If you, O Assiduous Reader, look on the comments beneath last week’s blog, you’ll find an erudite little exchange between Jane Finnis and myself, where we bat lines from Anglo-Saxon poetry around. I must say, I was pretty pleased with myself for coming up with The Wanderer as the source of those half-forgotten lines. It’s years since I’ve read it, but the image had stuck in my mind.
There’s been some interest in various types of Ancient Brits recently, with treasures unearthed from the Anglo-Saxons and a huge pot of Roman coins being dug up by a bloke with a metal detector and – perhaps most striking of all – the discovery that a type of human was living in the British Isles three quarters of a million years ago – in Happisburgh, Norfolk, to be precise - many thousands of years before anyone had imagined possible.
We can’t ever know what a hominin from the Early Pleistocene (as the scientists describe them) would have thought. Maybe, “Why on earth did I move from Africa to Norfolk?” and “This flint’s damn hard” and “Is there any mammoth left for tea?”
We do know, however, a dickens of a lot about Romans and Anglo-Saxons. That’s because they left us, in addition to the archaeology, some striking literature. It’s fascinating to read ancient literature because it’s the one form of time-travel that’s genuinely authentic. The Wanderer, for instance, takes us into the mind of a man who is wandering homeless after the death of his Lord, his protector and provider for his household, in a Britain where Roman ruins are thought to be the work of giants, where wolves hunt through the crumbling cities. The Wanderer, poor guy, is heart-broken by the loss of his Lord. You don’t get anything about romantic love in Anglo-Saxon literature, but you do get men mourning for their companions-in-arms. A man’s loyalty belonged to his group (I simply don’t know about women) not to his wife. The shared hall, not the private house, is the heart of the group.
Do you remember – it used to be taught in schools at one time – how the Venerable Bede in 7 something or other, describes the insight the new teaching of Christianity brought? Our life is, he says, like a sparrow who flies in from a bitter winter’s night, into the hall, with its feast and its fire and light and then out again, into the darkness of winter once more. Christianity, says Bede, illuminates the darkness. The message is clear and the depiction of the hall is unforgettable.
Like anyone who writes history, even recent history, I sometimes get asked how I go about research. Well, for the 1920’s, I do it exactly as I would hope someone writing a novel set in the 10th Century would; read the books. Read about the period if you like – why not? Read other novels set in the period – again, why not? If you’re writing about the hominins of the Early Pleistocene, you might have a few problems, but if they wrote it, read it. To get the absolutely authentic taste of the period, you have to read what they wrote themselves. And sometimes, as with The Wanderer, there might have a few surprises in store.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Lessons From A Gigantic Leg
If you’ve bought or borrowed a copy of my latest book, A Hundred Thousand Dragons, then, apart from earning my grateful thanks, you’ll know that printed in the front is the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Now, without giving too much away, the poem is there for a purpose. I mean, it comes into the story. It’s far too much sweat for the Avid Reader to go chasing off after random pieces of poetry when reading a detective story, so I thought I’d print it in the front so, if moved to do so, the A.R. can simply flick to the front of the book. It’s not just lugged in to give Dragons a bit of class, although I’ll have any bits of free class that are going! Just making life easier, don’t you know. Always willing to please. All part of the service.
Ozymandias has always been a real favourite of mine. It’s all mysterious and ancient and Egyptian in a sphinxandpyramidsandmummies sort of way, the spiritual precursor of all those hoaky old films where, having not troubled the general populace for millennia, the first thing any self-respecting mummy does on being dug up is wander around, inflicting grief on all in its path. I can imagine the Poet Shelley punching the air, fighting off Coleridge, tripping up his mate Bryon and yelling, “Dibs on the old statue!” as he raced for his pen and muse. Incidentally, The Poet Shelley is a phrase that cracks me up. Jeeves often refers to The Poet Shelley as he attempts to broaden Bertie Wooster’s education. On one occasion, Bertie, when closeted with the appallingly soppy Madeline Basset, says to her (he’s got the phrase from Jeeves) that his pal, Gussie, is “A sensitive plant”. Madeline blinks at him and says, “You know your Shelley, Bertie.” To which Bertie replies, “Oh? Am I?”
Anyway, back to Ozymandias. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that with a theme as strong as that, you couldn’t go wrong. The Poet Shelley certainly doesn’t. Here’s his first few lines:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Magic! But… my pal Jane Finnis told me there was another poem called Ozymandias. This one’s by a bloke called Horace Smith. Smith was a friend of Shelley’s who had written his poem in competition with Shelley. It was published in the same magazine as Percy’s a month later. And you can’t help thinking he was ill-advised. The title makes you think a bit, for a start: On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg
I don’t know why, but legs are funny. A Farewell to Arms? Yup. A Farewell to Legs? I don’t think so. Particularly as this particular Leg seems to double as a sun-dial: the Leg (Horace is responsible for the capitals, not me)
which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
And so the next line, the punch-line, lacks a bit:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
To be fair to Horace, the second bit, where he looks forward to a science-fictiony post-apocalyptic London is all right:
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place
However, that’s rather taken us away from his Leg. It’s a shame, but it’s true. It’s not enough to have a brilliant story. You’ve got to tell it right, too.
Ozymandias has always been a real favourite of mine. It’s all mysterious and ancient and Egyptian in a sphinxandpyramidsandmummies sort of way, the spiritual precursor of all those hoaky old films where, having not troubled the general populace for millennia, the first thing any self-respecting mummy does on being dug up is wander around, inflicting grief on all in its path. I can imagine the Poet Shelley punching the air, fighting off Coleridge, tripping up his mate Bryon and yelling, “Dibs on the old statue!” as he raced for his pen and muse. Incidentally, The Poet Shelley is a phrase that cracks me up. Jeeves often refers to The Poet Shelley as he attempts to broaden Bertie Wooster’s education. On one occasion, Bertie, when closeted with the appallingly soppy Madeline Basset, says to her (he’s got the phrase from Jeeves) that his pal, Gussie, is “A sensitive plant”. Madeline blinks at him and says, “You know your Shelley, Bertie.” To which Bertie replies, “Oh? Am I?”
Anyway, back to Ozymandias. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that with a theme as strong as that, you couldn’t go wrong. The Poet Shelley certainly doesn’t. Here’s his first few lines:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Magic! But… my pal Jane Finnis told me there was another poem called Ozymandias. This one’s by a bloke called Horace Smith. Smith was a friend of Shelley’s who had written his poem in competition with Shelley. It was published in the same magazine as Percy’s a month later. And you can’t help thinking he was ill-advised. The title makes you think a bit, for a start: On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg
I don’t know why, but legs are funny. A Farewell to Arms? Yup. A Farewell to Legs? I don’t think so. Particularly as this particular Leg seems to double as a sun-dial: the Leg (Horace is responsible for the capitals, not me)
which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
And so the next line, the punch-line, lacks a bit:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
To be fair to Horace, the second bit, where he looks forward to a science-fictiony post-apocalyptic London is all right:
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place
However, that’s rather taken us away from his Leg. It’s a shame, but it’s true. It’s not enough to have a brilliant story. You’ve got to tell it right, too.
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