John James:
Votan and other novels.
London: Gollancz, 2014.
9780575105508.
xi + 737 pp.
This book contains three historical novels (Votan,
Not for All the Gold in Ireland,
Men Went to Cattraeth)
originally written in the late 1960s.
I had never heard of John James
before, but the subject matter sounded interesting,
and this edition contains an introduction by Neil Gaiman, who praises them highly,
so I decided to give this book a try. And I'm very glad that I did, as I enjoyed
all three novels greatly.
*
Votan
Votan is something between a historical novel and a fantasy one,
based on an interesting premiss: what if a good deal of pagan Germanic
mythology was in fact little more than vaguely remembered and heavily embellished
stories of real events involving some perfectly regular (if remarkable) people?
In Votan, these events take place late in the 1st century AD
and are told in the first person by
their main protagonist, a Greek named Photinus. He is a young man from a rich
merchant family, himself a canny (and greedy) trader, a not
incompetent physician, highly skilled at con games and sleight-of-hand tricks,
an inveterate womanizer, and a devotee of Apollo — but mostly in one of his darker
manifestations, as Apollo Paeon,
the god of destruction (p. 42).
<spoiler warning>
At the beginning of the story, we find Photinus living in Vindobona, at the
outskirts of the Roman Empire, where his family had been exiled for political reasons (p. 4).
Sleeping with a married woman gets him in trouble and he is obliged to
leave the city in a hurry, so he joins a small group of Germans travelling north (p. 23),
hoping to open up a new trade route for amber (to bypass the territories of the
Cat Men and the Thuringians,
who are currently in control of it; p. 16). They are attacked by Cat
Men, members of a hostile Germanic tribe (p. 37), and Photinus is wounded and separated from
his companions; to evade pursuit, he climbs a tree and even chains himself to it to
make sure he won't fall down if he falls asleep or unconscious (p. 42); but he loses the key
and ends up being stuck on the tree for nine days full of pain and delirium until
he finally manages to extricate himself (p. 47; a well-known episode from actual Norse mythology). He is found and saved by another
tribe, the Polyani (‘from their word for the river meadows’, p. 50, so judging by this
name they seem to be Slavic rather than Germanic, though I wouldn't expect to find
Slavic people this far to the west, at least not at such an early date;
the wikipedia mentions a Polani in the
area of present-day Poland), who find
his ordeal on the tree and his survival nothing short of miraculous and a clear
sign that there must be something divine about him. Thus begins the legend of
Votan Allfather (the various Northerners have trouble with his Greek name Photinus
and end up corrupting it into Votan, p. 10;
the Allfather bit seems to be a result of their
pattern-matching his experience with some of their earlier legends, p. 48).
Besides, the name Votan immediately leads them to connect him to their pre-existing
beliefs in a sky-god called Wude (pp. 8, 79).
Photinus would probably have a hard time dispelling these tales even if
he wanted to, which he doesn't as they are useful to his purposes. He continues
vaguely northwards and eventually reaches the land of the Asers,
another Germanic tribe, which seems to control most of the amber trade (p. 61). The geography
of this novel is always a bit vague but my impression is that the Asers seem to be living
approximately in southern Denmark or so. Their leader is an old man named
Njord, ruling from his palace
called Valhall in the
trading town of Asgard (p. 69).
Photinus makes good use of his business acumen and his familiarity with all
sorts of useful knowledge that is widely known among civilized nations such as Greeks
but not so much in the North (p. 88). Soon he becomes a respected and influential
member of the ruling clique; he introduces improvements into their amber trade business (p. 73),
starts distilling liquor (‘Honeydew’, pp. 82, 85), mediates political disputes (p. 101),
spreads the art of runic writing (p. 93; another link to the real-world Odin myth), etc.;
for his trouble, they give him a horse famous for its swiftness (Sleipnir, “He was fast too, some people
used to say he must have eight legs”, p. 74),
and eventually he even marries Njord's daughter Freda (p. 89).
Various further adventures follow; notably, at one point a storm (p. 127) blows his ship
to Pictish territory in the north
of Britain, where Photinus finds himself forced to marry Bithig, sister of the local king (p. 148).
The Picts turn out to have very “old-fashioned” (p. 154) ideas about kingship:
the throne is inherited not by the king's son but by his nephew, so Photinus's role
in the whole business is merely to stay married to Bithig for a year (and hopefully get her pregnant),
at the end of which time the Picts intend to kill him and eat his corpse. Fortunately
he manages to run away in time (p. 159).
Photinus's stay in the North ends in a dramatic way. Loki,
a partly estranged member of the Aser ruling family (who has mostly been staying away from
Asgard, running his own trading outpost of Outgard; p. 53),
seems to be jealous of Photinus's influence and the growth of his trade, so he provokes a dispute (pp. 110–4, 180) which eventually
breaks into an all-out war (pp. 191, 201, 207);
Asgard is sacked by Loki's army, Valhall burned and most
of the Asers killed, including Photinus's wife (pp. 209–16); the amber trade will be ruined for years (pp. 220, 222).
Photinus returns to Vindabonum (p. 220), but the tales
of his exploits will live on in the North; and thanks to his profligate womanizing,
he will end up being the father of most of the up-coming generation of kings of the
various Germanic tribes, who will be proud to consider themselves “Votan-born” (p. 218;
another link to actual old Norse myths about Odin).
</spoiler warning>
I enjoyed this novel a lot, especially the idea of writing a story that
corresponds to Germanic mythology but explains it mostly without supernatural
elements. It was pleasant to discover these correspondences while
reading the story, and I guess that someone who's more familiar with Germanic
mythology than me would have even more fun with this (Neil Gaiman in his
introduction to the present edition, p. ix, recommends looking things up
in google and the wikipedia while reading this novel, which strikes me as a
good idea but unfortunately I didn't have internet access where I was reading it;
well, at least I looked some of this stuff up while writing the summary above).
Admittedly, this close connection with mythology does have a few downsides;
some parts of the story struck me as a bit picaresque and hard to follow,
with lots of incidents and characters being introduced for which I saw no
really good need in the story as such, but which I guess had to be introduced
because they are present in the underlying mythology. I guess the problem
is simply that I'm more accustomed to putting up with unnecessary complicated nonsense
in mythology than in genre novels.
One example of such an episode: at one point, Donar travels to the land of the
Scrawlings for no particularly obvious reason (p. 108), and returns with what he claims are
teeth of the World Serpent, though they are really just mammoth tusks (pp. 115–8); hence the
myth of Thor's fights with the
World Serpent.
An interesting device whereby the author was able to introduce a few more
connections to actual mythology occurs in pp. 62–6: one of the Asers,
named Tyr, likes to invent tall tales and entertains other guests at a tavern by telling them.
We listen to his tale of his encounter with a nobleman named Fenris;
in an effort to sleep with one of Fenris's daughters,
Tyr tries to bind his arms and in the ensuing brawl, Fenris cuts off one of Tyr's hands.
Judging by the wikipedia,
the mythological Fenris was actually more a wolf than a man, but he did bite off Tyr's hand
at some point and we also find the efforts to bind him with various types of ropes, just
like here in James's novel. On p. 66 Tyr says that he also has other tales,
including one “about Loki and a horse, rather indecent” — well,
again judging by the wikipedia,
there is an actual Norse myth saying that Loki at one point assumed the form of a mare,
had sex with a stallion and later gave birth to Sleipnir, who would later become Odin's own horse
(this story is also briefly alluded to on p. 74 and again in a hilarious passage on p. 113).
There's also an amusing tale which pretends to explain the origins of Odin's
ravens, Hugin and Munin. On p. 79, Photinus travels to a desolate heath littered
with remains of the Roman legions that had been defeated long ago in the battle
of Teutoburg Forest; he carries away various valuables, but also some legionary
standards in the form of eagles.
Later, being asked what they are, he passes them off as ravens, and the names
“Hoogin and Moonin” (p. 92) are given to them by a Finnish king who happens
to be present. “People said later that it was my ravens that told me all
I knew. It was not; it was those same people themselves, a word here, a phrase there” (p. 103).
I was somewhat surprised to see the author mixing up so many non-Germanic
elements into the story. I already mentioned Photinus's trip to Pictish Britain
above, though I don't know if it's based on anything concrete in Celtic mythology
or not. There's also the presence of vaguely Slavic tribes where I wouldn't
expect them (Polyani, p. 50; two other Slavic tribes are mentioned there, the Rus and the Lesny). Some Finns also make an appearance,
and we encounter names familiar from the Kalevala
(spelled in a curious way with hyphens: Jokuhai-inen, p. 91; Leminkai-inen, p. 118),
though I didn't have the impression that the similarity between e.g. the
Jokuhainen in Votan and that of the Kalevala goes
any further than just the name itself. I thought that drawing these various
non-Germanic elements into the story made for some unnecessary complexity
but I guess the author felt they would make the story more interesting
and picturesque.
One thing that did bother me about this novel is that supernatural elements
aren't completely absent from it. In my opinion, if the underlying idea of the
story is ‘what if Germanic mythology was based on overblown accounts of
some real events’, then the events in question should actually be something
that can happen and doesn't involve supernatural elements. But here,
Apollo Paeon actually speaks to Photinus in visions on several occasions (pp. 42–7, 77, 107, 219),
usually enjoining him to bring chaos and destruction upon the North;
maybe we are meant to imagine that Photinus had been hallucinating and now simply
honestly describes his experiences, thinking that he really was talking to a god;
or maybe we are meant to consider him an unreliable narrator (he is a slippery
and tricky fellow, after all); but I still found the presence of the supernatural
to be a bit annoying. Or consider the episode early in the book, where
a mysterious Germanic “Holy Man” (p. 9) named Joy (who may or may not be
another manifestation of Apollo Paeon, p. 219) leaves a spear stuck into a tree
and which then Photinus easily pulls out while his companions were unable to do so (p. 25);
that's another annoying supernatural element. (The spear, known as
Gungnir, becomes an important
part of the Votan legend; p. 70.) And there are a few occasions
where we get to see what might be extremely impressive stage illusions and
sleight-of-hand tricks, but which frankly look more like something that couldn't
be done without supernatural influences (pp. 138–9).
I think the author made a good decision in not trying to portray the
ancient Germanic world as more exotic than it needs to be, and for example
he often uses English-ified forms of names to make them look more familiar:
thus for example we have “Outgard” for what the wikipedia calls, much more
pedantically, Útgarðar;
we have “Asers” (singular: “Aser”) for what is
otherwise usually known as Æsir
(singular: Ás); the Chatti are
more commonly referred to in the book as “Cat Men” (p. 205; TBH it isn't obvious to me if the name Chatti actually
has anything to do with cats); and the Germans disparagingly refer to the
Finns as “Scrawlings” (pp. 61, 91, 116–8), a word which we usually encounter as
skrælings
and which was used by e.g. the Vikings in Greenland to refer to Eskimos and
American Indians.
Photinus the man of his time
I liked the fact that the story is told by Photinus himself, in the first
person. He has a pleasantly chatty style of storytelling and the author took
care to have Photinus show the sort of opinions and attitudes that you would
expect a man of that time to have. In hindsight, some of the things that
Photinus and other characters in the book are up to would be considered
atrocities nowadays, and I was wondering if we were meant to be shocked by
them. But to Photinus, such things as slavery, executions, rape, looting and
pillaging are ordinary things which he describes in a matter-of-fact way,
and they didn't come across as shocking, just like they don't when you find
them described in actual ancient myths and legends.
In particular, he regards slavery as essential to civilization:
“A civilized man, if he is to live a full life, has to be backed by power
not only to grind corn, but to cut and carry fuel and mine metals and smelt them.
But the Brits, if they will not use slaves outside the household, are doomed to barbarism for ever” (p. 343);
“we use slaves only in large groups, and only in tasks which no free man will do,
which no freed man will continue in. And if there were anything better than the fickle,
mischievous, unhealthy slave to give up the power we want to break stone or pull ploughs
or build, then we would use it. But there is, and can be, nothing else in nature that
will ever serve” (p. 494).
Photinus on geography:
- “Now whether the Land of Norroway is a part of Germany or an island no man knows, but if the shallow sea balances our central sea, as it must if there is any logic on the earth, then that great desert land, where a man may walk to Scania, must be a Northern Africa.” (P. 104.)
- On being told of “a land where fire spouts from the earth and the rivers run hot with steam” (Iceland?),
Photinus says: “That sounded reasonable enough, for there must be a burning mountain in the north to balance Etna in the logic of the world.”
- “The Alps are fifty miles high, we know that because Pliny has measured them,
and I think that these mountains west of Isca must have been at least ten miles to the tops.” (P. 454.
See Pliny's Natural History 2.65;
what he really seems to be saying is that the terrain gradually rises over the distance of 50000 paces, not that the mountains themselves
are that high.)
- “Ireland lies half-way between Britain and Spain. Let us then sail west, passing north of Ireland, and in a few days we shall be in the harbour of Gades.”
(P. 535.)
Photinus on future technology:
- “There's absolutely no future in trying to use horses to pull vehicles, unless you can find some way of not tying the harness around their necks, and if nobody's thought of a way by now they never will.”
(Pp. 135–6. This problem is solved by the horse collar, which according
to the wikipedia was invented in China around the middle of the 1st millennium AD and reached Europe in the 10th century.)
- He says on p. 376: “there's no future in earth coal”. But Rhiannon is wiser: “It will be the salvation of the Isle of the Mighty [= Britain].”
Photinus on physics:
- “Everyone knows that a ship floats because the weight of the timbers press down
on the water and the heavier the ship the better she will float” (p. 419;
this understanding of buoyancy
strikes me as somewhat dubious).
Humor
Another thing I greatly enjoyed both in this novel and in its sequel are the numerous
funny passages. A frequently used technique is to make something funny by inverting
modern expectations. For example, nowadays we think of bagpipe music as horrible noise that couldn't
possibly appeal to anyone except those hairy barbarians from the Scottish Highlands.
But to Photinus, bagpipes are the hallmark of civilization, a sublime pinnacle of human achievement:
“and a bagpiper in front of us, and it was a wonderful thing to hear that civilised music in a savage land” (p. 143).
“It was wonderful in that desert place to hear real civilised music again. The pipes are the absolute peak of human achievement in music making.” (P. 149.)
I can only assume that the writer is trolling us :)
Photinus also likes to invert modern stereotypes of cold-blooded, rational northerners and
simpleminded, voluble southerners. In his day, of course, it was just the other way around,
as the Mediterranean was the seat of civilization. “I pulled myself together, forced
myself to think like a solid unemotional Greek, not like one of those volatile northerners” (p. 207).
And on noticing Pryderi's vigorous gesticulation: “Northerners need more room to talk
than do we unemotional southerners” (p. 286).
Photinus bragging about his conmanship: “Did I tell you, once in Alexandria I sold
the Pharos to three different people in one day, and another day, the whole Library?” (P. 57.)
And: “There are plenty of men who can boast that in Alexandria they sold the Pharos to
visiting Arab chiefs. I sold it there once to an Alexandrian.” (P. 306.)
There are a few inevitable jokes about British weather:
“long cool winters and their long cold summers” (p. 288);
“there is no need to believe the tale I have heard, that the Druids hide the Temple and the Hill in the mist, for why should a magician labour to raise mists in that island that is full of mists all day and all year long?”
(p. 143). “Two days without rain are a wonder in that country. Two days of sun are a miracle” (he says this of the Pictish country in the north of Britain, p. 152).
Uncle Frazer sends his regards
Some years ago I read the first couple of volumes of James Frazer's
famous Golden Bough, which focused on the idea
that early monarchies had their origin in magical thinking in which the king was responsible for
controlling fertility and other natural phenomena, and might if needed even be sacrificed in various rituals
to ensure these things. Apparently modern anthropologists don't think highly of Frazer's work,
but his ideas influenced and inspired numerous writers and artists, especially in the earlier part
of the twentieth century. So I was interested to notice some Frazerian elements here in Votan as well.
For example, the Saxons are convinced that their fields derive their fertility from their king. Their current
king, Edwin, unfortunately appears to be infertile: “In the old days, of course, there would have been no
hesitation, he'd have been ploughed in to make the barley grow the first barren spring” (p. 121);
and they have other magical uses for the king as well: “There's the herring shoals to foretell, and the
whales to call to shore” (ibid.), “The king is the luck of his people” (says queen Edith on p. 123).
Fortunately for Edwin, his wife Edith arranges to get herself impregnated
by Photinus, who is happy to oblige (pp. 123–124). This episode also provides one of my favorite
puns in the entire book; after they are done, Edith, who acts as if the whole thing is merely a part of her
customary worship of the Mother goddess, thanks Photinus with the sentence (p. 125): “Votan, you came
when the Mother called.” :)))
Incidentally, Edith also describes the transition from the idyllic, peace-loving, matriarchal
cult of the Mother goddess to the present evil patriarchal worship of the sky-god:
“The Riders came out of the east. They worshipped only the cruel sky that sends snow and sun to torment
us. They swung their great iron swords from their high, high horses” etc. (p. 124).
The idea of such a transition is nowadays mostly considered ahistorical, but it was remarkably widespread
in the 19th century and a good deal of the 20th, when you could find it in anthropology, in fiction, and
in some odd intersections between archaeology, new-age crackpottery, and second-wave feminism. Fascinating stuff;
I read a whole book about it years ago — Myth of
Matriarchal Prehistory by Cynthia Eller — and this reminded me that I should some day also read her other book on
this topic, Gentlemen and Amazons,
which focuses on the origins of this myth in the 19th century.
The Picts also mention a connection between kings and fertility. When Photinus complains
about the prospect of being killed and eaten after being married to the king's sister for a year,
Taliesin the druid explains: “The King must die for the harvest, we've got a good king, let's have the
next king's harvest instead.” (P. 156.)
Not for All the Gold in Ireland
This is a sequel to Votan and I guess it does for some bits
of Celtic mythology what Votan tried to do with the Germanic mythology;
but as I know even less about the Celtic mythology than about the Germanic one,
I wasn't really in a position to notice any such correspondences, so I was mainly
reading this novel for the sake of its story as such.
<spoiler warning>
The story is set a few years after the events of Votan
and is again told by Photinus. I found the setup of the story very amusing.
The sentence of exile on Photinus's family has been lifted
and they live in civilized lands again. His bumbling cousin has bribed
a high imperial official to obtain the monopoly over the importation of all
gold from Ireland into the Roman Empire, but he then promptly gambled away the
deed of monopoly to some Celtic ruffian named Gwawl (pp. 229–30). Now it's up to Photinus
to follow Gwawl, get the deed back and then arrange for the gold trade to actually
get started (after which the family's business agents in Britain can probably
handle it from there).
By the time Gwawl is ready to sail from Gaul to Britain,
Photinus has already made arrangements to ensure that he will do so on
a ship under Photinus' control (p. 245), at which point Photinus takes the monopoly
deed (p. 252) and abandons Gwawl at sea in a tiny boat (p. 255). On reaching Britain, Photinus
finds that opening up the gold trade with Ireland won't be such a simple matter.
In Londinium, he is introduced to two Celtic noblemen, a Briton named Pryderi (p. 285) and an
Irishman named Cuchulainn (p. 480),
also known as ‘the Setanta’ as he
is a prominent member of the Setantii tribe (pp. 291–3).
They tell him that the Irish have imposed a strict embargo on all trade with the
Roman Empire (p. 273), for they know that “the Eagles follow trade” (p. 523; i.e.
starting to trade with the Romans will sooner or later provide them
with an excuse to occupy your land, as had indeed happened in Britain less than
a century before, p. 274).
But Ireland is far from politically unified; there are four independent kingdoms,
and at any point one of their kings is considered the High King of all Ireland (p. 286), but
often has little or no practical influence over the other three, and the position is highly unstable (p. 484;
“had the last forty-three kings not died a violent death, however and whenever enthroned?”, p. 495). Currently, the king of the
western kingdom of Connaught is the High King, but the Setanta's uncle
Conchobar (p. 495)
is king of the northern kingdom, Ulster,
and wants to reclaim the high-kingship for himself; the Setanta is trying to raise
and outfit an army for this purpose (p. 294). In exchange for Photinus's help, especially with the
raising of weapons, the Setanta promises
him that when his uncle takes power, he will lift the embargo and allow Photinus to
export as much gold from Ireland as he likes.
Pryderi and the Setanta find it prudent to pass Photinus off as a Celt during his travels
in the British Isles, which is in fact not even entirely false, for his
mother was from a Celtic family in Galatia
in Asia Minor (p. 293). He somewhat implausibly remembers the names of her ancestors more than twenty generations back,
and based on this information the two Celts even figure out
which clan he technically belongs to: “ ‘Plain, isn't it?’/
‘Obvious,’ agreed Pryderi. ‘Son of Lear, he is.’ ” (P. 296;
they also determine which animal he must therefore refrain from eating: swans, much to
Photinus's disappointment.)
He has also learned the British language passably well on his
way there (from a British slave-girl named Cicva, whom he had bought for that purpose
and then released upon reaching Britain; pp. 236, 268).
Now Photinus, disguised as Manannan
the Galatian Celt, travels westwards with Pryderi
to confer with someone named Master of the Western Sea (p. 294). This seems to be a minor British
ruler in an area where the Roman presence is next to nonexistent, and he might be able to
help them ship the Setanta's warriors and their weapons from Britain into Ireland when the time is ripe.
Along the way, they have a few episodes which I thought belong more to a fairy-tale
than a novel. Photinus, never a man to miss a business opportunity, crafts some
shoes (p. 303), shields (p. 323), and saddles (p. 334), and sells them in market towns along the way;
each day the best and last of the items he has for sale is bought by a mysterious
and beautiful woman named Rhiannon,
who is always accompanied by flocks of birds (pp. 308, 369, 403; there's
the annoying supernatural element again) and who pays with a single gold coin each time (pp. 309, 329, 338),
thereby confirming his impression that he is indeed on the right track to reach gold.
They also find themselves pursued by Gwawl at one point but manage to shake him off (pp. 355–65).
Upon reaching the coast (p. 382), it turns out that the Master of the Western Sea is none
other than Caw, whom we briefly met in Votan (p. 165) — Photinus
stole his boat after escaping from his forced marriage in the Pictish country,
and perpetrated some fairly gruesome violence upon him in the process.
Caw seems surprisingly phlegmatic about this and agrees to help Photinus.
Pryderi gets married (p. 387) — to none other than Cicva,
who is actually Caw's niece (p. 358)!
Come on — what are the odds that, of all the British
slave-girls that Photinus could have bought in Rome to learn British from, he happened
to buy the one who was in fact from a Celtic princely family and who
will end up marrying the man to whom Photinus was introduced after his arrival
in Britain? At some point, a coincidence is no longer just a coincidence but enemy action a
cheap deus-ex-machina style plot element.
Photinus also attends a curious Celtic religious ceremony, which takes
place at midwinter once every 49 years at the Glass Mountain (pp. 409–17).
In the ceremony, he and Rhiannon act as representations of certain deities and dispense advice
to the believers. It ends with a feast where everyone eats their taboo dishes
(Photinus eats swan, Rhiannon skylarks; p. 416). You can't help noticing that there are lots of vaguely Christian
elements in this ceremony, though the Britons themselves don't seem to know or care
about this background; they do however remember that these things were brought by an old Syrian
man a little less than a hundred years ago: “he had the spear, and he had the cup, and he had a sprig of the
thorn”,
which he used to worship and which the Celts would later incorporate into their ritual (p. 417).
Soon afterward, Gwawl shows up again and nearly captures Rhiannon, but she
runs away and apparently escapes to Ireland in a small boat. Photinus hadn't
originally been intending to go to Ireland himself but now decides to do so,
hoping to find her again (pp. 443–5).
We saw earlier that Photinus's new Irish ally, the Setanta, is trying to
raise an army in Britain and ship it to Ireland, but one of the problems with this is a
shortage of weapons, as the Romans had disarmed the British Celts pretty thoroughly.
Here's where Photinus can help; thanks to his family's connections in high places,
he is able to gain access to stores of confiscated weapons kept by one of the
Roman legions in the area (p. 452). But as it now turns out, Photinus is really planning to
betray his Celtic allies; he makes arrangements for two legions to invade Ireland
in a few months (pp. 432, 451), after the Irish have been sufficiently weakened by the war
between the Setanta and the previous High King (p. 464). The island would then easily be occupied
by the Romans and Photinus's gold trade would be much smoother.
The Setanta's invasion of Ireland now begins (pp. 455, 460–3) and initially goes rather well.
Photinus is there as well, watching the Ulster army defeat the previous High King
near Ireland's ceremonial capital of Tara (pp. 470–81).
To claim the gold that had been promised
to him, Photinus now takes a small detachment of men and travels
towards the gold-bearing rivers in the south of Ireland (pp. 502–3). However, it
seems that all the gold is long gone; the locals have an old traditional
“gold dance” in which the moves seem to mimic activities such as
panning for gold, refining it and even trading it, but they have completely forgotten
what the dance represents, and Photinus himself finds very little gold (pp. 508–12).
The story ends with a few very dramatic, and to me completely unexpected, reversals.
Photinus finds himself having to retreat from an unexpected attack (p. 512) of the
army of the eastern kingdom of Leinster, ruled by none other than Gwawl, who now
captures Photinus and his friend Aristarchos (p. 519).
After the northern and western armies annihilate each other (Cuchulainn's northern army
is already melting away, the men deserting as soon as they have gathered up enough plunder; p. 518), Gwawl will easily
claim the High Kingship for himself. It further turns out that Rhiannon is
really his cousin (p. 519) and has been in cahoots with him all along, informing him of
Photinus's moves and plans (pp. 524–5). Gwawl is also aware of the planned Roman invasion
of Ireland and has arranged to prevent it by instigating barbarian invasions
of Roman territory from northern Britain and Germany, thereby keeping the legions busy (pp. 525–6).
This is in fact why Gwawl had been in Rome at the start of the book — he
was trying to learn if Rome had any designs against Ireland, and managed to come
across Photinus's cousin and his monopoly deed by chance (p. 524 — there's
another implausible coincidence).
Photinus gets Gwawl to release both him and Aristarchos by defeating him at the game
of fichel (similar to chess; pp. 520–8). They sail off in a small boat and are
soon picked up by a ship operated by Madoc, one of Caw's men; also on board are Taliesin, Cicva, Rhiannon, and an unknown
Christian from Bonnonia. Although Photinus feels as if Rhiannon had betrayed him, it turns
out that she had in fact been protecting his life all along (p. 534). Since they have enemies in
so many other places, they decide to sail westwards from Ireland, hoping to reach Spain (p. 535).
(Of course sailing west from Ireland would take them not to Spain but to America;
this might be an allusion to an actual Welsh legend about a man named Madoc
who is said to have sailed to America in the 12th century.)
</spoiler warning>
I think I liked this novel even better than the previous one. The story
felt more coherent and I enjoyed all the grand schemes and surprising reversals,
especially towards the end of the story.
Unfortunately I wasn't in a position to enjoy the links to Celtic mythology
as I'm not sufficiently familiar with it; but a bit of searching in the wikipedia
shows many of these correspondences — see the links in the plot summary
above. From Welsh mythology (mostly the Mabinogion),
we have Gwawl, Pryderi (son of Pwyll, pp. 265, 278, 428), Rhiannon, Caw
(I couldn't find a wikipedia page for Caw, but there is one for his son
Hueil, who is
also mentioned in this novel; pp. 309, 322, etc.), as well as Photinus's Celtic pseudonym,
Manannan (but as Photinus himself
points out, there's also an Irish sea-god of
the same name, p. 297). From Irish mythology
(the Ulster cycle),
we have Cuchulainn the Setanta, his uncle Conchobar, his druid
Cathbad (p. 489),
queen Maeve (Conchobar's former
wife and now more recently married to the king of Connaught, p. 494).
The druid Taliesin, who appears
both here and in Votan, seems to be inspired by a semi-legendary
bard of the same name (though of a later date).
I have occasionally, years ago, made a few half-hearted attempts to read up
on Celtic (and also Germanic) mythology, but I found that I could never really
get into it the way I could get e.g. into Greek mythology. I wonder why that is.
I can't really believe that one mythological tradition is in some meaningful sense
better than another. Perhaps it's simply that my first encounters with Greek
mythology were at a somewhat earlier age, when one is more susceptible to such things?
Or is it just a coincidence of language and spelling which makes the Celtic
names look so outlandish that I can't even keep the names of the characters straight
in my head? (But that seems to be a weak argument. If one can remember Agamemnon
and Klytaimnestra, why not also Cuchulainn and Conchobar?)
But there does seem to be something about it, for even here
in James's novel I had a bit of a hard time keeping up with all the
Celtic names and remembering who's who. What probably also
adds to the overabundance of characters is the fact that
the story mixes two different and, as far as I understand, otherwise not
particularly closely related mythological traditions.
Much like in Votan, there are some supernatural elements (see e.g. Photinus's
sacrifice at Tara, mentioned above) and implausible coincidences.
An example of the latter: on p. 339, the gold coin which Rhiannon gives to Photinus turns out to have “been struck
in the Old City, in my home, in my very house, by my own ancestor. These coins showed common ground
between Rhiannon andmyself. They were not chosen foolishly.” Right.
A very fine old Druidic motto, mentioned by Rhiannon on p. 346: “The truth against the world.”
There are many mentions of it on the web, though I couldn't find any that would explain
precisely what they meant by it. The first hit when I googled the phrase, however, was the home page
of some conspiracy theory crackpot :))
Language
An interesting theme that occurs several times in this novel is language.
Photinus learns British early in the novel and is later surprised to find
that Irish is different enough to be quite unintelligible (pp. 455–6; that surprised me
too; in any case, Photinus quickly learns Irish as well, p. 465). He occasionally
makes comparisons between the various languages he knows:
- “Germans can't learn to speak Greek, their tongues are too short,
and they had great difficulty with the initial Ph of my name.” (P. 10.)
And similarly in Men Went to Cattraeth: “Oh, no they [= Anglo-Saxons]
cannot speak the tongue of the Angels [= British] like us, not Latin, because their tongues are too short.” (P. 569.)
- Photinus remarks on his agent, a heavily romanized Briton: “It was when you had him worried that you could hear the touch of the
woad in his voice, in the
adenoidal sibillants and
in the collapse of all grammar into a continuous passive voice and a flood of impersonal verbs.
The British tongue is one that is best spoken slowly by an old man, as Latin is by a middle-aged
one at court, and as Greek is made for the slangy arguments of the markets of Alexandria and Tyre.”
(P. 273.)
- The sibilant and adenoidal thing also appears in Men Went to Cattraeth (p. 551):
“Men there are from Mona, who speak strange and sibilant, as if they had adenoids.”
(TBH I have the impression that everyone has an adenoid,
but with some people it gets swollen and needs to be removed.)
- “It was easy already to fall into the Brits' manner of speech, and after speech comes thought,
and after thought comes life, and love. If you talk in Latin and think in Latin, you must be dignified,
and think in dignity, because there is no short or easy or comfortable way of saying anything in that language.
But in Greek, as we speak it all along the coasts of Asia and into Alexandria, from Massilia to Trapezus in the
Caucasus, everything is easy and full of slang and comfortable ways of thought. And yet, in this unconventional
tongue, it is always possible to say what you mean, and to know that it will only have one meaning to anyone who listens.
But while the Brit's tongue is also full of slang, it is vague and imprecise and soft at the edges, and behind the
plain meaning of everything said you have to look for another hidden meaning.” (P. 302.)
- “he had that easy flow of language and wide vocabulary and subtle sense of rhythm which are common to all Britons
[. . .] he was about to launch out again into one of his interminable sentences, the only saving quality of which was that like all the Britons he was careful to begin each one with the main verb” (p. 372).
I suspect that this sort of vague, impressionistic comparisons between
languages are mostly bullshit, but they're delightful to see anyway.
James also tries to give a Celtic flavor to the speech of some of his
characters by employing some very curious grammatical constructions such
as, I guess, would result from translating too literally from Celtic languages
into English. A typical feature is that the subject of a sentence is
an “it” that doesn't really refer to anything in particular,
and what would normally be the subject is in fact buried in a subordinate
clause; the results tend to appear vague, sometimes nearly incomprehensible,
and usually quite funny:
- Leo Rufus on p. 273: “And is it thinking then that it is you are, that it would be making it any easier for you to go to Ireland and to return again? [. . .]
The less that it is that it is that it is being said about it, that is the better it is that it will be.”
- Taliesin on p. 353: “And there is true it is what you are saying”.
- Rhiannon on p. 354: “And where else is it thinking you are that I am going?”
- A miner shows coal to Photinus, p. 373: “If it is not knowing that you are, [. . .] then it is guessing you will have to be.”
- Madoc offering seal meat to Photinus, p. 392: “If it's wearing it you are, then it's eating it you can be.”
- Even Photinus himself: “This is an island of deceit and duplicity and mists indeed, I thought, and
if ever I heart the truth about anything, then it's lucky I'll be. ” (P. 306.)
Some of the Celts also have a curious tendency to pile on synonyms in a way that nobody but a lawyer would do in English.
Pryderi is probably the most frequent perpetrator of this, but the finest example is the following masterpiece
from a coal miner on p. 372: “Easy it is to be hearing, and understanding, and knowing, from your question,
though it is very well you are speaking the language of the Gods, and only making a few mistakes in the grammar,
and in the order of the tenses and in the mutations, and sometimes being indistinct in your appreciation of the
fine gradations of meaning, that it is from far away and from foreign parts and from a distant land that you have
come, and travelled, and ridden.”
Religion
There are some loose ends in this story that I don't know
what to do with. In particular, a man who is obviously a Christian
occurs several times in the novel, practically following Photinus
step by step throughout his journey: he draws a fish in a tavern
at Bonnonia (p. 241)
and a Sator square
in Londinium (p. 289);
he appears again in Cunetio (p. 342),
dropping hints which fly right over Photinus's head (“ ‘There is one flock, and one shepherd: one
vineyard and one true husbandman.’/ What that meant I had no idea, and so I only said back:/
‘And a pretty small farm that must be, brother.’ ”);
he attends the midwinter festival on the Glass Mountain
and grumbles about it (pp. 410, 414; perhaps because it's got so many christian elements
that he regards it as a perversion of actual christianity), he even ends up on the ship that's
taking Photinus and others into the west at the end of the novel (pp. 532–3).
Yet we never learn who he is or why he's doing this; and Photinus
himself doesn't pay any real attention to him, nor reacts to his hints.
(He is shocked to hear that the christians ignore the official cult of the emperor; p. 535.)
Photinus's outlook is, just like in Votan,
completely pagan, he doesn't seem to be even aware of christianity,
which suits me just fine since I'm a rabid anti-theist myself.
Nevertheless, I found his religious ideas confusing and wasn't quite
sure what to make of them. In Votan, he considered
himself a servant of some kind of evil form of Apollo, and spoke to
that god several times in visions; near the end of the novel (p. 219),
Apollo Paeon praised him for bringing chaos into the North and dismissed
him from his service. (In Not for All the Gold in Ireland, this Apollo is often regarded
as identical with the Unconquered Sun:
by Photinus's uncle on p. 235, by Taliesin on p. 351, and by Photinus himself on p. 379.)
Thus in Not for All the Gold in Ireland,
Photinus is now a servant of “Those Below”; their exact nature,
or how Photinus came to serve them, are not explained, but there are a few
illustrative bits of infomation:
Photinus says on p. 235: “Wherever you go, you find different Gods for this and that. But the Gods Below are the same everywhere.”
On pp. 446–7, Photinus and Pryderi sacrifice to the Gods Below before their forthcoming invasion of Ireland.
Photinus offers gold coins and a diamond-encrusted fake eye; Pryderi offers a dead man's head.
“Weighted with silver, the head went straight down to Those Below. And I have no doubt it pleased them more than Gold or diamonds.”
The most substantial explanation of the Gods Below comes on p. 472, where Photinus is making
a sacrifice on the plain of Tara on the night before the big battle; this ritual actually calls
up a number of dead spirits which give a good fright to the High King's men and thus materially
affect the course of events, pp. 473–4. “To bring the friendly dead was one thing.
To bring the just Gods was another, those who favour no man, who cannot be persuaded. Thoth and Adeimantus.
But all the night I stood upon the mound in the cold dark, the worst May frost in a man's life,
and the sweat upon my skin froze within my clothes. I sang the words I may not here repeat in the
language none may know I speak, and at last the great Judges of the Dead stood beside me to judge the High King and
all the host and condemn them for all the evil they had done. But they judged the host of the North also, and they judged me.
But that I did not know./ Last I sang up the named and the nameless Gods Below, the
gods who do not care for justice or for right or for any man, and it is these gods above
all who rule the world from their place below, rule the Sun and the Earth and all the other gods.
They hate all things living, and they seek only to draw us down to themselves and suck out our life.
These are the gods that no man worships, but the gods do: that men and gods fear, and will never tell
their fear. They feed on souls. I promised them food in plenty.”
So they seem to be some kind of impersonal forces of nature or of entropy; I must admit this all sounds
delightfully creepy and evil, and the contrast between the ‘just Gods’ and the
‘Gods Below [. . .] who do not care for justice’ reminded me a little
of Lovecraft's The Other Gods.
Rhiannon is also described as “Queen of Those Below” (p. 351)
and “Mother of Those Below” (pp. 379, 386; and on p. 375 a coal miner upon meeting her literally
prays to her as if she is a goddess).
Also on the subject of religion, here's a hilarious misunderstanding between the Polyani people and a Christian missionary from Votan
(p. 52): “At the end, they had been forced to do what he seemed, to the best of their understanding, to be
asking them to do. They ate him and drank his blood.”
Where is Photinus from?
Photinus never quite says where exactly he's from; he refers to his home town vaguely as “Old City”,
a phrase which struck me as delightfully ominous :)
On p. 339 he says that Alexander the Great, being a Macedonian, was “as far from the line of Themistocles
or Solon as we of the old towns of Asia”. So I guess his home town was in Asia Minor
and might not even have considered itself quite fully Greek. This fits together
well with the fact that his mother was a Celt from Galatia, which is also in Asia Minor (p. 293).
Another vague hint of its easterly location is on p. 439, where he says to Rhiannon:
“I will take you with me back, through Rome and through Ostia, past Brundisium and Athens, through Alexandria and Byblos to my own home in the Old City.”
But it isn't exactly clear to me when it would make sense to go “through Alexandria and Byblos”;
one is on the coast of Egypt, the other on the coast of Lebanon, so if you're coming from Rome (or Athens for that matter),
surely you will sail to either one of those two cities (whichever is more convenient for the continuation
of your trip) but not both. And neither of them makes much sense if your ultimate destination is
in Asia Minor.
We know that the Old City has a “Sanctuary” (pp. 42–3, 77) or Temple (p. 107) of Apollo Paeon;
“[t]he God came from the Islands long ago and chose his own Temple” (p. 42).
The Old City is also mentioned on pp. 293 and 418, but without any new information.
Civilization and its discontents
By the time of this novel, most of Britain is under Roman control, but
Pryderi is one of the few British princes that still resist it (the Romans
regard him as a major nuisance, p. 428), as does his father Pwyll (pp. 265, 278).
What I found extremely interesting were the discussions surrounding his reasons
for this resistance. Basically, Pryderi subscribes to the old-fashioned warrior
ethos where the whole point in life is to go about slaughtering, looting, pillaging, raping, etc.
An advanced, sedentary, urbanized civilization based on the rule of law,
such as that of Rome, has nothing of interest to offer to him.
Photinus, unsurprisingly, takes precisely the opposite view. He has no interest
in the warrior culture, but he likes making money, and civilization provides him
with a better environment in which to do so. They have an interesting conversation
about this on p. 436, where Photinus points out that Pryderi could gain both
wealth and power by submitting to Rome (the Romans tended to leave a good deal of power
in the hands of formerly independent Celtic princes, as long as the taxes were paid
and Roman laws generally adhered to): “‘The future lies in the towns,
Pryderi. It is the Guild of Shoemakers and the men who peddle earth coal who will
rule this land
in the end. Submit, Pryderi. There is no other way to power.
[. . .] I know what it is. You are jealous of the Irishman, the King's
nephew, the Setanta. You want to be like him, to lead a fianna, to ride into great
battles, to topple monarchs and empty thrones. It is too late, Pryderi. Submit and
be rich and happy and have power.’ ” Pryderi replies:
“ ‘I might be richer than I am, and have more power, but I would not be happy’ ”
and adds his motto:
“ ‘never to forsake a friend, or forget a wrong, or forgive a Roman’ ”.
By contrast, Ireland is free of Roman rule and the old chaotic warrior culture is
still in full swing there. Photinus has a few chances to observe it in action during
the Setanta's military expedition. He surveys the carnage in the aftermath of a battle
(p. 465): “I looked at the huddle of weeping, bleeding, naked bodies. This, I
thought, is what Pryderi would want, this is what the other island [= Britain] was
like before the conquest, when every king was as good as any other king, and any man as
good as his master if only he were strong enough. But the legions would settle that;
as brutal perhaps in the first months, but in five years there would be roads all across
the land, and inns by them, and even Rhiannon could ride unguarded and unharmed wherever she liked.”
And on watching the Setanta ride to war, he comments (p. 499): “This,
I thought, is how Pryderi would like to ride, at the head of an army, sweeping a
country bare of women and food and beasts, and it is only for preventing this that
he has his hatred for Rome. Oh, yes, war is a fine thing for nobles and leaders,
even in defeat; but for the defeated, or the weak on either side, there is little to
be said for it, and if you can think what that little is, then tell me, because I cannot think what it is.”
Photinus points out that the Irish hardly even understand the point of civilization (p. 492):
“They had no real idea what the Empire was about, or what the army was for.
They saw it not as a great union of peace and trade, held together by an army of engineers
and builders and messengers and administrators: they thought of it as a despotism in other
interests than their own, symbolised by the fierce shield wall of the legion. The Irish
knew well the rule of their own custom: but the rule of law that we live under in the
Empire was beyond their comprehension.”
I think this is one of those situations where both of them are right, and it's
*so* frustrating! Emotionally, I agree with Pryderi; my ideal is basically
the Riders of Doom scene
from Conan the Barbarian, and I don't see how anything that civilization
is able to offer could compare to it. Even if you become a CEO and take over your
rival company — even if you become your country's president and push it into war
and win that war — even then, nothing you will get to do in your moment of triumph will
involve riding a goddamn horse with a Basil Poledouris soundtrack in the background
and whacking at your enemies with a giant-ass two-handed axe! Even if you were to win a war,
you still won't get to walk in triumph down the main avenue of your enemy's capital city,
while a tearful populace is made to throw rose petals in front of your feet, with the
Imperial March from
Star Wars playing in the background and all. No matter what you do,
Conan's best in life will continue
to elude you. Screw you, civilization, you miserable, boring old spoilsport!
And yet, and yet — of course Photinus has a point. We live better under civilization,
on average (and there can be more of us too, although I don't see that as a good thing);
especially those of us who wouldn't be princes like Pryderi. Of course a good deal of Photinus's
defense of civilization is hypocritical nonsense; he praises it as a “union of peace and trade” with
“the rule of law”, as if he didn't know perfectly well that a civilized state (especially
one like the Roman Empire) is merely a way to organize violence and plunder more efficiently and on
a larger scale; its elites always make sure that trade mostly serves to enrich them and
that the rule of law mostly exists to make the population easier to control, while the laws
are written in such a way that they defend and advance the interests
of the elites rather than of the rest of the population. (In any case, it is of course normal that
Photinus turns a blind eye to these things, since he himself is from a rich and influential merchant family,
so all the systems of a civilized state work very much in his favor.)
But no matter how poorly Photinus defends it, it's nevertheless true that civilization
has many things going in its favor; it's nice to have a computer
and indoor plumbing, and no matter how deeply I despise the very idea of law, I have to admit
that I'd fare much worse if I had to depend entirely on wielding a large axe for my safety.
And that's the problem with this whole thing; both barbarism and civilization are deeply
unsatisfying, each in its own way, and we end up miserable under both of them.
Basically, I love Pryderi for his attitude where he says “I might be richer than I am, and have more power, but I would not be happy”.
Civilization is like a Siren, constantly trying to seduce you with ‘come join us,
we have cookies (and peace and trade and rule of law and roads and public health
etc. etc. etc.),
all you need to do is abandon all your natural impulses!’
And we all crawl to it, because of course we do, and hate ourselves for doing so. But Pryderi here says
defiantly: fuck you, I'm not buying what you're selling. Rationally, civilization is always the better
choice, which indeed is why we all choose it; but that inevitably means that the only way
to assert any sort of freedom for oneself at all would be to spit in its face, like
Pryderi does here. And this is why he has my admiration; he is an actual, real,
authentic human being in a way that someone living
under civilization cannot possibly be. Plus, he gets to whack at people with a giant axe.
Hot bestiality action!
One thing I like about early monarchies are the utterly bizarre ideas they have
about the monarch's role and his relationship to the state. A common idea is that the
monarch is somehow married to the state (and brings fertility to it, as we already saw above). But the real charm
of this idea lies in the details, which are what separates the real men from the weaklings.
The Doge of Venice, for example, would simply throw a wedding-ring into the sea during
his ‘marriage to the sea’ ceremony.
But the Irish king, or so the story goes, would actually screw a horse in public
during his coronation ceremony!
(And before you ask: yes, the horse was female — a white mare in fact. What, did
you think they were some kind of sick perverts?! :P)
Photinus witnesses this spectacle on p. 496, and is suitably shocked: “I will not tell what
happened then, because there are things a man may
stomach only to do in darkness in the rites of a mystery, but to do it in broad
day in sight of ten thousand people as the High King must do — I will not
speak of it. I will only say that I was sorry for the horse.” :))
The event also provides one of my favorite puns in the entire book:
“the day that Cuchullain held the white mare for Conchobar to mount” (p. 525). :)))
(Incidentally, tvtropes says that
there isn't much actual evidence of bestiality, and that the main source for it, Gerald of Wales, is not the most reliable.)
From watching the antics of the candidates in the U.S. presidential campaign,
I can't help feeling that the times might be getting ripe for a return of
man-on-horse action into politics. All we need is to get at least one dissolute billionare
to support the idea and tie his donations to it, and we'll have the Republican candidates
gangbanging that horse live on Fox TV like there's no tomorrow! :)))
Photinus's itinerary through Britain
Much of Photinus's journey through Britain can be reconstructed pretty closely and goes
more or less directly in an east-to-west direction:
I'm a bit unsure about the next step, Arberth (p. 360). Everything I could find about
it on the wikipedia and elsewhere suggests that this is modern Narberth in Wales,
and that town is in fact often mentioned in connection with actual medieval Welsh stories and legendary characters
which were the inspiration for James's novel. The problem with this is that Arberth is about 150 miles away from Cunetio,
and yet Photinus seems to cover the distance in a single night, while dragging the bound
Lhygod along (p. 357). (For comparison, that's about twice the distance from London to Cunetio,
which took several days and more than 60 pages.)
After Arbeth, the geography of the novel gets a little more vague: Photinus enters
“the Summer Country”, with features such as “Glass Mountain”,
“Apple Land”, “Lead Hills”, and “Deer Moor” (p. 377).
The Summer Country seems to be a direct translation of the Celtic name for
Somerset. Apple Land seems to be
likewise a direct translation of Avalon,
a mythical island which in turn is thought to correspond to
Glastonbury (which lies in Somerset,
so we seem to be on the right track). Glass Mountain probably refers to the nearby hill
called Glastonbury Tor, whose Welsh
name literally means “Glass Isle”.
If we need any further proof that Photinus really is in Somerset at this point, we can
find it on p. 419 where he sails “across the Severn Sea”
to Isca Silurum
(Caerleon, Wales).
This makes sense if he started in Somerset, whereas e.g. if the Summer Country had been in Wales,
he wouldn't need to cross the Severn Sea to reach Caerleon.
But if Photinus really went to Somerset, this counts against the idea that Arberth corresponds
to Narberth in Wales, because looking at the map shows us that going from Cunetio to
Somerset through Narberth is a huge detour, which nobody in their right mind would take.
An alternative explanation for Arberth might be based on the following passage from p. 359:
Grathach refers to the mound of Arberth as “Hill of the Sun, or the Hill of Sul, who is our Goddess of the Sun”.
The wikipedia says that this goddess, Sulis, was worshipped
at Bath — and looking at the map
shows that Bath lies very nicely on the way from Cunetio to Glastonbury. So perhaps this is the location
that the author had in mind, and he just borrowed the name of Arberth to gain some bonus associations
with old Welsh literature.
I'm not sure if we can trace Photinus's movements through Somerset any more precisely.
He travels through marshy country, and Caw's home is “under the bluff edge of the hills
on the Western side of the Summer Country” (p. 382). According to the Wikipedia,
there's a marshy area called Exmoor in
the west of Somerset, so perhaps that's where Photinus went.
Links to Google Maps: with Narberth,
with Bath (and continuing to Caerleon).
When do these stories take place?
Neither Votan nor Not for All the Gold in Ireland say explicitly which year(s)
they are taking place in, but there are a few hints scattered here and there through the novels. In Votan, we have:
- Photinus (pp. 4–5) refers to “their late Sainted Majesties Nero or Galba” — Galba died in AD 69.
- Otho (p. 16) remembers that “Sixty, seventy years ago, this was a great place for the Amber trade” and that these
good times ended after “Herman came. First he beat the Romans up in the north [. . .]
We had our Good King then, my grandfather Maroboduus”. So this early part of Votan
is happening about 2 generations (and less than 70 years) after the battle of
Teutoburg Forest (this battle was in AD 9).
- Tawalz says (pp. 51–2) “long ago, in Grandfather's Grandfather's time,
a man came talking about a God, who hung on a tree, and was wounded with a spear” etc.
So if this novel is happening 4 generations after a Christian missionary reached Tawalz's people,
this could hardly be earlier than the 2nd century. This seems inconsistent with other time-related passages
quotes above. (Maybe we aren't really dealing with a Christian missionary? Odin
also hung on a tree (for nine days) and was wounded with a spear.
But on the other hand Tawalz later mentions eating his flesh and drinking his blood,
which would definitely fit in well with the hypothesis that he was Christian,
and I couldn't find anything similar in the Wikipedia page for Odin.)
- Photinus says (p. 78): “I had known old men who had heard at first hand about old Claudius
raving through the palace when he heard,
how he cried,/ ‘Varus, Varus, bring me back my legions.’ ”
This seems to be another reference to the battle of Teutoburg Forest, thus agrees with Otho's citation above.
However, I'm confused by the emperor's name; that battle was in AD 9, when the emperor was Augustus,
not Claudius (who ruled during AD 41–54).
So this would suggest that Votan is taking place somewhere in the last quarter of the first century or so.
Next, in Not for All the Gold in Ireland we have:
- Photinus (p. 227): “A hundred years ago, now, His Sacred Majesty
the Emperor Claudius had conquered the fertile southern quarter of the island”.
The Roman conquest of Britain
started in AD 43 and gradually continued for several decades.
Photinus probably refers to the early phases of the conquest.
- A local official (p. 329) mentions “the municipal by-law ‘Whatsoever person’ of the seventh year of the Emperor
Hadrian”.
This suggests the story is taking place no earlier than AD 124 (Hadrian's reign started in AD 117).
- Taliesin (p. 416): “until, oh, just ninety-eight years ago, there was no cauldron here on the Glass Mountain’;
and then Caw explains that this cauldron, or cup, was brought at that time by an old Syrian man together with other things that
are obviously Christian relics: “he had the spear, and he had the cup, and he had a sprig of the thorn”.
So the events of this novel must be taking place at least 98 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, probably a bit more to take
account of the time it took the Syrian to reach Britain. Well, this doesn't tell us much that we don't already know from the
quote from page 227 above.
So this second novel seems to be taking place in the second or third quarter of the second century.
Fitting these estimates for both novels together is made harder by the fact that Photinus
doesn't strike me as being *that* much older in the second novel than he was in the first.
From Otho's quote it's hard to put Votan any later than around AD 80,
and from the Hadrian quote we can't put Not for All the Gold in Ireland sooner than AD 124,
so there is a gap of some 44 or more years between them. Even if Photinus started
in Votan as a young man, he'd have to be in his sixties in the second novel,
and I have a hard time imagining him as that old. The rigors of the journey would have to
take a big enough toll on him that we'd have to hear something about it. Besides,
his uncle is still alive (p. 227), which also suggests we should expect a less advanced
age for Photinus. If we take the ‘hundred years after the Roman conquest’ datum as
our basis, it gets even worse; that would put Not for All the Gold in Ireland well after AD 140,
with a gap of 60 years between the two novels.
Men Went to Cattraeth
Although this novel is not a sequel to the previous one (Not for All
the Gold in Ireland), it was also inspired by a bit of very early Welsh literature,
namely Y Gododdin, a series of elegic poems about
a battle at Cattraeth and the men who died there, written by a poet named
Aneirin. James explains in an introductory note (p. 539) that
we don't really know exactly when the battle of Cattraeth took place or who
was involved in it, so this novel is a kind of attempt to imagine what sort
of conditions might have given rise to the events described in the poem.
The story is told in the first person by Aneirin, “pre-eminent chief poet of the
isle of Britain” (p. 544) and mostly takes place in the late 5th century AD
(during the reign of “Theodoric in Rome and Zeno in Byzantium and Clovis in Gaul”, p. 541),
when Aneirin was a young man, though he is now several decades
older (p. 697) and occasionally refers to later events as well. Britain is
a very different place than it was in Not for All the Gold in Ireland;
there, in the 2nd century, most of Britain was under Roman rule (imposed barely
a century earlier), which the Britons were grudgingly and unwillingly putting up with.
By the time of Men Went to Cattraeth, these same Celtic Britons
have become heavily Romanized, indeed they consider themselves to be Romans
and Christians and civilized people, and are tremendously proud of all this,
looking down upon the pagan Germanic barbarians who are now invading their island.
Indeed the Britons consistently refer to themselves as Romans throughout this
book (the only exception to this seem to be the Picts, who had never been part of the
Roman empire; p. 549); sure, it's been several decades since the legions
evacuated
the island, but ‘we Romans’ are still here (p. 599). (At first I thought this was a bit
silly, but TBH the Greeks had been doing
the
same thing for many centuries before and after, and nobody seems to be complaining about that.)
The departure of the actual Romans from Britain naturally left a bit of a
power vacuum; British leaders started fighting amongst themselves, and some
were happy to accept help from Germanic tribes who wanted to settle on the island
(pp. 598–9, 703 — incidentally, the Romans had a similar excuse when starting their
invasion of Britain in the 1st century). I don't see how anybody could be surprised by what happened
next; once they got established on the island, more and more invaders came from
the mainland, so that now, some fifty years later, large parts of Britain are already
under Germanic control and the Celtic Britons are being pushed
to the periphery, from where they are fighting an increasingly desperate struggle
against the invaders. (See the Wikipedia for some useful maps of early medieval Britain:
1,
2,
3.)
Aneirin grew up on the edges of this struggle, at the court
of king Eudav of Mordei (pp. 549, 623–4), a region lying just north of Hadrian's Wall. South of it lies the
land of Bernicia,
which has been held by the Anglo-Saxons for some 30 years already (p. 636).
Mordei itself has increasingly been turning into a debatable
region, suffering frequent raids, until eventually, about a year before the
events of this book, Eudav was killed in a raid, his hall was altogether destroyed and the
area is now basically depopulated (pp. 549, 628, 636); the British population has either
fled or been enslaved by the invaders. Aneirin himself spent some months
in captivity among the Saxons and has only recently
been rescued during a successful British military campaign (pp. 549–50, 613).
<spoiler warning>
At the start of the novel, we find Aneirin travelling to the hall of
king Mynydog of Eiddin,
a country lying just north of Mordei. Mynydog is planning a large war
against the Saxons, hoping to repopulate Mordei and perhaps
even weaken their hold on Bernicia. He receives help from numerous other
British rulers: the rich king Evrog of Dumbarton sends him armor and weapons (p. 551),
the gallant and charismatic (p. 687; but annoyingly overconfident) prince Owain
comes from Cornwall to lead Mynydog's army (p. 563),
warriors from numerous British kingdoms sign up as volunteers (pp. 551–2),
and Mynydog also seems to be arranging an alliance with the British kingdom of
Elmet
a bit further south.
Aneirin's initial plan is not to join Mynydog's expedition; he just
wants to see Bradwen (pp. 551, 564), king Eudav's daughter,
whom he knew and fell in love with during his days at Eudav's court (p. 549).
However, it turns out that she is not interested in anybody other than Owain (p. 607),
so Aneirin decides to join the army anyway to forget his disappointment (p. 572).
After several months of preparations, the British army sets off towards
the south (p. 611). It consists mainly of about 350 well-trained and -geared horsemen,
which apparently counts as a “huge army” (Owain's words, p. 576), especially in
view of the fact that the Saxons don't have any cavalry of their own (“they
find it hard enough to manage oxen”, p. 554).
Additionally, there is also an infantry of about 2000 peasants (p. 612), many of whom
are originally from Mordei and now intend to settle there again, to help rebuild the
province (their families will join them there once the war is over; p. 635).
The campaign starts well; the cavalry moves ahead and encounters no resistance
in Mordei; they even rebuild king Eudav's hall (p. 633).
However, the peasants in the infantry are so demoralized by the
devastation they find in Mordei that they turn back north; the prospect of
rebuilding their homes in what is now practically wilderness, under the
constant threat of Saxon raids, is simply too daunting (pp. 639–40). At this point, it
would probably be reasonable for the cavalry to turn back as well, but
surely nobody in their right mind would expect a bunch of knights from
early medieval heroic literature to be reasonable: after all, they gave
Mynydog an oath to fight the Saxons, infantry or no infantry (pp. 645–6).
So they press on into Bernicia; they soon start encountering Saxon
villages, in which they thoroughly slaughter everyone and everything that can be slaughtered,
and burn or smash everything that hadn't been alive to begin with (pp. 654–7).
Aneirin notices that there has been a curious shortage of men of military age in these villages (p. 657); and sure enough,
next thing you know, a huge army of Saxons shows up. A small detachment
of Britons is taken by surprise and slaughtered (p. 659), but later the rest of them
score a victory against the Saxons near the ruins of the town of Cattraeth (pp. 667–71;
“empty for generations”, p. 686).
However, there are still plenty of Saxons left alive and ready to fight,
they have just been scattered temporarily. The Britons celebrate their
victory with a big feast in the nearby hall that formerly belonged to the local Saxon chief, Bladulf (p. 674);
soon they are all completely drunk and unable to defend themselves from
a surprise Saxon attack in the middle of the night. To make matters worse,
their horses are scattered in the process, which deprives them of their
main advantage relative to the Saxons (p. 682).
The Britons manage to make their way on foot to the nearby
ruins of Cattraeth, which is protected by a wall (p. 684).
The Saxons generally hardly dare to even enter a city and certainly
wouldn't know how to besiege one (pp. 588, 662, 687), so the Britons are hoping they can
hold it until either the Saxons give up and go away (p. 687), or until an army
from Elmet comes to rescue them (pp. 694–5).
They manage to repel the initial Saxon attack, though with considerable
losses (pp. 688–91). Bladulf's brother (who appears to be some sort of intersex dwarf) is sent by the
Saxons to negotiate (pp. 693–701), and he manages to kill Owain with a concealed dagger and run away (p. 702).
About a third of the remaining Britons rush after him in rage, only to be
slaughtered by the much larger Saxon force (p. 703). Only about a hundred Britons
are now left inside the town walls, many of them badly injured (p. 704).
Most of them leave the town after nightfall, some hoping to make
their way back to Eiddin and some to establish contact with the allies from Elmet; but nearly
all of them are killed soon afterwards (pp. 707–9). Aneirin and
a few other badly wounded Britons stay behind, and soon only Aneirin is
left alive, composing death-songs for his comrades (pp. 710–4).
The Saxons finally show up in the city and Bladulf is remarkably
magnanimous; despite numerous cases of mutilation of corpses earlier in the book,
the Saxons now bury the British dead according to British customs (p. 716);
they take care of Aneirin until he recovers (pp. 715, 722–5), and then let him go
(Bladulf is suitably grim on p. 715: “ ‘Death is a reward for victory
[. . .] Those who are defeated must live, and regret it. [. . .]’ ”).
The novel ends, much like the previous one, with a few surprising revelations.
Bladulf tells Aneirin that he got advance warning from Mynydog about the approaching
British army (p. 726). Anerin travels to Eiddin to confront Mynydog about this betrayal,
and Mynydog explains that he knew that the allies from Elmet wouldn't be coming
at all, and that Owain wasn't the sort of leader that could unite the
squabbling British tribes well enough to take on the Saxons (pp. 731–2). Mynydog
used the war as a distraction to send his little nephew safely to his
father's house, confident that he will one day become the leader of all Britons
and suceed in driving away the Saxons. Although this nephew has been mentioned
many times earlier in the book, we only learn his name now — it's Arthur (pp. 733–4).
The campaign was in fact not a complete failure; the destruction of numerous
Saxon villages and the surrounding farmland led to famine and has seriously weakened their position
in the area (pp. 720–720). And from various passages scattered throughout the book, we see that Arthur
would later in fact eventually manage to drive the Saxons out of a large part of their
territories in Britain. As for Aneirin, he becomes a monk and spends the
rest of his days composing poems in memory of the warriors who rode to Cattraeth (p. 736).
</spoiler warning>
Great migrations
For me, one of the best things about this wonderful novel is that it
gave me a vivid picture of what had until now only been a dry historical fact.
History was one of my favorite subjects at school, and I still remember a lesson
that must have occured somewhere early in the second year of secondary school.
In what certainly can't have been more than 45 minutes, we learned about the
great migrations of
the early middle ages. There were plenty of them, and not much time, so that the
whole thing ended up being little more than a bulleted list: starting with the Huns,
moving on to the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks, Vandals, Langobards, Angles, Saxons, Jutes,
then our own Slavic ancestors, and finally the belated migrations of people such as
Magyars, Bulgarians and Vikings; ding, end of lesson. And so, one of the items
on that bulleted list was the fact that at some point, Angles, Saxons and Jutes
settled in Britain. I had never given it much thought. There were a dozen such
migrations, all more or less alike.
But if you think about it a little more closely — what must that have been like?
None of those migrations was into an empty country (unless perhaps you include the Vikings
in the whole process and count Iceland and Greenland as sufficiently empty). Nor were
they instantaneous events; each migration must have been a process that took years,
decades and quite possibly centuries; thousands, probably millions of people were caught up
in each of them. And on the receiving end of each such migration there must have been
an increasingly terrified population fighting an increasingly desperate fight against
an unstoppable invading juggernaut that was gradually but inexorably rolling over
their country, taking it over, and destroying everything thew knew and cared about.
I can hardly even begin to imagine how miserable they must have felt.
Now, I suppose that in a certain sense, one is rationally aware of these things — the
notion of a migration (into a non-empty country) obviously implies all of that.
But I had never before given much thought to this, until reading this novel, which paints
a very vivid picture of what the Germanic migration into Britain must have felt and looked like
from the point of view of the Celtic Britons. A somber tone pervades the whole story;
even before you find out just how bad the outcome of the war will be for Owain's army,
you can imagine that it won't end well, partly from observing their grim fatalism
(“We knew that who came, who rode, would not return, and that was our fate, settled by
the Virgin”, p. 649) and partly from the fact that there's only three hundred of them, and that's no way
to drive invaders out of a country the size of Britain. And what is more, even though
Aneirin ends his story on a somewhat optimistic note, reporting on Arthur's successes
in the decades following the battle of Cattraeth, you can't help knowing what Aneirin
didn't know — that in the long term, his side *was* doomed and that eventually,
the Germanic invaders would indeed suceeed in occupying most of the island.
Hating on the invaders
Another thing I liked about the book is that it gives you a very good sense of
the deep, grim, relentless hatred that Aneirin and his compatriots feel towards the invaders.
The Britons in this novel never refer to the Germanic invaders by any other name than
“Savages”; they are frequently described as vermin (p. 621), as rats (p. 699), as not human (pp. 569, 593–44, 652, 700),
as mindless hordes (pp. 638, 689);
Aneirin hates them and everything they stand for, everything about their way of life:
that they grow wheat instead of oats (“wheat, that evil plant”, p. 595;
“filthy wheat”, 642; “barren wheatfields”, p. 655; “we set the evil wheat
alight where it grew”, p. 656),
and they smell of it too (“stinking of wheat”, p. 628;
“the strange almost-sweet smell of wheat flour, leavened with yeast”, p. 665;
“wheat-stinking, ale-stinking breath”, p. 700;
“stench of unwashed wheat-eaters”, p. 725);
that they make their bread
with yeast (p. 654); that they use larger ploughs
than the Britons, and have them drawn by oxen instead of by horses (pp. 595, 718); that they drink
beer instead of (or in addition to) mead (pp. 654, 674); that they live in clustered villages instead of scattered
ones (pp. 646, 653); that they don't practice transhumance and graze their animals in the uplands
(pp. 646, 652); that they raise their own children instead of sending them away to be fostered by
distant relatives and friends (p. 652); that their hair is the wrong shade of blonde
(Aneirin praises Owain's hair as “corn with the touch of gold that gives it life, not the dull
yellow tow of the Savages”; p. 564);
but perhaps most of all, that they don't care about forests
and about hunting and gathering food in them (pp. 641, 656–7, 726) — to the Savages, the forests are merely
something to be cut down as soon as possible to make space for more wheat fields,
and to turn the wood into charcoal to power their smiths' furnaces (p. 628).
Aneirin portrays their impact on the wilderness in such a negative light that you could put some of the passages from this book,
with minimal modifications, next to those describing orcs in The Lord of the Rings
and you'd have a hard time telling them apart from each other:
- On p. 631 he describes how the Savages, to avoid the trouble of cutting down trees, simply stripped the bark from them
and left them to die: “through the summer the tree will dry slowly [. . .] The next
spring, the leaves will not bud again. The trees will be dead. [. . .] But all the life of the high
forest was gone. [. . .] All this the Savages had done.”
- “The woods were dead, every tree ringed with the cruel saxes, dead and withered
away. The deer had gone out of these woods on to the high moors. The land was dead. The land
had been killed.” (P. 634.)
- “A man may fell an apple-tree in spite, or even, demented by fury, hack at a rowan.
It takes more than fury, it takes time and patience to ring a tree, to strip the bark away as high
as a man can reach. And this was not one tree, but a thousand thousand trees.
[. . .] It was the care and patience of all that witless horde, working for weeks
on end, all across Mordei, like the spread of a blight. They had quietly, thoroughly killed
the kind forest, that shelters our beasts, that gives us nuts and berries and hides the deer we eat.
They killed the trees that should have given us fuel and house timbers for a hundred years.
All this they destroyed in malice.” (P. 641.)
- “And what do they do, when they have killed the trees, and burned them, as we have seen them do this year
in Mordei? They pull out the stumps and they plough the ground level, to turn the fruitful forest
into barren wheatfields.” (P. 655. I particularly like the contrast between the fruitful forest
and barren wheatfields — usually we'd expect the adjectives to be reversed.)
On some other
occasions I couldn't help wondering if the Britons' interest in the preservation of nature
was inspired by 1960s environmentalism (the novel was first published in 1969).
E.g. Owain on p. 555 criticises the Savages for their high-intensity agriculture
(at least relative to British practices): “It is a sin against the Virgin and against God, to multiply
cattle, or people, or crops, without heed. For the earth is the Lord's, and he gave it to
us to keep, and not to destroy.”
Aneirin makes it clear that he cares a lot more about British wildlife
than about the Savages. After decribing the slaughter of several Savage villages, he comments:
“The wolf and the bear, the kite and the buzzard came flocking into the houses
for easy meat. Why should they not feast, and why should we not feed them? They were
our wolves, our kites.” (P. 657;
later on the same page he adds: “ugly straight fields would be changed to pleasant marsh”.)
“The bodies of the Savage dead we left. This was Bernicia. Were not the wolves
here ours to feed?” (P. 673.) Precent on p. 708: “Every stag that grazes, every moorhen that
nests where we have burnt the farms and blocked the ditches is our memorial.”
Aneirin on p. 714, as Cattreith is littered with corpses of his dead comrades:
“These were our kites, our buzzards: why should we not feed them?”
In another echo of modern environmentalism, the Savages' disregard of forests bites
them back when the British destroy their fields and villages shortly before harvest time:
“they had cut down the wide forests where any man of culture and civility,
where any Roman, could find food and clothing for the taking at this time of the year./
These Savages, being tied to one crop, and not knowing how to use the forests of the land, how to hunt deer or how to search
for nuts and fruit, faced a whole year on half-rations.” (P. 721.)
Aneirin welcomes the destruction of Savage farmland: “The valleys were laid waste.
The trees would grow again, the deer and the duck come back, the fields would flood and merge
and vanish as if the wheat had never grown. Our sons would hunt again over that land”
(p. 726). Sounds like the world's most misanthropic nature conservationist :P
Some of the British rants against the Savages look like recycled WW2-era anti-Japanese propaganda,
just with rice changed to wheat :)) Owain says on p. 646:
“All these Savages are warriors, they are brought up to nothing else. Among us, our mothers
pray that we will grow up to be poets and the pride of our families and our Kingdoms. Savage mothers
only pray their sons will be good fighters. And they live on a handful of wheat a day. So underfed,
it is no wonder that though they are all ready to fight, any of us is as good as a dozen of them, and
that on foot.” And Aneirin on p. 665: “a line of dun ants, frugal as the ants, not knowing
what art or poetry or civilisation is, needing only each man his handful of wheat to live. Satisfied with
that little too.”
As we've already seen in this last quote, another frequent complaint of Aneirin's is that the Savages do
not appreciate poetry, or in fact culture in general. The contrast with the Britons could not be greater:
- “They had no Poets, and certainly would take no notice of them if they had. They aren't like us. For us poetry is the whole reason why men live. Not for them.” (P. 566.)
- Owain says of the Irish: “they know that the true aim of a kingdom is to nurture poets.” (P. 568.)
- One of the most beautiful passages in the entire book occurs on p. 712, as Aneirin's comrades are slowly dying
all around him: “And Gwanar said, and it was the last time he spoke, ‘Poetry is the crown of the nation,
and the chief product of the Kingdom. If we have died only that a poem is made, then we have died for a better
thing than ever we lived for.’/ And no one contradicted him, because it was a self-evident truth, as clear
to the eye as is the difference between black and white, or the truth that the many is more than the one. This was
the truth we proclaimed against all the world, that there is more in life than the mere growing of wheat, and breeding
till the whole land is covered by the soles of men's feet, and the blue sky is blackened by the smoke of the smiths' fires,
and the song of the little birds is drowned by the harsh voices of men talking in dead-footed prose. Our open, wild land
is a poem in itself, even if no man sings in it: and thus we had died to keep it.”
Some of the (dis)information Aneirin repeats about the Savages is hilarious, e.g. on their
shipbuilding techniques: “They glue the planks together with Roman blood, and sew them with the sinews of Christians.” (P. 590.)
On the other hand he does debunk the claims that they are cannibals (p. 590).
Savages are people too
One of the most touching scenes in the book happens well before the
actual start of the campaign. A ship full of Savages, mostly dying or already dead,
drifts towards the coast and is found by a patrol of British soldiers.
One of the Savages, an old man, tells a truly piteous tale of how they came to
settle in Britain to escape dire poverty in their homeland. In fact, they are
an extended family of what we would now call environmental
refugees: “The water is rising. Some of the marshes used to be fields
when he was a boy. They can no longer grow enough wheat to live. They cannot go away
inland, because they are afraid of the people who live there. So they have to set out
to sea to find a new land.” (P. 595.) They regarded Britain as a fertile land
of opportunity, indeed a partly empty one after the Romans left it, and they remembered
that a generation ago earlier settlers from their country had been welcomed by the Britons (pp. 598–9).
But due to unfavorable winds and having
next to no seafaring experience, they ran out of food and water, and spent the last
few days watching their close relatives die and trying to resist eating their seed corn
and killing their last ox, which they would need to pull the plough (without which
they couldn't grow wheat in their new homeland); pp. 596–7.
Oh, and the Britons? While the old Savage is telling his story,
they are busy killing the ox, throwing the seed wheat into the sea,
smashing the Savages' ploughs, pots, querns and other implements, and
destroying the rigging of their ship (pp. 593–4). You can practically
feel the mixture of shock, sadness, anger and despair in the old man's voice
at seeing this: “ ‘And what have we done to you? What has changed?
When first our people came here, you welcomed us. [. . .] You were
glad enough to have them then, to have more men in your empty Island.
[. . .] I remember, myself, the talk about Hengist, how he sailed,
in my grandfather's time. [. . .]” ” (P. 598.) “ ‘What shall we do now?
How shall we live? You have stripped the clothes from our backs. You have broken our
plough, and killed the poor ox that was to pull it, that was dearer to us
than our children, because we kept it alive though they died. You have scattered our seed corn
into the sea, that we thought dearer than our own lives, because we starved rather than
eat it. You cannot do all that to us, and not feed us. [. . .] How else
shall we live?’/ I gave him Cynon's answer, before Cynon spoke it./ ‘We
do not care how you live, so long as you do not live here.’ ” (P. 600.
Note the “before Cynon spoke it”; Aneirin is acting as interpreter here
but the answer is so obvious to all the Britons that he doesn't need to wait for Cynon
to say anything.)
The Britons throw the old man back into the ship and push it away to sea,
and although they seem to disapprove when one of them throws a torch onto it (causing
the ship to burn and sink soon afterwards), it seemed
to me that this at least saved the Savages from an equally certain but slower and
more painful death (pp. 601–2).
This scene is one of the very few places in the book where we get to
see the Savages as people too, and can feel sorry for them as well and not
just for the Britons. I was almost prepared to reverse my opinion and start
seeing the Britons as the bad guys of this story.
But then, as Aneirin is quick to point out: sure, the Savages come all
humble and weakened and in small numbers at first, but after a while they
settle down and multiply and before you know, half the island belongs to them.
They start by begging for food while they wait for their first harvest,
but before long it would escalate to stealing and rape;
“I had seen Bradwen herself feed them, a hundred times, down in
Eudav's Hall, and at the end they had come back and burnt the Hall for her charity.” (P. 597.)
Aneirin himself spent a year as the Savages' slave not long ago (p. 599).
And as for Hengist, sure he had been welcomed at first — and then he
killed the popular and powerful British king Vortigern
“at his own board” (p. 559).
In fact a theme that frequently runs through Aneirin's complaints is that
the Savages, due to their farming techniques (wheat instead of oats, bigger ploughs that are
pulled by oxen instead of horses, so they can go deeper, etc.), can support a higher
(and faster-growing) population than the relatively less-intensive agriculture
of the Britons (see e.g. pp. 655–6). If so, this whole conflict is similar to what has been going
on all over the world for thousands of years, as farmers displaced hunter-gatherer
societies due to their ability to support a denser and higher population. Here in early
medieval Britain it wasn't farmers vs. hunter-gatherers, but more intensive farmers
against less intensive ones.
Be that as it may, and despite all the fine words about fighting for poetry and culture
quoted earlier, Aneirin concludes this episode with a much more materialist explanation
of the conflict: “There is no more to power than wealth./ Wealth does not come to those without power,/
[. . .]
For no new wealth can ever be created/ And Power is indivisible and single./
[. . .] It was to keep our own wealth and power that we went to Cattraeth.” (P. 603.)
This was a really touching scene and although it was written some 45 years ago,
I couldn't help being reminded of the present crisis with large numbers of
refugees or migrants trying to enter certain parts of Europe. Nobody will doubt
that they are very reasonably trying to escape genuinely terrible circumstances at home,
but at the same time, the countries they are trying to move into aren't exactly
empty, and admitting the migrants in sufficiently large numbers will inevitably change
their destination countries beyond a point that their existing inhabitants would
be happy with. I wonder what will eventually come of this. We can't really deal
with this sort of situation the way Aneirin would, i.e. with a war of extermination;
on the other extreme is the approach that currently seems to be preferred by the
politicians, which is to deride as somehow illegitimate any opinions that are unwelcoming
to the migrants; and I'm not particularly happy with either of these two extremes.
By the way, the only other passage in the book where the Savages are really shown as people
comes near the end, after the disaster at Cattraeth. Aneirin, the only survivor,
is captured by the Savages; their chief, Bladulf, lets another Savage, Ingwy,
decide Aneirin's fate, for Aneirin had killed Ingwy's brother, father, and son.
“He [= Ingwy] had been weeping, and the tears had made runnels on his face. Black blood
was clotted on his arms, and on the naked saxe in his hand. His left ear was cut almost
away from his head, and hung by a shred of skin. He hesitated a little. Then:/
‘What is one more dead among so many? Let him live.’ ” (P. 715.
The detail about weeping is particularly notable — as recently as p. 708,
Aneirin had claimed: “The Savages do not weep.”)
The pleasant warmth of hate
I imagine that in typical high-fantasy stories, orcs and other such beings are
put there so that you have someone you can hate on without feeling bad about it,
because they aren't human and are deliberately designed in such a way that it's
easy to hate them. But it's more fun to hate on people than on non-human monsters,
and that's one of the nice things about this book: Aneirin hates on the Savages in the same
way that you would hate on orcs, and through him you get to vicariously experience
the pleasures of this kind of hatred without anything much of its downsides.
In fact, I suspect that the main reason why I liked to read about the countless
examples of Aneirin's deep hatred for the Savages is that it brings me a feeling
almost of relief — finally someone who understands me and feels reasonably
and naturally about these things. In our modern societies, the prevailing virtue is one
of tolerance; it is preached at us every day from countless sources; we are told to be
tolerant and to treat people equally regardless of their nationality, culture, religion,
race, appearance, and other such characterstics. I suppose this has its good sides;
it promotes peace and trade, and serves the interests of those who would otherwise
find themselves oppressed and persecuted. But apart from that, it's just yet another
in a long list of annoying, unnatural things that civilization constantly rams down our
throats. I don't think it's natural to be tolerant towards those who are different from us,
or to want to interact with them; if it were, society wouldn't have to expend so much
effort on promoting these things. My natural reaction, whenever I encounter a foreigner
of any description, is still ‘aieeee! a foreigner! you should hate him!
quick, kill! kill! kill! before he kills you!’ and I have to consciously
remind myself ‘wait, no, you're supposed to act as if he was a normal person,
even though he's just a foreigner’. And then I have this odd feeling of dissonance
as I'm standing there having a nice civil conversation with the nice foreigner,
but at some level it feels somehow wrong, as if a subconscious voice was telling me
‘wait, this is wrong, you're supposed to be *strangling* him, not talking to him’.
And that's why it feels like a relief to read about Aneirin's society in this novel;
the idea of tolerance, of having people of different nations living peacefully
together in the same area, is simply nonexistent here. It doesn't occur to anyone.
Nobody even hints at it. In this book, the thing to do when a bunch of foreigners
shows up and tries to settle in your country is to regard them as vermin and make an
effort to exterminate them before they do the same to you. It's horrible, but it's
also so naturally obvious and so refreshingly honest! And it's not an extreme, fringe
idea the way it would be today; in Aneirin's world, it's simply the default way of
looking at these things. Reading about it was simply *pleasant*, like a vacation in
an area that suits you better than the place you normally inhabit. Reading about
Aneirin's hatred, and empathising with it, allowed me to vicariously experience
a little of that pleasure of hate which is denied to us in the modern world,
hell-bent on tolerance and multiculturalism as it is.
The old-fashioned sort of war
Normally, when I imagine a war, I think of the kind of war between states that is
common in the last few centuries. One king makes war upon his neighbor; they grow tired of
it after a few years, and sign a peace treaty; some territory changes hands, the victor
is glad to receive his new taxpayers (who will one day also become his new conscripts),
maybe he tries to pressure them a little into assimilating, but basically life goes on.
But the warfare in this book is different; it's the old-fashioned sort of war; it's personal:
when the Britons fall upon a few relatively defenceless Savage villages early in their
campaign (p. 656), they not only kill all the men and rape all the women, they then make the
women fill up the ditches around the fields to make sure the land turns into marshland
again, then they kill all the women as well; they carefully burn everything that can be burned, the corpses,
the buildings, the fields; they take the trouble to break everything that can be broken,
destroying all the Savages' tools, ploughs, querns and so on; they fill up the wells with
corpses to poison them, etc. etc.
The term ‘living space’
has been made notorious by the Nazis, but basically this is what the Britons and the Savages
in this book are fighting for. It's a war of annihilation for both sides; the whole
point of taking over a territory is that you kill off the previous inhabitants, restore
it back to the state it was in before they ever got there, and settle it with your own people.
I don't often get to read about wars pursued with quite this level of determined white-hot hatred,
which made this book even more interesting.
Are we the baddies?
An odd feeling of dissonance occured to me every now and then while reading this novel.
I cheered on the Celtic Britons throughout the story, and felt almost as much hate for the Savages
as Aneirin and his comrades do. And also more generally, I feel a great sense of sympathy
for the Celts, these tragic losers of European history, who used to control so much territory
in ancient times and later went on to lose nearly all of it.
But then, when I think about it, you could shift the story of this novel just one
century forward and about a thousand miles in a roughly east-southeastern direction,
and you could end up with a very similar story of partly Romanized Celts fighting
an ultimately hopeless struggle against barbaric invaders — except that in this
case, the invaders in question would be my distant ancestors. And they were more
thorough than the Savages of Aneirin's story too, for in my country there weren't
any Celts left after the migration period, nor did any of their writings survive
(if they had written any to begin with). I hope that ‘our’ Celts were
mostly assimilated rather than killed, but still — I couldn't help feeling vaguely hypocritical
while hating on the Savages in this book.
And yet, and yet — you could shift the time of the novel a couple of millennia back
and keep it in the same place, and write a very similar story, except that this time it
would be the Celts that would be the bad guys, taking over huge swaths of territory
from their previous inhabitants, of whom we don't even remember the names, let alone
their languages or anything else about them. There are precious few spots in the world
that are inhabited by the descendants of the first people ever to settle there (though I heard
that a few islands in the Pacific qualify). The more I think about this, the more
I agree with the old epigram
about history being little more than the record of crimes and misfortunes.
Title and epigraphs
Each chapter begins with an epigraph consisting of a few lines from Y Gododdin,
the early medieval poem that inspired the novel. They are quoted in both Welsh and English,
taken from John Williams' edition of 1852
(useful links: scans on archive.org,
Project Gutenberg e-text (lacking the critical apparatus),
another page with the Welsh text and
several other translations). In fact James seems to have modified Williams's translations
a little, mostly I think for the better — I can't comment on them as translations from Welsh, of course,
since I haven't got the slightest clue about that language, but Williams's style strikes me as
a bit creaky and ponderous, and most of James's modifications seemed to improve matters a bit.
In particular, the phrase “Men went to Cattraeth” is one of James's deviations
from Williams' translation, where it's alawys “Heroes” instead of “Men”, and
often “marched” instead of “went” (the phrase occurs frequently in
Y Gododdin, especially at the beginning of individual elegies, e.g. 8–14).
Skene's translation of 1868 (searchable text,
scans) uses “The men went”,
so James might have adopted the phrase from there (although I don't see any other signs of Skene's influence
in the translations of the epigraphs).
There's an old saying that poetry is what gets lost in translation, but occasionally
I couldn't help feeling that Williams deliberately wrung every last bit of poetry out of his
translation and discarded it mercilessly. Consider the following three lines (elegy 24, ll. 3–5),
which appear as the epigraph to ch. 11 (p. 650):
Bu trydar en aerure bu tan
Bu ehut e waewawr bu huan
Bu bwyt brein bu bud e vran
There was a noise in the mount of slaughter, there was fire,
Impetuous were the lances, there was a gleam like the sun,
There was food for the ravens, there the ravens did triumph.
Now, as I said, I don't have the slightest clue about Welsh. But even so, it seems obvious that
the original has all sorts of nice poetic ornaments of which there's not even a trace in Williams's
translation (which also has the defect of being nearly twice as long as the original).
The original seems to have a rhythm, all three lines seem to rhyme, there seems to be a good deal of
alliteration in the last line, and the word “bu” repeats itself in an interesting way.
(Well, this last bit seems to actually be mostly present in the translation, in the repetition of “there”.)
I was interested to see that vran means “raven”, as it's nearly the same
as the word for a crow in Slavic languages (and words for crows and ravens tend to overlap a great deal;
after all, these birds are similar and closely related). I'm always happy to see these old Indo-European
connections showing up in unexpected places.
(Also on the subject of Indo-European connections, I was interested to learn from p. 627 and elsewhere
that the name ‘Saxons’ comes from a type of knife they used, called a ‘sax’
or ‘seax’. According to the Wikipedia
this is ultimately from proto-Indo-European *sek- ‘to cut’, which I imagine is
also the root of our words like sekati ‘to cut, hack’, sekira ‘axe’ and so on.)
In any case, I was glad to see these bits of Welsh at the beginning of chapters. As always, I'm in awe
at the spelling habits of Celtic languages, and Welsh seems to be one of the few languages where
the readability of a text would not suffer even if you passed it through rot-13 :)))
Here's a particularly impressive example (epigraph to ch. 6, p. 611):
“Gwyr a aeth gatraeth yg cat yg gawr/ Nerthmeirch a gwryrnseirch ac ysgwydawr/
Peleidyr ar gychwyn a llym waewawr/ A llurugeu claer a chledyuawr”.
Rationally, I know damn well that most of this seeming unreadability is simply due
to the fact that they use w and y as vowels, but still — my
first thought on seeing that was ‘you could have a cat walk over the keyboard
and the results would probably be more readable than this” :P
The Britons in this novel, by the way, have a much better opinion of their language:
it's “tongue of the Angels” (Aneirin on p. 569), “blessed language of the Angels” (p. 722),
Religion
The Britons in this novel are technically christians, but their christianity is of a very peculiar sort.
By far the most important feature of their religion is the Virgin, who is probably mentioned at least 20 times,
which is about three times as much as all other elements of christianity put together.
These other mentions are:
“Virgin and her Son and the Dove” (p. 651);
“For One and the Virgin!” (p. 653);
“Go with God” (p. 666);
“Blessed Trintiy” (p. 717);
“worship of the Virgin and her son, who likewise went to their Cattraeth” (p. 736);
“Virgin and all her saints” (p. 712).
Another mention of the worship of saints (p. 614): “Many, too, called on the saints they worshipped, on Josephus or Jesus or Albanus or Spiritus.”
The Britons are keen to destroy old pagan (Roman?) idols and images if/when they find them (p. 650).
Aneirin does seem to have a few supernatural beliefs that are unrelated
to christianity: he mentions the “Little People” (pp. 588, 630), “Dwarves” (p. 628),
“Vergil the Magician” (pp. 628, 631, 650; which sounds odd but is actually true:
the ancient Roman poet Virgil was vaguely remembered in medieval and
later folklore as a prophet, magician etc.).
On a semi-related note, some of his notions of history are very sketchy: Hadrian's Wall, we are told, was “raised
in one night, complete from sea to sea, by the Magician Vergil, at the bidding of King Hadrian.
This was one of the works that Hadrian did for the pleasure of his leman Cleopatra.” (P. 631.)
:)) Or perhaps Aneirin has the same idea that I've recently read about on G. R. R. Martin's
blog: ‘when truth becomes legend, print the legend’.
The Savages, meanwhile, are still pagans; Aneirin doesn't take much interest in their
religion, except insofar as it provides him with another reason to hold them in contempt.
He mostly describes it at demon-worship (pp. 569, 588, 701); they sing
“spells and hymns to their demons” (p. 688); they sacrifice animals to
their “Wind God” before a voyage (p. 596); they have
“powerful wizards, who make their strong swords” (p. 588), and Bladulf's “wizard” also
acts as a healer (pp. 714–5).
Miscellaneous
There's an unusual number of misprints in this novel; I found 16 and there might
of course be some more that I overlooked (whereas I didn't notice any misprints
in Votan and Not for All the Gold in Ireland earlier in
the same volume). Some of them seem to be OCR-related (“eandles”, p. 676),
and many involve a word partly or completely missing and replaced by a semicolon that
doesn't belong there (which TBH could also be OCR-related).
Honi soit qui mal y pense:
“the little boy
hid under the table between us and sucked at a marrow bone, with plenty of meat on it, that I slipped down to him”
(p. 610).
*
I initially thought I'd finish my posts about this book by saying which of the novels in it
I had liked best, but I realized I can't really choose a single favorite. They're all excellent
and have a wealth of interesting things and ideas in them. The first two are a bit more
light-hearted with plenty of funny passages, while Men Went to Cattraeth is quite a bit
more grim (which is perfectly fine, sometimes one is in the mood to read something grim).
It's also a bit more realistic and there are fewer supernatural elements in it than in
the first two novels (not that there are excessively many in those two either); I considered
that to be a plus since I'm not too keen on mixing fantasy with history. On the other hand,
the first two had links to things I was at least partly familiar with, i.e. old Norse mythology,
whereas Men Went to Cattraeth had links only to things with which I had until now
been almost completely unfamiliar (but on the positive side, I learnt a bit about early medieval
Britain alon gthe way). So, anyway, they were all good, each in a slightly different way.
The Wikipedia says that James
wrote another novel set in ancient Britain, Bridge of Sand (1976); hopefully
I'll get to read that one as well some day.
Labels: books, fiction
