"The Sword in the Stone" by T H White

Wart is a fatherless lad who lives with foster-father Sir Ector and foster-brother Kay in a castle near the Forest Sauvage; Merlin comes to tutor him. His lessons include turning into a fish and a hawk and a snake and a badger; there are some adventures, one involving a witch and another involving Robin Hood and the Anthropophagi. There are other adventures, in which Wart is turned into an ant and a goose, which were not included in the original but were later added when the single book was turned into a tetralogy called The Once and Future King.

This is a traditional boy's adventure story set in a nostalgic world that mixes Merrie England and the Age of Chivalry with the customs and manners of early twentieth century aristocrats of the hunting, shooting, fishing country set. It's full of anachronisms, which emphasise its status as fantasy, whilst being underpinned by what it presumably immense knowledge and understanding of the mediaeval world (there are a lot of outdated words and some didacticism) which seems designed to add verisimilitude. 

It is told it 'traditional' style as a third person omniscient past tense narrative; there are moments of authorial intrusion when White becomes didactic. 

The message, if there is one, seems to be that we should respect nature while at the same time hunting and eating it. Providing nature doesn't eat you! There is a rather distasteful war against the 'Anthropophagi' who are deformed creatures (straight out of the pages of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville) who are cannibals and seek to eat Dog Boy and Wat; after these monsters have been slaughtered (one by Wart), Kay asks to take home the head of one of them and it becomes a trophy in the castle: this whole episode reads a little like the triumphalism of a colonial war against dehumanised 'savages'. White wrote TSitS in 1938, having retreated from teaching at Stowe to living in a cottage in the woods (perhaps he thought he was Merlin!). Some of the later books in the tetralogy express White's distaste for the Nazi regime and there have been suggestions that White was a pacifist but the war against the Anthropophagi and the hunting episodes don't bear this out. What seems not in doubt is that White was a social conservative who was very much in favour of maintaining the traditional class structures which kept the English aristocracy in power.

My main criticism of the novel is that the hero, Wart, never changes. I think the purpose of his education is that he should develop into the sort of King that Arthur is but he's a nice lad at the start, he's nice in the middle and, despite the way he is treated, he's still nice at the end. As a bildungsroman, TSitS leaves a lot to be desired.

We had a lively discussion about this book in my U3A 'The English novel' group; we watched a BBC interview with the author from 1959 in which T H White came across as a rather angry old man longing for the ways of a previous age. But he had a dreadful childhood, being unwanted and then used as a pawn by his ever-warring parents before being sent to live with grandparents and then sent to boarding school which he hated. If the character of Wart, a parentless boy, reflects the author, he seems to have forgotten the anger and bitterness he showed in a poem he once wrote. 

Our discussion was complicated by the fact that there are two versions of TSitS. Most of us had the original, 1938 version, most often sold nowadays as a stand-alone, but some of us had read the 1948 version which was revised in order to fit in with the Once and Future King tetralogy. There are aspects of this later version, such as its message bewailing the futility of war and promoting internationalism, that simply don't appear in the original. Mostly I learned that THW wanted us to return to a benevolent feudal system with strong predetermined classes , overseen by a kindly patriarch. This was born out by the interview.

Selected quotes:

• "Oh, my own random, wicked little lamb." (Ch IV): Wart's nursemaid seems to have inherited the persona of Nanny Slagg in Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. 
• "He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas." (Ch V)
• "A face which had been ravaged by all the passions of an absolute monarch, by cruelty, sorrow, age, pride, selfishness, loneliness and thoughts too strong for individual brains." (Ch V)
• "Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution." (Ch V)
• "He did say it, pushing the words out as if he were breathing against water." (Ch VI)
• "I believe Sir Ector would have been glad to get a by-our-lady tilting blue for your tutor, that swings himself along on his knuckles like an anthropoid ape." (Ch VII) The traditional academic's dismissal of sporting types. 
• "It just goes on to the end, you know, and then stops - as Legends do." (Ch XIII)
• "Each realised how beautiful life was, which a reeking tusk might, in a few seconds, rape away from one or another of them if things went wrong." (Ch XVI) The justification for boar hunting: that it gives an adrenaline rush; that you are never so alive as when you are risking your life. 

September 2023; 286 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Secrets of Filming Swallows and Amazons" by Sophie Neville

Sophie Neville was cast as Titty in the 1974 film adaptation of Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. This book, adapted from her contemporary diaries, describes the filming day by day and then tells what happened afterwards: the actor who played Susan became a film actress but 'John' started an engineering firm and 'Roger' became a hermit. Ms Neville herself has mostly worked on the other side of the cameras but has also written books and been a missionary.

I adored the Swallows and Amazons books, all twelve of which are reviewed on this blog. But a day by day account of the filming has little in it to interest anyone other than a fan. 

Selected quotes:

"We were so lucky, so few inches further and we would have been under the steamer. Anyone could have been killed" (Ch 5: Friday 8th June ~ Twenty-second day of filming)

September 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

The Swallows and Amazon series contained twelve books:

• Swallows and Amazons: Children camping on an island in a lake have sailing based adventures
• Swallowdale: More sailing adventures are threatened when the Swallow sinks
• Peter Duck: The Swallows and Amazons and Captain Flint sail on a big yacht into the Caribbean in search of pirate treasure; pirates pursue
• Winter Holiday: the lake freezes allowing a sledge-based expedition to the 'north pole'; the 'D's are introduced
• Coot Club: The Ds join the Death and Glory kids in the Norfolk Broads but the excitement is just as great when birds have to be protected from rowdies.
• We Didn't Mean to go to Sea: The Swallows accidentally find themselves at sea in a yacht they scarcely know: for my money this is the most dramatic and exciting book of the series.
• Secret Water: The Swallows are joined by the Amazons in an expedition to map some tidal mud-flats
• The Big Six: The Death and Glory kids have to be cleared of accusations of crime; the Ds help.
• Missee Lee: The Swallows and Amazons and Captain Flint are shipwrecked near China and captured by a lady Chinese pirate with a taste for Latin.
• Pigeon Post: The Swallows and Amazons and Ds search for gold in the hills above the Lake; one of my favourites
• The Picts and the Martyrs: The Ds have to hide in the hills when the Great Aunt comes to stay with the Amazons
• Great Northern: The Swallows and Amazons and Ds and Captain Flint are protecting birds in the far north of Scotland

"Still Life with Woodpecker" by Tom Robbins

 Published in 1980, this novel is a 'post-modern fairy-tale' about the live between a Princess (of a small European state, living in exile in Seattle) and an outlaw who meet at an environmental conference in Hawaii. We also have red-headedness, UFOs and the power of pyramids.

It's the sort of novel that revels in word play and pokes fun at conventions. It's a satirical novel. The sort of novel in which the story is framed by the author taking about his typewriter (and ending in cursive script). 

There's a certain touch of Chandleresque, especially when the outlaw is mentioned: "Her heart would grow moody, turn up the collar on its trench coat, pull down the brim of its hat, dangle a cigarette from its sullen lips, and go walk for hours on the poorly lighted streets of the waterfront." (Ch 80). And, like Chandler, he positively adores one-liners:

• "Her surname resembled a line from an optometrist's examination chart." (Ch 15)
• "The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist." (Ch 80)
• "The wedding was at dawn, and dawn had a nasty habit of showing up before breakfast." (Ch 91)

In its self-conscious self-parodies, SLwW reminded me of other novels I have read recently such as Lanark by Alasdair Gray, The Last Simple by Ray Sullivan, and Road Kill - The Duchess of Frisian Tun by Pete Adams. It seemed very much of its era, a rather laboured version of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. There must be a genre name for this sort of fiction, but I'm not sure what I'd call it. 

It was easy to read and amusing but I doubt it will linger long in my mind.

Selected quotes: 

• "While the US publicly regretted that the junta permitted so few civil liberties, it was loath to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, particularly a nation that could be relied upon as an ally against those left-leaning nations in whose internal affairs the US did regularly interfere." (Ch 4)
• "Prince Charming was a toad. He lived in a terrarium at the foot of Leigh-Cheri's bed. And yes - you nosy ones - she had kissed the toad." (Ch 7)
• "It was autumn, the springtime of death." (Ch 11)
• "They say of the full moon, when the moon is neither increasing nor decreasing, the Babylonians called Sa-bat, meaning 'heart-rest'." (Ch 13)
• "Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life." (Ch 27)
• "The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag." (Ch 30)
• "Woodpecker's the name and outlawing's the game. I'm wanted in fifty states and Mexico. It's nice to feel wanted, and I'd like to be wanted by you." (Ch 35)
• "The line that separates objects from ideas can be pretty twiggy, but let's not unzip that pair of pants." (Ch 36)
• "If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal." (Ch 38)
• "scruffed shoes." (Ch 39)
• "Now, art galleries, boutiques and discos were replacing the storefront churches, and the declasse luncheonettes were giving way to restaurants that featured imported mineral water and a gay waiter behind every fern." (Ch 48)
• "That uncomfortable half-amused half-resentful look that people always give you when they're remaining sober and you are getting looped." (Ch 51)
• "King Max was one of those who believed that psychology was at that point in its development that surgery was when it was practised by barbers." (Ch 55)
• "Max put his arm halfway around his wife - halfway was as far as he could reach." (Ch 55)
• "Space is merely a device to prevent everything from being in the same spot." (Ch 56)
• "The philosophy of CHOICE was outlaw philosophy, insofar as outlaws have philosophy (they are more inclined to have hangovers, herpes, and lousy credit ratings)." (Ch 71)
• "The Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls have been looked at so often they've become effete, sucked empty by too many stupid eyes." (Ch 81)
• "You go to paint the town red on a Sunday, you'd better be prepared for pink." (Ch 90)
• "How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek." (Ch 92)

September 2023; 276 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Berg" by Ann Quin

One of the best opening lines: "A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father..."

But the simplicity and straightforwardness of this opening belies the rest of this novel. It uses a 'stream of consciousness' technique in which the narrative is supplied by the main character's internal monologue which includes, without formal distinction, his thoughts, his memories, his observations, events that happen, and the dialogue of the other characters:

• "Alistair Berg, alias Greb, commercial traveller, seller of wigs, hair tonic, paranoiac paramour, do you plead guilty? Yes. Guilty of all things the human condition brings; guilty of being too committed; guilty of defending myself; of defrauding others; guilty of love; loving too much, or not enough; guilty of parochial actions, of universal wish-fulfilments; of conscious martyrdom; of unconscious masochism. Idle hours, fingers that meddle. Alistair Charles Humphrey Greb, alias Berg, you are condemned to life imprisonment until such time you may prove yourself worthy of death."
• "Oh Lor’ I’m sorry, have I hurt you Aly? Aly there now, what is it? You are a funny chap. Oh dear I nearly trod on it, I mean him. Of course he’s very possessive, I mean was possessive, I couldn’t even look one-eyed at another man and he’d threaten to slit the poor chap’s throat."

 This usually worked very well: I could always distinguish the dialogue of others but sometimes I got confused. I also found it difficult to believe that Berg's lower middle-class upbringing and education would have furnished him with the extensive range of literary allusion (from Sophocles to Milton to Shakespeare and beyond) that clouded his thoughts; eg: 

• "He drew a circle in the mirror and wrote NON OMNIS MORIAR."
• "To take his father’s corpse back home to Edith—the trophy of his triumphant love for her! In a Greek play they’d have thought nothing of it"
• "George into ‘Georgina’, the exchange of sonnets, in remembrance of Michelangelo, Rimbaud, Valéry, Whitman, occasionally Milton; you, Lycidas sleeping in the river valley, head cradled only by grass and the wind; body lulled by sunlight."
• "Because he’s not coming back, he’ll never be back, because he’s full fathoms five. For why should he intrude now when he was never there when the blades of corn struck the wind, and the trees whispered go home, go home, the hour of play is over, away from the tree’s trunk with its skin of a toad, the bees swarming below; bees with ruby eyes that would fly in after the goodnight kiss and the door closed."

The point about stream of consciousness, I suppose, is that it is a stream, and Quin represented this by using very long sentences with multiple phrases separated by commas. This sometimes led me to becoming confused. There were also moments when Berg's thoughts became either obscure or pretentious:

• "Threading experience through imaginative material, acting out fictitious parts, or choosing a stale-mate for compromise. Under this fabrication a secret army gathers defeating those who stalk the scaffolding of comparisons. Yet they still haunt with their pale perplexities, and resentful airs."
• "Squatting furniture—senators in conference."

One of the obscure elements revolved around Berg's sexuality. In his memory, there are suggestions that he might have been sexually abused by a man when he was a boy, there are hints of of childish fumblings with girls, there are suggestions of humiliation (through impotence?) in a heterosexual encounter. At one stage he dresses up like a woman. Fundamentally, Berg is like Oedipus: not only does he want to murder his father but he listens through the thin walls of the boarding house to his father having sex and longs to replace him ... but the women is not his mother but his father's mistress.

The first half of the plot seems to be based on Hamlet (there are suggestions that Hamlet is based on the story of Oedipus). Berg's aim is to kill his father, an intent motivated, perhaps, by revenge but also by jealous disgust as he listens to his father making love to his mistress (as Hamlet is motivated in part by disgust at the incest of his mother and his uncle). Berg, like Hamlet, repeatedly hesitates.

The turning point comes at the 50% mark; from there on Hamlet is abandoned and the plot mutates into farce. For most of the second half, Berg is under as misapprehension; I don't know whether Quin intended the reader to be aware of Berg's mistake (I certainly was) or not.

Berg was Quin's first novel, published in 1964. She was at the forefront of contemporary avant garde fiction of the time, together with others such as Eva Figes, William Burroughs (eg Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys, The Soft Machine), and Alexander Trocchi (Young Adam, Cain's Book). She lived in Brighton, the seaside town on the south coast of England, dying there at the age of 37 by drowning, possibly suicide (she had a long history of mental health issues). 

Selected quotes:

• "She was, without doubt, a good deal younger than his father, attractive, he supposed, in the artificial style, and who would wish to go beyond the surface in a woman anyway?"
• "Can one compare a landscape that remains, though the evolutionary surfaces suffer unlimited contradictions?"
• what is gained by delving into such linguistic labyrinths?
• "He placed the razor against his neck—not there you fool, the wrists, the wrists."
• "that’s what is always so unforgiveable, the fact that everything will go on with or without my existence."
• "How separated from it all he felt, how unique too, no longer the understudy, but the central character as it were, in a play of his own making."
• "the problem arose from that store house in the mind, where all things unpleasant are wrapped up for a time, until something—a self-imposed injection—perhaps makes it react, or a knock hardly at the time felt, but later confronted by the bruise."

It's a very short book but the experimental style can make it difficult to read and, fundamentally, the stream of consciousness seemed to be that of the author rather than the character.

September 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"This side of brightness" by Colum McCann

 From the first few lines you can tell that you are in the presence of a writer of quality.

In 1916, Nathan Walker is digging the first railway tunnel under the river in New York when a seal fails and he and two others are blown by compressed air up through the river; a fourth man dies. In 1991, Treefrog lives in the abandoned tunnels under the city. This book, a tribute to the working men who risk their lives on a daily basis to build our cities, and a chronicle of the heartbreak of everyday life, traces and connects these two men.

We had a brilliant discussion about this book at the Grove Theatre book club. One of our members felt 'tricked' by the author because she had been enticed (seduced? groomed?) into liking Treefrog before discovering his guilty secret, she then realised that Nathan could be guilty of the same failing which was of such a nature that she couldn't, or wouldn't, see it as a weakness but as an absolute irredeemable moral sin; two other members felt the revelation of this secret was 'contrived'. I disagree. It seems to me that Treefrog was driven underground by his guilt at what he perceives as his flaw and that the whole narrative is leading up to his confession and potential redemption. One could interpret his time underground as time in a very Dantesque purgatory. 

Indeed, the whole book could be seen as a religious allegory. It starts with a type of resurrection, as Nathan escapes from his tube underground to shoot upwards through water into the air; it could be an allegory of birth, or of rebirth through baptism. And there are the tunnels, which are hellish, where the lost souls dwell (the obsessive behaviour of Treefrog is a very Dantean interpretation of the interminability of hell), and there are the skyscrapers reaching towards heaven. And there are the ordinary men and women, living their ordinary lives, doing right and doing wrong.  And, in the end, there is confession and at least the possibility of redemption.

It is also a book about how the world in which we live has been built on the toil of its underclass. Nathan labours underground to construct the tunnels for the subway system. Clarence sacrifices an eye soldiering for his country. Treefrog, when younger, built skyscrapers. As the song says:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run

Made it race against time

Once I built a railroad, now it's done

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower up to the sun

Brick and rivet and lime

Once I built a tower, now it's done

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee, we looked swell

Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum

Half a million boots went slogging through Hell

And I was the kid with the drum

Say, don't you remember? They called me 'Al'

It was 'Al' all the time

Why don't you remember? I'm your pal

Say buddy, can you spare a dime?

Furthermore, I think that the way the author leads you through the story is masterful. The first hint of Treefrog's problem is subtly brushed into the narrative; even at the end when it becomes clearer, there are still ambiguities about what he did and why he did it. Subtlety is a hallmark of this book. He could make much more of the thesis that the city of New York was built on the toil of its underclass. He could go to town on the racism experienced by Nathan and Eleanor. Instead, he concentrates on his characters, all of whom are fundamentally good (there is no place for the doctrine of original sin in this novel) but with weaknesses, many of whom are destroyed by the pressures imposed upon them by society.

We also had a discussion about why the author chose a dual narrative, jumping backwards and forwards between time frames. A part of this was, of course, to create suspense as the reader tries to work out the exact connection between Nathan and Treefrog. But, more than that, I think there are intended to be parallels. Both of them toil to create the infrastructure that the city takes for granted. Both of them are ostracised by society for their love. 

What a book! I fully intend to read more books by this author.

Selected quotes:

• "They arrive at dawn in their geography of hats. A dark field of figures, stalks in motion, bending towards the docklands." (Ch 2)
• "If, at that time, Treefrog had made a map of the beats of his heart, the contours would have been so close together that the lines would almost have touched one another in the steepest and finest of gradations." (Ch 5)
• "Everybody is due despair in their lives, she says, and therefore everybody needs a remedy - it's a fact of life and it only costs two dollars to cure, a guaranteed bargain." (Ch 6)
• "They move like two chiaroscurists above the covers, black and white, white and black, then sleep under foreheads wet with sweat." (Ch 6)
• "The dust slips through the candlelight and descends lazily, landing on the spiderlimbs of wax at the base of the candles." (Ch 9)
• "There's a grave inside all of us." (Ch 9)

This is a book full of the joy and pain of everyday life.

September 2023; 239 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Keeper of Stories" by Sally Page

 Janice may be 'just' a cleaner, as her husband keeps reminding her, but she is an extraordinary cleaner and an extraordinary woman whose services are in high demand around Cambridge, UK. She cleans for an opera singer and an ex-spy, amongst others. Her neighbour used to play cricket for India, the shoe-shop assistant used to play squash for England. But then, Janice's own father was a university professor and the bus driver's dad ran a bookshop. It's quite a place, Cambridge!

I love the idea of writing about ordinary people: a cleaner and a bus driver, brilliant. But they weren't ordinary at all. Cop out.

Janice collects the stories which show that ordinary people have extraordinary backgrounds. She likes stories that show that good people aren't always perfect but she doesn't like stories that show that villains may have redeeming features. And, although she collects the stories of others, her own story is locked deep inside her.

The plot revolves around Janice's latest client, an old lady who tells her, in instalments, a true story about a Parisian courtesan. The old lady's son is trying to persuade his mum to move into sheltered accommodation. Janice also cleans for his wife and has fallen in love with his dog, whom she walks. She's also trying to help the son of another client come to terms with the suicide of his dad. At the same time, Janice's husband, 'the man of a thousand jobs', is seeking new employment and taking Janice for granted.

The narrative is third person past, told from the PoV of Janice. It is perfectly paced with the Parisian courtesan story starting at the 25% mark, a major change in Janice's life occurring at 50%, major revelations at around 75% and the end-game happening shortly afterwards.

This is the sort of book where the plot is very much in charge (there is a lot of foreshadowing!). The characters were carefully observed but were subservient to the needs of the plot and I'm not sure I ever fully believed in any of them, although I certainly enjoyed old Mrs B and the dog with attitude. The villains were too clearly villains, without redemption, and the heroes were heroes without flaw. Janice herself had issues with her self-esteem but she was fundamentally another in the long list of Mary Sue heroines who seem to litter modern fiction: good at everything she turned her hand at. The bus driver was not just a bibliophile but able to talk calm control in a crisis. Even the protagonist, Janice, didn't really have a character arc; rather she went on a voyage in which she discovered that her fears were fundamentally groundless. The ending was twee. 

Perhaps the best character was husband Mike. Everything he did was to take Janice for granted. But it was everything he did. There was not a single spark of redemption in him, except, perhaps, that he didn't hit his wife.

Perhaps the problem was that there were simply too many stories for the author to focus on developing the characters beyond the  superficial. 

Spoiler alert

There is a remarkable similarity between the heroines of this book and Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Both of them are overlooked women, both of them have remarkable strengths, and both of them get away with murdering abusive men, not just in the eyes of the law, but in the eyes of the reader.

Selected quotes

• "the bus doors sigh as if exhaling and shudder closed." (Ch 1). Great, I thought. This is a nice original way to describe the bus doors. But then she uses the same description again. They doors shudder three times (in the first thirty pages) and sigh at least three times. 
• "At a funeral people were often lost, not just in their grief but, being English, immobilised by the fear of saying or doing the wrong thing." (Ch 3) The 'being English' annoyed me. Really? Isn't this rather an over-generalisation? Couldn't the sentence be as powerful if those two words were omitted? These two words turned an acute observation into a cliche.
• "This morning's driver looked like a geography teacher." (Ch 4) Another cliched observation. If this had been 'Janice's idea of a geography teacher' it might be reasonable but as it stands it isn't.
• "It still amazes her how much he swears. For a fox terrier." (Ch 7)
• "She wants to ask if he's having an affair but doesn't know how to say it without sounding hopeful." (Ch 16)

September 2023; 375 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Nibelungenlied" translated by A T Hatto

A castle in the modern Rhine

The 'song of the Nibelungs' is one of the classic mediaeval prose romances; it is most well-known today for forming one of the key bases from Wagner's Ring Cycle, although much of his tale is actually derived from other mediaeval poems.

The story

Siegfried (arrives in Worms to woo Kriemhilde, the sister of King Gunther of the Burgundians (who rules with his two brothers Gernot and Giselher). Siegfried helps Gunther defeat an army of invading Saxons. He then travels (with Gunther and vassals Hagen and his brother Dancwart) to Iceland so that Gunther can woo Princess Brunhilde, a lady of formidable strength who demands that Gunther beats her in three trials (throwing a javelin, throwing a boulder, and long jump) or lose his life. Siegfried helps Gunther by using a cloak of invisibility, ensuring that Gunther seems to have won. Brunhilde acknowledges defeat but, on her wedding night, refuses access to Gunther, tying him up in her girdle and hanging him from a hook on the wall for the duration of the night. So he again enlists Siegfried’s help who, the next night, using his cloak, subdues Brunhilde (but doesn’t violate her, leaving that to Gunther, after which Brunhilde loses her strength) and steals her ring and the famous girdle which he gives to his bride Kriemhilde.

Brunhilde has the mistaken belief that Siegfried is one of Gunther’s vassals and therefore begrudges him marrying Gunther’s sister Kriemhilde. She doesn’t realises that Siegfried is King of the Netherlands, the Nibelungs, and Norway. So when, after a few years, Siegfried and his queen Kriemhilde return to Gunther and Brunhilde’s court, the two ladies have a fight about who has precedence. Angry  Kriemhilde reveals that she has the ring and the girdle, implying that Siegfried deflowered Brunhilde. 

Hagen, arguing that this scandal has dishonoured King Gunther, and (as a bonus) that this will be a good way to get hold of the fabulous treasure of the Nibelungs, won by Siegfried previous to this story, conspires with Gunther to murder Siegfried, after tricking Kriemhilde into revealing Siegfried’s vulnerability (a patch between his shoulder-blades where a linden leaf landed while he was bathing in the blood of a dragon he had killed, so becoming horny-skinned). Hagen's plot works and Siegfried, a guest, is betrayed and assassinated, and his gold is stolen and then hidden in the Rhine.

After a dozen years or so the still beautiful Kriemhilde (who stayed at Gunther’s court rather than returning to the Netherlands and her infant son) marries King Etzel of the Huns. Later, seeking vengeance for her first husband, she invites her brother, and Hagen, and their men, to her new husband’s court. They go, despite realising that it is probably a trick. Following a lot of fighting, and many dead, finally Gunther and Hagen, the only survivors of the thousands of Burgundians on the trip, are captured by Dietrich, and imprisoned and then murdered by Kriemhilde, though they refuse to say where the Nibelung's treasure is hidden.

The sources

There is an awful lot of fighting in the poem but A T Hatto points out that there is very little technical detail about the fights, suggesting that the anonymous author was not a knight. Nor, given the lack of a Christian message, was he likely to have been a monk. The most likely explanation, especially given the prominence of two minstrels employed as messengers, is that the poet was a literate minstrel.

Hatto dates the poem using things mentioned. The bleeding corpse is a motive in the poem Iwein by Hartmann von Aue which was probably written in about 1198. The fabric from 'Ninnive' probably comes from a version of the Alexander legend written about 1190. Rumold, a minor character, is described as ‘Lord of the Kitchen’ which is a real title dating from about 1201. Etzel’s wedding with Kriemhild in Vienna may be based on the wedding in Vienna of Duke Leopold VI and Theodora Comnena, grand-daughter of a Byzantine Emperor, which took place in 1203. All this suggests a date of composition of about 1203.

Sources for the poem include the Lex Burgundionum (pre 516) and Latin chronicles which mention a Burgundian King called Gundaharius who has a brother called Gislaharius; these are probably the originals of Gunther and Giselher. Etzel is almost certainly Attila the Hun, said to have been murdered in 453 by Germanic wife Ildico. 

Another source, the Waltharius, probably written about 920 by Ekkehard, a monk of St Gall, records the escape of Burgundian princess Hiltgirt, her lover Waltharius, and Hagano, from the court of Attila, after Guntharius, King of the Franks, reneged on a treaty; Hagano and Guntharius conspire to steal from Hiltgunt and Waltharius the treasure they have stolen from Attila. In this story the Franks are described as 'nebulones' (rascals?) which may be the origin of the word 'Nibelungs'.

The Poetic Eddas contain part of a poem in which Brynhild, Gunnar’s wife, accuses Sigurd of deflowering her, perhaps because she is jealous that Gudrun, Sigurd’s wife, is pregnant. Guthorm kills Sigurd, perhaps acting on behalf of a conspiracy involving Hogni. Another poem in the Eddas, the Atlakvida, dated to about 900, tells the story of Atli, King of the Huns, who invites Gunnarr, King of the Burgundians, to visit him. Gunnar consults his brother Hogni: why did their sister, Gudrun, Alti’s wife, send a ring twined with wolf’s hair? Despite this warning Gunnarr goes. The Burgundians are seized (after Hogni kills eight men). Gunnarr refuses to say where his treasure is hidden. The Huns bring him a human heart, saying it is Hogni’s, but he refuses to believe it, saying the heart is too trembly. The Huns cut out Hogni’s heart, who dies laughing. Gunnarr now says that, since Hogni was the only other person who knew there the treasure is, the Huns will never find it. They throw him in a snake pit where he dies, playing the harp. Gudrun then revenges herself on Atli by (a) feeding him with the flesh of their sons at a banquet (b) killing him in bed (c) burning down his house. Many of these items are found in the second part of the Nibelungenlied. 

Poetic form
I read a prose translation into English. The original versions are written in verse. There is variation of form but the fundamental basis is that each stanza has four lines with an AABB rhyme pattern (there are also internal rhymes, particularly for the words just before the caesuras. The first three lines of each stanza have three metrical beats, a caesura, and then three further beats. The final line of each stanza has an additional foot after the caesura. The last word before the caesura is usually an iamb (stress/unstress) whereas the final word of the line is usually stressed. 

Evaluation

Morally speaking, this is a squalid tale. The author is firmly on the side of valiant fighting men and very misogynistic. Thus, the treacherous and indeed thieving and murderous Hagen, is praised for his last ditch stand against impossible odds. Meanwhile Kriemhilde is a she-devil, principally because she outrages the laws of hospitality under which you shouldn’t seek to kill your guests (though that is exactly what Hagen did earlier, prompting this symmetrical revenge). Furthermore, Gunther more or less escapes censure for his part in tricking Brunhilde. But this, of course, is to judge the story in the light of modern-day morality.

Judging it by modern literary sensibility is similarly anachronistic. There is a great deal of action, fighting in particular, and plot, and very little concern for character. Hagen is a villain according to modern sensibilities but is presented by the poet as brave and a great fighter whose morally dubious actions are realpolitik; the bereaved Kriemhilde is derided as a she-devil. Time scales don't work: Giselher is described as young despite being at least fifty, Kriemhilde preserves her charms over a similar period, Dancwart claims to have been a child when he was manifestly an adult. 

Much of the narrative is along the lines of: this happened and then this and then this. 

Selected quotes:

• "Siegfried loved his sister, though Siegfried had never set eyes on her." (Ch 5)
• "Siegfried son of Siegmund stood there handsome as though limned on parchment." (Ch 5)
• "He tried to win her by force, and tumbled her shift for her, at which the haughty girl reached for the girdle of stout silk cord that she wore about her waist, and subjected him to great suffering and shame, for in return of being balked of her sleep, she bound him hand and foot, carried him to a nail, and hung him on the wall." (Ch 10)
• "That evening, while the King sat and dined, many fine robes were splashed with tine as the butlers plied the tables." (Ch 13) This sounds as if the butlers were very clumsy but I think it is meant to show that the courtiers can afford to buy new clothes.
• "One of the warriors then went over to a corpse and, removing his helmet and kneeling over a wound, began to drink the blood that oozed from it and, little used to it though he was, he thought it very good." (Ch 36) Not vampirism; the warrior is very thirsty. But this passage adduces evidence for the partiality of the author: anything the Burgundians do (tricking women, murdering guests, drinking blood) is good but their enemies are continually characterised as evil. 

There was a BBC Radio 4UK 'In Our Time' programme about the Nibelungenlied; click on the link for the podcast.

September 2023; 290 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Passau

The text says: Passau: A literary centre of the High Middle Ages. The Nibelungenlied, a major European epic, was written here around the year 1200, at the court of Bishop Wolfger von Erla (who was bishop between 1191 and 1204). It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2009. The outstanding position of the Bishop's court in mediaeval literary life is also evidenced by the fact that Bishop Wolfger's travel accounts mention 'five long shillings' for a fur coat, which Walther von der Vogelweide received in 2003 as a singer in the episcopal court. This note is the only documentary evidence of this greatest poet of the German Middle Ages.

I'm writing this on a river cruise while the boat is docked at Passau, the town in modern Germany where the Danube meets the Inn and the Ilz. Being at the confluence of three rivers made Passau an important town in the Holy Roman Empire. In Chapter 21, which describes Kriemhild's journey to Hungary where she will marry Etzel (Atilla the Hun), we are told that she travels through a place where there is a cloister and where the Inn flow into the Danube, a place called Passau, where "Bishop Pilgrim" holds sway. Many scholars believe that this is a sort of product placement, or mention of the sponsor, who may have been renowned literary patron Wolfgang von Erla who was bishop in Passau between 1191 - 1204, dates coinciding with the expected dating of the poem. 

"Lotharingia" by Simon Winder

 

A very personal history of the lands along the border between France and Germany, from the Benelux countries to Switzerland ("a region that is both the dozy back of beyond, and central to the fate of humanity"; Introduction) written by the funniest historian I have read (I also loved his Germania and I'm looking forward to Danubia). 

This book is made glorious by the utter and total irreverence that this historian shows towards the past. Repeatedly describing monuments as fantastically weird and grotesque, repeatedly showing that most wars aren't won but lost through one side being even more hopelessly incompetent than the other, he views the past through affectionate modern eyes, proving that people then were just like people nowadays, just trying to survive the hurricanes of history. 

Of course the patchwork madness of the Holy Roman Empire, representing everything from kingdoms down the individual monasteries, makes it easy to mock Lotharingaria for most of its history.

He's funny about himself, too, for example: "It does not reflect well on me that at an age which is for most boys an eye-rolling frenzy of coughed-over cigarettes and self-abuse I was enjoying making a little cardboard wheel go round." (Ch 8: Fencers and soap-boilers)

Selected Quotes:

• "Here I was in a bus filled with the great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of those who had experienced 'historical' events of various, terrible kinds and who were - with their jolly backpacks and untiring ability to laugh helplessly when one of their number farted - happily oblivious." (Introduction)
• "'Palatinate' in the sense of 'of the palace' ... indicated territory with special, defensive connotations, as in the County Palatine of Chester ... the French word 'paladin' has the same root." (Introduction)
• "Human life in much of Europe is dictated by trees. Pine and beech forests were the great enemies, their seeds creeping forward and within a generation stamping out any areas abandoned by humans." (Ch 1, Ice -sheets to Asterix)
• "Hildegard's ... cure for jaundice by carefully tying a stunned bat to your loins and waiting for it to die seems beyond improvement." (Ch 3, The Sybil of the Rhine)
• "Strasbourg became a great hub for reform ideas, but this was preceded by the inexplicable episode in 1518 when all together some four hundred people danced themselves to death.No plausible explanation has ever been given for what happened: people simply kept dancing until they had seizures or heart attacks." (Ch 6: The life and adventures of Charles V)
• "The nadir of his existence was probably being defeated while fighting in Brittany, pretending to be dead on the battlefield and then being unfortunately recognized." (Ch 6: The Oranges)
• "A very strange emblem of two burly mermen with their suffused and muscular tails interwined. It was completely impossible not to see this as an early-modern thumbs-up for male love, albeit of a specialized kind, but I fear it may just have been some tedious allegory of different rivers joining their courses." (Ch 7: Whitewash and clear glass)
• "Ferdinand's advisers flapped their arms about with excitement, not knowing whether to pray or self-flagellate first." (Ch 8: 'A harvest of joys')
• "Most famous was Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Royalist general, whose stylish clothing, corkscrew locks, soft-leather accessories and damn-your-eyes manner came to define Cavalier chic before the inevitable fashion change of Cromwell's no-more-Christmas, black-and-white collection." Ch 8: Elizabeth and her children)
• "How startling it would be to find an elaborate sculpture of a nymph on her way to the bath, with a sensible gown on and a little basket for her shampoo, rather than being 'surprised' in the bath in a skittish naked pose." (Ch 8: Uncle Toby's hobby-horse)
• "The series of civil wars that wrecked the British Isles from 1639 to 1653 killed a greater percentage of the population that the First World War." (Ch 8: 'Too late to be ambitious')
• "A bedlam of aristocratic spongers and weirdos who were not used to earning a living but who, cut off from their estates, soon ran out of money." (Ch 10: 'The old times have gone')
• "There is a pub partly on Dutch and partly on Belgian territory which, reflecting different licensing laws, allows you to keep drinking just by jumping over a line on the floor." (Ch 10: 'What is there to fear if you are a slave?')
• "Neutral Moresnet was so small that if there was a fire it had to call in the Prussian fire brigade." (Ch 11: Strange happenings underground)
• "Luxembourg battles with Edinburgh or Budapest in any Most Craggy City contest." (Ch 11: Grand Duchies, Empires and Kingdoms)
• "The Prussians would only ever pause because they assumed they were being led into a cunning trap, which in each case turned out to be simply a piece of rank incompetence." (Ch 12:Kilometre pigs)

September 2023; 470 pages

"Time Shelter" by Georgi Gospodinov

 This book won the International Booker Prize in 2023.

The author and narrator (GG) meets a mysterious man called Gaustine (G) at a conference. Gaustine tries to treat dementia patients by taking them to 'time shelters': rooms which are authentic replicas of some moment of their past, the time they 'want' to live in. Gaustine's clinic has a floor for the 1940s, another for the 1950s, and so on.

The idea catches on. Bulgaria holds a referendum to determine whether it, as a nation, shall turn the clock past to its glorious nationalistic past (pre World War II) or its post World War 2 socialist heyday. Soon, nations across Europe are choosing the decade in which they want to live (although each referendum is divisive and prompts some to secede from the national era and choose their own time zons). Europe becomes a chaos of different nations returning to different times. Of course, the spectre haunting Europe is the Second World War. 

As the narrator starts to lose his own memory, re-enactment groups set out not just to replicate but to recreate the trigger points of the first and second world wars with deadly consequences.

This is very much a novel of ideas. It is strong on ideas. However, I felt it sacrificed characters and narrative to the ideas. For example, section 4 is devoted to explaining which decade was chosen by which country; the narrative of the rest of the book (such as it is) being suspended for about twenty pages. The only character I could imagine as flesh and blood was Demby; even the narrator seemed an intellectual construct, despite the information that dribbled out about his previous life. I felt that this distanced me emotionally from the story; in the end I didn't really care what happened.

The translation had some quirks (eg the use of the words 'gotten' and 'ass') which made me suspect that it had been rendered into American English.

Selected quotes:

• "The times is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past." (1.11)
• "For us the past is the past, and even when we step into it, we know that the exit to the present is open, we can come back with ease. For those who have lost their memories, the door has slammed shut once and for all." (1.11)
• "Isn't it truly astonishing that there is no recording device for scents? ... we don't even have names for smells ... Rather, it's always through comparison ... It smells like violets, like toast, like seaweed, like rain, like a dead cat ..." (1.14)
• "A forgetful God, a God with Alzheimer's, would free us from all obligations. No memory, no crime." (1.20)
• "The most terrible thing about hide-and-seek is realizing that no one is looking for you anymore." (1.21)
• "Time doesn't nest in the unusual, it seeks a quiet, peaceful place." (1.27)
• "We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past." (1.37)
• "Does the past disintegrate, or does it remain practically unchanged like plastic bags, slowly and deeply poisoning everything around itself." (1.37)
• "If hate were the gross domestic product, then  the growth of prosperity in some countries would soon be sky-high." (2.2)
• "fellows of an undefined middle-age (but with well-defined potbellies)" (3.12)
• "In short, that's how the sixties ended, like a college party where you've gotten drunk, just gotten your buzz on, and suddenly the cops bust in." (4.5)
• "God is not dead. God has forgotten. God has dementia." (5.4)
• "When I write, I know who I am, but once I stop, I am no longer so sure." (5.5)

August 2023; 302 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God