April with his sweet showers

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Venus Verticordia

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote …

Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

Tomorrow is kalendae apriles — the kalends of April — and in ancient Rome it was was marked by the festival known as the Veneralia, the feast day of Venus Verticordia (“Venus the changer of hearts”). April then would have been the month dedicated to the goddess Venus.

It seems an apt time to conjure up the notion of love when there’s a lot of hating going on the world: as Peter and Gordon sang in 1964 in the Paul McCartney song, “I don’t care what they say I won’t stay | In a world without love.”

Below I list ten related facts for your edification, but in honour of the better known association of the first day of April one of them will be a factoid or fake news; can you guess which one it is?

Music, magic, maturity

Cart and Cwidder (1975)
by Diana Wynne Jones,
in The Dalemark Quartet, Vol 1.
Greenwillow / Eos 2005.

There is sometimes an assumption that if a novel’s protagonists are youngsters then the novel can only be for other youngsters to read. This is not always the case, and for me many of Diana Wynne Jones’ ‘young adult’ stories can and ought to be enjoyed by youngsters of all ages.

It is also sometimes assumed that fantasy is a lesser genre than more mainstream novels. I don’t accept that needs to be so, and the author herself has made clear that to dismiss fantasy as escapist is a mistaken attitude. The best fantasy has as much to say about the human condition as more literary examples, and Jones’ fantasy mostly falls into this category. Add to that the fact that Jones attended lectures by Tolkien at Oxford (he mumbled a lot, apparently) as well as C S Lewis and then this series of four related fantasy novels deserves to be given more consideration.

The first three of the Dalemark Quartet were published in the 1970s, with the first two published in North America as Volume 1 nearly thirty years later. As Cart and Cwidder happens more or less contemporaneously with Drowned Ammet it made sense to have the two titles combined in one, as the publishers Greenwillow did back in 2005 (though just the former title is considered here). The action takes place in a land wracked by civil war between north and south, in which Jones’ young heroes and heroines must make their precarious way.

#Narniathon21: the Lost Prince

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Esteemed Narniathoners, we are now at the halfway point in our readalong of the Chronicles of Narnia. The Silver Chair (1953) is the fourth published title in the septad of titles C S Lewis set in his portal world although, chronologically speaking, it’s actually the penultimate story.

You will, by now, have hopefully read The Silver Chair but, if not, never fear! It’s never too late to complete it and return here to add your comments.

As is usual, in this #Narniathon21 post I shall pose three general questions to get you started on a discussion — but of course it’s not compulsory to answer them! Feel free to state your thoughts or respond to others who’ve expressed themselves, for this is yet another tale rich with images, ideas and emotions. And don’t forget to link to your own posts and reviews.

Deserving more fantasy fans

© C A Lovegrove

The Spellcoats
in the Dalemark Quartet
by Diana Wynne Jones.
Oxford University Press 2005 (1979)

A young girl, who has little idea that she has a talent for weaving magical spells into garments, has to abandon home along with her orphan siblings when they are all suspected of colluding with invaders with whom they happen to share physical characteristics. Thus begins a journey down a river in flood to the sea and then back again up to its source before the causes of the conflict can start to be addressed.

The Spellcoats has a markedly different feel compared to the middle two Dalemark tales. As well as being set in an earlier period, this story is recounted by the young weaver Tanaqui (an approach unlike that in the other three books which are third-person narratives). We also find that the story is being told through her weaving of the tale into the titular Spellcoats, a wonderful metaphor for how stories are often described as being told.

We finally discover (in both an epilogue and in the helpful glossary that is supplied at the end of the book) that the boundaries between myth and factual truth are not as clear-cut as at first seems, a fascinating exercise in the layering of meaning and reality. It’s what might be called metafiction — which, as you all know, is defined as fiction about fiction, or ‘fiction which self-consciously reflects upon itself’ — a term which had only been coined in 1970, nine years before The Spellcoats was first published.

A skein of tales

Celtic head, Newport church, Pembrokeshire © C A Lovegrove

The Four Branches of the Mabinogi:
Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi
by Sioned Davies.
Gomer Press, 1993.

Four medieval native tales from Wales, known collectively as the Mabinogi, have rather remarkably survived for a millennium in two codices compiled somewhat later. Each tale in the quartet is known as a bough or branch (keinc, in Modern Welsh cainc) suggesting they derive from a common narrative tradition.

Sioned Davies, who was later to provide a readable  English translation of The Mabinogion, long established as the extended collection of medieval Welsh tales, offered us here a translation and adaptation of her 1989 Welsh essay on the Four Branches; it proves, for those whose familiarity with Welsh — such as myself — is as best very rusty, an extremely useful companion.

What are the tales about? Why should they still be read? And who wrote them? These and a few more exercise the minds of many, whether or not they are Welsh speakers, scholars, or merely lovers of story. Having long studied medieval narrative Dr Davies is in a good position to offer some solutions, but as any academic knows we can never give definitive answers, not while there is more research to do.

Pilgrims and proselytisers

Septentrionalium Regionum Descriptio, by Abraham Ortelius (ca 1570): the ghost terrain St Brendan’s Isle is marked bottom left.

Lives of the Saints.
The Voyage of St Brendan;
Bede: Life of Cuthbert;
Eddius Stephanus: Life of Wilfrid.
Trnslated with an introduction by J F Webb.
Penguin Classics, 1970 (1965)

Three insular saints —  a sixth-century Irish abbot, two seventh-century English clerics — form an interesting contrast in this trio of hagiographies translated from the Latin. By far the bulk of the text deals with the lives of English saints Cuthbert and Wilfrid, both composed in the eighth century CE by named authors, but at the head of this collection is the curious Navigatio which I personally find more interesting and which will be the main focus of this review.

All three narratives — two being true hagiographies or vitae sanctorum, while the navigatio is really a fantasy travelogue — are full of miracles and homilies, designed to encourage belief and strengthen faith but, beneath accounts of devils being cast out, the dead being restored to life, and hermits being sustained for years solely by spring water, one can discern historical facts and chronological events, all attesting to growing religious influence in the early medieval period.

But in addition to all that is the sense of two different cultures, one Celtic and the other Anglo-Saxon, struggling for primacy on these islands on the northwestern fringes of Europe, cultures that were outward-looking while also closely connected with their continental neighbours.

The Utter East: #Narniathon21

Illustration by Pauline Baynes

“Where sky and water meet, | Where the waves grow sweet … | There is the utter East.”

Chapter Two

I promised I’d discuss some of the possible influences on C S Lewis’s conception of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. You may remember that this instalment in The Chronicles of Narnia featured a journey by sea eastwards, ostensibly on a quest to locate seven missing Telmarine lords but which stopped at the World’s End before reaching Aslan’s country.

It is generally accepted that Lewis’s own Christianity played a large part in the symbolic import of the story: with Aslan as a parallel to Christ where else would he be found than in an Eden-like place to the east? That this would require some form of pilgrimage towards the dawn seems to be implied in Matthew’s gospel:

For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

Matthew 24:27, King James Version

But Lewis framed his Narnian pilgrimage to the east not as a trek but as a journey by sea; and he drew on a variety of exemplars from mythology, literature and history for the form and detail of his children’s fantasy. In this extended essay I want to mention a few of the concepts that fed into Lewis’s fictional odyssey.

When the hurly-burly’s done

Generated by a text to image app

Witches Abroad
by Terry Pratchett.
A Discworld novel,
Corgi Books 1992 (1991).

‘They must have witches here,’ said Magrat. ‘Everywhere has witches. You’ve got to have witches abroad. You find witches everywhere.’

Three witches meet, not on a blasted heath but by a blinking swamp. Rather than concocting their own cauldron stew they sup a gumbo cooked up by a voodoo witch. And instead of prophesying to a would-be monarch they try and thwart another witch’s nefarious plans to gain power by controlling stories.

I like a bit of metafiction, especially metafiction that hides itself in plain sight. Witches Abroad is a novel that plays with the relationship between stories and being human, even if the author’s humans are denizens of the Discworld; and while spinning a yarn about individuals who want to manipulate narrative tropes for personal gain Pratchett’s well aware that he’s doing the very same himself.

This is a story about stories. Or what it really means to be a fairy godmother. But it’s also, particularly, about reflections and mirrors.

And now to the story.

Dawn-treading: #Narniathon21

Everhardus Koster: Viking ships on the river Thames (1847)

The Dutch artist Everhardus Koster, who died in 1892, in 1847 painted a fanciful picture of Viking ships in the river Thames. This being a while before any sleek clinker-built Viking era vessels were scientifically excavated Koster’s imagined ships appear somewhat clunky, but at least they feature the familiar square sail and single mast, together with the animal head prows we know from the Oseberg longboat (a serpent’s head ornament found with other detached animal-head posts) and from depictions of Norman ships on the Bayeux tapestry.

What I find interesting though is the fact that their appearance closely resembles the illustrations that Pauline Baynes drew for C S Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952).

In this post for #Narniathon21 I want to say a bit about the sea journey undertaken by the Dawn Treader (this name somehow feels typical as a kenning for a ship of the early medieval period in Northern Europe); but I want to leave the kinds of sources and influences Lewis very likely drew on for his narrative to a later post.

“Never again war.”

Protest in Krefeld against the austerities of Hungerwinter, March 1946: “We want COAL, we want BREAD.”

The Aftermath
by Rhidian Brook.
Penguin Books 2014 (2013).

“On the night of 29 July 1943, 370 persons perished in the air-raid shelter on the Hamburgerstrasse in a bombing raid. Remember these dead. Never again fascism. Never again war.”

Memorial to the victims of the Hamburg bombings, Hamburger Strasse

Hamburg, 1946. Colonel Lewis Morgan is allocated a villa, requisitioned from a local family as part of the denazification process in the British sector of postwar Germany. By the time Lewis’s wife Rachael and surviving son Edmund arrive to take up residence they discover that the colonel, instead of insisting that the widowed German architect and his daughter remove themselves, has allowed them to share the capacious house and its associated grounds with his own family.

Not for nothing is this novel entitled The Aftermath. The port of Hamburg, its factories, refineries and workers in 1943 were targeted under a total war strategy; it resulted in a devastating firestorm at the end of July which killed tens of thousands, one which would now be classified as a war crime. A year after the war ends how can the city be rebuilt amongst the ruins? How will people survive during the extreme cold of the Hungerwinter of 1946-7? And how will occupiers and occupied get on with each other when sharing accommodation?

Rhidian Brook’s novel builds on his own family’s memories as well as the realities of Hamburg’s occupation, melding fiction with history and individual lives with a bigger picture. Bitterness struggles with forgiveness as a lingering antagonism adapts to fraternisation, and we watch as the lives of army personnel, British civilians, shadowy individuals and feral children interact in Brook’s taut story.

All at sea: #Narniathon21

The Dark Island by Pauline Baynes

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
by C S Lewis,
illustrated by Pauline Baynes.
Puffin Books 1965 (1952)

When an author takes many of their childhood obsessions — and not a few of their adult ones too — and stirs them around in the cauldron of their imagination they may well produce a dish similar to that which Lewis has concocted for us here. Some may consider it a mess of pottage, others a culinary triumph, but there’s no doubting that there is richness here, drawing on many different and mostly complementary flavours.

As he did in Prince Caspian Lewis plunges us in medias res with a call to adventure, the context for which we are told in a backstory. The fact that, after a brief preamble, that call requires three youngsters to be summarily thrust into the middle of an ocean is daring enough; that there is a ship conveniently passing by proves fortunate; and that from the start there is conflict to be resolved is sufficient to entice us to join the youngsters in their unexpected dunking.

If what follows may at first be seen as a series of random episodes, it soon becomes clear that there are patterns to be discerned and processes to be revealed as the voyage of many weeks and leagues wends its way towards a final goal. And we may be sure that, as this is Narnia, Aslan will be coming back into the picture.

For the completist. Or the gullible.

King Arthur: The True Story
by Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman.
Arrow Books 1993

In this book we are invited first to look at the traditional evidence for the existence of King Arthur. And what a ragbag it is, as any researcher knows. At the centre is a yawning black hole, sucking in the unwary. A sensible approach therefore to the historical problem of who Arthur might have been is to fix, by logical deduction, the time and place in which he might have flourished. The time suggested is the late 5th/early 6th century. This seems uncontroversial, so no Brythonic god, first-century Roman, Sutton Hoo warrior or Atlantean avatar here, it would seem.

The first half of the book sifts through Romantic preconceptions through to the ghost chronology dimly perceived from the difficult documentary evidence we possess. Thus far, there is little to quibble about.

But now the authors make a leap into the dark, and the ‘possible’, the ‘probable’, the ‘could be’ and the ‘surely’ all rear their several heads.