"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. 

"Troy" by Stephen Fry

This retelling of the story of the Trojan War is a sequel to Fry's Mythos and Heroes, both of which I adored.  It preserves Fry's inimitable style of making his characters thoroughly modern yet telling the story traditionally. There are some delicious moments of humour. 

But the first third of the book, in which Fry attempts to make sense of a hugely complex back story, is very difficult. Only occasionally does a character come to life. As soon as we reach the final year of the war, and the Homeric story and beyond, the story becomes vivid and absorbing. Homer, of course, could assume that his listeners understood the back story; Fry can't. But I did wonder whether the origins of Paris, cast away on the hillside, and the birth of Helen from an egg hatched by her mother who had coupled with Zeus in the form of a swan, and the origins of the House of Atreides would have been better done as footnotes as the action was progressing. Either that, or do it like George Martin and turn the story into a whole series of books.

Nevertheless, Fry's erudition is displayed as is his enormous wit.

Selected quotes: (page references from the Penguin paperback edition)

• "They say a fool and his gold are soon parted, but they ought to say too that those who refuse ever to be parted from gold are the greatest fools of all." (p 11)
• "The moment when flowers and fruits are at their fullest and ripest is the moment that precedes their fall, their decay, their rot, their death." (p 44)
• "As Luck would have it - Luck? No, Faith, Providence, Destiny ... Doom, perhaps, but not Luck, certainly not Luck." (p 53)
• "Antenor was a seasoned courtier. Courtiers do not survive long enough to be seasoned unless they maintain an efficient network of spies and informers." (p 166)

November 2022; 352 pages

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

"Underland" by Robert Macfarlane

A travel book in which the author explores a variety of subterranean landscapes including cave systems and glacier moulins as well as those that are manmade, such as the catacombs below Paris and mine-workings and underground storage facilies.

Much of the joy of this book lies in his descriptions. Here is one example, from the first page:

• “Late-summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass. Gold of standing corn, green of fresh hay-rows, black of rooks on stubble fields. ... A swan flies high and south on creaking wings.” 

There is much of this throughout the book, combining detailed observation with precise vocabulary and perfect metaphor.

There’s a lot of science (from an experiment to detect dark matter, buried in an English mine, to geology to climate change), much of it viewed through a quasi-mystical lens. Most of the journeys that Macfarlane makes are, for him, deeply spiritual experiences, and he connects them with legends about the underworld, and more recent stories - perhaps legends in the making - such as the Victorian obsession with a hollow earth.

I found many of Macfarlane’s journeys horrific. He squeezes into impossibly narrow tunnels, descends gulping sinkholes, wades starless rivers and wanders underground labyrinths, sometimes describing his terror, and I really didn’t want to share his experiences. Even when he is above ground, climbing glaciers and mountain sides, often alone, sometimes in heavy fog, far from any prospect of help, I was terrified on his behalf.

My favourite part was his description of the underground urban explorers in the Paris catacombs: perhaps because I am fundamentally a townie I could understand the romance and excitement of this below-street counterculture (though I still wouldn’t go down there: too scary!).

He makes the point repeatedly that geology has a much longer time span than humans and that all our little lives and dreams will disappear into nothingness. But then he also talks about the ‘anthropocene’, the new geological era characterised by human activities, and implicitly suggests that we shouldn’t produce so much plastic waste, or consume so much oil, or mine so much, or bury long-half-life nuclear waste. “Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd - crushed to irrelevance.” (Ch 1)

There is a great deal to enjoy in this book ... but there is a great deal. I thought it went on too long. It belaboured the environmental message and over-romanticised the ‘little people’ who lived simple lives in impossibly beautiful (and often dangerous) landscapes - and still burned oil and produced wastes. And, at the end, there were just too many tunnels to squeeze through, too many mountains the climb, and the last ones just sounded the same as the earlier ones.

But the descriptions were beautiful.

Selected quotes:

• “An aversion to the Underland is buried in language. In many of the metaphors we live by, height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down’. ‘Catastrophe’ literally means a ‘downwards turn’, ‘cataclysm’ is ‘downwards violence’.” (Ch 1)
• “To perceive matter than casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence.” (Ch 3)
• “If we’re not exploring, we’re not doing anything. We’re just waiting.” (Ch 3)
• “All cities are additions to the landscape that require subtractions from elsewhere.” (Ch 5)
• “A densely stacked modern cityscape leads, inevitably, to a new geography of inequality ... Broadly speaking, wealth levitates and poverty sinks.” (Ch 5)
• “Urban exploration mandates itself as a radical act of disobedience and liberation: a protest against state constraints on freedom within the city.” (Ch 5)
• “The city was full of portals - service hatches, padlocked doorways, manhole covers - that lay unseen in plain sight.” (Ch 5)
• “The leather noise of their wings kept time for me.” (Ch 5): Bats emerging from a cave at night
• “That cenote was understood by the local indigenous people to be an access point to the Mayan underworld, to ‘xibalba’ ... ‘place of fear’ ... a brutal realm ... heavily staffed by demons ... Just to reach Xibalba, you had to cross a river filled with scorpions, a river filled with blood, and a river filled with pus. If you were lucky to make it that far, you were then tested in the six deadly Houses of Trial.” (Ch 5)
• “The sound of this starless river is like none I have ever heard before. It has volume. Its volume has hollowness. Each sound has its echo, and each echo its interior.” (Ch 6)
• “In the Celtic Christian tradition, ‘thin places’ are those sites in a landscape where the borders between world or epochs feel at their [page break] most fragile. Such locations were ... often to be found on westerly headlands, islands, canvas, coasts and other brinks.” (Ch 8)
• “It is so cold the ink in my pen freezes in under a minute.” (Ch 10)

Shortlisted for the 2019 Waterstones Book of the Year

April 2022; 425 pages

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

"How UFOs Conquered the World" by David Clarke

 If the title suggests a pulp scifi story, the subtitle "The History of a Modern Myth" gives the game away. This is a comprehensive debunking of the UFO phenomena by a one-time believer who is now a sceptical investigative journalist with a PhD in folklore. He shows that 95% of UFO stories can be explained as observations of birds, Venus, and car headlights, some are outright hoaxes, and the most outlandish such as alien abductions may be explained by waking dreams and sleep paralysis. Most of the details are derived from folklore, myth or science fiction stories. The 5% that are not yet explained are not distinguishable from the 95% that already have been. UFO stories are believed by those who want to believe them and are not susceptible to scientific analysis for the simple reason that UFOlogists don't accept scientific methods such as the application of Ockham's razor. 

This is a well-written and very comprehensive book. It delves into: 

• folklore ("‘sky sailors’ were captured by angry French peasants in the ninth century, they were questioned by the Carolingian Bishop Agobard. Presumably fluent in French, they told him they came from a ‘a certain region called Magonia, out of which ships come and sail upon the clouds’"; Introduction) and fairytales (“Kidnapping and interbreeding with Homo Sapiens to produce hybrids was a common motif of the abduction syndrome but it had precedents in folklore. The fairy myths of Wales, Ireland and other countries of the Celtic fringe were replete with similar stories. In these the little folk were elusive creatures, much like the aliens, and were similarly interested in procreation. They travelled in hosts through the sky and occasionally kidnapped humans and took them to fairyland.”; Ch 8), 
• the post-war days of flying saucers with the classic 'sightings', and the Roswell incident,
• the links between ufology and new age religion and the founding of the Aetherius society
• the links between the descriptions of 'saucers' and aliens and science fiction
• the belief that governments have evidence which they are hushing up and the 'Men in Black'
• alien abduction and sleep paralysis

But in the end it concludes that believers believe because they want to believe. In ufology “the scientific method is nearly always sacrificed to wish-fulfilment.” (254) and that ufology is not qualitatively different from any other religion: “If we laugh at people who believe in cosmic masters or sinister greys ... than where should that laughter stop? Is it only antiquity and strength in numbers that insulate the major faiths of the modern world from the same joke?” (Ch 7)

Selected quotes:

• “You  can measure a circle by beginning anywhere.” (Introduction)
• “Why would aliens redesign the appearance of their craft to conform to a mistake made by a journalist?” (Ch 1)
• “The ‘weight of numbers’ argument could not be used to support the existence of UFOs when the IFOs outnumbered them by a ratio of nine to one.” (Ch 2)
• “certain special places attracted UFOs in a similar fashion to the way stately homes attracted ghosts. The idea of a small community under siege from alien forces was already a science fiction staple.” (Ch 3)
• “The more they repeated their stories the more they tended to exaggerate.” (Ch 3)
• "They talked about scientists being closed-minded. But for them, being open-minded meant being prepared to accept anything as evidence. Even if it was inconsistent, self-contradictory or demonstrably wrong.” (Ch 3)
• “Every type of UFO evidence, from complex photographs to alien abductions, secret government documents and stories told by high-ranking military officials about extreterrstrial cadavers hidden in air force hangars, has at some point been unveiled as being invented.” (Ch 4)
• “Being open-minded actually means being sceptical. ... One of the definitions of a sceptic is an inquirer who has not yet arrived at definitive conclusions.” (Ch 4)
• “Even if in a court of law eyewitness testimony is a high form of evidence, in the court of science it is the lowest form of evidence you could possibly put forth.” (Ch 5)
• “I had learnt long ago that sincerity was not a reliable guide to honesty.” (Ch 8)
• “A fundamental theme of the stories told by experiencers [of alien abductions] ... human beings in conflict with creatures that possess virtually supernatural powers ...aliens are essentially indistinguishable from the gods of old.” (Ch 9)
• “Aliens might exist therefore UFOs must be extraterrestrial craft. This is faulty logic.” (Ch 10)
• “The test of a good scientific theory: it includes specific, testable predictions ... For it to be testable it must be falsifiable ... any theory that involves supernatural forces cannot be disproved.” (Ch 10)
• “People say seeing is believing ... All the evidence suggests the opposite is the truth. In plain fact, we see what we believe.” (279)

A sympathetic debunking of the UFO myth. February 2022; 279 pages

Also on UFOs and reviewed in this blog:

• The 37th Parallel by Ben Mezrich

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God #

"Tales of the Greek Heroes" by Roger Lancelyn Green

This is one of the books that I read when I was young, together with the Tale of Troy and the Saga of Asgard by the same author, that made me adore old myths (and must be at least partly responsible for my atheism, for if these colourful stories are untrue why should the rather less colourful stories from the Bible be true?).

Reading the book again as a much older reader I realise the skill that went into telling for children these often complex, frequently bloodthirsty, and from time to time sexy myths. The author can do little with the multiply sinful story of Oedipus except to say "Then Oedipus ruled well and wisely at Thebes, until a curse fell upon the land because of crimes which he had committed unintentionally, and he wandered away as a blind beggar" (C 8; surely the most Mrs Grundyish summary of parricide and incest in the whole of literature). However, normally he simplifies the sometimes contradictory accounts and produces a sanitised but exciting boys' own adventure story. We have the early stories of Zeus and Cronos, of Prometheus, and of the great flood. The central part of the book deals with the labours of Hercules. Finally we learn about Jason and the Argonauts and the Battle with the Giants.

First published in 1958 but still very readable.

A more grown up version of these stories is provided by Stephen Fry with Mythos and Heroes.

"In the Footsteps of Orpheus" by R F Paget

This books was written in 1967 about amateur archaeologist's Paget's own excavations of tunnels at Baiae, near Naples. He concludes that these are the tunnels on which Vergil based the visit to the underworld of Aeneas in book 6 of the Aeneid. Certainly Aeneas is said to have visited Cuma, to visit the Sibyl there, and Lake Avernus; both of these locations are enormously close to Baiae. Peget concludes that the tunnels he excavated were used in Orphic rites in which a suppliant was led to an underground river (identified as the Styx) fed by thermal springs.

It's a fascinating theory marred, as so often in the work of non-academics, by fleshing out facts with flights of fancy. Thus towards the end Paget reconstructs a suppliants journey from the account of a ceremony at another Oracle, as if it applied to these tunnels. Leaps of faith include:

• "we and everyone that we have taken down the Oracle, has immediately recognised the Entrance to Tartarus, the River Styx and the Gates of Ivory and of Horn, just as they were described by Vergil" (p 159)
• “The speech of Anchises proves the Vergil was a devout Orphic.” (p 157)
• “We just knew we were sitting on the banks of the River Styx. We both drank some of the water, and found it was potable." (p 114)

One of the most serious flaws is that he uses Homer Odyssey as if it recounted a real voyage by a real man and further assumes that it is evidence of Odysseus visiting Baiae in his voyage to the Underworld. Paget ignores or is unaware of the body of work that places the land of the dead in Homer outside the Pillars of Hercules, ie in the Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean (eg Ulysses Found by Ernle Bradford). He assumes that the Perpetual Mist of which Homer speaks is in fact fumes from the volcanically active region around Naples. He then goes on to use this purported voyage as a dating reference.

Another flaw with Paget's book is that he tends to divorce the archaeology, with its measurements and angles and careful descriptions, with the interpretation. I would have liked to have seen the evidence for each Vergilian reference to be linked with the archaeological evidence.

These weaknesses perhaps explain why Paget's discoveries, which should have been historic, are more or less unknown.

The thesis in this book needs to be treated with extreme caution , but it is full of fascinating ideas.

June 2020; 199 pages

Also read:

• Virgil's Aeneid by David Ross
• The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble, a work of fiction in which the narrator studies Virgil and travels to Naples

"Man and the Sun" by Jacquette Hawkes

This book was written in 1962 and is a reasonably authoritative layman's guide to the relationship between man and the sun. She starts off discussing the science and how the sun drives life on Earth but her main interest lies in the realm of myth. Thus she considers the prehistoric representations of sun gods, finding solar disks in burials on Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge, before considering solar gods in the religions of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Incas and Aztecs, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and the followers of Mithras and Christ.

There are many interesting points she made although she sometimes allows her cultural biases to show (for example when condemning the Aztecs for their practice of human sacrifice). Often her writing is vigorous and she has a way with metaphor that can coin a memorable phrase (“We stand before the chimpanzee’s cage thinking, each one of us, there but for the grace of God swing I.”) Occasionally this can stray into the use of language for reinforcing bias, such as when she describes Neanderthals [I assume] as "less able types of human being". There is sometimes a statement made baldly without any evidence but which she clearly considers fact: “As the individual self-consciousness increased and the conscious and intellectual mind grew further apart from the unconscious, there was an equivalent tendency to set a single male divinity outside and above nature, the world being his creation, sometimes his creation as Logos, the most intellectual of conceptions. It is not easy to distinguish sharply between transcendental and immanent gods.”

This is a book of its time but it is well-written and very readable.

Interesting moments:

• “At two thousand million miles from the Sun its light is still strong enough to allow the reading of fine print - were there readers on Uranus, which orbits at about this distance.”
• “Plants can feed on pure carbon dioxide ... The leaf wantoning in the air is eating away as steadily as a sheep in a field.”
• “It is an all but universally recognised attribute of the inspired person to have bright-shining eyes.”
• “There are people who have developed religious ideas that allow them to be as light-hearted and guilt-free as many of the South Sea Islanders, or as grim and guilt-ridden as the Calvinists, who rejoice in simplicity like the Quakers or in grandeur like the Roman Catholics ... Yet always ... we are inclined to think of the religion shaping the faithful instead of the faithful shaping the religion.” 
• “Satan, Prince of Darkness, and his followers can hardly be distinguished from Ahriman and his demon host.”
• “No more than a bird can build its nest exclusively with its own feathers could the Christian leaders build a faith, rites and church without picking up all manner of extraneous material from the Graeco-Roman environment.”
• Leonardo da Vinci said that “whoever evokes authority for his reasoning is using not his intelligence that his memory.”

February 2019; 240 pages

"Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman

This is a retelling of the Norse myths which I first encountered as a child through the magnificent Saga of Asgard by Roger Lancelyn Green. This retelling has much in common with Mythos, the retelling of the Greek myths by Steven Fry. Both authors are masters are turning tales of long ago into stories with people who might be walking down the street right now.

Gaiman tells about how the world was created and the Aesir gods (and also some of the older Vanir gods such as Frey and Freya) who live in Asgard and who fight the giants. He tells of Odin, who bought his wisdom through the sacrifice of his eye and who gained his power through his own sacrifice, hanging himself for nine days from the branches of Yggdrasil, the world tree, his side punctured by the point of a spear. He tells of Thor, the strong and mighty warrior, who kills giants with his hammer. He tells of Loki, the deceitful, trickster god, who gets the gods out of the scrapes he has usually got them into in the first place. All these are tales of long ago. But Gaiman ends with a chilling account of Ragnarok, the last day, and the twilight of the gods, when the gods battle the giants and the people of Hel, with Loki, will fight the dead warriors of Valhalla, and when the children of Loki will kill and be killed by the gods.

These are brilliant stories and Gaiman is a superb storyteller. Perhaps those things go together.

There is so much in this book that was brilliant but here are a few of my favourite moments:

• "Asgard ... was a Viking hall and collection of buildings out on the frozen wastes." (Introduction) 
• "From the ice and the fire  that the universe begins in to the fire and the ice that end the world." (Introduction)
• "The clouds ... were once Ymir's brains, and who knows what thoughts they were thinking, even now." (Before the beginning, and after)
• "A world is not a world until it is inhabited." (Before the beginning, and after)
• "The squirrel tells lies ... and takes joy in provoking anger." (Yggdrasil and the nine worlds)
• "Some norns give people good lives, and others give us hard lives, or short lives, or twisted lives." (Yggdrasil and the nine worlds)
• "Seldom do those who are silent make mistakes." (Mimir's head and Odin's eye)
• "He tried to look ashamed and succeeded simply in looking pleased with himself." (The children of Loki)
• "Dreams know more than they reveal."  (The children of Loki)
• "The Death Ship, made from the untrimmed fingernails of the dead." (The story of Gerd and Frey)

A fabulous book by the best-selling author of, among much else, The Sandman and Anansi Boys.

"Mythos" by Stephen Fry

Fry takes us through the earlier Greek myths, including the creation, but not including the labours of Hercules, the siege of Troy and its Oresteian and Odyssean aftermaths, or the story of Theseus etc. Perhaps there was just too much.

But what he has given us is his own retelling of some of the less-well-known stories. The ones that lurk in the corners of the cultural subconscious (or did for those of us with some sort of traditional British education). As such it enlightened many dark pockets of my ignorance. I had heard of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with the statue he had carved, the classical reference underpinning the GBS play that metamorphosed into My Fair Lady, but I had never read the story. I was dimly aware of the story of Hero and Leander, one of whom drowned swimming the Hellespont, but I knew no details. Again and again Fry fleshed out the bare bones of my knowledge. And told me how these stories had passed into our culture by, for example, citing the poems by Byron or Keats or the passages in Shakespeare that had referred to them.

There was a huge western European culture built around these ideas. Young people today are ignorant of much of it (although the themes are often reprised without their knowledge in computer games, sci-fi serials, and soap operas). It is sad that so much cultural heritage is slipping away although of course it was only available to the public-school educated elite and there is a great deal of wonderful culture that is replacing it. I was ashamed of my ignorance. After all, I am a few months older than him, we had similar educations (although I wasn't expelled) and our times at Cambridge overlapped. But I studied science and that is a huge culture in itself. Life is too short for everything.

The real joy of this book is the way that Fry writes. He retells these stories of Gods and mortals in the most human way possible. For example, Ganymede is such a beautiful youth that both men and women are lovestruck on meeting him. “When they got home they wrote and instantly tore up poems that rhyme ‘thighs’ with ‘eyes’, ‘hips’ with ‘lips’, ‘youth’ with ‘truth’, ‘boy’ with ‘joy’ and ‘desire’ with ‘fire’.” (p 306) It is the "instantly tore up" that makes the imagery so quotidian, so mundane, and so real you can touch it, poke it, prod it and squish it. These are humans. “A compound of village gossip, nosy neighbour and over-solicitous best friend, Echo found it impossible to hold her tongue.” (p 333) I know Echo. She lives down the street.

And then there is the erudition. Legend, we are told,  “derives from the gerundive of the Latin legere, meaning ‘to be read’. Interestingly, the absolute origin of the verb legere and its supine form lectum bears the meaning of ‘gather’ - as in ‘college’ and ‘collect’.” (p 403 & fn) This single example will have to suffice for the learning that is displayed on every single page of this brilliant book.

Selected quotes:

• “Think of Chaos perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yawn. As in a yawning chasm or a yawning void.” (p 3)
• “In time you will abandon your trousers - not yet, I hope - and they will rot down in a landfill or be burned.” (p 4)
• “It was a sickle. An enormous scythe whose great curved blade had been forged from adamantine, which means ‘ untameable’. (p 16)
• “Our word ‘hearth’ shares its ancestry with ‘heart’, just as in the modern Greek for ‘hearth’ is kardia, which also means ‘heart’.” (p 59)
• “If that makes her seem a spoilsport, well, sometimes sport needs to be spoiled and the children called in from the playground.” (p 67)
• “The blameless majority, whose lives were neither especially virtuous not especially vicious ... were guaranteed a pleasant enough afterlife: before they arrived they drink of the waters of forgetfulness from the River Lethe so that a blithe and bland eternity could be passed, untroubled by upsetting memories of earthly life.” (p 144)
• “In this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved.” (p 227)
• “Perhaps narcissism is best defined as a need to look on other people as mirrored surfaces who satisfy us only when they reflect back a loving or admiring image of ourselves.” (p 344)
• “Gods of this kind are created in our image, not the other way round.” (p 403)

There is only one thing missing from this book. All the other stories! Please, Mr Fry, let us have the stories of the heroes, Theseus and Hercules and Achilles and Ulysses and Oedipus and Orestes and Antigone and Medea and Jason and ...

And then perhaps you can move to the Viking gods who are just as much fun.

January 2018; 410 pages

I am delighted that the series has been continued with Heroes.

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

"Ragnarok" by A. S. Byatt

Byatt tells the story of a thin girl, evacuated with her mother during WWII and missing her airman father, who reads two books: Pilgrim's Progress and Asgard and the Gods. This last tells her the story of the Viking Gods, of Odin and Thor and Baldur and Loki, of wolves and sea serpents and bareserk warriors, of frost and forests and night.

Byatt has written a poem in prose form. Her images are intense and lyrical, her descriptions of seaweed and hedgerows are colourful and fresh. The great thing about the Norse Gods, which she brings out, is how vulnerable they are. Odin is one-eyed having sacrificed the other eye to buy prophesies from the head of Mimir, Tyr the hunter has his hand bitten off by Fenrir the wolf, Loki is captured and tied and has poison dripping into his face, Baldur is killed. And they are doomed. The world will end at Ragnarok and all of time is hurrying towards this finish.

This is a book filled with wonderful writing, fabulous, haunting characters (Hel, goddess of the underworld, has a face and a body which is half alive and half dead) and mysteries. What was the word whispered by Odin into the ear of his dead son? What will come after the destruction of Ragnarok?

Byatt has written a beautiful book. November 2015; 171 pages

Also reviewed by A S Byatt: Possession a delightful, Booker winning novel about a literary researcher tracing the details of an unknown and illicit Victorian love affair.

"The clashing rocks" by Ian Serraillier

This is a retelling of the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. They brave adventures to sail to Colchis in the Black Sea (the first Greek fleet to enter the Black Sea through the eponymous clashing rocks) to recapture the famous Golden Fleece. But they need the help of witch Medea who falls in love with Jason and requires him to mary her as the price of her help. But part of her help involves the murder of her brother. Later when Jason is safely back home Medea poisons his uncle the King which revolts the people and means that Jason and Medea need to flee. Finally in exile Medea kills two of Jason's children and leaves him.

Which is perhaps the most distressing story in the whole of the Greek pantheon (although the Oresteiad) is perhaps as dark.

It was simply told by Serraillier. He added very little although there were little touches to add reality to such things as Medea's love and the way ordinary people reacted to the tale. But it is still mostly a bald myth.

"Into the woods" by John Yorke

Yorke, a successful television screenplay writer, explains that all drama adopts a three act or five act structure with a turning point exactly half way through (stories are almost exactly symmetrical). He illustrates his thesis with everything for Hamlet to Thelma and Louise (both five act) although he concedes that Raiders of the Lost Ark has seven acts.

At the same time, heavily referencing Joseph Campbell's Hero with a thousand faces (which I read in the mid seventies) which was itself the inspiration for George Lucas' Star Wars, he lays bare the skeleton of every story: an 'inciting incident' propels the hero into a strange world (into the woods), where he battles with an antagonist, changing, learning and developing psychologically; once he has grown he is ready to return to the normal world.

It is both inspiring and wonderful. It contains so many insights:

• "Dialogue is not narrative ... dialogue is the characters' responses to the narrative." p150
• The narrative fallacy is "post hoc ergo propter hoc": after this therefore because of this; the idea that because things are stated sequentially there must be some sort of causal link p215: "The wisest advice I ever received" was that Shameless "might just have been a success despite you." p216 He quotes Polly Toynbee as saying that journalists "precis a muddled reality into a narrative of right and wrong." p217

He's right. I watched the film Genova last week. After the young girl runs out of the church, seeing the ghost of her mother, and disappears IN THE WOODS I said to my wife: that's the turning point; we are exactly half way through the film. I was correct within three minutes.

This was a wonderful book and I shall keep it and dip into it again. It says a lot and I will need repeat readings to understand it all . But it has already changed the way I think about dramas.

Brilliant and thought-provoking. May 2013; 231 pages