Today on greydogtales – why hobbits suck, Wayland’s Smithy, some proper Anglo-Saxon folklore and how to aethelfrith without losing your appetite. Fantasy for those who like mythology and history; mythology and history for those who like fantasy. Or something like that. Hang in there.

People ask me if I write fantasy. They do this with a vague sense of hope, trying to deflect me from another fascinating lecture on either lurchers or Edwardian psychiatry. It’s interesting, I reply, that Freud began corresponding with Jung concerning his patients’ fantasies in 1906…

“No, we meant magic swords, elves, dragons, that sort of thing! Fun stuff!” they shriek. And as it happens, today we celebrate an exciting anniversary, Aethelfrith Day. So this is a good time to talk about fantasy.

As everyone knows, it is one thousand four hundred years ago to the day since King Aethelfrith died*. He was slain, in fact, fighting King Raedwald of East Anglia in 616CE. But he had already managed to lay the foundations of the Kingdom of Northumbria by uniting the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira. Hurray!

A lot of my family come from around York in old Deira, the city from which Edwin, Aethelfrith’s successor, ruled Northumbria for a while. Edwin converted to Roman Christianity at York. Regarding this event, the church historian Bede (672 – 735) quotes a famous simile about a sparrow flying in and out of a hall, which ends with:

“…This life of man appears for a short space but of what went before or what is to follow we are ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.”

OK, said Edwin. I’ll buy that. I’m not fond of birdwatching, but I would like to know what happens when I finally put down the binoculars. It’s politically-motivated, deeply-suspect Roman Christianity for me!

We’ll stick with Bede for a moment, because it’s also Easter Month, or Eosturmonath, as they called it in the Kingdom of Northumbria. Bede was an Anglo-Saxon monk based in County Durham, and wrote On the Reckoning of Time, in which he says that during Eosturmonath, which is effectively our April, the pagan English celebrated Eostre the Goddess and held feasts in her honour. At the time Bede was writing this (about 723), the custom was dying out and being replaced by a Christian celebration, the Paschal Month, which focussed on Jesus.

I’ve mentioned before that I grew up on a coast with a lot of this sort of history (see whale-road, widow-maker). As a teenager I took Bede’s An Ecclesiastical History of the English People out of the library – that and Tom Swift and His Giant Robot.

Bede’s plot is weak, but the names in there are great, and not long after that I read J R R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I still say that hobbits are best considered in relation to pie-filling (see later), but when I got to the Riders of Rohan, and the genealogy of Theoden King, I was deeply hooked.

The names, the names… I wanted to write this sort of thing. There were villages around us which might have come straight out of Bede and/or Tolkien. There’s even an Eastrington in the East Riding of Yorkshire, a village which was around when the Domesday Book was assembled, and which may get its name from Eostre. I was getting an Anglo-Saxon rush.

In The Two Towers, there is a song with the line “Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?” Tolkien sourced this from the Old English poem The Wanderer:

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?

The Wanderer is a great read for fantasy fans, by the way. Check out the Exeter Book online, the largest collection of Old English literature still in existence, given to the library of Exeter Cathedral in 1072.

You can listen to The Wanderer in Old English here, just to get the rhythm and sound of the original words:

Side-note: If you want to go deep-Tolkien, the old chap probably got Theoden’s death from the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields in 451, when the Romans and the Visigoths allied to face Attila the Hun. During an indecisive battle (or a victory for the forces of the West, if you like to see it that way), the Visigoth King Theodoric was killed. As Theoden fell at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, so did Theodoric get thrown off his horse and crushed at the Catalaunian Fields (according to a 6th century Roman guy called Jordanes, anyway).

The Exeter Book also contain reference to another figure of Anglo-Saxon and Northern mythology, Weland, known as Wayland, Weyland etc, the smith/god. Heavy-duty Weland stuff is for another time, except to say that he was a key figure in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, which we also talked about a while ago.

Some will know of Wayland’s Smithy, the megalithic burial mound in the south of England which was probably adopted by the Anglo-Saxons as a sacred place.

This is Weland in the Old English poem Deor:

Weland, the strong man, had experience of persecution; he suffered a lot. Sorrow and longing were his companions, along with exile in the cold winter; he experience misfortunes after Nithad laid constraints upon him, supple bonds of sinew on a better man.

That went away, this also may.

In Beadohild’s mind her brothers’ death was not as grieving as her own situation, when she realized she was pregnant; she couldn’t fathom the outcome.

That went away, this also may.

Many of us have heard that the Geat’s love for Maethild passed all bounds, that his love robbed him of his sleep.

That went away, this also may.

For thirty years, Theodric ruled the stronghold of the Maerings; which has become common knowledge.

That went away, this also may.

We have learned of Eormanric’s ferocious disposition; a cruel man, he held dominion in the kingdom of the Goths. Many men sat, full of sorrow, anticipating trouble and constantly praying for the fall of his country.

That went away, this also may.

If a man sits in despair, deprived of joy, with gloomy thoughts in his heart; it seems to him that there is no end to his suffering. Then he should remember that the wise Lord follows different courses throughout the earth; to many he grants glory, certainty, yet, misery to some. I will say this about myself, once I was a minstrel of the Heodeningas, my Lord’s favorite. My name was Deor. For many years I had an excellent office and a gracious Lord, until now Heorrenda, a skillful man, has inherited the land once given to me by the protector of warriors.

That went away, this also may.

Anyway, I have written fantasy since finding Bede and Tolkien, but I like it skewed. I was Grimdark years before Grimdark was even though of, except that I prefer complex personal struggles over ultraviolence and pitched battles.

I like swords which are named ‘False Hope’ and have no power whatsoever, and rings whose main use is for barter when some bastard steals your coinage. Apart from the unusual octagonal copper rings of my most amoral mercenary, Nemors of the Last Blessing, and they’re not really magical either (weird – I just realised that I wrote about Nemours in my very first blog entry ever, in the year of the blue heron).

I’ve never written about a dragon in my life. I’ve never submitted any fantasy stories either, because I’ve rarely finished any of them to my satisfaction. The only one with which I was happy, Gafolmearc, I lost during a house move, like a number of other ‘only one copy’ stories of mine. This was in the days when you had to remember to put the carbon paper in the typewriter.

(Carbon paper? Typewriter? These, my dear children, were devices used by writers in ancient days to ensure that even more could go wrong with their careers than nowadays.)

I do still have most of The Strength of the Skies, one of my Anglo-Saxon fantasies. Might even do something with it one day. Until then, here’s a snippet:

Listen now! Those who have passed are uneasy. They shuffle and turn in their mounds, and spearheads rattle between their ribs. There is a voice above them which says remember, but they only wish to sleep.

A doomsayer has come, and her chants are part of the wind which stirs the barrows. Her scarlet cloak has a wild bird’s will, cracking and flapping in the snare of her broach. As she climbs the mound of Crooked Gydda, she leans into the rain and bares a thin knife. With each name she utters, with each struggling step, she cuts at the tight skin of one arm. Bright blood spatters the earth, name on name.

This is why she is here: to speak doom with her flesh, from the scars of years long gone to the open wounds of the Now.

And this is what she will say: Beornred, last of the Eorls of his line… Beornred, gift-giver, swift-striker… is dead.

As she sings out across the headland, her blood beads like new-pressed wine.

“…son of Aecghild, daughter of Aecglif, who harrowed Mathun and left ten hand of skulls at its gate…”

Eadric shudders and tugs his cloak more tightly around his shoulders. The mutterings of the Wyrd are in the woman’s voice, patterns of a doom which the living should not hear. And he is cold. The sky above the headland is a leaden bowl, filled with rain and wind-whipped spray, and his grey hair is plastered to his scalp. Mathunness at winter’s end is too exposed for his rusting mail threadbare clothes, and his chest tells him so.

Too old, too old, it moans.

“This is tomorrow’s wind, my friend,” says his companion, “But I do not think that you are tomorrow’s man.”

So much for that. To finish with Aethelfrith, why do we have a photo of the Sutton Hoo helmet on here? Because King Raedwald of East Anglia (remember him?), who fought Aethelfrith, is the most likely person to have been buried at Sutton Hoo, in the intact burial-ship they found there. It was Raedwald who installed Edwin as King in Northumbria – yes, Edwin who… you know the rest.

Speaking as one who watches The Lord of the Rings extended DVDs by skipping most of the bits where halflings fall over, drop palantirs and so on, I will end with that hobbit pie recipe in full.

Ingredients:

One plump hobbit
One turnip, a couple of potatoes, one small onion
Half a pound of bacon
Handful of fresh thyme and sage; pepper
Flaky pastry to cover

Method:

Throw the turnip really hard and stun the hobbit
Gently saute the onion, bacon and potatoes
Add herbs and pepper
Cover with pastry and cook for 45 minutes
Eat with fresh crusty bread

When the hobbit regains consciousness, tell him that the pie’s all gone, and then laugh at his stricken expression. Gosh, you didn’t think I was going to suggest actually eating one of those hairy little horrors, did you? You’d be picking fur and toes out of your teeth for days…

*I lied about the exact timing of Aethelfrith Day, incidentally – it might have been a Friday – but not about the rest.

Next time on greydogtales: A feature that makes more sense – our super interview with fantasy and horror author Joshua M Reynolds.