the original, I must admit that I preferred – and prefer – Steinbeck’s retelling. If you’ve not read this book, do so. It will transport you but, more importantly, reading it will make you a better person.
On the face of it, there doesn’t seem much involved in making a sword. Get some iron, heat it, hit it with a hammer until it is flat and shaped like a sword, stick a handle on it and sharpen the edge.
In actuality, every one of those steps is fraught with difficulty. But ultimately all the work that went into forging a sword was in answer to the fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of sword-making. A sword needs to be hard so that it can hold an edge, but it needs to be flexible so that it will not break. All the smith’s art and craft was devoted to solving this paradox.
The solution depended upon marrying iron with its closest cousin, steel.