The Agony Aunts are arriving!

Harking back to my recent series on Mystical Voyages, you may remember that when my very own Argonautical hero, David, set off on his voyage across the Mediterranean in Tim Severin's good ship Argo, I sat at home like Penelope, having neither the requisite muscle power to row one of these huge oars - or indeed the equipage to use the toilet facilities. In a bit of genuine reconstructive archeology, the crew discovered the purpose of that mysterious little wooden nubble you can see half way down the ram.  Apparently visible on some ancient paintings, it was incorporated in Argo's design, and turned out to be there to help you keep your footing while you do whatever you need to do directly into the sea.

Anyway, to keep myself busy and not too jealous, I whiled away some of my spare time writing and illustrating a Voyage story of my own: 'Jason and the AgonyAunts: a silly tale in eight fits', which I gave David when he got back and which I'm going to post on this blog over the next few weeks.  (For anyone unfamiliar with it, an 'Agony Aunt' is the cheery British term for an advice columnist in a magazine or newspaper.) 

I'm not a trained artist, as will become rapidly apparent! -  but I can get the occasional likeness, and I had a lot of fun making this little book or booklet.  More important though, I've finally got down to writing a new long fantasy.  I know you'll all understand that I'll need to give most of my concentration and time over the next few months to that.  I've don't want to stop blogging - and I won't! - but perhaps the Agony Aunts will amuse some of you as much as they did me, when they visited me for the first time rather more years ago than I care to count - and well before I was a published writer.

So please enjoy the Agony Aunts, whose story will be delivered in weekly installments beginning this very Friday and lasting into the New Year.  I'll be popping in and out regularly, so please do leave comments, as I'd love to know what you think of Flora, Agatha and Harriet's adventures with Jason, Medea, Zeus and Hera.

Mystical Voyages (8) Saint Brendan ...and Caspian again.

The traditional Old Irish voyage tales known as immrama mostly tell of voyages towards the west, the traditional (European) direction for the Otherworld, where the sun sets into the sea.  The immrama hark back to older pre-Christian Celtic voyage tales: but the briefest of readings will show that the stories of Bran or Maeldune are simple entertainment compared with the difficult and cryptic Welsh  poem, ‘The Spoils of Annwfn’.

It's hard to disentangle cause and effect, belief and tradition.  Why was it the practice of many an early Celtic monk to set sail for a remote island on which to live and meditate – like Saint Cuthbert on Inner Farne, who was observed by the community on Lindisfarne to pray all night standing in the sea?  Was it only for the solitude and sense of being cut off from the world, or was there a half-hidden memory or tradition that the voyage itself was a holy act which would bring the traveller at last to set bodily foot upon the shore of another world?  Alongside the fame of their monasteries, is there a second reason why Lindisfarne off the east coast of Britain, and Iona off the west, are both named ‘Holy Island’?

We’ll never know, any more than we’ll ever be able to answer the question I asked at the beginning of this series on Mystical Voyages, if prehistoric peoples who set out under sail or oar in the earliest times and colonised previously uninhabited lands all over the globe, may have done so partly out of a belief that they were voyaging to the land of spirits, gods, and their ancestors, the blessed dead.

‘... do you think,’ says Lucy in ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’, ‘Aslan’s country would be that sort of country – I mean, the sort you could ever sail to?’

Well, who knew?  There was only one way to find out.

This Irish in particular, stationed as they are on the western verge of Northern Europe, were in a particularly good position to ask themselves the question, ‘What might be out there?’  One of the earliest parts of the British Isles to become Christian, Ireland was sending out missionaries to England and the continent by the 6th century AD: which is also the era of Saint Brendan.

Brendan, whose voyages are recorded in many manuscripts, sets off into the Atlantic Ocean in search of Paradise, the Land of the Blessed, after dreaming of  ‘a beautiful island with angels serving upon it’.  Later, hearing the account of  a fellow monk, Mernoke, who claimed to have sailed to the Earthly Paradise, Brendan puts out in a curragh – a hide boat – with twelve companions in search of this country.  He spends years wandering the Atlantic between island and island: the island of the ‘Comely Hound’ (a dog which leads them to a hall with a table spread with food); the Island of Sheep, ‘every sheep the size of an ox’; ‘The Paradise of Birds’, on which the angels who fell with Lucifer, but whose fault was small, live in the form of small birds all rejoicing and singing the matins and the verses of the psalms…

And I particularly like the amiable sea monster, ‘Jasconye the Fish’, whom the monks mistake for an island and who – after a startled first occasion when he swims off, bearing the fire the monks have lighted upon him still on his back – allows Brendan and his companions to celebrate Easter upon his back as an annual occurrence. Brendan seems to know all about this beast, explaining to his companions that Jasconye is for ever vainly trying to swallow his own tail.  Is this an echo of the Northern Midgard Serpent, or simply a bit of early medieval natural science?  Here he is anyway, on a map of 1621, obligingly stretched out between the east coast of Africa and 'the Fortunate Isles', with 'St Brendan's Isle' to the north.

There’s a clear sea like Maeldune’s, full of fishes which come to hear Mass:

So clear that they could see to the bottom, and it was all covered with a great heap of fishes.  …And the fishes awoke and started up and came all around the ship in a heap, that they could hardly see the water for fishes.  But when the mass was ended each one of them turned himself and swam away, and they saw them no more.

It’s lovely, I think, that all nature is included in this Celtic Christianity.

Like Maeldune and his friends, Brendan and his companions also venture close to what seems suspiciously like an erupting volcano:

There came a south wind that drove them on… and at the end of eight days they saw far away in the north a dark country full of stench and of smoke; and as the ship drew near it they heard great blowing and blasting of bellows, and a noise of blows and a noise like thunder, the way they were all afeared and blessed themselves. …And with that there came demons thick about them on every side, with tongs and with fiery hammers, and followed after them till it seemed all the sea to be one fire… and they saw a hill all on fire and like as if walled in with fire, and clouds upon it…

This has to be Iceland, surely?  To Brendan of course, it’s the borders of hell, and therefore hardly surprising that their next encounter is with poor Judas Iscariot, marooned on a rock.

In the end, after forty days more sailing, and showers of hail, and fog, Brendan and his companions do reach the Land of Promise, the Blessed Land.  Oddly enough, although they should be sailing west, the land they see is to the east. (Perhaps this is because east is the direction of Jerusalem: the Earthly Paradise is always located to the east in later medieval maps.)  It is:  

...clear and lightsome, and the trees full of fruit on every bough… and the air neither hot nor cold but always one way, and the delight that they found there could never be told.  Then they came to a river that they could not cross but they could see beyond it the country that had no bounds to its beauty.  Then there came to them a young man… and took [Brendan] by the hand and said to him…

‘Here is the country you have been in search of, but it is our Lord’s will you should go back again and make no delay… And this river you see here is the mering,’ he said, ‘that divides the worlds, for no man may come to the other side of it while he is in life; [and when he dies] it is then there will be leave to see this country towards the world’s end.’

Praising God and laden with fruit of the country, and precious, stones, Brendan returns to Ireland and dies, his whole mind set on the heaven he has already seen.

NB: I am also to be found, this morning, over at The History Girls, talking about girls dressed as boys in historical fiction.

Picture credits:

Saint Brendan - image found at the blog Logismoi

Saint Brendan and Jasconye the fish - Honorius Philoponus, Nova typis transacta navigatio novi orbis Indiae Occidentalis, 1621

Mystical Voyages (7) Bran and Maeldune

The Irish hero Bran’s Mystical Voyage begins when, after being lulled to sleep by the magical music of a silver branch with white apple-blossoms, he meets a woman who invites him to seek the wonders of the Emain Ablach or ‘Isle of Women’, where there is peace and plenty and no one is ever sick or dies.  Bran sets out after her with twenty-seven companions and three curraghs – nine men in each boat.  After sailing for two days he is encouraged by meeting Mannanan Mac Lir, god of the sea, driving his golden chariot over the sea, who tells Bran he should reach the Isle of Women by sunset.  First however they come across an island on which everyone is laughing, and when Bran sends one of his men to investigate, he begins laughing too, and will not return to the boats. (Is this reminiscent of the Odyssey's Land of the Lotus Eaters?) They are forced to leave him there, and sail away.

Arriving at the Isle of Women, Bran’s boat is drawn into port by a ball of magical thread which the queen tosses to him.  Each of the men is paired with a beautiful woman, Bran sharing the bed of the queen, and they remain there happily, unaware of how much time is passing in the real world, until Nechtan son of Collbran becomes homesick and Bran decides to return home.  The queen warns against it, and especially against setting foot on land, but Bran insists – but when they sight Ireland, so many years have passed that Bran’s name is only an ancient legend, and when Nechtan leaps out of the curragh, he crumbles to dust. (Just the same fate befalls one of Oisin's companions in the legend of Oisin and the fairy woman Niamh.)  At the sight, Bran and his companions sail away, never to be seen in Ireland again. 

The hero Maeldune also discovers these same two islands which Bran found, but his is a longer voyage and a happier homecoming.  Setting out to avenge the killing of his father Ailill, his journey is extended because he fails to follow the advice of a druid to take only seventeen men with him.  His three foster brothers swim after the ship, and Maeldune picks them up – but one by one loses them as they visit or pass thirty or so marvellous islands and a variety of other wonders.  At last Maeldune receives the advice of a hermit that he will only be able to return home safely once he has forgiven his father’s murderer.  Maeldune does so and makes a safe landfall. 

Along the way Maeldune and his companions see such wonders as the Isle of Ants ‘every one of them the size of a foal’; an Island of Birds; an island where demon riders run a giant horse race; an island of a miraculous apple tree whose fruit satisfy the whole crew for ‘forty nights’; an island where a mysterious beast turns itself around and around inside its skin (and hurls stones at the voyagers); an island of fiery pigs, an island of a little cat;  a ‘four-fenced’ island divided into quarters for kings, queens, fighting men and young girls respectively; an island where giant smiths strike away on anvils and hurl a huge lump of red-hot iron after the boat (surely a volcanic eruption?) so that ‘the whole of the sea boiled up’.

The Very Clear Sea

They went on after that till they came to a sea that was like glass, and so clear it was that the gravel and the sand of the sea could be seen through it, and they saw no beasts or monsters at all among the rocks, but only the clean gravel and the grey sand.  And through a great part of the day they were going over that sea, and it is very grand it was and beautiful.

Surely this influenced C.S. Lewis’s ‘Silver Sea’! ('How beautifully clear the water is' said Lucy to herself as she leaned over the port side early in the afternoon...'I must be seeing the bottom of the sea; fathoms and fathoms down.'  Although Lewis soon fills his clear sea with the Sea People and their castle, as shown in this lovely illustration by Pauline Baynes.)   

Maeldune soon comes across another marvel: one of my favourites:

The Silver-Meshed Net

They went on then till they found a great silver pillar; four sides it had, and the width of each of the sides was two strokes of an oar; and there was not one sod of earth about it, but only the endless ocean; and they could not see what way it was below, and they could not see what way the top of it was because of its height. There was a silver net from the top of it that spread out a long way on every side, and the curragh went under sail through a mesh of that net.

Diuran, one of Maeldune’s companions, strikes the net with his spear to obtain a piece:

“Do not destroy the net,” said Maeldune, “for we are looking at the work of great men.”  “It is for the praise of God’s name I am doing it,” said Diuran, “The way my story will be better believed; and it is to the altar of Ardmacha I will give this mesh of the net if I get back to Ireland.” Two ounces and a half now was the weight when it was measured after in Ardmacha.  They heard then a voice from the top of the pillar very loud and clear, but they did not know in what strange language it was speaking or what word it said.

I love the way these voyage tales don’t try to explain anything: they simply delight in the marvellous inventions (of the poet, or of God) and convey a sense of great wonder at the things men find when they set out upon the illimitable sea.

All quotatations are from Lady Gregory's translations of the voyages in her 'Book of Saints and Wonders'

Picture credits:  illustration from 'The Voyage of the Dawn Treader' by Pauline Baynes
Bran meets Manannan Mac Llyr : 'The Voyage of Bran': Tapestry by Terry the Weaver/Terry Dunn, 1996

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

Mystical Voyages (5) Jason and the Argonauts

Although I said that the Odyssey was the grand-daddy of voyage stories, perhaps I was rash, for the story of Jason and the Argonauts is just as old and maybe even older. We know this because Homer clearly expected his audience would be familiar with it. In Book 12 of the Odyssey, when Circe is advising Odysseus and his men how to avoid the Clashing Rocks, she says:

 

…against them

crashes the heavy swell of dark-eyed Amphitrite…

That way the only sea-going ship to get through was the Argo,

who is in all men’s minds, on her way home from Aeetes;

and even she would have been driven on the great rocks that time,

but Hera saw her through, out of her great love for Jason.  

 

 

But the only full remaining account of Jason’s adventures is the ‘Argonautika’ by Apollonius of Rhodes, written in the mid 3^rd century BC and clearly a ‘literary’ achievement, while the Odyssey, like the Iliad, dates from the late 8^th century BC - so I tend to think of Jason as coming later. (Add the fact that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey refer to events of the Bronze Age in the early 12^th century BC, and I don’t know about you, but I begin to feel giddy with all this gazing into the dark backward and abysm of time.)

I rather like the story that Apollonius wrote the first draft of the Argonautika as a very young man, and it got terrible reviews.   Undeterred, he moved from Alexandria to Rhodes, rewrote the poem, and finally published it to great critical acclaim - a story which demonstrates the importance of resilience (and revision) for writers of all eras! 

Anyway, as everyone knows, the Argo was built to carry Jason and his band of fifty heroes (including Hercules, Hylas, Orpheus, and the twins Castor and Pollux) all the way from Thessaly to Colchis, Georgia, in search of the Golden Fleece.  Argo herself was a prophetic ship with her own voice, for a beam of the sacred oak of the oracle of Zeus at Dodona had been built into her.

Jason wept as he turned his eyes away from the land of his birth.  But the rest struck the rough sea with their oars in time with Orpheus’ lyre, like young men bringing down their quick feet on the earth in unison with one another and the lyre, as they dance for Apollo round his altar at Pytho… On either side the dark salt water broke into foam, seething angrily in answer to the strong men’s strokes.  The armour on the moving ship glittered in the sunshine like fire, and all the time she was followed by a long white wake which stood out like a path across a green plain.

Can’t you just smell the salt? I love this vigorous, stirring passage. It’s so clearly an account by someone who has often seen these very things.

As in all these mystical voyages, the Argo island-hops to her destination – reflecting the real-life practice of ancient ships which rarely spent long out of sight of land.  The heroes head first for Lemnos in the Northern Aegean, where the women of the island have recently murdered all their menfolk and greet the Argonauts as useful breeding partners to repopulate the island. From thence the Argo passes the Hellespont and heads into the Sea of Marmara, making landfall at Cius in Bythynia (northwest Turkey) where Hercules’ companion, the youth Hylas, is drowned by a nymph as he goes to fetch water:

The naiad of the spring was just emerging as Hylas drew near.  And there, with the full moon shining on him from a clear sky, she saw him in all his radiant beauty and alluring grace.  Her heart was flooded by desire… Hylas now leant over to one side to dip his ewer in, and as soon as the water was gurgling loudly round the ringing bronze she threw her left arm round his neck in her eagerness to kiss his gentle lips.  Then with her right hand she drew his elbow down and plunged him in midstream.

Terribly upset, Hercules abandons ship at this point and the Argo sails on without him.  At the Bosphorus, the Argo encounters the Harpies and the Clashing Rocks till, finally arriving at Colchis, Jason wins the Golden Fleece with the aid of the witch princess Medea.  Jason’s protectresses, the goddesses Hera and Athene, bribe little Eros to shoot one of his arrows at Medea, ensuring she falls in love with their protégé. In the charming passage where they beg Eros’ mother Aphrodite to assist them, she responds:

“He is far more likely to obey you than me. There is no reverence in him, but faced by you he might display some spark of decent feeling.  He certainly pays no attention to me… I am so worn out by his naughtiness I have half a mind to break his bow and wicked arrows in his very sight, remembering how he threatened me with them in one of his moods. He said, ‘If you don’t keep your hands off me while I can still control my temper, you can blame yourself for the consequences." Hera and Athene smiled at this and exchanged glances.

Transfixed by Eros’ arrow, Medea has no choice.  She falls in love and shows Jason how to pass (and survive) the three tests set by her father King Aeetes: to harness bulls with bronze hooves, to plough the field of the war god Ares, and to sow the dragons’ teeth which turn into an army of warriors.  Finally, as King Aeetes still refuses to part with the Fleece, Medea uses her herbal skills to put to sleep the dragon which guards the Fleece.

It seems likely the legend of the Fleece itself sprang from the ancient Georgian practice of  using sheep fleeces submerged in running streams to collect particles of gold, and this may be reflected in a sentence from one of Pindar’s odes which describes ‘the fleece, glowing with matted skeins of gold’ (trans: Nigel Nicolson). But in the Argonautika it takes on a much more magical appearance:

Lord Jason held up the great fleece in his arms.  The shimmering wool threw a fiery glow on his fair cheeks and forehead and he rejoiced in it, glad as a girl who catches on her silken gown the lovely light of the full moon as it climbs the sky and looks into her attic room.  …The very ground before him as he walked was bright with gold.

 

Jason and Medea escape together on the Argo, and eventually return to Thessaly, avoiding the Sirens and helped through the Clashing Rocks by sea nymphs who:

… holding their skirts up over their white knees, began to run along on top of the reefs and breaking waves, following each other on either side of the ship.  Argo, caught in the current, was tossed to right and left… but the Nereids, passing the ship from hand to hand and side to side, kept her scudding through the air on top of the waves.  It was like the game which young girls play beside a sandy beach, when they roll their skirts up to their waists on either side and toss a ball round to each other, throwing it high in the air so that it never touches the ground.

 

Isn’t that lovely?  Old as the story of Jason may be, this later telling of Apollonius often feels light, sophisticated and playful.  But the voyage across the sea to Colchis, and the journey into the sacred, dragon-or-serpent-guarded grove has a resonance that has lasted down the ages.  And Medea is Circe’s niece, a priestess of Hecate, goddess of childbirth, death, necromancy, doorways and crossroads, magic, torches and dogs.  In keeping with this, Medea is an often ruthless figure of great power, who near the end of the Argonautika calls on the spirits of death, the hounds of Hades, to slay the bronze giant Talos.  In other versions of her legend, she is the owner of a magical cauldron which can restore life to the dead (something which will turn up in Celtic mythology too: see next week's post).  She poisons her rivals and murders her own children.  The voyage of Jason to the land of the Golden Fleece and his meeting with Medea, giver of life and death, seems to suggest that his too is an Otherworld journey.

The quotation from the Odyssey in this post is from the translation by Richmond Lattimore, Harper Torchbooks, 1965

The quotations from the Argonautika are from the Penguin translation by E.V. Rieu

Picture credits:  The Argo and Argonauts - red-figure Greek vase
Building of the Argo - William Russell Flint

Hylas and the Nymphs - John Waterhouse

Jason and the Golden Fleece - Apulian red-figure krater

Naiads Playing - Arnold Böcklin

Mystical Voyages (4) The Sirens

The sirens were originally young girls, the friends of Persephone, who were changed into birds with girls' faces after she was abducted by Hades.  Of course, this means they are the companions of the powerful goddess of death, and their irresistable song will take your spirit into the Otherworld (while your body lies lies rotting in their meadow full of bones).

So this quick post is another poem. This is one of mine: and it's the only poem I ever wrote which - rather than being consciously composed - seemed to come to me through the ether, as though I were listening to a very faint voice on a distant radio and trying to make out the words.


It's also from a long time ago, when I was having an internal discussion with myself about whether I should be writing fantasy... (Was fantasy 'serious'?  Wasn't it rather frivolous - derivative - escapist? Was it something that leached energy from reality, rather than enhancing it? I wanted to write fantasy, but I worried about it.)

Then this poem arrived and informed me direct from the muse that it didn't matter whether I worried or not.  I have no choice about it.  I write what I am compelled to write, and there really is no escape... 

If you try to jump ship, you merely drown.

Ulysses

'Come here, young man,' the siren sings
from her unfaithful rock.
The knowledgeable dreamer
closes his crew's ears to the ringing sound,

but, all the summer, hears across the water
the cheated music slide
after his ship: 'Come back...'
There is no escaping from the experience.

Presently he approaches the cave-riddled land
of Giant One-Eye,
whose log-wide gaze
the dreamer is, of course, clever enough to burn out


but cannot help his friends, being No Body.
They were dreams, anyway.
With inevitable luck,
the boulder smashing into the sea misses him -


and so it goes on.  On Circe's smoke-wrapped island
he is protected
by a magic herb,
but is permanently changed, unlike his comrades:


she saved her subtler incantations for him.
And so, on waking -
having reached home safely -
he finds that he is still a prisoner,


and all his clever tricks of touching wood,
crossing his fingers, tongue in
cheek during promises,
never fooled or hindered anyone at all.


At home now in the factual world he finds
his dream unbreakable.
'Come here, young man.  Come here,
sailor, bold sailor,' impossible voices call.

Copyright Katherine Langrish 2011
Picture credits: Odysseus and the Sirens, British Museum vase

Mystical Voyages (3) The Old Ships

A couple of quick ones this week. Two poems, in fact. Here's the first, and the second will be up just after the weekend. 

I remember coming across this poem in a school anthology, and it's stayed with me ever since.  You probably know it too, but it's well worth reading again.  It references not only the tale of Odysseus, but a story about Dionysos, god of wine and ecstasy.  Once, sitting on the seashore in the form of a beautiful youth, he was kidnapped by sailors who dragged him on board their ship, intending to sail away and sell him into slavery.  This turned out to be an extremely bad move - never kidnap gods! - for as they raised the sail, Dionysos caused vines to spring up all over the ship, twining up the mast and tangling the oars so that they could not move.  Then he turned himself into a fierce lion and killed everyone on board, except for the helmsman who had pleaded for him, and those terrified sailors who had jumped into the sea, whom he transformed into dolphins. The story is depicted above by the painter Exekias in black-figure on the interior of a kylix, a shallow two-handled bowl for drinking wine.

'The Old Ships' by James Elroy Flecker

 

I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep

Beyond the village which men still call Tyre,

With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep

For Famagusta and the hidden sun 
That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire; 
And all those ships were certainly so old -

Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,

Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,

The pirate Genoese

Hell-raked them till they rolled

Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold. 

But now through friendly seas they softly run,

Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green,

Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold. 

But I have seen,

Pointing her shapely shadows from the dawn

And image tumbled on a rose-swept bay,

A drowsy ship of some yet older day;

And, wonder's breath indrawn,

Thought I -  who knows - who knows - but in that same

(Fished up beyond Aeaea, patched up new - 

Stern painted brighter blue -)

That talkative, bald-headed seaman came

(Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar)

From Troy's doom-crimson shore,

And with great lies about his wooden horse

Set the crew laughing, and forgot his course. 

It was so old a ship - who knows, who knows?

- And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain

To see the mast burst open with a rose,

And the whole deck put on its leaves again.

Mystical Voyages (2) Odysseus

 'Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew…’

So speaks the aging Ulysses to his companions in Tennyson’s great poem.  Unwilling ‘to rust unburnished’ and die by his own hearth, he sets out actively to seek the lands beyond the sunset, the home of the heroic dead. 

But the voyages Odysseus makes in the Odyssey have already taken him alive into the Otherworld – to many a magical island ruled by nymphs and goddesses, and at last to the very shores of death.  At the beginning of the Odyssey, the gods are discussing the latest news from Mycenae, where Orestes has just struck down Aegisthus, his father’s killer. Zeus complains that men blame the gods for their misfortunes, when in reality they bring troubles upon themselves.  But Athene takes the opportunity to put in a plea for her own protégé Odysseus:

Aigisthus indeed has been struck down in a death well-merited.

…But the heart in me is torn for the sake of Odysseus,

unhappy man, who still, far from his friends, is suffering

griefs, on the sea-washed island, the navel of all the waters,

a wooded island, and there a goddess has made her dwelling-place.

This goddess is the nymph Calypso, who

…detains the grieving, unhappy

man, and ever with soft and flattering words she works to

charm him to forget Ithaka; and yet Odysseus

straining to get sight of the very smoke uprising

from his own country, longs to die.

Zeus agrees that it is indeed time to work on bringing the hero home. 

The story of Odysseus is the grand-daddy of legendary voyage stories.  Setting off from Troy with twelve ships, he and his men are driven by storms to the land of the Lotus Eaters (whose fruit causes memory-loss) and then the island of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who captures them for food ‘like killing puppies’ and from whom they escape after blinding him.  Still grieving for their dead comrades, they make their next landfall at

…the Aiolian island where Aiolus

lived, Hippotas’ son, beloved by the immortal

gods, on a floating island, the whole enclosed by a rampart

of bronze…

Aiolus is in charge of the winds and gives Odysseus a leather bag holding all except the west wind – a gift which properly used should have carried the hero home.  But while Odysseus sleeps his men open the bag, and all the winds burst out and drive them back on their course.  Aiolus refuses to help them again, and, entering the harbour of the cannibal Laistrygonians, all Odysseus’ ships are destroyed except his own:

My ship and only mine, fled out from the overhanging

cliffs to the open water, but the others were all destroyed there.

Next:

We came to Aiaia, which is an island.  There lived Circe

of the lovely hair, the dread goddess who talks with mortals.

Circe changes Odysseus’ remaining companions into swine, but, aided by Hermes who gives him the magical herb moly, Odysseus rescues them and becomes Circe’s lover.  Finally, Circe advises them to sail to Hades, land of the dead, to consult the spirit of the seer Tiresias.  Deeply shaken by this advice, Odysseus demands,

‘who will be our guide on that journey?  No one

has ever yet in a black ship gone all the way to Hades.’

But the goddess tells him to raise sail and:

…let the blast of the North Wind carry you.

But when you have crossed with your ship the stream of Ocean, you will

find there a thickly wooded shore, and the groves of Persephone,

and tall black poplars growing, and fruit-perishing willows,

then beach your ship on the shore of the deep-eddying Ocean. And yourself
go forward into the mouldering home of Hades.

Odysseus meets many spirits of the dead here, including his own mother, whom he vainly attempts to embrace:

…three times

I started towards her, and my heart was urgent to hold her,

and three times she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow

or a dream, and the sorrow sharpened at the heart within me.

And Achilles, whom he tries to console with news of his earthly fame, only to receive the bitter reply:

I would rather follow the plough as thrall to another

man, one with no land allotted to him and not much to live on

than be king over all the perished dead.

This, from the Achilles of the Iliad who chose glory instead of length of days, shows how very different the mood of the Odyssey is from that of the Iliad… 

Returning to Circe’s island, Odysseus and his men are given further advice about their homeward voyage.  They skirt the island of the sweetly-singing Sirens who tempt sailors on to the rocks, and pass the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis.  Then the ship is wrecked (as punishment for hunting the cattle of the sun god Helios), and Odysseus is the only survivor.  He is washed ashore on the island of the nymph Calypso, who keeps him as her lover for seven years until Zeus orders her to release him…

For me, one of the most fascinating things about the Odyssey is the prevalence of powerful women, beside whom Odysseus is simply a homeless wanderer. There are the nymphs Calypso and Circe, the female monsters Scylla and Charybdis, the goddesses Persephone and Athene, the Sirens, the princess Nausikaa who rescues Odysseus after his second shipwreck, and her mother Queen Arete whom Nausikaa advises Odysseus to approach first rather than her father King Alkinous.  There is wise Penelope, Odysseus' wife: clearly queen in her own right since marriage to her will give one of the suitors kingship.  There's even Odysseus' old nurse, who is the first person to recognise him on his return to Ithaka. And there's Odysseus’ longing to embrace his beloved mother in Hades.  It’s so different from the warlike world of the Iliad in which women – Chryseis, Briseis, Andromache, Helen, Cassandra – are powerless victims. No wonder Robert Graves suggested in his novel ‘Homer’s Daughter’ that the Odyssey was written by a woman!

But most of all, the Odyssey sets the pattern for the Mystical Voyage, which takes the protagonist from one magical island to another, encountering mystery, danger and wonder.  The island sealed with brazen walls, the island surrounded by whirlpools, the island of the winds, the dark shore of Death with its black poplars and whispering willows, all these will recur and echo down the centuries. 

All quotations from the Odyssey in this post are from the translation by Richmond Lattimore, Harper Torchbooks, 1965

 Picture Credits:

Odysseus and Calypso by Arnold Bocklin

The Island of the Dead by Arnold Bocklin

Mystical Voyages (1) Of Ships and Suns

In all kinds of mythologies there are stories about sailing across the sea to a mystical land.  Maybe peoples of all races and all times have this in their blood: anyone who’s ever stood at the seashore and seen the sun rising or setting over the ocean must have wondered, like my hero Peer Ulfsson in ‘West of the Moon’ what it would be like to find the lands beyond the sun:

He clambered across the cargo and up the curve of the ship into the stern, where he stood for a moment holding the tiller and gazing out westwards.  The sun was low, laying a bright track over the water: a road studded with glittering cobblestones.  It stung his heart and dazzled his eyes.

He felt a surge of longing.  Life was a tangle that tied him to the shore.  What would it be like to cut free, shake off the land, and go gliding away into the very heart of the sun?

That ships and suns go together can be seen from the Egyptian sun god Re with his two boats: the sun boat or Mandjet (Boat of Millions of Years) which carried him from east to west across the sky accompanied by various other deities and personifications, and the night boat, the Mesesket, on which the god travelled through the perilous underworld from west to east, to rise again in the morning.  

How old is Re?  Well, judging by the dates of temples dedicated to his worship, his cult rose to its zenith in the 5^th Dynasty, beginning approximately 2500 BCE.  The dead were expected to spend eternity travelling with him across the sky. (Later his cult was superseded by the resurrection cult of Osiris.)  The photo above this paragraph shows the full-size Egyptian ship known as the Khufu ship, 143 feet long and built of Lebanon cedar, which was sealed into a pit at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza: the remains of many other solar boats have been found in different locations in Egypt.

Rock engravings in Scandinavia, dated to the Bronze Age any time between 1500 and 400 BCE show the same correspondence between ships and suns.  Here are some examples, reproduced in ‘The Chariot of the Sun and other Rites and Symbols of the Northern Bronze Age' by Peter Gelling and Hilda Ellis Davidson, showing ships embellished with sun discs and spirals. 

But people have been heading out to sea for literally hundreds of thousands of years.  Here’s a link to an article which seems to show that even before we were modern humans, hominids such as homo erectus ‘used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from Northern Africa to Europe’ – island-hopping as they went and leaving stone hand axes on Crete dating to at least 130,000 BCE.   How amazing – how utterly mind-blowing is that?  Modern humans crossed to Australia 60,000 years ago, and to North America earlier than 13,000 BCE. 

Whatever drove them to make these discoveries?  A nomadic hunter-gathering lifestyle is one thing: but setting off in a boat or on a raft on a one-way trip into an unknown ocean is quite another, especially with no population pressure pushing you on.  I can’t help but wonder if there was there a religious, a mystical element to these early voyages of discovery.  Maybe, standing on the sea shore, gazing at the sun rising or setting (depending which side of which continent they were), early peoples believed themselves to be embarking on journeys to follow the sun to the land of gods and the happy dead? 

And those left behind, watching them depart, must have felt a huge sense of awe, wonder and mystery about what befell the seafarers. As it says in ‘Beowulf’, when the dead king Scyld Scefing is set adrift in his ship-funeral:

Then they set up / the standard of gold

High over head: / let the sea bear him:

Gave him to the flood / with sad hearts

And mourning minds.  / Men cannot

Say for certain, / neither court-counsellors

Nor heroes under heaven, / who received that cargo. 

Who received that cargo?  By the time the Beowulf poem was written down, England was Christian.  But the poem leaves us in doubt as to the eventual supernatural landfall of a pagan king: it was an age which could still hold Christian and pagan beliefs in relatively comfortable simultaneity – an age which, maybe, knew it didn’t have all the answers.

And people down the centuries have been buried in ships, like the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo ship, dating from the early 7^th century AD, and the Oseberg ship, circa 800 AD,  which carried the bodies of two women, priestesses or queens, and the Gokstad ship, built of oak felled around 890 AD, sheltering the body of a man, perhaps a king.  The 10^th century Muslim traveller Ibn Fadlan wrote an eyewitness account of a Viking ship-funeral in Russia: a chieftain interred in his ship along with many grave goods and sacrifices, including that of a slave girl who ‘saw’ into the land of the dead in a kind of drugged trance, after which she was strangled and stabbed and laid beside him to accompany him on his mystical voyage.  According to Ibn Fadlan’s account, she had voluntarily offered herself as the sacrifice, and we needn’t be too sceptical.  In all probability she utterly believed she would be accompanying her lord to the Otherworld.  He was her passport to immortality.  

So ships and suns and voyages into the west have been part of the human imagination for many thousands of years.  After Re the sun god, there came Odysseus, Jason, Maelduine, Brendan, Oisin and many a nameless adventurer with them.  There came the Christian hermits who sailed out to remote islets in the Atlantic, and the saints who founded monasteries on Holy Islands like Iona and Lindisfarne.  And for the next few weeks, I’m off to explore some of these tales of mystical voyages.

So let’s set sail for the western isles, the land of the gods, the land of the dead, the land of the ever-young.  Bid farewell to Middle-Earth.  This way to Aeaea, Avalon, Tir na n’Og, Valinor, Eldamar, the Hesperides and Hy Brasil.  Hush! Can you hear the seagulls crying?    

Picture credits: Sunset over Roskilde fjord, Katherine Langrish 2005

The Khufu Ship

Ship and sun symbols: 'The Chariot of the Sun' by Peter Gelling & Hilda Ellis Davidson