Stonehenge’s mythic history

Early print of Stonehenge: the bluestones are the smaller pillars surrounded by the trilithons

Brian John The Bluestone Enigma:
Stonehenge, Preseli and the Ice Age
Greencroft Books 2008

Ancient man didn’t
transport stones hundreds of miles.
And nor did Merlin.

Brian John, who lives in Pembrokeshire (where much of this study is set), has had a long interest in this whole subject area. A Geography graduate of Jesus College, Oxford, he went on to obtain a D Phil there for a study of the Ice Age in Wales. Among other occupations he was a field scientist in Antarctica and a Geography Lecturer in Durham University, and is currently a publisher and the author of a number of articles, university texts, walking guides, coffee table glossies, tourist guides, titles on local folklore and traditions, plus books from popular science to local jokes. His credentials are self-evident when it comes to discussing Stonehenge.

One of the strongest modern myths about Stonehenge to have taken root is that the less monumental but no less impressive so-called bluestones were physically brought by prehistoric peoples from the Preseli Hills in south-west Wales to Wiltshire. The second strongest modern myth is that the whole saga was somehow remembered over a hundred or more generations to be documented by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century as a feat of Merlin. In this self-published title Dr John examines these and other myths and finds them wanting in terms of echoing reality.

The book is dead?

The death knell of the book made from dead trees may have been premature, according to figures which keep being bandied around various media. For a long time the inexorable rise of the electronic book seemed to spell doom for the traditional tome: the demise of Borders was supposed to be a foretaste of worst to come, along with the closure of numerous bookshops both in the Old World as well as in the New. But is the situation changing?

A richly imagined future

Eifion Jenkins If You Fall I Will Catch You Seren 2008

Gwidion is a boy an the verge of manhood to whom 9/11 means nothing. But in 2084, the psychic shockwaves of an event that once shook the world are still felt in his village — all that is left of Wales. Gwidion’s unusual mental powers bring him to the attention of the planet’s remaining politicians, desperate for a way to escape the failing Earth. But in a world which has lost track of its history, Gwidion is determined to find out the truth about his past. His efforts to answer his own questions propel him from his sheltered rural community, via the mysterious Soma Academy in Madrid, to a new life in the outer reaches of the galaxy.

Publisher’s description

A remarkable first novel, If you fall I will catch you is set in a richly imagined future where the narrative shifts from south Pembrokeshire to Spain, Peru and a world several light years away. Eifion Jenkins spins a tale that, following the arrow of time, springs out of the events of September 11th and the World Trade Center at the beginning of this millennium. It gradually becomes clear that while you can’t change the past you can influence the shape of future events by just little apparently inconsequential acts, sometimes by just being yourself.

Uncertainty principles

The roofless keep of Dinefwr Castle, Carmarthenshire, Wales

This is the third and last interim post about Titus Groan before I publish my review. This discussion will circle around certain patterns that I’ve detected in the novel, though whether they’re patterns which Mervyn Peake intended or merely the phantasms of my fevered mind I’ll leave for you to judge.

Peake himself was born on the ninth day of the seventh month, in a year — 1911 — which featured double digits. Was this what encouraged him (around 1940, when his first son Sebastian was born to Maeve Gilmore) to put the titular hero’s birthday as “the eighth day of the eighth month, I am uncertain about the year”? The 8th of August is the day before and a month after Peake’s own birth.

Is there any significance to this? Possibly. I think that there is a kind of duality to much of Titus Groan which the eighth day of the eighth month in a way prefigures. Let me give you some examples.

Imagining Gormenghast

Four Chinese boys standing in a gateway, Kuling, Jiangxi, China, ca.1900-1932 (Wikimedia Commons)

As I hurtle towards the final pages of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan I have not only been delighting in his panoply of curious names for individuals: I have also, as countless others have too, been captivated by his seemingly detailed descriptions of Gormenghast Castle, so much so that I have been trying to draw up a ground plan of the buildings and surrounds. But, as others have no doubt also discovered, amongst all the circumstantial descriptions, perambulations and measurements the gargantuan edifice remains disturbingly ghostly and mirage-like. All I can offer at the moment are a few thoughts, based on notes taken from the text and from odd research — including from Mervyn Peake: Two Lives (Vintage 1999), which comprises Maeve Gilmore’s A World Away (1970) and Sebastian Peake’s A Child of Bliss (1989).

As befits the name

Before I get round to posting a review of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan — which, by the by, I’m enjoying immensely and have nearly finished — I thought I would share with you a few posts dealing with aspects of this first book of the Gormenghast trilogy. Aspects that include time, place, structure … and names.

In times past I used to peruse New Scientist at friends’ or at the doctors’ for the exciting ideas thrown up in all the sciences, however much or little I understood the ins and outs. A thread which was covered in the 90s was the concept of nominative determinism — the idea that people’s names, particularly their surnames, were a factor that predisposed them to follow a particular occupation. Some of these names — Cook, Butcher, Archer for example — would have been borne by some male ancestor who had that job, but many seem to be just puns, curiosities that go into that section of the universal memeplex labelled ‘Ain’t Life Odd?’ You know, a vicar called Vickers, or a poet called Wordsworth.

But fiction has the propensity to be stranger than fact.