A glorious journey through early-medieval Britain in a story that brings the many different cultures of the time to vivid life. Artemis is a splendid heroine who highlights the many roles women played in these societies.
Laura kindly sent me an ARC to read and review.
So far as we can tell – and we can tell little with certainty – Anglo-Saxon paganism had little idea of an afterlife. Working from later Norse mythology, we can guess that warriors killed in battle might expect a posthumous existence of feasting and fighting (no mention in existing sources of the other ‘f’ but it was the sort of reward unlikely to be recorded by monkish annalists writing down pagan stories). But there seems to have been little expected for anyone else beyond a shadow existence analogous to the insubstantial shades of classical mythology. The followers of the old polytheistic religions did not hold that we are simply flesh puppets, dissolving upon death, but it was among the living that there was life; what came afterwards was merely shadows and whispers, the long outbreath of final expiration.
In comparison, the new religion offered hope. And it was a hope not confined to a small subsection of the population but one available to everyone: child and adult, poor and rich, slave, peasant and warrior. The first pairing must have been particularly appealing at a time when infant mortality was probably over fifty per cent. The knowledge that the children you had lost and still mourned were not reduced to shades but lived transformed must have been a huge solace to many bereft parents.
It’s still an open question what proportion of the population in Northumbria was Anglian and what Britonnic. There were probably pockets of each spread through a sparsely peopled landscape, although it seems likely that the Britonnic population was more inland and Anglian villages lined the coast and the riverways.
In Hope-Taylor’s excavation of Edwin’s royal palace at Ad Gefrin, in the lea of the Cheviot Hills and under the shadow of the Iron Age hillfort atop Yeavering Bell, he found traces of a huge enclosure for cattle and sheep. He interpreted this as the corral where the hill folk brought their render of livestock for the king when he and his household, on their itinerant progress through the kingdom, stopped at Ad Gefrin.
It’s likely that these pastoralists of the high country were of the same lineage as the first people to practice transhumance during the Neolithic. When Edwin’s golden hall stood at Ad Gefrin under the Hill of the Goats, the great circling ring of the hill fort would still have glowed pink, the colour of the quarried andesite from which it was made. Centuries of weathering have dimmed the shock of pink that once wreathed the hill. But Edwin saw it shining bright above his golden hall, a stronghold made by the ancestors of the people who now came down from the hills with their render of sheep and goats and cattle.
If you want to read about the most important battle you’ve (maybe) never heard of, buy this month’s issue of History of War magazine, which has my feature on the Battle of Nechtansmere. (If you want to know why it’s important, it basically set the border between England and Scotland 1300 years ago).
In the monk, named Aidan, that Abbot Ségéne sent to Oswald, the king found the ideal partner for his mission: to render thanks to St Columba by the conversion of his people. In Aidan, Oswald found his monastic foil. Bede’s appreciation of him is unstinting and, so far as one can tell, deserved. This regard is all the more remarkable in that Aidan was a proponent for aspects of Ionan Christianity that Bede would spend much of his career writing against. But for Bede, holiness as the best foundation for a new church trumped even doctrinal purity.
Bede wrote his history not just to record the facts but to provide a template for the church of his time and the future as to what they should be. Aidan provided him with an excellent example of the sort of behaviour Bede considered exemplary in a bishop: personally simple and ascetic, ever ready to meet the people at their own level and in their own spaces, uncorrupted by wealth or status. For Bede, Aidan represented a sort of Franciscan ideal five centuries before Francis’s birth.
Oswald had grown to manhood in Dal Riada. His faith had been formed by the monks of Iona and it was deep and profound. In his Ecclesiastical History, Bede portrays Oswald as his ideal of kingship, a warrior saint equivalent to Plato’s philosopher king. Modern historians tend to discount this as hagiography but in part this is the result of the restricted modern idea of what it means to be holy: a plaster idol of piety, partaking of equal measures of Victorian sanctimoniousness and modern self-help psychobabble. This is about as far from real holiness as it is possible to get. Holiness is both far more terrible and far more practical than either: it will reduce a man to the state of a shivering child and enable him to endure pains and trials beyond enduring.
I suspect that Oswald really was as Bede portrayed him: a warrior and a saint. A man who could leave his enemies coughing their lifeblood into the mud but who would also break up the silver plates upon which he was eating to give to the poor clustered around his gate, a man who prayed so habitually that his hands, in rest, assumed the gesture of prayer that he had learned on Iona.
For Oswald the Battle of Heavenfield was a triumph. For Iona it was vindication of their support for this Anglo-Saxon ætheling. At a sword stroke, he went from prince in exile to king of the most powerful realm in Britain.
Oswald set out immediately to render thanks to those to whom he credited his victory: St Columba and the monks of Iona. He sent to the abbot, Ségéne, asking him to send monks from Iona to work for the conversion of his people. Oswald’s family was of the northern, Bernician, line, centred around the stronghold of Bamburgh, whereas Edwin’s line sprang from the southern, Deiran, line, which had its origin in the region of York. So when Ségéne sent a party of monks, led by a young man named Aidan, Oswald gave them for a site for their monastery an island that, standing upon the ramparts of the family stronghold at Bamburgh, he could see jutting from the coast to the north: Lindisfarne.
Lindisfarne was a special island, linked and then separated from the mainland twice daily by the falling and rising of the tides. To this day it retains a unique atmosphere, particularly during those periods of estrangement when the sea rises to cover the causeway and all the coach tour parties have left. Then, Lindisfarne becomes a place apart, home to terns and seals and the lingering sense of a long-ago sanctity.
It’s likely that Oswald took Cadwallon and his men by surprise. The men of Gwynedd had been on campaign for a year or more. It was a long time to be away from home. They had acquired a great deal of booty (the Staffordshire Hoard has vividly illustrated just how much riches could be taken from the body and arms of a dead enemy).
The battle probably started around Corbridge, where the old Roman road crosses the River Tyne. It became a running rout, with Cadwallon and his surviving men making a fighting retreat, down along the course of a river, being forced back and back into the bleak moors until finally the remnants of Cadwallon’s army, and the king himself, were caught beside the Devil’s Water.
There Oswald cut down Cadwallon. The last great hope of a Britonnic reconquest died in the mud.
The Eisenhorn novels were the very first Warhammer 40k novels I read about twenty years ago now. Since then, I’ve read many more and, rather improbably, even written some. So I decided to go back to my original door to the 40k galaxy to see how they would read coming at them with the eyes of a writer of these stories as well as a reader.
The answer, of course, is very well. Dan Abnett is a very, very, very good writer, with an unmatched ability to coin words that not just fit into the 40k universe but with a single word engage the reader more fully into that universe.
But now, working from a 40k writer perspective, I’m pretty sure I know how Dan pitched the idea of these novels originally: this was James Bond in 40k. But James Bond with a 40k twist – which means that there’s no sex but even bigger guns. What the Eisenhorn novels and the Bond films share is a breakneck pace with a huge range of exotic locations: unusually for 40k, the stories escape the usual round of polluted hive cities to take in a far wider range of planets, some of which seem like they actually might be quite pleasant to live on (so long as you have money).
In another Bond trope, there’s an unusual emphasis on fine food and drink, with many meals described in loving detail. As an Inquisitor, Eisenhorn unfortunately couldn’t really have an interest in gambling, which is a shame as I’d have loved to have read Abnett’s take on a 40k casino.
As the stories progress, the tie to Bond lessens as the story and characters grow into themselves, but, yes, I still think that’s how they began, when Dan emailed the editors at Black Library and said, “Let’s do Bond in space!”
Oswald with his small party of men rode to beat the news of their landing. Reaching a camp site in the shadow of the Wall, they took shelter there. According to the later accounts in Bede and Andoman’s account of the life of Columba, this eve-of-battle camp was crucial for the battle’s outcome.
Andoman tells of a dream, coming to Oswald in the night, in which Columba himself promised victory to Oswald on the morrow. Expanding the sense of mission in this war band, Bede tells how Oswald raised a cross in the field where they camped on the eve of battle and had all his men, Christian and pagan alike, swear to fight in its name.
Bede, an avid reader of Eusebius’s History of the Church, would have been aware of the parallels between this and Constantine’s vision and oath taking before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.
Bede wrote an ecclesiastical history of the English people. As the title tells, he was not interested in recording all the many victories and defeats that peppered those battle-weary centuries. The ones he wrote about were those which were important for what happened to the Church, and few, in Bede’s estimation, were more important than the one between Oswald and Cadwallon.