Arthur's Voyage to the Otherworld

 

Perhaps you don't tend to think of Arthur as a voyager?  Bear with me, and I'll explain.

Some of the earliest mentions of Arthur come from ninth or tenth century Welsh literature – just glancing references, as if to someone already well-known. The earliest of all may be a couple of lines from the poem Y Gododdin, in which another warrior is compared with Arthur:

He fed black ravens on the ramparts of a fortress,
Though he was no Arthur.

This makes sense if the historical Arthur really was an early British war leader: his name perhaps a nickname or pseudonym: ‘the Bear’, suitable for a fighter who may have wished to maintain an air of terrifying mystery. Whoever the historical Arthur may have been (Andrew Breeze, a professor of philology at the University of Navarre, has put forward the interesting theory that he was a 6^th century warlord from the Strathclyde area in Northern Britain, whose battles, like those of the Ulster cycle, were glorified cattle raids against other Britons rather than against the Anglo-Saxons), the name of Arthur became associated with legends connected with supernatural figures from Celtic mythology. And such stories continued to be told about him in all parts of Celtic – that is British – Britain: and also in Brittany, the region of France to which many British Celts migrated after the fall of Roman Britain.

Even in Sir Thomas Malory’s late 15th century ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’ with all its courtly French additions and sources, plenty of Welsh and Celtic personages and motifs remain: the most obvious is Merlin himself, and the Lady of the Lake who gives Arthur his sword Excalibur, and there is Arthur’s shadowy relationship with his half-sisters: Morgause the mother of their son Mordred, and Morgan le Fay, Morgan the enchantress – whose name chimes with that of the Morrigan (‘great queen’ or ‘phantom queen’), the Irish Celtic goddess of battle and fertility. At any rate, Morgan is one of the queens who carry the wounded king away to the Isle of Avalon after the battle of Camlann.

And when they were at the water side, even fast by the bank hoved a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur.

…‘Comfort thyself,’ said the king, ‘…for in me is no trust for to trust in, for I will into the vale of Avilion to heal me of my grievous wound, and if thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul.’

But ever the queen and ladies shrieked, that it was pity to hear.

 

The shrieking and keening women, companions to a powerful sorceress, the ship that carries the hero away to the island of the dead, the island of apples...surely there are echoes here of the voyage of Jason to the Hesperides, home of the sorceress Medea, and of Odysseus to the island of Circe and the shores of Hades?

 But  much closer to home is a highly cryptic account of a voyage by Arthur to the Underworld. It’s the marvellous Welsh poem Prieddeu Annwfn, preserved in the single 14th century manuscript of The Book of Taliesin, but dated (cautiously) by internal linguistic evidence to around 900 AD. Here’s a link to the poem, with notes. It's an account of a raid led by Arthur, in his ship Prydwen, on Annwn, the Welsh underworld. There's a gorgeously illustrated book of this adventure by John and Caitlin Matthews:-

 

Annwn is described by a number of different epithets. Are these simply varying descriptions or manifestations of the same place, or are they intended as different locations which Arthur and his men encounter along their way, island-hopping as Jason and Ulysses do, gradually approaching their destination through a transformed and numinous sea-scape? The poem tells how Arthur and his men travel to Caer Sidi ‘The Mound Fortress’; Caer Pedryuan ‘the Four-Peaked Fortress’ – also described as Ynis Pybyrdor ‘isle of the strong door’. They travel to Caer Vedwit ‘the Fortress of Mead-Drunkenness’, Caer Rigor ‘Fortress of Hardness’, Caer Wydyr ‘Glass Fortress’, Caer Golud ‘Fortress in the Bowels [of the Earth?]’, Caer Vandwy ‘Fortress of God’s Peak’, and Caer Ochren ‘Enclosed Fortress’.  Alan Garner used some of these names in his book Elidor, which references the poem in other ways.

 

 

The aim of the expedition was to bring back a cauldron belonging the lord of Annwn. We're not thinking blackened kitchen pots here, but inspirational, magical, probably sacred objects like the 1st century BC Gundestrop cauldron, pictured above.  One of the many scenes on its sides depicts a pony-tailed warrior dipping a man into another such cauldron headfirst, probably to restore him to life:

 

 

 

In 'Elidor', one of my favourites of Alan Garner’s books, the children bring four treasures out of the Mound of Vandwy, corresponding to the Four Treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan: a spear, a sword, a stone and a bowl: 'a cauldron, with pearls above the rim. And as she walked, light splashed and ran through her fingers like water'. Taken into the workaday world of 1960's Manchester, however, the objects change appearance, and Helen finds she is carrying only 'an old cracked cup, with a beaded pattern moulded on the rim.' Once these treasures have been buried in the garden for safekeeping, all kinds of strange disturbances begin to occur, culminating in the eruption of the unicorn Findhorn onto the city streets. 

Here is the second stanza of the Prieddeu Annwfn:

 

I am honoured in praise. Song was heard
In the Four-Peaked Fortress, four times revolving.
My poetry, from the cauldron it was uttered.
By the breath of nine maidens it was kindled.
The cauldron of the chief of Annwfn: what its fashion?
A dark ridge around its border, and pearls.
It does not boil the food of a coward...

And before the door of hell lamps burned.
And when we went with Arthur in his splendid labour,
Except seven, none rose up from Caer Vedwit.

Most of the eight stanzas end with a variation on the recurrent line: ‘Except seven, none returned’: by ordinary standards the expedition appears to have been disastrous, but this is no ordinary poem. Fateful and gloomy, mysterious as Arthur himself, all we can gather from it is some sense of a venture, by ship, by sea, into the Otherworld, and - perhaps – a description of a mound or island where a youth, Gweir, is imprisoned, lapped with a heavy blue-grey chain. Of a four-peaked fortress with a strong door, guarding a cauldron full of the magical life-giving mead of poetry, warmed by the breath of ‘nine maidens’. And of a fortress of glass with six thousand men lining the walls (‘it was difficult to speak with their sentinel’).

 In the medieval story of Culhwch and Olwen in the Mabinogion, Arthur sails to Ireland in his ship Prydwen to steal the cauldron of Diwwnach Wyddel: not just any old cauldron either, for it’s also listed in ‘The Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain’ as the cauldron of Dyrnwich the Giant, which will not boil the food of a coward. Clearly the same cauldron as that which Arthur went to find in Annwn, and doubtless the same also as the Irish Cauldron of the Dagda, from which 'no man ever went away unsatisfied'. How old is this legend of magical, life-giving cauldrons? As old as Medea's? Could the ancient British and Irish cauldrons be the ultimate origin of the witches' cauldron we find in 'Macbeth'? Who knows?  But the legends all say that Arthur did not die. He only sleeps. And is waiting in the Otherworld to return to us, in our hour of need.

 

 

 

Picture credits:

The Death of Arthur by James Archer, 1823-1902
The Death of Arthur by Katharine Cameron
The Gundestrop Cauldron, wikipedia
Detail from the Gundestrop Cauldron, wikipedia
The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (detail) by Edward Burne Jones

 

"Sword of Light" Interview with Katherine Roberts

King Arthur is dead, the Round Table broken.  You'd think all hope was gone... but you'd be wrong, for the King has one last heir - a young girl!  Hidden for her own protection in the enchanted mists of Avalon since she was a child, she now comes riding forth to save her father's kingdom from the wiles of the evil Mordred.  Meet Princess Rhianna Pendragon, King Arthur's daughter!

And here is the lovely cover of 'Sword of Light', the first of the 'Pendragon Legacy', a  magical Arthurian fantasy for children by my friend Katherine Roberts. 

This is just the sort of book I adored as a child.  It has everything - sword fighting, magically beautiful mist-horses, elves, dragons, a couple of truly evil villains, more than a hint of Celtic folklore, and on top of all that a brave, frank, adventurous heroine with red hair and freckles.  Think Anne of Green Gables in a suit of armour!

Katherine Roberts' writing is perfectly pitched for any romantic ten-year old who likes a tale of adventure with a strong dash of magic. It can also be slyly witty.  I loved the episode where Rhianna meets the langorous Nimue, Lady of the Lake (who, disconcertingly, has gills):

"Rhianna Pendragon," the fish-lady repeated, and the name sang around the cavern, making the anemones flare brightly.  "Hmm.  A damsel with a warrior's name. No tail, I see," she observed as Rhianna squeezed the water from her hair.


"Of course I haven't got a tail! I'm human.  And I need that sword so we can take it back to Avalon for my father, as soon as Merlin shows up again."


"Ah..."  The lady's turquoise eyes went distant.  "Dear old Merlin.  Strange, I can't see him.  How is he?"

So here is my interview with Katherine Roberts.  I think it sheds interesting light on the writing process - the way themes or an idea can occur years before they are used, and work their way slowly to the forefront of a writer's mind, morphing and shapeshifting as go - and on the way a writer's 'world' slowly emerges, too.

Rhianna Pendragon, King Arthur’s daughter! Such a simple but marvellous idea - how did it first occur to you?

I first came across the idea of King Arthur having a daughter in a collection of novellas by Vera Chapman (“The Three Damosels”), which I won in one of the infamous Fantasycon raffles organised by the British Fantasy Society. That was way back before I’d had any books published myself, but the concept of a Pendragon princess certainly caught my imagination. As Vera Chapman says in her introduction to the story: “Nobody can say that King Arthur did NOT have a daughter. King’s daughters, unless they make dynastic marriages, are apt to slip out of history and be ignored.”

The idea resurfaced when I wanted to write a series about a warrior princess for younger readers. I’d actually begun a book about Queen Boudicca’s daughters, but found the rape scene to be a stumbling block for children’s publishers. So I ditched that idea and combined my red-haired Celtic warrior princess with Vera’s more courtly Princess Ursulet… and ended up with Rhianna Pendragon!

It’s refreshing to read an Arthurian story in which a girl is active and heroic rather than a damsel in distress. But Rhianna Pendragon has been kept ignorant of her parentage, and is called into action at the darkest possible moment, after Arthur’s death at the hands of Mordred. Why did you decide to begin Rhianna’s adventures at this particular late stage of the story?

I wanted to start where the traditional Arthurian legends left off because I knew that would give me more freedom to work up some new stories for Rhianna. The TV series “Merlin” takes the Arthurian legend backwards, which can work too, but for me a story is usually more interesting when you don’t know the ending.

Rather than the medieval period, you’ve set the novel in the much earlier Dark Ages at the time of the Saxon invasion of Britain, thought be the likeliest period for a historical Arthur. But the narrative also makes room for magic and ghosts, for Celtic myths and legends, for the Wild Hunt, dragons, and gallant knights. The blend of history and fantasy is seamless, but was it hard to balance these elements?

It wasn’t seamless in the first draft! I had to do a lot of invisible stitching... But yes, the Dark Ages appeal to me as a setting simply because they are historically dark and therefore leave me more freedom to work in fantasy elements. There’s actually very little historical fact about Arthur, so I haven’t been too strict on the historical details in my series – I’m aiming to give these books the feel of a fantasy age, occurring somewhere between our Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, but not entirely of our world. If you look closely at my maps, you’ll see I’ve taken the same approach with the geography – familiar, but not too familiar!

Rhianna has good friends to assist in her quest: the faerie Prince Elphin of Avalon, a stocky squire named Cai, and of course her beloved little mare Alba, a silver-shod mist horse who can mind-speak with her mistress! I don’t think I’ve ever met a mist-horse before, so are they even more special than unicorns?

In the first draft of the book, Rhianna’s horse was just an ordinary white mare. Then I remembered the Irish myth of Oisin and Niamh, where the fairy horse carries Oisin across the sea to his lover in Fairyland, and decided to make Alba more magical. When shod with silver, mist horses can trot over the surface of water – a useful talent when Rhianna needs to escape her enemies. They also have the ability to “mist”, which is a kind of vanishing/reappearing act and (as you can imagine) makes a mist horse tricky to ride. And, of course, all fairy horses can talk.

In your ‘Fairytale Reflection’ (coming on Friday!) you chose to write about ‘The Snow Queen’ and Andersen’s steadfast heroine, Gerda, who sets out to rescue her brother. Do you think there is a connection between her and Rhianna – who sets out into the world on a quest to defeat another powerful queen, Morgan le Fay?

Now that you mention it, the two quests are very similar, aren’t they? Rhianna’s ultimate quest is to bring her father King Arthur back to Camelot from Avalon. Gerda’s quest is to bring her brother Kai back from the Snow Queen’s palace. Both involve going into an enchanted place and rescuing a loved one from the cold kiss of death.

I know Rhianna has many more adventures to come: and she hasn’t even met her mother Queen Guinevere yet! Given her parentage, which do you think she takes after most - the noble and brave King her father, or the beautiful Queen?

In looks – freckles and red hair – Rhianna takes after her mother. But in courage and spirit, she’s definitely more like her father. Though having grown up on the enchanted island of Avalon in the care of Lord Avallach with brief visits from Merlin, she is also her own person, and sees no problem with using magic to help her on her quest. She finds it hard to relate to the other damsels at Camelot, and poor Arianrhod (her maid) has a hard time trying to turn her into a princess!

SWORD OF LIGHT is published in hardcover by Templar (www.templarco.co.uk)
You can follow Rhianna Pendragon on Twitter at www.twitter.com/PendragonGirl
Katherine’s website with details of all her books is at www.katherineroberts.co.uk - where you can also read the first chapter of 'Sword of Light

Mystical Voyages (6) Arthur's Voyage to the Underworld

Perhaps you don't tend to think of Arthur as a voyager?  Bear with me, and I'll explain.

Some of the earliest mentions of Arthur come from ninth or tenth century Welsh literature – just glancing references, as if to someone already well-known. The earliest of all may be a couple of lines from the poem Y Gododdin, in which another warrior is compared with Arthur:

He fed black ravens on the ramparts of a fortress,
Though he was no Arthur.

This makes sense if the historical Arthur really was a fourth or fifth century British war leader fighting the Saxon invaders: his name perhaps a nickname or pseudonym: ‘the Bear’, suitable for a fighter who may have wished to maintain an air of terrifying mystery. Whoever the historical Arthur may have been, his name soon became associated with all kinds of older legends connected with supernatural figures from Celtic mythology, and such stories continued to be told about him in all parts of Celtic – that is British – Britain, and in Brittany, the region of France to which many British Celts migrated after the fall of Roman Britain.

Even in Sir Thomas Malory’s late 15th century ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’, with its many courtly French additions and sources, plenty of Welsh and Celtic personages and motifs remain: the most obvious is Merlin himself, and the Lady of the Lake who gives Arthur his sword Excalibur, and then there's Arthur’s shadowy relationship with his half-sisters, Morgause the mother of their son Mordred, and Morgan le Fay – Morgan the enchantress, whose name chimes with that of the Morrigan (‘great queen’ or ‘phantom queen’), the Irish Celtic goddess of battle and fertility. At any rate, Morgan is one of the queens who carry the wounded king away to the Isle of Avalon after the battle of Camlann.

And when they were at the water side, even fast by the bank hoved a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur.


…‘Comfort thyself,’ said the king, ‘…for in me is no trust for to trust in, for I will into the vale of Avilion to heal me of my grievous wound, and if thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul.’

But ever the queen and ladies shrieked, that it was pity to hear.

The shrieking and keening women, companions of a powerful sorceress, the ship that carries the heroic king away to the island of the dead, the island of apples – seems familiar, doesn’t it?

At any rate, there is an earlier – and highly cryptic – account of a voyage by Arthur to the Underworld. It’s the marvellous Welsh poem Prieddeu Annwfn, preserved in the single 14th century manuscript of The Book of Taliesin, but dated (cautiously) by internal linguistic evidence to around 900 AD. Here’s a link to the poem, with notes. It's an account of a raid led by Arthur, in his ship Prydwen, on Annwn, the Welsh underworld.

Annwn is described by a number of different epithets. No one has a clue if these are simply varying descriptions/manifestations of the same place, or intended for different locations which Arthur and his men encounter along their way. It may not matter much, but in the context of the Mystical Voyages I’ve been thinking about so far in this series, the latter fits in well with the island-hopping itinerary of heroes in ships gradually approaching their destination through a transformed and numinous sea-scape.

The poem tells how Arthur and his men travel to Caer Sidi, ‘The Mound Fortress’; Caer Pedryuan, ‘the Four-Peaked Fortress’ – also described as Ynis Pybyrdor, ‘isle of the strong door’. They travel to Caer Vedwit, ‘the Fortress of Mead-Drunkenness’, Caer Rigor, ‘Fortress of Hardness’, Caer Wydyr, ‘Glass Fortress’, Caer Golud, ‘Fortress in the Bowels [of the Earth?]’, Caer Vandwy, ‘Fortress of God’s Peak’, and Caer Ochren, ‘Enclosed Fortress’.  Alan Garner used some of these names in his book Elidor, which references the poem in other ways.

The aim of the expedition was to bring back a cauldron from the lord of Annwn.  We're not thinking blackened kitchen pots here: we're thinking inspirational, magical, perhaps sacred items like the 1st century BC Gundestrop cauldron, above.  One of the many scenes on its sides depicts a pony-tailed warrior dipping a man into another such cauldron headfirst, probably to restore him to life:

In my personal favourite among Alan Garner's books, 'Elidor', the children bring four treasures out of the Mound of Vandwy. corresponding to the Four Treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan:  a spear, a sword, a stone and a bowl: 'a cauldron, with pearls above the rim.  And as she walked, light splashed and ran through her fingers like water'. Taken into the workaday world of 1960's Manchester, however, the objects change appearance, and Helen finds she is carrying only 'an old cracked cup, with a beaded pattern moulded on the rim.' Once these treasures have been buried in the garden for safekeeping, however, all kinds of strange disturbances begin to occur, culminating in the eruption of the unicorn Findhorn onto the city streets.

Here’s the second stanza of the Prieddeu Annwfn:

I am honoured in praise. Song was heard
In the Four-Peaked Fortress, four times revolving.
My poetry, from the cauldron it was uttered.
By the breath of nine maidens it was kindled.
The cauldron of the chief of Annwfn: what its fashion?
A dark ridge around its border, and pearls.
It does not boil the food of a coward...

And before the door of hell lamps burned.
And when we went with Arthur in his splendid labour,
Except seven, none rose up from Caer Vedwit.

Most of the eight stanzas end with a variation on the recurrent line: ‘Except seven, none returned’: by ordinary standards the expedition appears to have been disastrous, but this is no ordinary poem. Fateful and gloomy, mysterious as Arthur himself, all we can gather from it is some sense of a venture, by ship, by sea, into the Otherworld, and - perhaps – a description of a mound or island where a youth, Gweir, is imprisoned, lapped with a heavy blue-grey chain. Of a four-peaked fortress with a strong door, guarding a cauldron full of the magical life-giving mead of poetry, warmed by the breath of ‘nine maidens’. And of a fortress of glass with six thousand men lining the walls (‘it was difficult to speak with their sentinel’).

In the medieval story of Culhwch and Olwen in the Mabinogion, Arthur sails to Ireland in his ship Prydwen to steal the cauldron of Diwwnach Wyddel: not just any old cauldron either, for it’s also listed in ‘The Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain’ as the cauldron of Dyrnwich the Giant, which will not boil the food of a coward. Clearly the same cauldron as that which Arthur went to find in Annwn, and doubtless the same also as the Irish Cauldron of the Dagda, from which 'no man ever went away unsatisfied'. 

How old is this legend of magical, life-giving cauldrons?  As old as Medea's?  Is hers' the ultimate origin of the witches' cauldron that we find in 'Macbeth'?  Who knows?  Lastly, also in the Mabinogion, the Welsh hero Bran is the keeper of yet another magical cauldron which restores the dead to life. And he too is the subject of a Mystical Voyage. More about him and some other Celtic voyagers next week!



Picture credits:
The Death of Arthur by James Archer, 1823-1902
The Death of Arthur by Katharine Cameron
The Gundestrop Cauldron
Detail from the Gundestrop Cauldron
Illustration by Charles Keeping from 'Elidor' by Alan Garner

The Silver Apples of the Moon, the Golden Apples of the Sun

Here is Hercules, in brown, depicted on an Athenian vase. Eros, standing on his shoulder, offers him one of the golden apples of immortality from the Garden of the Hesperides.  The female figures are the Hesperides themselves – the Daughters of Evening, or the Western Maidens  – designations all apparently tied to their imagined location in the distant west. (Hesperis is the personification of the evening: Hesperus is Venus as evening star.)

But what is it about apples?  Why are they so evocative? Why was the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – not named in the Bible – assumed to be an apple?  Not only did golden apples of immortality grow in the Garden of the Hesperides, but the goddess Idun was the keeper of golden apples which preserved the youth of the Norse gods. Why was the Apple of Discord – with its inscription To the Fairest – an apple at all, and why were three golden apples so irresistible to Atalanta that she paused to pick them up and lost her race?

The apple as the fruit of immortality, or perhaps equally of death, appears as a symbol in Celtic mythology too. Heralds from the Land of Youth would bear a silver apple branch with silver blossom and golden fruit, whose tinkling music lulled the hearers to sleep – perhaps to everlasting sleep…  And Arthur, after his final battle, went to the island of Avalon, the island of apples, to be healed of his mortal wound.  And of course there’s the apple Snow-White’s stepmother gave her, of which one poisoned bite sent her into a death-like sleep.   

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love... Apples are tokens of love and promises of eternity. In Yeats' ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ the lovelorn Aengus seeks forever for the beautiful girl from the hazel wood.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

But such an eternity is probably also the land beyond death. 

Where do apples even come from, why are they so ubiquitous? Why are there, even today, so many varieties available even in supermarkets, usually the home of homogeneity? I went into our local Sainsburys the other day and counted eleven different named varieties of apple all on sale at once:  Empire, Royal Gala, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Russets, Granny Smiths, Pink Ladies, Jazz, Braeburns and Bramleys.  (In comparison, there were four named varieties of pears, and everything else was generic – bananas, strawberries, oranges, etc.)

But if you look here, you'll find names and pictures of many more, older varieties with names like poems. Adam's Pearmain, Foxwhelps. D'Arcy Spice, Marriage-Maker, St Ailred, Sops-in-Wine, and Ribston's Pippin, of which Hilaire Belloc wrote:

I said to Heart: "How goes it?"
Heart replied, 
"Right as a Ribston Pippin!"
But it lied.

Apples are related to roses, I’m delighted to tell you. According to a rather lovely book called ‘Apples: The Story of the Fruit of Temptation’, by Frank Browning (Penguin 1998):

‘In the beginning there were roses. Small flowers of five white petals opened on low, thorny stems, scattered across the earth in the pastures of the dinosaurs, about eighty million years ago. …These bitter-fruited bushes, among the first flowering plants on earth, emerged as the vast Rosaceae family and from them came most of the fruits human beings eat today: apples, pears, plums, quinces, even peaches, cherries, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries.

‘The apple [paleobotanists believe]… was the unlikely child of an extra-conjugal affair between a primitive plum from the rose family and a wayward flower with white and yellow blossoms of the Spirea family, called meadowsweet.’ 

Isn’t that wonderful? Apples as we know them today developed in Europe and Asia. The Pharoahs grew them. The Greeks and Romans grew them. And they keep. You can store apples overwinter, eat them months after you’ve picked them: fresh fruit in hard cold weather when there’s nothing growing outside. So perhaps you would think of them as life-giving, immortal fruit. They smell fragrant. They feel good too: hard-fleshed, smooth, a cool weight in the hand.

The medieval lyric Adam lay y-bounden provocatively celebrates the Fall of Man. when Adam ate the forbidden fruit...

And all was for an appil
An appil that he toke
As clerkes finden
Written in her boke.

…by ending with the mischievously happy thought that if Adam had not eaten the apple, Our Lady would never have become the Heavenly Queen:

Blessed be the time
That appil take was!
Therefore we maun singen:
Deo gratias.


Here is a poem by John Drinkwater, surely the most poetically-named poet ever - which consciously or unconsciously captures some of those mystical coincidences of apples, eternity, sleep, moonlight, magic and death. 

MOONLIT APPLES

At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,
And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those
Apples are deep-sea apples of green.  There goes
A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.

A mouse in the wainscot scratches, and scratches, and then
There is no sound at the top of the house of men
Or mice; and the cloud is blown, and the moon again
Dapples the apples with deep-sea light.

They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams
On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams
Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams
And quiet is the steep stair under.

In the corridors under there is nothing but sleep.
And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep
Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep
On moon-washed apples of wonder.


Picture credits: 
Hercules in the Garden of the Hesperides:  Red-Figured hydra made in Athens circa 370-360 BCE.
The Golden Apple Tree and the Nine Peahens:  Arthur Rackham
Adam and Eve:  Lucas Cranach

Ring Out the Old

Happy New Year!

The Roman god Janus, who gives his name to January, looks both ways, fowards into the future and backwards into the past.   He is the gatekeeper of the year: and television and newspapers over New Year still honour him by the custom of examining the past and trying to figure out the future. As this is my first post of 2010, I too will start by looking back before setting out across the threshold of the year.

When I was a child, my parents would send my dark-haired elder brother outside just before midnight on New Year's Eve, armed with a small piece of coal, a coin and a branch of greenery, so he could come in on the last stroke of twelve bearing the gifts of fuel and prosperity.  He couldn't let himself in; he had to ring the doorbell and be formally admitted.  The 'first footer' over the threshold had to be a dark man, for what reason I don't know.  The piece of coal would be wrapped in cotton wool and kept all year.

How old these customs are, who knows?  According to Ovid, the Romans gave away little presents of 'white honey' and a small coin at New Year.  During the medieval period, New Year's gifts were more common than Christmas gifts.  In the wonderful medieval poem 'Gawaine and the Green Knight,' Arthur's courtiers are busy exchanging New Year's gifts and waiting for a 'marvel' to occur before they can dine, when in rides the Green Knight, the mysterious stranger who crosses Arthur's threshold bearing a green branch: 'a holly bob/ That is greatest in green when groves are bare'.  The Green Knight appears menacing: perhaps one of the things he represents is the mystery and challenge of the unknown year ahead.

Another New Year custom was to open all the doors of the house 'to let the old year out'.  And in many parts of Britain it was considered unlucky to throw anything out on New Year's Day: even the ashes from the fire, or vegetable peelings, had to be kept indoors.  And making a very loud noise at midnight on New Year was traditional: the ringing of church bells might also be accompanied by shouting, banging of dustbin lids and the hooting of factory sirens.  Nobody washed clothes at New Year, as superstition held that 'if you wash on New Year you wash for the dead.'  And it was of course unlucky in the extreme to work on New Year's Day.

Which is (of course) why this, my New Year's Day post, comes three days late...  If anyone else remembers any New Year's customs, I'd love to hear them.