Codex Celtica

The Great Circle

2012-01-26T16:32:00.024Z

--The aerial northern “Great Circle” route in the headlines follows much the same transatlantic route used by early Keltic as well as Nordic seafarers.

Every Xmas, the press run some inane Santa tie-in story, such as NORAD is tracking his sleigh. This year it touched on a new “Santa’s shortcut” air route crossing the Arctic Circle allowed by changing airline regulations. This may or may not really be news, but the transatlantic ‘shortcut’ route cutting across the Arctic is certainly not a new idea. Just as today’s Santa is the development of an ancient idea [see books by Phyllis Siefker, Paul Frodsham, Tony Van Renterghem, etc], the ‘Santa’s shortcut’ route continues an ancient practice as far as transatlantic crossings go. Now you may wonder, looking at a standard map, why would an airliner from, say, New York to London be flying over Greenland in the first place? Why not just fly a straight E-W route? (In fact, NYC is southwest of London, the Titanic took this south-westerly route – though it didn’t save it from an iceberg.)

The answer lies in the deceptive standard map projection: plot the shortest course between, say, NYC and London on a globe with a piece of string, and you will find it skirts Iceland and traverses Greenland, crossing in and out of the Arctic Circle. Similarly, the route will show as a straight line on a ‘gnomonic’ map projection, a more accurate map projection, ironically said to be the world’s oldest, created in the 6C BC by the Greek scientist Thales.

But because this route appears as a curve on a flat Mercator-style map projection, it’s called a Great Circle Route. The airlines all follow Great Circle Routes and if you’ve never made the transatlantic crossing by air during daylight hours, get a window seat: take my word, I’ve made the trip several times, it’s well worth it for the view of the immensity of the North Atlantic (often littered with icebergs), Iceland and a whole slice of the Arctic Circle.

In fact, airlines have to fly a slight zigzag pattern over their GCR to maintain compass headings for set times, just as sailing vessels do, whether or not they are ‘tacking’ into head winds. And regulations requiring airliners to keep within x minutes of a place to land if need be, reflect the way sailors steer bearings that take them past a series of safe havens. In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed the importance of a type of ancient, carefully guarded, codex called a periplous, which was essentially a ship captain’s directional guide to a series of landfalls en route. And while it’s been assumed early seafarers didn’t have proper compasses, recently it’s been argued that they may have used the ‘sunstones’ referred to in the Norse sagas – crystal rocks which refract light differentially). However if you look at a map, the need to keep within a day’s sail (the Norse called this a doegr) of a harbour would take these vessels northward in any case, for the only landfalls for the North Atlantic crossing are up towards the Arctic Circle.

This fortunate coincidence, that the shortest route also has harbours more or less en route, allowed ancient Keltic and Nordic seafarers to cross the Atlantic. This so-called 'northern stepping-stone route’ arcs up NW from northern Britain or Scandinavia, past the Orkney Isles, passes within a day’s sail of the Shetlands, and then the Faeroes. There follows a dangerous open-water passage, NW over to Iceland, then the route heads NW again to make the shortest passage to the next landfall, SE Greenland, across the narrows of the Denmark Strait. There, midway once stood a lost land: a small group of habitable islets, now drowned by rising waters, called Gunnbjorn's Skerries. The sailing route then turned SW down Greenland’s east coast (helped by the current), continuing SW to landfalls on the North America continent, the closest of which is the tip of Newfoundland.

That this route was much used by early seafarers is not just a matter of map observation, for traces of Keltic and Nordic settlement have been found along these routes. The Nordics’ presence is well known, from the naming c980 AD of Greenland by Erik The Red (who should really have been called Erik The Ready Wit), through their use of Iceland as a base (attested in sagas) to the 1960s re-discovery of the ‘Viking’ settlement at L’Anse Aux Meadows on the northerly tip of Newfoundland, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That site, possibly settled by Erik’s son Leif Ericson, is usually identified as the land known in the Icelandic sagas as “Vinland the Good” (Vinland meaning Wine-Land) as it was then below the northerly limit for wild native grape-vines to grow (some identify Vinland as Nova Scotia). The search is still on for the sagas’ ‘Helluland’ (not an Erik The Red witticism, just Erik The Red’s son Leif Ericson’s ad hoc place-name, Old Norse for ‘Flat-Stone Land’ – possibly Baffin Island or northern Labrador) and Leif's ‘Markland’, meaning ‘Forest-Land’ which Leif also visited (somewhere farther south below the Arctic tundra/taiga treeline – possibly southern Labrador).

What is less well known, and is our concern here, is the presence of the earlier Keltic seafarers along this route. The orthodox view is that the Keltic presence which is found in Icelandic DNA etc is the result of Viking raiders taking slaves – mainly capturing Scots or Irish women to breed with. However the Nordic sagas themselves acknowledged the presence of earlier Keltic seafarers, referring to a land called Whitemansland (Hvítramannaland), or Irland-Mirka. This latter translates as Ireland-the-Great, usually rendered just as Greater Ireland. It is usually identified as Greenland, the idea being that there were Irish monastic settlements along the southerly coasts here. Its other name, Whitemansland, was taken from a native appellation for a land where (a native told the Norse) men in white robes processed carrying long poles with banners of white cloth and chanting loudly. They had "hair and skin as white as snow" and Whitemansland is sometimes translated Palefaces’ Land, paleface being a native term for the invading whites which survived in Hollywood-western Indian-speak, for what that’s worth. (Their white hair indicates older men, and another account says they wore a fringe, the shaved-pate effect which is the priestly tonsure in some orders.)

Early accounts exist in Latin as well as Icelandic Norse, and the terms used there are Hiberni (Hibernians, i.e. Irish), or Albani/albani, which can mean white men [when not capitalised] or men of Alban, a term for Britain [Greek Albion] and later in Gaelic sources for non-Romanised northern Britain. These are not just terms of origin, with Greater Ireland being translated as either Hibernia Major or Albania, suggesting more than just transient settlements. (The first Norse settlement in Iceland is dated to the reign of Pope Adrian, AD 772x795] while Greenland was first settled 986, by Eric The Red’s son Leif; the Norse abandoned their settlements in Greenland etc in the climate downturn of the 14th/15th Centuries.)

Here’s a quote from the first chapter of the Landnámabók, ‘The Book Of The Settlement Of Iceland’, which opens with how The Venerable Bede (historian and father of the English Church, fl. c.730) refers to old books that describe a land called Thule, ‘said to be six days' sailing north from Britain’, where ‘day came not in winter, nor night in summer’ (meaning it was above the Arctic Circle).

… before Iceland was peopled from Norway there were in it the men whom the Northmen called Papar; they were Christian men, and it is held that they must have come over sea from the west, for there were found left by them Irish books, bells, and croziers, and more things besides, from which it could be understood that they were Westmen [Irish]; these things were found east in Pap-isle and Papyle, and it is stated in English books that in those times voyages were made between these countries.

Do we have any Celtic codex sources on this presence? Sadly, there’s nothing that has survived quite like the Icelandic sagas, which are a distinct literary genre of historiography that developed as a written form after the Viking Age. De Mensura Orbis Terrae, a c825 geographical text by the Irish monk Dicuil (who may also be the anonymous Irish poet known as “Hibernicus exul”), describes the presence of a party of Irish monks who spent half a year on the farthest-north destination island of “Thule,” which is usually identified from details about the midnight sun as Iceland, but could be other sites to the east or west. With the Norse accounts that refer to these ‘papar,’ meaning fathers in the sense of priests, and place names like Pap-isle, are there not any more detailed matching Celtic church legends of far-flung anchorite colonies?

Legenda, meaning in Latin that which is to be read, were a then-popular ecclesiastical genre concerning saints’ lives - though unfortunately not reliable as historical accounts, the focus being on the fantastic and miraculous events the saint was involved with. Here, we do have a 8th C. composition, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, the Voyage Of Saint Brendan The Abbot, a strange legend concerning Irish seafaring monk St. Brendan The Navigator (one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland), who sailed westward in a leather-and-woodframe currach c550 AD in search of the ‘Promised Land Of The Saints.’ A currach [spelling Anglicised as curragh; not to be confused with the small round Welsh coracle] is a Celtic seagoing-longboat design of unknown antiquity, but the associated boat-building skill is maintained in a few remote parts of the Gaeltacht [Gaelic-speaking area of western Ireland]. That it was possible to sail such a [twin-masted] currach across the north Atlantic, from Ireland to Newfoundland via Iceland, was demonstrated in 1976-7 by Tim Severin, in The Brendan Voyage, the title of a subsequent book and tv documentary. (Despite what you see in films, and the occasional reconstruction sailing voyage from 1893 onward, the Viking Norse didn’t use their dragon-prowed longships to cross the stormy seas, but a class of small merchant ship called knarr or knorr; I’ve read that the lifting action of Atlantic waves could break the back of a flat-keeled longship if one wave caught the bow and the other the stern.)

Even if St Brendan’s Navigatio was factually based, the actual route he and his fellow monks might have taken remains a matter of argument, for most of the legend’s strange encounters do not easily lend themselves to modern rationalising that would turn them into an account of an actual voyage or voyages past the Faeroes to Iceland and beyond (some argue all the way to Newfoundland). The Navigatio belongs to a then-popular type of marine wonder-tale genre known generically in Celtic as immram, and so incidents may have been copied from earlier now-lost instances. Tim Severin’s book, an international best seller, details his own route-rationale, which he explored with a 4,500-mile test voyage in his makeshift replica curragh; others have made their own research attempts on an armchair-travel basis using maps, ruler, compasses and textbooks. This has the advantage of tracing a set of different voyages which St Brendan may have made as the model for the tale as a composite adventure.
(The basic information is now all online, for anyone else who wants to have a look at it, starting with an English translation, here.) Of course, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani may be compiled from accounts by other papar, like Cormac, another Irish monk who is mentioned in Adomnán’s c700 Life Of St Columba as an intrepid sailor who went where no other had, over the uncrossable ocean to the north, but of whom we hear nothing more beyond Adomnan’s account.

More generally, regarding the problem of the lost discoveries and settlements by Keltic pioneers, one writer who has done ongoing field and literary research over several decades is veteran Canadian author Farley Mowat, who has written a series of books on this research area, culminating in his 1998 The Farfarers: Before The Norse (also issued in the UK as The Alban Quest: The Search For A Lost Tribe,1999). Mowat argues some sites classed as Norse really belonged to the Celtic seafaring settlers of North America he calls the Alban - largely the remnants of the Armorican tribes of Brittany enslaved by Caesar and later Picts from the Orkneys, driven ever westward by the advancing Norse. Mowat’s work is regarded by ‘serious’ historians as over-imaginative (he uses novelist’s techniques to add picturesque details), but academic research into such early transatlantic contact, which promotes the notion of multiculturalism, has of late acquired a certain respectability and impetus with a Worldwide Atlantic Conference in 2009, whose motto was, inevitably, 'Columbus was not first', and related pre-Columbian archaeo-finds such as this.

A less academically-respectable but separate longstanding line of enquiry by others has pursued the legend of a later (but still pre-Columbian) seafarer, the Welsh Prince Madoc discovering land to the west in 1170, and returning to Wales to escort a large fleet of colonists there. When the first American overland explorers crossed into the Ohio Valley, they discovered a tribe of native people called the Mandan, who they said bore odd similarities to the Welsh, in language as well boat-building style (round coracles on the Welsh pattern). This included the artist George Caitlin, who painted the coracle-like Mandan bull boat [pictured]. Sadly, the Mandans’ civilisation was almost wiped out by smallpox in the 1830s, right after Catlin visited.

But the controversy has continued ever since, the Welsh-Mandan claim being disputed as crypto-racism, or flagged up as English propaganda going back to the Tudor kings (Tudor was a Welsh name, Tewdr) to extend English geopolitical claims farther south, from the 16th century onwards. Hakluyt’s famous ‘Voyages’ even had Iceland seized for England by the fleet of mighty King Arthur – who even if real would scarcely have been English himself, but was adopted by the Welsh Tewdr/Tudor dynasty as a propaganda tool; Hakluyt was recycling and updating a part of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 1135 (pre-Madoc) mythmaking Arthurian opus the Historia Regum Brittanorum, to promote English gains in the New World by Raleigh et al.) Although it got nowhere academically (though there is a U. Of Wales scientific research vessel called Prince Madoc) or politically (beyond local speculative commemorations), the Madoc story has lived on in literature.

For those interested in the Arthurian legend, this later northern-route tie-in to the legend has added a distinct subgenre of this subject area. This is based on the notion that the original legendary “isle of apples” Avalon, where Arthur was taken when mortally wounded and possibly also where the Holy Grail with its healing power was kept, was based on somewhere across the North Atlantic, some real island or peninsula on North America’s east coast, which a Celtic religious order used as the ultimate secret retreat. Like the Promised Land of the Saints, the Celtic Otherworld, after all, was somewhere to the West – perhaps it was a real place, a secret burial isle, perhaps a place of convalescence a wounded hero, if fortunate, might one day return from, or at least retire to, living out his days in peace?

Various writers have entertained the New World Avalon thesis, dating back at least to Arthurian-Glastonbury author Geoffrey Ashe in Land To The West, 1963, focusing on St Brendan’s voyage. Later entries, post the bestselling Holy Blood, Holy Grail, are more conspiracy-oriented, focusing on the Templars, Freemasons and related ‘hidden-history’ cover-ups: Michael Bradley in Holy Grail Across The Atlantic, 1988, Andrew Sinclair in The Sword And The Grail: The Story Of The Grail, The Templars And The True Discovery of America, 1992, and Graham Phillips, in Merlin And The Discovery Of Avalon In the New World, 2005 [feature and cliff-hanging Ch. 1 online here and here). This is not entirely a new inspirational idea: there are Avalon place names on the map of eastern Canada in Newfoundland, notably the Avalon Peninsula, named after England’s official Province of Avalon colony, designed and given a Royal Charter in 1623 as a Glastonbury-style religious refuge (sadly, the long winters proved too much for the intended farming commune).

The ultimate goal in these early nor’westerly voyages of exploration was distant Thule, whose popular appellation in Latin (thanks to the poet Virgil) of Ultima Thule indicated it was believed to be the most northerly limit of land in the world. Today, we know this limit would be the north coast of Greenland, which is never approachable by sea except by modern icebreaker vessels. (The US built an airbase nearby which they called Thule.) But from descriptions of visits by various sailors (including Columbus) giving lengths of daylight, ancient Thule is usually taken to be Iceland, on the edge of the Arctic Circle – although again it could be lands east or west at a comparable latitude. (As Dava Sobel‘s 1996 bestseller Longitude details, establishing one’s E-W longitude remained a problem for mariners well into the 18C.)

The earliest visitor to write an account of visiting Thule for Greco-Roman readers was Pytheas c325 BC, who said he sailed there, near the edge of the congealed sea. Inevitably he was denounced as a liar, mainly by the Roman geographer Strabo (who never visited), and his book Peri Tou Okeanou (‘On The Ocean’) was lost to posterity (we have only passages quoted by others like Strabo). Pytheas was from Massilia, the modern Marseilles, then a Greek colony in the western Med offering trade access to mainland Gaul and points beyond, and this raises the prospect that Pytheas, who was a private citizen rather than an official, travelled with the help of local sailors, perhaps first from Gaul and then from Britain, who knew the north Atlantic trade routes.

In modern times, the surviving references to Pytheas’s lost book have allowed a re-appraisal by scholars such as Rhys Carpenter (Beyond The Pillars Of Hercules, 1966) and Prof Barry Cunliffe (The Extraordinary Voyage Of Pytheas The Greek, 2001). I have both these books and they definitely concur that Pytheas’s observations (which include latitude measurements using a gnomon or sundial-type calibrated measuring stick) are reasonable even if not that accurate. I suspect ‘Thule’ [pronounced Tooley] however was an obsolete pre-Keltic and then a poetic classical name meaning simply the far-away [cf Greek tele, ‘at a distance’], and was attached by different map-makers to different islands and peninsulas, from Norway to Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland. Thus, no set of coordinates given or geographic description matches up with the next. As the subarctic island-stepping-stone trade route opened up, the symbolic name Ultima Thule for the farthest land retreated like a mirage, reassigned to the next potential landfall on the next generation of maps being made back home.

It’s quite possible the notion of yet-another unknown island was kept alive for its confusion value - disinformation to maintain secrecy over trade routes. Just last year a rare giant map parchment scroll 6.75 m long, the Tabula Peutingeriana, was put on display as the only example of its type to survive. This was drawn in the 13C but based on 4C and older Roman sources giving official itinerary i.e. highway-stopover info, for the entire imperial road network, showing how it reached out to the ends of the known world. You can see from the detail I’ve reproduced below, taken from the map’s NW top-left corner there is a string of 3 small unnamed islands leading westward from “Jbernia Ins.” [Hibernia = Ireland] and ending with “Thyle Ins[ula]”. The stretched-planisphere scroll format means that neither directions or distances shown are to be taken seriously. The Romans were such hopeless mariners that it is more likely the Ultima-Thule stepping-stone route shown here derives from 2nd-hand info, perhaps from the work of Pytheas himself, for no Roman expedition seems to have followed up his circumnavigations (hence the arguments lasting for centuries between Roman writers over the accuracy of his observations).

Thus, we’ve come full circle, back to where transatlantic map-making explorations began. Nevertheless, I would argue there is a reasonable supposition that Celtic mariners knew the sea route from mainland Europe as far northwest as Shetland (at 600 N.) and probably Iceland (and the pack ice of the Frozen Sea beyond) as far back as c325 BC, and may well have crossed all the way to the New World in their currachs.

What is needed is archeo evidence regarding the traces of early settlement along the route indicated above, by Keltic monastic refugees, traders, fishermen and whalers etc. Author Farley Mowat visited many such sites, compiling fieldwork notes largely from local reports, and his 1998 The Farfarers: Before The Norse aka The Alban Quest: The Search For A Lost Tribe, has original outline maps sketching in a large number of these possible sites. Copyright restrictions discourage me from reproducing them here, but the book is still available online, detailing Mowat’s arguments. For example, he felt that the roofless ruins found around these coasts are a reflection of an old Scots-Irish practice where you use your longboat as the roof of your shelter on such distant shores where no suitable trees etc are to be found locally; thus he argues L’Anse aux Meadows may be a Keltic site rather than a Norse one.

Was Hamlet Celtic?

2011-10-09T15:17:00.010+01:00

-- Did 'Hamlet' derive from an older, now-lost Celtic manuscript source?
A press story surfaced, or rather resurfaced, in August (cf picked up by the News For Medievalists blogsite 6-08-11) that the most famous character in Shakespeare was not Danish at all, but Irish. Or to put it another way, what is usually cited as English Lit’s greatest play was in fact of Celtic origin. As the original source would thus be a Celtic codex, it's within our remit to take a look at the controversy. This matter is also related to another longstanding controversy regarding Shakespearean authorship which is about to go wide with the release this autumn of a big-budget film about literary intrigues at the Elizabethan court, titled Anonymous.

Like most such press stories based on scholarship, the was-Hamlet-Irish story is not altogether new, being picked up by some papers earlier this year [cf "Was the great Dane Irish? That is the question," Guardian 3-3-11]. The press source seems to be an article in Oxford University Press's Review of English Studies (I can't find the article online) by a mediaeval Scandinavian scholar at Aberdeen University, Dr Lisa Collinson, who argues the name Hamlet derives from Dark Ages Irish literature.

Shakespeare's source is always given as a c1200 compilation, the Gesta Danorum (Deeds Of The Danes), by Danish scholar Saxo Grammaticus. But the story differs from the play in many ways, there's no other evidence Saxo's Vita Amleti was actually historically based i.e. that there was a real Prince Hamlet; and there is an older Scandinavian folktale of a similar-sounding hero called Amlothi. Supposedly Shakespeare got the "Hamlet" spelling from a then-current [c1570] French translation of Saxo. Dr Collinson argues the name derives from Admithi, which is found as the name of a walk-on character in the old Irish saga The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel, part of the so-called Ulster cycle. (There was also a 10th-C king-slayer figure called Amhlaide in the Irish Annals, though Irish mh is pronounced more as v.) She says the Irish root refers to grinding and the Scands adapted this word a metaphor for the 'grinding' sea, grinding in the ancient sense of a quern-style millstone being turned to grind down wheat, or in this case presumably, boats. (The early-mediaeval Icelandic work the Prose Edda also quotes an old poem wherein a local name for the sea is Amloði's Mill.) Quite why the seafaring Scands would need to borrow a name from Irish legend for the sea escapes me, as they had their own terminology. We still have the wonderful Nordic-Germanic term maelstrom for a whirlpool-like effect at sea, literally a grinding stream. Like all oral (what we now call illiterate) cultures, they also had a rich poetic storytelling language, as did their Anglo-Saxon cousins of the Beowulf era who gave us metaphors (known as kenning) like "the whale's way" for the open sea.

But let's follow the argument, as reported, a bit further. There is an earlier [1969] academic 'fringe' text called Hamlet's Mill, a comparative-myths study which made an etymological argument that ancient myths have an astronomical 'key.' This is to do with the so-called precession of the equinoxes, an effect of the earth wobbling around on its axis so that the Pole Star is in a different astrological or zodiacal 'house' every 2,000-odd years, in a 12-part cycle completed every 25,000-odd years. It's a theory best known through popular culture, as in 'This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.' The two co-authors gave the name Amlodhi's Mill (or variants) to this astronomical effect, attempting to reconstruct a lost master-myth of a heavenly mill, run by Amlodhi the Titan, whose instability causes what we might call sea changes - great political and cultural changes – on earth. This work has always been a bit much for me to buy, with a £25+ textbook pricetag, but you can now read it (or a potted version of it) online free, here.

Now we have the added press confusion implying the original Hamlet was an Irish nobleman, which might make for a provocative press headline but misrepresents the underlying academic argument about the grinding sea. But if you don't buy the academic argument of an Irish etymological origin of Hamlet as astro master-myth, is that the end of the matter as far as a possible Celtic source goes? I would argue: not necessarily. There may be more to it.

Shakespeare evidently wrote more than one version of his play, and there is thought to be a lost original source, designated the Ur-Hamlet, which if it could be located would betray its sources in earlier literary works. (Shakespeare always based his plays on existing legends etc.) But even if we don't have the lost Ur-Hamlet, we still have clues pointing to a British - not Irish - source for much of the play's plot. Others better placed than me have made the argument that much of Shakespeare's Hamlet derives from an old British source, with comparisons made with other British mediaeval romances like Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton. For instance the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 edition argued “The close parallels between the tale of Hamlet and the English romances of Havelok, Horn and Bevis of Hampton make it not unlikely that Hamlet is of British rather than of Scandinavian origin.” This theory does not appear in the modern EB and may seem just old-fashioned patriotism at work in 1911. The earlier sagas of course were formative-national in their outlook, so where a story is set is always significant. And while the play’s setting is limited to one place, a Danish castle, the older versions venture farther abroad. Even the earliest surviving Scandinavian version of the Hamlet legend oddly has him going to Britain and spending much of the story there. Here's the basic story from an older (note the now-strange names like Feng) surviving pre-Saxo Danish version, called in Latin Chronicon Lethrense and in English the Chronicle Of Lejre:

Then [king] Rorik ... set up Orwendel and Feng as rulers in Jutland. The king gave Orwendel his sister, for the good work he'd done. With her he had a son called Amblothe. Then Feng killed Orwendel out of envy and took his woman to wife. Then Amblothe devised a plan to save his life, and acted the fool. Then Feng was wary of Amblothe and sent him to the king of Britain with two of his servants and a letter saying Amblothe should be put to death. He scraped it off while they slept and wrote saying that the two servants should be hanged and Amblothe marry the king's daughter; and that's what happened. A year to the day, as Feng drank to the memory of Amblothe, he came to Denmark and killed Feng, his father's murderer, and burned all Feng's men in a tent, and so was king of Jutland. Then he went back to Britain and killed his father-in-law who wanted to avenge Feng's death. Then he took the queen of Scotland to wife. As soon as he came home, he was killed in battle.

In the play, Hamlet survives similarly when sent to Britain with a sealed death-warrant letter, but this takes place offstage, whereas in the earlier version[s], a considerable amount of the action happens in Britain, with a marriage to a British king's daughter followed by a return as king to Britain, including a possible visit to Scotland. This is despite the fact both this and Saxo's version are thought to have been Danish-nationalist (anti-German) in their spirit, but Saxo's more elaborate version is also set largely in Britain. Here's a plot summary from Wikipedia:

Gervendill, governor of Jutland, was succeeded by his sons Horvendill and Feng. Horvendill ... married Gerutha, daughter of [the] king of Denmark; she bore him a son, Amleth. But Feng, out of jealousy, murdered Horvendill, and persuaded Gerutha to become his wife .... Amleth, afraid of sharing his father's fate, pretended to be an imbecile, but the suspicion of Feng put him to various tests ... Feng was assured that the young man's madness was feigned. Accordingly he dispatched him to Britain in company with two attendants, who bore a letter enjoining the king of the country to put him to death. Amleth surmised the purport of their instructions, and secretly altered the message on their wooden tablets to the effect that the king should put the attendants to death and give Amleth his daughter in marriage.
After marrying the princess, Amleth returned ... to Denmark. ... He arrived in time for a funeral feast, held to celebrate his supposed death. During the feast he plied the courtiers with wine, and executed his vengeance during their drunken sleep by .... setting fire to the palace. Feng he slew with his own sword. ... Returning to Britain for his wife he found that his father-in-law and Feng had been pledged each to avenge the other's death. The English king, unwilling personally to carry out his pledge, sent Amleth as proxy wooer for the hand of a terrible Scottish queen Hermuthruda, who had put all former wooers to death but fell in love with Amleth. On his return to Britain his first wife, whose love proved stronger than her resentment, told him of her father's intended revenge. In the battle which followed Amleth won the day .... He then returned with his two wives to Jutland, where he ... was slain in a battle against Wiglek, and Hermuthruda, although she had promised to die with him, married the victor.

There are more British parallels with the romance Bevis of Hampton. The comparison is not usually made as the hero has a different name, but the story is surprisingly similar and this was the most popular single version of it. The oldest surviving version is an Irish Gaelic translation whose scholarly Dublin translator believed was based on a lost English original. (The oldest surviving version in English is a 15th-C. metrical romance meant to be read aloud at court.) While Bevis is obscure today, it remained a popular story for centuries. It was the favourite book of the Puritan writer John Bunyan, and its use of transparently symbolic character names may have influenced his Pilgrim's Progress, and the underlying tale may also have inspired Shakespeare.

What may have interested Shakespeare in the tale was some odd parallels between the misadventures of Bevis and those of his patron Henry 3rd Earl of Southampton [1573-1624]. Indeed, some have speculated he actually was the real ‘Shakespeare,’ who as author used a Stratford actor as a front lest the political ramifications of the plays affect his position at Elizabeth’s court. The Earl also had his father (Henry VIII's godson) die in suspicious circumstances in the wake of a political intrigue (possibly poisoned like Hamlet's father). Like the displaced young count Bevis, the young Henry fell into political intrigue, went on sea voyages, lost his estates and spent years in prison before being eventually restored to his rightful status (though this last part probably post-dates the writing of Hamlet). Like Bevis, he too was banished from court over an affair, fought in several campaigns, and attempted to overthrow the reigning king. When James I was crowned, Southampton was able to return, being made a Knight of the Garter and governor of the Isle of Wight in 1603. A tale featuring an earlier 'Count of Hampton' triumphing over exile and adversity may thus have struck a chord with young playwright or young Earl.

A film being released this autumn, Anonymous, is likely to broaden awareness of the issue of Shakespearean authorship.

The older version of the legend as it survives in Danish sources was dramatised in 1994 in the film Prince Of Jutland [aka Royal Deceit], made in Denmark with a British cast.

The plot has Bevis sold to 'heathen' (Moorish?) pirates after the murder of his father the Count of Hampton by an old royal rival. This is done at the behest of Bevis's mother, daughter of the King of Scotland, who had forced her into marriage with the ageing Count to bolster a political alliance. Traumatised, the ten-year-old Bevis is unable to contain his anger. To get rid of him before he can take revenge (he is of a violent nature), he is ordered secretly killed; instead, he is despatched in a different sense by less ruthless courtiers, sent away by ship to a (variously named) remote kingdom as apprentice labour at a distant fictional court. (The details here are Crusader-era: Saracens etc.) Later, he survives an attempt to have him killed there, in an intrigue that involves altering the contents of a letter to the court.

Eventually, he returns to take his revenge, slaying his stepfather and massacring the courtiers. As in every older version, from the Irish saga The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel on, this involves burning men alive inside their dwelling [palace/hostel/tent etc.]. He resumes his rightful place, but soon afterwards is driven back into exile.

The odd overlaps and interplay of details suggest Saxo's Vita Amleti, the Chronicon Lethrense/Chronicle Of Lejre, Sir Bevis, and Shakespeare's play all draw on a common origin in folktale. Telltale details indicating an early origin include the death-warrant letter being inscribed on wooden tablets, a lack of Christian motifs, pagan symbolism like “talisman” crown jewels, and the naming of the hero in one version as “Bogo” – an ancient name for a trickster figure, who might typically act “mad.” The hero-acting-mad motif, which occurs elsewhere in primitive literature, became the basis of the brooding introspection and veiled-menace wordplay which distinguishes Shakespeare’s take on the legendary story. Later versions would emphasize martial valour and stoicism more than sly tricksterism. The story would thus more likely be pre-Celtic in origin, but could be classed as Celtic by the time literacy arrived with the English settlements. Such a tale could at first be transmitted orally by court bards etc, but as literacy spread, written down by clerics in Latin or some Celtic language such as Erse [Irish], Pictish or Brittonic. (Despite what some have claimed, all these were written as well as spoken languages.)

The geographic settings indicate not an Northern-Irish (Ulster) provenance but a British one, a southern British one at that. (Though many parts of Britain were settled by the Irish before the Anglo-Saxon Advent.) The northerly Scottish (Pictish?) setting with its ferocious queen remains vague, but the southerly setting is firmly localised around Southampton and the adjacent New Forest, Avon Valley, and Isle of Wight. Sir Bevis actually become the official founder of Southampton (originally called just Hampton). Henry V, who sailed for Agincourt from the port, had tapestries representing the deeds of Sir Bevois [sic], as did Henry VIII, the 2nd Earl of Southampton’s godfather.

There were earlier connections between Denmark and England, dating back to the time when the king of Denmark was also king of most of England. The most powerful prince of Denmark, Cnut or Canute, in 1017 landed in Wessex and fought the English king Edmund Ironside to a standstill, taking eastern England and leaving Wessex to his defeated counterpart. (Canute’s palace was said to be at Southampton, on the eastern edge of Wessex; the famous no-man-can-turn-back-the-tide incident where he supposedly got his feet wet to impress his courtiers, supposedly taking place on Southampton Water above the Isle of Wight.) A surviving anonymous Elizabethan drama titled Edmund Ironside is thought by some, like Peter Ackroyd, to be Shakespeare's first play. When Ironside died within weeks of his peace treaty with Cnut, of unknown causes, Canute did something which would be echoed in the plot of Hamlet, the romance Sir Bevis, and another Shakespeare play, The Winter’s Tale. He sent his two orphaned infant princes (now heirs to Wessex) to his neighbour and ally the Swedish king to be secretly murdered. Here’s a literal transcription of the earliest account, from the early-12C Chronicon by Florence and John of Worcester, quoted by Hakluyt (a contemporary of Shakespeare’s and possible source) in his prose-epic of English seamanship, Principal Navigations [etc] (1589-):

The voyage of Edmund and Edward the sonnes of King Edmund Ironside into Hungarie, Anno D 1017
Edric counselled king Kanutus to murther the young princes Edward and Edmund the sonnes of King Edmund. But because it seemed a thing very dishonourable vnto him to haue them put to death in England, hee sent them, after a short space, vnto the king of Sweden to be slaine. Who, albeit there was a league betweene them, would in no case condescend vnto Canutus his bloody request, but sent them vnto Salomon [sic] the king of Hungarie to be nourished and preserued aliue. … Edmund in processe of time there deceased. But Edward receiued to wife Agatha daughter vnto the Germane Emperour Henry of whom he begot Margaret the Queene of the Seots, and Christina a Nunne, and Clito Edgar.

Prince Edward, nicknamed Edward the Exile, finally returned four decades later, in 1057, but died within days of his landing in England. (Another suspiciously convenient death here.) But Edward the Exile’s Hungarian-born son, called “Clito Edgar” in the quote above, became another legendary displaced princeling, Edgar The Atheling, whose surprisingly long life saw many adventures which would fit into a courtly romance (and probably did). Slightly too young to be elected by the Witan to lead the English army against the Norman invasion of 1066, he was elected king after Harold’s death at Hastings, and fought on for many years as a rebel against the Normans, using his family connections to the Scottish court as a power base. He went on the First Crusade and then was offered a place (which he declined in order to return to England) at court by the German Emperor (another figure who appears as a character in the Bevis version of the legend). Scotland and Jutland were neighbours in the sea-province sense (i.e. on a direct east-west trade route across the North Sea), while the Scots-English link became closer after 1100 when the last king Edgar served under, Henry I, married into the same Scots dynasty that had backed Edgar. So here we have a historical background with various motifs which surface in the Hamlet/Amleth/Bevis stories. This may be no coincidence, but find an explanation in geo-politics.

Though we speak of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest, the father of English history, Bede, writing c725, said a third part of England was settled by the Jutes - settlers from Jutland. This was the New Forest / Isle of Wight enclave, where Bevis is partly set. The New Forest was known until the Norman Conquest as the Forest Of Ytene, meaning “of the Yuten” ie the Jutes [German J is pronounced Y]. According to Bede, Wight was settled in the 6th C. by settlers from Jutland, who remained pagan. The Jutes seem to have integrated more peacefully than the Saxons and likely intermarried with the local Celtic tribe, so that stories could easily have been shared, even if there was not already a common European folktale version. (Sons who cleverly outwit cruel stepfathers by pretending to be simple-minded, only to take their revenge later, would make a suitable subject for campfire folktale, judging by other surviving examples.)

In 685-6, Wight became the last British province to be Christianised, when Saxon King Caedwalla of Wessex and his bishop, Wilfred (who also worked among the Picts), forcibly converted “the Island which was still entirely devoted to idolatry and by merciless slaughter endeavoured to destroy all the inhabitants thereof, and to place in their stead people from his own province.” Last to die were two young princes, brothers of the late local king, Arwald, who had both just been crowned and had fled across the Solent to the “the neighbouring province of the Jutes”, i.e. the Forest Of Ytene (New Forest after 1066). A local abbot betrayed the two young princes and they were captured. He insisted they first be “saved” – i.e. catechized and baptised - before being killed. Bede says these two last young survivors of this now obscure Jutish pagan people submitted happily to execution (though he may have misunderstood the reason) and that with this, all the British provinces were officially Christian. But he concludes with the odd remark that until his time (early 8th C.), there was no local bishop, “because of the mystery of foreign subjection.” … Perhaps not everyone was killed after all, but were left alone as they could not speak the Saxon language? And there is no claim of massacre re the Jutes in the adjacent [i.e. across the Solent] Forest Of Ytene /New Forest. They may also have preserved their language and legends, and kept in touch with the ancestral home in Danish Jutland.

These circumstances could explain how a now-lost Celto-Brittonic tale got back to the courts of Denmark, to be written up in Danish chronicles which became the official source of English Lit’s greatest play.

For background on the Shakespearean authorship controversy, the October issue of Fortean Times has a cover feature on it [below].

How To Use A Codex

2011-07-24T13:24:00.014+01:00

Below is a humorous video showing a mediaeval monk learning how to use one of the new-fangled codex books, rather than a simple one-sheet scroll. It's a popular skit from a Norwegian TV show which has since become a YouTube hit. (The changeover from one-sheet scrolls to bound book-style codices took place well before the Mediaeval Era, but don't let that spoil your enjoyment; it's the only item I've seen addressing the impact this new "invention" - the hand-written book - must surely have had.)
I'm posting it as I've been holding off on the usual kind of post, which usually takes the best part of my weekly day off to compile and check, until the hosting situation with Google's Blogger is clarified. (There have been rumours Google is "moving on" from Blogger, and that it will shortly go the way of so many other free setups. Google has sent out a warning to all account holders to back up their posts, so I'm busy doing this as well as looking out for another possible ad-free online home, after 5 years here. )
In the meantime, if you want to see or own a real old-style codex for yourself, English Heritage has them in their souvenir shops, in two sizes - something approximating modern full-page size and half-size, akin to a bulky filofax. They have a leather cover with a rawhide wraparound thong to tie them shut, enclosing 140pp of handmade paper, resembling a thick vellum. It's obviously more "in period" than the elastic-bound waterproof A5 Moleskin notebook I've previously purchased for field trips.

If you can't get the embedded video to play for some reason, here is the direct link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

Eating Up The Past

2011-04-04T00:27:00.009+01:00

- Can codex sources cast any light on the recent Ancient-Britons-were-blood-drinking-cannibals shock-horror press stories?

The stories appearing over the past month cf in the Daily Mail, BBC online news, the Guardian etc (even a skull-cups cartoon in contemporary satire mag Private Eye), that Ancient Britons practiced bloody rites, eating dismembered bodies and drinking out of skulls sawn in half, are based on archaeological finds which actually stretch back some years, and which relate to various early groups over a period of tens of thousands of years.

In my electronic archives are a series of such items stretching back to 1991, with an increase in coverage in the last few years. These archeo digs referred to show physical evidence [human bones with butcher’s cut-marks and sometimes human teeth-marks] that this was common practice across Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. The news stories use “early” man as broadly as possible to mean so early they're not even homo sapiens sapiens. The accounts often refer to practices all the way back to the Neanderthals – who of course are now surmised to have been eaten up by their successors, Stone Age man. There have also been stories about first Stone Age people, the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers who flourished near the end of the last Ice Age [c12000 BC] practising ritual human sacrifice. These are based largely on a 2007 paper in the archeo-historians’ in-house mag Current Anthropology. (Interestingly, this highlighted the issue, which we shall return to presently, whether people suffering from dwarfism got special treatment.)

Around Easter 2009, you may recall (we covered it at the time) those “Cannibal Druids” stories which turned out to be based on press releases promoting a National Geographic documentary claiming the Druids practised human sacrifice and cannibalism. The evidence was a bone in the 2000 find of the mass-grave cave find at Alveston north of Bristol - a thigh-bone with apparent cutmarks. This was talked up by media-friendly Dr Mark Horton (advisor on the BBC’s unintentionally-funny, shortlived archeo-adventure TV-drama series "Bonekickers"), who suggested the dead could have been sacrificed to the gods. However he balked at claiming Druids were cannibals, but said it might just have beeen someone who was, well, starving. In 2009, there were also press stories concerning the subsequent Neolithic era, based on a report, in the archaeologists’ journal Antiquity, of evidence of mass cannibalism being found by French archaeologists at a 7,000-year-old site in south-west Germany, with the human remains including children being ‘spit-roasted.’ This was near the start of the early Neolithic period, when supposedly peaceful farmers were first supplanting our semi-nomadic Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. The notion supported by some New Age proponents that the Neolithic was a peaceful era has suffered repeated blows to the head over the past decade, due to finds of corpses with wounds caused by arrows, spears, axes etc.

Contrast this with the 1991 BritArch piece, “The Edible Dead” by the archaeologist who was academic consultant to the Channel 4 documentary series Cannibal, based on similar British finds from “the mid-1st millennium BC,” about professional opposition – “Many archaeologists vigorously deny that cannibalism has ever been normal practice in Britain or elsewhere, in prehistory or at any more recent period.” He also says references to cannibalism have been removed from textbooks after anthropologists called them a slur on ancient or primitive peoples. (Some would include here Pliny’s reference to cannibalism, along with other ‘shocking’ practices, among the 1st C. AD Irish.)

The arguments are complicated by the different types of prehistoric cannibalism – dietary (consume flesh and/or bone marrow for protein in hard times), funerary (eat a bit of your dead kin as a magical kinship bond etc), war-trophy (eat a bit of your enemies to share their power), and the currently-highlighted blood-drinking type of human sacrifice (share in a human sacrifice to help appease the gods?). Some evidence may come from ‘excarnation’ burial rituals, where skeletons are re-buried, after de-fleshing by some means other than relatives eating them, in mausoleum-style megalithic tombs which were open to relatives to visit. Finally, there is "medicinal cannibalism," which survived longest in Europe - a 2009 feature in Der Spiegel's Online's international edition pointed out that Europeans continued to drink blood and mix ground-up human skull and cadaver parts into ‘medicine’ well into the Christian era, practices by kings and popes and commoners alike, until the 18C Enlightenment kick-started modern medical practices. (If you can’t access that link, the Guardian also did a more recent similar feature in the midst of the 2011 controversy, here.)

This recent round of press stories with headlines like ‘Ancient Brits Ate Dead And Made Skulls Into Cups’ is based largely on finds at Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge [pictured above] in Somerset. Again, it deals with the pre-Keltic Stone age peoples who lived here before the Iron (and possibly Bronze) Age Keltic tribes appeared, in this case towards the end of the last Ice Age [c12-15,000 BC]. This is before people knew how to make pottery or metal bowls or cups, so they would have had to use natural receptacles like skulls for fluid containers. Nevertheless, it still fits the historians’ common schema of characterising all pre-Roman British peoples as savage barbarians. In this case the people are pre-Keltic, perhaps the early Stone Age forerunners of the aboriginal or native people briefly referred to by Caesar as still living in “the interior” when he invaded in 55-54 BC. ("The interior portion of Britain is inhabited by those whom they say that is handed down by tradition that they were born in the island itself … Most of the inland inhabitants do not grow corn, but live on milk and flesh, and are clad in skins.” --Caesar’s Gallic Wars, ch 5.)

Note this description indicates a pre-agricultural people, possibly nomadic, still leading a hunting-herding lifestyle that predates the so-called Neolithic Revolution. Caesar also mentions tin is produced in the interior, which may qualify them as technologically Bronze rather than Stone Age, as tin was used to smelt good quality bronze. They may have traded tin with the Keltic tribes Caesar says lived along the coasts (the tinworker or ‘tinker’ motif is one we will come back to presently). The later Kelts themselves, on the Continent at least (i.e. the Gauls), were reported by Roman encyclopaedist Diodorus to collect and embalm in oil trophy heads of enemies and hang them on their war horses or over doorways (rather like modern hunters mounting animal trophy heads on their wall). One interpretation of this is that you cut off and take your enemy’s head so he will have no proper burial. Beheading has remained an official form of execution in many countries, and worry over this practice in turn could explain the popularity of tales of hauntings by headless ghosts.

Though the press plays this down, the evidence behind the latest stories, that skulls were likely shaped into cups, as well as the earlier ones on finds of more human skulls compared to full skeletons, helps to “refute the hypothesis of cannibalism” (to quote the archeo source, here).

There don’t seem to any references in the old sources to cannibalism apart from Pliny, whose claims about the wild Irish don’t seem based on any first-hand knowledge. Another late Roman reference [4th C. AD], by St Jerome, implies a possibly Irish ‘subject’ or tribute-paying tribe known as the Atecotti, active near Hadrian’s Wall, were still cannibals while in Roman service against the Picts, but that whole business now seems dubious.

Our “father of history” Herodotus says that around 500 BC the Scythians of western Asia kept blood-drinking cups made from enemy skulls, and the Scythians are sometimes cited in early history-of-Britain codices by Bede [c 735 AD] et al as Pictish ancestors, for what’s that’s worth. Human sacrifices were reportedly [cf Caesar, Tacitus, Lucan] done by drowning in a bog, by burning inside a giant wicker figure, or ordinary throat-slitting. The description of the event which prefaced the Boudiccan revolt of AD 61, the Roman siege of the Isle of Mona [Anglesey] as a Druid stronghold, ends with a description by Tacitus how the legionaries, after slaughtering women and priests alike, hacked down the Druids’ sacred groves and altars dripping with the gore of sacrificed prisoners, as part of Rome’s “civilising mission.” (This is the phrase used in a standard-reference textbook by the prolific archeo-writer Leonard Cottrell, who says Anglesey is proof we should not be cynical about the Roman empire’s benign influence.)

There’s always a grim irony when Roman writers and Romanophile English historians express tabloid-style shock-horror outrage at what were the religious and ritual practices of “barbarian” societies when Roman practices even by their own accounts were so bloodthirsty. (“Roman holiday” comes from the phrase “butchered to make a Roman holiday” used by Byron, for the sort of bloodbaths served up in the arena as Rome’s favourite form of popular entertainment.) The best-known surviving [found in the 1st C AD Codex Traguriensis] literary work referring to Rome’s own hypocritical and barbaric attitudes, Petronius's satire the “Satyricon,” has a final sequence of Romans agreeing to commit cannibalism, not for religious or starvation reasons, but simply as required by the will of a pedantic poet to obtain shares in his fortune. (If you can’t stomach the literary version, the scene also concludes the 1969 film version, Fellini Satyricon, without anything explicit onscreen.) In the story, to rationalise their cannibalism, the legacy-hunters cite various other historical examples of cannibalism known to the Roman writer. (He is thought to have been the same Petronius who was advisor to Nero; again if you prefer a film version as an intro, see MGM’s 1950 Quo Vadis, where he is played by Leo Genn to Peter Ustinov’s Nero.) These references are to the people of the Spanish city of Saguntum eating their dead when besieged by Hannibal, as did the famine-struck folk at Petelia in south Italy; and to Roman general Scipio ‘Africanus’ entering the besieged city of Numantia and finding mothers with half-eaten babies at their breasts. There’s seemingly no reference to Gauls or Kelts doing the same, though there are some vague early Greco-Roman references elsewhere to the forebears of the Kelts in southern Europe, the Ligures, being head hunters.

But is there any evidence in the oldest surviving literature of the Gauls or Kelts, perhaps to it being practiced by earlier, possibly native, cultures? Surviving literature does mention the earlier displaced people, known in Celtic as the Aes Sidhe [pr ‘shee], which I take to mean People Of The Seats, in the ceremonial sense of court seats - ancient mounds where oath-taking and such ceremonies were conducted, perhaps because these would be solemnized by ancestral burials within the mound, so any oath or testimony would be taken as sworn on the bones of one’s ancestors. (In the collection of Welsh folktales called the Mabinogion, a mound like this is mentioned, at Narberth.)

The Irish pre-Keltic people the Tuatha de Danaan were also said to have retreated underground, inside the hollow hills or prehistoric mounds which still dot the landscape. Later folktale translations use the term fairy folk for such ancient magic-dealing people, but this is deceptive, for these were nothing alike the cute doll-size fairies of Victorian children’s books. They may have been shorter by comparison with the Keltic people the old stories would be told to, but they were not tiny, and they were feared rather than regarded as cute, referred to with a careful determination not to offend, by euphemisms such as the Good Folk, the Peaceful Folk, and so on. The word “faerie” originally referred to the state of being enchanted by these folk with their eerie powers (think of it as fay-eerie). The root word fay survived into the Arthurian Romance, as the enchantress Morgan Le Fay. (There are other “fays” in the romances, like the Lady Of The Lake.) Blood drinking, cannibalism, and the like are not mentioned anywhere in accounts of the Sidhe, who are not bloodthirsty in any sense.

As late as 1691, a Scots clergyman, Robert Kirk, wrote a codex-style book [printed in 1815], The Secret Commonwealth Of Elves, Fauns And Fairies, which claimed these folk still existed in an Otherworld which could manifest into our own. (After his death from a stroke while out walking over a ‘dun-shi’ or fairy mound, his successor claimed Kirk was not really dead: he had been struck down and ‘taken’ by the Good Folk, angry at his giving away their secrets; Sir Walter Scott, recounting this, tells of a scheme to rescue Kirk, which in the event misfired.) Kirk depicted them as continuing to exist in a parallel but overlapping realm, akin to folktales of innocents who enter a fairy mound or hollow hill to be entertained by lavish gifts and hospitality – only to return to find their gifts are sticks and leaves, and (shades of Rip Van Winkle) decades have passed since they left.

From the 1880s through 1920, another Scots scholar, David MacRitchie, published a series of monograph collections (the one usually cited by commentators is The Testimony Of Tradition), in which he claimed some of these (not all) old folktales reflected a less supernatural survival of these folk. His thesis was that some of these tales of brownies and the like were a memory of the last survivors of a shorter [dwarf-like?], darker, pre-Keltic people, eking out a wretched existence in remote spots – hence the practice of leaving out milk etc for them to avoid trouble. The Scots New Year’s custom called First Foot is thought to refer to this – it being good luck if your first caller of the year is a ‘dark’ man bring a gift – the surmise being this represents a renewal of an annual peace accord. You could alternatively try to keep them away by hanging an iron object like a horseshoe over your door – for they feared iron, as they had no Iron Age technology, only bronze [tin + copper], hence the generic name for such marginalised folk ‘tinkers,’ short for tinworkers. (The plan to rescue the Rev Robert Kirk mentioned above as being held in Fairyland involved throwing an iron dagger over his head to free him.) There is also a 12C reference to “picts” (perhaps piskies, Scots dialect for pixies, would be a better translation) who were short and swarthy underground dwellers fearful in daylight of warrior peoples. In a long series of books and monographs, MacRitchie argued that fairies, picts, and some of the people misnamed Gypsies (i.e. not Romany folk) were survivors of an aboriginal race. (The profession of itinerant metalworker who mends pots and pans etc. was often associated with so-called gypsies or Irish “travellers” – who are now thought by some academics to be a pre-Keltic remnant.)

Here we have a possible basis for regarding Keltic folktales as more than fiction. This ‘anthropological’ explanation is sometimes adopted by historical novelists who wish to incorporate these elusive folk into a reasonably historical setting. (The earliest example of this I’ve come across is a 1912 children’s book about Robin Hood by Henry Gilbert.) The question is – do the tales themselves depict the fairy folk as cannibals? The answer is no: they might steal your milk, cast a spell on your husband or son, kidnap your baby (leaving in its place a sickly 'changeling'), or blight your crops, but the cannibal motif is conspicuous by its absence.

The “anthropological” theory of fairytales has not gone anywhere since MacRitchie wrote. But then how could it? His books are full of speculative suggestions that all the early peoples of Europe, from Lapps to Basques, belonged to a dwarf-like “pygmy” race, and this is of course confounded by DNA studies showing diverse localised origins. Over-enthusiastic eccentric Victorian theories of racial origins have little place today. However the media tend to still eat this sort of sensationalism up, with the current skull-cup stories probably just one step away from being incorporated into the next version of the Horrible Histories book/TV/CD series, where the emphasis is relentlessly on gory lifestyle details (“Did you know in the Savage Stone Age, the Ancient Britons liked to drink your blood and eat your brains? Uggh!”) That said, the situation may be otherwise not so straightforward, and we’ll look at that next time, as the underlying issues tie in with some upcoming films.

Hollywood Goes For The Glastonbury Legend

2011-01-16T00:13:00.014Z

US filmmakers are preparing, for 2012 release, a £50m production of the so-called Glastonbury Legend - how Joseph of Arimathea arrived at Glastonbury, where he planted what became the Holy Thorn as a token of the foundation of Christianity in Britain. This does not seem to be a conventional Hollywood project in the Mel Gibson/Russell Crowe mould. Galatia Films’s “Glastonbury: Isle Of Light” is being directed by David M. Evans, who tends to specialise in films about children, while scriptwriter and producer Daniel McNicoll is also a director, best-known for a documentary on swordplay in historical film, Reclaiming The Blade, with a background in music as well as film.

View over the Somerset Levels from South Cadbury hillfort (claimed by some to have been Arthur's Dark Ages 'Camelot'), with Glastonbury itself just visible in the haze, 12 miles away.

Location filming is planned for the Isle of Man, Ireland, Wales, and Somerset, using CGI to mask any modern features. Glastonbury at the time of Joseph was a tidal port, with the sea then reaching far inland across the 360 square-mile Somerset Levels. (This is suspected to be the basis of its oldest known name, Ynys Witrin or Isle of Glass, and the effect of light reflecting off the surrounding water may also have inspired the film’s “Isle Of Light” title as a visual metaphor.) What would have existed at Glastonbury itself was a “lake village” familiar elsewhere in Europe in Celtic provinces during the Iron Age, with timber-framed houses, thatched with marsh reeds, set on stilts. A new museum is actually being built locally using this as a harmonious design (story and computer-modelled image here). This may also have been the design of the original wattle-and-daub church in the Abbey grounds where, the legend says, the Apostles built the first above-ground church in Christendom - foundation of the Celtic or Apostolic church of Britain.

This of course is disputed by academically-orthodox English historians, whose determined hardline stance towards this subject area should not be underestimated. (A recent example of this was in Radio 3’s pre-Xmas 3-part series The Romans In Britain, wherein presenter Bettany Hughes claimed the so-called early Celtic church of Britain was really Roman. Of course Rome did not adopt Christianity for several centuries after the AD43 invasion, and often imprisoned early adoptees, burnt them alive, threw them to the lions, and so on. But her view is part and parcel of a pro-Roman authoritarian outlook common among English historians. She calls the Britons 'thuggish barbarians' and even claims that the term “Wealas,” the original of “Wales” and “Welsh,” literally meaning forest-folk and used by the Saxons to refer to the natives as “foreigners,” really meant Romano-Britons. )

The film project is being advertised as “A sweeping epic chronicling the legends of Joseph of Arimathea as he escapes peril in Jerusalem only to find himself on the other side of the globe facing a more extreme enemy. Upon arrival in Britain, which is on the edge of war with Rome, he implores the help of the warrior-prince Caractacus in an effort to defend their sacred customs and ancient ways.” The director has commented that “It seems impossible that no one has made this story before,” and it certainly offers a heady mix of elements. There’s the founding of a new religion (a motif familiar from Hollywood films like Quo Vadis and Ben Hur); the escape by sea from a Holy Land under Roman occupation (more shades of Ben Hur); the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43 (not really dramatised onscreen yet); the betrayal (supposedly by a pro-Roman tribal queen) and capture of the British resistance leader Caractacus, who is kept in Rome as a hostage; there he is married to the Emperor Claudius’s daughter Genuissa to bind his loyalty (love interest as well as a captivity narrative).

However there are a few touchy issues inherent in the story situation, which may well provide the underpinning reasons why there have been no previous film dramas. For a start, these days there’s a speculative theory that Caractacus’s sojourn in Rome led to the introduction there of the formative new religion Joseph had brought to Britain a decade before (circa AD37). This theory implies that Christianity went from Britain to Rome, rather than vice versa, turning church history on its head - so is difficult to put into a mainstream film representing a large investment by those most conservative types, the money men. Hollywood Roman-era epics like Quo Vadis and Ben Hur have always been completely reverential, with the prospect of church-organised boycotts and press attacks (as happened with The Da Vinci Code).

The film’s (working?) title “Glastonbury: Isle Of Light” sounds reverential in a New Age Christian sort of way, which is very like Glastonbury today, a mix of New Age belief and modern Church of England style Christianity. This year is a special one for the church, the 400th anniversary of the KJV - the King James version of the Bible. This is the now standard edition which James I commissioned to replace earlier printed (mainly Tyndale’s 1522 version) and older hand-copied monastic codex versions, and this is getting media coverage, especially from the BBC, as a founding work of British culture. (For example, the Queen’s Xmas broadcast this year was from Hampton Court, as it was where James I convened the church conference that led to the KJV, also known as the Authorised Version.) The KJV/AV like other versions does mention Joseph of Arimathea as the wealthy man who claims the body of Jesus, which Pilate agrees to as Joseph is a relative (usually given as uncle). Thus Joseph’s existence cannot be questioned by the orthodox, but there is nothing more there about him in the Bible - certainly nothing about his coming to Britain afterwards with other Apostles and building a church.

Emperor Claudius’s daughter Genuissa appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12C codex Historia Regum Brittaniae, but this is a worthless source in itself, an historical romance done as a pseudo-history, only useful as a pointer to search out more obscure codex sources (which are probably lost). There, the British king Arviragus (not Caratacos – though some argue these are different names for the same man) after his defeat by Claudius’s legions, is given Claudius’s only daughter in marriage to cement the peace treaty - Genuissa. Emperor Claudius’s life and times are splendidly captured in Robert Graves’s 2-volume novel I, Claudius, and he did go to Britain to lead the AD 43 campaign for a time, for which he was accorded a triumph (parade), and his son was later named Britannicus. (In the novel, he claims he almost captured Caractacus during a battle, which does not seem to be historically based, or even likely.)

But you won’t find the Genuissa story there, the novels being based closely on Roman sources, which say that Caratacos (not Arviragus) was betrayed and taken to Rome under house arrest. He saved himself from a gruesome execution via a dignified speech to the Senate, and may well later have got married there to a Roman princess, but the marrying-the-Emperor’s-daughter part doesn’t really hold up. If Genuissa and her treaty marriage were both genuine, she may have been married off not to Caractacus but Arviragus, just as Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Brittaniae says. The argument in favour is that Arviragus as far as we know was never captured, and it would make more sense if he had long eluded capture to make him a son-in-law, ending hostilities by preserving his status as a client king of Rome - a common practice. (A reference in Juvenal implies Arviragus is still astride his chariot in the reign of Vespasian and/or Domitian – which would mean he survived Claudius, and as late as AD 81-96.)

The hawthorn tree in Glastonbury Abbey grounds.

Returning to our present era, the hawthorn tree which the legend has planted by Joseph of Arimathea was vandalised just before Xmas for reasons unknown. This is the one on Wearyall Hill at the edge of town, not the one in the Abbey grounds which is pictured above. (The earlier thorn trees having been cut down by Cromwell’s men, what survives are several offshoots; the vandalised one was planted in 1951 for the Festival of Britain.) The wide coverage of this vandalism in the national (and international) media indicates the veneration of the legend, despite the Church of England (called Anglican abroad) officially slighting it.

The Church is actually quite ambivalent towards the legend. On the one hand, it tolerates it in ways, with a flowering sprig from the Glastonbury Thorn (the one in the Abbey grounds) sent every Xmas to the Queen - who as Head of State is also Head of the CoE as the Established Church. (The Thorn is said to flower at Christmas time, as a proof of its miraculous status.) On the other hand, it dismisses the idea of a pre-CoE, Celtic, Apostolic, Church of Britain, and some of its ministers refuse to allow the song inspired by the legend to be sung in church. (It's often referred to as a hymn, to the annoyance of these clerics, as it isn’t one in either official status or form, and its extra-Biblical content could be seen as somewhat subversive doctrinally.) This is of course the popular communal song Jerusalem, beginning “And did these feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green”, the lyric deriving from a poem by Blake. This refers to the tie-in ‘holy visit’ legend that Jesus as a boy visited Britain with his uncle - which we won’t get into here as [a] it’s quite unlikely the film will dare to incorporate this, and [b] we’ve covered it in earlier posts (cf “And Did These Sandals Walk Upon England’s Mountains Green?").

View from Glastonbury Tor, with the town at right.

Today, an international pilgrimage route has developed following in Joseph’s final footsteps. This includes the path where he wended his way first up Wearyall Hill, where he supposedly planted his staff, which later flowered (a motif you can see in films like Quo Vadis); the Tor whose viewpoint summit [photo, top] is reached by a winding footpath which may be a relic of a Celtic field-strip system for cultivating steep hillsides, but some claim is an ancient ritual maze; the Chalice Well just below; and the Abbey grounds where, the legend says, the Apostles built the first above-ground church in Christendom.

The song also is well travelled, though it’s not clear how many of those who hear it or even sing it understand the allusion to the legend. There was an interesting BBC documentary on Glastonbury a few years ago which begins with what looks like a clip from a silent film showing Joseph traipsing across the hills here. The 2007 docu Jerusalem: An Anthem For England outlines how the song has now been adopted as an anthem by all the major political parties plus other national groups like the Women’s Institute and the Naturist movement (Blake and his wife were nudists). Just this past year, the CoE leadership relented on its opposition, and put out an official advisory to ministers to stop banning the song on grounds it is “too nationalistic.” Considering the diversity of social and political causes the song is sung in support of (covered in the 2007 BBC documentary mentioned), this was always a simplistic approach.

With all the various interest groups around, the filmmakers are going to have more than the Church to worry about if they put a foot wrong in their depiction of the legend, and will have to tread a fine path of their own, overcoming a few insurmountable obstacles along the way, some of which are too complicated to get into here (like the matter of whether Joseph brought relics like the Chalice Cup or Grail with him). For those interested, there is more background on the Glastonbury legend in our previous blog post, “The Thorny Matter Of Glastonbury” , as well as on our earlier illustrated webpage on Glastonbury and the legend, here.

Casting A Long Shadow

2010-10-27T14:21:00.016+01:00

--Hallowe’en is a suitable time to consider the survival of a tradition of hand-written codex books in the post-Gutenberg age: the Wiccan “Book Of Shadows.”
As a codex is a handwritten bound book, it is usually a product of the pre-Gutenberg or pre-printing-press era, when books had to be copied by hand to safeguard them as well as to disseminate their contents. Yet it may be that the tradition of hand-written hand-copied books has been continued privately for centuries to this day - by Wiccans for their collections of spells, chants, and other ritual texts. The “genre label” Book Of Shadows used today for this is not itself old, being evidently coined by Gerald Gardner in 1949, to supplant the mediaeval term grimoire. “Grimoire” sounds frightening (perhaps deliberately so) with its first syllable the same as an Anglo-Saxon term for fate or the Devil (as in landmarks like Grim’s Dyke). It may be a sinister adaptation of “grammar” in the old sense of a beginner’s textbook (what an American might call a primer) teaching the basic building blocks of language. Originally the Old French word grammaire meant just a Latin/French/English textbook, but a grimoire was an “occult grammar” of the secret language of magic spells and rites. Grimoire or “grammarye” (as TH White spells it in his The Once and Future King), seems related to glamour (via obsolete glomerie, after Latin glomeria) in the older (pre-Hollywood) sense of an enchantment or magic spell - fairy dust cast in your eyes. White refers to the now-vanished enchanted Britain of Merlin & co. as the Isle Of Grammarye.

- The old view of a by-the-book witch ceremony, equated with black magic and Satanism. (Still from the 1922 Danish docudrama Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages.)

That mediaeval grimoires have a dark reputation (at least since the witch-hunting hysteria of the 16-17Cs) is an understatement, as anyone will know who reads the stories of the “father of the English ghost story,” M.R James. His best-known story (thanks to the classic 1958 film version Night Of The Demon), “Casting The Runes,” has an Aleister Crowley type occultist in possession of an ancient book on witchcraft and demonology, which includes spells for conjuring up windstorms and fire demons. Nearly all of M.R James’s stories have a similar plot setup, and I’ve suggested earlier that the first of them may even have been inspired by his hearing, on a visit to the area in 1892, something of the same legend of Rennes-le-Chateau and its wealth-amassing priest (Sauniere) that would inspire so much literature from Holy Blood Holy Grail onward. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” is the message here: “do not dabble with what you do not understand.” By definition, the contents of a grimoire or Book Of Shadows are to be kept secret – I believe Wiccans say the material is “oathbound” i.e. initiates are bound by oath not to disclose it. Nevertheless, some of the material has appeared online. Apparently this is a tactical move to discourage others from simply inventing material and claiming it as genuine tradition. (Like the Christian church, modern Wicca is split among several rival factions.)

- Gerald Gardner's controversial Book Of Shadows, now on display in a witchcraft museum. (Wikipedia photo.)

The great question of course is: does this “genuine tradition” dating back into the mists of time really exist? Some modern books (such as Leo Ruckbie's Witchcraft Out Of The Shadows and Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of The Moon) claim the Wiccan Movement is a modern creation invented by the Freemason, nudist, folklore collector [etc] Gerald Gardner, his 1940s Book Of Shadows being his ad hoc textbook for the postwar movement he founded. Certainly the Gardnerian Book of Shadows [pictured above] considered as a text seems to have been a modern creation. By the time Gardner retired, his successor Doreen Valiente had realised that he had cobbled together parts of rituals from various sources, from Freemasonry to Aleister Crowley to a Kipling poem. (You can read chapter and verse on these textual sources in books by Philip Heselton and others as well as online, cf here.) Doreen Valiente as the new “High Priestess” of English Wicca then rewrote the Book Of Shadows in the mid-50s, rewording it some cases and adding her own original work in others. She also drew on Aradia, Or The Gospel Of The Witches published in 1899, which claimed to be based (the argument has never been settled) on a mediaeval Italian witch’s account. Valiente says in her Witchcraft For Tomorrow (1978) she did this reworking as she was fed up with self-appointed individuals proclaiming their own teachings, obliterating the older ways, and that the only way to stop this trend was to make authentic witchcraft information public. That of course begs the question: what was authentic?

This is where the whole Wiccan movement ran into difficulty, both internally and otherwise. In the 70s, various feminist writers created a construct of a peaceful pan-European Great Goddess cult going back to the Neolithic, suppressed by the advent of a patriarchal war-oriented society which invented Christianity and burnt millions of goddess worshippers as witches in the so-called Burning Times. This was an elaboration of the ‘pagan survival’ thesis anthropologist Margaret Murray had put forward from the 1920s on, in books like The Witch Cult In Western Europe. Without getting into the controversy over the slender historical evidence for this scenario (which resurfaced when The Da Vinci Code cited it), this meant Wiccans had to tread a fine line of argument. On the one hand, their cult was ruthlessly suppressed since the Neolithic; on the other hand, its rituals survived intact - which might seem a bit of a stretch to many. Valiente’s own writings indicate she wanted to create material along lines she thought were less indebted to male-dominated groups like the Freemasons and the Ordo Templi Orientis. (There was a suspicion the women-hating Aleister Crowley had helped Gardner write his Book Of Shadows, based on OTO rites when the dying Crowley appointed Gardner his OTO successor in 1946, and students of this field have said Gardner’s original Book draws on Crowley’s writings.)

The argument could have been made that an older Book Of Shadows could have survived from the grimoire era, but nothing seems to have turned up since Aradia in 1899. (“Traditionally a Witch's book of shadows is burned upon the person's death” is one reason cited.) Valiente’s own candour however seems to have precluded this claim being made. She said Gardner’s defence when she challenged him over the issue was that the coven he was initiated into, in the New Forest in 1939, had only fragments of rites surviving. After his death, a leather-bound codex was discovered among his effects, with the cod-mediaeval title Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical, which apparently contained the first draft of the rites he would publish in the 1950s, and these have since been dismissed as largely taken from Crowley’s OTO material. Valiente also spotted where Gardner got the term Book Of Shadows: an article in an occult magazine where the ad appeared for his 1949 novel High Magic’s Aid (whose depictions of English witchcraft, written in 1946, don’t accord with his 1950s writings). This was to do with an ancient Sanskrit grimoire telling “how to foretell things based upon the length of a person's shadow.”

- A conventional image: the 3 witches in 'Macbeth', from Lamb's Tales From Shakespeare. The conical hats and all-black garb are actually genuine enough, worn by widowed older women in Wales right up into the 20th century as traditional dress.

There is no reason in theory why it could not have been argued an authentic Book Of Shadows codex was a transcription of an oral tradition that had survived the centuries of oppression. Wiccans claim “the Craft” did survive among country folk, where certain families had a hereditary witch tradition. The oral-tradition argument however runs into two difficulties. First is that where such ‘witch’ families have been identified, they have been not very literate and unable to articulate any historical theology, but simply operate at a practical level. Evidently, there are no rival claims among traditional witches that they kept a Book of Shadows. Secondly, in the case of the one high-profile exception to the above, the deity reported is not a goddess but a male god.

The most-cited case of the main ‘traditional’ or village witch, Old George Pickingill (1816-1909), is the subject of one book (The Pickingill Papers, 1994) and mentioned in other modern works as the best-documented case of a tradition surviving. Pickingill was an active proselytizer, apparently due to his hatred of the Church. He supposedly used his Romany-gypsy background to travel around England to horse fairs, setting up other covens. How this would have worked is unclear, but Crowley claimed he himself learned authentic rites from joining one of these covens (details not known) and later passed on details to Gardner. Gardner also supposedly learned details from a Pickingill ‘descendant’ coven. Pickingill, according to his source (EW ‘Bill’ Liddell, a descendant), did leave some papers when he died. He said witches worshipped not a goddess but Gwyddion and his sons, who were represented by stone heads. “Gwydd” is a Welsh word with various meanings – presence, wild, trees, etc, and can be used to refer to a male witch type of figure. There is some support for this in the authentic collection of mediaeval Welsh folktales known as The Mabinogion, which was first translated into English in the 19th Century by Lady Charlotte Guest with the help of a pair of Welsh scholars. The Mabinogion has both male and female wizard-style king and queens, including a warrior-prince called Gwydion with some magical abilities, the male figures being the more dominant in the stories. Pickingill implied there was a national school of witchcraft based in Wales, operating in secret, with any informants being killed using a peashooter-style paper-screed device to blow a herbal toxin into their face.

The Welsh links here would indicate this was a Britonnic Celtic cult, and the carving of stone heads is also an attested Celtic practice. The Gwidonad, Gwyddonaid etc are usually described in Welsh lore as a Bardic group; a late and possibly contaminated Welsh source, the Barddas of Iolo Morganwg, reproduces mnemonic texts saying the name derives from the order’s practice of meeting in woods to maintain their studies as “men of science.” There seems to be a fine distinction between the 3 well-known Celtic classes of learned men – bards, ovates, and druids – attested in Roman sources, and it is possible this secret surviving woodland order were not so much bardic as druidic, the former being a cover for the latter adopted in the Christian era. (It is not unusual for religious groups to adopt a secular guise.) Caesar and others referred to the druids studying and teaching scientific subjects, with Britain as the centre of this collegiate system which met in woodland groves.

Yet this explanation still leaves little room for the modern feminist Wiccan tradition, for there is scarce mention historically of female druids, and the relatively modern Druidic ceremonial orders which still exist seem as male dominated as their Bardic counterparts. Crowley notoriously disliked the idea of any group run by a woman, and it’s possible Gardner only did away with all-male groups to indulge his own fetishes. In his setup, he would be the one man being in charge of a group of women who would strip to order and allow themselves to be tied up and scourged. The nudity and S&M aspects introduced by Gardnerian ritual gave the movement a sexual frisson or prurient aspect that got plenty of Hammer-horror-film style depictions in the media of its so-called “Satanic” rites during the so-called Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s, as well as a supply of new members thereafter.

Anyway, due to Gardner & co., the 1950s in Britain saw what we might call the coming out of the witches, following the repeal in 1951 of the repressive act which criminalised witchcraft as a form of blackmail. Some might insinuate this postwar official turnaround of attitude is due to the role Wiccans played in wartime. This is the one aspect where they seems to be evidence of a longstanding belief about witches, at least one which they themselves might support or encourage.

In Britain, at times of national crisis such as threatened invasion, there is an apocryphal tale that this was thwarted by a “Witches’ Wind,” created by a secret magical ceremony to raise the “cone of power”. This scenario was applied to the storm-wrecked Spanish Armada in 1588, circulated evidently early enough to alarm the future James I. When his ship was likewise delayed by adverse winds the following year, 1589, he put it down to the work of witches, and wrote a codex in 1597 about the danger they represented, called Daemonologie, then set about suppressing them with a personal zeal, leading to the witchcraft persecutions of Shakespeare’s time - the dark view of the time being presented in his Macbeth.

Come 1940, when invasion again loomed, the story is that a group of Gardnerian Wiccans met in the New Forest and performed a rite to raise the “cone of power.” How this quite worked is unclear, for there was no storm (or invasion fleet), but it became the founding myth of modern Wicca. The explanation given is that the cone of power transmitted a telepathic signal saying “You cannot cross the sea, you are unable to come,” which caused Hitler to abandon his invasion plan (rather than the normal explanation that the RAF denied Germany the air supremacy necessary to invasion).

- Witches' magic causes a deadly storm in an old woodcut - which shows the belief in this power is not a modern invention per se. (I've coloured the image as the original was too dark and grey to make out details.)

Whether this is simple wishful thinking or clever Wiccan PR or something else entirely, it is part of a larger scenario whereby British occultists did their bit for the war effort in a campaign known as The Magical Battle Of Britain. This was inspired by the Nazis’ own interest in the occult, which soon led some to see them as not just a political entity but as a personification of evil, a perversion of genuine paganism cultivated to pursue power over others at any cost and by any means. There was a cover feature on this campaign in a recent Fortean Times magazine [pictured], now online, here. Needless to say, many mysteries remain, which we cannot deal with here.

As this blog-post was occasioned by the approach of Hallowe’en, one of the significant dates on the old pagan calendar, we can end by considering these, as they may hint at some authentic survivals of pagan, pre-Christian belief and practice. Hallowe’en is a relic and commercial displacement of an old pagan date, known as a cross-quarter day, in this case midway between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, but moved to the evening of the start of the next calendar month. (Our months represent a clumsy Roman attempt at defining lunar cycles within the overall framework of solar alignments.) Celtic ‘festival’ dates were celebrated starting the evening before the marker day. In this case, the eve of Nov. 1st is supposedly when the dead come out, and witches fly, called in Celtic Samhain. In church ritual, Nov. 1st is All Hallows Day or All Saints Day and the next day is All Souls Day, known also as The Day Of The Dead, commemorated by elaborate pageants involving ghoulish mask-wearing figures representing the dead in purgatory whom relatives were praying for. The true equinox-solstice midpoint would be around November 5th, which is supposedly a historical-anniversary date in the British calendar, when bonfires are lit across the nation. These are supposedly to commemorate the 1605 "Catholic" plot (the whole affair may have been rigged by gov't) by Guy Fawkes to blow up the witch-hating James I and his circle with gunpowder. But it may have been a take-over of an older sacred “bone-fire” festival, when livestock was slaughtered and cooked; the straw-man "guy" who is thrown on post-1605 bonfires may be a relic of the Celtic-era "wicker man" sacrifices mentioned by Roman writers. That is, Bonfire Night may be a secularization of an ancient relgious feast, which the government adapted to encourage hatred of Catholics.

When the shortest day of the year is reached, the Christian holiday of Xmas now replaces the older one of Yule. The wheel of the year passes another solstice-equinox midpoint marker in the 1st week of February, when Celtic tradition celebrated, as Imbolc, the time when sheep’s udders again filled up with milk, the Christianised Anglo-Saxon feast of Candlemas today, now displaced by a very commercialized [St] Valentine’s Day mid-month. The two remaining “cross-quarter” days are May Day Eve, the Celtic Beltane, and the 1st week of August, called in Celtic Lughnasah and in Anglo-Saxon, Lammastide, when the harvest month begins. On this latter date in 1100, a famous political assassination, that of the hated Norman king [see our previous post], William Rufus, took place in the New Forest. Pagan advocates like Margaret Murray claimed this date suggests it was a ritual sacrificial slaying, one of a long series. In 1940, the official site of this slaying (the Rufus Stone) was chosen as the place where the coven’s anti-invasion ritual was to be held on the eve of 1st August, i.e Lammas Eve; the rite was performed in the nude, and supposedly several older members of the coven died from the cold and exertion.

The war in Europe itself ended 5 years later, after Hitler committed suicide in his bunker on the day of May Eve – an appropriate date for an event that marked the downfall of Nazis’ neo-pagan religion, akin to the myths of the Götterdämmerung or Twilight of the [pagan] Gods which Hitler’s favourite composer Wagner set to music. May Eve was a significant day in Germanic lore: as interpreted by Christian sources who saw witches as Satanic, this was supposedly when they had their last chance to fly before the powers of light became ascendant on May Day. Witches and warlocks traditionally assembled on an eastern German mountain called The Brocken, where those who ascended above the misty valley might see the Brocken Spectre – their figures casting a long shadow on the fog below, which slowly disappeared as the sun set in the west.

Those Forking Normans

2010-10-06T01:01:00.021+01:00

-- Or, The Normans’ Long Reinvention For Posterity

"Bloody Normans!" - "Maudits Anglais!"

Since July, the BBC has been running what they call a season on The Normans, plugged first by BBC History Magazine and website, then appearing as a documentary strand on BBC Two and BBC Four. I suspect the BBC use the term season rather than the more logical thematic one of "strand" due to the fact the programmes get repeated over and over across an entire calendar season and beyond - to the point it’s hard to remember after a while what you’ve seen and what you haven’t. (Clips and other info from the main programmes are still available online
here - and a set of DVDs has already appeared in the BBC’s online shop.)
This well-meaning historical onslaught now seems to be continuing with follow-up spinoff BBC4 programmes like Michael Wood’s Story Of England (tracking a village through Domesday records etc) and Churches: How to Read Them (the earliest surviving churches being Norman). It turns out that this is just the start of a 2-year interactive project, with BBC Learning (formerly BBC Schools) providing tie-in “Hands On History” educational materials, “to highlight the effect that the Normans have had on our civilisation.”

With almost no criticism to be heard of this invading, enslaving regime, the tv coverage was definitely not – to use a US hunting term – open season on Normans. However this was not always the case. For centuries, the Normans have been the heavies or villains in popular depiction, as in Scott’s Ivanhoe, which is set in the 1190s, as the Robin Hood tales usually are, so that protest is not against an “English” king but the hated new Norman regime. In an earlier post on Robin Hood, I mentioned how the Normans were so hated that to ride 100 yards from their castle was to risk an arrow through the throat from some disgruntled peon armed with the national weapon, the longbow. The later tales of Robin Hood were moved back in time-setting from a 13-14C setting to an earlier Norman one to capitalise on this, making the hero more of a freedom-fighter, the underlying idea being the Normans were such a Bad Regime that assassinating their officials was ok. (William The Conqueror was known more at the time as William the Bastard, his father known as Robert The Devil.) Setting the tales in the reign of Richard I was a masterstroke, for Robin could be heroic fighting his usurper brother evil King John, then bend his knee to rightful authority when Richard reappeared at the end, back from the Crusades and/or captivity abroad. The real Richard in fact spent almost none of his reign in England, having no interest in the place, for the original Norman colonists were just as concerned to protect or expand their Continental holdings.

This wicked-Normans-versus-benign-Saxon motif even creeps into in what is regarded as the most intelligent drama about the Normans, Jean Anouilh’s hit Broadway play Becket. The long-hard-to-see 1964 film version with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton was also televised on BBC4 to pave the way for their “Norman” season proper (as well as issued on a Telegraph-giveaway DVD). The Guardian did one of their ‘reel history’ write-ups [reviewing historical films for their accuracy], heading it “Becket: forking Normans and a not so turbulent priest .. Misplaced Saxons, rubber swords ... they even got the cutlery wrong in this error-strewn drama…”. (The forks which are a dialogue point are actually an anachronism.)

Anouilh’s 1959 play Becket Or The Honour Of God is set in the reign of Henry II (father of kings Richard and John) and portrays Thomas Becket as an educated Saxon who depends on his Norman overlord for his position. Of course, Becket was not really Saxon at all, or he would not have been appointed Chancellor of England and Archbishop of Canterbury, especially as he was a merchant’s son. (The same sleight-of-hand was performed on later figures like the “Scots” freedom fighters William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, both descendants of Norman knights.) When the historical error was pointed to Anouilh before the first production, he declined to correct the play, no doubt as it would not work otherwise. For if Becket had been depicted as the Norman knight he was (he even went along on Norman crusades, and Victorian writers styled him as the more noble-Norman sounding “Thomas à Becket”), he would not have remained sympathetic - as most of the time he reluctantly acquiesces to his king against his own “conscience.” More recently, Becket was named, in a 2006 BBC History Magazine poll, as the 2nd-worst Englishman ever (right after Jack the Ripper), for stubbornly creating a church-state schism while using his position to enrich himself (his wealth in modern terms apparently would be £25 billion).

Nevertheless, the 1170 martyrdom-assassination of the Archbishop of Canterbury in his own Cathedral over the Xmas holidays by 4 of the king’s knights remained a right royal grade-A public-relations disaster, Henry having to allow himself to be flogged by monks as part of his penance - as the film shows. Whereas the Normans’ 1066 invasion had been endorsed by the Pope as a holy crusade, the assassination of this “turbulent” priest (some sources have Henry saying “Will no one rid me or this troublesome priest?") became a turning point. It meant the ending of Norman supreme feudal state power due to church opposition. Henry was excommunicated and Becket was made a martyred saint, and his tomb was the #1 English pilgrim destination for centuries, as in Chaucer's late-14C Canterbury Tales.

This is also the subject of the other serious play on the topic (based partly on a surviving eye-witness account by a young cleric), a 1935 religious pageant verse drama by poet T. S. Eliot. (Despite his bleak modernist Waste-Land views, Eliot was a keen Church of England supporter). Eliot’s Murder In The Cathedral is still acted out in churches and schools across Britain despite the complexity of its text. Though we’ve had several dramas about 1066 in the past year (covered in earlier posts), still to come is a Hollywood production of a stage play about the foursome who killed Becket and had to go onto hiding: Four Knights, from what we might term the Blackadder School Of History, with ribald jokes mixed in with mordant reflections.)

The Normans of course had a bad rep going back to the days [8-11C] when they were the roving Norse or Northmen, before one branch relocated from Denmark and Norway to settle among the coastal Franks in north-western Neustria, renaming it Normandy, and merging their language with Frankish or early French. (Thus after 1066, Germanic Old English became the French-influenced Middle English.) There is said to have been a monastic prayer from the days the raiding Northmen or Norsemen sea-rovers, the so-called Vikings (this just means "inlet-ers") who pillaged European coasts for centuries: "Protect Us O Lord, from the wrath of the Northmen." (You can see and hear this apocryphal prayer spoken by Orson Welles in the 1958 film The Vikings, in the explanatory scene-setting animated prologue cleverly based on Bayeux Tapestry imagery.)

The next step was for the branch which left their base in Normandy to abandon the hated Norman (from the Latin for Norse /North-men) identity and rebrand themselves completely (rather like the present royal family changing their surname in WWI from von Saxe-Coburg to Windsor). The Norman identity in a sense began to be abandoned as early as 1100, when William the Conqueror’s unpopular (anti-clerical) son and heir William Rufus fell dead with an arrow in him in the New Forest, and his brother rode off and left the body lying there in order to quickly secure the crown as Henry I. (The legitimate heirs were another branch of the family, his brother Robert’s, whom Henry put in prison for life.) A 19-year civil war over succession, known as The Anarchy, followed Henry I’s death, and when Henry II took over, he adopted a new name for his branch of the royal tree. The family’s actual dynastic name was Anjou, whereas the new dynastic name, Plantagenet, which they adopted (later as a surname) came from a French word, a nickname for Henry II’s father after a sprig of broom he wore in his hat. It was adopted by the Angevin branch of the dynasty, suggesting a metaphor of a transplanted gens or people. (The French word gens implies a noble people defined by their role in history, so there is a special phrase for “ordinary people” - gens sans histoires: people without a history, associated with people of the servant class, which is what the English people had suddenly become.)

What have the Normans ever done for us?
All this new tv and media-kit coverage seems by way of rehabilitating the reputation of the Normans, a sort of what-have-the-Romans /Normans ever-done-for-us riposte to their brutal reputation in historical records. Our interest here is in codex books, and the Norman Conquest of course led to an immense national land-holdings project culminating in several bound codex volumes known collectively as the Domesday Book. This has recently been put online in more simplified form for the general public (earlier versions being for academics). The BBC season had a programme on the Domesday Book as the definitive guide to the new Norman feudal allocations in 1086.

Over lunch with a local archivist and historian, I was discussing this issue of the Normans supposedly “giving” us civilised features (including forks), and the way the season seemed as uncritical about the Normans as tv coverage of the Romans, who supposedly also brought civilisation with them. (Both are credited with introducing rabbits to Britain; the remains of a Romano-British era rabbit dinner were unearthed this spring by a county council archaeological unit in Norfolk.) He pointed out the Domesday Book does not in fact really show a snapshot of Norman England at all but one of pre-Conquest England. It shows how well Saxon England was run as a church-state partnership, much of it a legacy from the days of Alfred the Great. It’s not so much an example of a new more competent Norman administration but the exploiting of the work of an earlier civil service.

In fact, because Harold of Wessex who opposed the 1066 invasion was officially persona non grata (declared a perjurer and blaspheming heretic over a loyalty oath he supposedly swore to William over a saint’s bones hidden from him beneath a table-cloth), his coronation and acts like his land-holding appointments were considered legally void, and thus Domesday omits his reign and portrays land-holdings as they existed in the time of his predecessor. Coincidentally, there is another new related searchable database of Anglo-Saxon names of persons and places, put online in August, with the wonderful title The Prosopography Of Anglo-Saxon England. (A prosopography is a sort of collective comparative biography, a historian’s method used to establish how a group of people lived etc.; the database is a searchable one so you can see all the manuscript references to e.g. Cerdic, official founder of the kingdom of Wessex – despite his name being merely an Anglicised Celtic one -Caradoc.)

The BBC coverage did mention the so-called Harrying of the North, a virtual genocide of Nazi-style reprisals on towns and villages resisting the Norman yoke (and was followed by the Norman Conquest of Ireland) - though this did not stop at least one pro-Norman English historian from saying how “it only took the Normans a single day to conquer England,” i.e. at Hastings. I’ve read statements by military historians that on the contrary if Harold had been able to hold out for just one more hour, the Normans would have had to withdraw to their boats.

There was little BBC coverage either, of the way the new Norman regime’s official commemoration narrative, the Bayeux Tapestry, was a self-justifying propaganda account of the Conquest whose details are suspect – an 11th-C dodgy dossier, as one wag put it. One example of this was the most famous detail, Harold’s arrow-in-the-eye demise at the Battle of Hastings, as (apparently) depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, despite this being contradicted by surviving codex accounts. (The controversial arrow-in-the-eye moment from the Tapestry is used as the cover of the new BBC DVD.) I’ve blogged before regarding a surviving codex account, the Vita Haroldi, which claims that Harold even survived the Battle, nursed by a Saracen woman who was a healer. (Saracen women were sometimes brought back to England from the Crusades - Becket’s mother was said to have been one, though this was left out the film version of Anouilh's play, perhaps as it is fanciful – she was as Norman as his father). Harold became a non-person, erased from history as a wandering pilgrim, his mutilated face concealed behind a cloth mask. This odd survival legend [earlier blog entry here] was at the very least also a subversive whispering against the new Norman regime lasting up the Normans’ rebranding themselves as Plantagenets.

A more significant aspect of the post-Conquest “rehabilitation” of the Normans as Plantagenets which was not delved into was the Celtic Breton influence on the Arthurian legend. The season did include a programme called The Making Of King Arthur, which supposedly “reveals that King Arthur is not the great national hero he is usually considered to be. He's a fickle and transitory character who was appropriated by the Normans to justify their conquest, he was cuckolded when French writers began adapting the story and it took Thomas Malory's masterpiece of English literature, Le Mort d'Arthur, to restore dignity and reclaim him as the national hero we know today.”

This self-serving farrago is designed to give the almost-culture-free Normans credit for the development of Arthurian Romance. Whether or not he ever existed as an actual king or general, Arthur was depicted as a heroic national saviour in chronicle and legend well before the Norman-French court poets got their hands on the legend. In fact, it was no doubt because his name was so well-known that fabled “King Arthur” became the anchor-point in terms of scene-setting for the fashionable new genre of knightly romances that were otherwise quite fantastical. And Malory lived several centuries too late to be regarded as a Norman. In any case, he was little more than a compiler and translator, whose work was done for the first printed compilation of the various stories into a single narrative, by England’s pioneer printer, Caxton, in 1485.

This very year is regarded as the end of the Middle Ages, and Caxton’s preface says he is publishing the book after being pressured by various noblemen who claimed Arthur was a great (and historical, not fictional) Christian ruler. Arthurian romances had political-propaganda potential, and it was this that probably got the earlier romans d’aventures sponsored at the English court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. It’s thought the code of chivalry that these romances espouse as a behavioural model was invented to try to control knights from the new Norman landholding dynasties who were otherwise out of control, killing anyone who got in their way.

These courtly romances may have been written in Old French, but the thematic material was Celtic-British: it came largely from Breton conteurs (minstrels) whose predecessors had brought the original tales of Arthur with them from the West Country when they fled across the Channel to Brittany and Normandy to escape the Saxon takeover of southern Britain. It is estimated that around a third of the “Normans” arriving in 1066 were in fact Bretons, who would regard themselves as returning to their old mother country. (This is now thought to include the parents of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who around 1135 wrote in Latin prose a History Of The Kings Of Britain, the pseudo-history which really launched Arthur as a claimed historical ruler of a great kingdom - the earlier Arthur was more of a general.) The Breton presence was useful to the relatively uncultured new Norman regime as they tried to pass themselves off as a legitimate regime, based on an ancestry older than any Saxon presence.

But if anything, it was the wily Breton conteurs and Welsh nationalists who were putting one over on the uncultured Normans, who were never accepted as British. The Breton conteurs and Welsh clerics at the Norman court could read Celtic script (Welsh or Breton) and used earlier Celtic-British folktale motifs which had been maintained at the courts of the Dark Ages exiles in their colony of Brittany or “Little Britain” where the place names were based on West Country ones, like Cornouaille from Cornwall. (Geoffrey Arthur alias Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed his work was based on "an old book in the British tongue" - which has never been identified.)

For instance, in the programme blurb reference to Arthur being turned into a cuckold, i.e. Guenevere being unfaithful with Lancelot, this was not an invention of Norman-French writers, but a reflection of an old Celtic-British social practice. Centuries before, Julius Caesar on visiting Britain mentioned that among the Britons the 10-12 men of a warband would often agree to share a wife (not a servant or slave), with any paternity designated to her first consort. This was probably inspired by a shortage of women to travel with a warband, but something similar is known to have survived in the free non-Romanised north, where Pictish noblewomen consorted, apparently at their own wish, with the warriors at court. In fact their royal descent may have been matrilinear – with no son apparently succeeding his father in the Pictish Kings-list codex – the mother was more important, the identity of the actual father probably being unclear due to this practice. As one Pictish princess visiting Rome told some shocked Roman matrons, whereas Roman women consorted secretly with the vilest of men, Pictish noblewomen consorted openly with the finest. Though not much is known of the Picts, I’ve read that the Pictish word “cing” meant not a monarch but a champion, so here we would have the cultural basis of Lancelot the court champion winning Guinevere’s favour over the now older former battle champion turned sedentary monarch, Arthur.

The Norman-founded dynasty lost their original Continental holdings under militarily weak kings. Kings like John and Edward II, who were unwilling or unable to expend sufficient resources to fight the French in what became known as the 100 Years War, which with periodic English victories like Agincourt in 1415 lasted over a century. This lengthy war was at once followed by a dynastic civil war lasting almost as long, known as the Wars Of The Roses. This split the post-Norman Plantagenet dynasty again into two branches or forks, the rival Houses of Lancaster and York, based on yet another dispute over succession between “cadet” branches. (The Lancastrians were supposedly the Plantagenet descendants, but there were Plantagenets on both sides: the Yorkist leader, the father of Richard III, was Richard Plantagenet.)

It ended with Richard III’s crown falling under a bush at Bosworth in 1485, the same year as Caxton printed the final and definitive edition of the Arthurian legend at the behest of those unnamed noblemen. (Malory was dead by then, having spent part of the civil war in prison for various un-knightly offenses, and it was there he supposedly researched and wrote his Morte d’Arthur compilation.) Henry II’s attempt to leave the hated Norman stigma behind backfired because of his own misconduct. His role in getting Becket killed led to people muttering the dynasty was “the devil’s brood,” cursed by God. Later around 1200, Henry and Eleanor’s joint role in killing off their late son Geoffrey of Anjou’s teenage son Prince Arthur [1187-1203?] of Brittany when he got involved in the dynastic feud led to more whispering against the dynasty. (Henry and Eleanor’s son King John usually gets the credit for castrating, blinding and drowning the imprisoned teenage Arthur.)

This in 1485, all this came to a conclusion with both the end of the Wars Of The Roses and – perhaps no coincidence – the first printed, “definitive” version of the Arthurian cycle. The odd title change Caxton imposed on Malory’s vast compilation The hoole booke of kyng Arthur & of his noble knyghtes of the rounde table, to emphasize only the last act, may have been political. There had already been a final “death of Arthur” volume, which Malory had used for his final section, the prose post-Vulgate [Vulgate = not in Latin] work called “Le Mort le Roi Artu” (usually since known just as the Mort Artu).

This was a disillusioned mid-13C. take on the legend (with an aged Arthur etc), which came with a preface saying it had been commissioned by Henry II himself to finish the story up to death of Arthur et al. It ends with a note saying the matter has now been bought to “a proper conclusion” and that “no one ever afterwards can add anything to the story that is not complete falsehood.” It was clearly meant to forestall any unauthorised follow-ups. Henry II was long dead by then, but in his lifetime may have felt the Arthurian cycle an embarrassment inviting comparisons between “emperor” Arthur, mighty and wise king of 30 domains, and Henry, accursed excommunicated king of England, Ireland, and half France, and unsuccessful Crusader ruler of Jerusalem, not to mention failed husband and father. (The play The Lion In Winter, filmed in 1968, with Peter O’Toole this time as a post-Becket Henry some 20 years on, makes a meal out of his dysfunctional family situation.)

The court-sponsored Arthurian Romances depicted an ideal world no real king could ever come close to living up to.

Caxton’s 1485 Morte d’Arthur, produced at the insistence of unnamed nobles (Geoffrey Ashe has suggested this was political, from high up) was most likely another attempt at ending a propaganda cycle that had outlived its usefulness and largely backfired, the comparison with chivalrous Arthur only drawing attention to the Plantagenet line’s feet of clay. It was the end of an era. In 1485, the final successor of all this splitting (perhaps we should sat forking) into rival dynastic branches, crowned as Henry VII, claimed kingship largely based on his Welsh ‘Tewdr’ or Tudor roots on the distaff side, the House of Plantagenet being extinct in its male royal line due to all the centuries of bloody disputes. Though Henry’s chosen heir, suitably named Arthur, died young, the “House Of Tudor” would prove a more long-lasting claim, with the heir to the throne today still known as the Prince Of Wales.

Would You Believe The Plato Code?

2010-07-19T13:19:00.008+01:00

-- A British scientist claims 'secret messages' are hidden in Plato's manuscripts.
I suppose it had to happen … in fact I’d guess the only reason it hasn’t happened until now in this post DaVinci Code era we live in is that the oldest Platonic manuscripts are so difficult to obtain and read. This also makes it difficult to discuss – not that this forestalled some immediate expression of academic disdain of the what-more- DaVinci-Code-rubbish sort - despite others supporting this “previously discredited symbolic, rather than literal, way of reading Plato's great works.”
The controversy was unleashed by a press release from Manchester U. in late June announcing the claim one of their profs has cracked "The Plato Code" - the long disputed secret messages hidden in the great philosopher's writings. The fuss even got into the Daily Mail (never one to miss out on a controversy.) A paper explaining the modus operandi of both the prof, Dr Jay Kennedy, and of Plato himself (i.e of the decoding and encoding methods) is being published in an academic journal, Apeiron: A Journal of Ancient Philosophy and Science [U Of Texas], but in fact is already published online by MU as a PDF. Dr Kennedy claims Plato imposed an esoteric framework onto his writings which initiates would understand but those hostile to certain ideas would not be aware of. The covert approach was to protect Plato from being put down as a dangerous heretic: hence the “Plato Code,” as the papers have dubbed it.
What Dr Kennedy, who is not a traditional classicist but a science historian, did was to subject Plato's MSS to a computer analysis to establish its stichometry in each case – basically how the text composition and layout (divisions etc) accorded with the conventions of the time. (It’s implied these formal conventions were respected when the papyrus MSS were copied in post-Classical times, for the oldest Platonic MSS are from centuries later, being early-mediaeval era codexes. Apparently, otherwise unrelated ‘daughter’ MSS done centuries later in different countries have the same breaks.)

He claims this shows a 12-part division which chimes with (I think that’s the best metaphor) the Pythagorean scheme of mathematical harmonies referred to as ‘the music of the spheres.’ The theory as developed was that the musical scale was simply an expression of an underlying cosmic plan which ruled all matter. It could apply to astronomy (cf Bode’s and Kepler’s laws of planetary distances and motion), pure maths (the Fibonacci Sequence, converging on phi), to art (the Golden Ratio /Section rule in Renaissance painting), or (oldest of all) to ‘sacred geometry.’
This is where we come in, with a long-theorised link to our own ‘Celtic’ realm via references to the Druids and their putative megalithic-site-building predecessors.
‘Pythagorean geometry’ or triangulation was theorised by Scots engineer Prof Alexander Thom, after measuring hundreds of British sites, to be behind megalithic constructions which exist from the Mediterranean up the Atlantic seaway to the Orkneys. (He argued the sites’ common ovoid or egg shapes were the result of pegging out Pythagorean triangles and stretching cords around to create a perimeter ellipse, using a standard measure of 2.72 feet, which he called the Megalithic Yard.) Without getting into futile argument whether or not this ‘sacred geometry’ theory is valid (others have published complicated mathematical “proofs” I’m not in a position to argue over), there may well be other links. While nothing is known for sure of the original figure of Pythagoras [6th-C BC] and was not known to commit his ideas to writing, his school, the Pythagorean Brotherhood, is said to have later spread beyond Italy, where its precepts were written down. The Hyperboreans [also 6th-C BC] who lived somewhere in the latitude of the North Sea (Pliny and Diodorus give details from Hecateus’s lost History Of The Hyperboreans) exchanged gifts and visited with the ancient Greeks. It was also said the Druids lived by Pythagorean beliefs. Ammianus Marcellinus’s ‘The Origin of the Gauls’ in his Roman History of c380 AD speaks of “the Druids, men of loftier genius, bound in brotherhoods according to the precepts and example of Pythagoras.” This supports the idea both Druidism and megalithic science were a product of Pythagorean precepts – though we shouldn’t use the latter term as megalithic science predated Pythagoras by perhaps 3,000 years.

Diodorus's account says the Hyperboreans had both a city and a sacred precinct built "after the pattern of the spheres," a phrase that has excited interest. The reference seems to relate to the ancient Greek idea of the cosmos as a nesting set of transparent crystal spheres out from Earth. These were seen as revolving inside one another at different speeds. These totalled ten: Earth, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Firmament Of The Heavens holding up the stars, as well as the Crystalline Primum or Mobile Heavens which were also the Abode of the Blessed. Ancient priesthoods taught there was a natural harmony of the universe, in which each planet had a frequency to which it "resonated," and from which comes the inspiration since then for composers to recreate "the music of the spheres" (as in Holst's musical suite "The Planets").
The notion megalithic science had attempted to recreate the 7 nested spheres of the cosmic model seems to have made its debut in print in 1846, when the Rev. E. Duke, who claimed he had found 7 circular "temples" which formed satellite sites around Silbury Hill near Avebury, and that this was evidence such sites were cosmic or planetary models. There were then 7 known i.e. visible planets, but the idea of 7 nested circles exists elsewhere, cf the proverbial “7 circles of hell” (7 vies with 9 as the key magic number for numbers above 3).
‘Numerology’, as it’s known, is not today regarded as a science, but it was before the schism developed between science and religion. Just to give a taste of it, below is a reproduction of a worksheet I designed back in the 90s when I was teaching a related adult-ed course. The scheme involves laws of geometry, astronomy and music, specifically (1) Pythagorean geometry, (2) Kepler's Laws of planetary motion and Bode's Law of planetary distances, and (3) the natural harmonic series of intervals in music. The formula most associated with Pythagorean Geometry (it may well be older) is that in a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the two other sides, e.g. three squared plus four squared equals five squared. Kepler's First Law said that planetary orbits form an ellipse, which is the shape, Prof Thom determined, of ancient megalithic sites. Bode's Law said that if you take a mathematical series beginning 0, 3 etc and double each successive number, i.e. 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192, 384, 768 etc, and then add 4 to each, a rough measure of planetary distances from the sun can be calculated in relation to the Earth-Sun distance (reckoned as one AU or Astronomical Unit) when divided by 10. For example, Earth, by definition one AU from the Sun, would as third planet from the Sun have a Bode number of 6 + 4 = 10 divided by 10 or 1 AU. Below is a partly-completed table you can save (it's a JPEG) and print out to try these ideas out by working out the answers to the blank slots. (You may find some holes in this ancient theory at this point, as I did – the sheet is not designed to prove anything beyond exploring how well the numeric conversions work.)

The modern astronomical calculation of the actual planetary distances show reveals some interesting oddities. One is the Asteroid Belt just beyond Mars has to be included in the series, supporting the idea it is the remains of an exploded planet. Also, the series suggests Neptune's orbit has been drawn in and Pluto's moved into Neptune's "proper" orbit, i.e where it should have been per Bode's Law (and a long-hypothesized "10th planet" in Pluto's "old" orbit) -- suggesting an ancient interplanetary collision akin to a snooker ball shunting others out of their positions. This may also account for a slight difference between the Bode's Law prediction and the actual distance when measured today. For example Mars is officially 1.52 AUs from the Sun, rather than the 1.6 AUs Bode's Law indicates for the 4th planet from the Sun (4th in series 0, 3, 6, 12, plus 4 = 12+4 = 16).
Via the Fibonacci Natural Harmonic Series, the ancient interest in "the music of the spheres" can be taken further by relating these planetary "rules" to the intervals in the musical scale. (The ancient Greek system seems to have been a 12-note scale.) This proposes the progressive series of fractions, diminishing to infinitesimal differences (approaching but never reaching zero) 1:1, 2:1, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, 6:5, and 9:8, 18:17. In art, if the last number in this sequence is divided by the previous one, it yields an increasingly close approximation of the Golden Mean ratio of 1.6:1 favoured by Renaissance artists. Here it is related to the musical scale (as in minor Thirds, perfect Fourths, Fifths etc). For example, the "basic" or unison frequency, associated with Earth, would be "C" natural [262 Hertz or cycles/second], one octave up being 524 Hz = 2:1 ratio. Multiplying this by the corrected Bode value for Mars (1.52 rather than 1.6) gives 398 Hz, which works out as the pitch nearest "G" which is used in the musical representation of war trumpets -- as in Holst's "Mars The Bringer of War." Holst’s 1914 suite The Planets was inspired by astrology, which of course also ties in the notion of a 12-part zodiac model, which since around 1930 has also been proposed as an explanation for landscape features around Glastonbury etc. which supposedly mirror the constellations; this theory has had little support since some of the proposed shapes have been found by landscape research to be mediaeval, without earlier predecessors. However the “as above, so below” starscape theory has also been applied independently to explain the shapes of megalithic sites having unique configurations and differing number of stones, all around Britain, as per Thom’s sketches.
Anyway, Diodorus' Hyperborean account says that within the sacred precinct, the priesthood sang hymns continually. The most ancient names we have for Stonehenge, the "Chorea Giganticum," implies an assembly involving singing (as in choir) and perhaps dancing or ritual processions as well. The implication here is the Hyperborean hymns celebrated and emulated the natural frequency of the planets, and the pattern of the spheres as the heavens turned in their place, as if held up by an invisible column of power -- generated by this sympathetic choral magic? "My claim," Kennedy says, "is that Plato used that technology of line counting to keep track of where he was in his text and to embed symbolic passages at regular intervals." This "unlocks the gate to the labyrinth of symbolic messages in Plato".

This labyrinth reference brings us to the most famous of Plato’s writings, concerning the dread A-word, Atlantis. Nearly all the details recycled endlessly in popular speculative books on this topic are from two of Plato’s Dialogues, which describe this elusive city-state, capital of a lost maritime empire. Since then, writers have tried to locate the place all over the known world, including in the Celtic sphere. What stichometric manuscript analysis of these two Dialogues can tell us we have to wait and see, but it has always struck me there is something peculiar about Plato’s too-perfect description of the 7 “circles” of alternating land and water forming the Atlantean capital or royal isle, which may have a bearing on the new arguments. His layout plan, which has been sketched out in various books, reminds me of one of those roughly circular mazes carved on rocks here and there around the western fringe of Europe. These rounded maze shapes are different from the rectangular labyrinths of the classical world, and when traced out on the ground as turf maze shapes etc are generically as “Troy Towns”, based on a legendary association with Britain’s supposed founding by Trojan exiles. (See Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12C Historia Regum Britannorum.) These are different from the “multi-vallate” Celtic hillforts Caesar described as being tribal capitals [oppida], which have perhaps several alternating banks and ditches for defense. However with “ritual” i.e. religious rather than defensive sites (the latter have the ditch on the outside of the first bank), there may be a total of 7 “rings” by counting each up and down separately. Although it’s a composite site built up over different eras, I believe you can do the same with Stonehenge, if you want to, by counting the outer rings. (Anyone wanting to test this out should be aware of the latest archeo-discovery here, of two encircling hedges.
There’s now a 3-D “Virtual Stonehenge” at the Heritage Key website, which requires registration and software download. Just announced [July 2010] is a new 3-year archeo initiative, The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, to build up a ‘digital chart’ of the landscape, and prove or disprove a theory the surrounding monuments form two large circles or loops around Stonehenge, one with a radius of 0.6-1.2 km away, and the other with a radius of 2-2.4 km away.)
The smaller Troytown mazes seem to be symbolic paths, rather like the ones tiled into cathedral floors to be traced by those whose health or circumstances do not allow them to make a full long-distance pilgrimage and can only make a symbolic observance. (The “Stonehedge” discovery aside, surviving Troytown mazes are ground-level designs only – there are no hedges blocking your view, as in later examples e.g. Hampton Court. You can see your route ahead, though you still have to work out the one correct path to the centre, as convention has it you should not retrace your footsteps at all.) The older, pre-Christian religious symbolism of mazes sadly seems to be lost, the chief modern interpretation trying to link it with goddess worship. The Greek double-headed axe known as the labrys, kept or carved at the centre of the labyrinth – the basis of its ancient name - was used in animal and perhaps human sacrifices to the gods or should we say, goddesses.
I could go on and argue the “Celtic” aspect is more substantial here than previously indicated, but it might be better to leave it at that for now – I think the problem with this topic is already, as they say in text messaging, TMI.

Arthur Rides Again

2010-05-23T22:47:00.012+01:00

- King Arthur On Screen
Just as Robin Hood is associated with May Day revels, King Arthur in the early manuscripts is associated with the feast of Pentecost, better known in Britain as Whitsuntide. Several mediaeval romances have Arthur holding a special court where in exchange for the feast, he expects to be entertained by a tale of some wonder or marvel.

Pentecost, still a public holiday in many European states, was also when people set off on pilgrimages, so the timing of the entertainment may have been to inspire them just before setting off. We ourselves are approaching Pentecost [7th Sunday after Easter] and the (perhaps older) British holiday of Whitsuntide (basis of the official Spring Bank Holiday = last Monday in May). As knights riding out on quest is such a cinematic image, it seems a good time to take a look at what Arthurian screen entertainments await us in 2010.

Currently, there seem to be up to half a dozen Arthurian films in the works.
One is Galahad, alias Mortal Armor: The Legend Of Galahad. It was announced as due to start filming in Britain in 2007, but didn’t. It has since got a new director, Mikael Salomon. He is the twice Oscar-nominated Danish filmmaker who has worked on Hollywood productions as a cinematographer (The Abyss etc) and director (Band of Brothers). It’s synopsized as “A coming-of-age take on Sir Galahad's quest for the Holy Grail.” This one, from Seven Arts Pictures, however seems to have stalled in pre-production again as it has recently disappeared off the britfilms.com “British films in production” list.
The second is an announced remake of the 1981 John Boorman film Excalibur, usually considered the most intelligent of Arthurian films. It’s being produced by ‘X-Men’ director Bryan Singer, who spent years getting the rights. The original 1981 script, by Rospo Pallenberg, focussed for the first time in Arthurian screen drama on the mythic rather than the dubious “historical” side of the legend. Boorman had wanted to make Lord Of The Rings, but couldn’t get the rights. (Boorman and Pallenberg are currently working together again, on an adaption of leading French author Marguerite Yourcenar's much-admired 1951 Memoirs Of Hadrian, so it looks like we’ll soon be back to Hadrian’s Wall, setting of the last major Arthurian screen drama, the 2004 King Arthur starring Clive Owen, which we discussed earlier.) This remake is also in pre-production, though given the director and source, perhaps I shouldn’t say remake, but re-imagining. Another project inspired by Boorman’s Excalibur, from the British outfit Pendragon, was put on hold when the 2004 King Arthur film was announced; since revived by writer-director Alan Campbell in 2006 “as an attempt to put Arthur into a historical setting,” this ‘Pendragon’ is still awaiting funding.

Another project is sometimes confused with the above, as it’s another Arthurian drama from the same studio, Warner Bros. Some press sources even refer to it by the same working title, Excalibur. (The Boorman film was only called Excalibur when the producers were told their original – less dynamic - choice, Merlin, was likely to lead to what English lawyers call a “passing-off” action due to the Robert Nye novel. The retitling ironically helped sell it as a sword-n-sorcery action drama abroad. Merlin itself of course is now also taken as a title, first by a 1998 TV miniseries starring Sam Neill, and a 1998 tv movie starring Jason Connery as young Merlin, and then a 2008-9 three-season BBC children’s series, which depicts Merlin, Arthur, and Guenevere Harry Potter style as teenagers developing their professional and interpersonal skills.)
The current director assigned to this new WB film is Guy Ritchie, best known for several violent gangster films and his recent bare-knuckle Sherlock Holmes re-working. The Arthurian legend is again to be “reimagined for a modern audience,” focusses on the Round Table knights gathering, and is being described as "The Magnificent Seven in armour," but “in the tone of Star Wars.” (Whew.) It’s being scripted by John Hodge, who adapted Trainspotting and The Beach, supposedly using Sir Thomas Malory’s 1470s mediaeval-romance compilation Le Morte d’Arthur. (Malory’s in 1485 became the first printed version, has remained in print ever since, and is the standard reference for scriptwriters, so this means little.) This is being scripted by British graphic-novel author Warren Ellis. His earlier Marvel comic-book series of the same title was otherwise unrelated, but he has done a historical graphic novel, Crecy, on the 100 Hundred Years battle which was won largely by English archery.

The final project was only announced in March, and so is still at the scripting stage, though shooting is due to start in June. (Typical.) This is Camelot, a US-financed “five-season” TV miniseries to be made over a 5-year period in Ireland, with production based at Ardmore Studios in Wicklow (where Boorman’s Excalibur was made). The producer was also involved with the 2004 Clive Owen film King Arthur and made the recent BBC miniseries The Tudors, both based at Ardmore, just outside Dublin. Scripted largely by The Tudors series head writer, Michael Hirst, this will “centre on the fellowship of the knights of Camelot. While it will feature King Arthur, it will not follow The Tudors style of focusing on one person. Scriptwriters will flesh out the characters of Sir Galahad, Sir Gawain and Sir Lancelot.” The producer says the concept is “to make the past seem relative and contemporary. That’s what we did for the Tudors.” (This caused press comment by historians about anachronisms.) Co-produced by British quality tv drama production co. Ecosse Films, it seems to have been presold to the Starz pay-cable channel in the States, which suggests it is not for children. (That's the channel that bought the Spartacus: Blood And Sand TV series, which has gory violence as well as explicit sex.) Ecosse’s Douglas Rae told trade paper Variety it would be a drama of “genuine ambition on the scale of Rome and Band of Brothers.”

A producer of one of the above projects made a crack about his being different from “the 751” earlier Arthurian screen dramas. I don’t know about the total, but I find difficult to come up with a listing of ten Arthurian films or TV dramas I would recommend to a friend. There is a book on earlier Arthurian films, though it’s an academic tome priced for the institutional market. This is Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays, edited by Kevin J. Harty, author of the 2006 The Reel Middle Ages. Cinema Arthuriana has been updated since 1991 not only to cover new releases, but to reflect the changing nature of Arthurian media studies. (I gather in the 2002 2nd edition only 4 of the 20 essays were straight reprints.) I haven’t ordered it due to its price, but apparently Arthurian films go back to 1904, so 751 may well approximate the actual total. The book’s editor has a partial filmography online here, up to 1997.

Unlike with Robin Hood, Hollywood seems to have become interested in Arthur only after WWII, when they needed to free up moneys held in Britain under postwar currency export restrictions as well as to find suitable subjects for historical epic, the genre they built up to promote the new widescreen and single-strip Technicolor filming processes as production values. MGM led the way. They had done well out of a 1952 film of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which is itself a reworking by Scott of the original French mediaeval romance Lancelot, The Knight Of The Cart into an historical setting contemporary to Robin Hood, who has a cameo part in it. So for their first big-screen colour location adaptation, MGM made Knights Of The Round Table, 1953, in Devon (on Dartmoor), Cornwall (at Tintagel) and Ireland, with Robert Taylor as Lancelot. We meet him singing along with his troop as he searches out Arthur to serve him, though when they meet they challenge-fight in the woods a la Robin and Little John. At ‘the Ring Of Stones,’ a replica Stonehenge set, where a council of war inevitably turns into treachery, Arthur's men push over a sarsen to make good their escape, and L jumps off the fallen sarsen onto his trained horse Beric, just like in a 50s western. The following pitched battle is won Agincourt style, recreating Olivier's 1944 Henry V quite openly with longbow volleys. (To be fair, the same director’s Ivanhoe had showers of arrows in the scene where Robin Hood also appears.)
Camelot itself appears later on, when Lancelot returns after fighting the usual badly-dressed Picts and dallying with Elaine the lady of Astolat, a magnificent stone castle with courtyard and lawns for jousting. Then as L dallies with Guenevere, treachery by Modred (Stanley Baker) who schemes to wreck the chance of a truce, leading to a climatic battle largely offscreen on a fogbound field, precipitated by an adder bite. (I should add the scriptwriters got this touch from the original 12th-C sources, or it might easily have been a rattlesnake.) L fights Modred to the death on a rocky headland, and is saved from the Dartmoor quicksand quagmire (you know, the ones in The Hound Of The Baskervilles) by whistling up his trusty steed Beric. After a quick visit to a now-penitent Guenevere in a nunnery (in the sources, it’s at Amesbury near Stonehenge), finally we’re back to Tintagel, whose monastic ruins represent ‘the Chapel of the Sword,’ where L casts Excalibur into the sea, and presumably casts himself into exile for his sins, the film indicating L's unborn son Galahad will carry on the Round Table tradition. The Grail manifests itself to L’s successor Percival, with a voice-over, apparently from God, as a grand finale.

One way or another, KOTRT seems to have discouraged Hollywood from doing anything more than action programmers until they decided to film the Lerner & Loewe stage musical Camelot, as a 3-hour production starring Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave (and David Hemmings as Arthur’s bastard son Mordred). This was a promising idea, because the Arthurian mythos emerged largely from a bardic tradition which demonstrated the power of verse and song in regard to reputation. (It was said even kings feared bards lampooning them.) Lerner & Loewe had already built a musical around the theme of language with their 1956 My Fair Lady, from Shaw’s play Pygmalion.
Ostensibly based on T.H. White’s novel-sequence The Once And Future King (which Disney based their 1963 animated version The Sword in the Stone on), this 1967 production, shot mainly on a soundstage (with a few exteriors shot in California and Spain), has an odd narrative framework. It opens with Arthur musing on his life on the eve of his fateful final battle, setting up the main story as an flashback. This done, it ends with an inept finale with a CU of Richard Harris shouting "Run" at the boy Young Tom he has been telling his story to. Tom is meant to be the future author Sir Thomas Malory, who Arthur tells to flee so he can write this up as a memoir later. (It’s actually some 8 centuries later, from time-setting to Malory’s era.)
White’s approach is entirely whimsical and eccentric, which is not such a problem for a stylised stage musical, but Hollywood’s treatment of it leads to unintended absurdities. For instance, Arthur refers to the other two as 'Jenny' and 'Lance.' The songs don’t deal with Shavian themes, of the power of language etc. even though this was a natural. (The words glamour – originally meaning fairy enchantment and grammar are anciently related, and White even calls Britain the Isle of Grammarye.) Here’s a paragraph from a recent piece by Alex von Tunzelmann in The Guardian [“Camelot: what a castleful of crock,” 1 Oct 2009] on how Arthur

… sets up a Round Table, and advertises for knights. Thousands of written manuscripts are scattered out of towers and from horseback, all across the land. Yes, thousands. The printing press did not arrive in Britain for another millennium, so Arthur's monks must have been slaving round the clock to illuminate all those. As they are strewn, the toiling peasants of the fields pick them up and give them a good read. So very literate, these sixth-century farmhands. It's amazing they didn't leave more written sources. Over in France, Lancelot (Franco Nero) catches one manuscript. This prompts him to take a short break from striding around his battlements showing everyone how great he is, in order to sing a song telling everyone how great he is. He's French, so it's called C'est Moi.

I’m sure there’s an interesting film in the idea of a French knight going to a British court, but no-one seems to have picked up on that yet. (In Camelot, Guenevere seems to fall in love with L because he apparently brings a dead knight back to life!) The Sixties did however produce a less overblown version with Cornel Wilde directing and starring as the French knight, together with his wife Jean as Guenevere: Lancelot And Guinevere (1963), released in the US as Sword Of Lancelot. This was one of the first period action films shot in Yugoslavia, where thousands of horsemen were available at discount prices, though it seems to have been a tough shoot, and the first to show real violence, with men having limbs lopped off. This is not gratuitous but in the context of the story shows how foolish dalliance which violates a strict social code leads to grim consequences for everyone.

However it was only in the Seventies that such more thoughtful adaptations started to appear. There were a couple of films by the French filmmakers Bresson and Rohmer (which I haven’t yet managed to view), plus the first film version of Gawain And The Green Knight – (starring pop singer Murray Head) which seems to have sunk without trace. The same director would be hired to remake the film in the 80s as a comic-bookish version, Sword Of The Valiant, with then-Tarzan star Miles O’Keeffe as Gawain and Sean Connery as the Green Knight. The first major British cinema version was actually the 1975 spoof Monty Python And The Holy Grail, shot in Scotland, which made fun of the Arthurian genre’s tropes:
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!
PEASANT: Listen - strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!

British tv had just graduated by then beyond innocuous kiddie adventures like The Adventures Of Sir Lancelot to the more realist Arthur Of The Britons (1972), which even gained a potted-feature release under its international syndication title King Arthur, The Young Warlord. This Welsh ITV production shows, in 24 half-hours, Arthur as an up-and-coming Dark Ages war leader, with famous motifs like the sword in the stone given a ‘rationalised’ depiction. (He demonstrates the importance of tribes working together by piling a boulder atop a sword – only together can the chiefs dislodge it so he can raise the sword.)

On the other hand, Boorman and Pallenberg’s Excalibur in 1981 was the first to focus on the purely mythic aspects. It made no attempt to work in any Dark Ages background history. This had Shakespearean actors to keep the intense, poetic dialogue from becoming risible, and wild Irish countryside to give it the look of a heavily wooded Dark ages landscape, contrasting with the glittering silvery armour of the knights.

Since then, nothing has really rivalled it. American productions tend to be family friendly - indeed, many are cartoons. Hallmark’s 1998 $30-million live-action 2-part mini-series Merlin for NBC-TV, starring Sam Neill, Isabella Rossellini as Nimue, Rutger Hauer as Vortigern, Helena Bonham-Carter as Morgan le Fay etc., is perhaps the most familiar example of this ‘inclusive’ family-oriented approach, though shot authentically in Wales. The director, Steve Baron, claimed at the time it was based on "lost sources". However, a viewing of even the longer 2006 DVD version (much re-edited from the TV presentation) suggests these new sources were not anywhere within the Arthurian mythos, but found in other fantasy works such as Tolkien or Ridley Scott’s Legend.
Thus, we get cute Disneyesque characters put in for young children, such as an elf called Frick as comic relief, a talking horse, Miranda Richardson from Blackadder playing Queen Mab (basically a Shakespearean poetic figure) as a croaky-voiced panto villainess, and a dragon done by the Jim Henson muppets workshop, plus plenty of first-generation CGI effects. As far as Arthurian legend goes, it doesn’t try to dramatize this either, just takes characters like old Merlin’s young nemesis Nimue and turns the pair into lifelong lovers. Supposedly the story is about Mab trying to block the advent of Christianity, so that witches like her will not lose their power. Arthur, Guenevere et al are pallid characters with merely incidental roles.

Even when filmmakers adopt a more realist approach, this tends to flounder trying to bridge the gap between explaining the story in terms of Dark Ages political history and the motifs of a familiar, popular but mediaeval and artificial legend. While many postwar novels seem to be able to reconcile the two aspects, this is through a careful use of point-of-view (often the stories are told in the first person). American-financed films need to be understandable to a mass audience, so in films like Merlin you get an Arthur who is inevitably 'King of all England' – something that is more than just an anachronism, since any Arthur figure worth his salt would have been fighting to stop the new Germanic nation state of ‘Angle-land’ coming into being.

Even the more sophisticated recent screen drama Tristan & Isolde (2005) falls prey to this confusion. The story is an Arthurian spinoff (Arthur himself is not a character in the T&I legend), so it has no need to work in any familiar motif, the film takes pains to create a Dark Ages west country rife with inter-tribal politics, with a script development period that was a good two decades. (Producer Ridley Scott was going to make it as his 2nd film in 1979, but went to Hollywood instead.) Despite this, none of the geopolitical background the story is built around (here, King Mark rather than Arthur wants to build a tribally united ‘England’) really makes much sense on reflection, and there are other touches indicating a ‘grab-bag’ approach. Mark’s Cornish stronghold is built in Norman style (atop a Roman dungeon the builders did not notice), the poison that paralyses Tristan is from a puffer fish [Japanese], there is the inevitable talk of the English and England as well (more interestingly) of one of their more obscure tribal components, the Jutes, and so on.

It makes one wonder if the genre is so inherently confused between the legend’s Dark Ages settings, and the need to serve the familiar mediaeval motifs in a contemporary populist way that it’s simply beyond the reach of popular cinema (though not of the popular novel) to reconcile. The romantic version of the Arthurian story is one of a short-lived golden age of political unity. This probably never happened, but in terms of an artistic golden age, we had the flourishing of the Arthurian cycle as the most popular subject matter in British literature before the printing press was invented. And its legacy has continued into the modern era with a series of Arthurian novels which satisfy both realist and romantic sensibilities, something that flourished soon after WWII and still continues. (This is perhaps the topic of another post.)
However, in terms of screen drama, we definitely haven’t had our golden age yet.

Some Talk Of Robin, And Some Talk Of Hood

2010-04-25T05:04:00.006+01:00

Back to Britain’s Wild West – the Robin Hood era
With the release of a big-budget Robin Hood film (directed by Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe) due mid-May, the national press has obligingly been running a series of articles on the elusive outlaw. After we get past the usual PR about how this film is different, more authentic, than all the dozens of earlier films, the articles turn as usual to asking who was Robin, actually?
Well, there don’t seem to be any new answers, actually. But given our emphasis here on matters Celtic, the question we need to ask is, is there a neglected Celtic element to the legend? The answer is, there certainly is.
This derives from the development of the longbow in Wales. During the Normans’ Welsh Wars of conquest, it became the most feared weapon the Welsh resistance had, nicknamed the king-slayer after the king had a few close calls while leading his troops. (Earlier, the Conqueror’s son had been slain by an arrow in the New Forest, in a rather suspicious ‘hunting accident’ in 1100.) More importantly, it enabled the development of guerrilla warfare using hit-and-run ambush tactics. With much more of Britain wooded then, it made every blind spot in the path a potential ambush site. A few hundred yards beyond the Norman lord’s huge brand-new castle, it was what we would now call bandit country. And wearing armour wouldn’t save you, as a longbow could put an arrow right through your shield and your chainmail. A six-foot long longbow had a 200lb pull, and could put an arrow through a 2” thick oak door. (Later, angled plate armour was invented to make arrows bounce off it, though this didn’t work very well, and made the knight almost immobile.) The longbow wasn’t just a technology, it enabled a military-political force, a body of men who were capable of turning into an effective guerrilla force, wielding a feared weapon against hated authority. The Robin Hood legend dramatizes this hatred of Normans as an oppressive occupying power, and the man that could use a longbow the symbol of national or popular resistance.
To adapt an American expression about the Colt six-shooter, the longbow was the great equalizer. American writers sometimes quote the western motto that the six-gun made all men equal – at least if you knew how to use it. Their popular literature soon created a whole cult around the freedom-loving westerner who could and would defend himself when threatened by corrupt authoritarianism, and who would invariably help the helpless (homesteaders or townspeople), from Shane to The Magnificent 7. This is the same process of the same mythic attribution that happened earlier with the bowmen of old England. After the defeat of Welsh resistance (which took two centuries), Welsh archers were recruited into the English army as instructors to train others in the use of this deadly weapon.

By the time of the Hundred Years War, longbow practice was required by royal decree in every parish across England. Thus was created the nucleus of a national defence force which would eventually end the supremacy of the heavily armoured knight on the fields of France, at places like Crecy [1346] and Agincourt [1415]. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the king after Agincourt tells his men that he too is Welsh; the later Tudor kings also had a Welsh background (the original Welsh spelling of their dynastic name is Tewdr). Welsh and Wales are from a Saxon word, wealas, referring to people who live in the woods as outcasts. The Welsh bowmen at Agincourt wore red flannel just as the early Robin does (Lincoln green came later).
In time, the bowman-veteran returning from Crecy or Agincourt became the core of a new layer in the class system, the stout yeoman. Yeo- is a term sometimes parsed as young, but it may have been chosen as it also resonates with yew. Yew was the tree planted in churchyards to keep farm animals out (its leaves are poison), and its wood was what longbows were often made of. Of course, medieval injustice was rife, and just as the American freedom-loving westerner who hated rules easily came in conflict with the local sheriff, one can imagine the same with the returning bowman. With the longbow however, there was no face to face duel in main street: some hated local official would simply be found by the forest path with a goose-feather shaft through his throat. It was difficult to identify the killer, as the entire population was armed. Bows were used for killing game like deer over a distance of a hundred yards or more, even where this was declared illegal poaching, with savage penalties under Forest laws. (A Forest was not just a woodland but a legal entity, a royal hunting preserve, like the New Forest, claimed by William the Conqueror.)
A returning veteran unable to readjust to ordinary life is a phenomenon we are now familiar with. American historians have suggested the very violent ‘Wild West’ period was the result of the madness and displacement of the Civil War, when many young men were unable to return home and drifted westward. More recently, after the Vietnam War there was the phenomenon of the so-called Bush Vets, who lived as hermits in the forest as they felt unable or unwilling to return to a workaday existence. It’s easy to imagine a yeoman-archer returning home to find his home, his livelihood, perhaps his family gone or turned against him, and made outlaw after some drunken brush with the law. There were also regular popular rebellions or uprisings, not only in Wales and Scotland, but in England itself, and after their inevitable crushing by the king, the known surviving participants would be outlawed. (Occasionally there would be pardons for military service, a motif that also creeps into the legend.)
Our yeoman would now be wanted, and he would need a nom de guerre, which would disguise his identity (protecting any friends or family) and intimidate anyone thinking of going after the reward on his head. What could be better than Robyn Hode? The first syllable was a pun nobody could miss. Robyn was a character in mediaeval pastoral plays (dating back to at least pre-1288) performed at May Day, where he was paired with a maid called Marian. (These plays were later banned by the church.)
The hood part needs no explanation, and as well as being symbolic of outlaw disguise, it is listed as a surname in the old tax records known as Pipe Rolls. At that time, surnames were often taken from occupations, so John Smith meant John the blacksmith, and so on. Thus, modern Robin Hood could have begun as an entry for a “Robert of the hood” or “Robin the hood” - which sounds more modern, the word hood still being in use for a criminal thug. (Robin is an old familiar version of Robert, like later Rob, Bob etc. Robert was itself used in a term for robbers – a 1331 reference has such robbers classed as “Robert’s men,” as if he was their symbolic leader.) The earliest instance seems to have been the ‘Robertus Hood fugitivis’ in Yorkshire court records of 1225-6. (There are persons named in the ‘classic’ form of the name, Robin Hood, in records of 1304 and 1316, though these are not necessarily outlaws.) The root also rhymed with Hob, the familiar name for a mischievous woodsprite. The interplay between history and myth has certainly been a motif in recent novels, but is not anachronistic. Some of the early records conflate the 1225 outlaw called Robert Hod with ‘Hobbehod’ [in a 1227 record], and other variants of the European root Hob, the folk name for the devil and his minions. It may be church sermons thus contributed to the mythicisation of such outlaws, who no doubt threatened church officials.

The second name also offers rhymes on hood, wood, and good. Hood was and is an emotive word, its latest incarnation, hoodie, being applied to the last screen version, the BBC’s recently-finished series Robin Hood. It was used by itself, without the Robin being necessary. Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton wrote in 1613, "In this our spacious isle, I think there is not one but he hath heard some talk of Hood and Little John.” A 2006 novel based on the legend by prolific American historical-fantasy author Stephen Lawhead is titled simply Hood. The start of the author’s “King Raven” trilogy, this portrays the original Robin prototype as entirely Welsh, an 11C aristocratic freedom fighter named Bran ap Brychan, who operates in the woods of the Welsh Marches. The associated 2006 press stories had a Nottingham Council rep asking if the author was being paid by the Welsh tourist board - tourism interests keep Robin linked to Sherwood, though Lawhead argued, as others have before him, that Sherwood Forest was already too tiny for outlaws to hide in. The latest modern adult novel on RH uses this standalone surname, to indicate its anti-romantic approach: Hodd by Adam Thorpe. This purports to be an English translation of a monkish codex manuscript in Latin (it comes complete with footnotes) of a 13C captivity narrative by a monastically-educated youth who is forced to witness the filth and degradation of the outlaw life, then has to romanticise his account when he finds people already sentimentalising his late captor, the megalomaniac Robert ‘Robbynge’ Hodd, as a folk hero. In a similar vein is the start of a series by British novelist Angus Donald, which began with Outlaw (2009) and continues this year with the Crusades-set Holy Warrior. The Reuters headline for the author's interview piece was "Novelist reinvents Robin Hood as medieval gangster."
A criminal thug is certainly how both church and state would have viewed such a figure, no doubt deploring his being turned into folk hero or myth. Evidence of this showed up not long ago. Last March, a scholar noticed a scrawled marginal note about Robin, previously overlooked, in a monkish manuscript from Witham monastery in Somerset. A lecturer in art history at St Andrews University in Scotland noticed the marginal note, dating from c1460, in a codex called the Polychronicon, dating to c1420. The 23 words of Latin were deciphered and translated as: 'Around this time, according to popular opinion, a certain outlaw named Robin Hood, with his accomplices, infested Sherwood and other law-abiding areas of England with continuous robberies.' I suspect RH got a mention because he was remembered in 1460, and the reference may have been a critical reaction to minstrel-ballads turning him into a folk hero now taken by “popular opinion” as real - rather than taken from any official account, which would have described him purely in legal terms as a wanted criminal. This is the only English pre-Reformation chronicle entry referring to RH, and does mention that he and his “accomplices” (read ‘band of Merry Men’ in the romantic version) “infested” not just Sherwood but other parts of England. This could have started a certain confusion, and we can also envisage others elsewhere following his example, taking the same nom de guerre and becoming the new local Robin-of-the-Hood. Guerrilla fighters, whatever the reality, do seem to see themselves as freedom fighters, where the authorities class them as criminals or terrorists. From what I’ve read of guerrilla forces, they also don’t rob the local poor as this would yield little and only invite disaster. To live as an outcast in the woods was to live as Robin (Goodfellow?), and if you had a gang, as the Merry Men. (‘Merry’ is such an odd word for what must have been a fraught lifestyle that it’s suspected there is a lost meaning here, perhaps to do with Mariolatry, or worship of Our Lady alias the Virgin Mary. A version of this cult is known as ‘Marian devotions’, a term which would give Maid Marian an original role in the band as a figurehead.)
Today, nonfiction authors often plump for someone with the “Hode” surname in their quest for the one-and-only, original, historical, true Robin Hood. With different candidates in different eras, it’s led to a great deal of research, contributing to our understanding of the era. There’s usually enough circumstantial detail that after reading such a book, you think, yes, that’s it, they’ve identified him – until you read the next such book, which argues for a completely different candidate! (The latest is one which makes him a fugitive Knight Templar - Robin Hood, The Unknown Templar by John Paul Davis.)

It seems unlikely there was one single person whose life provided the inspiration for the familiar story. Some of the now-familiar elements don’t even appear in early versions, the so-called ‘rymes’ (38 of which survive) such as Robin being a displaced aristocrat. (Making him Earl of Huntingdon, “Robin of Locksley” etc is a post-medieval motif, making him more respectable to the establishment of the time when there were no more such outlaws, the bow having given way to the gun. Robin would continue to be claimed as a colourful ancestor by more than one English aristocratic family.) Multiple sources of inspiration would help explain the difficulty scholars have in pinning the legend down to a single location or era, never mind a single recorded individual. Robin living in Sherwood Forest c1200 in the reign of Richard Lion-Heart, King John and the Third Crusade may now be the standard setting but it is a later [c1600] take on the legend.
The earliest surviving reference we have, to people knowing their ‘rymes’ of Robin, is in Piers Plowman, from 1377. This is taken as a reference to the start of the long-running cycle of ballads known as the Gests (“deeds”). There, the only reference to a named king is to ‘comely’ Edward (who meets and pardons Robin). This doesn’t narrow it down much as there are four candidates, from Edward I, the Hammer of the Scots who defeated William Wallace (and seems an unlikely candidate), to Edward II, who lost to the Scots at Bannockburn and was deposed and murdered by his queen, through Edward III, who had the longest of reigns. (Any handwritten versions of the ‘Gests’ ballads are long gone, these surviving only in early printed forms not collected until the late 18C. For discussion of the textual difficulties of the Gests, see here.)
The longbow was also a weapon in the Scots Wars [c1300 AD ± 15 years] conducted by Wallace and then Robert the Bruce, playing a decisive role against Edward I and II’s armoured knights. (Wallace, who early on had to seek refuge in woodlands, was described c1500 as ‘a Scottish Robin Hood.’) Fear of invasion from the north could also have helped prompted the assimilation of longbows and the men who could use them into the English hegemony. (The longbow was used in Scotland up till Flodden in 1513.) Scots antiquarians speak well of Robin and take him as historical, e.g. John Mair’s comment in his 1521 History Of Great Britain, “he was the prince of robbers, and the most humane.” The only overt Scots element that seems to survive in the legend is in the pronunciation of the texts of the early versions. That is, if you read from these aloud phonetically, you will sound vaguely Scots (“stood” is spelt “stude” with the long Scots vowel sound etc.) This was authentically adopted in the 1975 film Robin And Marian, a revisionist version scripted by The Lion In Winter playwright James Goldman and directed by Richard Lester, with English actors like Nicol Williamson (as Little John) and Ronnie Barker (as Friar Tuck) sounding like Sean Connery (as Robin).
The new Ridley Scott/ Russell Crowe film is set in 1199, beginning like Robin And Marian with the death of Richard in France, and Robin returning home and starting to come to terms with injustices all around him as he woos a rather spiky Marian. (I’m relying here on the advance press coverage, including interviews with the principals.) The script was originally green-lit in 2007 after a bidding war in Hollywood for it, as a completely new take on the legend. This was that the Sheriff of Nottingham, to be played by Crowe, would be the hero - a decent man trying to do a difficult job. (Again, this echoes the 1975 film, where the Sheriff, played by Robert Shaw, is sympathetic.) Robin would be the villain, and another wrinkle would be that Crowe would also play Robin! (Were they meant to be twins, separated at birth?) In July 2008, filming was all set to start in Sherwood Forest when somebody realised the leaves would change colour in the autumn, spoiling the continuity. When filming resumed the following year in the modern Forestry Commission evergreen-conifers plantation in Surrey where Scott and Crowe shot the Germania-set opening of Gladiator, the script’s raison d’être, its role-reversal concept had been dumped. (The original title, “Nottingham” had also been dumped as uncommercial – perhaps somebody had told them the town’s name was then spelt Snotingham.) Now the concept for the title-less project was “Robin begins” (à la Batman Begins), i.e. a prequel to the familiar story. Crowe will not play the Sheriff, who is back to being the villain, but a yeoman Robin, who for some reason has the Tolkienesque name of Longstride….
… Anyway, returning to the original legend, this latest film will not likely make any difference to its perception, but it should bring more interest to the subject matter, and ultimately to its remaining mystery. There is certainly more to this story, for the yeoman longbow on which Robin’s reputation is based is a weapon that was invented in the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age. Archery with bows long or short was used in warfare in early times. Oetzi the Iceman, found with a Bronze-Age arrowhead in his back, was not an isolated case. But the deadly longbow fell out of use, perhaps as fighting was regarded as subject to a warrior code requiring face to face fighting. This is something the Iron Age Kelts were famous for. They would line up and challenge the enemy to single combat with spear and short sword – a disastrous notion of warfare which led to the Romans easily defeating them. Thus, the mystery remains: how did the longbow make its comeback after at least a thousand years of neglect?
There’s still a story to be told here, and it may be there were much earlier Robin Hood types living on in the depths of the greenwood and keeping the ancient technology and lifestyle alive. (A longbow can be disguised as a stave by unstringing it.) This is a figure kept alive in pre-Keltic European myth and legend, like the woodland trickster of English lore, Robin Goodfellow, Herne the Hunter, or the equally elusive Swiss national hero, William Tell. Some have suggested he survives as a collective dream-memory of a king-of-the-wood huntsman figure, of the sort the late Robert Holdstock invoked in his Mythago Wood. Celtic sources do have both shamanistic figures and lordly ethereal huntsman figures, of whom Arthur may be one, who was later historicised – claimed as a historical figure. (For an analysis of this, see Concepts Of Arthur by Thomas Green, 2008.) Nonfiction books on the Robin legend have also meditated on the idea of the ancient mythic folk hero who can be killed over and over, but never really dies, being reborn whenever he is needed, dreamt up in a new incarnation. In other words, he is an idea, and you can never kill an idea. As Alfred Noyes’s poem ‘Sherwood’ puts it: “Dreaming of a shadowy man that winds a shadowy horn / Robin Hood is here again.”

2009 In Review

2010-03-01T23:32:00.008Z

-- A look at the key trends and events of the year just past.
To keep this to manageable length, I’m focussing this year-end review on the main developments, those clustered around Scotland’s official ‘Year Of Homecoming.’ For, by more than coincidence, this nexus led to press stories about King Arthur, the ‘original’ Merlin, the controversial Stone Of Destiny, the ‘Pictish’ mystery, the Knights Templar, and their supposed successors the Scottish Rite Freemasons of America - background subject of Dan Brown’s latest ‘factually based’ novel The Lost Symbol.

The cornerstone historic exhibit of Scotland’s ‘Year Of Homecoming’ national celebration was of course the Stone Of Destiny – coronation stone of the ancient kings of the Picts and Scots, kept at Scone Palace, where excavations of the area were finally begun in 2009. Stone Of Destiny is also the title of a famous book by Ian Hamilton QC, who was one of the nationalist students from Glasgow U who in December 1950 ‘recovered’ the stone from its place under the coronation throne in Westminster Abbey. (Edward I, after he defeated William Wallace in the 1290s, ordered the Stone sent to Westminster for all future English kings to be crowned on, to show they were also kings of Scotland.) The story of the daring stunt was made into a film in 2008, and this (not much seen on its cinema release) was released on DVD in April 09, together with behind-the-scenes items relating the background events, in which Ian (still going strong in his 80s with his own nationalist blog) appears. Today, there is considerable suspicion the Scone monks sent Edward a substitute (probably a sandstone cistern lid), as ancient codex descriptions suggest the stone is not the original. (For details, see earlier post on this: MacCamelot Revisited.)

Of course, some see the Homecoming Year (so designated as it was Burns’s 250th anniversary) as a way of rallying broader support for the now hotly topical issue of Scottish independence, with cultural representations that show more finesse than the main modern ‘touchstone,’ the crude ‘Jocksploitation’ film Braveheart, which depicted nationalism as defiant exhibitionism, protesting against English tyranny, on the level of a chanting football crowd.

In 2009, Scotland continued to be depicted on screen as a barbarian province, with several films going into production set in the North but with non-native heroes - invading Romans, or Viking raiders. This is an old problem which can be seen in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which a new study, Fiona Watson’s Macbeth: A True Story, revealed once again was historically a travesty. The actual Macbeth was a long-serving popular (and probably Pictish) ruler; historians say Shakespeare was trying to feed the anti-Scots prejudice of the time. (For details of these invading Romans/ Viking raiders films, see earlier post Those Pictish Blues Again.)

Braveheart itself was in the news again [Oct.] when Gibson admitted he knew from historical research that William Wallace was no Mr Nice Guy but ‘a monster’ akin to a Viking berserker. When the film came out in 1995, Gibson had reportedly tried to distance himself from the way it was used as a recruitment aid [leaflets handed out in cinema queues etc] by militant nationalists, who have since continued to paint their faces a ‘Pictish’ blue like Gibson’s - which like much else in the film is historically wrong. (Scots-born Wallace was from a Norman-Welsh family, his surname ‘le Wealeas’ meaning The Welshman, the family being from Shropshire.) Its American scriptwriter Randall Wallace (no relation) defended his screenplay on the grounds it was based on a 15C codex source, a verse epic by a minstrel called Blind Harry. Gibson has announced he is making a blood-and-thunder epic about the Viking berserkers, which will have Leonardo DiCaprio speaking subtitled Old Norse and ‘chronicle the Viking raids on England and Scotland in the ninth century.’

This was the background to another film produced last year (out March 2010), the Danish film Valhalla Rising shot in Scotland, Scandinavia and Canada, about a Viking escaping from slavery among the Highland clans. The idea Viking raiders might end up as slaves to the fierce Highlanders they tried to raid got some wry press coverage in 2009 when an academic conference promoted it to emphasise how the Vikings weren’t as fearless as believed to be by Mel Gibson. (Apparently Icelandic codex sources warned them to avoid Scotland as dangerous!)
(Earlier post here.)

It was these Vikings raids on Celtic monasteries which destroyed an untold number of codex manuscripts dating back into the Dark Ages. A priceless one which did survive, the Celtic Psalter, nicknamed ‘Scotland’s Book Of Kells,’ was the subject of an Edinburgh exhibition designed to conclude the 2009 commemorations. The exhibition of this long-unseen codex seems to have been caught in Scotland’s self-consciousness over image, the modern artist’s contemporising framework commissioned being rejected [Dec.] by the University library which was to exhibit it. The artist had wanted a motto warning about the fragility of a codex volume, “Every time you turn a page, it dies a little,” which Edinburgh University library thought ‘not celebratory enough’ for the 11C exhibit, which is illustrated with Pictish symbols.

Perhaps we should be using the terms Pictland and Pictish here rather than Scotland and Scottish, as stories concerning the earlier Pict inhabitants dominated those concerning the later Scots i.e. Irish colonists who with the help of the church began to colonise the country from the 6th C on. A number of these stories concerned a series of archeo finds this year which helped fill in a heretofore largely blank early history. One example of a find was of a “£1m golden hoard” near Stirling Castle, of pre-Roman era gold torcs which display similar artisanship to that found in Gaul. The press inevitably resorted to the phrase that this ‘rewrites the history of ancient Scotland’, but it was more a case of the finds indicating Keltic Pictland was not the impoverished backwater it later became under English rule. (The Stirling area, part of the same tribal kingdom as Edinburgh [and Rosslyn], that of the Gododdin, is covered in a separate web-page, here.)

Several films featuring the Picts were produced last year, mostly to be released in 2010 (again, discussed earlier in ‘Those Pictish Blues Again’ ). Since then, Bran Mak Morn - 30s pulp author and ‘Conan’ creator Robert E. Howard’s name for the supposed last king of the Picts - is now being filmed by Universal Studios, with Peter Berg [?] as director, and John (Intolerable Cruelty) Romano as scriptwriter. A pair of rival Romans-versus-Picts films are set for release in autumn 2010. Centurion, filmed on location in Scotland, has 7 survivors from the legendary Ninth legion, sent north ‘to wipe the Picts from the face of the earth’ (this is not at all historical re the 9th) being pursued by Amazonian-style Pictish women led by Olga Kurylenko as a warrior princess who has ‘had her tongue cut out by the Romans.’ Director Neil Marshall has said (I’m guessing in response to some early criticism) “It’s not meant to be historically perfect. I’m picking up on a legend and exploring it … it’s an action thriller.” (It’s a Gladiator-lookalike - trailer here.)

There is in reality no such legend of the IX Legion going north into Pictland; the legion simply vanishes from official accounts; if was defeated by British tribes, it was more likely by the Iceni of Norfolk some 60 years before. The story seems conflated with that of Boudicca [misspelt Boadicea by 19C English antiquarians] queen of the Iceni, who rose against Roman occupation in AD 60-1 after she was flogged by the Romans who looted her estate and raped her daughters. So many Roman ‘collaborators’ were massacred and butchered (women’s breasts stuffed in their mouths etc) by her rebel army that the Romans were later unable to take the usual Nazi-style mass-killing reprisals, as there would be insufficient population left to maintain the tax base. (Or so Churchill says in his The Birth Of Britain).

This rebellion indeed is or was (before his current Viking project) to be the subject of a long-planned Mel Gibson produced bloody-mutilation-and-suffering drama, work-titled Warrior but nicknamed by the industry ‘Braveheart in a bra.’ (Even its primitive ‘bandeau’ form, the bra of course was one item of clothing legendary women warriors like the Amazons didn’t wear; supposedly their name meant ‘no breast’, referring to the belief they cut off their breasts as these got in the way when drawing a bow.) Gibson’s was one of 3 rival such projects at the time, including one from Spielberg's Dreamworks (called Queen Fury), and another titled Warrior Queen [also the title of 2 novels on Queen B., plus a 1978 BBC TV series with Sian Philips]. All these may have been abandoned since being pre-empted by a TV movie starring Alex Kingston as earthy queen of a pack of beer-swilling Celts. Some of the major-studio interest here may have been prompted by a speculative (not much is known) 2006 biography, Boudica by Vanessa Collingridge, plus an imaginative trilogy of novels by M.C. [Manda] Scott, who originally trained as a veterinary surgeon at Glasgow University before switching to a teaching ‘shamanic’ dreaming and writing novels, notably her 'Boudica Dreaming' quartet, 2001-6.

This seems part of a Hollywood trend we’ve mentioned in earlier posts towards ‘women warrior’ heroines, something that works in this setting, especially among the Picts who (Bede says) practised matriarchal descent, their noble women ( a Roman historian says) consorting openly with the bravest warriors, and also (Irish legend says) employing women weapons trainers in places like Skye. A new novel published by Penguin last year, Warrior Daughter, by award-winning Scots poet and novelist Janet Paisley, depicts such a sexually-liberated (and bisexual) Iron Age people on Skye led by the orphan daughter of a warrior queen.

The 2nd film being made about the IX Legion was probably the first work of popular fiction to promote the notion it vanished in Scotland: Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 young-adult novel The Eagle Of The Ninth, about “a wounded Roman soldier and his loyal Celtic slave who try to solve the mystery of the Ninth Legion.” This is not another action adventure but a tale of friendship and personal discovery amidst a strange culture, a framework the director of the current film, Kevin Macdonald, is adhering to – adding a layer of deliberate contemporary political allegory about ‘cultural imperialism’ by having the Romans played by Americans in their native accents to emphasize a parallel with Iraq etc. Macdonald has said the ‘natives’ will speak Gaelic, though in the story they are a pre-Celtic Inuit-like relict population, The Seal People whom even the Celtic-Britonnic interpreter cannot understand. (More details in earlier post here.)

Although the ‘natives’ were historically portrayed as barbarians, a number of individuals who had previously been considered non-Scots were ‘repatriated’ or re-claimed as being ‘really’ Scotsmen. Columbus was claimed, on the basis of re-examining some old codex evidence, to have been a blond freckled Scot. This was a claim by a Barcelona historian [A.E. de Villalonga], so can’t be put down simply to Scots nationalist fervor.

As I discussed in an earlier post (see North To MacCamelot) , a proposed relocation of the Arthurian legend to Scotland was in the news. It was suggested Scotland's Southern Uplands rather than Wales were the likely locale of the original Merlin, Myrddin, such as Hart Fell near the source of the Clyde. In this post, I included a photo taken as I flew over the area in May, showing the old Caledonian Wood had been replaced by farmland and modern conifer plantations. Since then, Galloway Forest Park (near where The Wicker Man was part-filmed) because of its relative remoteness from built-up areas has, as part of International Year of Astronomy 2009, been named Britain’s first ‘dark sky’ site, where a view of the night skies can best be had free from urban light pollution. (Instead of the 200 or so stars you can see in cities, it is dark enough there to see up to 7,000 stars.) This is perhaps worth mentioning here, as the starscape was an important feature of life which inspired some of the stellar and lunar myths the ancients wrote of, and whose calendric alignments are also thought to be the basis of megalithic sites like Callanish, rather than just the solar events [solstice etc] celebrated by today’s popular New Age gatherings.

A Scots provenance for legendary Arthur was also proposed, which I won’t go into here as it was covered before in two earlier posts North To MacCamelot and MacCamelot Revisited. Since then, the only headline announcement I’ve seen is ‘King Arthur Was A Genocidal Warlord, Claims New Book’ - which turned out to be advance PR for The Celtic Revolution : In Search of 2000 Forgotten Years that Changed Our World by Dr Simon Young, whose interesting attempt at simulating a lost travel-guide codex, A.D. 500: A Journey Through the Dark Isles of Britain and Ireland, I reviewed 2 years ago [here].

This slighting approach to Arthur by English historians is in itself not new. But instead of “He wasn’t real, just a myth propagated by Welsh and Scots nationalists (and later woolly-minded Romantic Celtophiles overseas),” we typically get “Ok, we’ll agree he was real, provided you agree he wasn’t a proper king, just a Dark Ages warlord, a murderous tyrant.” (You can almost hear the unspoken coda – “a typical bloody Celt.”) The Telegraph article [27-Sep-09] painted Young’s Arthur as a "genocidal warlord whose deeds would have been the stuff of Nuremberg trials today." This didn’t encourage me to order the book, though from the Telegraph’s actual book review I see Arthur is only discussed in an Appendix, where “two sixth-century warlords, one called Arthur and another named Artur” are suggested as main inspiration. The review goes on to outline the thesis of the book’s subtitle, indicating Young does regard ‘Celtica’ as a real culture which made a major contribution to western civilisation. So it may be worth ordering when the paperback comes out.

On the other hand, the claim that one famous historical figure was half-Scots was debunked by a Scottish historian, Neil Hooper. The idea, which has made its way into tourist guidebooks over the years, that Pontius Pilate was born of a Scots mother and Roman father, at Fortingall in Perthshire, where a famous old yew stands, was attacked [Dec.] by Hooper as lacking any documentation before 1899. Hooper argued the new local laird, who entertained the likes of Kipling and Tennyson there, ‘invented the story as a prank with the help of his literary friends.’

As to the perennial Holy Legend, referenced in the famous Blake verse, that Jesus himself visited Britain, there is a long-standing belief in a visit to Scotland. This goes back at least to William Comyns Beaumont (1873-1956), a Daily Mail staff writer. In books with titles like Britain, The Key To World History and After Atlantis: The Greatest Story Never Told, he argued that Jesus was born in Glastonbury, and lived in Somerset, Jerusalem being really Edinburgh etc. – all this being covered up by a gigantic conspiracy by the Romans, who had the Bible rewritten. Since then, others (like Barry Durnford) have concentrated more on folktales of Holy Visits by Jesus and/or Mary to the Hebrides (Iona etc.) This past year, Scottish scholar Dr Gordon Strachan did provide the research basis for a new documentary film on the legend, called [what else?] And Did Those Feet?, which debuted in late November at the British Film Institute. (No sign of it since.) This was based on Dr Strachan’s theories, which for anyone interested, are largely given in his book Jesus The Master Builder. (They’re mainly mathematical arguments based on the idea of cross-cultural commonalities found in ‘Pythagorean’ geometry, and gematria.) For details, see our earlier post prompted by the film’s press release, here.

Scotland’s claim to independence was built partly around Robert the Bruce’s 1314 victory at Bannockburn, with the date figuring on nationalist flags. One of the recurring motifs in recent years in regard to Scots independence is that Bannockburn, would not have been won if it were not for a handful of English Templars who had fled here from the purge of their order in France and England which the Scots king refused to take part in. (The last part is not true, as I’ve mentioned before.) This it-was-really-the-English-Templars-who-won-it claim returned in 2009 [Dec.], based on a ‘statistical’ analysis that a certain percent of Templars would’ve wound up here, and this total is then added to Bruce’s forces. An analysis by a Californian lawyer claimed to demonstrate that, as 335 Templars went missing in France, 29-48 logically would have fought alongside the Scots. It was endorsed by the "Grand Prior of the Scots" Templars, then denounced in the Times as "rubbish" insulting to Scots by British Templar historian Helen Nicholson, who teaches mediaeval warfare at Cardiff U. Inevitably, the claim turned out to be promoting a new book, The Knights Templar And Scotland, and the author a Knight Commander in a modern Scots Templar order. Coincidentally, Helen Nicholson published an article for BBC History Magazine earlier this year on the fate of the English Templars, which provided me with one new item of info on the Knight Templar I had researched as a case study (see England’s Last Templar): the knight in question had, with others, disappeared not to Scotland but to Ireland. (There’s probably another book in that.)

There were also press stories about the Templars owning mediaeval estates in lowland Scotland, east and west. I’m assuming here (this is not clearly spelt out in the coverage) that Scots post-1314 independence allowed survivors of the purge and their descendants there to openly profess Templar affiliation. Gravestones found [Oct.] under a gateway by a ruined medieval church in the village of Temple, Midlothian carried strange carvings called by the press 'Pac-Man' markings. As its name indicates, this was a Templar property (some say the Templars’ Scottish headquarters), seized in the purge. To the west, Kilwinning in Ayrshire was proposed [cf article by AJ Morton in Fortean Times Mr 2010] as an overlooked Templar centre, with dozens of identifiable properties around its ruined Abbey, plus another score nearby at Irvine. Some of these properties were owned by key individuals with titles like High Constable Of Scotland and Guardian of Scotland, and who apparently included both Wallace and Bruce. Over a century before England’s Grand Lodge was founded [1717], Kilwinning also became in 1599 the ‘mother lodge’ of Scottish Rite Freemasonry – the name Kilwinning Lodge being used in the USA, when Scottish Rite Freemasonry was exported to the Colonies. (Unlike the English variety, Scots Freemasonry was opposed to an Established i.e. state church like the Church Of England - a Scots Presbyterian idea that soon found its way into the US Constitution as the separation of church and state.)

In America, Dan Brown’s long-awaited Da Vinci Code followup finally appeared, years behind schedule. Originally announced as about the idea the US capitol was founded according to a secret Masonic masterplan, nonfiction guidebooks had already ‘outed’ some of this historical background, about which he had given pointed clues. (This was still better from Brown’s viewpoint than books attacking his bad research, as with TDVC, and would have helped him establish his background claims of “Fact.”) The appearance of his latest thriller [Sep.] provided the amusing highlight of the year, as well as the biggest mystery of the year. The amusing highlight was when he switched the title at the last possible moment, leaving all those who had already published books with titles like ‘The Guide To Dan Brown’s The Solomon Key’ racing to reissue their works as ‘The Guide To Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.’ There was also a seeming mystery behind the delay. TDVC’s cover had clues pointing to US Freemasonry as the basis of Brown’s next conspiracy thriller. Inevitably, stories soon went around the novel would attack the Masonic order the way TDVC had with secretive Roman Catholic orders. This would set up a revisionist take on US history, portraying Freemason George (‘I cannot tell a lie’) Washington as a traitor who left a deathbed-confession manuscript, buried with him by conspiring fellow Masons in a sealed coffin at Mount Vernon, to avoid scandal.

There was also speculation the novel would deal with the fact the founding-father Masons were not orthodox Christians but Deists – hence the symbol of the Egyptian pyramid with the all seeing eye put on the dollar bill etc. Freemasonry as 'a unique system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols' seemed a natural choice of topic for Brown. Scotland’s leading writer on matters Masonic [he is curator of the Grand Lodge of Scotland], Robert Cooper, said Brown’s title change was due to Cooper’s 2007 nonfiction book Cracking The Freemason's Code – The Truth About Solomon's Key, and while on a US lecture tour, he heard from ‘an inside source’ that Brown was using the tale about George Washington’s buried confessional manuscript as his plot hook.

However, when the novel appeared, all of this, which had been written up in advance in guidebooks by Dan Burstein and David A. Shugarts (whose books I have), was missing. No ‘ancient secrets rewriting western history’ were proferred: the plot was just another solve-the-puzzle-quick chase thriller, not based on any conspiracy theories. Brown did depict a few Masonic ‘bad apples,’ but gave out in PR releases how much he admired the order, and would even like to join himself [hint, hint], his book then being adopted as a recruiting tool by US lodges. One can only wonder if he decided he had had enough of controversy and threats in his life, and decided to play it safe from now on.
Of course, as usual, we’re unlikely to be able to establish the truth of the matter ….

The Legend Of Christ’s Church Revisited

2009-12-25T18:05:00.010Z

Last time, I said we’d take a look at an officially-endorsed instance of the so-called Holy Visit legend for what it was worth. By its worth I mean looking at it as a case study which demonstrates the difficulty of exploring the legend of Jesus visiting Britain. Variant rival instances of the legend exist around the southwest coast; mostly these are set when he was a boy, brought by his uncle Joseph of Arimatheia, but not all versions claim this.
This instance of the legend is an officially-endorsed one where you can see an official relic of his visit on display in the church, a beam cut to length by a mysterious visiting carpenter. The church is Christchurch Priory, which we’ve mentioned before in our coverage of the mystery of a Knight Templar kept a prisoner there for decades [see Here Lies England’s Last Templar?]. It stands on the western edge of the New Forest, on the coast where the rivers Avon and Stour meet, forming Christchurch Harbour. The town’s earlier name was in fact Thuinam or Twynham, from tweoxnam, meaning “the ‘tween-the-waters-place.” It supposedly changed its name in honour of the legend, that is after the new Priory was founded in 1094.
Wait a minute, I hear the sceptics out there saying – 1094? How could Jesus, who died around AD 30, be visiting then? Stuff and nonsense! Well, the sceptics can stop reading right now, but for those of us willing to look beyond conventional explanations and rationales, the matter may not be as simple as it would appear to a sceptic.
There is another claim an early church was built in England by some of Jesus’s original disciples, apostles who fled the Roman Empire after the trial and death of Jesus. This was the old wattle-and-daub church at Glastonbury that the massive mediaeval abbey was built over. In fact, in old manuscript accounts by church historians, it was claimed the old church was built by ‘no human hands.’ This is never explained in the codex sources I’ve seen, but as it cannot refer to the disciples (always regarded as human), it must refer to Jesus, i.e. as someone who in early church doctrine was not human but divine, merely appearing in human form, as a carpenter. (I’ve read that the original Aramaic word actually has a broader meaning, like worker in wood, or perhaps builder.) Here we have the nub of the Holy Visit legend, and of the problem.
The modern interest in Jesus in our more secular age is as a historical person. The idea he could reappear after his crucifixion to help build churches in England does not fit this framework, and it creates difficulties even for the Church of England in that a physical reappearance after his death means a Second Coming, and no one has been officially willing to claim this honour. (Not surprisingly, as the orthodox view is that we are still waiting for this event, since it marks the End Of Days.) In this instance, the legend has it that a mysterious carpenter showed up as one of a party of workers, but would himself take no pay. Then when a key beam was cut too short, he somehow lengthened while the other workmen went home for the night, before he vanished again. This blackened relic, or a part of it, is now on display near the altar as The Miraculous Beam. (An 18C reference, by antiquarian Richard Warne, in his Companion of 1789 says the relic was then called Our Saviour's Beam.) There's also a pair of brass plaques illustrating the legend, and as the Beam's situation makes it difficult to photograph, I've included a photo of one of these, below.
Thus, what we appear to have is not a claim of an actual historical visit or a Second Coming, but more a miracle of the sort the Saints were said to perform. Yet if it was acceptable in early British church doctrine to claim local miracles performed by Jesus after his death, there should be other instances built around mysterious interventions during church building, yet I can’t recall seeing any. There are plenty of other “Christ Church” dedications around England without such a legend attached.
The modern ’sceptical’ explanation isn’t much of a help either. This is that during the building of the Priory, workmen [plural] appeared and vanished again because the head monk had brought in outside workers who hid out at night. As this probably makes no sense on first reading, here’s the explanation reproduced in an old travel guide (you won’t see it in modern ones), part of the Ward Lock Red Guide series: “In the story entitled The Origin of Christchurch Priory it is alleged that Bishop Flambard, the builder, found that in order to erect the Priory upon the site he had chosen for it and also to induce the canons to give up their revenues, it would be necessary to invoke the supernatural. He accordingly imported from Normandy a band of skilled workmen, who by day were concealed in a cave and at night did the work which was attributed to the special agency of Heaven.”

So, presumably, the idea is that [1] one of these workmen fixed a routine problem of a beam being cut too short. [2] the other workers then promoted the idea this must have been a miracle, and the mysterious carpenter who made the ‘fix’ none other than Jesus, on a miraculous return-to-earth visit in corporeal form for this purpose. The other craftsmen are specifically ‘fingered’ as the source of this undateable story – as if builders would be impressed by this routine type of mix-up. (Normally, you just get another beam, and reuse the short one for something else.)
Pilgrims came to see and touch The Miraculous Beam, which had to be relocated higher up as it was being steadily whittled down by souvenir hunters. (How you can shift a beam in a finished building where's it's holding up the walls is not explained, but you can see the Beam today, sticking out from the wall near the altar - obviously too long now!) But the attempt to rationalise the legend by saying a group of French 'black-leg' labourers were used, but kept hidden, doesn't give any sources, explain anything or even make much sense. There’s no old source traceable for it either. (The official compendium of records, the 14-C Christchurch Cartulary, sticks to official matters – such as disputes between clerics over powers and privileges – and has nothing to say about the Beam legend.)
However, there’s more to the legend itself: the final part is that the town of Thuinham or Twynham then renamed itself Christchurch. As this was the beginning of the town’s civic history under its present name, there should be a record of this name change as a matter of civic heritage, but local historians I’ve asked to help can’t locate anything definitive, cf in the Cartulary, only later second-hand references.
The explanation for this name change that occurs to me is this. The town was not renamed after the legendary ‘miracle’ itself, but after a new dedication for the church. The oldest-known manuscript reference [by Canon Herman de Laon in De Miraculis Sanctae Mariae Laudensis,1113] gives it as ‘Christi kercha’ – Christ’s Church. The joint name of Christchurch-Twynham also appears elsewhere [as Crischarche de Twenham], and the Norman castle built nearby was known as Twynham Castle. Thus it seems more likely the church was dedicated as Christ’s Church, and the town renamed Christechurche after its biggest and most prestigious building, which would be the attraction for the then all-important pilgrimage tourist trade. The church continued to be built through the Middle Ages, which would have required regular promotion as a pilgrimage destination. Though the town had a population of only c250, the church is huge, still today England’s longest parish church. Its enormous size is puzzling: it is simply many times larger than most other Norman churches, and is said to be larger than some English cathedrals.
The church’s size is an oddity which may be a clue. For some years now, a local architect named Eric Cockaign has been writing illustrated booklets with titles like The Miraculous Beam, The Saxon Face Of Christchurch Priory, and eventually one he co-wrote with the Priory’s own archivist, Ken Tullett, The Saxon Church Of The Holy Trinity Thuinam. These discussed the argument that Christchurch Priory was not so much built in the Norman Era as rebuilt, spanning the foundations of several earlier church buildings dating back to the Saxon era. Of course, as the Saxons did not take over until at least the mid-5th century, a Saxon church of course could not have been built in the 1st Century – as a strictly historical interpretation of any Holy Visit legend would require. Local historian W.A. Hoodless has suggested that the rather fanciful description of a town fire in the 1113 Canon de Laon account already mentioned above (as first to name the town not Thuinam but ‘Christi kercha’), was a holdover from an earlier era, representing "a mythological explanation of the destruction of the original thatched Saxon church." Could the Miraculous Beam legend similarly derive from the building of an earlier church? This would have to be a 1st-century “Celtic” church for the legend to at least pass itself off as a historical record of an actual visit, during that trip to southwest Britain.
One of the problematic aspects of the Holy Legend is finding references to it that predates Blake’s famous questioning reference to it c1804 asking if it can possibly be true, in his poem beginning “And did these feet in ancient times?” This implies pre-1804 references to the legend, but these have not been found. However here we do have pre-1800 references to the local ‘miracle’ version. A 1777 Supplement to the 8-volume Antiquities Of England And Wales ‘Collected from the best authorities’ by fellow of the Society of Antiquaries Francis Grose (c1730–91) refers to it. Grose travelled around Britain collecting local information for his massive series of illustrated volumes. (Incidentally this account differentiates “ChristChurch” the town and “Christ's Church” the Priory.) The Saxon church however wasn’t officially called Christ’s Church: as late as 1086 (only 8 years before the Norman church was founded) it was dedicated to The Holy Trinity, which includes Jesus’s divine aspect. (In the vast landholdings-register codex known as the Domesday Book, it’s The Monastery Of The Holy Trinity Of Thuinam.)
So perhaps the legend attribution was later, for the Norman church, or earlier, for a Celtic one. (I’m told the church has declined to have its Miraculous Beam carbon dated.) The fact none of the many other “Christ Church” dedications around England seem to have such a legend attached to their name may be a clue in itself, for these other instances (e.g. Christ Church college, Oxford) are of much later date. The unsatisfactory explanations behind the legend of ‘Our Saviour’s Beam’ and the name change from Twynham to Christchurch suggest there may have been another explanation. This is that the tale commemorated in the Church’s dedication is itself a 1st-century relic, which the Norman canons claimed as a relic of a ‘miracle’ (the likes of which do not occur elsewhere) in the building of their mediaeval priory.
I’m not suggesting Jesus made an actual historical visit, but that just as the church-building was given a ‘miracle’ gloss, so could the legend of his visit be relocated from the 1st C. AD to the Saxon and then the Norman eras as a ‘miracle’ reappearance. That is, the first above-ground churches in Christendom built by surviving Apostles had a ‘built by no human hands’ legend attached to them, perhaps in compensation for the lack of an established secular commissioning power behind them. (Rome didn’t become Christian for several centuries.) At Glastonbury, this motif is recorded unquestioningly by church historians in the 12th C. in regard to a 1st-C establishment. Sceptics always say these holy relics were just something to show the pilgrims on whose trade the church and town partly depended, and certainly many such claims seem incredible to us today. But this does not mean that every such relic is a fake.
The officially promoted legend about it remains so awkward that to me it suggests the tellers were stuck with an anachronistic scenario whereby this blackened old beam was to be promoted as part of the new Norman Priory. The idea that the older ‘native’ Apostolic churches were deliberately suppressed by the new Norman aristocracy will be no surprise to anyone who has read about the Normans. At Christchurch, the original Norman monks were replaced on the building’s initial completion in 1150 by an Augustinian order due to their drunkenness and lawlessness, and the head cleric in charge of building the Priory, Ranulf Flambard, was a notorious character who is said to have shortened his officials’ yardstick to force locals to pay more feudal taxes. (He also remains a suspect in the suspicious slaying of the king, William the Conqueror’s son William Rufus - to whom Flambard was chief minister - a few miles away in a ‘hunting accident’ in 1100 – one of a series of such incidents.) The codex account mentioned by the French monk Herman de Laon, who visited the town in 1112/1113, is scathing about the church’s uncharitable local monopoly that when he looked back and saw the whole town ablaze, he wrote this was the work of a fiery dragon sent by God to avenge the insult to mother church.
The Church authorities opposed the idea that churches like Christchurch Priory are physically built on Saxon monastic foundations (declining to sell Eric Cockaign’s booklets at the Priory bookstall), though it has admitted there are records of a monastery at Twynham going back to perhaps 700 AD. And Camden's 1586 encyclopaedia 'Britannia' describes the Priory as 'an antient church of prebendaries, built in the Saxon times, repaired in the reign of William Rufus by Ralph Flambard.' This indicates Camden knew of the Saxon priory being incorporated into the new walls, but not of any earlier foundation. Yet at Glastonbury, before the mediaeval Benedictine Abbey church was built, the ‘Ecclesia Primitiva’ or wattle-and-daub church had been first replaced by a Saxon church. Could the same 3-stage scenario apply to Christchurch – 1st C. Celtic Church of Britain chapel or church, Saxon monastery, and then mediaeval priory built atop this? Eric Cockaign’s books mention old references to nine other church buildings (chapels?) once standing on the site.

Another possibility for the origin of the beam is hinted at by another legend about the Priory and its workmen. This was that the original plan was to build the Norman priory not between the mouths of the two rivers, but up on St Catherine’s Hill over a mile away [see photo], where a chapel once stood; however, the Norman workmen found their building materials were being mysteriously moved downhill every night. The Mysterious Carpenter part of the legend may have been a face-saving one after some sort of (literal) climbdown over the Priory location, as much as a contrivance calculated to attract pilgrims. (This is too complicated to go into further here, but anyone interested can view the illustrated webpage I put together a couple of years ago on this: The Mystery Of St Catherine's Hill.

And Did These Sandals Walk Upon England’s Mountains Green?

2009-11-29T19:37:00.010Z

This past week, the news-wire services and newspapers have been carrying a story with headlines like ‘Jesus May Have Visited Britain, Film Suggests.’ This was from the Daily Telegraph, but as there are also Scottish and Westcountry connections, we also get more parochial headlines like ‘Jesus May Have Visited Britain, Says Controversial Scots’ and ‘Did Jesus Visit The Westcountry?’. The controversy-loving Daily Mail, perhaps encouraged by the number of viewer comments to its online edition (v. popular with expats in the US etc), followed up its story ‘Jesus May Have Visited Glastonbury With His Uncle, According To New Film’ the next day with the more challenging ‘Was Jesus Taught By The Druids Of Glastonbury? New Film Claims It Is Possible He Came To England.’ It actually went out on Reuters UK’s newswire flippantly headlined ‘Did Jesus Headline Glastonbury Before Springsteen?’ (The ‘Glastonbury’ Festival is actually held some miles away, in some farmer’s fields at Pilton.) I think it’s fair to say, from Google News results, that the story has gone right around the world.

All this is occasioned by the premiere this weekend, at London’s British Film Institute, of a documentary titled And Did Those Feet? Produced and directed by a former BBC religious-affairs correspondent, Ted Harrison, it features the theories of the Revd. Dr. Gordon Strachan, a lecturer (on the history of architecture) at the U of Edinburgh. Dr Strachan is not really all that familiar a name as an author in this field, though I suspect this will now change. He is in fact already the author of several books in this subject area, going back to Christ And The Cosmos (1985), followed by Jesus The Master Builder: Druid Mysteries And The Dawn Of Christianity (2000), Chartres: Sacred Geometry, Sacred Space (2003), The Bible's Hidden Cosmology (2005), and The Return Of Merlin: Star Lore And The Patterns of History (2006). He has a particular interest in early ‘cosmic’ mathematical measurements of the sort usually associated with Pythagoras, arguing the Britons were anything but the ignorant barbarians pro-Roman English historians so often make them out to be. Dr. Strachan has a doctorate in theology from U of Edinburgh as well as a history degree from Oxford, is a Church of Scotland minister, and in the 1980s became Director of the Church of Scotland's century-old Sea Of Galilee Centre at Tiberias.

In other words, a centuries-old fringe theory of British church history has suddenly acquired a veneer of respectability. The film isn’t available yet i.e. on DVD. Given its 45-minute running time, I suspect it’s got a distribution deal with an overseas cable network, probably in the USA for a showing at Xmas or Easter. (The US has more commercials time per hour – British docus usually run 50 or even 52 mins.) However, Dr. Strachan’s 300pp Jesus The Master Builder: Druid Mysteries And The Dawn Of Christianity covers similar ground. (Published in 2000, it’s out of print, and won’t be reprinted till Sep 2010 - it’s by a small Edinburgh publisher - but the interested reader can chase up copies via resellers.) To quote from the publisher’s blurb on Amazon:

The activities of Jesus before the start of his ministry at the age of thirty have been the subject of much speculation. Did he travel beyond the bounds of Palestine in his search for wisdom knowledge? Where did he acquire the great learning which amazed those who heard him preaching and enabled him to cross swords in debate with Scribes and Pharisees? A number of legends suggest that Jesus travelled to the British Isles with Joseph of Arimathea, who worked in the tin trade. With these legends as his starting point, Gordon Strachan uncovers a fascinating network of connections between the Celtic world and Mediterranean culture and philosophy. Taking the biblical image of Wisdom as the 'master craftsman', Strachan explores the deep layers of Mystery knowledge shared between the Judaic-Hellenic world and the northern Druids -- from the secret geometry of masons and builders, which Jesus would have encountered in his work as a craftsman in Palestine, to the Gematria or number coding of the Old and New Testaments.

To return to the film, I took the blog-post title from the film’s title (itself the first line of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ verse querying the so-called “holy legend”), plus the producer’s press-quoted comment ‘there is nothing specific by way of archaeological finds; Jesus's shoe has not turned up'. I suppose they mean a sandal (when sandals suddenly became popular in the late-60s, they were nicknamed ‘Jesus boots’). But this to me (and perhaps anyone else who has seen Monty Python’s Life Of Brian) is just asking for trouble. I’d guess the producer-director, as an experienced BBC religious-affairs correspondent, is offering a disclaimer in anticipation of the predictable backlash. But this metaphor (shoe or sandal for item of hard evidence) is an unfortunate phrase, given the way religious relics representing personal items (usually bones or bits of cloth) accumulate around popular church legends. As far as I know, no British church at present claims to possess Jesus’s sandals in support of the legend, which is probably just as well (cf the ongoing controversy over the Turin Shroud). Over the past century, there have been various books looking for the possible footprint or track of a holy visit, mainly around Glastonbury and Cornwall, listing local legends. Here, I thought we could look at what the real possibilities might be for such ‘sandals’ i.e. items of hard evidence that would be convincing than a shoe or bit of cloth.

For example, Dr Strachan’s Jesus The Master Builder mentions a Scots tiein to the story, Pontius Pilate’s supposed Caledonian mother. This is a legend associated with a very old yew tree in a churchyard at Fortingall in Perthshire. It says Pilate’s father was a Roman legionary or (since the Roman occupation was a century later) an ambassador posted nearby, and Pilate was “born in its shade and played there as a child.” But although the yew tree may well be over 2,000 years old, what does that prove? I don’t know of any codex i.e. ancient manuscript which might document the legend, leaving this as a dead end – by itself it’s not any kind of evidence. Similarly, there is in Glastonbury Abbey grounds a sacred tree, the Holy Thorn, about which I wrote about a year ago [The Thorny Matter Of Glastonbury], as well having a Glastonbury webpage up for several years, so won’t bother with further here.

The main item the press coverage mentions is the legendary ancient church which the producer says lies buried under Glastonbury Abbey. This is indeed mentioned in ancient sources, the earliest accounts of the British church and of how Christianity was established years before Rome even invaded, and centuries before it adopted Christianity itself. Of course it’s not likely Channel 4’s Time Team are going to be allowed in with a JCB backhoe-digger to excavate any part of the Abbey grounds, so we can only consider this evidence of the early accounts. The early [1st-C AD] founding date and/or the Glastonbury site are both mentioned in accounts by ‘respectable’ writers, like St Gildas [fl. c500], and this is summarised in modern books by Geoffrey Ashe and others. But because the Abbey’s own official history, by William of Malmesbury, a 12C monk, doesn’t mention this controversial claim in the surviving [corrupt] 13C text of its first edition, the story is dismissed by sceptical historians as an interpolation by the monks to promote the mediaeval-pilgrimage tourism trade in souvenir relics etc. The film’s producers mention how when St Augustine was sent to southern England to convert the locals c600 AD, he wrote to the Pope [Gregory the Great] about the old church, ‘built by the hand of the Lord himself.’ The version given by William of Malmesbury in his Chronicle Of The Kings Of England, which does not cite Augustine, has several extra words: “…no other hands but those of the disciples of Christ” - which is a bit more realistic. (If you’ve ever tried to build even a simple cabin by yourself, you’ll know you need more than one pair of hands.)

The filmmakers argue that Jesus could have visited to learn from the Druids as they possessed ancient astronomical knowledge. The press articles say the film “looks at the maths involved in structures such as Stonehenge and the standing stones in Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, and relates it to mathematics in the Bible, medieval cathedrals and the modern-day credit card." The producer adds Jesus “would have come to learn what was being taught about astronomy and geometry which was being taught at "universities" run by druids at the time." He evidently didn’t learn the Druid religion however – there is no congruity between reported Druid beliefs (e.g. taking omens from trees, transmigration of souls into animals etc) and his proto-Christian teachings which broke away from the rabbinical upbringing of Jesus’s own society. And as far as megalithic mathematics goes, the Stonehenge builders lived thousands of years before the Druids, whose secret ‘colleges’ took (according to Caesar) up to 20 years to complete – you weren’t allowed to take notes either. (And these secret schools would have scarcely been open to outsiders, like a modern university).
But in this field, when you’ve got a theory to sell, you don’t let details like that stop you. Instead, you take a set of genuine but separate mysteries and package them up into a single grand theory you can sell first to the publisher or film-TV distributors, and then the general reader, as a sort of general simplified theory of everything iconic to do with the country’s past. Then you issue a press release about your product, which today’s’ downsized, and thus always-content-hungry, news organisations are happy to publish almost verbatim (if you compare the news stories, they’re virtually identical).

The producers announce therein, ‘we are opening up a fascinating new insight into early Christianity.' As to when Jesus’s visit might have been, they say it could be as a boy with his uncle, returning at age 12 when he astounded the temple officials with his precocious questions and responses. There are certainly claims JC came here as a lad, brought by his tin-trading uncle. On the other hand if this seems too unlikely (at odds with the account in Luke 2:39-52, where young JC is only missing a day or so before his temple visit), “he may have made the visit when in his teens or 20s and used his earnings as a carpenter to fund it.” The producers are obviously hedging their bets here. But there is a story of Jesus working in southern Britain as an adult, as a carpenter, a story the Church Of England has officially promoted since at least the 12th century, and continues to promote to this day, complete with holy relic on public view. For what it’s worth, I think we’ll review this lesser-known legend next time.

The 'Phoenician' Question

2009-11-22T17:55:00.010Z

Merchant explorers of that day, / Hustling Phœnicians, came this way / To ship tin ore from Cornish mines / Three thousand years before these lines. - Charles Harrison, A Humorous History Of England, 1920
Last time we raised the issue of whether Homer’s Odyssey could have been inspired by long-distance voyages from Greece up the European Atlantic coast, possibly for tin. The people most often credited with making such voyages in pursuit of tin were the Phoenicians. No ancient historical source I’m aware of, however, explicitly supports the further claims by 19C British antiquarians that the Phoenicians ‘discovered’ Britain, establishing tin-trading outposts in Cornwall. This is the supposed background to the legend Joseph of Arimatheia came here, bringing Christianity/the Grail/the boy Jesus/Mary Magdalene/refugee Apostles (take your pick). Of course, as I mentioned last post, the Phoenician traders protected their trade-route secret to the extent (the story goes) the senate of the western Phoenician port of Carthage would reimburse any merchant captain who drove his ship on the rocks if unable to shake off pursuit from Roman etc vessels. It’s reasonable the location of tin ore supplies would be kept secret, this being the great secret of the Bronze Age - you needed tin for good quality bronze, and there was then no major supply source known in the Med.
This brings us to where we came in last time, the theory Homer’s Odyssey was a “coded” version of a maritime coastal guide to the distant northern Celtic entrepot known as the Tin Isles [Kassiterides], which Herodotus’s diligent enquiries were unable to locate. As Herodotus was enquiring about it back around 450 BC, and Roman-era writers centuries later could not come to any consensus about the Cassiterides’s location, it was obviously a long-running mystery, or if you prefer, a well-guarded secret.
The Phoenicians themselves remain largely a mystery, right down to their name, which occurs in Homer (Odyssey 13.270), dating it perhaps to at least 800 BC. They were traders, operating not as a single kingdom but as a ‘thalassocracy,’ a far-ranging wealthy sea-trading confederacy. (The Bible [Ezekiel 26:16] refers to them as lords of the sea and its islands who now wear fine embroidered garments but who will soon be punished and tremble with fear.) Starting at Tyre in Lebanon, they established ports including autonomous city-states like Carthage around the Mediterranean shore – and perhaps beyond. How far beyond is the great argument about the Phoenicians. (Some have even claimed they sailed right across the Atlantic, discovering the New World over two millennia before Columbus.) This past year, expeditions by three different replica Phoenician ships have been plying the seas to prove, by means of “Kon-tiki” style reconstructions, that long-distance voyages were feasible in Phoenician-style galleys. For the modern sceptics’ quickest dismissal is that such voyages were simply not practical with the technology of the time. One replica, the 20-meter Kybele (an Anatolian goddess), set out this summer with a volunteer crew of 20 to sail 2,300 miles (3,700 km) across the main part of the Mediterranean to promote awareness of Lebanese heritage. (The modern word ‘Phoenicianism’ has been coined to express this school of Lebanese nationalism which promotes the idea the Lebanese are not transplanted Bedouins – the usual academic theory of Phoenician origins – but descendants of native ancient Lebanon going back to King Solomon and Hiram of Tyre.) Sailing from Turkey, the Kybele’s destination was Marseille, the ancient Greek western outpost [founded c600 BC] of Massilia. (This was the home port of the maritime explorer Pytheas, of whom more soon.) Another, the 13-meter Europa (in legend, the king of Tyre’s daughter, after whom Europe is supposedly named), was to set sail last year from Tyre in Lebanon, but apparently had setbacks: its website now refers to an upcoming 6-8 month voyage in 2010. Organised by the Peace Missions Association, with a Lebanese crew of 16-20, it planned visits to Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Malta, Italy, Spain and France, “to raise awareness among citizens of foreign countries about past and present civilizations in Lebanon.” A third replica, the Phoenicia, set off last year but is still en route as it has a more ambitious itinerary - to circumnavigate Africa before sailing back and forth across the Med, and then up to the south coast of England. The main part of this voyage was inspired by a reference in Herodotus – a sceptical one.
Herodotus’s Histories [4.42] refers to a 7C BC Egyptian ruler, Necho II, who abandoned an early attempt to build a Suez canal for trade purposes lest it offer an invasion route to enemies from the east, instead despatched a Phoenician fleet to sail down the east coast of Africa to see if they could return via Gibraltar. This they did, returning several years later with a tale of strange sights. One was that down near the southern tip of Africa, the sun traversed the sky on their right hand as they headed west, i.e. the northern half of the sky. This detail prompted Herodotus to express his disbelief, for in the then-known world, being situated north of the Equator, the sun crosses the southern half of the sky. (This is supposedly the basis of the mnemonic used by those sailing in colonial routes from England to Arabia, India etc. to book a cabin on the shadier side of the ship: POSH = Port Out, Starboard Home.) Today, it is this telling detail that convinces historians that the voyage actually occurred. It also inspired explorer Philip Beale to build his replica the Phoenicia, which as I begin writing this blog post is just crossing the Equator, so that the crew will be seeing the sun rise and set in the northern half of the sky for many months to come. But when the Phoenicia sails north from Gibraltar next year and up to the south coast of Britain, will it really be following in the wake of pioneering Phoenician sailors? Did the Phoenicians also sail north, to establish tin-trade entrepots on the southwest coast of Britain?
The Carthaginian senate also despatched a fleet under their admiral Hanno to circumnavigate Africa anti-clockwise if possible, or at least establish trading outposts down the west coast of Africa, and map the coast. This last part Hanno managed, for his 18-paragraph summary account survived (as a 10th-C copy of a copy of a bronze pedestal inscription Hanno commissioned). This tells of having seen wondrous sights, such as gorillas and a mountain of fire – possibly Mt Cameroon – before turning back after some 35 days. Around the same time, another Carthaginian admiral, Himilco, was (according to Pliny the Elder’s 1st-C AD Natural History) sent 'to explore the outer coasts of Europe', i.e. the Atlantic coast. Sadly, Himilco’s official account did not survive. But a much later surviving source, a poem by a 4C AD Roman official, survives in a 714-line MS copy published in Venice in 1488, which draws in part on this lost account, quoting 3 passages mentioning ‘Punic Himilco’ ‘the Carthaginian.’ This is Rufius Festus Avienus’s Ora Maritima, a title which literally means maritime mouths i.e. inlets, implying it is based on a periplus – if not a coastal-navigation how-to style guide, then at least a memoir-style past-tense equivalent like Hanno’s. (Translated editions of Ora Maritima are titled Description Of The Seacoast From Brittany Around To Massilia [ed. JP Murphy, Chicago 1977]; or simply “Sea-coasts” or “Sea-shores”.) The poem credits its information as “published long ago in the secret annals of the Carthaginians.”
Unfortunately the poem is not a straightforward linear-narrative adaptation, making it difficult to fix some of its place-names on a map. The poem repeats details, and jumps from Cadiz up to Brittany, and gives the route south from there. The overall guide ends back at Massilia, suggesting it is derived from a Greek copy kept there. It may be that Avienus also combined details from the outward and return legs of the voyage. Himilco is mentioned as spending months facing sea monsters, fogs, doldrums, shallows, sandbars, and masses of seaweed, all making progress difficult. (The conventional theory is Himilco’s original account was a negative one to discourage rivals, but as the account would have been kept secret at the time, it may be that he was trying instead to make excuses to the Carthaginian senate, which could impose cruel penalties on officers who failed in their mission, such as crucifixion. Indeed, the Romans parsed ‘Phoenician’ as ‘Men Of the Penalty’ – Poeni.) Avienus says Himilco was not pioneering an unknown route. His was more likely a colonising expedition like Hanno’s, which involved a fleet of 60 penteconter [=50 rowers each] ships carrying 30,000 [sic – 3,000?] settlers, and establishing outposts en route. In practice, these had to be no more than a day’s sail apart - which would explain why it took Himilco 4 months to sail the first part of the route. The poem says he was following in the wake of the Tartessians’ former trade route, northwest from Tartessos. This may be the earliest reference to the fabled Celto-Iberian silver-trade port that once lay near Cadiz (exact location now lost).
The route northwest is referred to as not from Tartessos itself but from its successor port, Phoenician Gadir [later Roman Gades, modern Cadiz], used by ‘folk of Carthage.’ This confirms the origin of Gadir as a western Phoenician port established to open up the Atlantic trade, displacing its Celto-Iberian predecessor, Tartessos. (Some say it was also a Gibraltar-style naval HQ which effectively closed the Straits for centuries. One historian says a peace treaty with Rome survives from the Punic Wars era whereby Carthage retains exclusive rights to the Atlantic trade.) This ancient route leads, says Avienus, to the “bourne” (implying a trade haven) of the Oestrymnides [“extreme western isles”](thought to be around Brittany), where the Oestrymnici [“extreme westerners”?], a proud and vigorous people, carried on trade across the open sea using boats made only from sewn leather hides [i.e. Celtic curraghs]. It’s been suggested by Prof. Barry Cunliffe that Avienus’s description is so confused because there were in fact two clusters of isles called ‘Oestrymnides’ or “extreme western isles,” one in Spain and one in Brittany - just as today there are two peninsula called Finister[r]e [“land’s end”], one the westernmost tip of Spain, and the other, the westernmost tip of Brittany.
What is most interesting is that the poem seems to give away the great trade secret of the age: it says here in ‘the Gulf Oestrymnian’ [Bay of Biscay] are ‘the widely scattered isles .. rich with their lodes of lead and metalled tin’ – in other words, the long sought-after Kassiterides. I’ve never seen anyone comment on the remarkable fact of this great trade secret, which had Herodotus foxed, being divulged here. Perhaps this is not surprising for those who have written of the mystery as if the metal was actually mined there. It confirms my own view this is an over-literal interpretation, and the Tin Isles were merely trading rendezvous offshore islets which were in effect a moveable feast – the metal was brought there, smelted into ingots, at agreed times. The islands are not referred to in the poem as Kassiterides, but Oestrymnides. This further suggests the ‘the Gulf Oestrymnian’ [Bay of Biscay] took its name from being bounded by the cape of Oestrymnis and Oestrymnides, which suggests a ‘Cape Oestrymnis’ rocky headland in Spain and the string of islets off southwest Brittany as the Oestrymnides. Both names, based on the root meaning ‘westernmost’, are periplus-friendly ones which would tell captains these two were points where you did not want to head any farther west.

For those that have long championed isles off southern Britain as the location of the Tin Isles, I would argue that exploration of the Prettanic Isles with their own Cassiterides, like the tidal isle of “Ictis” described by Diodorus c50 BC, would come later. This is borne out by Himilco/Avienus’s casual passing mentions of Albion [Britain] and neighbouring Ierne [Ireland], given as two days sail away. Both island names are also slightly confused – Albion is parsed as “the Albiones’ isle” and Ireland or Eire as ‘The Sacred or Holy Isle (evidently confusing it with Greek ‘hiero’), and no particulars given of either island, which implies an early era, when the isles were still unexplored. (In the early pre-compass era, merchant ships tended to hug mainland coasts, guided by their periplous, which listed overnight anchorages a day’s sail apart.) Beyond the Oestrymnides, says Avienus, is the land of the Kelts [northern Gaul?]. Beyond these Keltic lands, one enters the frigid zone where the very heavens freeze. Here are only the now-empty fields of the Ligurians. In early Greek accounts, the Ligurians were characterised as fierce headhunting types, and the name Ligures was used loosely the way Keltoi would later be used. But the poem depicts them as farmers, now fearful refugees dwelling across the sea on a remote and rocky shore [Scotland/Pictland?], driven out by Keltic strife.
Similarly, the traders of the Oestrymnides isles, the once proud and vigorous Oestrymnici, have been driven out by “the serpent” [in Avienus’s Latin, multa serpens – many serpents]. This is associated here with Ophiussa, a legendary Greek western region (later a constellation) whose name in Greek means Land Of The Serpent. (There’s an intriguing reference to a Roman legion later encountering a giant ‘worm’ when in Spain, and destroying it with a ballista siege-engine catapult bolt.) While Avienus’s text puts Ophiussa facing Brittany across the ‘gulf’ [Bay of Biscay?] on the coast of Iberia [i.e. northern Spain], Ophiussa is elsewhere claimed to have been a region of Portugal, i.e. on the west [not north] coast of the Iberian peninsula, where a serpent and/or dragon cult, possibly Ligurian, supposedly flourished. Reported there were the Dragani, or Dragon Men as well as the Ophiusians. (Ophis can mean serpent in Greek, and –usa is an old place-name suffix, cf Hittite Wilusa for Greek Ilium, as in Iliad, i.e. Troy.) It looks like the Ophiusians migrated west later on, for Avienus puts Ophiussa only 7 days on foot from the ‘Sardum’ [Sardinian] sea, suggesting it was by the narrow neck of land along the Spanish-French border. The later description in Diodorus said it took the tin-trade pack-pony convoys from ‘Ictis’ off Britain a full 30 days to reach Massilia by crossing the main part of France, from an unidentified cross-Channel port south of Brittany [Nantes?] via the Loire Valley and then down the Rhone.
Of course, a c600 BC account like Himilco’s is still too late to be an actual source of inspiration for Homer’s Odyssey, per our current theory, but it’s as close as we can get at present to a possible underlying source. And there is certainly no lack of mysteries that might inspire a teller of tales - we have a whole boatload of them here, with peoples and places almost as strange as those in the Odyssey.
In some future post we can venture farther north to look at these in more detail – such as the people with a name similar to the Phoenicians – Homer’s Phaeacians, “most remote of men.”

Homer's North Atlantic Odyssey?

2009-10-26T13:30:00.005Z

--Could Homer's Odyssey be inspired by actual voyages of discovery by pioneering Mediterranean sailors up the North Atlantic coast?
This is a speculative theory which is not entirely new. That is, it was not simply born of the current publishing trend towards creating conspiracy-theory scenarios revealing the "secret history" of a contentious figure or event previously covered up. In this case, there are references in ancient codex sources dating back to Roman times suggesting the “northern” theory was entertained back then. However, modern books tend to go for grand schemes which don't simply suggest a tale based on an early northern pioneering voyage, but claim a 1:1 correspondence between every Homeric place name and a northern locale. It's suggested in some of these modern books that the Odyssey contains a secret navigational code hidden inside a novelistic wonder tale. Usually translated from German, French, or Dutch originals, they tend however to be disdained or ridiculed by the mainstream media in England.

For example, in 1990, I came across jokey dismissive references in Private Eye and on Ned Sherrin’s Loose Ends on Radio 4 to a new book which apparently argued the “real” Troy had stood near the motorway running past Cambridge, generating newspaper headlines like ‘Troy Relocated To A Happy Eater Off The A11.’ This was Where Troy Once Stood: The Mystery Of Homer's Iliad And Odyssey Revealed, the English translation of a Dutch work by the Paris-based Dutch-born author Iman Wilkens. It argued that not only was the Odyssey “really” set in the North Sea area, but that similarly, the Iliad was really based on a huge war that took place in eastern England among the Celtic tribes. It soon went out of print, which turned it into a sought-after cult book – by 2004 copies were on eBay for £395 – but then was re-published in 2005 in an expanded revised edition, with companion DVD. I had already been given a copy of the original version by the book’s English copyeditor, and at £37.60 I wasn’t buying a new edition just to see what had been tweaked. But I was able to comparison-read a sample chapter emailed to me as a PDF by the UK publishers. (You can now do this yourself if interested, link here).

I have to say I myself don’t buy the approach of playing place-name scrabble to give every single Homeric locale a 1:1 north-Atlantic identification, ranging all over the ocean, from Madeira to Newfoundland. For example in Wilkens, the River Cam which gives Cambridge its name is identified as the original of Homer’s River Scamander on the plain before Troy, and so on. Not to pick on Wilkens, this interpretation is credited to a 19th-C. Belgian lawyer, Théophile Cailleux, in a book written in French which placed Troy in the same spot, a century before, in 1878. This was echoed by Ernst Gideon in a 1973 book in Dutch, Homerus Zanger der Kelten, which doesn’t seem to be available in English. Evidently there were northern-odyssey books some two centuries ago, though again not in English. One was by Johan Voss, the German mythologist and translator of Homer, in 1804, and another in 1806 by the French writer Charles-Joseph de Grave, which put Odysseus in the British Isles and Western Europe respectively. Cailleux has been cited as inspiration by other postwar authors besides Wilkens, like the French amateur sailor Gilbert Pillot in his 1969 [trans. 1972] The Secret Code Of The Odyssey: Did The Greeks Sail The Atlantic?, whose Homeric-voyage identifications range from Madeira up around Ireland and the Hebrides, to Iceland. Other authors use both sides of the Atlantic in their search for similar place-names or geographic features. For example, Henriette Metz’s 1964 The Wine-Dark Sea evidently put the Scylla-Charybdis whirlpool in Newfoundland’s Bay of Fundy, where there is a dramatic tidal range.

The “North Atlantic Odyssey” theory is still worth exploring here, for it deals with unresolved issues referred to in ancient manuscripts relating to British prehistory - part of our range on this blog. The underlying premise of both the traditional Mediterranean theory and the North Atlantic one is that Homer based his Odyssey on early long-distance coast-navigation guides called in Greek periplous, which provided sailing times and directions, and coast features to watch out for. Classical enthusiasts have thus spent decades trying to fit Odysseus’s voyage onto a map of the Med without any consensus - the sailing times and directions Homer gives just don’t match up consistently enough. (Some amateur sailors have given this a good try, and written books of their own modern odysseys, either in modern yachts or replica galleys, which make enjoyable armchair-travel reading, like Ernle Bradford’s Ulysses Found and Tim Severin’s The Ulysses Voyage – both still in print.)

The “Northern” theory instead proposes a fresh approach of trying to fit at least the ‘flashback’ part of Odysseus’s voyage onto a map of the North Atlantic. At first, this may seem odd due to our standard mental image of Ulysses and his bronzed crew sailing the sunny Mediterranean, but this is likely based on modern screen versions being filmed there. (Iman Wilkens’s own personal starting point for his own take on the Iliad was wondering why the weather described by Homer is so rainy and foggy – more like his native Holland than the sunny Med…) With this approach you can keep Troy alias Ilium (hence Iliad) in the Aegean, where more evidence of a Homeric-scale city has recently been excavated (undermining one of Wilkens’s premises, that the ‘Troy’ in Turkey was too small). There are also mentions of the city in the records of their Hittites neighbour, as Wilusa (-usa being the Hittite suffix equal to the –ium in Homer’s Ilium), and of their war with the Akkihiyoi (Homer’s Achaeans), conducted by one Prince Aleksandros (Paris’s other name being Alexandros). (On this, see Michael Wood’s In Search Of The Trojan War.)

Instead, you can postulate a long-distance voyage west across and out of the Med. (Ulysses is blown off course westward by a storm for 17 days, which Gilbert Pillot says would more than do it if you work out the maths, i.e. 17 x 24 hrs at 5-10 knots/hr, the Med being only some 2500 km wide). This puts the story onto a larger world map and would help explain why Odysseus was away for 19 years – he went literally to the edge of the known world. It would also explain Homer’s odd reference to a shepherd being able to make twice as much money doing the night-watch in winter, something that makes more sense in the isles of the north, where the nights can be 16 hours long in winter. Others point to Homeric references to the singing swan, which is found only in northern latitudes. There are also apparent references to tidal currents in river mouths, something the Med is too small to generate, as well as the Scylla-Charybdis whirlpool being dangerous thrice a day. (Pillot identifies it with the Correyvreckan whirlpool off Mull which nearly drowned George Orwell.) Homer’s constant references to the “wine-dark” or “wine-faced” sea also seem an odd way to describe the Med’s famously blue-green colour (the “Northern” explanation for this is to do with eroded sandstone and red earth colouring coastal waters).

There are also odd references in the works of early classical writers, like the Roman writer Plutarch, who in passing suddenly claims Homer’s Ogygia (where Calypso keeps Odysseus captive) is located in the North Atlantic, "five days' sail from Britain" (some have suggested the Faeroes as the right distance here). Strabo, who investigated Homeric geography, thought Plutarch might be right. The poet Apollodorus thought the Odyssey unhistorical, but part-set in the North Atlantic. The Roman historian Tacitus said there was a memorial in the far north of Caledonia, i.e. Scotland, commemorating the visit there of Ulysses (the Roman version of Odysseus). Tacitus also says in his Germania the tribes venerate the Greek hero Hercules. There is also an odd Greek legend of a visit to ‘Britannios’ by Hercules. Odd because he was believed by ancient Greeks to have lived in the 13th C. BC, and to have marked the western limit of Greek exploration at the ‘Pillars Of Hercules’ - the Gibraltar Strait. Others, like 5th C. BC historian Thucydides, doubted the Iliad was historical - that their ancient Greeks forebears with their tiny city-states could have ever mounted a war on such a scale as at Troy.

The theories cited up to now have suggested an early voyage by Mediterranean sailors (Greek, or perhaps Phoenician) west and then north, recorded in a precious periplous which was worth keeping secret. (Later, the senate at Phoenician Carthage would reward any merchant captain who wrecked his ship if he could not shake off pursuit, in order to protect their secret trade routes from their rival Rome - which suggests these did remain secret until well into the Roman era.) Pillot’s 1969 northern-odyssey book is titled The Secret Code Of The Odyssey because he argued the verse epic was a Greek syndicate's way of concealing navigation data inside an “entertainment” which acted as an elaborate mnemonic. (Florence and Kenneth Wood's 1999 Homer’s Secret Iliad suggested the Iliad was also such a mnemonic work, to enable the congnoscenti to grasp cyclic star movements, with Achilles representing Sirius, and so on.) The ancient Greek mariners could thereby remember yet protect the key details (sailing directions, times, dangers) of their all-important northern trade route. This was to the sought-after sources of tin (the Kassiterides or Tin Isles, which the 5th-C BC historian Herodotus complained were unlocatable), which were the key to prosperity in the Bronze Age. (Tin was needed to make good-quality bronze and there was then no known supply of tin ore in the Med.) The Kassiterides or Tin Isles were later identified as various islets off the northern coast of Spain, Brittany, and the southwest coast of Britain. Wilkens also plumps for tin as the cause of his Britain-versus-NW Europe war.

The opposing interpretation would be that the entire genesis of the original, ur-Odyssey was northern-European, deriving from proto-Celtic/-Germanic or other early Nordic seafaring peoples. This is how the Iliad ends up being given an entirely northern interpretation, for it makes more sense in terms of fitting the idea of a Nordic origin for the epic than does the Odyssey, whose voyage begins with known places in the Med. One literary-transmission theory is that early Greek sailors might have come for long-distance trade in tin etc, and also took this wonderful epic tale back with them, transforming it into a national epic when it was written up in verse. If the northern peoples preferred not to write out their compositions, relying on prodigious feats of memory (as Caesar said of the Keltic bards), over time the original northern version could have been lost in wars and migrations. Another north-to-south literary-transmission theory is that the northern tribes were the ‘Sea Peoples’ mentioned in Egyptian records who swept south to attack Greece and Egypt around 1200 BC, obliterating the earlier Greeks, who assimilated the northerners’ campfire tales and made them their own when they flourished again as a nation after the Greek Dark Ages. Each theory has its proponents.

The second variant of this north-to-south literary-transmission theory can be found in an Italian book suggesting a largely Finnish setting, which got the usual dismissive reception (“Finnish scholars were quick to label it an interesting joke.”) It’s another “northern Troy” book, here arguing for a Scandinavian-Baltic rather than a Celtic-British setting, Troy being identified with Toy or Toija in Finland. The first of author Felice Vinci’s books on the topic, his 1993 Homericus Nuncius, was evidently not translated, but his 2nd, his 1998 Omero nel Baltico was published in English in the US in 2005 as The Baltic Origins Of Homer's Epic Tales: The Iliad, the Odyssey, And The Migration Of Myth

Vinci is not a Finn, but an Italian nuclear engineer, from Rome, and is not just - as is so often the case - nationalistically promoting his own homeland as the cradle of European civilisation. According to Vinci, Odysseus himself was Dutch. His argument is that a mighty northern Bronze Age civilisation invaded the Mediterranean, taking with them their epic tale of a great war in the Baltic, and its sequel, concerning the seafaring wanderings of one survivor between the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic. The place names were adapted into Greek, but the geographical detail simply did not fit the Med.

This is a theory that was foreshadowed in several books by a German pastor, amateur archaeologist and classical scholar, Jurgen Spanuth (1907-98), though his thesis was that these events survive in distorted version not just in Homer but in Plato’s Atlantis parable. Spanuth compared Homer’s and Plato’s descriptions on a point-for-point basis, and suggested both derived from a common origin. This was the rise and fall of a mighty Bronze Age seafaring nation based in and around Jutland, which fell when an ‘Atlantean’ North Sea flood drove them southward into the Med, where the Egyptians defeated these invading ‘Sea Peoples’ in the Nile delta. He refined his thesis in several books also published in English, from Das Entratselte Atlantis, 1953 [Atlantis-The Mystery Unravelled, 1956] through Die Atlanter [Atlantis Of The North, 1976/79], now all out of print. He argued when the Egyptians defeated the Sea Peoples, they recorded their tale of how their empire collapsed in a flood, and Plato’s source his uncle Solon the Lawgiver, picked it up, just as Solon said, on a visit to Egypt, and Solon and then Plato each wrote up a version.

However, some of Spanuth’s cited evidence and chronology have since proved mistaken. Coming from Germany in particular, the nationalistic enthusiasm which can lead to making such inflated claims - in effect assuming credit for another country’s cultural foundations - has caused a concern one can sense in review coverage. (The contrary, south-to-north, approach long supported by classicists was long promoted as what-the-Greeks-and-Romans-did-for-us 'cultural diffusion', though Carbon-dating of trade goods has somewhat undermined this one-way scenario.) Rebuffed by the mainstream, Spanuth published items in some right-wing German magazines, which marginalised him further, for one of the concerns with this type of historical claim is that nationalist political groups will use it as an intellectual justification for xenophobia.

However he is credited with prompting further research into sunken North Sea ports, in this case Rungholt, where underwater excavation has now, reportedly, found ceramics evidencing trade between Frisia and (wait for it) Minoan Crete dating back to 1600-1400 BC. This was of course around the time the Minoan Empire collapsed in the wake of the Thera/Santorini eruption – an event claimed by some classical scholars (and others) as inspiration for Plato’s Atlantis tale. (The new finds are detailed in cultural historian Hans Peter Duerr's 2005 book given as Rungholt: The Search For A Lost City, though it’s not clear if this is actually published in English.) Spanuth’s final work, from 1989, dealing with how the matter of this north-to-south cultural transmission might have worked, does not appear to have been translated. (Die Rückkehr der Herakliden: das Erbe der Atlanter; der Norden als Ursprung der griechischen Kultur - “The Return Of The Heraclides: The Legacy Of The Atlanteans, The North As The Origin Of Greek Culture.”)

This controversial north-to-south cultural-transmission theory is centuries older than German nationalism. There had been an attempt centuries before to place the inspiration for Plato’s Atlantis in the Baltic, which was the grandaddy of all these books. In the 17th C, the Swedish allround Renaissance scholar (physician, astronomer, archaeo-historian etc) Olaus or Olof Rudbeck caused consternation with his northern-thesis 4-part, 2,500 page work Atland eller Manheim, translated from Swedish into Latin for scholarly use as Atlantica. This cited linguistic parallels between Swedish, Hebrew etc to claim the oldest district of his home town Uppsala was centre of 'lost Atlantis' and thus - by the extravagant logic of cultural diffusion - Sweden was the cradle of western civilisation going back to Adam and Eve.

Despite ridicule from his local university colleagues (who accused him of forging evidence) Rudbeck's grandiose claim of Swedish precedence made him a national icon, though his life and work were cut short when his nominated 'true Atlantis' Uppsala had its own Atlantis-style disaster. This was not through earthquake and flood, but fire. Despite his climbing onto his roof to direct the fire-fighting, the blaze destroyed most of the university town, including his house and most of his manuscripts, and he died soon after. His notorious academic reputation notwithstanding, Swedish monarchs would be crowned over his grave, and his son carried on his father’s extravagant linguistic claims, evidently to help Sweden claim a place among the European powers of the day. Old Uppsala, the pre-Christian district he based his claim around, where among burial mounds is the remains of a strange 'temple' church, continues to attract interest from Neo-Pagan groups, as a place where pagan worship, including human sacrifice, continued long into the Christian era. Like nearly all succesful writers in this field, Rudbeck did not simply invent from whole cloth, but drew on still-unresolved mysteries from the past.

Rudbeck's monumental, obsessive work does not seem to be available in English. However US historian David King has published a 2005 study of Rudbeck's career and Swedish-Atlantis claim. His Finding Atlantis: A True Story Of Genius, Madness, And An Extraordinary Quest For A Lost World (a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in the US), describes how "Rudbeck challenged scholars to come to Sweden and prove him wrong; he would pay the expenses, he boasted. Indeed, for a time, some scholars credited Rudbeck with revolutionizing our understanding of the past. He was admired at the court of Louis XIV, proposed as a member of the Royal Society in London, and celebrated in cafés, salons, and academies across the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters. Avid readers were Leibniz, Montesquieu, and the famous skeptic Pierre Bayle. Even Sir Isaac Newton wrote to request a personal copy of Rudbeck's Atlantica."

Rudbeck's contentious Atlantis claim was the subject of a famous, somewhat satiric illustration, shown here, captioned "The archaeologist Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) reveals his 'Predecessors' - Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, Apollodorus, Tacitus, Odysseus, Ptolemy, Plutarch and Orpheus - the 'Truth' about Atlantis." King adds his own interpretation: "Like a physician dissecting in his anatomy theater, Olof Rudbeck cuts open a map of the modern world and reveals the secret history of Sweden. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and many other well-known figures of antiquity sit around the dissection table like students. Plato strains to take a closer look, and Apollodorus slaps his head in surprise. Ptolemy, who is so often criticized by Rudbeck for faulty geography, looks away in disgust."

Nascent nationalist enthusiasm causing researchers to get carried away in their claims of cultural-historical precedence is an ages-old problem in this subject area. Even Plato’s Atlantis fable was evidently angled to highlights of the dangers of this mindset. The author of The Republic reworked his ancestor Solon the Lawgiver’s unfinished verse epic into a cautionary political fable, told as an educational dialogue, about national hubris leading to the downfall of a mighty empire when it loses favour with the gods. As with Solon’s planned epic, Plato’s fable was never completed. Possibly this was for a similar reason of self-censorship, born of fear of what the Germans call realpolitik. Here it would be concern about which city leaders (known locally as tyrants) might suspect their regime was the model for this arrogant and doomed empire. A lesson there for us all, perhaps…

Having invoked the dread taboo name Atlantis, perhaps we’d better stop there for the moment.

2010 - A Screen Odyssey?

2009-10-04T20:08:00.008+01:00

Last post, I said we’d look at films about ancient odyssey-type voyages that sailed closer to home than the upcoming cycle of films about Jason, Hercules et al which we covered last time.
The Danish film Valhalla Rising now filming in Scotland, Scandinavia and Canada (for a March 2010 release) does bring us closer geographically, with a voyage showing relations between Scots and Vikings.
This is something that has been in the news headlines. Earlier this year, the papers carried articles with headlines like "The Vikings: it wasn't all raping and pillaging" (The Independent), "Spotlight on the cuddly side of the Vikings" (Guardian), "Vikings 'were not barbaric'" (The Press Association), "Those nice Vikings did a lot for us, says experts" (Independent, Ireland), and "Don't mention the pillage as academics explore the nice side of the Vikings" (Irish Times). The press stories were about the 'Between The Islands' conference organised by Cambridge University's Dept of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic Studies, presenting Viking raids as an example of ‘positive immigration’ from which we could learn ‘important lessons’ today. It was convened with 20 ‘cutting edge’ research papers to “celebrate the gentle side of the invaders: the town planners, shipbuilders, farmers, coin-minters and stonecarvers who were forever swapping songs, stories or advice on a better way to rig a mainsail with their Gaelic neighbours.” (As Basil Fawlty might put it, we're all friends together now, eh, and no need to Mention The War - or in this case, the centuries-long Viking terror contemporary sources write of.)
A more recent story outlined the older view more representative of the people at the time, as indicated by the source materials, the ancient codices containing Icelandic sagas, navigation guides etc, “set down on yellowed calf vellum eight centuries ago.” The comments gleaned from these on Scots-Viking relations by a historian at Reykjavik University, Gisli Sigurdsson, were summarised by the Telegraph [20-Sep-09] as: “Vikings 'were warned to avoid Scotland' - Scotland is full of dangerous natives who speak an incomprehensible language and the weather is awful. That was the verdict of a series of 13th century Viking travel guides that warned voyagers to visit at their peril.”
The sources quoted were one-sided, only representing the Nordic view, complaining the Scots made a dangerous prey: "Icelanders who want to practise robbery are advised to go there. But it may cost them their life." There is unintended irony here, with the historian saying the Vikings were ‘nervous’ about the wild Scots and Irish Gaels. The word Scot, like Vikingr, is thought to mean raiders, and the residents of the Western and Northern Isles had been raiding by sea since at least Roman times, when their population was beefed up by refugees from the new ‘Pax Romana,’ and raiding took on a nationalist-political appeal.
Well, all this promises rich dramatic possibilities, but what of this latest film, Valhalla Rising? This has a giant mute Viking (Mads Mikkelsen again) called One-Eye escaping longterm slavery among the Highland clans, joining up with a boy-companion/interpreter, some other Vikings and Scots missionaries en route south to the Crusades, who get turned around in the fog, and end up coming ashore on what they believe to be Valhalla, the warrior paradise of Nordic myth, which proves to be their accidental discovery c1000 AD of America. (Quite an odyssey that, setting out for Jerusalem and ending up discovering North America). There, their companions meet a gruesome fate at the hands of the local denizens, while 'One-Eye discovers his true self.' (YouTube trailer here.) From this synopsis, it sounds a bit like The 13th Warrior, the Beowulf-inspired spinoff (via an obscure Michael Crichton novel called Eaters Of The Dead) of a few years ago - a reworking of various existing strands of history and legend, set amidst brooding northern landscapes where unknown foes lurk.

It also sounds sadly similar to director Marcus Nispel's previous epic, Pathfinder, which in turn is a remake of a 1987 Scandinavian native epic from an old Saami folk tale, authentically filmed by a Saami filmmaker, which was nominated as Best Foreign Film. (Beware the video version, evidently taken from a badly dubbed 16mm US TV print.) The 1987 Pathfinder, a 70mm epic originally titled Veiviseren or Ofelas, recounted how a youth helped defeat an incursion by murderous neighbours in remote Lapland. The 2007 remake has a youth, himself a Viking left behind among the natives as a boy, leading the fight against an incursion by murderous Vikings landing in North America. (Apparently, the locals are the Beothuks of Newfoundland - the original 'Red Indians', who used red-ochre war paint, and were one of the first native tribes to be exterminated). The director is best known for the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and had extra gore added for a special 'unrated' version of the remake.

Historically, the Norse and Picts (as opposed to the western Scots and Irish Gaels) were also rivals and neighbours, until the Norse colonised Pictish bases in northern and eastern Scotland, but nobody has made a film about this yet. One writer who tried to work close to this area in pulp-fantasy terms was the American Robert E Howard, with his Conan and other stories. As reported previously, his Bran mak Morn stories, about the last king of the Picts, are being filmed. Now we also have both a new feature and a new British TV series of 90 minute episodes, on Conan. As I mentioned before, author Robert E Howard was a Romantic Celtophile, and took the name Conan from Celtic legend. The movie began shooting in late August in Bulgaria, after a long wrangle over rights, while the Brit TV series is being prepared by some of those behind the HBO/BBC series Rome. It uses some short stories fallen into the public domain since Howard's death by suicide in 1936, not using the name Conan in the title. (Unlike a lot of REH's other motifs, it's a genuine Celtic name, usually spelt in early sources such as The Gododdin of c600 AD as Cynon). The bad news is the film has the same director as the Pathfinder remake, Marcus Nispel, whose interview comments have fans worried about its 'authenticity.'

The 'world's most famous barbarian' was a Cimmerian, from an historically attested tribe originating in the area of the ancient Crimea, but which is often presented as a land of mist and fog, suggesting a northern Atlantic-coast setting closer to home. Some writers identify them with the Cimbri of Jutland, who abandoned their homeland due to flooding. REH apparently thought the Cimmerians were the ancestors of the Celtic peoples of the British Isles. Ironically, the Picts are excluded from this, treated as the enemy, of both Conan and REH's predecessor-hero Kull of Atlantis. REH was one of many who held to the Romantic 19C belief the British Isles were remnants of once-mighty Atlantis. He used the name Hyboria, adapted from the Greek name for the dwellers-beyond-the-North-Wind (controlled by the god Boreas), the Hyperboreans, who some identify with the residents of the North Sea area, including Britain.

What about the two new screen versions announced of The Odyssey? For there is a theory going back to Roman times that Homer's Odyssey is not set anywhere in the Med, but somewhere beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar Strait), closer to home, among the mythical Hyperboreans. (The Odyssey's foggy weather and remarks about the constellations and the nights being twice as long as the days in winter have suggested a northern voyage.) Well, one filmization, to star Brad Pitt (the recent film Troy's Achilles), is actually an S-F adaptation to be directed by George "Mad Max" Miller and set in outer space. This may not be an isolated case - there's a claim that the current Battlestar Galactica TV series is "a retelling of The Aeneid"

Since the success of the 1956 SF classic Forbidden Planet (the template for Star Trek), widely accepted as an adaptation of Shakespeare's Mediterranean-island fable The Tempest, such cross-genre adaptation has become quite accepted and overt. With its classic opening line "Of arms and the man I sing," Virgil's Aeneid, intended as Rome's "founding" epic, remains a highly influential work, originally translated into English by Dryden and later by Poet Laureate C Day Lewis in 1963, by Allen Mandelbaum (1973 National Book Award), and US Poet Laureate Robert Fitzgerald (1981). In the past few years, there have been four recent translations by American scholars: by Penguin's own 'Aeneid' translator, Robert Fagles of Princeton, by Frederick Ahl of Cornell, by U of Kansas classics professor Stanley Lombardo, and the first by a woman, poet and classicist Sarah Ruden of Yale. And there are reportedly two more versions in the works, one by poet and translator David Ferry, and one by classical literature professor Jane Wilson Joyce. So it isn’t a ‘dead’ work by any means, just a difficult one.

Despite a finale so violent the dying Virgil ordered the manuscript burnt, it has not had a proper film adaptation (as far as I know), though the Italian sword-n-sandal cycle no doubt drew on it. (Obviously the title would be changed as it merely means "concerning Aeneas," the Trojan prince who flees west carrying the 'sword of Troy'. (This is a ‘cameo’ moment at the end of the 2004 film Troy, as if setting up a possible spinoff.) The story is that after a suitably epic period of odyssey-like wanderings, Aeneas founds Rome.)

Disappointingly, the other 2010 Odyssey film will omit Ulysses' ten-year epic voyage and concentrate on his return home and bloody revenge against his wife's suitors back on Ithaca, and looks set to be another gorefest. (it's directed by South African filmmaker Jonathan Liebesman, best-known for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.) Yet there is still hope here for a mature film of Homer's Odyssey - the bestselling UK paperback till 1962 (the year of the Lady Chatterley's Lover censorship trial victory). It's had major English translations into both verse (Alexander Pope) and prose (TE Lawrence), and the influence it still holds among writers, together with recent archaeo-historical theory, may turn the tide.

In the late 19C, Heinrich Schliemann, insisting the Iliad was fact-based, confounded the scoffers of the archaeological establishment by digging down into a great mound near the Hellespont and discovering traces of 7 citadels, one built atop the other. Sceptics said it was too small to fit Homer's account, but a German team of several hundred archaeological staff led by the late Manfred Korfmann have since patiently uncovered a moated outer city, of suitably 'Homeric' size. Since then, there have been similar attempts to rationalise the Iliad's sequel The Odyssey, and its cousin the Argonautica, at least in terms of questing 'in-the-wake-of' style travel books and Discovery Channel documentaries. The account of Jason's Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece is postulated to have been inspired by an early voyage east through the Black Sea to the Caucasus. There, gold was (and still is) traditionally 'panned' out of mountain streams by putting a sheep fleece in the shallows to trap the gold flakes, while rams' skins were royal paraphernalia. (Archaeo-historian Michael Wood, author of In Search Of The Trojan War: “Recent discoveries about the Hittite Empire in Bronze Age Anatolia show celebrations where fleeces were hung to renew royal power.”)

However, with Homer's Odyssey, a similar rationalising theory has not found similar acceptance, partly as earlier books traced out Ulysses' wanderings around the Western Med without reaching any consensus. Since then, it's been argued none of the geography proposed really fits the story 1:1. More recently, a fringe theory has developed that scholars have been trying the fit the inspiration for the tale onto the wrong map, and that they should get their noses out of maps of the Med and look farther afield. That is, the 2nd part of the Odyssey at least was inspired by sailors' “tall tales” from long-distance early Greek voyages to visit actual Bronze Age peoples dwelling on the North Atlantic coast - principally the British Isles.

This is a thesis which is as far as I know is yet untapped by a film industry always on the lookout for 'new' theories, or rather for some twist or spin on orthodox history (like King Arthur having been 'really' a Roman commander). None of the screen Odysseys I've come across to date have had anything but a Mediterranean setting. And we've no had no Discovery Channel type documentary which might document the idea, and thus pave the way. (I’m thinking of the likes of Shaun Trevisick of Atlantic Productions, akin to his 2004 documentary The Real Jason And the Argonauts - inspired ironically by his seeing the 1963 fantasy epic Jason And The Argonauts.) Any film-maker who came across the “Northern Odyssey” thesis via various speculative books, and looked into it may have been put off by the sharply conflicting claims in these books, with no agreement at all on geographical identifications etc. So to do it justice, it's best if we devote a separate blog post to it – next time.

What Price The Favour Of The Gods?

2009-08-31T13:48:00.008+01:00

The film industry seems to have rediscovered what canny CB DeMille built his Biblical epics on: public domain sources allow you a latitude in their adaptation while harking back in publicity to a respectable source - for which you don't have to buy rights. However the flip side of this is that competing productions tend to appear - when the grapevine says that a major producer or director is developing a project on a particular subject, people will think that such an undertaking must be blessed - in olden days they might have said favoured by the gods. For film production is a sector with great risks but no guarantees of success. Everything becomes a gamble, and like others faced with little control over their fate, producers easily become insecure and superstitious. In olden times, if the powerful turned to a new god, others would copy them. In Hollywood, the cliché is that the god is always the same – success, to the extent people will hang on your every word when success shines on you, but cross the street to avoid you as soon as good fortune abandons you. Despite the movers and shakers maintaining secrecy about their latest undertaking (Spielberg learned early on to print his draft scripts on purple paper, which goes black when photocopied), rival projects will quickly appear, since the theme or topic is obviously “favoured.” And with ancient legend, no one can hold monopoly rights.

Currently, it's not the Bible that's in favour (now too divisive for another De Mille), but Greek and Roman myth and legend, whose gods like Zeus are officially part of a 'dead' or churchless religion. Today, we can say things like 'By Jove' (as the characters in the 1962 film The 300 Spartans do, quite anachronistically as it’s a Roman phrase) without worrying that we are turning our statement into an oath sworn in the name of Jupiter - originally Io, the father [piter or pater] of the gods, equal to Greek Zeus. This is the irony of the current trend, and the chief difficulty facing dramatists - the ancients lived and died to please the gods, sacrificing not only animals but even their nearest and dearest to appease them and gain their favour. Whereas today we live in a secular and materialist age that can scarcely comprehend the ancient mindset this literature gives us insight into.

Yet if the gods’ role can be credibly managed for a modern audience, it's still a genre with built-in drama. In Greek or Roman myth-tales, if a hero has the favour or disfavour of one god, he is likely to attract the enmity or secret support of another, for they were jealous rivals, constantly intriguing against one another by meddling directly in the affairs of mortals. I learned that early on, watching films and TV dramas like the 1963 Jason And The Argonauts - obviously a favourite in Hollywood (I think Tom Hanks once said every kid knew the best film ever made was not Citizen Kane but the 1963 ‘Jason.’) The Jason legend is currently undergoing rival remakes - another miniseries version from NBC TV (who made an on-location live-action version in 2000), this time using ‘green screen’ to allow the latest CGI special effects free play, plus X-Men writer Zak Penn's The Argonauts for 20th Century Fox, backed by the producer who brought you "Alien vs. Predator." There is also The Argonauts from Spielberg's DreamWorks, which opens as a modern-day treasure-wreck quest before the heroes are shot back in time to 2000 BC. … I've been keeping tabs on this increasingly crowded media scene as some of these productions are bound to inspire others set closer to our remit here, of the Celtic world. (There are claims going back to classical times that both Hercules and Ulysses - in legend at least - sailed to British shores, more about which in a future post.)

If you read reference works like Larousse's Mythology summarising the tales, you find they often exist in differing form, e.g. Hercules (originally Greek Heracles, meaning glory of the goddess Hera) has several incompatible lifepaths and fates. Scholars say that different cults or priests would change the story to promote their own agenda - and who there and then could argue with them? This inconsistency can be baffling when encountered today in a modern reference sourcebook. But it can help counter one of the genre's PR problems - purist claims the scriptwriters have got the myths or legend 'wrong.' This is often misconstrued anyway. Films like Helen Of Troy (1955 and 2003) or Troy (2004), for example, are not strictly adaptations of Homer's Iliad - neither the start of the onscreen story we always see (Helen's elopement) nor its denouement (the Wooden Horse ploy) are in The Iliad, which covers only a single episode, the 'Wrath Of Achilles,' part a (largely lost) story cycle of different epic poems. The Wooden Horse appears in Homer's 'sequel' The Odyssey, in what we would call a 'flashback' scene, where shipwrecked Odysseus tells his hosts how the ten-year siege of Troy finally ended.

The various screen adaptations of Classical myth and legend coming up for 2010 are inspired, I've read, by veneration for the box-office and DVD millions earned by the 'Rings' trilogy, Gladiator, Troy, and Zack Snyder's hit 2006 R-rated Spartans-last-stand epic '300,' which earned $70 million in its opening weekend in America alone. 300 was a shot-for-shot filmization of a graphic novel by Frank Miller, itself inspired by his seeing an earlier 'straight' historical adaptation [no gods or monsters], the 1962 film The 300 Spartans shot in Greece with official cooperation, the story then having Cold War anti-Soviet propaganda as an example of ‘free men’ standing up against Eastern-bloc tyranny, an issue that had led to civil war in Greece after WWII; the original main source, Herodotus’ near-contemporary Histories, may also have reflected his own determination to write up the war with Persia as the big East-West conflict of his age – perhaps exaggerating the scale of the conflict.) Warner Bros. is now working on "a follow-up film" to 300 - presumably a ‘prequel,’ a similarly-titled sequel being tricky as the 300 all died in the first film.
With the spread of CGI effects, the traditional live-action film seems to be converging with the video game, and like the recent Beowulf, 300 used CGI layers and a blue/green-screen matte process to create a new high-definition IMAX-quality 'hyperrealist' look, an improvement image-wise on both the video game (which 300 was also simultaneously released as) and the adult-content graphic novel. 'Graphic' here also means explicit sex and violence, which seems to be the favoured new approach, to the extent of reducing the characterisation to that of a video game or comic book, and introducing monsters like giant wolves into an historical tale. (Online magazine Spiked published a long essay on 300, on how the R-rated film turned 'xenophobia, amorality and inaccuracy' into 'comic-book' entertainment. That is, where the 1962 film directed by Rudolph Maté had Cold War propaganda value as an allegory of the ‘free’ West resisting tyranny (which is ironic if you know anything about the Spartans), this version was designed to appeal to an America at war with Iraq and its allies, portraying them in a way reminiscent of the sub-human orcs in the ‘Rings’ trilogy. (The film uses a framing device called the Unreliable Narrator to get around this issue.)

Even the Greek and Roman heroes’ own gods are easily regarded today as vain, cruel and capricious, and scriptwriters have to reckon on the fact many viewers would have trouble with the way the gods like Zeus or Poseidon actively intervene out of spite or lust, even visiting mortals in the shape of a swan or a bull to have sex or cause other mischief. Thus, with a film about Troy, the Iliad's references to the constant meddling in the war by a whole gallery of jealous rival gods like Apollo and Poseidon favouring one hero or another are usually omitted as unfilmable. This means the scriptwriters have to come up with 'rational' reasons why the Greeks gift of the Wooden Horse (originally an offering to seagod Poseidon - cf cresting waves are referred to as 'white horses') will be foolishly taken in by the Trojans without checking it. Or reasons (besides Poseidon's disfavour) why it took Odysseus ten years to sail 200 miles home afterwards, being 'forced' to spend years dallying with sea nymphs like Calypso [pictured below] or sorceresses like Circe who could turn men into swine. (I wonder how faithful Penelope reacted to that one?)

Far from home: Arnold Boecklin's painting of Ulysses with the sea-nymph Calypso

The 'Celtic' counterpart gods like Dis Pater that Caesar wrote of encountering in Gaul and Britain (with Druidic 'wicker man' sacrifices), and the fearful goddesses and bloody rituals Tacitus writes of in his accounts of Germania and Agricola's British campaign, represent a similar problem. Ancient religions requiring human or even animal sacrifices by the pious won't work for sympathetic characterisation today.(A new book on the Druids, Blood And Mistletoe, by University of Bristol history professor Ronald Hutton, traces how the Druids have been repackaged over the centuries to fit changing tastes.)

Making everyone ruthless, as in 300, doesn't really circumvent the problem, since piety and cruelty have gone hand in hand throughout history. And piety in itself can make characters seem dim (like Peter O'Toole as old Priam, with his pathetic trust in Apollo in the 2004 Troy, a film where by contrast the hero Achilles is 'modern' in believing gods like Apollo are powerless, he himself being only out for fame). Even with a historical rather than mythic tale, as with the films about the 480 BC Battle of Thermopylae - The 300 Spartans, 300, and the upcoming Gates Of Fire - script difficulties can emerge in terms of character motive. For instance, the Spartan warriors initially refused to mobilise against the Persian invasion as it was a religious holiday. The same difficulty may be faced with the upcoming Sony-Columbia filmization of the March of The Ten Thousand, which is historically a follow-on from the '300 Spartans' war a generation before. It's from the memoir called The Anabasis ['Journey Up-Country'] by Xenophon, one of the officers present, and though no no gods appear, religion still plays a role, with decisions influenced by the ‘reading’ of the entrails of sacrificed animals etc.

Still, historical rather than mythic sources offer the best prospect for keeping the gods at bay, as with the 13-part US TV miniseries on the life of Spartacus debuting in January 2010. I read the news of this with interest, as I recalled from seeing the highly regarded 1960 film directed by Stanley Kubrick that Spartacus' fellow slave, and later common-law wife, was from "Britannia." This intrigued me, since Spartacus died in 71 BC, long before Roman Britannia existed (the name existed, as Celtic-British Prydain, in Greek Prettanike). I thought if this was true, there must have been Roman-British trade routes through Gaul long before. The Roman plutocrat leader Crassus, who buys Varinia, was a character in Winter Quarters, a 1956 novel set in Gaul by British archeo-historian turned novelist Alfred Duggan. And the real Spartacus (under wifely influence?) first led his peoples northwest towards Gaul - when most decided to turn back after they saw the Alps, they were doomed to be trapped on Italy's narrow peninsula. However the Varinia character was evidently just to fit the casting of a British actress (Jean Simmons). Plutarch's account, in his Life Of Crassus, is that Spartacus' "woman" [actual name unknown] was a Dionysian priestess of the same Thracian tribe as he, enslaved and escaped along with him. "Varinia" was just a made-up name, and not even Celtic-British (more Germanic).

I'm not sure about the various other modern retellings, but religion is left out of the 1960 Spartacus, except significantly for an opening remark that slavery was only ended by Christianity - which is not historically correct, and reportedly a calculated sop, added to foil people attacking the project as left-wing. (Before Howard Fast's 1951 novel - self-published as he was blacklisted and in jail for refusing to become an anti-Communist informant, there had also been Scots author Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 1933 Spartacus, famous for its opening sentence, plus Hungarian Arthur Koestler's 1939 The Gladiators, which like Fast's was angled for contemporary political allegory.)

The ancient accounts tell how Spartacus with an army of up to 140,000 slaves, defeated Roman forces in battle half a dozen times, something left out of the 1960 film, presumably to make him more sympathetic, despite blacklisted scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo's arguing for their inclusion, which he labelled the 'big" approach. (He meant that populist revolt could defeat imperial tyranny, as opposed to what he called the 'small Spartacus' concept the producers went for - where the slaves revolt is doomed, but their inevitable defeat became an inspiration). Though Spartacus died in battle, the film has him being crucified. A new study based on the surviving ancient accounts, The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss, professor of classics at Cornell U. and author of The Trojan War: A New History, apparently has various theories about her religious influence as Spartacus' wife, saying the revolt was in partly in pursuit of "the favor of the gods."

Sadly, it seems the upcoming Spartacus miniseries, subtitled Blood And Sand (from the title of a famous bullfighting film), seems intended as little more than a vehicle for 'graphic' violence etc. It is being produced for an R-rated slot on a US premium cable channel, and co-stars Lucy Lawless, former star of Xena: Warrior Princess (and wife of the series' exec-producer), in the role Peter Ustinov played in the 1960 Kirk Douglas film, the gladiator school owner Batiatus, here renamed Lucretia!

Since the cult TV series 'Xena', famous for lines like "The way to a man's heart is through his rib cage," women have been getting more onscreen action roles. As well as the 'braveheart with a bra' Mel Gibson version of Boudicca's revolt we mentioned before, Amazon, a film about an Amazonian "gladiatrix" starring Scarlett Johansson, is also in the works. (The Amazons, mentioned by Herodotus, appear in various myths like the odysseys of Aeneas, Hercules, Theseus, and the Argonauts.) Johansson will play a 'bloodthirsty gladiatrix' out to destroy the army that ravaged her homeland. It's being touted as a cross between 'The Wild Bunch and The Seventh Samurai' [sic], and is set in 200 BC, though there may be a few anachronisms creeping in, given that the scriptwriter got the job on the basis of Outlander, which has a humanoid alien UFO-crash survivor in 709 AD Norway helping local Vikings defeat another alien who has landed nearby, the vicious 'photo-luminescent' predator the Moorwen.

Anyway, the focus in the 2010 Spartacus miniseries is to be on the back story of his early life for which there is no ancient source, to freely go for 'blood and sand' scenes of gladiatorial gore, aiming [at $2 million an episode] to outdo '300' with an orgy of 'graphic sex and violence unlike anything ever seen on television.' This tidbit should suffice to give the idea: "There's a great deal of nudity, both male and female, and some guys are not as well endowed as others, so we had to create [a prosthetic male extension we called] the 'Kirk Douglas' so that certain actors would have [something] they could wear and feel comfortable."

On his own website, Professor Strauss recommends Spartaco, a 1953 b&w Italian film, as more accurate than the 1960 film he thinks it clearly influenced, as well as the 2004 US miniseries adaptation of the Howard Fast novel. Ironically, the first Spartacus film is only available in dubbed version called Sins Of Rome, issued in the US on a double-feature DVD with a 1960 version of the Jason-and-the-Argonauts story, Giganti di Thessaly, from the same director, Riccardo Freda. The latter was re-released in typical dubbed form (I've seen it) as Jason And The Golden Fleece at the same time as a better-known US-UK production of the story, of which more below.

For the Greco-Roman epic has long been the popular basis of Italian cinema, with the 'sword 'n sandal' genre's 1950s revival introducing many to the dubbed action spectacle. (A British film extra I met who had worked on films like the 1955 Helen Of Troy once told me that until 1968, Italian films were shot without sound, all audio being post-dubbed. For the 'sword 'n sandal' epics, this one figure would arrive at the studio with two suitcases containing swords and chains, and in one projection run-through, do the sound effects as well as the dialogue - Take that, you Spartan dog!)

Special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen put both gods and monsters on screen with his 'kidult' colour fantasy films derived from ancient myth, starting with his 1958 The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, loosely based on Arabian Nights tales (some of which are adapted from Homer’s Odyssey; here the Cyclops and the Sirens appear). This was followed by two films featuring Greek gods as characters. Scripted by a writer who was both a classicist and a dramatist, Beverley Cross, the 1963 Jason And The Argonauts was the first to show the gods v mortals, here having them play a sort of chess with human fates. (The first big-screen Technicolor film of the Odyssey, Dino de Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti's 1954 Ulysses starring Kirk Douglas, now finally out on DVD, was more a Classic Comics version of the tale. It had monsters like the Cyclops, but no gods intervening on-screen, only a curse on Ulysses by Neptune - these being the Roman equivalent names of the Greek Odysseus and Poseidon.
The 1997 Hallmark TV miniseries version of The Odyssey directed by Andrei Konchalovsky did go for the full Homeric framework of heroes v gods on-screen, cf Poseidon to Odysseus - “without the gods, man is nothing.”) Hallmark Entertainment's 2000 2-part TV movie Jason And The Argonauts, aka Jason And The Golden Fleece, also has Zeus and Hera again intervening in mortals' affairs, and their 2-part 2005 Hercules takes a similar approach, with the troubled strongman battling against various burdens and tasks set by the gods. (Hercules of course was also one of the Argonauts, though he dropped out, angry and upset, after his adopted companion Hylas is seduced and spirited away by nymphs [pictured below]. The 1963 Jason And The Argonauts, aimed at children, had him drop out due to guilt over Hylas being killed by bronze giant Talos.) Variety reports at least three Hercules movies in development, including one from Universal Pictures and one from Spyglass Entertainment called Hercules: The Thracian Wars. As I mentioned earlier, Hercules had such a crowded life, some scholars there were several different figures with that forename, so he’s a natural candidate for bare-chested screen heroics that can claim to be based on some myth somewhere.

An Argonaut, Hercules’s pal Hylas, is about to forget all about finding the golden fleece

The Perseus-v-the-Gorgon legend is also being filmed again, with a remake of Clash Of The Titans, which was a major box-office draw in 1981. Despite some nightmarish scenes, Harryhausen's 1981 version was a kid-oriented grab-bag of Greek and other myth plus some blatant inventions for the kiddies (like a cute R2D2-style beeping robot owl). Scripted like the 1963 Jason by Beverley Cross, it had an A-list star gallery of gods - Olivier as Zeus, Ursula Andress as Aphrodite, Claire Bloom as Hera, Maggie Smith (Cross' wife at the time) as Thetis etc - all standing around in a heavenly palace. Here, Perseus combats hazards such as the Kraken (actually a Scandinavian sea-monster), and the Gorgon Medusa (who here seems to live across the River Styx, crossed in Charon's rowboat, on the isle of the dead shown in Arnold Boecklin's famous painting, pictured here).

Warner Brothers' Perseus-legend remake is being produced largely here in the UK (shot partly in England and Wales) for March 2010 release. It stars Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes as "feuding Greek gods Zeus and Hades" (I'm quoting The Guardian here) who try to help or hinder young Perseus trying to rescue Princess Andromeda with the help of Pegasus the winged horse, and two players from recent 007 films: Mads Mikkelsen as the leader of his 'Praetorian Guard' and Gemma Arterton as Io, "a priestess who in the myths is seduced by Zeus before being turned into a cow." (I have a feeling the scriptwriters will drop the cow transformation - as much a nonstarter as those moments in Homer where Achilles or Odysseus is dressed as a girl to avoid conscription.)

One of the Argonauts, Theseus (who went on to slay the Minotaur), is also now getting his own film in 2010, though gods and their demon minions are co-stars here, judging from the title, War Of Gods. (IMDB synopsis: "A purported bastard who retains an allegiance to his mother despite the fact that he longs to join the quest of a king who is battling demons in ancient Greece later embarks on a grail of discovery that has him finding he is the king's son and also fated to become his country's greatest hero as he leads the successful war against long-imprisoned Titans who are hoping to use the demons to restore their power.") This is not to be confused with God Of War, a popular mythology-based video game which is now also being turned by Universal Studios into a feature.

Whether the gods will smile on all these competing endeavours by mortal producers and scriptwriters to achieve box-office success through ancient myth and legend, only time and the Hollywood trade papers will tell. But like Odysseus, we're still far from home - where are the films of myths and legends from the Celtic world? Ancient 'classical' tales influenced Celto-British works within our remit here, like the one which launched the Arthurian cycle, Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12C Historia Regum Brittanniae (just out in a new £25 textual-study edition from Boydell & Brewer), which is set up as a follow-on to The Aeneid. (Trojan exile Aeneas, now a king in Italy, banishes his great-grandson Brutus, who sails away and eventually ends up on an island he names after himself – Britain. Geoffrey was probably misled by the “y” in the underlying Celtic name Prydain, thinking it pronounced like the first “u” in Brutus.) But the films discussed so far take place outside our area, on Mediterranean shores. However, one or more of the new films announced for 2010 may have a northern Atlantic setting closer to home.
More on this next time.

Those Pictish Blues Again

2009-08-13T23:19:00.010+01:00

While we’re in the area of Pictish history [see previous entry], it might be the time to mention this elusive, neglected people are to feature in several upcoming screen epics.
The first screen epic is Bran Mak Morn, being made by British mini-major Working Title (Atonement, Elizabeth, Fargo, United 93), for 2010 release. Bran Mak Morn was a series of fantasy tales about the supposed last king of the Picts by ‘Conan’ creator, the 30s pulp author Robert E. Howard, a Texan self-conscious about his Celtic roots. The fansite rumour is that the chosen story will be “Worms Of The Earth” wherein let’s just say (I read it years ago) fearsome underground denizens are called up to rid the Pictish kingdom of the Romans.
As Howard’s work sprang from his fevered brow and has almost nothing to do with the actual Picts, there’s not much to say, except for their use of the idea the proto-Picts were a stunted underground race, surviving in hiding from the superior warrior race who invaded from Atlantis. This is one of several problems in the traditional depiction of the Picts – their identification with a dark dwarf-like ‘aboriginal’ race. This remains a source of irritation to anyone trying to give the historical Picts their due.
The second film project, now in post-production, is writer-director Neil Marshall’s Centurion, whose plot synopsis is given as follows:

AD 117. The Roman Empire stretches from Egypt to Spain, and East as far as the Black Sea. But in northern Britain, the relentless onslaught of conquest has ground to a halt in face of the guerrilla tactics of an elusive enemy: the savage and terrifying tribesmen known as the Picts. Marcus Dias, sole survivor of a Pictish raid on a Roman frontier fort, marches north with General Titus Virilus’ legendary 9th legion, under orders to wipe the Picts from the face of the earth and destroy their leader Gorlacon. But when the legion is ambushed on unfamiliar ground, and Virilus taken captive, Marcus faces a desperate struggle to keep his small platoon alive behind enemy lines, evading remorseless Pict pursuers over harsh terrain, as the band of soldiers race to rescue their General, and to reach the safety of the Roman frontier.

The IMDB tags it as a war-adventure drama/thriller, and it does sound like a plot setup familiar from WW2 dramas about the platoon or patrol cut off behind enemy lines trying to make their way back to their base. As the stoic title implies, the heroes are Romans, played by Michael Fassbender and Dominic West (of The Wire). Olga Kurylenko is Etain, which is at least a Celtic name, even if more Irish than Pictish. None of the other names in the IMDB list sound Pictish or even Celtic - Bothos, Macros, Thax, Gorlacon. The synopsis paints the Picts as ‘savage and terrifying tribesmen’ (“Cue the Pictish Hordes, and .. Action!”)
It sounds as if we’re in a similar treatment as in the 2004 film King Arthur with Clive Owen as a Roman Arthur (Artorius), venturing north of Hadrian’s Wall. There, the natives are called “Woads”, sort of angry peasants living in the bushes, who need Roman leadership to oppose the invading Saxons (who for reasons best known to themselves are here invading several centuries too early, and from the wrong end of the country). The script’s patronising designation of the natives as ‘Woads’ is no doubt is inspired by Caesar’s description of c54 BC how British men used the woad plant to paint their bodies blue all over. ("Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem, atque hoc horridiores sunt in pugna aspectu" - "In fact all the Britons dye themselves dark blue with woad, making themselves all the more terrifying in battle.")

(Hence Mel Gibson’s blue face [pictured] in Braveheart, which is completely ahistorical, but became a Scots nationalist rallying point – Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond said Braveheart had “given the Scots back their history”.)
The idea the Picts of succeeding centuries also painted themselves blue with woad seems to be a confusion with later Roman accounts of Pictish warriors tattooing themselves with blue marks, the woad being presumed to be the ink (though I’ve read of a modern investigation which found it to be useless, even dangerous, as tattoo ink). One account says they used iron to draw the shapes of animals on their faces and arms. Indeed, the name ‘Briton’ (as in Ancient Briton) has been parsed as People Of The Shapes or Designs. Anyone who thinks they were uncultured only needs to look at their artwork, which appears on so-called symbol stones. It’s almost a language of its own, and they symbolism remains obscure, just as the Pictish language, surviving only in written fragments such as memorial inscriptions, has never been deciphered.
The 3rd upcoming screen epic is the £15m production The Eagle Of The Ninth, an adaptation which we mentioned in a previous post, of a well-regarded 1954 young-adult novel by Rosemary Sutcliff OBE, CBE (1920-92), which begins filming this month, in Scotland and Hungary.
Though the IX Legion merely ceases to be mentioned by name in Roman imperial records, English writers have been trying to depict its ‘vanishing’ as British history’s equivalent of the 1876 Custer ‘Massacre’, with the Picts playing the role of those other painted savages, the Red Indians. (Novelist John Fowles’s reference to the Kelts as ‘the Red Indians of ancient Europe’ seems apt here.) No such battle is in fact known to history. (In fact, one 2007 film already had the IX legion as being not 'lost' but 'last': The Last Legion, starring Colin Firth and Ben Kingsley, has the characters trying to find the 9th, in 460 AD as the last one still loyal in Britain!)

The real Pictish confederacy, which probably arose as an anti-Roman alliance, was the foundation of a kingdom which eventually merged with their western neighbours the Scots, the kings being crowned at Scone using the Stone of Destiny as sacred relic. But even peaceful kings like Macbeth (now considered of Pictish descent) have been depicted as villains (even Shakespeare is guilty here).
Until recent times (Dances With Wolves etc), Hollywood’s depictions of the North American native peoples have been crude, or worse. With film treatments of the natives of ancient Europe, we seem to be still in the stage where the natives are similar savages, always looking to make trouble for ‘civilised’ types (here the Romans and Romano-Britons). English historians quite shamelessly use the word barbarians to describe all those societies outside the Greco-Roman ‘classical’ civilisation (which was of course built on slavery), i.e. the native peoples of Europe.
The story setup here concerns “a wounded Roman soldier and his loyal Celtic slave who try to solve the mystery of the Ninth Legion, a brigade of Roman soldiers that vanished after heading into the untamed Highlands of Scotland 15 years earlier.”
The title refers to the fact the hero actually wants to recover the legion's lost eagle-motif standard. (If this sounds familiar, it's probably as an actual incident mentioned by Caesar in his Gallic Wars became the means whereby two 'plebian' characters were introduced into plotlines normally confined to imperial types for the BBC/HBO miniseries Rome - which may be returning to the screen.) The two young heroes (played by Hollywood’s Channing Tatum and ‘Billy Elliot’ star Jamie Bell) are a Roman citizen, Marcus Aquila, and his ‘Celtic’ freed-slave/sidekick, Esca, who Aquila rescued from a gladiatorial arena.
Hopefully, the depiction of the Picts will not be so backward - children’s literature and drama are carefully vetted for racial stereotyping etc. The talented and prolific Sutcliff, who was confined to a wheelchair for most of her life due to Still's Disease, was a dedicated historical novelist, whose work for children and young adults is largely still in print. The Eagle Of The Ninth (1954) was her first success, the start of a 6-book series, of which the two follow-ons are available together as a Puffin omnibus paperback [pictured].
It tells the story of a trek beyond the Roman Wall into the Pictish lands (up the W side of Loch Lomond towards Kintyre), where the duo must dwell among the Picts to obtain what they want by patience and guile. This type of story, classed as Captivity Narrative, is a venerable genre that has evolved from 17th-C shock-horror accounts of humiliations of Christians at the hand of benighted heathen savages, to a more enlightened approach where the two cultures are balanced out by having the ‘civilised’ one shown as repressive and unhealthy, as in Dances With Wolves.
But although there is also a tame wolf cub in this story, Sutcliff was still a product of her background and her era. That is, like other English historical novelists, she sympathised with the Roman invaders rather than the native British. In these works, the story of early Britain becomes the story of the Roman occupiers and their Romano-British successors. The Romans are always honourable and sensible, while the natives are ignorant and superstitious. (In the series followon Sword At Sunset, Arthur is a Roman-trained soldier who tells his story – the basis of the Arthurian legend - in the first person as a Roman military memoir.) Here, the legionary Eagle the heroes want to recover is predictably being guarded as a captive sacred icon (“the Red Crests God”), and they have to recover it to stop it being used to whip up anti-Roman hatred. (As if that would be necessary, with the Romans enslaving their families and sowing their fields with salt.) In a 1986 interview, Sutcliff admitted, “I think that I am happiest of all in Roman Britain. I feel very much at home there... The more level-headed viewpoint of the Romans is nearer to our own way of looking at things.” The story offers up as a guide a helpful blue-tattooed Pict, but he turns out to be an ex-Legionary survivor, now living among a southern Pict tribe.
The film’s Oscar-winning director discussed the project in a recent [3-Aug-09] article by Magnus Linklater in The Times, headlined as “Kevin Macdonald Will Bring To Film Pre-Celtic Clash Of The Cultures”. This raises the issue, an ongoing debate, as to whether the Picts are indeed pre-Celtic, even pre-Indo-European – hence their inscriptions remaining indecipherable. Here, the filmmakers are stuck with Sutcliff’s original story, and for reasons best known to herself Sutcliff has the Pictish Caledonian tribe called by the Romans the Epidii refer to itself as The Seal People. (Epidii is usually taken to be from the same root as the Celtic horse goddess Epona, pony - the Q-Celtic equivalent of what became equus in Latin - and would more likely mean Pony People.) Macdonald says the ‘natives’ will speak Gaelic (Pictish is a lost language – unlike the Lakota-Sioux speech in Dances With Wolves, it can’t be reconstructed). The Romans “will be played by American actors” to “achieve a little contemporary symbolism.” As to the mysterious Seal People, he says he has a theory who they might have been. “They were a more indigenous folk than the Celts, who were from further south. They were probably small and dark, like the Inouit, living off seals and dressed in sealskins. We are going to create a culture about which no one knows much, but which we will make as convincing as possible. We are basing it on clues gained from places like Skara Brae.”
The novel does refer to them as small and darker than most, but portraying the Epidii of Kintyre as remote Stone Age maritime seal-hunters like the Inuit seems to be more of the same stereotyped approach. It’s not a new theory, but rather a discredited 19th-C one that the Picts were small and dark as they were related to the Eskimos [Inuit], Basques, and Lapps [Sami people].
To use a cinema-going figure of speech, it sounds like where we came in.

MacCamelot Revisited

2009-07-04T22:43:00.010+01:00

As indicated last time, the ‘MacCamelot’ theory that Arthur was mainly active in what is now Scotland is currently topical again. The theory dates back at least to the work of antiquarian WF Skene in 1876, and in the later 20C was supported by Dr Rachel Bromwich (translator of the Triads Of Britain etc), and others like the influential US scholar Norma Lorre Goodrich, who in the 1980s put ‘Camelot’ in the Kingdom of Strathclyde, arguing from mediaeval manuscript evidence that Arthur’s wife Guinevere was really a Pictish queen, Lancelot a rival Scottish king etc. Scots nationalist Adam Ardrey’s just-out Finding Arthur (a sequel to his 2007 book placing Merlin in Glasgow) is merely the latest in a long line of ‘MacCamelot’ books, given topicality by the growth of the nationalist cause. 2009 being Scotland’s official Year Of Homecoming, this is the year such theories can expect maximum press coverage.
But if Arthur was a Scot or Pict or North Briton (take your pick from the available theories), where would his ‘Camelot’ or main court be located? If he was a Scot, i.e. from NE Ireland, it would be somewhere in the Scots colony of Dál Riada on the west coast, perhaps at the hillfort at Dunadd, when the Scots first took it over from the Picts, or at Dunstaffnage, which a 1612 account claims was once home to the Coronation Stone known as the Stone of Destiny; or on Iona, where St Columba set up his base to convert the Picts and Scots. If he was a North Briton, it could be at Dun Edin (Edinburgh) or Alt Clud (Dumbarton Rock), both capitals of then Brittonic kingdoms which stretched between the Firths of Forth and Clyde and across Southern Scotland down to the Borders. And if our northern King Arthur was a Pict, it could be up near Inverness, or perhaps over at Scone on the east coast, or Dunadd (see above) on the west coast, for Highland topography split the Pictish confederation into two or more separate kingdoms.
Each site (there are other nominees) has its champions: for instance, Edinburgh has a hill overlooking the country’s present capital palace at Holyrood, called Arthur's Seat; near Stirling was an ex-Roman fort with a similar-sounding name to the Romances’ “Camelot” (which in French had a silent “t”): Camelon; Alt-clud, alias Dumbarton (“Fortress of the Britons”) on the Clyde below Loch Lomond, was referred to as Castello Arturius, or Arthur's Castle, in an 11C document, while some locals claim Loch Lomond was formerly called “The Lake" (as in Lancelot of ~).
But the site that became the coronation centre of the amalgamated Celtic (Scots-Pict-North Brittonic) kingdom of Alba (Scotland) was Scone (rhymes with “boon”), just outside the city of Perth on the east coast. There from the 9th C AD stood the original coronation throne where the kings of this amalgamated kingdom were crowned. It held the fabled Stone Of Scone, alias the Stone Of Destiny. Today at Scone there is only a replica to satisfy the visitor, for the whereabouts of the original is uncertain. (As the Palace of Scone’s advertising puts it, “Here you can see where the Stone of Scone once stood and ponder on the tantalising mystery of where it might be today.”)
Here we run into a centuries-old mystery that remains unsolved perhaps because none of the major vested interests wants it solved, publicly anyway, in case the verdict goes against them. Officially, the Stone Of Scone or Stone Of Destiny, is on view in Edinburgh Castle, having been returned there in 1996 to end Scots nationalist agitation over this hijacked coronation relic. (As it is used in coronations, it is officially just on loan; the plan is to return it to Westminster for the next one, when the Queen dies.) This 26” x 10” x 16” sandstone block sat under the coronation chair when every English monarch was crowned from the time of Edward I, who ordered it taken south in 1296 to discourage the Scots from the idea they could crown their own kings. (That didn’t stop them, of course.)
It was briefly returned to Scotland when 4 nationalist students took it from Westminster Abbey at Xmas 1950. They were never prosecuted for fear of stirring up even more anti-English feeling and public demonstrations – and of having the Crown’s claim to own the Stone Of Destiny challenged in open court. The story of the 1950 escapade is told by the coup’s original Ian Hamilton, then a law student in Glasgow, who went on to become a QC or Queen’s Counsel – though he refused to take the oath of allegiance in its original form on the grounds it was historically dishonest. His 1952 book has just been reissued to tie in with the release of the film Stone Of Destiny last year, just out on DVD.

Our northern King Arthur sat here? Not very likely. The chair itself is only 13C, and the stone it holds may not be what it seems. This is the same image used in the film Stone Of Destiny.

A final mystery remains, however: as there in fact more than one stone? If so, is the official stone a substitute? For some time, rumours have been circulating this is the case. This is the suspicion (or claim) that Edward I was given a substitute, i.e. the unprepossessing slab of sandstone you can see in Edinburgh Castle was simply a lavatory cesspit or cistern cover – a great joke on the English monarchy. A secondary issue re the stone’s identity has also been raised: the thesis here is that the stone returned to Westminster by the police after the Xmas 1950 escapade was a 20C manufactured substitute. This has been the claim of several people who were on the periphery of the 1950 incident, that one of the replicas that were being fashioned around this time was sent back to London. One of the items of evidence cited is a considerable weight discrepancy between the present, official 336 lb stone, and the c450 lbs referred to in Hamilton’s memoir and an Abbey account from when it was cleaned earlier the same year.
Ian Hamilton himself still says the same stone was returned, and that he’s sick of these stories. As it has long been argued that an earlier substitution was made, this would have meant one fake was replaced with another, i.e. a real, monastic-era cesspit cover was replaced with a 20C replica of one. Such a modern substitution of one fake for another would have made little sense for anyone who knew the story - as I believe nationalists would. Of course, it may be a simple intended nationalist PR coup, to get around the fact that the fake, the cesspit cover taken to England in 1296 is claimed as the real Stone. Revealing that a substitution was made in 1950 would overcome this, and thereby promulgate the idea that if the present Queen, or perhaps her successor, was not crowned on the authentic Stone, then she or he cannot legally be the monarch.
Shortly after the Stone Of Destiny DVD arrived in the post, I flew up to Scotland to check out a few things. One was to see what was claimed about the stone in the various editions of the book itself, which gives its known back history. Geological testing of the red sandstone block doesn’t show much, and for answers we have to rely on references in historical sources – which is of course our metier here. Mediaeval codex manuscript accounts from around the time of its move south do describe its existence and function, and sometimes its appearance, e.g. “Apud Monasterium de Scone positus eat lapis pergrandis in ecclesia Dei, juxta manum altare, concavus quidam ad modum rotundae catherdeaie confectus, in quo future reges loco quasi coronatis” (“In the monastery of Scone, in the church of God, near to the high altar, is kept a large stone, hollowed out concave as a round chair, on which their kings were placed for their ordination, according to custom.” - Walter, Canon of Guisborough Priory, Yorkshire, early 14C). Note the use of the present tense here in describing the stone as being kept at Scone, implying Canon Walter is reproducing an earlier account from before 1296. The chronicler, sometimes known as Walter De Hemingford, reportedly had been present at the coronation of John Balliol at Scone in 1292, so the description would date from then.
The antiquarians who flourished from the 18C onward also tended to claim this was the same ritual stone that had been used for similar purposes by Irish kings crowned at Tara. They called it the Lia Fáil, which was in legend brought to Eire by a ‘fairy’ people, the Tuatha Dé Danann ('people of divine Ana'). Lia Fáil is usually translated as The Speaking Stone. This is in support of a myth that it would roar or scream when the rightful new king stood or sat on it. But I can’t find any stories in the ancient Irish tales where this miracle actually happens as it should. (Also, the replica seems to be a pillar stone, rather like a modern Ordnance Survey trig point marker.) What happens in one tale I’ve come across is that it doesn’t speak, and the proposed king’s foster-father, the champion Cúchulainn, angrily splits it (almost a variation on the Arthurian “sword in the stone” motif). In another tale, the hero Conn of the Hundred Battles hears it roaring, but this is when he treads on the forgotten half-buried stone, and a druid tells him the number of roars is the number of kings who will succeed him at Tara. But when the Irish set up their colony in the Inner Hebrides, they took the Lia Fáil Stone to ratify their separate kingdom there.
Lia means stone (there is a similar word in geology, lias) but the translation of fáil as ‘speaking’ doesn’t feel right to me – more like a back-explanation based on the context being misconstrued. Ireland as the home of the Lia Fáil is sometimes given the poetic name in Gaelic of Inis Fáil, translated as Isle Of Destiny. The same stem also seems to occur in Gaelic Fáilte, which you can see all around Scotland (and Ireland) as the tourist organisations use it, for it means Welcome[s] . This would make more sense if it was meant to be an inaugural stone welcoming the new king, and he could speak his oath standing on or holding it, and so take up his “destiny.”
If we also consider tales promoted by the 19C British Israelite Movement (which claimed the Celts were one of the Bible’s 10 Lost Tribes), there’s also a Biblical tiein legend the Lia Fáil was originally Jacob’s Pillow stone, mentioned in Genesis, where Jacob dreamt his vision of a ladder to heaven. Like Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob’s Pillow became a symbol of inspiration and blessing, and it was used as a politico-religious token in establishing the original nation-state named Israel, after Jacob’s second, “divine” name. Supposedly the stone then became the pedestal stone of the Ark (as in Raiders Of The Lost ~), and went to Egypt, then Spain, then Eire.
Founding legends cited in Hector Boece’s 16C Chronicles of Scotland name Egypt and Spain as where key founders came from, with Scotia supposedly named after a Pharaoh’s daughter named Scota. But how or why the stone would’ve ended up at Tara is not really explained in the legend beyond a tale of Scota and her husband fleeing from the Egyptian Plagues. It sounds like another attempt by Irish monastic writers to depict a pagan relic as a Christian one via a vague Biblical link. The Lia Fáil also was alternatively identified as St Columba’s altar stone, but this is equally unsourced and unprovable. The sandstone block now in Westminster is similar to the sandstone still found locally around Scone Abbey, which gives the cesspit-cover theory the edge. That would also explain why Edward’s men returned in 1298 to ransack Scone, and why the Scots declined later English offers to return the Stone. (Both sides have remained tight-lipped about this.)
The current film tie-in edition of Ian Hamilton’s account of taking the Stone Of Destiny in 1950 has an intro by Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, who as might be expected, does not advance any controversial theories about rival Stones there. But around the same time [June 2008], Salmond (who studied mediaeval history) publicly announced he believed the original Stone was switched in 1296 - that the Westminster Stone is a fake. (In an online readers’ poll in The Times, more than half agreed with the First Minister.) The original 1952 edition of the Hamilton book, which I found in the library up there, No Stone Unturned, has a different foreword, by Sir Compton Mackenzie. (If you don’t know who he was, he was a Scots writer best known for Whisky Galore, who also liked to snipe at officialdom. He also wrote a 1940s novel, The North Wind Of Love, on an unsuccessful 1932 attempt to recover the Stone Of Destiny to bury it in Scotland.) He comments that the stone we know was probably part of ‘the red sandstone used for the gateway of Dunstaffnage Castle’.
But if the official one is indeed a substitute, what happened to the original one, the stone alluded to in the earlier references - the one on which early princes like our putative northern Arthur would have sworn their oath? There are a couple of anecdotes in the Scottish press of people stumbling into caves in eastern Scotland and seeing a stone throne with carvings on it. The odd thing is that in a couple of old accounts (which I haven’t seen myself directly yet) the Stone described is quite dissimilar in appearance to the familiar sandstone block. This is odd, because if you want to fob someone like a victorious king (Edward I) off with a replica trophy, it should at least resemble the original. For Edward and his staff would have been sure to have heard descriptions of it.
But the rival mediaeval codex accounts give the ‘authentic’ Stone as respectively [1] made of black stone (basalt) and [2] made of white marble! Seemingly we have three Stones Of Destiny. Besides the fake discussed, perhaps one was the Irish Lia Fáil, and the other the coronation stone of the Picts? Ian Hamilton QC has also written two volumes of memoirs, and the Foreword to the first, A Touch Of Treason, by the Scots historian and novelist Nigel Tranter (who helped return the Stone in 1951) says he has no doubt the Westminster stone is a fake, as the real Stone, the Lia Fáil, is described as a marble chair. (Presumably he got this from mentions of it in mediaeval codexes like the 14C chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, which has it as being of “whyte marble ston”.) That would leave the black basalt stone as the Pictish one.
Nationalist groups (including a modern Scottish Knights Templar organisation) have hinted in the past that they still possess the “original” (whatever that means), and that will surface at the appropriate moment in Scotland’s history, when it is about to take up its own destiny as an independent modern nation. (I met someone who was told as much when visiting Roslyn Chapel for a seminar.) This being Scotland’s Homecoming Year, hopefully more news of this long sought-after talisman will surface.

North To MacCamelot

2009-06-01T12:49:00.008+01:00

Recently, the Times tellingly referred to Arthur as “widely regarded as the quintessential English king.” This is a bit of unintended irony demonstrating how the Celtic national hero has been tacitly appropriated by English literature, usually by claiming he was really a Roman or Roman-trained, a cohort commander for the aristocratic Romano-British leader Ambrosius. (If you don’t get the irony, it’s as if historians claimed that not only Crazy Horse was a captain in the 7th cavalry fighting the Sioux ‘barbarians,’ but learned his horsemanship and military skills from the US Army as well, under the tutelage of wise old General Custer.)

Earlier, from the Middle Ages on, courtiers referred to Arthurian and related literature – legends and folktales of Arthur, romances involving the grail, Tristan, Lancelot, Merlin etc as “the Matter Of Britain.” I think ‘the Matter Of North Britain’ would be apt here for the current drive to push the Arthurian nexus back up north across the Borders. The original setting used in Arthurian Romance was a vague cross-Channel setting which allowed the British expats who fled the Saxon invasions to sustain the identification with the mother country, by referring to the setting only as ‘Bretagne’ – which could mean Brittany (the name of their colony in France) as well as Britain itself. The next political shift, post-1066, was to map the action to a real England, with its capital Winchester as Camelot. This was useful PR for the new Anglo-Norman dynasty who dropped the hated term Norman and called themselves Plantagenets (another usefully ambiguous bit of symbology to do with transplanting).

Today, with the growth of Scots nationalist politics, there is a growing attempt to relocate the Arthurian nexus away from the Welsh and English Arthurs and Merlins of the past, to the land of the Picts and Scots. Ever since someone realised the one unequivocal place name in the famous list of Arthur’s 12 victories was ‘the Caledonian Wood,’ (Celtic Coit Celidon, ‘woodland-hideaway stronghold,’ glossed in Latin as Silva Caledonis) writers have been arguing the original events (or legends) have Scottish roots. This goes a long way back (at least to 19C antiquarian WF Skene), but the drive north is now being taken up again anew, this time more publicly.

That 2009 is Scotland’s official “Year Of Homecoming” (inspired by its being the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth) makes any new books or theories topical. Some may think suspiciously so, for such proprietary historical claims inevitably have contemporary nationalist political overtones. (Full independence for Scotland is still “unfinished business” for many nationalists, and the ongoing Parliamentary scandal, which may see half of all MPs losing their seats over expense account abuses they tried to cover up, seems a renewed opportunity to fulfil this agenda.) The latest claims seem either proposed or adopted by Scots nationalist interests, including local governments interested in the heritage-tourism potential.

A new book, Finding Arthur: The Truth Behind The Legend Of The Once And Future King, by legal advocate and amateur historian (and Scottish National Party activist) Adam Ardrey, claims the legend of Arthur was based on the life of Artur Mac Aedan, the 6th-C warlord prince of Argyll, son of Aedan king of the Scots (i.e. Irish colonists in Argyll). Ardrey argues this Arthur was a pagan, his key military role being suppressed by hostile churchmen, from Glasgow’s own official founder [7C] St Mungo onwards. Merlin also features in the book as a contemporary, and we’ll look at the issue of ‘Merlinus Caledone[n]sis’ (‘Merlin The Caledonian’ i.e. the Scotsman) first, as his story is complicated enough, the matter getting a lot more complicated when you get to Arthur himself.

In Ardrey’s interpretation, ‘Merlinus Caledonesis’ was a confident of 6C King Aedan, this building on Ardrey’s 2007 Finding Merlin: The Truth Behind The Legend, which placed Merlin in Glasgow. This renewed publicity prompted Glasgow City Council this spring to add Merlin to its official roll of “Famous Glaswegians” alongside Billy Connolly (who also lived in the same neighbourhood where Ardrey places Merlin - Partick in west Glasgow). The Times quoted a Glasgow City Council spokeswoman that “recently an amateur historian has pointed to the fact that the legendary Merlin lived a 'comfortable life', with his wife Gwendolyn in Partick, not Camelot. We are sure that most Glaswegians will think that's just magic." (It’s understandable to want to locate legends in your own backyard, and always popular with the local tourism people. Ardrey himself began by researching his own surname and family history, concluding that Merlin lived on what is now Ardery Street, in Partick.)

The news stories are what you call pre-publication hype, the book won’t be out till June 11th, so I haven’t seen it, even though when the press stories came out, I was in Scotland, and in fact read the news on the train as it travelled through Partick. I say hype rather than just PR for it seems that books of speculative history are publicized via a deliberate stirring up of controversy just prior to publication. (Sound familiar?) In this case, the press predictably contacted the supporters of a Welsh Merlin for a rebuttal, getting “a fiery response from a Welsh community.”

The earliest Arthurian references are in Aneirin’s Gododdin eulogy to Edinburgh-based warriors of c600, which cites Arthur in passing as a paragon of military ability, and mentions the name Merlin as well (as a poet or bard) in its older form Myrddin (this being the surviving Welsh version, Merlin being from Latin variant Merlinus). The poem evidently originated in the Edinburgh court of the Gododdin kingdom, surviving via a later version kept at the kingdom of Strathclyde’s court, which may have been based at Dumbarton, and also apparently known at one time as Castello Arturius. Thus, we have an early association of the Arthurian legends with the North, though of course before the Scots, who were colonists from Ireland, had taken over from the Britons.

Mainstream historians tend to ignore the ‘Artur mac Aedan’ identification on the grounds he was too late to be the victor at Badon Hill, which is almost always placed in southern England, with Badon as Bath. A 1998 ‘Scots Arthur’ book, Arturius by David Carroll (described by the Telegraph as “a chiropodist from Hull”), got only a blip of publicity before sinking from view (though you can download it as a PDF). He cited a 7C codex, Adomnan’s Life Of Columba, as inspiration for his thesis, and challenged English Heritage to a £20,000 bet they could not disprove his claim. Not surprisingly they declined, having just been through the ‘Artognou’ Cornish controversy [see our earlier page on this, here]. Borders resident Alistair Moffat has also been emphasizing the Gododdin and other north-Brittonic links to the Arthurian legend in a series of books, like his 1999 Arthur And The Lost Kingdoms. There was even a 2001 exhibition in Glasgow ‘reclaiming Arthur for Scotland.’ The same year, The Quest For Arthur by Edinburgh lecturer Stuart McHardy also argued for a Scots Arthur, here not pagan but rather ‘involved in a crusade to re-Christianise the pagan north.’

Evidence here includes place names (such as Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and elsewhere) and other research by Glasgow historian Hugh McArthur, whose material appears on the Clan MacArthur website. ("The Duchy of Cornwall makes a lot of money out of the Arthurian legend with very little evidence.") The family tree of the rival Clan Campbell, once Strathclyde based, also starts with King Arthur as founder, via a link to a son of Artur macAedan.) The 2004 Walt Disney-backed film King Arthur starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley also had a northern setting around Hadrian’s Wall, claiming to be factually based (the film’s consultant historian was John Matthews, author of many books on matters Arthurian and Celtic). However, Arthur here is a Roman cavalry officer from the Eastern Empire [Sarmatia], with the natives [i.e. Picts] referred to disparagingly as “Woads,” led by a raggedy old Merlin and Pictish warrior-princess Guinevere, who fights in a leather bikini. Scottish Borders Tourism nonetheless mounted a tie-in campaign to “highlight areas in which local historians have previously cited evidence they claim points to the Scottish Borders as home to Arthur and his armies.”

The new characterisation of Merlin leading a 'comfortable life' in a large house with wife Gwendolyn, next door to her brother the king, as 'a scholar and politician,' rather than an eccentric old wizard, is quite a contrast to that of the earlier depictions of Merlin as an ageing, doddery wizard (cf TH White's novels like The Sword In The Stone) or more recent ones, in fantasy novels and dramas, which turn him into the Obi Wan Kanobi of the Druid set. The older Merlin legend focuses on his later life, after his downfall rather than as a court advisor. The major study to date of Merlin (we should really say Myrddin) as an historical figure is The Quest For Merlin by Nikolai Tolstoy, 1985. (Tolstoy, a professional historian, is not himself Scots, but an early supporter of the anti-EU UK Independence Party, who got into a major legal case which ultimately led to the European court censuring the UK government for suddenly withdrawing WWII records from the Public Records Office re British war crimes complicity that would’ve helped Tolstoy fight off a libel action which ruined him financially.) This book dealt with the ‘Scots Merlin,’ but focussed on the last phase of his life when he had had a breakdown after giving some disastrous advice to a neighbouring Borders king, Gwenddolau. Myrddin’s false prediction of victory had led to Gwenddolau’s defeat at the battle of Arderydd [now Arthuret near Carlisle] around 573 AD.

Myrddin went mad from shock and ran off into the great Caledonian Wood to live as a hermit, writing verse about his lonely life there. Several of these Merlin-attributed poems, such as Yr Afallennau or 'The Apple Trees' (“No diversions attend me, / Nor fair women visit me. / Though at Arderydd I wore a golden torque / The swan-white woman despises me now”) survive in the mid-13C codex The Black Book of Carmarthen. (Which is why the town of Carmarthen was contacted for a rebuttal quote to the new Scots claim, as they themselves have long claimed their town was named after Myrddin as a native son, i.e. Caer Myrddin (though others argue the personal name was created to explain the town name). Carmarthen Town Council, which hosts an annual Merlin & Magic Festival, told the Times: "Everyone in the Carmarthen area is very proud of our long-established links to Merlin and we certainly won't accept that he is from Scotland.")

Tolstoy’s 1985 book has a vivid description of Merlin’s being inspired by the wind rushing across the treetops around Hart Fell in Scotland’s Southern Uplands. (I flew north over this same area last month, and for anyone thinking of visiting, the Great Caledonian Wood is long gone, replaced by open farmland and post-WWII Forestry Commission plantations - see aerial photo.) This experience was the supposed basis of his enigmatic poem The Battle Of The Trees, which Robert Graves writes of in his ‘historical grammar of poetic myth,’ The White Goddess. For there in the wilderness, ‘Merlinus Caledonesis’ developed the gift of the awen, or prophetic insight, and this is the supposed origin of the cryptic (apocalyptic) Prophecies Of Merlin, which were published in the early-9C Historia Brittonum miscellany compiled by the monk Nennius, and recycled by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Prophetiae Merlinus plus a followup volume, Life Of Merlin, to accompany Historia Regum Britanniae, his fake 12C History of British kings leading up to glorious Arthur, there ‘emperor’ of 30 lands. GoM’s works led directly to the vast Arthurian romance genre, and as he had already dropped any Northern connection (Geoffrey was from south Wales), it became as obscure as the prophecies themselves are text-wise.

‘Merlinus Caledonesis’ gave way to ‘Myrddin Wyllt’, Merlin The Wild Man of Welsh lit, based at Caermarthen. (For other bios of Merlin, see Michael Dames’s Merlin And Wales, 2003; John Matthews’s 96-pp Merlin: Merlin: Shaman, Prophet, Magician, 2004, and for a more international approach to Merlin-related sites from Somerset to Sicily, see On The Trail Of Merlin by Ean Begg & Deike Rich, 1991. Merlin also appears of course in dozens of Arthurian novels, such as Mary Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy, where he narrates how he grew up to be advisor to the Romano-British cause against the Saxons; for the more mystical, shamanistic shape-shifting approach where he appears in different times and places and guises, see Robert Holdstock's Merlin's Codex trilogy, which has Merlin ranging from Greece to Britain over a span of millennia.)

Complicating the Northern-Merlin issue is the hermit-prophet called Lailoken or Laleocen. Because the king who defeats Myrddin’s monarch was St Kentigern’s patron, Lailoken is mentioned in a Life Of St Kentigern. This king was Rhydderch Hael, ruler of Alt Clut [Dumbarton, capital of Strathclyde, on the north side of the Clyde below Loch Lomond], and Lailoken was supposedly married to Rhydderch’s sister. Lailoken is the likely inspiration for the Arthurian romances episode where Lancelot goes mad after his liaison with Guenevere causes the fall of Camelot, and runs off to live in the woods as a ‘madman.’ (The Lancelot-as-Lailoken episode is usually omitted from later retellings, but does appear in the 1981 film Excalibur, which was originally to be titled Merlin, but had to be changed due to a title conflict with a surreal, rather scurrilous novel by the then Edinburgh-based poet Robert Nye.) However Lailoken seems to have been the same person as Myrddin, for he also lived near Partick, has a similar life-legend, and there are poems referring to him by a similar-sounding nickname, Lallogen, apparently meaning twin, he having a twin sister, who also appears in the early legend.

But at Geoffrey’s hands, Myrddin became Merlin Ambrosius, an orphan who had the same gift of prophetic insight, which first comes to notice when he advises Romano-British leader Vortigern (who has unwisely let Hengist and his Saxons have a foothold in Britain) that his new fortress cannot be built as two dragons are fighting in a pool under its foundations. (A red dragon fights a white one, a bit of symbolism anyone could get, the former being the Welsh national symbol, and the latter the English symbol.) The name Ambrosius also appears in early historical sources as the ‘last of the noble Romans’ [i.e. Romano-Briton aristos] who acted as inspirational war leader against the invading Saxons led by Hengist. Though some historians have argued Ambrosius was the inspiration for the legendary war leader Arthur, when English novelists took over the legend after WWII, Ambrosius would usually become the ageing (often dying) political leader the young cavalry commander ‘Arturius’ works for.

But in nearly all cases Merlin remains Welsh and takes up his career in southern England. Even Nikolai Tolstoy in his own followup novel, The Coming Of The King, which is largely based on authentic early sources like the Black Book of Carmarthen, avoids a purely northern setting. (It was to be the start of a trilogy, left unfinished due to the libel action.) For - the “Battle of the Caledonian Wood” apart - Arthur still fights his battles in England, and novelists can’t resist following Geoffrey in having Merlin magically building Stonehenge - as a war memorial to the victims of Hengist’s treachery! (Tolstoy in his Quest For Merlin has a few theories about this as well.)
--(More next time from my May research trip to Scotland.)

Jesus Christ, Stonehenge Star?

2009-04-13T19:54:00.005+01:00

Last time we reviewed Easter 09's tie-in crop of book and film-TV releases and related press announcements. As we were fully occupied last post with 'cannibal' druids, new Templar secrets to do with the Shroud, and so on, I said I'd devote a separate follow-up over Easter weekend to the most promising-looking of the new books. This was The Missing Years Of Jesus by Dennis Price, for which I put in a pre-publication order so I could review it at Easter. It's been getting positive early reviews - perhaps from those encountering the subject matter for the first time.
For this is the first modern full-length book study of this subject, the old West Country folktale known as the Holy Legend, famously referenced by Blake's poem Prelude To Milton, which became the lyric for England's so-called alternate anthem, "Jerusalem" that we've discussed before (see various earlier blog items, passim). The last study (perhaps the only other modern one), out last spring from Clairview Books, Glyn S Lewis's Did Jesus Come To Britain? : An Investigation Into The Traditions That Christ Visited Cornwall And Somerset, was only 78 pp, focussing on local folklore from those two counties. Despite its broader title, this new 252pp hardback also focuses on England's Holy Legend.
The legend takes the traditional form of snippets of local folklore across the West Country that Jesus himself was brought to England as a boy by his uncle Joseph of Arimatheia on one of his (alleged) trips to acquire Cornish tin. These folklore snippets were collected in several early 20th-C. books by Church of England clerics. In 1989, a 21-page essay by AW Smith in the Journal Of The Folklore Society surveyed the various collected folk sayings, songs etc, arguing none of these were provably pre-1804, i.e. before Blake's famous allusion to it. This the big problem with the legend's cred, the difficulty in finding pre-Blakean references. The Journal's conclusion was the legend was just propaganda from the early-20th-C British-Israelite movement (though typically no evidence was offered to support this convenient it-was-all-just-special-interest-propaganda argument).
But here, the author dismisses [p139] Blake's famous allusion to it as negative evidence calculated to make people disbelieve the idea Jesus came here, so Blake's involvement gets short shrift. And even though he's trying to locate JC in England, he explores only a few items from this local folklore roundup. This is counterproductive as the Folklore Journal volume is not well-known, and has a lot more to it in the way of topical references which could lead to firmer evidence (I have the 21-page original). At the very least, a lot of snippets of folklore can create the idea that where there's smoke, there must've been fire, if you see what I mean. It's certainly a tried and tested approach in the speculative book genre.
He does mention the so-called tunic crosses found around the West Country which show Jesus as a boy, but doesn't pursue the matter as to dating or any associated folklore. Price's real interest is in Stonehenge and nearby monuments like Silbury, in whose archaeology he's been involved for several decades. Thus the main rival theory that JC went east during his missing years to India etc., he dismisses in a few words as merely the result of someone claiming psychic powers c1900. As we saw last time, there's a whole lot more to the “Eastern school” than that, with a trail of scholarly books following up on several old manuscripts, going back centuries. Rather than try to amass a weight of counter-evidence for the West Country thesis, he soon shifts to writing about his own favourite site, Stonehenge, which has no associated legends.

This is where the book begins to undermine its own thesis, for in doing so he slights evidence associated with the many rival local legends, which exist from the New Forest right around the whole southwest coast. Priddy in Somerset, which he visited, is the only other site to get a favourable mention. Even Glastonbury doesn't get much prominence, though the Holy Legend is so associated with it it's often referred to as the Glastonbury Legend. But he says he has ignored all the legends about Joseph of Arimatheia returning to Glastonbury post-Crucifixion as irrelevant.

Nothing is known about Stonehenge in the 1st C. AD . The association of Druids with the site has long been ridiculed by archaeo-historians as it's thought to have been in ruins for over a thousand years by that point. But the book keeps trying to tie the legend in with it, as his own personal-interest area, where he worked on various archaeological digs over a period of years. He was the person who flagged up the idea that the 'city' and nearby sacred 'precinct' in a famous early description of the Hyperboreans (Far-Northerners) could well be Stonehenge and Vespasian's Camp hillfort outside Amesbury (see my earlier post on "The Lost City Of Apollo"). But he doesn't pursue this angle here, though it would help his argument as it implies such sites were not abandoned but still in use in the late Iron Age. Instead we get: Did Jesus visit Stonehenge, perhaps to exorcise a "resident demon"? (He argues Stonehenge was a labyrinth like the Cretan one with the Minotaur at its centre.) And did deeply religious archaeologists guess this connection, and interfere with the site and conceal evidence because they were unnerved and thought the place evil? (We also get local ghost stories.)
Because of this Stonehenge-centred approach, the author can't come up with any real evidence, so the book turns into one of those overly-speculative and under-evidenced books you get in this subject area, where the thread of some sensational argument is built around the phrases "might have", "could have," "no reason why not" and so on. Here the thesis is that Jesus didn't just visit as a boy, but lived here for his whole 'missing years' period, ages 12 to 30. This would imply there should be more evidence than previously published. Originally, I thought as Jesus is not named as such in any known British sources (or we'd have heard about it), we'll get the he-was-living-under-another-name approach that we get with sought-after but still-elusive figures like Arthur. (In fact the other rival recent book mentioned last time, Ralph Ellis's King Jesus, argues Jesus was exiled here and became the original inspiration for Arthur.)
We do get the proposal that JC may be commemorated as the Celtic deity Esus, portrayed as a wood-cutter, as Christ was a carpenter. Esus or AEsus is not British however, being known from inscriptions from Gaul and NW Africa, a pagan 'woodsman' deity thought to be centuries older than JC. He also argues this was also the 'Esiu' whose name is inscribed on British Iron Age coins depicting a horse, together with a reminder that Christ rode a sort of horse (an ass). In fact, British coins from the 1st C. BC often depict stylised horses (thought by some to be the Celtic horse goddess Epona); and there are various others of uncertain antiquity depicted on chalk hillsides. (The root AEs- can also be related back etymologically to a pair of Indo-European horse-brother deities, and is also the likely I-E root of ass, i.e. donkey.) We get the translation of the “Phoenician” Bal-deity Beelzebub as “Lord Of High Places” (it's usually given as lord of flying things, i.e. carrion flies), with the suggestion this inspired Blake to write of “England's mountains green” when England doesn't have any real mountains.
No ancient codex manuscripts are cited in support. (The citations in the Folklore Journal article are of course to undateable oral traditions.) Nor is there is any correlative attempt to claim Jesus's teachings paralleled those of Druidism (as those proposing the “Eastern Thesis” have done with Buddhist influence), only vague insinuations that JC could easily been interested in meeting Druids, and vice versa. Little is known of Druidic belief, as it was maintained through oral tradition rather than holy books, but there is a school of thought the author is evidently unaware of, that there was a continuity between the Roman-persecuted Druids and the first generation British Church.
Reconciling pagan and Christian traditions has a broad appeal these days, and some early reviewers are clearly excited about the idea that you-know-who-was-here. It adds buzz to the mystique of a whole New Age Christianity-rediscovered subculture which dates back to the early 70s era of the influential filmed musical Jesus Christ, Superstar. But this 'Jesus Christ, Stonehenge star' approach will only convince the more critical that the entire legend has no basis beyond wishful thinking.
I had higher hopes of this work, partly as the author runs an iconoclastic blog about Wessex archaeo-history, called Eternal Idol, one of whose posts gave the book its punning subtitle The Greatest Story Never Told. However if there is indeed a factual background story, it remains untold. The book is so padded out it reads like a companion to one of those cable-channel historical documentaries where speculative claims keep getting repeated and questions raised which are never answered.
I think (having scripted a few documentaries myself) if one were making such a TV documentary to which this appears to be an advance companion, exploring other avenues into the legend would be far more productive. As I've made clear in earlier posts, I feel there's an underlying story there worth pursuing even if the legend can't be taken literally, at face value. Various ancient codex accounts support Britain's long-standing claim it had a Christian church before Rome, i.e. at Glastonbury, which is of general interest in itself. As is the way the so-called Holy Legend persisted over the centuries underground, through allusions in texts like Blake's "Jerusalem" - what we would call nowadays a literary "code." Perhaps it would help if we gave it a name .... The 'Jerusalem' Code?

Easter 09: Cannibal Druids, Templar Secrets, And ‘Jesus Was Here’

2009-04-08T18:07:00.007+01:00

Easter is upon us once more. As I detailed last year ("Another Busy Post-Modern Easter"), nowadays this means speculative books and/or documentaries offering a revised version of Jesus's life and (this being the timely bit) death. The TV companies inevitably run a documentary in this strand over the Easter holidays, and book publishers' spring lists are now sure to include a controversial title attempting to rewrite the New Testament narrative. And if they're not ready, a pre-Easter press release is issued regardless.
For instance, we have a news story that a new academic text (Prof Rachel Elior's Memory And Oblivion: The Secret Of The Dead Sea Scrolls) shows that the Essenes sect, supposedly the first Christians, and authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, never existed – even though the book isn't even out yet. And there are also news stories, serving whatever end, on some long-running controversy. This year, it’s business as usual.

Thus, we had National Geographic announcing that the Druids practised human sacrifice – and cannibalism. In case you only remember National Geographic for those glossy full-colour travel magazines with the yellow trimming and earnest photo-essays on remote parts of the world, they now have their own TV channel where they run speculative documentaries. Their announcement is PR for a new NG documentary (with re-enactments), Secrets Of The Druids. The idea is that those Druids-burnt-people-in-giant-wicker-men stories were not just the Romans’ self-serving propaganda, there’s now archaeological evidence, in the form of the mummified ‘bog body’ known as Lindow Man, and some skeletons in a cave near Bristol. In fact Lindow Man was dug up out the peat in 1981, and Celtic scholar Dr Anne Ross wrote a book about him in 1991 (Life And Death Of A Druid Prince) theorizing (if memory serves) he was a Druid who agreed to be sacrificed to protect the land. (He died a ritual ‘threefold’ death, and mistletoe pollen was found in his stomach).
It turns out there’s a question mark after the ‘cannibalism’ part as there’s no real evidence in the mass-grave cave find at Alveston north of Bristol (again, this is nothing new, the find dating back to 2000). Burning people and animals in a giant wicker man as Caesar described doesn’t really work as a prelude to a cannibal feast, but there’s a break-mark on one of the cave bones indicating it could have been a ‘Druid’ drinking the bone marrow. The archaeologist cited here turns out to be Dr Mark Horton, and even he is reluctant to back the Druids-were-ritual-cannibals theory, saying perhaps someone was starving. (I say even he, as Dr Horton got his fingers burnt last year over claims he made as archeo advisor in the BBC Bonekickers TV-series fiasco which I’ve written of at length elsewhere.
Easter being a moveable feast, it can run close to St George’s Day (23rd April) if late, or April Fool’s Day if early, so in between you get a sort of press ‘silly season’ (i.e. the press print stories they otherwise wouldn’t). Last year Easter was relatively late, and our ‘Another Busy Post-Modern Easter’ item also covered items in the press inspired by St George’s Day. This year Easter is relatively early so it follows soon after April Fool’s Day, inspiring hoax news stories to do with sacred relics, so that genuine stories (which are normally high on the strangeness index anyway) get confused with April Fool’s hoaxes.
The Sun newspaper (if we can call it that) had one on a London digger-bulldozer driver finding the Staff Of Moses. (They didn’t bother trying to come up with how it came to be buried in east London, just invoked a few dodgy names like archaeologist Dr Henry Jones of Indiana.)
The Vatican, always under PR siege since Dan Brown cast them as the great villain of Christian history, is usually good for an Easter tie-in story. (The Vatican are currently mulling over some sanction against The Da Vinci Code followup film out soon, Angels & Demons.) This year they did not disappoint, though their genuine non-hoax story echoed an April Fool’s hoax story run several years ago. The first week of April, the Vatican’s own newspaper L'Osservatore Romano reported on where the Turin Shroud was held during its ‘missing years’: the Knights Templar had it. This was suspected at first being a hoax partly as it is a (sort-of) confirmation of the thesis in several books going back to 1978. (There’s even a book arguing the KTs actually created the Shroud relic, the image being that of their last grand master, Jacques de Molay – the image being a bit of post-modern irony on the part of KTs, as their master was sort-of crucified by the Church who – well, you get the idea.)
The report said one of their researchers had found clues in the Vatican Archive that the Shroud was taken away by the Templars so that the Cathars wouldn’t get it, as they would’ve destroyed it since they didn’t believe in a corporeal Jesus. (The Catholic Church destroyed the Cathars and their fellow Gnostics the Albigensians, a massive purge mentioned in most of the 'Holy Blood Holy Grail' books I’ve seen, as part of a grand papal conspiracy to suppress evidence of a Royal Bloodline etc. I think The Da Vinci Code also works it in somewhere.)
The Shroud in this new regard was also the controversial and mysterious sacred relic the Templars venerated, i.e. the bearded head they called Baphomet that they were accused at their 1307-10 purge of worshipping. (Earlier accounts have suggested the head was a relic of John The Baptist who lost his head to either Herod or Salome; or a way of worshipping Islam, with Baphomet a version of Mohamet.) The Vatican report said there was a reference to the KTs using the cloth image in a 1287 initiation. This has stirred up more controversy as a fragment of the border of the Shroud was carbon-dated only to the 14th C, leading to press reports it was a ‘mediaeval fake.’ Since then, others have said that the DNA test was of a patched section of the fire-damaged Shroud, and not valid at all. (The Daily Grail news-commentary website, which ran the Templars-had-the-Shroud story as an April Fool’s joke several years, now mentions there is other manuscript evidence for a pre-mediaeval Shroud. ‘A tenth century codex found in the Vatican Library, the Codex Vossianus Latinus quotes a man called Smera in Constantinople in the 8th century as saying that "King Abgar received a cloth on which one can see not only a face but the whole body."’
The Vatican's researcher was in fact mediaeval scholar Dr. Barbara Frale, who found the account, published last year, of the Pope’s post-1307 inquiry into the Templar accusations, known as the Chinon Parchment. (It was found in 2003 - again there was a time lag, presumably allowing for 5 years to study the document for its implications.) She said the Chinon Parchment trial-document research led her to the 1287 reference, and that the find vindicated the theory first proposed in 1978 that the KTs had the Shroud for a century or more. This theory was first argued in The Turin Shroud: The Burial Cloth Of Jesus Christ? , by Bristol-based iconoclastic revisionist historian Ian Wilson (not to be confused with AN Wilson, biographer of Jesus, St Paul etc) regarding ‘the mystery of the relic's missing years.’
Speaking of ‘missing years,’ there are a pair of new books just out dealing with the missing (i.e. Biblically undocumented) years of Jesus (ages 12-30). These represent one of the two opposing views – in one, he went East, and the other, he went West (we’ll get to that in a moment).
In terms of book coverage at least, the more established view is that he went East into Asia. The "Eastern thesis" has been the basis of ‘alternative-Christian-history’ books since the 1990s via the work by German religious author Holger Kersten. Kersten claimed Jesus had been schooled by Buddhist monks in non-violence and was influenced to change his teachings from Old Testament blood-n-thunder religion into the relatively more pacific New Testament one. It also claimed Jesus survived or escaped crucifixion, returning to live and die in India - where the book became a bestseller. (See The Original Jesus: The Buddhist Sources of Christianity? by Elmar R. Gruber & Holger Kersten,1995, and Kersten's 2001 Jesus Lived In India: His Unknown Life Before And After The Crucifixion? )

Kersten's Jesus Lived In India was based on a manuscript with the same title (Masih Hindustein Mein = Jesus In India) written in 1890 by a leading Urdu cleric who had collected documentation on the Indian sojourn of "Issa." Other, earlier books focus just on Jesus’s 17 ‘gap’ years being spent in the East, i.e. not the post-Crucifixion period which is too upsetting for some to consider (including Dan Brown, according to his testimony in the Holy Blood Holy Grail plagiarism case). One example of these is Elizabeth Clare Prophet's 1988 The Lost Years Of Jesus: Documentary Evidence Of Jesus' 17-Year Journey To The East.)
However it’s only now the Jesus-Went-East is about to go mainstream. As I remarked last time, Hollywood has developed a penchant for "Young [fill in famous name]" prequel-style stories, and about to hit the big screen is a "Young Jesus", or rather a "Young Jesus Heads East" story. The upcoming $20-million "fantasy action adventure" The Aquarian Gospel being shot using CGI (like the recent 300 and Beowulf) has JC heading east to acquire Oriental wisdom etc. (I expect the film PR will refer to JC as a"bodacious dude" on his way to fame and fortune after encounters with some wise heads in the East and perhaps with a few mind-expanding substances as well.) The film is officially based on an ancient Buddhist manuscript found in a Tibetan monastery over a century ago which became the basis for Nicholas Notovich's 1898 The Unknown Life Of Jesus Christ.
The tradition that Jesus came west as a youth was not been a serious rival to the Jesus-went-East theory as so far it has merely claimed Jesus was brought here to England on a one-off visit by his uncle Joseph of Arimatheia during a business trip to the Cornish tin mines. (It is of course inspiration for William Blake’s poem beginning "And did these feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green".) There is a range of West Country folk legends regarding this, but none as far as I know claim more than a boyhood visit.
Now however, two recent books have Jesus coming to SW England as more than a summer tourist. One has him spending his entire 17/18 year missing-years long period (ages 12-30) here, and the other has him escaping crucifixion to preach on here in exile as an inspirational leader, eventually inspiring what would become the core of the Arthurian legends. The latter work, Ralph Ellis’s King Jesus, From Kam (Egypt) To Camelot [pictured] has been out for a while without making much of a splash media-wise. (This is perhaps because the author has previously published a series of books on the X-was-really-Y thesis, e.g. Jesus was the grandson of Cleopatra.) I asked a colleague if he would like to review this one, while I ordered the other one, The Missing Years Of Jesus by Dennis Price. This is just out in time for Easter, already making a splash, and places Jesus in our backyard here in that part of Celtica now England’s West Country.
A key element of this story turns out to be Stonehenge, which often gets Easter news stories linked to it (modern Druids etc), no doubt as Easter itself is a compromise (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox), where an ancient luni-solar ‘pagan’ calendar celebration is glossed over by the later Christian celebrations. This new book initially stirred up a fuss pre-publication, with a Church Of England representative backing out of a BBC interview which was then cancelled. The now-published book however has generally been receiving a favourable reaction. I’ve read it, and have a number of issues with its approach, but to do it justice, will cover this as a separate blog item, which I’ll post over the Easter weekend.

See The Film - Read The Codex?

2009-03-05T05:00:00.012Z

I know many people come to this subject area for the first time after exposure to it via some popular work which references an old manuscript as authority for its plot hook. The Da Vinci Code is an obvious (if dubious) example of this, hence my use of it in the blog sub-title. (launched the blog deliberately the week The Da Vinci Code film came out in cinemas.) So I thought it would be appropriate to consider what’s in the pipeline in terms of screen adaptations derived ultimately from pre-Gutenberg manuscripts. I’m including works without regard for their original bindery format, i.e. even if they were originally rolled-up scrolls rather than bound like a book - many Greco-Roman manuscripts only survive due to disintegrating original scrolls being copied out by mediaeval scribes into bound codex volumes. I'll also incorporate a link to any original codex version if one is readily available online.
I suppose we have to start with a Da Vinci Code update, and ask the question whatever happened to Dan Brown? Five years after he wrote The Da Vinci Code, Brown’s publishers are still waiting for his planned followup novel. Reportedly it is called The Solomon Key and concerns how the USA was really founded by Freemasons along lines that suited their secret plans for state control, having planted various clues in public art and architecture for reasons best known to themselves. However as the story doesn’t seem to involve ancient manuscripts much (Masonic founding legends of Hiram etc seem to be unsourced historiography), we can move on to more interesting developments.
There are still more popular works appearing about the Knights Templar. One that is imminent is the US TV miniseries version of Raymond Khoury’s novel The Last Templar, another contemporary-set thriller-with-flashbacks-to-Biblical/mediaeval times. Its plot hook is an ancient ‘insider’ journal (I will say no more) which resurfaces after two thousand years in readable condition, threatening to undermine Christian orthodox history by its revelations. (Amazingly durable material, that ancient papyrus, apparently!) The idea that any such works to do with the Templars and the holy-blood mythos are based on any such definitive ancient source is dubious at best. I’ve already written various items on the Templars, including a blog post elsewhere on new film-TV versions for their official “400th” last year, so don’t propose to go into this further here.
Several projects have been announced which sound of interest, but turn out to be more in the Hollywood action genre. Another version of the story of the former Roman gladiator Spartacus is being remade as a TV series for US pay-for-cable. (There was a 1960 epic feature version starring Kirk Douglas and a 2004 US TV miniseries, both from a 1951 novel by Howard Fast.) The new version is to be ‘a totally R-rated, hard, hard show... [with] decapitations, people being split in half,’ and will film entirely in a studio using the ‘green screen’ technique of backgrounds added in via CGI. This is the same approach to filming used in Beowulf and 300, the 2007 adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel on the Spartans’ heroic stand at Thermopylae.
Also in this category, I suspect, will be Bran Mak Morn. This is being made by a major British production company for 2010 from the stories by ‘Conan’ creator Robert E Howard about the supposed last warrior-king of the Picts. Howard’s Conan and Bran Mak Morn stories were built on his interest in his Celtic heritage, inspired by his reading a library book on the Picts. Sadly, the film won’t however be based on any ancient source – we don’t have one for the Picts beyond a basic king-list chronicle prefaced by a short account of their dynastic origins, plus a few Roman historians’ passing references.
Ditto for a long-awaited film about the famed ‘Lost Ninth Legion,’ which was supposedly annihilated by northern barbarians. (This is the 3rd such project announced, two earlier attempts to turn it into a gory action adventure epic having failed to get funding.) This one is from one of Britain’s most talented directors, Kevin Macdonald, but is being publicised as ‘a swords-and-sandals western,’ in which ‘the Romans speak with American accents.’ Again, there is no ancient source - in fact nothing is known beyond the fact the Ninth disappears from official records, and historians suggest it was more likely just redeployed overseas. Instead, it’s being adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 juvenile novel The Eagle Of The Ninth.
NBC is also planning a ‘green screen’ remake of Jason And The Argonauts, though how much of the original 3rd-C BCE Argonautica (by Apollonius of Rhodes, and perhaps others) will survive is unclear. If it’s for US TV, I suspect it will be a youth-oriented version like the last such (in 2000).
The Mel Gibson-produced project about Queen Boudicca as ‘a simple peasant girl’ may also fit the recent trend of prequel story setups to capture the youth market. It was seen last year in BBC One’s Merlin (teenage apprentice-wizard Merlin meets teenage trainee-knight Arthur and teenage scullery-maid Guinevere). The Mel Gibson project may have been delayed by ITV’s Boudica, starring ER's Alex Kingston and adapted by the top man for period adaptations, Andrew Davies (BBC’s Pride & Prejudice etc), which was condemned for its boorish and simplistic mud-n-blood depiction. (Historian and TV presenter Michael Wood: "off-the-wall period hokum ….the absurdity of script and direction only made bad history … The first few minutes said it all. Long-haired ancient Britons roaring like England football fans, knocking back beer, muddy faces daubed in woad, loose sexual morals ... you know the sort of thing. Not the remotest inkling of what an Iron Age society might really have been like.") Known in Hollywood as Braveheart-with-a-bra, the Gibson version seems to be finally set to film, with Gavin O'Connor directing, under the working title Warrior [ an earlier TV version was titled Warrior Queen] for 2010 release. It is however likely to be a gory Jacobean (perhaps we should now say Gibsonean) revenge melodrama, complete with scenes of savage flogging and rape, culminating in an orgy of mass violence and sexual mutilation of women who 'collaborated' with the Romans.
In a category by itself is Feelgood Fiction’s Four Knights, a kind of sequel-spinoff to Becket. I'll quote from its official synopsis, lest you think I’m caricaturing: ‘Western-style version of the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. The assassins are a bawdy gang of adventurers constantly on the run from the authorities.’ You can sense the major Hollywood money and thinking behind this – a bit like ‘Young Guns’ except they use broadswords to kill authority figures who are ‘asking for it.’ (Director Paul McGuigan: ‘Being from Scotland, I don’t have this reverence for the history. I see it as a modern film. It’s a kind of road movie, because they are always fleeing and they are on the road all the time. It’s a medieval Wild Bunch, full of big characters and great action.’) In fact it seems to be partly based on a 1999 black-comedy stage play, Four Nights In Knaresborough, about the foursome holed up at an inn and depressed about having made a rather bad career move – i.e. murdering the head of the church in his cathedral during Xmas services. (If you want to read the original 12C eyewitness account of Becket being hacked to bits, it’s here .)
…. In the more-interesting-sounding projects category, two versions of King Lear have been announced. Sadly this competition has since scuppered the version that was to star Anthony Hopkins. The 2nd one is to star Al Pacino and be directed by Michael Radford. Lear of course is not just a Shakespeare play – like all his works, it’s based on earlier tales, in this case, one recounted in Geoffrey Of Monmouth’s 12C History Of The Kings Of Britain as an existing Celtic legend taken from an ancient ‘British’ (possibly meaning Breton-dialect) book. Shakespeare of course ‘took liberties’ with his direct source (usually Holinshed’s Chronicles), so you need to go back to studies of Geoffrey Of Monmouth, and how he adapted earlier versions for 12th-C nationalist propaganda purposes.
A feature version may be in the works to wrap up the unresolved plot strands of the award-winning HBO/BBC TV series Rome, which dramatised the dirty-politics underside of Rome’s transitional period from republic to virtual monarchy amidst civil war. The TV series ended abruptly story-wise when the 3rd series was cancelled in mid-term. The original kernel of it was a reference in Caesar’s Gallic Wars memoir to two ‘ordinary’ soldiers who recover the Legion’s captured brass eagle. The original plan was for 5 seasons, the last focussing on how the Roman authorities dealt with the troublesome rise of a certain ‘messiah’ in Palestine, but cancellation led to this subplot being abandoned and other plotlines combined into highlights. The primary source seems to have been Suetonius’s gossipy Lives Of The Caesars (download details below).
As the series ended with young Octavius defeating Anthony and Cleopatra and becoming Rome’s first Emperor, Augustus, the feature will presumably overlap the timeframe of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, which is also being remade by writer-director Jim (My Left Foot) Sheridan. Hollywood has wanted ever since the 1976 BBC hit series to do its own feature version; last year a version to star Leonardo DiCaprio fell through after the backers fell out. Graves’s 1934 novel developed the idea, not found in the main source material, that stammering C-C-Claudius (r 41-54 AD) was a pose cultivated to protect an intelligent man from assassination, while he wrote a secret history of his time.
The real, 8-part history Claudius wrote is sadly lost, which would have given us a firsthand account of the Romans in Britain in AD43, for Claudius himself joined in the campaign. There is a chapter on Britain in the sequel, Claudius The God, but this is largely Graves’s own speculations along the lines of his The White Goddess. In the BBC version all we get is a few lines delivered in Rome by the captive British resistance leader Caractacus, and even these are not the ones originally reported. The new film may however include the invasion for a bit of spectacle. Graves elaborated his novels largely from Suetonius’s c121 AD Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, which Graves had translated himself, cross-referencing it with other information from the era. It is available in Penguin Classics paperback as well as downloadable from here and here .
Sony-Columbia Studios have commissioned a script from The Anabasis of Xenophon. (Anabasis means a journey up-country.) A manuscript dating back to 400 BC, Xenophon’s is the first detailed, eyewitness military-campaign account we have from history. It recounts another episode in the Greek-Persian wars, an epic march homeward across Persia by 10,000 Greek (including Spartan) and allied mercenary soldiers after they are betrayed and left leaderless on campaign. (Xenophon, an expert on horses, was a member of the ad hoc officers council who helped organise the retreat.) No doubt the studio can use CGI to paint in most of the huge armies involved, but the story itself remains a challenge, contradicting any traditional simplistic view one might have about what happens in a wartime survival situation.
The basic story has been the classic template for many an action film, where an elite group of pros head into enemy territory on a covert mission to burn out a remote base, etc. Having stirred up a hornet’s nest, they barely make it home after high-level betrayal and other setbacks, with superior enemy forces hot on their heels and difficult survival decisions all the way. But the original Long March homeward of The Ten Thousand is on a larger scale than seen thus far on screen. (Xenophon’s Anabasis , since the 19C a set text for pupils of advanced Greek, is available in English as a Penguin Classics paperback under the title The Persian Expedition, as well as a downloadable text, here). The project may have been prompted by two recent (2005) historical-cultural studies: Tim Rood’s The Sea! The Sea! The Shout Of The Ten Thousand In The Modern Imagination and The Long March: Xenophon And The Ten Thousand edited by Robin Lane Fox (a consultant to Oliver Stone on his ill-fated 2004 Alexander). The people behind it are not only successful Hollywood producers but keen historians who have co-authored historical books and documentaries, one having been co-producer on HBO’s Rome. So hopefully it won’t just be an animated graphic-novel gorefest like 300.
Speaking of which, Universal Studios is developing another script about the 300 Spartans i.e. their inspirational 480 BC heroic holding-the-pass last stand against 100,000 Persian invaders. (‘Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.’) It’s called Gates Of Fire, a souped-up version of the meaning of the place name, Thermopylae, the Hot Gates, and is based on a 1998 novel by historical-action author Steven Pressfield. The original manuscript source, from c.440 BC, is the ‘father of history’ himself, Herodotus, who became known to a wider public through references to him in The English Patient. (The scale of the war Herodotus describes remains so great historians have trouble accepting it as accurate.) Herodotus’s Histories is available in Penguin Classics paperback as well as downloadable text (Links on Wikipedia page here.)
Closer to home, the development that most interested me when I heard of it, is a set of 3, possibly 4, rival films about the Norman Conquest of 1066, which will be the first feature films ever made on the Battle Of Hastings. One is from British company Qwerty Films with no title set so far, and the focus here is on the earlier friendship and love lives of William (happily married) and Harold (‘a dashing figure who had numerous girlfriends’).
A 2nd is being produced by a Hollywood “indie” company called Killer Films, a $39.25 million (£25 million) epic titled William The Conqueror which will focus on the rise of Harold’s Norman nemesis, with Daniel Craig’s name being mooted as star.
A 3rd is a $75 million (£50 million) production titled simply 1066, co-written by director Robin Jacob and historical novelist (Harold The King) Helen Hollick. This is being shot in 70mm in Wales with former Oliver child star Mark Lester as King Harold, and focuses (with a 3 hr 45 min length) on the 50-year rise and fall of the Godwin dynasty.
The IMDB also lists another 1066 being made for Channel 4 by Justin Hardy, with a cast list that doesn’t include Harold or William. This would normally suggest a children’s drama serial (where the children are eyewitnesses to some great event), but the writer’s and director’s CVs suggest it may be instead a black-comedy worms’-eye view of history.
There is yet another film work-titled 1066, this one from Kudos Pictures [USA], aiming at a 2011 release. (This may be the same production earlier credited to Shine, which makes BBC’s formulaic youth dramas Spooks and Merlin.) Early announcements indicated this was to be another former-buddies-fall-in-love-and-then-fall-out-over political differences story. (Shades of the 1960s play and Richard Burton/Peter O’Toole film Becket, which also turned the ultra-wealthy Norman churchman into a Saxon underdog.) However this version is being scripted by William Nicholson, whose sensitive work adapting Shadowlands (on CS Lewis and Joy Gresham) got him the job of developing Gladiator into something more than warmed-over chunks of Ben Hur, Spartacus and The Fall Of The Roman Empire. He did this by giving the hero a longing for death, and I’ve been hoping that this version will present the hitherto-obscure sad tale I would personally like to see.
The most famous account of 1066 is of course that prototype of all comic books and graphic novels, the Bayeux Tapestry. But there are also near-contemporary manuscript accounts which are regarded as more definitive than the public propaganda art of the tapestry. The Tapestry’s best-known detail, the arrow-in-the-eye, is in fact contradicted by these codex accounts. (The fatal arrow is not in the earliest illustrated manuscript copies, and seems to have been added later, during some re-stitching.)
Two years ago, I put together a blog post (since linked to by a TV channel) concerning another mediaeval manuscript account of Harold’s death – not in 1066, but years later. The 13th-C Vita Haroldi (Life Of Harold) tells of his surviving the Battle Of Hastings, left so facially disfigured and traumatised that he spends the rest of his days as an anonymous pilgrim. This is not the usual folktale survival-scenario where the hero (Arthur or whoever) goes off to well-deserved rest in a cave, awaiting the clarion call to return in his country’s hour of need. It is a very sad and all too human story, without any of the usual miraculous or ‘inspirational’ aspects we get from these legends.
The original 1066 production poster had an intriguing tagline that seemed to hint it was partly based on the controversial 13th-C. Vita Haroldi wherein Harold survived Hastings with terrible facial wounds, being tended by a “Saracen woman” for two years before becoming a masked hermit. The film’s original poster tagline read “I am Harold Godwinson, the last king of England.” This is slightly odd semantically, and I wondered if it came from the payoff line in the Vita Haroldi, where the masked hermit makes a deathbed confession to a priest using similar words. That the cast list also shows a “Saracen Woman” and the film’s press-release final comment is “There is more to the story than told in school history books” seemed to support this. However, on the film’s website poster image, the line has now been changed to “I am Harold Godwinson, chosen king of England.”
Personally, I fear Harold will now get an arrow in his eye three times over (what sleazier Hollywood producers call ‘the money shot’), in a big CGI-boosted Lord of The Rings style battle with a gory and eye-smarting finale. If anyone wants to read the alternative version - a summary of the original early-mediaeval account suggesting Harold survived, disfigured, as a wandering pilgrim - my earlier blog post is here: The Man In The Cloth Mask .