'Daughters of Time' at the Oxford Festival

This coming Sunday, 30th March, 2.00 pm, I'm heading for the Oxford Literary Festival to join my fellow authors Mary Hoffman, Penny Dolan, Leslie Wilson and Celia Rees who will be talking about this book,  'Daughters of Time'.  We're all founding members of The History Girls blog, created by Mary Hoffman to celebrate historical writing, fiction and non-fiction, from a female perspective.  We were thrilled when she suggested that some of us might get together to write a series of children’s stories centred around significant women in British history. In the end, thirteen of us took up the challenge: too many to fit on one panel! So I've got the easy job of sitting in the audience -  but I'll be there to help sign books at the end.

                 

Why did we feel this book was important?  Growing up in the 1960’s, the history taught to me at school was mostly about men. I heard of few women role models. When sibling rivalry between me and my younger brother descended a level or two, we might wrangle about whether ‘girls are as good as boys’ or ‘boys are better than girls’, but if he challenged me with ‘Why are there more famous men than women, then?’ my arsenal was small. Queen Elizabeth the First.  Grace Darling.  Joan of Arc (though being burned at the stake was hardly something to aim for). Um. Queen Victoria? – a dull old lady who wore black and was not amused?  Not very inspiring to a child.  I knew of only one woman scientist, Marie Curie (culled from the pages of my Grandma’s ‘Reader’s Digest Book of Famous Lives’, I was a child who read everything).  Famous authors? – well, I knew about the Brontes. And that was about it.

True, I devoured the historical books of Geoffrey Trease who usually had a brave, cross-dressing heroine adventuring alongside the young hero.  But that wasn’t real.  Rather gloomily I supposed that women didn’t have adventures.

How wrong I was.  And ‘Daughters of Time’ amply demonstrates it. When we came to decide who we should pick, we were spoiled for choice: we had heated discussions about which women to include: we could have written three anthologies, never mind one! (Some of the names which had, inevitably, to be left out are listed at the back of the book).  Among us, we wrote about queens, visionaries, reformers, political thinkers, dramatists, scientists, pilots and activists. And I knew immediately who I wanted to write about: Lady Julian of Norwich. 

Lady Julian, a medieval visionary and anchorite who spent perhaps thirty years of her life walled up in a small stone room or ‘cell’ at the back of St Julian’s Church in Norwich, may seem a strange character to offer to readers of nine plus. But she was an amazing person, strong, sane and compassionate.  She is the author of the very first book known to have been written in English by a woman – ‘Showings of God’s Love’, in which she vividly recounts her visions. It’s a very good book, too – full of imagery drawn from everyday life, as when she describes how God showed her ‘a little thing, the size of a hazelnut’ on the palm of her hand, and when she asked what it was, told her, ‘It is all that is made’.  And she has a wonderfully feminist take on religion, describing God as a Mother who tenderly cares for us: ‘for when a child is in trouble or scared, it runs to its mother for help as fast as it can’.

Julian’s message down the centuries is one of hope.  ‘All shall be well,’ God promised her. We still need to hear that message, and that was why I chose it as the title of my story in which twelve year-old Sarah, Lady Julian’s new little maidservant, battles with homesickness and grief.

Wayland's Smithy: a tangle of tales...

by Penny Dolan

All that was needed, so people said, was a single coin placed on a stone beside your tethered horse. Have faith, leave the horse there all night and when you came back next morning, your steed would be newly shod and the coin gone.

Though the nights of magical shoeing are surely long past, the ancient burial mound known as Wayland’s Smithy is still there on the shoulder of chalk downland, and the place with its tangled tale, haunts me.

I first saw the Smithy on a day so wet that froglets skittered from the path into overfull ditches and milky water ran down the cracks in the chalky clay.

The rain gods had only paused. By the time we had reached the crest of the ridge, a downpour had began. Thunder rolled around the hills and as we approached Wayland’s Smithy, the huge, dark clouds above were lit with streaks of lightning.

The long barrow lies off the track. We pushed through wet bushes and came to it, covered in grass and surrounded by grove of trees. Several ancient stones formed the gateway.

With the storm raging, the moment felt as if the past was only a shadow away. It was impossible not to think of the many feet that had passed along the Ridgeway and made the path, with or without horses to be shod. Did they all wonder at the mysterious mound or the strange white horse* spread across the hillside nearby? Did they seek shelter in the small wood?

However, the helpful smith of the legend does not match entirely happily with the Norse version of Wayland the Smith. 

Wayland, or Volund, had been apprenticed to the dwarves of the Icelandic Mountains, He was one of the three sons of Wade, the king of the Finns. Out hunting, the brothers found three beautiful swan maidens, seized their feathered robes, and made them their wives.  When the three sisters discovered their hidden feathers again, they flew away to freedom.

The two older brothers went searching for their wives, but the desolate Wayland stayed working at his smithy, sure that his beloved wife would return for the golden ring he was keeping for her and all the other treasures he was creating.

Soon rich men grew greedy for Wayland’s skills, King Niduth of Sweden more than any. Wayland was lured to his castle, crippled, imprisoned on an island and made to forge endless objects for the king. So dazzling were the treasures and so great the family’s pride that they forgot to be wary of their prisoner.

The two princes visited Wayland, who treated them kindly until they mocked him. Enraged, he beheaded them both and fashioned a set of dreadful gifts for the royal parents. The princely skulls became golden goblets, the eyes glittering gems from their eyes, and their pearly white teeth made a necklace for the queen their mother.

Meanwhile, the princess, jealous of her brothers, visited Wayland, bringing a golden ring for him to mend. Recognising the stolen ring as that made for his lost wife, he cruelly seduced the princess, leaving her with child. Having sent her and the horrific treasures back to the palace, Wayland strapped on a pair of mechanical wings, rose into the sky and flew away. 

It is not quite clear how this tale links up to the burial mound, although the ancient site may have been given its new identity by Anglo Saxon invaders.

Certainly the tale travelled and adapted. One version claims that Wayland’s wings brought him to the mound, and that  the Norse hero Sigurd  brought his horse there to be shod. Some say that explains the white horse set in the chalk, who leaves the hillside once every hundred years and gallops across the sky to the smithy to be shod.

To me, this tale is loaded with contrasting images – the stolen skins of the swans, the broken wedding ring, the patient and desolate waiting, the greed of the powerful, the Samson-like captivity, the image of those awful golden chalices, and thee Daedulus-like wings – and they all make the tale of Wayland unforgettable.  One cannot love or admire him, yet there is something enigmatic about his tale and about the unbound rage that creates such dreadful treasures.

The crippled smith’s name is mentioned in Beowulf, in the poem Volundarkvitha (part of the poetic Edda) as well as in Chaucer’s writings, in Kipling’s 'Puck of Pooks Hill', and in 'Kenilworth'. He is said to be a fore-runner of St Clement, patron saint of blacksmiths and both have feast days in November. 

Why does the Wayland story matter to my writing? When I wrote my novel 'A Boy Called Mouse', I came to a section where my Mouse needed to have a place where he could rage and let out all the anger he felt. The pattern of his world had shifted dreadfully and he needed time in the wilderness to move out from his terrible grief, and renew his hope for his quest.

The image of that ancient site came into my head and the long path running alongside, and the wild storm overhead. So I created a “tramping man”, a character called Wayland. He is not a man who would put out my young hero’s eyes, but a wise kindly figure who makes Mouse to walk and walk and keep on walking along the high ridge of ground while a storm rages around them, almost Lear-like. Wayland. This agonising march moves Mouse out of his despair and sets him free for his future. The tales don’t fit easily together but for me, something matched.

 

Weland forges the sword, HR Millar, 'Puck of Pook's Hill'

 

* The Uffington White Horse, a bronze age chalk figure cut into the hillside.

 

My friend Penny Dolan is a Yorkshire lass like me, a storyteller as well as a children’s writer, and we share a delight in that feistiest of fairytale heroines, the beautiful and dauntless Lady Mary from ‘Mr Fox’. 

Penny is the author of many picture books and fairytale retellings for younger children, as well as longer books for junior readers. Notable among these is ‘The Third Elephant’, a lovely tale of a small wooden elephant who longs to see more of the world than his dusty mantelpiece:

When night came, the small elephant looked at the empty pool of moonlight.  He thought about what the mouse had told him: wish for what you want, wish for what you dream about. ‘I wish’, he thought, as hard as he could, ‘I wish I could see the white palace again.’

In the classic tradition of change coming to discarded toys, the little elephant is thrown from the window and falls into the hands of a young girl on her way to play the flute in a concert - and the adventures begin. ‘Charming’ is an adjective which can sometimes be suspected of carrying the subtext ‘trivial’, but this is a book which is both truly charming and seriously involved with the fears and uncertainties of childhood.  Her novel, 'A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E’ is ‘a historical fairy tale’, a beautifully written, carefully researched story of a young boy wandering the roads of Victorian England, and is full of allusions to Victorian fiction, the theatre, and old legends about larger-than-life wanderers on the old roads of England - including Wayland himself.

Picture credits:
Wayland's Smithy: Wikimedia Commons