Blogs, Interviews, Reviews
and Dialogues
Pilgrim out of town: Chaucer’s Modern Echoes
Posted on April 15, 2014 by Candace Barrington
http://globalchaucers.wordpress.com
GUEST BLOG BY GAIL ASHTON
See also: How do you translate Chaucerian scatological wordplay into Afrikaans? What happens
when the Parson’s Tale gets adapted for Muslim readers in Turkey? How do translators in Brazil
or China reinvent a medieval English past for their readers? Find out these answers and more
about Chaucer’s reception around the world in the chapter written by Candace Barrington and
Jonathan Hsy, co-founders of the Global Chaucers project <http://globalchaucers.wordpress.
com> in Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture
St. Pancras, Gray’s Inn Road, to Holborn . . . Holborn viaduct with its knight flanked by two
dragons guarding one of the old city gates . . . on to Cheapside, Poultry, Bankside . . . and
there ahead London Bridge streaming with traffic and people: to the left, upriver, Tower
Bridge, to the right St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the dirty old River Thames chopping and surging
below and everywhere crowds walking as if they know where they’re going, contemporary
buildings scraping the skyline. And, as if from nowhere, Southwark Cathedral tucked into
a hollow, its perfect rising tower the centrepiece to long sweeps of stone fanning out on
either side.
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This is the oldest church building in London. It stands at the oldest crossing point of
the tidal river Thames and was for many centuries the only entrance to the city this side
of the river. Some believe there was a place of worship here as far back as Roman times but
the ‘modern’ cathedral was re-founded in 1106 by 2 Norman knights. It has had a long and
colourful history thereafter.
Yet, as befits this evening’s event with its title Chaucer’s Modern Echoes, this is not
simply a medieval shrine but a building at the heart of contemporary life. It’s ringed by the
Thames, by bridges and tenement-style wharfsides. In the closing years of the last century
the Millennium Buildings were created where the priory of the religious community once
stood. Soon there will be a new railway viaduct and the tallest building in Europe, the Shard,
stands nearby. Around a corner and along an alleyway and here are the ruins of Winchester
Palace, home to a host of medieval bishops. There’s a replica of the Golden Hinde ship, a
sign to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and the Clink Museum, site of the former Clink Prison,
the oldest gaol in England dating back to 1140.To the left of the cathedral, the small busy
Borough market is crammed beneath the railway viaduct, and all the time trains grind along
the track, postmodern structures in glass and steel mesh lean into the cathedral yard, straining
for a share of its light.
This is a narrow cathedral, the eye drawn to the altar with its small high window.
I almost overlook John Gower’s gaudy tomb tucked into the wall and just beyond it
Chaucer’s window which depicts the Canterbury pilgrims about to set off on their journey.
And before I can even get in to look around I have to wait for the close of a memorial
service dedicated to one Michael Cox, master vinter and part of a family owned UK wine
company; it’s as if Chaucer has just stepped from the shadows for a last glance at the
evening to come.
Tom Eveson and Gabby Meadows intersperse the performances with extracts from Troilus
and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, Tom in his fabulous rendition of Middle English
and Gabby with her mellifluous modern readings. I speak about Chaucer’s literary heritage
and his contemporary afterlives with special nods to the fabulous LeVostreGC aka Brantley
Bryant and to the medieval meme rendition of the Mamas and the Papas (I never thought
I’d be singing in Southwark Cathedral). Lavinia Greenlaw takes us on a narrative journey
through her haunting A Double Sorrow. And Patience Agbabi blows the roof off with her
dramatic performances from Telling Tales: Harry Bailly’s fictional biography; the Prologue’s
Grime Mix; her Prioress’s Tale or the amazing Sharps an Flats; the sassy Things alias The
Shipman’s Tale; Unfinished Business or the Melibee, her clever and disturbing mirror poem;
before ending with Makar, the Franklin’s Tale.
Best of all, as we take turns to speak, in my left ear all night is the rumble and clatter of
trains, a helicopter whirring, and Patience stepping into her Sharps an Flats with its call to
Damilola Taylor, stabbed in real life and left to bleed to death in a stairwell, a police siren
wailing in time to Chaucer’s still ticking pulse.
My warmest thanks to Poet in the City, especially to Isobel Colchester, Suzy Cooper and
Gabby Meadows for hosting and organising this amazing event. And too to the Dean of
Southwark Cathedral for bringing over 300 people into such an iconic space.
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WHAT THE DICKENS SHALL WE DO ABOUT CHAUCER?
Ever wondered why no one in the UK seems to read Chaucer anymore? Why Gail Ashton sees
a ‘residual affection for Chaucer’ compromised at every turn? Read on . . .
It is the tap end of one of the hardest winters for decades. I am sitting in a steamy café talking
to a former senior examiner about Chaucer’s shrinking presence in a UK school system. I
recognized him from the scarf he said he’d be wearing; his bobble hat threw me for a while,
but we joke about blind dates and strangers on a train and I forget for a moment why we’re
meeting in this way. It’s all rather reminiscent of a spy movie and this makes me laugh as much
as it concerns me.
My ‘date’ – let’s call him Geoffrey, Mr G for the craic - tells me how he’s taught Chaucer
extensively, all the usual ‘culprits’: the Miller’s, Wife’s, Pardoner’s, Knight’s, Nun’s Priest’s
tales—, his interest in Chaucer’s narrative and story-making matching my own. His eyes light
as he recalls reading the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ aloud to kids, their delight in the humour of it.
He likes the ‘Merchant’s Tale’ too, its ‘cynicism’ which can ‘make it modern,’ fresh.
Later he will say, ‘as you shut the door on Chaucer it very quickly stays shut.’ And I will
walk back along the road against the fading light and press of commuters hurrying home, just
as earlier I wandered around the museum, and took tea with a professor I taught with, in a
former life. It seems apt.
Driving in, I was tuned to Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 lunchtime show which was debating
a recent parliamentary call to ensure all school children will have read Dickens by the time
they are ten. The phone-in celebrates National Dickens Day (2012), each caller someone
of a certain age extolling Dickens’ humanistic impulses, universal values, a mordant social
commentary made to speak for our economically depressed contemporary times. On this
day Dickens is both fully alive (in films, TV series) and long-gone, a ‘classic’ author whom
nostalgic readers quote at length. Claire Tomalin’s recent Charles Dickens: A Life (2011)
shares air space with Prince Charles’ rally to get children reading again. I am already
depressed.
I share with Mr G my concerns about children being force fed a diet of classics, recount
how I’ve just heard an academic warn against reading Dickens too early on the grounds
he’s a ‘mature read’. Mr G responds with an anecdote about how at a presentation he gave
in Newcastle, someone demanded to know ‘why are you not teaching my child Dryden?’
Education in the UK has, Mr G says, an ultra-conservative agenda that ‘cuts across all parties’
and where English usually takes the brunt of reform—as in 2000, under Labour, when ‘a
wholesale root and branch renewal gave us more of the same.’ The watchword, he believes,
is always ‘rigour,’ something seemingly achieved only by teaching and examining canonical,
pre-20th century authors, often, specifically, those our political leaders studied at school and
university.
At the same time, it seems, no-one wants to invest in Geoffrey Chaucer. Mr G speaks of
a ‘residual affection for Chaucer’ yet I hear it compromised at every turn. He invites me to
contemplate my suspicions about educational idealogy in the UK, and then triple the worst of
them. Dominated by inspections, assessment and examination league tables—which are, he
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suggests, ‘more pernicious than I’ll ever know’ — teachers are ‘scared witless.’ No teacher, he
says, is going to take a risk with Chaucer who is perceived as less accessible to today’s students
with his ‘weird language’ and as one of those authors available ‘only for the best.’ I wonder
if this is why those schools already at the top of the table (grammar or independent schools)
will teach Chaucer when, Mr G tells me, ‘few comprehensive schools dare risk it.’ And just
to compound the inequity, most teachers ‘go to default,’ teaching only the texts and authors
they were taught at A level.
Is it then that no-one reads Chaucer today? Or that no-one reads anything very much
at all?
Mr G insists that, contrary to popular belief, kids today do read, are, in fact, highly textliterate; the problem comes from the gulf between what and how they read, and what the UK
examination system assesses. We are, he says, asking technical questions about how Chaucer
constructs his narratives for instance, even as no-one is teaching the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how he
does it; ‘the technical repertoire isn’t there.’ Here, of course, we too fall into the honey-trap
of nostalgia, reminiscing about how we read aloud in our old-school classrooms, something
no-one does anymore, so that ‘the sound’s gone.’ Instead Chaucer’s work becomes ‘a story
you had to decode’ and he’s ‘written about as though he’s a novelist.’ All sense of Chaucer as
a poet seems to have gone.
If we no longer recognise Chaucer as a poet, in what sense do we read him, then, if at all?
Oddly enough in the recent past, Chaucer has appeared on examination syllabi in sections
on Poetry. Surely this was good? Mr G thinks not, telling me that the pressure to impose on
English Literature a grid of tick box, quantitative criteria—‘the right buttons’ —leads to many
compromises and ‘mile-off thinking.’ The result: a relatively random choice of texts which,
inadvertently, ‘gave Chaucer more chance.’ Michael Gove’s (former Education Minister)
more recent ruthless so-called radicalization of UK curricula – more of the same – means
‘now Chaucer fits less easily into the new comparative model.’ And where once Chaucer
might have been an option for coursework, government reforms have ensured that final end
of course examination is currently the only acceptable mode of assessment.
Or is it? Chaucer’s face, it seems, simply doesn’t fit.
As ever, nothing is quite as it appears. Even if Chaucer was formerly available for coursework,
in Mr G’s long experience as an examiner not a single school ever took this up, which raises
further questions: about accessibility (again) , innovation, ways of teaching. So, too, despite
Mr G’s earlier comments about a lack of technical vocabulary with which to discuss Chaucer’s
text, he feels ‘and anyway that’s not crucial.’ What about, he asks, exploring Chaucer’s work
through issues, contexts and ideologies, thinking about, for instance, sex and sexuality: ‘The
moral pornography of, say, the ‘Merchant’s Tale’ . . . that’s glossed over . . . that’s got lost in
the way we ask the questions.’
In Mr G’s view, ‘The really interesting questions are not the ones being asked,’ of any
writers. The best thing on one of the new A level papers (2014), he says, is the section on
narrative ‘which is where Chaucer should be and isn’t . . . Chaucer could be there and be
really fascinating’—if only we were free to ask ‘what interesting narratives can we do’ rather
than ‘how does the question correlate to the assessment criteria we’re given.’
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Yet even if we agree ‘how sad (it is) that he doesn’t fit,’ —and we do—I am forced to concede
that perhaps I am barking up the wrong tree. I’ve already been told that it’s the specifics that
matter—which is why the exam questions hardly change—and not the broader issues, or the
place of narrative, or genre in our culture. I persist: should we teach a ‘modernized’ Chaucer?
Incorporate his afterlives, the web, TV adaptations? Hit those text-literate, media savvy kids
right where they most hurt?
The town clock strikes. Day draws to a close. Mr G demands, ‘who’s to say who we should
read?’ I concur. Then, ‘what’s the point of every kid reading Chaucer if you stop as soon
as you can?’ I admit I don’t read him for pleasure. We both confess (sheepish? defiant?) we
rarely go to the theatre. And I wander home, thinking on Mr G’s quick look, that comment
offered not quite at the end, but which may be the final word after all: ‘who says I’d teach
him at all?’
Here’s the thing. I still would.
By Gail Ashton. Read more . . . Gail Ashton, ‘Silence in the Library?- Medievalist Poetry
Shout-Out,’ in Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture
Read more . . . Gail Ashton in Conversation with Gwyneth Lewis and Patience Agbabi, this
website. Gwyneth Lewis, former Welsh Poet Laureate, says, ‘If you don’t have help to read
Chaucer at school, then you’re never going to venture into that world.’ Likewise, we have to
show students how to access the Bible, ‘the biggest source for literature until now; ’otherwise
we give ‘our children roots into their culture which are more shallow . . . it’s like being cut
off from the water table.’
Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales (2014), is currently working with The Full English to
produce a teaching pack on Chaucer for use in UK schools. She says:
There’s a freshness to Chaucer’s language that makes it timeless. That’s what I first fell
in love with as an A Level student. I was astonished at how accessible and irreverent he
was . . .
Everyone I’ve met who studied Chaucer at A Level loved it yet it has dipped in the
popularity stakes. I hope my book, and the proposed Teaching Pack, will in a small way
change that trend. The pack will give teachers several pedagogic approaches so they feel more
equipped to take Chaucer into the classroom. Clearly a whole generation has missed out on
studying Chaucer themselves so it’s especially daunting for them to teach it.
I presented Telling Tales as a seminar, workshop and keynote performance at the NATE
conferences in 2013 and 2014. Everyone agreed that Chaucer should have a higher profile
on the National Curriculum. I suspect our results-led society has frightened secondary
school teachers into going for the easier options. Yes, the language is challenging but
in some ways, easier than Shakespeare’s in-jokes to the groundlings. If A level students
experienced the electrifying live version of The Reeve’s Tale as I did at Cheltenham
Literature Festival, they’d love Chaucer. This was performed by Trevor Eaton ‘The
Chaucer Man’. (Actually, there was an A Level class in attendance and they did love
Chaucer). I perceive there’s also a move away from poetry in general and Chaucer is seen
as the most difficult.
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GAIL ASHTON IN CONVERSATION WITH JANE
DRAYCOTT, PEARL (CARCANET, 2011)
(Summer 2013 and 2014, telephone and email)
www.janedraycott.org.uk
Jane Draycott’s collections include No Theatre (Smith/Doorstop) and, from Carcanet Press,
Prince Rupert’s Drop, The Night Tree and Over, short-listed for the 2009 TS Eliot Prize. Other
collections, from Two Rivers Press, include Christina the Astonishing, co- written with Lesley
Saunders, and Tideway, a sequence about the Thames Watermen, with images by Peter Hay.
Her translation of the medieval dream-elegy Pearl (2011), was a Times Stephen Spender
Prize-winner. She teaches at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.
GA. I wonder if you wanted to tell me a little bit, Jane, about what prompted the project:
where it came from, what attracted you to this particular work and so on?
JD. I wrote my postgraduate dissertation on the unresolved endings in medieval dream
poetry, the idea of the ineffable, and wrote amongst other subjects about the Pearl poem, the
Pearl dreamer and that abrupt, unresolved moment of waking. That was a long time ago but
I, like a lot of people who first encountered it at university, was very touched aged 19 or 20,
by the poem. I had no idea why but it stuck with me and years later, decades later, out of
nowhere I found myself going back to it. First, I wrote a 100-line poem Matchless based on
the lexical patterning of the Pearl poem, about lost daughters, fathers and daughters, fathers
searching for daughters. I wrote this at the time my own daughters were just growing up
and planning to leave home. And then Bernard O’Donoghue - who I had come to know in
Oxford- suggested that I might have a go at a translation.
Looking back I now wonder whether some of my attraction to the poem when I was a
teenager arose out of the fact that my own father had died not that many years before I had
gone to university. I think there is something very strong in the father-daughter relationship
for modern readers which in the end is probably at the heart of my engagement with it. Now
I’m engaged with it very closely, line by line, moment by moment, idea by idea and I do see
that very strongly, what you might call a modern apprehension of that relationship which
includes the courtly love aspect of the grieving father‘s imagined bringing-back-to-life of his
daughter . . . perhaps the grown daughter he might have had, the girl she might have been
had she lived and so on. I think that’s possibly where my own connection with it is. And I
had also lost my younger brother. He wasn’t a child, but a child to me, and I think there was
something about that very strong sense of loss which is most of the electric charge for a reader
today. So, all sorts of personalised interfaces I suppose.
GA: I think for a modern reader and, would you also say a medieval one, it does have a
huge emotional resonance doesn’t it?
JD: It does and it’s there right from the top. It’s a wonderfully constructed poem. It’s
been tremendous to work at such close quarters with an imaginative mind in action firing so
perfectly on all cylinders if you like in so many aspects of the composition, and the relation to
that traditional material out of which this very personal piece of meditation arises . . . So yes,
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it can’t help but touch the modern reader. I don’t see how anyone, especially anyone who has
experienced loss, could fail to be touched - let alone the dreadful loss of a child.
GA: One of the things that has just struck me as you were talking - as well as, if you like,
the personal touchstone that it has for you and for many other people - is your intricate grasp
of the more formal structures of the poem and its medieval context. How much were you
aware as you were writing this piece about all those different contexts: the fact that it is a
spiritual consolation, it’s dream vision, it is a poem about loss, it’s all of these things? Were
you aware of this all of the time as you were writing and what kind of challenges did this
present for you?
JD: I never felt that the religious framework or religious energy from which the poem
draws – that well of religious understanding - was a challenge. I think the Pearl poet writes
knowingly, luxuriating in all the vivid detail within the tradition, the religious vision, the relay
he is taking part in. This was a piece of poetic imaginative musical action in the same way as
the dream in Revelations, and the related Dante material, and the narrative biblical material.
So there is something which is completely simultaneous in its imaginative action across all
those texts, if you like.
GA: So it’s all poetry really for you.
JD: Yes and it’s how the poetic imagination works/has worked for all these centuries
and through all these traditions and through all these phases of the relay, if you like. So it’s
not hard for a modern reader or translator to understand how within the allegory - partly
a poetic idea but a religious ideal as well - the girl is simultaneously a child, a mother, the
Virgin Mary, the bride of Christ, the immortal soul, a precious pearl - all these things – and
also, in a theologically/imaginatively complex way, Christ himself. It’s not hard for a poet
or a reader of poetry to understand that these things are simultaneous - this is the essence of
metaphor.
GA: Exactly and I’m really interested in that aspect. I think this sounds quite patronising
in some respects but I think many other people would have come to that poem and thought
okay, what can I do with it? And been fazed, if you like, by that Christian message at its
heart, as opposed to seeing it, as you say, as running simultaneously with so many other
strands.
JD: No quite the opposite. I was moved by it. And it connected for me with a previous
interest in the Christina Mirabilis story, and the Christina the Astonishing poems I wrote
with Lesley Saunders about her. I do think the idea of perfection, the ideal, how we could be
perfect - which is manifest in the Christ figure and in a lot of those women saints’ lives – is
something that is still of interest to people. I think this revival of interest -if you can call it
that – this reheating of it, if you like, is a kind of revivifying of the notion of the ideal and
how can we do this thing ideally, what’s the best we can do.
GA: That’s really interesting yes, I do see that. What about all the medieval symbols and
formal devices and structures that would be shorthand code for medieval, much of which you
know has gone for the ordinary reader?
JD: As has much of the Christian detail.
GA: Yes it has. Were you aware of this at all as you were writing, because you’ve largely
kept it which I think is fabulous/not.
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JD: I think all I did was work moment by moment with the Pearl poet’s imagery, frame by
frame.
GA: Staying very close.
JD: Absolutely staying very close. The only challenges I found were where one or two
words so perfectly contained an idea that they were impossible to reproduce.
GA: What kinds of words?
JD: Well, there is a beautiful word where the poet describes the Pearl maiden as being
beautiful ‘on-vunder cambe’, in other words ‘in her face beneath her hair comb’ all done in
one phrase. I thought that was just the most wonderful sort of conflation of so many ideas
in one thought. So those are the challenges I felt as a translator, as a writer working very
intimately having put on the Pearl poet’s coat so to speak. I quite simply saw what he saw,
heard what he heard, or tried to, and somehow relay it. I wasn’t consciously thinking about
the difficulty a reader might have. It’s a poem borne on sound and imagery - he takes all that
imagery there in the common conversation of his time and he revitalises it.
GA: I’m intrigued about how you actually set about doing this.
JD: I already had quite a strong close familiarity with it so in a sense I already had ‘my’
Pearl, at an intuitive level. I read it and reread it, and then it was a little like starting on any
other new poem. I had to find it in my ear. I had to find its phrasing - ‘voice’ is too clumsy a
word. I had to find the sound of its phrasing in my ear and the tone of it, the pitch of it. So
for about a week I just read and reread the first section because at this point I was thinking
only about where what I wrote would stand in relation to it, how close it was going to be, how
far back I stood from it. Steiner talks about the translator working in a circle, circumscribing
the original, pacing round it. And eventually, one night, the first few lines came to me. Not
in any strange mysterious way but as happens when you think continuously about things: it
came to me, then I had it. So that was very like starting on any new poem. That’s what I had
to wait for. By the end of that night I’d translated the first stanza. I knew that I was going to
try and retain all that beautiful echoing effect made by the very strict and rather restrictive
rhyme scheme, but not stitch every line down at the end with an end stop rhythm or a perfect
rhyme, just loosening those stitches a little. So once I’d done that, then I thought, ah yes, now
this is me, writing.
GA: So it came alive for you.
JD: It came alive for me and I understood how the song would go, so to speak, how I was
going to work it and I felt confident about it and I sent it to Bernard and he said yes.
GA: So, obviously, he has been a huge influence on what you have done, even deciding the
initial kick start
JD: Yes, oh he was tremendous. He agreed very kindly to be my guide. Every dreamer
needs a guide and he was mine. So I would send him one or two sections about once every six
weeks or couple of months and then I went and had at least four sessions in his room Wadham
College where we would get the Medieval English Dictionary out and look at whether or
not I had understood the original properly, fully. But most importantly - because Bernard’s a
poet - what I was able to get with Bernard was a wonderful poetic ear. You know that’s him,
as a poet, rather than as a medievalist. So in a way that was the greatest gift, his poetic ear.
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GA: I see that yes that would be fantastic because you do get that added dimension from
someone like Bernard, don’t you, for an extra sensibility?
JD: Yes and he could hear when I was writing clunky lines and he was able to say things like
this whole section is really deadly, do you know why it’s so different from this section? Things
that I couldn’t see. It’s quite difficult working on a long piece and I just wonder whether that
was something the Pearl poet must have experienced as well on the long haul.
GA: Would this be longest piece you have done? Or was that Christina the Astonishing?
JD: No, that was an experiment where we wrote the next thing and wrote the next thing
and didn’t even plan it as a book. It turned into a book because we kept writing. Yes, this
is the first. That’s one of the reasons I learnt a lot from it, I had a lot to learn about the
dramatic structures in a long sustained poetic piece like this, the narrative rhythm, dramatic
rhythm . . . All of that’s in there. It’s a tremendous poem and of course it’s wonderful in
Gawain as well, such a good storyteller, a fantastic storyteller.
GA: Was there ever a time when you were tempted to put it to one side? There is always a
point when I’m writing something when I think, oh I wish it were done now.
JD: I’d translated the first four sections and then thought, I can’t do this at a trot until I
get to number twenty - I’d feel like a slave to it, carried by it in the back of the truck. I didn’t
want to follow it in that sense. I wanted to ride it in my own time, so, once I’d got the hang of
the technical life and shape of the way I was working with the original, I deliberately started
translating out of order, jumping about.
GA: Yes I see that that makes sense. You are obviously extraordinarily accomplished at
this kind of thing but did you find the formal structures and styles of the poem a particular
challenge?
JD: Well that’s kind of you to say that. I’ve never done any translating before which is why
I enjoyed doing it so much. I had so much to learn. I don’t know if this is the same with other
translating - I’ve done some others since and I think it is - you become completely beguiled
and hypnotised by the tone and the rhythm of the original, and because of the way the Pearl
line works - these end-stopped lines very heavily stitched in at the end of every line - I had
to deliberately pull back once in a while, and make a conscious effort to go back to working
more freely with the run-on line. So that’s the power of the original on me which I had to
draw back from slightly and take one step back from in formal and acoustic terms.
GA: It’s interesting you say that because, yes, I can hear it, the intricacy of the original and
the sound of it . . . I can see how that is absolutely in your head.
JD: The narrative propulsion of the poem drives forward on this pulse of the end-stopped,
closely rhymed line-turns - it’s a tremendous fix on the ear.
The other thing about the Pearl poet and this long, sustained fixed patterning is that there are
moments in it which are almost padding. And you can see how that might have happened.
GA: Yes but for me you cut through all of that because, as I said, a good translation, a
proper translation in that sense is you go over and above and beyond.
JD: Well that’s very kind.
GA: No I don’t think it is kind. I’m not just saying it to be flattering. I think it really is so.
This is almost not a question in some respects, but one of the things that particularly interests
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me about the poem is there is almost . . . I won’t call it a dissonance, but there is a gap, it
seems to me, between the form and the control of it. There’s the intricacy of these structures
and the haunting sense of loss, the emotional resonance of it, which also comes through the
beauty of sound. I feel a bit like Caliban sometimes when I hear it and if I hear someone read
it: I hear the beauty of it and it’s gorgeous, but I don’t always- unless I’ve got it written in
front of me - fully understand it, if that makes any sense.
JD: Well I think there is tension between the formality, the strictures of the form it inhabits,
and this very vital imagination at work. A vital imagination in action every moment as one
image gives rise to another, gives rise to another . . . And he draws on his personal imaginative
life, at the same time as drawing on the equally circumscribed structures of the traditional
imagery and the traditional narrative in it. So there is this tension in it and that’s why it’s
fascinating to get inside. It’s a formal tension but it’s also an imaginative tension as well.
GA: I think that’s exactly it.
JD: Judith Wilson, who recently won the Popescu European Translation Prize, said one
should always love the poem you are translating. And I think that’s what it is in the end. You
have to have that relationship: be a little in love with what you are translating.
GA: That really does come through. Out of interest then, do you have any favourite bits?
JD: It’s all the bits which speak strongly to a modern reader. It’s the bits that contain the
most expressive thought and imagery, especially the opening sections. It’s perhaps not the
central theological sections though I do think the parable of the vineyard is really amazing
storytelling, its rhythms and phrasing. The vision of Christ is very moving too.
GA: And when you read it or perform it do you tend to do it as a whole?
JD: No, I tend to read extracted bits from the first four sections until the dreamer sees the
child, and she steps down towards him because it’s just electric really. And then more recently
I started to read sections about the descriptions of the Christ figure which I think are very
moving at the end.
GA: I agree. I think the end is incredibly moving because it’s both uplifting and desolate.
JD: Yes.
GA: And I don’t quite know how it works as both but it does.
JD: It’s very precious. I mean it’s corny to say so but anyone who has experienced grief it’s
a strange thing; it can feel it’s very precious in itself, it’s oddly precious. So, yes, I think that’s
why the ending is so moving.
GA: I think so. Yes and it’s interesting that you say that because grief, it seems to me, is, as
you say, it’s precious. And it’s personal, it’s intimate. It obviously has universal flavour but it’s
unique to the particular person who’s feeling it don’t you think and you carry it and yet we
have public performance and so on. Are you aware of that at all as you read?
JD: This is what elegy is, isn’t it, energy? So it’s down as a work of Christian consolation –
a consolatio - but really in the way it ends it’s an elegy. David Constantine has suggested that
the aim of all elegy is to bring the lost person alive again. And in this poem he completely sees
her . . . just like a dream, he sees her and we see her. So he brings her alive again and that’s
what elegy does. David Constantine has written in an essay [in The Poet’s Voice and Craft] of
how every line of verse is doing its best to wriggle free of death. He’s talking about poetry
more generally really and how an achieved poem is an act of life in the face of death.
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GA: This one certainly is isn’t it? . . . What’s been the most interesting context in which
you’ve read this poem?
JD: For the launch for the translation we were offered the garden at St Edmund Hall in
Oxford the old rose garden which has been brought back to life in memory of a younger
student who died. I didn’t know that until the evening, but a lot of people found that touching.
It was by complete accident, and a sort of co-opting of a situation so I wasn’t sure about that.
But there are always people who are touched by it who come up and talk, not necessarily that
they have lost a child but they’ve lost dear ones. So almost everywhere I read it, the poem just
comes shining through really.
...
GA: What attracted you to Christina the Astonishing? You say that wasn’t conceived as a
book . . .
JD: Well, that the layer upon layer of very dramatic story telling which also was the kind
of relay of some ideas and some events which I imagine must have taken place, reinvented,
dramatized, handed down, was wonderful storytelling. It was actually mostly about the
collaboration for me with Lesley Saunders who I’d just met. She and I had just discovered we
lived near each other, liked one another’s work and so it became an exchange poem exploring
the tale. I’d call it a tale, I think.
GA: Is collaboration something you do a great deal of or do you tend to work on your
own?
JD: No, no, I do like collaborating a lot. I wish I could collaborate more. Collaborating
with people who are happy to work in the same sort of exploratory way is a joy. I’ve been
asked to take part in various collaborations but I quite like - or I think it’s very important - not
to know where you are going. It gets the most lively work out of it and so working too with
my friend Elizabeth James - who is a brilliant, much more experimental poet than I am - and
with Lesley Saunders, have been the two big collaborations from which I have got so much.
It’s like suddenly becoming a 3D person instead of just a 2D person.
GA: It’s incredibly energising and inspiring isn’t it?
JD: Different ways of looking at things that I could never have arrived at on my own.
GA: That is interesting. May I flick back then to translation? Do you see yourself as a
translator Jane?
J. Pearl was the first thing I’ve ever tried. I think I’ve come to understand quite a lot about
the business of translating, but you know I don’t think of myself as . . . well, I’ve done one
big translation.
G. What are its challenges and its joys for you?
J. Well, the challenge is a sense of responsibility. If you are going to take someone else’s
work and not co-opt it, that’s the challenge. To do proper justice to the work means really
thinking hard about your reading of it, so there’s a sort of sense of responsibility there. I’m
trying to remember who said a translator has to be simultaneously present and absent, so
that’s the challenge but I think that’s also . . .
G. Also the joy
J. Yes pretty much - you’re wearing somebody else’s skin and you inhabit somebody else’s
ear and it opens up your own practice. Heaney talks about translation as an act of advocacy
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but also an act of refreshment and I think that’s absolutely it, taking your possible sense of
your own work out into the world more pathways open up, more understanding of what
poetry can do
G. Do you find that a translation takes over more than any other sort of poetic work
would?
J. Yes it’s very difficult to do something else at the same time and in fact after Pearl all I
seemed to write was rhymed - for about . . . well, not really writing very much it’s actually
very difficult to write again after working closely with someone with the experience of the
Pearl poet . . . There are a lot of dreams and visions and rhyming poems in the cupboard at
the moment, yes.
G. Do you find that anyway when you have finished a collection?
J. Yes I think most people do. Matthew Sweeney talks about closing a gate on a field and I
think that’s right, you have to close the gate and then wait a little bit. I can’t believe I came to
translation so late - all these years and I haven’t till now done this thing which seems like the
most obvious way of participating as a writer in a world of writers.
G. How interesting. Things come when they come though don’t you think. As you say
you think you have waited a long time to do it but maybe the time wasn’t right for you
earlier?
J. Yes perhaps it takes confidence as well. One of the things I had to know was that I could
write a Pearl that that I wouldn’t mind putting my name to so to speak but had to work in the
end in its own right. You work very closely moment by moment, phrase by phrase, line by line
and then you have to stand back and put the original away, I mean literally put it away. Then
you work on your translation - this is very close to the end - and then the decisions you are
making are all about the poem you know this should be.
G. And is that a scary moment or an exhilarating moment or . . . ?
J Well I was excited to realise it - that this what I had to do and I had to stop being scared
about the original and my responsibility. Maybe if I hadn’t written enough of my own I
wouldn’t have been confident enough to do that.
G. Well I’m glad you did it because you have done the most amazing job on it. It is an
astonishing piece of work, it’s so beautiful.
J. That’s very kind. I had the Pearl poet at my heels.
G. I’m always a little bit wary about picking up translations and I suspect it’s because, like
you, I know the work so well. Is that an odd thing to say? So I’m waiting to see what someone
else is going to do with. As you say it has to go beyond it and give something in its own right
and . . . I actually read it twice back to back.
J. That’s one wonderful thing about the modern reader and the medieval literary
imagination, the way allegory and symbols tap into our sense of the associative power of
metaphor - something we are utterly familiar with as modern readers.
G. To me that’s exactly it. You talked earlier about the tremendous pity if you like of losing
our wealth of Anglo Saxon and medieval literature and the language. If you like, its structures
and its devices are so embedded in our own work we know them, unconsciously we recognise
them which for me is the most beautiful thing.
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J. Yes and it is - it’s associative, it’s interested in ideas, it’s interested in the way we live.
There’s a lot that’s really worth hanging on to and be excited by. And I think it’s a shame that
the alliterative tradition became a little forgotten, even after Hopkins, we have been so fixed
on other things and on the end of the line especially. That’s why I think Simon Armitage and
his Gawain is so brilliant.
G. I raise this because I could count on the fingers of one hand almost the people who
are working with our older forms of literature and who are translating and bringing it
into a contemporary sensibility or contemporary awareness. Actually it’s already in the
sensibility . . .
J. Yes there is as I say the alliterative tradition. It’s a shame it almost dropped by the wayside
as a mode of listening, but there are many poets now who are working consciously more
alliteratively. Matto and Delanty’s collection of new translations of Anglo Saxon poetry The
Word Exchange is an important part of this revived interest, I think . . . I do think alliterative
phrasing gives fantastic fire- power to a narrative and I think Simon’s Gawain is just a modern
example of that.
...
G. It certainly is. Is there anything else you want to draw my attention to at all that my
clumsy questioning has not allowed you to?
J. I’m just sort of I‘m looking at your questions again now . . . One of the most important
things that happened came as I was translating the end of the first section, writing ‘my girl’
where the original is ‘my pearl’. The moment I’d written it, without thinking (driven by my
ear ‘girl/pearl’), something went click in my head and I realised that’s what I‘m writing about.
That was driven by my ear.
G. That’s really interesting because that’s one of the most beautiful things for me because
you can hear the pain of that that word.
J. At that point I realised OK, that’s my engagement with it. It wasn’t conscious in terms of
content, it was something that happened in my ear.
G. One of the most beautiful things as I say is to hear the repetition of that and because
it is close to the original yet so different and you hear something different; it has a different
charge.
J. Yes I mean there have been commentators on sort of Catholic websites talking about
how I have wrested the emphasis away from the doctrinal consolation towards this personal
elegiac aspect, and I think it’s true, without doing it deliberately or I hope heavy-handedly.
What you relay is your own reading.
G. I don’t know, perhaps you have wrested it but in so doing you have opened it up in a
completely different way to a contemporary audience.
J. You change the emphasis.
G. Yes you do.
J. Not deliberately but there it is, there it was.
G. That was an inspired piece of thinking there if I may say.
J. Yes and not even thinking, that was the wonderful thing about it.
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GAIL ASHTON IN CONVERSATION WITH PATIENCE
AGBABI, TELLING TALES (CANONGATE, 2014)
(April 2014, just before the publication of Telling Tales)
www.patienceagbabi.wordpress.com
Patience Agbabi is a poet, performer, mentor and Fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes
University. She read English at Oxford and has an MA in Creative Writing from Sussex. She
has lectured in Creative Writing at Greenwich, Cardiff and Kent Universities. Patience has
spent over 20 years celebrating the written and spoken word. Active on the literature and
arts scene, she’s on the Council of Management for The Arvon Foundation. Her poem, ‘The
Doll’s House’, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2014. Telling Tales,
a contemporary version of The Canterbury Tales, is her fourth collection of poems.
I’ve read on a number of occasions the suggestion that one of the attractions of being offered
the Canterbury Laureateship (2009–10) was a chance to write your own version of Chaucer’s
Tales. Is this true? And why had you never written it before? I read too that you describe
Chaucer as ‘a lifelong passion’. Go on, indulge me; tell me why this is so for you, what it is
that you love about him. In what ways did the Laureate post help at all with the genesis of
your own Tales?
It was a case of perfect timing: a week before I was offered the Laureateship, I had
a serious discussion with my partner about which project to get stuck into. My previous
collection, Bloodshot Monochrome, was a year old and the dust had well and truly settled
from touring. I was ready to write again. I had the idea for a children’s picture book, the
outline of a novel and the idea to add to my ‘Wife of Bafa’ poem by developing more of
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I’d considered it on and off for years but when I was offered
the laureateship I read it as a sign. Now or never. It was the project closest to my heart and
a long time coming.
There’s a freshness to Chaucer’s language that makes it timeless. That’s what I first fell in
love with as an A Level student. I was astonished at how accessible and irreverent he was.
My first encounter with Chaucer was The General Prologue, his characters, too full of life
to be contained on the page. The Miller, the Wife of Bath, the Cook, the Summoner, the
Pardoner.
And I now appreciate his technical innovation too: the first poet to extensively use the
heroic couplet in English and whilst most of the tales are written in these rhyming couplets,
his range of register within it is astonishing. He can switch from the sophisticated elaborate
style of The Knight’s Tale; to below-the-belt, fabliau peppered with words of Anglo-Saxon
origin ‘queynte’ and ‘ers’ in The Miller’s Tale; to isoteric jargon from the world of alchemy
in The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale
He’s the first poet who totally inspired my own writing, a poet, storyteller and master
dramatist, living in an age on the cusp of wider literacy. His work is designed to be both
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heard and read and that’s what I strive to achieve in my own work, and why I set out to create
Telling Tales, a contemporary version of The Canterbury Tales.
24 tales, 29 characters, even retelling some of the least well-known (and liked) narratives . . . This
is quite a feat Patience. Could you tell me something of how you approached this endeavour,
how you kept going over the planned 2 year period? What was it that drove this piece for
you? Was it any one aspect more than the other, like the form, the dramatic or performative
thread? Or was it the stories themselves?
I went into the project with a huge amount of optimism. I like to set myself challenging
writing tasks and I felt as if I’d served my poetic apprenticeship with my previous three books
where I’d written quite a few character-driven monologues and experimented successfully
with a variety of technically ‘difficult’ forms like the corona and sestina. The optimism didn’t
last long. I was soon to realise that I’d conveniently forgotten that although I did a special
paper on Chaucer at university, I hadn’t actually read all of The Canterbury Tales. Most but
not all. I’d conveniently missed out The Parson’s Tale, The Tale of Melibee, etc. the least wellknown (and liked) for a reason.
As I was fortunate to receive a Grant for the Arts for the project I had thought quite closely
about the process beforehand but nothing could prepare me for the sheer terror I felt when
I actually received the funding. Also, being Canterbury Laureate, I felt as if each poem was
not just mine but belonged to the whole of the literary community of East Kent! I began
writing January 2010 and by the end of that year had only written five poems (out of 25). A
three-month residency at Chatham Dockyard was brilliant but sapped my energy for writing.
Similarly, three months spent on an aborted version of The Knight’s Tale didn’t help either. I
was demoralised and in danger of becoming more blocked.
In my interim report to The Arts Council (January 2011) I came up with strategies that
would help me write more quickly. The most important was going on writing retreats where
I wrote a first draft of a poem in a day then moved on to the next. Staying in first-draft mode
was more productive and the more I wrote, however raw, the more confident I became. I was
able to produce 15 poems in 2011. Also, I asked for an extension to the end of 2012 to take
the pressure off. Although I was aiming for a slim volume, the original needed more time to
digest and creatively respond to. So what drove me? Panic. But also, when I immersed myself
in the stories and temporarily forgot the enormity of the task ahead, I was so inspired, that
kept me going. I also enjoyed engaging with other art forms—music and film—to feed my
creativity. Reading ‘The Parson’s Tale’ was not the most exciting experience but rewatching
Seven, to engage with the seven deadly sins, was. I found rewatching the six BBC adaptations
very helpful too.
The Arts Council website (www.artscouncil.org.uk) describes this work as a ‘pastiche’ of
Chaucer’s. Is that how you see it? Or is there something more at stake for you?
The word ‘pastiche’ describes the form of my book. It is of course, a single author collection,
but presented as an anthology with fake biogs at the back of the book. I deliberately wrote
in different forms and styles as Chaucer did, to try to link the tale to the teller. It was a
contemporary way of paying homage to Chaucer and in doing so, I wanted to do something
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new in the world of poetry. To repeatedly write as if I were someone else. Some poems are
more successful than others in this respect.
How did you manage the range of form Patience? I suspect with ease, judging by your own
eclectic influences, from Northern Soul song titles to film noir. I note that many of these
influences are from popular culture. Is that so? If so, what draws you here? Which form
challenged you most and/or which tale was the most difficult to bend in that respect?
I’ve long been interested in writing poetic sequences so have quite a lot of experience of
sustaining a form, from the sestina sequence in Transformatrix to the corona in Bloodshot
Monochrome. I’ve also enjoyed writing several specular poems. My formal influences are
mainly literary but I tend to mine other artforms for ideas e.g. my film noir version of The
Tale of Melibee is a specular poem, a form I’ve used several times. (The second half is the
exact replica of the first but in reverse order). It’s ideal for showing two conflicting points
of view from the same person, two versions of the same event. This, in turn was further
inspired by the film (originally a short story) Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan) but I wrote
the first drafts of the poem before I saw the film, read the story, and found the quotation about
cowardice and forgiveness. By perfect coincidence, the film has half of its narrative going
backwards so my poem is connected to it in both form and content.
Whilst ‘That Beatin’ Rhythm’ is written almost entirely from Northern Soul song titles, it
follows the plot of the Merchant’s Tale very closely. I was interested in the language of the
Merchant’s Tale, the poetry of high art and courtly love yet the tale was, in essence, a fabliau.
There is a tension in that contradiction. Similarly, Northern Soul is popular culture that was
never popular. On the Northern Soul scene, many of these rare tunes are highly prized and
very expensive because they did not hit mainstream culture. They have the value of high art
and the appeal of popular culture.
My love of form proved prohibitive when it came to The Knight’s Tale because I was
confident I could pull off a longer narrative in iambic pentameter ballad form but it was the
wrong form and it took me five months to realise it. What the Knight’s Tale needed wasn’t a
clever clever form, it was imaginative interpretation of content. I learnt a lesson from that: the
idea is everything. I have the technical skill but what’s the point of that without good content?
How difficult has it been to capture some of the more idiosyncratic voices such as the
Wife—okay, you’d done her before—or the Pardoner? Was there a greater expectation there
do you think?
The greatest challenge with, what I consider to be Chaucer’s most sophisticated
characterisation, was to be original. Not originality to give myself a pat on the back, but
to justify the existence of the interpretation. What could a reader gain by encountering my
versions of the Wife of Bath or the Pardoner? I was lucky that the former had a successful
life on the performance and literary poetry circuits as the Nigerian ‘Wife of Bafa’. I knew I’d
managed to pay homage to Chaucer’s original and create a new character in her own right.
Rereading The Pardoner’s Tale, which I’d studied for A’ Level, was a hairs-on-the-back-ofthe-neck experience. The writing was so vivid, the language so rich that I wasn’t daunted but
inspired. I took the bold step to stay very close to the original plot but add a twist. It would
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be a first-person narrative. My pardoner, a self-help guru, would be one of the three dissolute
men who encounter death. The challenge was how to resurrect the guru in the story rather
than how to resurrect Chaucer’s original character.
Which character has been the most challenging and which tale and/or speaker did you most
enjoy transforming?
Some characters were more fully formed than others. It took me a while to work out how
I’d allocate the Tale of Sir Thopas (and the Tale of Melibee). In the end, I decided to break
away from the original and allocate them to different speakers. Sir Thopas is now a belowthe-belt grime battle between Sir Topaz and Da Elephant. I then had to decide whether they
really were the street kids they were claiming to be and attempt to create different layers of
irony within the text, as Chaucer did when he presented himself a simpleton telling a dreadful
rhyming tale. My battle has obscene sexist language in it and I had to think long and hard
whether to tone it down or not. I decided that it had to be ‘bad’ to be ‘authentic‘, and left
it in. To cover myself, I have the host, Harry Bailey, justify it in the opening ‘Prologue’ and
apologise for it in ‘Back Track’, my version of the Retraccioun.
It’s difficult to say which tale I most enjoyed transforming. The most satisfying artistically
were The Tale of Melibee and The Parson’s because the originals had little narrative drive
and were written in prose. I had to use my imagination yet adhere as much as I could to
the originals. The one that’s probably closest to my heart is the Franklyn’s Tale where I
had fun with the magic realism and the form, my first attempt at rhyme royal, the verse
form Chaucer himself invented. It was in part inspired by another Christopher Nolan film,
Inception, about implanting ideas into people’s dreams. It was a real departure from my usual
work, so liberating! For contemporary technical inspiration, I turned to John Haynes ‘You’, a
book-length love poem to his wife written entirely in rhyme royal. His frequent enjambment
encouraged me to do the same, to maintain narrative momentum.
At what point do the certain tales or individual voices come alive for you Patience? Do you
rehearse them, go for lots of rewrites? Or is there a more ‘natural’ tipping point for you?
I often wrote a pre-draft in prose in order to inhabit the character’s voice before I attempted
to squeeze them into a poetic form. If the work flowed at first draft and it was fun then I
relaxed, knowing I was on the right track. (The three-month formal cul-de-sac of the Knight’s
Tale taught me a valuable lesson. The writing should flow easily. If it doesn’t, my muse is
telling me something). So by the second year of the project I learnt to create the first draft
in one sitting to get a feel for the whole, the voice and the narrative arc, then spent ages
reworking in later drafts.
I’ve been lucky enough to hear you perform and, of course, there are those fabulous YouTube
clips. What comes across time and again is your enjoyment of what you do. Do you get those
feelings as you write or is it a bit more of a slog for you?
Once I’d radically altered the way I write and embraced creating several first drafts at a
time, then most of the process was highly enjoyable. It was often challenging, and it stretched
me as a writer imaginatively, technically, emotionally, but that’s what I wanted from this
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project. When I was teaching, I always preferred students who had wildly creative ambitious
ideas they couldn’t quite pull off than the ones who played safe. This project enabled me
to take creative risks I wouldn’t have attempted if I hadn’t had the feeling that the spirit of
Chaucer was guiding my hand. Whenever the task seemed too great, I’d reread the tale at
hand to reinvigorate myself.
The other element here is that you perform and that performative is, of course, a strong
feature of the Tales, and medieval poetry more generally. Is this a driving force for you too?
I saw this project as the perfect way to celebrate the literary and the performative. Over a
decade ago I coined the phrase per(FORM)ance poet to describe my poetics i.e. a poet who
combines performance poetry with an interest in traditional poetic forms like the sonnet,
sestina, and more recently rhyme royal. In fact, studying Chaucer at A’ Level whetted my
appetite for poetry that set out to entertain but had a deep literary foundation. The Canterbury
Tales are particularly interesting because they were written on the cusp of the oral tradition
and burgeoning literacy. I hope to capture that duality in my work.
How did you negotiate Chaucer’s intertwined voices? I see you employ your own dramatic
frame. But did you for example cut the somewhat incomplete links Chaucer tries to use?
Also, how do you negotiate the unfinished nature of the ‘original’, how do you confront the
Retraccioun?
I decided from the outset that I would create an anthology-style book i.e. each poem would
stand alone with no links at all apart from section headings. (I maintained the conventional
ordering of the tales after researching other alternatives). I loved the unfinished nature of the
‘original’. Unfinished texts are always crying out to be ‘finished’, remixed, revisited. I had a
lot of creative fun working out how to suggest my poems had been interrupted or producing
open-endings. My version of The Cook’s Tale finishes with the mic being pulled when it
gets too below-the-belt; my Squire’s Tale presents an unresolved relationship. My Tale of
Melibee is called ‘Unfinished Business’ serving as a twist on the original where The Tale of Sir
Topas was interrupted and followed by Melibee. My Retraccioun is quite similar to Chaucer’s
but ultimately a secular apology in the voice of Harry Bailey, ‘Back Track (Grime Mix)’. I
apologise for the sexism, crude sex scenes and stereotypes, issues I genuinely grappled with
for the duration of the project.
I read on your website (www.patienceagbabi.wordpress.com) that you’d like to tour this piece
as a one-woman or collaborative show. Is this still the plan? Do you have any other thoughts
for getting it out there? Maybe an accompanying CD? A website?
I’m currently touring Telling Tales from April to October 2014. I’ve presented 10 of
the poems in a one-woman poetry slam in several arts venues, where the audience vote for the
best poem, which has been quite popular. I’ve also produced a staged slam with Performance
Poetry Organisation, Apples & Snakes, and agency, Renaissance One as one of my tour dates.
I also enjoyed reading the poems in a more conventional set, occasionally reading out the
biogs to give the audience more insight into the character. One of the most rewarding events
of the tour has been the Southwark Cathedral launch, where the audience had the dual
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experience of contemporary Chaucer and extracts of the Tales in original Middle English. I
have recorded many of the poems with The Poetry Archive, http://www.poetryarchive.org/,
which will be available to download from October 2014. Also, I am working with The Full
English to create a Chaucer Teaching Pack, which will include extracts from the poems.
My publishers, Canongate, produced a short film to help publicise the book on their website
www.canongate.tv The book is currently available in hardback and e-book formats.
This performance extends I think to your work in schools and colleges, not least with that
wonderful grime mix you performed at the English and Media Conference in October 2012.
Where you read without recourse to notes— impressive! To what extent do you think young
people have missed out on Chaucer? If they have, if the man and woman in the street have
also missed him, do you think this matters at all? Is it a language issue do you think (sorry,
there are many questions tied up in here)?
I presented Telling Tales as a seminar, workshop and keynote performance at the NATE
conferences in 2013 and 2014. Everyone agreed that Chaucer should have a higher profile
on the National Curriculum. I suspect our results-led society has frightened secondary school
teachers into going for the easier options. Yes, the language is challenging but in some ways,
easier than Shakespeare’s in-jokes to the groundlings. If A’ level students experienced the
electrifying live version of The Reeve’s Tale as I did at Cheltenham Literature Festival, they’d
love Chaucer. This was performed by Trevor Eaton ‘The Chaucer Man’. (Actually, there was
an A’ Level class in attendance and they did love Chaucer). I perceive there’s also a move
away from poetry in general and Chaucer is seen as the most difficult. I’m delighted the BBC
versions of six of the tales were so popular: although they didn’t engage with the original
language, they were excellent versions of the tales. They reached a wide range of people.
You write in contemporary idiom, just as Chaucer wrote in his contemporary and subjugated
mother tongue. Is there any response you’d like to make to this?
One of the most exciting aspects of writing this book was creating in a wide range of
registers e.g. Geordie, Yorkshire, cockney rhyming slang, Northern Soul Song titles, txt
language. The latter was a real challenge to create a new contemporary form which I call
‘100 chars’. I also enjoyed using identical rhymes (where a word rhymes with itself as in a
sestina); and homophones like Chaucer’s ‘seke/seeke’, both of which derive from the French
poetic tradition. I was aware that Chaucer was the first poet to write extensively in English
at a time when English was beginning to supersede French at court so played with that in
my Miller’s Tale, where I translated Nicholas into a Frenchman, and introduced snippets of
French into the ruder parts of the story. I wanted to replicate Chaucer’s linguistic playfulness
but in my own style.
Chaucer also inhabits academia, the occasional exam syllabus. I recently had a conversation with
a former Senior Examiner for A Level English Literature in which he indicated that Chaucer
was slipping from view at A Level and that, for him at least, that was not a particular concern.
What, if anything, do you make of this? What might be the appeal of medieval literature
which, after all, finds its way into the contemporary in a host of modern afterlives?
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Everyone I’ve met who studied Chaucer at A’ Level loved it yet it has dipped in the
popularity stakes. I hope my book, and the proposed Teaching Pack, will in a small way
change that trend. The pack will give teachers several pedagogic approaches so they feel
more equipped to take Chaucer into the classroom. Clearly a whole generation have
missed out on studying Chaucer themselves so it’s especially daunting for them to teach
it. People will always be drawn to these timeless stories and vibrant characters as the
BBC versions show. What is needed, perhaps, is a film in the original Middle English
with subtitles. I’ve recently watched the animated versions directed by Jonathan Myserson
which are allegedly available in Middle English but I’ve only encountered the modern
English version online.
What’s next for your work Patience? Apart from a well-earned rest I think!
On the strength of the Telling Tales manuscript I’ve been asked to put in a couple of
proposals for radio so I’m currently enjoying writing in this different genre. My next big
project will be poetic versions of stories from the Niger Delta region in Nigeria where my
family originate. Longer narrative poems are very rewarding to write and these unknown
stories deserve a wider audience. I’m looking forward to the challenge of working with new
characters, forms and idioms.
Many thanks for your responses and for the pleasure of talking to you Patience.
GAIL ASHTON IN CONVERSATION WITH
MATTHEW FRANCIS, MANDEVILLE (FABER, 2008)
(email, April 2014)
Matthew Francis is the author of five collections of poetry, Whereabouts (rufus books,
2005), Blizzard (1996), Dragons (2001), Mandeville (2008), and his latest, Muscovy (2013;
all Faber). His work has twice been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and in 2004 he was
chosen as one of the Next Generation poets. His first novel, WHOM, was published by
Bloomsbury in 1989; more recently, he has published a collection of short stories, Singing
a Man to Death (Cinnamon Press), which was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year
Award in 2013, and a second novel, The Book of the Needle (Cinnamon, 2014). His future
projects include a chapbook of poems based on Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, due out from
rufus books in 2015 to mark the 350th anniversary of the original text.
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What drew you to Mandeville’s Travels in the first place Matthew? What kinds of things
inspired you, and how exactly did this project come about? Does ‘the medieval’ find its way
into your work more generally would you say?
At a quite early stage of my writing career I was looking for source material to base my
work on, either in poetry or prose. I’m not sure why, but it wouldn’t have been an unusual
approach for writers of any previous age —you seek out a subject and write about or adapt it
rather than assuming all your work must come out of your own feelings and experience. The
Travels was one of many texts I sought out in this way; it influenced earlier pieces of work
(a couple of the poems in my first collection, for example), and the project itself was one I
mulled over for years before I finally started. I would say I’m interested in history in general
rather than the Middle Ages in particular. A lot of my recent work has drawn on texts from
the Early Modern period.
You call your work Mandeville; why the change? Was this implicit focus on the author—
whoever he was—intrinsic to your piece from the start?
One reason to change the title is lay claim to the book as my own imaginative effort, not
merely a version of a classic text—it is a collection of poems drawing on the Travels rather
than a translation. All my collections so far have had one-word titles, and in this case I
liked the name, and it seemed natural to choose it. But I also found myself fascinated by the
character of Mandeville, which comes through surprisingly strongly in the original, and I do
think he helps to give my book a unity just as much as the idea of a voyage round the world
does.
Mandeville’s medieval text has at its heart, I think, strange kind of conflict—between
the surreal, defamiliarized world of his travels, almost a romance, and its chosen form as a
reference book. Did you feel this to?
I most certainly do and one of the things I especially like about your version is that you
express this tension in the crystal clear yet haunting, almost poignant, voice of the narrator.
If I could just ask, why did you opt for narrative poetry instead? Equally, you choose poetry
over the prose ‘original’, even though you’ve huge success in both genres. What was your
thinking here?
Secretly, what I wanted to write was a long poem, even though what I ended up with was
that much more popular of current genres, a poetic sequence. I love narrative, and have always
been torn between fiction and poetry, so I frequently write poems with a strong narrative
drive. I still rather regret not having written Mandeville as a novel—in fact, I sometimes
think I might still try it—but the problems would have been much greater. I would have
needed much more historical detail, and I would have had to make up a cast of characters.
The latter would have been particularly problematic, as most fiction requires characters with
a certain amount of continuity, and Mandeville’s thirty-four-year voyage would inevitably
have been episodic in nature, with his relationships with other people changing as much as
his surroundings. You can’t, for example, imagine him setting off on a ship with a captain
and crew and arriving at journey’s end with the same people. Making up all the necessary
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characters and contriving a satisfying plot out of all the different elements would have been
a huge challenge. I have, since then, written a historical novel based on researched material,
and have found out how difficult it is— it took four and half years, whereas Mandeville only
took one.
Maybe you could talk about how you set about writing this book. How did you confront the
narrative element, for instance? What kinds of challenges and openings faced you when you
began to structure what is an admittedly very long work; is this why you opted for a poetry
sequence? I read elsewhere that you prefer an outside-in approach as a writer, that you like
the idea of form with all its constraints, inspirations, and joys; could you perhaps say more
about this here?
The idea that fascinated me was that of a voyage round the world. People often forget that
medieval thinkers knew that the world was round, though, of course, no one we know of had
actually sailed round it at that time. Mandeville himself alludes to the fact, almost as an aside,
in a charming little anecdote of a man who almost travels all the way round but can’t get his
companions to agree to finish the journey. As a plot there’s something almost postmodern
about that, an absurdity Beckett might have enjoyed. At the same time it reveals how difficult a
concept the roundness of the world was: he finds it as hard to grasp as we might find relativity
or the uncertainty principle—we know they’re true but they’re still difficult to imagine. And
you can represent that difficulty in poetry, which doesn’t have to say this happened; we are
quite comfortable with a poem saying something vaguer and more hypothetical, like what
if this happened? So I decided to plot a voyage round the world, taking his descriptions of
various places and arranging them in a more or less geographically coherent order, but for
much of the time the narrative is only implied. Sometimes Mandeville tells us what he did, but
more often he addresses us directly and tells us what is happening, or might happen, to us. I
take full advantage of the ambiguous word you, which might mean the fictionalized reader,
or simply one, an unspecified person.
As a poet, I’m obsessed with form, and I don’t feel a poem has really got going until I’ve
found a form for it. Every poem is a struggle with its form—I need it to intervene and shape
my writing, even to interfere with what I think I want to say, so that I have to find new ways
of saying it. At the same time, I don’t think it should be arbitrary; there must always be some
relation to the content. I chose a form for Mandeville that both resonated with the theme (the
three-line stanza, as in Dante’s terza rima, having connotations of medieval epic) and was
not so difficult it hindered my use of material from the original. Rhyme would have been too
artificial and intrusive, a conspicuous metre would have had too much cultural baggage: blank
verse reminding the reader anachronistically of Shakespeare and Milton, for example. I went
for the longest syllabic line I could fit comfortably on a page, thirteen syllables, feeling that it
was the closest I could get to Mandeville’s prose while still forcing me to use line-breaks and
stanza-breaks to space out and structure the material in the way characteristic of poetry.
Mandeville is part of a locus of contemporary reworkings, reimaginings and adaptations of
medieval texts, especially in modern poetry (I’m thinking Agababi’s work and her forthcoming
Telling Tales, Lavinia Greenlaw’s A Double Sorrow, Jane Draycott’s Pearl, the Gawain poems
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from both Armitage and O’ Donoghue, plus Armitage’s work on the Alliterative Morte
Arthure—let alone a host of Y/A and other fiction, much of it Arthurian in scope . . . ). Do
you have any thoughts on the ways in which we seem to be drawn to the medieval, and/or
why there is currently an upsurge in its popular appeal? Does it matter do you think that we
reinvigorate medieval texts and stories, or that, conversely, medieval studies is slipping off the
agenda in all but the most elite and academic of institutions?
To me, this new direction is one of the most exciting things to happen in British poetry
for a long time. It represents a break from the rather solipsistic tendencies of confessional
verse and the lyric I. Suddenly poets are admitting to an interest in things outside their own
life experiences, including history. They are also seeing verse as a way of telling stories, and
perhaps that is a response on some level to a weakening of the novel’s literary dominance. At
any rate, in reusing such material, as I suggested earlier, they are really getting back in touch
with an aspect of poetic tradition that has been allowed to grow dormant, but was important
to earlier generations.
The particular interest in the medieval, I think, is related to another current literary
tendency, the rise of fantasy. You can make up stories about swords and sorcerers, knights and
dragons, or you can remember that they had some pretty good ones hundreds of years ago.
My students, for the most part, don’t see much point in stories of everyday life and personal
relationships. They’ve grown up with the idea that fiction is the realm of the marvellous, an
idea that medieval writers would have had no difficulty with. And poetry can handle that
concept, sometimes more effectively than the novel can. There are great fantasy novels, of
course, but many of our expectations of the novel are conditioned by the tradition of realism,
so that we’re not always comfortable with fantasy fiction and either treat it as children’s
writing or as a guilty pleasure, not serious literature.
At the same time, there is the risk of creating our Middle Ages, rather than trying to
understand the historical period. Fantasy always tends towards self-indulgence, and there
needs to be some scholarly discipline to balance it. History is about understanding people
who are different from yourself. I was disappointed, for example, when I gave a class a
passage of the Travels to read, and they saw it as religious propaganda. That’s a failure of
historical imagination: Mandeville had no need to convert anyone to his beliefs because all his
contemporary readers shared them. We need history to help us understand things like this.
Do you have any thoughts or views on any of these ‘new’ medieval works (I note a number
of them are Welsh, Seren’s Mabinogion series to name but one . . . What might be at stake
here?). Perhaps you have a personal top 5-10 medieval afterlives, in any genre? If so, list them
or tell me about one or more of them?
I think the Seren reworkings of the Mabinogion—at least, the ones I’ve read— suffer from
the problems the novel form has in accommodating fantastic material. The episodic plots,
drawing on oral storytelling devices, don’t translate easily into the structures of contemporary
fiction, nor do they seem ‘relevant’ to modern life in a way that novel-readers have been
conditioned to expect.
I don’t think I could pick a top ten of medieval rewritings, but I would like to make a
special mention of Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nightmare (2002) a brilliant novel which
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adapts themes and devices from The Arabian Nights to produce a novel that evokes medieval
Cairo in a thoroughly postmodern way.
Anything else you’d like to add or comment on, any new projects in the pipeline?
My recent poems, and my forthcoming novel, draw, as I mentioned, on Early Modern
material. I’m sure I will go back to the Middle Ages at some stage, as there is so much still to
explore.
Many thanks for your time and patience Matthew. . . .
GAIL ASHTON IN CONVERSATION WITH GWYNETH
LEWIS, A HOSPITAL ODYSSEY, (BLOODAXE, 2012)
(email, Summer 2013)
www.gwynethlewis.com
Gwyneth Lewis has published eight books of poetry in Welsh and English. Parables & Faxes
(Bloodaxe Books, 1995), won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and was shortlisted for the
Forward. Zero Gravity (Bloodaxe Books, 1998), inspired by her astronaut cousin’s voyage to
repair the Hubble Space Telescope, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry. Sparrow
Tree (Bloodaxe 2011) won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award. Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s
first National Poet from 2005–06. She won the Crown at the National Eisteddfod 2012.
Other publications include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression (Harper
Perennial 2002), Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate, 2005) recounting a voyage
made with her husband on a small boat from Cardiff to North Africa, and a sci-fi novella
The Meat Tree (Seren),a retelling of part of the Welsh Mabinogion. She is a librettist and
has written two chamber operas for children and an oratorio. In 2006 she was Writer in
Residence at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University.
What strikes me is how like a medieval romance A Hospital Odyssey is with its epic journey/
quest, its characters, its set pieces and motifs, its locations and its huge imaginative sweep, at
once concrete, precise, scientific and yet prosaic, humorous. How difficult, or otherwise, was
it to negotiate these elements and were they something you were conscious of as you were
writing it?
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You’re quite right about the medieval feel to the poem. I was very taken with medieval
romance when I was at college reading English and particularly liked the way everything,
however strange, happens at plot level. That’s the paratactic structure of a story which says “and
this happened and this happened”, rather than the more modern “this happened and therefore
this happened.” I loved the way no comment was made about how odd events followed each
other. I like the horizontality of no one occurrence being more important than any other. It
allows you to put together a lot of modern disparate elements without having to worry too
much about decorum. I was familiar, of course, with the Welsh Mabinogion tales, which have
the same dream-like quality to them. To be fair, though, I should say that I owe the sweep of
the book as a whole to writers like Virgil, whose poetry I’ve loved since I was in school.
You draw extensively on the biomedical sciences, stem cell technology, and the latest
oncological research. Is this the new ‘medieval’ metaphysics do you think, where cancer is
the modern Black Death with its own myths, fallacies and ‘cures’, and where the new search
for the Holy Grail is the elimination of cancer? Or is it simply that there was a more personal
journey and experience at stake here for you?
That’s an interesting thought. I had a very personal reason for my interest in cancer, in that
my husband was being treated for non-Hodgkin Lymphoma when I was preparing to write
the poem. A stem cell transplant was one of the treatments we discussed at the time though
it didn’t prove practicable for him. I think we’re in an age of wonders, or will be soon, with
regard to some cancer treatments. I was lucky enough to be introduced to some world-class
biomedical researchers in Cardiff and they explained that, for all there might be stem cells for
blood, there might also be such a thing as cancer stem cells. This seems to me like a physical
equivalent to original sin: for us, there may be no cancer-free source to which we can return.
Given that I could only write the carer’s, rather than the patient’s, story, then I knew it had
to be a quest narrative to propel her through the hospital universe.
You write ‘illness is exile’. Could you please say more about what you mean by this? Am I right
in thinking that, just as in Sunbathing in the Rain, there’s an idea of illness as a restorative, a
contemplative time and withdrawal, even the notion of it as redemptive? So, too, not many
people will speak today of the soul. Yet you do right from the off when you write ‘their souls
made passage’ , even as the one doctor whispers ‘I want to heal . . . //and that means the soul//
before the body’. And, again, towards the end as the souls of the dead float past the spaceship
limbo Maris and her companions inhabit. What kinds of things prompted your thinking
here?
Talking about the soul is very unfashionable isn’t it? And yet it seems a physical entity
to me: that part of one’s self that’s turned towards something greater than one’s own will.
I certainly don’t envisage the soul as an ethereal shimmer above our heads, it’s much more
folded into ordinary life.
I took the “illness as exile” idea from what a friend told me about being diagnosed with
breast cancer. My friend said that it places you in a different place from the well. I didn’t want
to even pretend to know what that might feel like. This is, of course, reminiscent of Virigina
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Woolf ’s idea of illness as an undiscovered country. As for doctors treating the soul, I absolutely
don’t mean that they’re spirit healers before being physicians of the body. The satire on the
druid doctors attacks the idea that patients get ill because they’ve done something wrong or
thought negatively about something; I reject that.
However, there is an element of theatre to doctoring that’s important in the same way as
the mass is a drama. The doctor, to be successful, has to make an assessment of how to speak
to the patient in order to give him or her confidence in their treatment, and that’s a moral
issue. The best doctors discern how to address the patient most fully. This, however, needs to
come after being an excellent diagnostician.
What drew you to the form of this poem Gwyneth? Or perhaps it chose you?
It was a life task. I’d always hankered after writing a long poem, since I started to make
one when I was seven years old, so it was unfinished business. Besides, I’ve always found epic
particularly satisfying to read – from Virgil, Milton, James Merrill to Vikram Seth’s Golden
Gate. I cobbled together a stanza from Villon’s Testament, adapting it for my gait, but I was
particularly keen on his earthiness and humour.
Where does your knowledge of classical and medieval ‘story’ come from Gwyneth and how
consciously do you use it in your work? One of the many amazing things for me about this
poem is the extent to which it is medieval in spirit: all those dichotomies structuring the
work—mind/body, inner/outer, ascent/descent—and your acute awareness of the integration
of body and spirit. In particular, you focus on the body (no surprise there considering the
subject matter) but a body that’s ‘medieval’: open to speculation (all those microbes), spilling
its secrets (Bakhtin) and viscera yet with an impulse towards closure, an integritas if you like:
in the Body Museum ‘we like the body apart,//single and separate’ , how ‘nobody sees the
person in full.’ Any thoughts on this?
My thoughts on this are all in the poem! You’ve reminded me how much I liked Bakhtin’s
Rabelais and his World. Jill Mann, who taught me medieval literature, said “This book will
change your life” and it did alter how I see things. I felt it was important to get to grips with
what the body actually is and is not, so I read widely around the subject, both in mainstream
medical literature and the more New Age end of the spectrum.
I could go on forever here and ask you to speak to all or any of the medieval tropes at the
heart of what you accomplish in this poem: the dream vision choice of 3 doors, Peace, Love,
Death . . . the ‘dragon of disease’, the Mother of Cancer and her monstrous son . . . the stem
cell orchard . . . the redemptive love token ring ( in this case Helen of Troy’s) . . . Orpheus’s
music and the ascent from the underworld . . . Ludlow, the knight Templar (complete with
descriptions of armouring) . . . the noble greyhound Wilson . . . the lovely description of
Maris being carried heavenwards that reminded me of Chaucer’s narrator in the House of
Fame . . . What was your interest in these? To what extent was there a juggling act taking
place here between writing accessible poetry full of verve, drama and humour and negotiating
some of the more difficult work you’d set yourself, wearing your considerable learning so
lightly if you like ( and believe me you do accomplish this)?
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I had a lot of fun with all this! I think it worked because, in extremis, we turn naturally to
mythic ways of describing our lives. I’ll give you one example. Turns out that our Consultant
Haematologist, a wonderful man called Chris Poynton, plays clarinet in a chamber group. He
invited us to a concert they gave, so we sat there, supporting him, with his family. So, the idea
of him as a musician and doctor (coupled with Novalis’s remark about every illness requiring
a musical solution) gave me the culminating scene of the book, when the doctor leads all the
patients out of the hospital with his music. Chaucer was in my mind as well, but in the sense
of Troilus looking down at the world and laughing at his past foolishness.
In fact, if I could extrapolate two of these tropes and invite further comment. The first is
weeping; how I love the Professional Weepers of Book I. Then there’s Wilson licking the
bandages of Philoctetes’ suppurating body and Maris’s tears cleansing and healing him. In fact
Maris’s tears throughout, with her single tear in the orchard/garden the turning point in her
quest to save Hardy. I don’t need to tell you this is a crucial motif in hagiography. You use it at
the end here when Maris goes through the door marked Love. What was your thinking? How
much were you aware of the subtle difference lost to the contemporary world, that marker
between pity and piety? Or is this just too deep?
I didn’t know that consciously about hagiography, but I do collect postcards of Andalusian
Virgin Marys. Some of my favourite have lovely shiny tears on their faces. I’m a Wednesday’s
child, so I cry. It is striking to me, psychologically, how a really good weep helps you move on
in a tight situation, where you might think you have little room for manoeuvre.
The 2nd feature I’d like to ask you about is the marvellous ‘medieval’ narrator of this poem,
at once self-effacing and courteous and yet feisty, down to earth, plain speaking, humorous
and hugely compassionate. I love the bathos of lines like ‘Stuff you and stuff that scary tree’
or (to Ludlow) ‘that’s not what I call a chivalric doom,// to sit on your armoured arse.’ How
difficult was it to ‘get; this voice so right? Which came first: poem? Form? The voice? How
much of this voice is ‘you’ or is that question too naive?!
The two bits you quote are both Maris speaking, not the narrator. I had to work out exactly
where the poet (and no, that isn’t quite me) stood in the poem. I approached the task with
fear and trembling, because you can’t enter such a big project without paying your respects to
the forces of poetry and the underworld. That’s why the epic invocation is so important, you
have to pay your way by acknowledging the forces that allow you to pass safely. Otherwise, I
think I wouldn’t have been able to finish. I survived, just!
Dramatic, warm, heartbreaking, bawdy and grotesque, sardonic, brimming with compassion:
some of the words I’d use to describe A Hospital Odyssey. Would you agree? How easy or
otherwise did you find it to juggle these elements? What kind of poem was it to write? Can
you remember how the form came to you and how easy it was to fit? Did you ever think you’d
run out of steam (I ask this because it’s so fluent and natural yet Dante’s 12 book structure
alone must have made huge demands)?
The book was glorious to write, the most enjoyable so far. I felt as though I were using
all my poetic muscles for the first time. The exhilaration of the measure and my anxiety
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carried me through, but after writing so many formal stanzas, I needed a break from rhyme.
For a while.
Let’s go back to my descriptors if we could. A key word for me is its compassion, in every
sense, but especially its medieval understanding. By this I mean the affective and somatic
features you weave into the piece, in Book II for instance when the doctor, interested only
in the theatricality of medicine wants Maris to ‘go the route// of somatic therapy’ while the
matron insists pain’s ‘not transferable’ and ‘there’s no dying, not on my floor’, even as she’s so
caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare she can’t be bothered to care for her patients. Crucial
here, too, is the character of Ludlow, one who was ‘fully human’ before he was a doctor in
A&E. I take it compassion is something you think is missing from Health Care today, perhaps
from our lives full stop? And yet at the same time we’re all touchy-feely, talking-therapy
oriented? Could I ask a hard question: what ought we to find at the end of this odyssey?
Something different for all of us? The same simple lesson Maris teaches at the start, which
is love? Did you have a Holy Grail in mind at all? Is the lesson that of patience perhaps, in
whatever sense you might mean that?
In literal terms, Maris leaves the hospital with her husband, yes, but I think that the outcome
could have been very different. The happy result isn’t crucial to the poem’s plot. The real
prize, if that’s the right word, is the ring given by Helen of Troy. It’s small, hard, portable and
dark. Its importance is that it’s proof that Maris did see a vision of health which is not about
the success of the body. What this odyssey gives is a map of the terrain you enter through
illness, even if it’s not your own. I think it’s pretty accurate, from what people tell me.
And what about the humour Gwyneth which makes this such a joy to read? It’s all very
carnivalesque and visual. The Microbes Ball is a highlight for me. It’s also truly as the back
cover of my copy suggests ‘ Dr Who meets Paradise Lost.’ Now I’m a big fan of the Doctor,
one of the most prominent medieval ‘afterlives’ around today; you too? And with all of this in
mind I’m struck by how I could see this poem ‘translated’ to the screen, or as a graphic novel.
Any thoughts on this? I won’t say any plans but . . .
I love the idea of this as a graphic novel; I think that would work very well. In one way,
though, poems in stanzas are already cartoons, they’re framed spatially as well as in time.
I’m a lifelong Dr Who fan. I watched the wonderful revival by Russell T Davies carefully and
learned from how he used myth to examine moral questions. The programme is, like any
good art, full of echoes of other works.
I did adapt A Hospital Odyssey for BBC Radio 4. It was produced and directed by Allegra
McIlory and was a rich aural experience. We took ages to decide, for example, how Ludlow’s
armour should sound, but the Microbe’s Ball seemed entirely realistic, once you accept that
germs can talk.
Do you have any thoughts on the place of medieval literature in the world today Gwyneth? As
an ex-academic medievalist I’m still struck by how medieval literature occupies a smaller and
smaller space in UK schools and universities yet how its afterlives proliferate in contemporary
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culture. Talking to a former Senior Examiner for English Literature A level last year, he
suggested he had no interest in retaining Chaucer on these papers, that literature of this kind
was set to disappear (all literature now begins with Shakespeare I assume). I wonder if you
have any views here?
Oh dear, that’s very depressing. If you don’t have help to read Chaucer at school, then
you’re never going to venture into that world. It’s a big mistake, I feel. There’s nothing to be
gained from giving our children more shallow roots into their culture. An even more worrying
fact, for me, is that children don’t have access to the biggest source for literature until now:
the Bible. This is going to affect writers too. It’s like being cut off from the water table.
It’s also striking that in popular culture there’s been a huge revival in medieval storytelling, as if that world has to be reinvented in fantasy, even if it’s not taught in the classroom.
I discovered Game of Thrones this year: marvellous! It’s no accident, I’ll bet, that fantasy’s
drawing on medieval literature at exactly the time it’s been left out of the syllabus.
Finally, is there anything else you’d like to say about the poem and its writing, anything you’d
like to expand on or have us talk about further?
No, only to thank you for reading the book carefully and thinking about it.
As ever, it’s been a privilege and a joy both to read your work Gwyneth and to have you talk
to me about it. Thank you so much.
GAIL ASHTON IN CONVERSATION WITH KAREN MAITLAND,
COMPANY OF LIARS (PENGUIN, 2009), THE OWL KILLERS
(PENGUIN, 2010), THE GALLOWS CURSE (PENGUIN, 2012)
(Summer 2013)
www.karenmaitland.com
Karen Maitland’s bestselling, award-winning medievalist novels are cross-genre historical
fiction and thrillers. Read The Owl Killers- a novel of the Dark Ages (Penguin, 2010), The
Gallows Curse (Penguin, 2012), Company of Liars – a novel of the plague (Penguin, 2009)
and its companion novella Liars and Thieves (Headline, 2014), The Vanishing Witch about
the Peasants’ Revolt (Headline, 2014), and The Falcons of Fire and Ice (Penguin, 2012).
Karen also writes as part of the medieval Thrillers collective of authors published by Simon
& Schuster. The tenth and final novel in this series is The Deadliest Sin (2014) about a group
of pilgrims on their way to Walsingham in the year of the plague.
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How exactly did you get started with the medieval period Karen? Did you study it somewhere
or have your travels inspired you? What draws you to it time and again? Your work has a
broad historical sweep to match the literally hundreds of years of the so-called Middle Ages
but is there any particular time, activity or group of people that you’re especially attracted
to, and why?
Over twenty years ago, I visited Bruges in Belgium and stumbled across the beguinage
there. I’d never heard of beguines; I don’t think many people in England had at that time, and
I was fascinated by the idea of a city of women. I was also intrigued by the strong reaction
against them even after all those centuries. One of guides at the cathedral actually told me
they were all prostitutes.
I came home and began to research them, and my interest rapidly turned to indignation
when I discovered what a vast movement it was in the Middle Ages and how many thousands
of women had been involved. They had left such a legacy of schools and hospitals and writing,
not to mention ideas that were way in advance of their time, which were to emerge later in
the Quakers as well as many other radical groups. Why had they been written out of history?
Why had I, who’d been taught history in an all-girls’ school, never been taught this? After
all, there were probably more women involved in this movement, than there were men who
had fought in crusades. (Incidentally, why were we never taught women also fought in the
crusades?) In the last few years, I am delighted to say, they have been well studied, and
hopefully over time they will take their rightful place in history. But that was the start of my
own fascination with the Middle Ages and eventually I wrote a novel about the beguines in
The Owl Killers.
I am drawn to the Middle Ages for two reasons. Firstly, the times we are living through now
have so much in common with the Middle Ages, probably more so than any other historical
period. With them we share massive and rapid climate change with the resulting extremes of
weather, floods, droughts and food crisis. The rise of unknown and frightening pandemics
in both humans and animals, for which we struggle to find cures. War and tension has again
arisen between Christian and Muslim countries, with the same crusade mentality on both sides.
Women are once now fighting the same religious battles in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, as
the beguines were in the Middle Ages. We have similar economic uncertainty, bringing with
it a resurgence of interest in fortune-telling, astrology etc. as a means of desperately trying to
control events and our lives which are becoming increasingly uncertain just as they were in
the Middle Ages. I think reading and writing about the Middle Ages allows us to view modern
problems from a different angle.
The second reason for my preoccupation with the Middle Ages is the mind-set of the
time. They had very advanced medical knowledge, including anaesthetics and antiseptics, and
could perform complex operations, skills which would soon disappear for centuries. They
built bridges, castles and cathedrals which are still standing as a tribute to engineering feats
which have seldom been surpassed even today. Yet, they believed in the supernatural as woven
into every part of daily life. Angels and demons, saints and mythical beasts were part of most
people’s beliefs. The Church encouraged it even to the point of training some priests as
necromancers. In the twenty-first century we compartmentalise science, religion, superstition,
myth etc. But these were all interwoven in the Middle Ages. A physician would use good
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medical principles together with amulets to cure a patient. A captain going into battle would
use sound military planning, but employ omens and saints’ relics to assure victory. A farmer
would pray in church, but place an offering of bread and salt in the corner of his field for the
faerie folk before ploughing. It is this mindset that I love about the Middle Ages and one, I
believe, which is surprising, often ignored in books set in this period.
Before I started writing novels, I was commissioned to write a number of non-fiction
books which involved going into very deprived communities and interviewing people about
their lives. I found that often the most seemingly ordinary people had experienced the most
extraordinary lives. During this time I edited the autobiography of a man who’d worked on
ships when they were still carrying cargoes under sail down the canals and into the Humber.
He had unique knowledge and skills which, if it hadn’t been for the book, would have died
with him. It breaks my heart to think of how many men and women like him through the
centuries have lived and died, unremarked and unrecorded. I think that’s why I am always
drawn to write stories, not about kings and queens, but about villagers, craftsmen, the people
who really shaped our landscape. It’s their lives which intrigue me. In a way, I want to give
those unknown people a voice, even if it’s only through fictional characters, saying ‘we lived,
we struggled and you in the twenty-first century are the people you are now because of what
we were’.
Where do your ideas come from? How do you set about the research demanded for these
huge, complex and incredibly rich novels? And which comes first: inspiration, literature (as
in the medieval or folk stories that shape your books. I’m thinking of the famous Wife of
Bath’s folk tale of what men most desire and the compromising ‘magic’ green girdle of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that you revision in The Gallows Curse), a historical
snippet?
I am hugely influenced by folktales and medieval tales; I’ve had a life-long love of them.
Folktales are the key to understanding the character of any group of people, so if I travel
anywhere in England or abroad, the first thing I do is read the folk tales and myths of that
place. They tell you about the character of the people and the way they see they landscape.
In terms of medieval literature, I don’t think we fully appreciate the extent to which they are
foundation of the centuries of art and literature which came after. I think these stories, values
and ideas are inextricably woven into modern Western culture and literature. These tales are
embedded deep in the recesses of my mind waiting to emerge, often emerging in my dreams
and only after I’ve written a first draft, do I realise where the images or symbols have sprung
from.
I always think of collecting ideas as if you are walking down a track and every now and
then you find a piece of a jigsaw puzzle lying on the path. You pick up the pieces, not even
knowing if they belong to the same puzzle. In idle movements you take them out and look at
them and suddenly see that two of the hundreds of pieces you collected over the years lock
together and you can see a fragment of a picture. So for example, in Company of Liars, the
hollows in the ground, towards the end of the book, where animals lie dead is something I
saw on a camping holiday when I was a child. This eventually came together with the myth
of Morrigan, the shape-shifting goddess whom I learned about when, years later, I worked in
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Ireland. Some years after that I was commissioned to tour with a theatre company travelling
the length of Britain in midwinter and playing in remote rural villages and I began to wonder
what life must have been like for those minstrels in the Middle Ages who had to tramp from
village to village to entertain. Finally, a contemporary news item about the panic over Bird
Flu, gave me the last piece of the puzzle and Company of Liars emerged.
Once a corner of the puzzle is assembled like this, I then move onto the research. Take The
Gallows Curse: I already knew about sin-eaters, that was one of the pieces of the jigsaw I’d
collected years ago. It was a prime case of a historical snippet becoming the germ of a plot,
fired by an article I read in a modern magazine about a woman who’d had an organ transplant
and thought she was beginning to take on the personality of the donor. This struck me as
very similar to the fears medieval people had who believed that they had been tricked into
becoming sin-eaters.
I then researched the general political situation surrounding the Interdict of King John,
the threat of French invasion and also the crusades under King Richard. Then having soaked
my mind in the general background, I move on to specific things. One of my characters was
castrated as a child, so I reached modern medical journals to find out what effect that would
have on both psychological and physical development. I looked at medieval food which is
important in the novel; how they caught eels and the herbs used in the conjuring spells of
the time.
One key thing for me is to actually visit the places and buildings I write about in the
novels. So for The Gallows Curse I spent time lying on a rise about Great Yarmouth to try to
imagine what a battle between ships would have been like there when Great Yarmouth was
an island. I also visited a manor house of the type that features in the novel, and walked the
outside staircase trying to imagine servants racing up and down with food in the dark from
the outside kitchen, with only flickering torches to light their way.
You have some amazing characters in your books (Mother Margot in The Gallows Curse is a
favourite of mine). How and when do particular voices come alive for you?
She is one of mine too. I built her up around a remark a woman on a council estate made
to me. She’d had a really hard life, but told me, ‘I’m not a survivor, I am a fighter.’ She
was, I hasten to add, nothing like Mother Margot in any other way. But often it is one key
personality trait or a physical feature that is the key to a character. With Pega in The Owl
Killers it was Chaucer’s reference to a lecherous gap between the front teeth. Pega was created
from her teeth.
I know they have come alive, when I start dreaming about them. I am on a train or in a
cafe and I look up and see them sitting opposite me in my dream. That is usually the point
when I start to have to change the plot, because I know that what I had originally thought
that character would do at that point, I now realise they wouldn’t. I have just had this happen
to me with character in the novel I’m writing called the The Vanishing Witch (2014). I was
writing a scene in which there is an argument and I had planned that one character would
resolve to join the rebellion at this point, but the character I had intended would join the
rebels didn’t do it. Much to my surprise, another character did it instead.
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Your women are often particularly strong and interesting, especially given the restricted role
for most of them in medieval life. Is that something you’re conscious of, something you plan
for? A number of them have magic or supernatural attributes. Could you say something about
why or how this is a recurrent theme for you?
In the early Middle Ages, wealthy women had more power than they were to have by
the end of Middle Ages. Educated women were allowed to enter medical school and indeed
several wrote text books which were still being used in in the 18th & 19th centuries long
after women had been prevented from practising medicine. Wealthy and titled women could
argue their own cases in court and they ran immense estates in their husbands’ absence,
and there are several accounts of woman donning armour and leading the defence of their
husbands’ lands and, of course women archers fought in the crusades. But all of that power
they had was gradually lost as the Middle Ages wore on. But I think there is a romantic view,
probably started by the Victorians, that in the Middle Ages all wealthy women did was to
waft handkerchiefs from battlements as their husbands went off to war. I am determined to
counter that.
But most of the women I write about were at the poorer ends of society where life
was pretty restricted for both sexes. Women were not confined to the home; it was it an
economic necessity that they worked, but they didn’t have a voice or any power, especially
if they were serfs. One of the few areas the poorer women had control over was folk
medicine and folk magic. I think the home was often where the beliefs in the old gods and
old folk ways remained strongest and hearth and home was the woman’s domain. These
skills were increasingly demonised, with not only tragic consequences for many women
who would later be accused of witchcraft, but also for the whole of society because the
expert knowledge of herbs and healing held by both the cunning women and the nuns
would be lost.
Again, for me it is a question of trying to reflect the beliefs of the time and people did
believe cunning women had supernatural abilities and no doubt they believed it themselves.
Even the great scholar and theologian, Bishop Grosseteste, in 1225 wrote a thesis, Expositio
in epistolam Sancti Pauli ad Galatas, in which he gives a theological explanation for the Evil
Eye. He writes, ‘For who knows whether an envious person’s sight is poisonous and infects
those of tender years, as the sight of a basilisk infects the air and as the sight of a menstruating
woman infects a new mirror, freshly cleaned and polished.’
Religion, too, features strongly, and that medieval mix of pagan and Christian, of nation
building and questions of identity with references to the Crusades, to Saracen and Jew in The
Gallows Curse and Company of Liars. Zophiel’s hard line stance on many issues, including
sexual ‘sin’, in Company of Liars, makes him a fascinating character while the centrality of
relics in the novel is a crucial theme. Could you maybe say something about any of these
aspects of your work?
Having lived in countries where religious divides caused bitter bloodshed, I am interested
by religion’s on-going ability to bring out the very best and the very worst in human
behaviour, which even today shows no sign of diminishing. I’m endlessly fascinated by
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the way religious leaders, both then and now exhibit the very opposite of the virtues their
religion extols for its followers, and how religion is used to force others to comply. People
are both willing to submit to terrible deaths for the sake of their faith, but also to impose
those same cruel tortures on others in the name of their loving and merciful gods. That sadly
hasn’t changed.
Paganism lay on just beneath the surface in the Middle Ages, as it does today. Economists
today tell us that in times of recession or crisis the sale of tarot cards, fortune-telling and
lucky charms rises markedly. People are desperate for some measure of control and the same
happened in the Middle Ages, when the Church failed to halt the progress of the plague, then
people reverted to the old pagan practices and we still do. When Queen Victoria’s son, the
Prince of Wales, was seriously ill and the doctors said there was nothing more they could do,
Queen Victoria sent for a toadsman from the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk to come and
cure her son. He did recover, though whether this was due to the toadsman or not is not
recorded. Even a queen, whose title was ‘Defender of the Faith’, reverted to the old ways
when desperate.
An example of this mix of pagan and Christian attitudes is represented by one of my
characters, Cygnus the storyteller, in Company of Liars, who tells several stories about
swans.
In pre-Christian days, there was a widespread belief across Europe in supernatural creatures
of the air and water who lived their lives as swans. If they came across a human they found
attractive, they would transform themselves into a beautiful person, make love to the human,
then when they were weary of the human, transform back into a swan and fly off.
This was anathema to the Church, because it suggested that animals and birds were higher
beings than humans, otherwise why would anyone choose to be a swan? They couldn’t suppress
the legends so they were transformed into Christian versions, giving rise to the stories such as
Swan Lake and Grimm’s tale of the Six Swans. In these Christianised stories, the swans were
once humans who had been transformed into birds by a wicked sorcerer or witch, and longed
to be human again. They could only be rescued from their plight by the Christian virtues of
faithfulness, chastity and self-sacrifice. They became classic Christian stories of redemption,
with the swan now representing the sinful or evil nature from which they had redeemed by
the sacrifice of ‘good’ person.
Finally the swan story became an official medieval government lie. Godfrey, Knight
Commander of Jerusalem, returned from the crusades immensely wealthy and powerful.
Rumours began to circulate that he was not in fact of noble birth. The whole feudal system
was based on the idea that only nobility could rule, and only knights of noble birth could
display the knightly virtues of bravery and honour. So, a minstrel was commissioned to invent
a story to cover up his lack of lineage. The story he came up with was an offshoot of this
Christian myth of bewitched humans.
In Company of Liars, I pull together all three legends, which Cygnus tells as the story of the
Swan Knight towards the end of the novel. As he tells it, he moves from the pagan tale to the
Christian and then to the political spin-doctor tale. Of course, in the novel, Cygnus is telling
this story for a very different reason, but as a character he represents this transition between
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pagan and Christian in the Middle Ages. He longs to fly like the swans, whereas Zophiel who
represents the Christian viewpoint sees Cygnus and his longing as less than human, in fact
subhuman, and treats Cygnus accordingly.
I continue to see so much in your work that is ‘medieval’ in spirit and enterprise . . . How
much are we shaped by landscape, for example, which is something that figures strongly in
your novels: Ely, Yarmouth, rivers, and the marshlands in The Gallows Curse, the place names
and towns and villages, the fenlands of Company of Liars?
In those days I think people were formed by the land in which they grew up. It dictated
what jobs they did, what they ate, how they lived and what the threats they had to overcome.
Many ancient local legends arise from the landscape itself: an oddly shaped rock, a mountain,
a lake, the seals that bask on the shore which become the mythical selkies. People who lived
by the sea developed very different superstitions and customs from those who worked on
the land.
In church, people would have seen wall-paintings of Jesus and other biblical characters,
but they weren’t set in the Holy Land. They would have seen Jesus preaching on the hill
outside their own village. Saints would have been painted walking down the streets in their
own town. Mythical beasts, angels and demons would have peeped out from behind their
neighbour’s barn. So the whole of their religion was drawn back into their own landscape and
so even their beliefs were then shaped by that landscape.
But I think, although we are slightly more removed from this today, the landscape still
shapes us. I know Londoners who are quite nervous of the countryside and its lack of
people. People who grew up with the big skies and vast horizons of Lincolnshire say they feel
claustrophobic in the Welsh mountains, and people used to hills, feel utterly depressed by flat
fenland. It affects the character of the people.
And many people I’ve spoken to have a landscape which, when they enter it, they say
‘feels like coming home’, even if it’s a place they haven’t been to before. This must mean it
is resonating with something subliminal in them. In Company of Liars, I tried to explore this
concept of home. What is home? Where is home? I don’t think we fully understand what
makes that feeling of home, even though advertisers spend a fortune trying to persuade us
that this sofa or that family meal with real gravy will give us this sense of ‘home’.
Similarly pestilence and the weather take on such significance in Company of Liars they seem
to count as characters in their own right. . . .
Having lived in a rural village in Nigeria, I am aware of how much medieval people
were affected by the seasons and weather. It governed their lives in every sense, from simply
struggling to work in rain, storms or blazing sunshine, to it literally being a matter of life.
If the crops failed in your area where was food to come from? Weather and pandemics
were entirely outside anyone’s control, which made them into dragons, monsters and tyrants
which could rarely be defeated. So, I do think of weather and disease as characters in the
Middle Ages, because they seemed to have an independent will of their own. In the same way
that sailors and fishermen talk and think about the sea as if it was sentient being, a person,
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someone to be wooed, appeased or conquered. Mountaineers speak of mountains in much
the same way.
In the last century, this view of weather and plagues was fading because we felt we had
control of disease, and could at least predict what would happen with the weather. Many
worked indoors rather than in the fields and if the crops in your area failed, you could buy
what you needed from another part of the country or from abroad. But in the last decade with
the rise of unknown pandemics and extremes of weather again, just as they had the Middle
Ages, the language you hear used is very much back to thinking of these things almost as
demons bent on destroying man. Interesting, isn’t it, that we don’t give hurricanes numbers,
we give them human names.
Yes it is a fascinating thought. And then there are all those ‘medieval’ monsters: the beasts,
the disguised or deformed humans (how I love the hidden depths of Ma Margot’s ‘boarding’
house). Your books are Gothic, peopled by grotesques, shockingly violent ( I really wasn’t
expecting that, I don’t know why) and bloody, yet also redemptive. What’s going on here
for you?
I think many authors whether they write modern or historical novels, often choose
viewpoint characters who are outside society, because if they were inside, for one thing, they
would be reasonably happy and therefore not good material for fiction. But also by virtue
of being marginalised they are able to hold up a mirror to society. Even Bridget Jones, who
is often referred to as the typical singleton, is in fact an outsider in her family circle. Her
dilemmas and the humour comes precisely from the fact that she is not in a relationship, not
having 2.4 kids and a nice domestic house as all of her relatives are, so she is treated by the
extended family as different, an object of ridicule or pity.
For me one of the advantages of writing historical novels is that by presenting the way,
say, homosexuals, the disabled, the maimed were treated in the Middle Ages, it allows us to
examine these issues at a comfortable distance and ask ourselves, though our treatment may
be superficially much better, have our attitudes deep down really changed towards those we
perceive as different?
There was a programme on TV where Stephen Fry looked at bipolar disorder and found
it was a source of immense creativity. He asked people with bipolar if a pill was developed
that would ‘cure’ them, would they take it, and most said no. Then there was outrage in some
quarters, when deaf parents refused to allow their deaf children to have an operation that
would allow them to hear. The parents didn’t regard lack of hearing as a disability. We know
that people who have dyslexia, have brains wired for great creativity, yet you hear the phrase
‘suffers from dyslexia’. We still, after all these years, view being different as a disability not
as a gift.
Similarly we still hear talk in some religious groups of attempts to ‘cure’ homosexuality. I
actually heard a clergyman the other day protest against women vicars and bishops citing the
fact that they menstruated and were therefore ‘unclean’.
In terms of the monsters in the novels that is a different question. They come from inside
us. Certainly in my case they come from inside me— nightmares, imagination. But they are
our dark side and are something we should embrace as part of our nature. An oil painting
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depends on the painter painting shadow as much as light to give it depth and to make it threedimensional. All of us have a dark side. We all have creatures lurking in the subterranean
passages of our mind. I think in the Middle Ages they were just much better at objectifying
them and acknowledging them than we are now. Though the constant fascination writers and
readers have had for those dark creatures which dwell inside us has been around at least since
the time of Shelley and Bram Stoker, but I believe it’s clearly there in Medieval Literature too,
and it continues today in the teenage Vampire books and films. We need some way of taming
the darkness within us and we do it by turning it into a monster.
Where did your travellers come from in Company of Liars, what is the back-story here? The
novel clearly nods to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales while a couple of characters, Camelot
especially, remind me in so many ways of the Pardoner (I could write an article here but don’t
want to give away the plot of your book). Was any of this a conscious influence?
I had studied The Canterbury Tales at school so the influence had been there for a long
time, but it wasn’t until after the first draft, I saw the link and began to build on it. Company
of Liars is the dark side of Chaucer’s merry England. From the start I choose nine as the
number of travellers, because nine is the number of completion in the rune lore and also the
number signifying the end and beginning. In the book the evil doesn’t begin until the nine
are assembled. But it wasn’t until after the book came out and I was watching the Lord of the
Rings films and I remembered Tolkien had nine ring bearers too, for exactly the same reason,
though I wasn’t conscious of that link as I was writing.
I began writing The Owl Killers before I wrote Company of Liars. Camelot was created just
to deliver the prologue and epilogue in The Owl Killers, but when I started to think about the
character’s life story, it was far too interesting to be relegated to a bit-part player. I felt as if
Camelot was standing at my shoulder demanding his own story be told. I stopped writing The
Owl Killers and wrote Company of Liars just to shut the character up and get some peace.
Each character arrived in a different way. But I think in many ways the overall structure
came from wanting to get back to old-fashioned storytelling, the kind of tales people would
once share around a fire or on a pilgrimage.
Could we talk about genre and ways of telling now perhaps? What is your audience do
you think, what kinds of people come to your readings? How much are you aware of that
audience as you write or plot new books?
From the emails I get, I find that my readers are from a very wide age group from young
teenagers to all ages of adults. Some readers are drawn by the history side, others by thriller
elements or the multi-layered plot, others the folklore and magic elements. Surprisingly a
large number of men read the books, in fact possibly more men than women.
In response to comments, I have included more ancient customs, folklore and plant lore
not in the novels themselves, but in the chapter headings, because people tell me they are
fascinated by this. They are often delighted to discover that something strange that their
Grandma did, like insisting egg-shells were turned over and smashed after the boiled egg was
eaten, actually goes back to Medieval times if not pre-Christian times. I had one man tell me
at an author talk that the custom of the Cripples Wedding in Company of Liars which was
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practised all over England and Europe actually took place in Cambridgeshire as recently as
20 years ago. Another told me his grandfather was a toadsman, as in The Owl Killers, and
always wore the toad’s bone. Recently, another elderly audience member told me they had
a sin-eater in their village when he was child after I was speaking about the sin-eater in The
Gallows Curse.
I think people are also interested in the differences between what they were taught at
school about the Middle Ages and more recent research. For example, there is the common
belief that people with toothache merely had their teeth yanked out without anaesthetic in
medieval times, whereas there is an incident in The Owl Killers in which a girl gets her tooth
drilled and filled and is given pain relief. Readers often don’t realise that they did have this
skill in the Middle Ages, though obviously the poor couldn’t afford to pay for skilled dental
work.
People have been kind enough to say that they also relate to the characters, and I am
thrilled by that because although my characters inhabit a very different world, I would like
to think readers feel they might run into similar types down the pub or in the work place.
Human nature, hopes and fears, cruelties, loves and passions never really change.
For me you write both as a contemporary and ‘as a medieval’ in that you use familiar romance
patterns of inter-relation, and the modern interlaced narrative structure that stems from it.
Your endings are amazing too, conclusive yet not, pointing up ambivalences and begging
more questions (Company of Liars is a classic case in point). Again, is this something you
deliberately write into your work?
The interlaced narrative is certainly important to me. Each character has their own
problems and issues which are almost irrelevant to the other characters, rather as we see in
modern soaps, and yet the decisions they take in isolation are going to make their individual
worlds collide. Lives twine about each other, more and more tightly.
I love the recurring theme in medieval literature that it is the seemingly insignificant
decisions, or even the ones we don’t realised we’ve made, that become the very things that
ultimately destroy us. In the medieval tale of Peredur, Son of York, the hero faces huge choices
and overcomes all kind of obstacles, but as the black girl tells him, it is his simple failure to
ask why the lance is bleeding that is ultimately the cause of the misery of the kingdom. That
is so true to life; I think it is the small decisions that always prove more fateful than the big
ones we agonise over, something I try to reflect in the novels.
Endings: I grew up in war-torn countries and learned from a very tender age that the
cavalry does not come charging over the hill to rescue the innocent at the eleventh hour. I
hated children’s literature for its happy, sewn-up endings. What was the point of reading the
story, if you knew the hero was never really in any danger of dying? Graham Greene was
the first adult author I read at a very early age and I fell in love with his characters, because
you knew his anti-hero could actually die, but, at the same time you felt that the story would
continue, because you could guess what might have happened to him in the end though you
never knew for certain.
I am a firm believer in the fact that only half the book is ever written by the author; the
other half is written by the reader who brings their own experiences, personality, hang-ups,
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and passions to the story. Therefore I want to leave room for the reader’s imagination. I want
the characters to live on in their heads.
What’s your genre do you think or is this a reductive question? I’ve seen you advertised as
a writer of medieval mysteries or thrillers and, of course, you participate in a collective that
does that. Could you tell me more about that group of writers and what you all do? How
exactly do you collaborate with them, and why?
The books I write with the Medieval Murderers (see www.michaeljecks.co.uk/
medievalmurder/) are firmly in the historical crime/thriller genre. The group consists of
historical crime writers Philip Gooden, Susanna Gregory, Michael Jecks, Bernard Knight &
Ian Morson and myself. The group was initially formed by Michael Jecks and the others who
decided that giving readings at author talks was fairly pointless—boring to any reader who’d
already read the book, and meaningless to any reader who hadn’t and was hearing a short
extract out of context. So it would be much more interesting to speak as a group and chat
among themselves, sparking off one another
They decided that as they all write in different medieval periods it would be fun to write
a book in which an object would pass down through the ages; in the case of the first book
this was a fragment of the true cross stolen in the crusades and cursed by a dying monk. Each
author would write a self-contained crime/thriller novella featuring this object and then one
person would write an epilogue with the final crime set in the modern day. Each author writes
in their own style and authors who have on-going detectives from their own series books
sometimes use them in their novella. I was a latecomer to the group, the last to join, coming
in to write book number 7.
No one thought it would ever be more than one book, but we are currently writing
number 9 and have a contract for number 10. As well as objects such a sword, a meteorite,
King Arthur’s bones and a book of prophecies, we also had places through the ages such as
an abbey and an iron age hill near Bath which is a great opportunity to show how somewhere
like Bath evolved and changed over the years. Our most recent novel features a cursed
Medieval Mystery Play, which rather like Macbeth seems to bring death where ever is
performed.
We are scattered all over the country, so we seldom get an event that we all do together.
Usually it’s just three at time, but we do most of our discussion about the books by email.
Someone, usually the person who came up with the idea for the book, writes the Prologue
explaining how this object or place came into being in ancient times. Then we decide which
time slot each author will take and someone volunteers to do the Epilogue as well as own
their novella. Then we research and write.
If an object is involved you have to decide before you write your story where you are
going to leave the object at the end of your novella, so that the next author’s characters can
find/steal/buy it at the beginning of their story in ten or 100 years’ time, depending on the
time gap. So you have then to work your story towards that point. As you write, you have to
remember to tell any author who comes after you if you’ve changed the object: broken the tip
off the sword; got blood stains on the meteorite; added any words to the play script or built
a new staircase in the abbey.
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Emails fly back and forth – ‘If my character has got the fake bones, who ended up with the
real relic?’ ‘Will the play script be in scroll form or bound as a book by the time my character
gets it?’
‘Would your character sell the sacred stone to mine?’
‘No, she’d never part with it.’
‘The problem is my character is far too honourable to steal it.’
‘What about someone else stealing it and your character buying it not knowing it’s
stolen?’
We ask often check historical details with each other. Bernard Knight, having been the
pathologist on the Fred/Rosemary West case and a great expert on forensics, can answer any
question about dead bodies. Michael Jecks is a medieval weapons expert. Philip Gooden has
written many books on the evolution of language, so can advise on words and terms. We all
have our specialisms.
All of our novellas are then sent to our wonderful and long-suffering agent, Dot Lumley, who
represents the Medieval Murderer books, though we all have our own agents for our individual
novels. She assembles them and checks for any glaring inconsistencies between the novellas
such descriptions of the object and whether two author have used the same name for their
leading characters which could be confusing for the reader. Then it’s off to the publishers.
That’s fascinating—and sounds like fun! If we could come back to genre for a moment . . . is
a label what you have in order to sell books? In a similar way, your novels have a generic
production style, don’t they, all medieval illuminated capitals, Gothic fonts for titles,
decorations and symbols for chapter headings. How much is this your choice? One advantage
of this, I think, is to enhance the cult status or appeal of a body of work. Would you agree you
have a kind of cult following? I suppose I see your fabulous website (see www.karenmaitland.
com) as part of this fandom . . .
I can’t take any credit at all for design of layout or covers. I occasionally get asked if there
are any images in the book that might be worked into the cover such as a bird, a skull, that
kind of thing; the rest is down to the publishers and designers. The only thing I was worried
about for the first book was that they might produce a book that had one of those headless
women in period costume on the front which were all the rage for historical novels. Apart
from the very sexist idea of promoting a woman as just a body draped in a costume, if they
had done that, I would have asked that if she was going to be headless it would be because her
head had been cut off and the stump was bleeding. But fortunately there was no suggestion
of going down that route.
But it is interesting to look at the covers of novels written over the past 100 years which are
set in the Middle Ages and see what the images on the covers say about our perceptions of the
period and how those perceptions have changed over the decades, and how we’ve interpreted
the fashions of our time for the medieval covers.
But I think that since I write standalone novels rather than a series, it is all the more
important to have a consistent brand look. And readers do say they like a run of books by an
author that have a consistency on their book shelves.
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It would be lovely to have a cult following—maybe one day . . .
Sorry to keep harping on this question of genre . . . Maybe the only place for medieval
afterlives is in genre fiction, as romance, or sci-fi, or thriller perhaps? Do you have any
thoughts on this?
I think the historical novel covers every type of genre fiction from faction (fictionalised
biography of the famous people from history) to crime, thriller and romance. I think it’s true
that historical fiction doesn’t actually exist as a genre as far as the booksellers are concerned,
but increasingly seems to have become a subdivision of other genres such romance or crime
or Sci Fi or even literary fiction. You can tell that from where it is placed on the shelves in
shops. There isn’t an historical fiction section in most shops or even entire shops devoted
to historical fiction as there is for crime, for example. I think this is a shift from when I was
a child reading Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy when there did seem to be a genre called
historical fiction.
But, unlike fiction of any genre set in modern times, I think people do read historical
fiction for the story, but also to actually learn about history. It is considered a bridge between
non-fiction and fiction in a way that contemporary fiction isn’t. I was talking to one reader,
who said she thought ‘historical fiction was less frivolous and more worthy than a modern
novel.’ She said didn’t feel guilty about reading it, because she was learning something. I
think that is still quite a powerful motive for reading it, possibly going back to childhood
when reading a story was considered by adults to be pastime, but reading a non-fiction book
was studying. Historical fiction was regarded as honorary non-fiction and considered an
‘improving book.’
I suppose the other thing that really strikes me is that I was initially put off by your genre label
and might not have otherwise read your work. Now I’m a huge fan, not least because I think
your novels are far more ‘literary’ and complex, far more subtle than the marketing might
have us believe. Your take on Chaucer in Company of Liars is a case in point, but equally in
the same novel so is your clever use of a first-person narrator whom I trust right till the end.
Elsewhere The Gallows Curse kept me hooked to the last while The Owl Killers is thoroughly
eerie and atmospheric. These are the hallmarks of a skilled and accomplished writer, which
is not to say genre writers aren’t that. Just that maybe labels are restricting. Is it possible you
have other aspirations or is that a question you’d rather not answer?
Thank you so much! Genre labels are a blessing and a curse. They are needed because a big
part of the publishers selling the book to the shops and even on-line is being able to tell the
buyers exactly where it will fit on their shelves. Readers also like to search for key words online. But equally it can put readers off. I’ve several times been told that ‘I don’t like thrillers
and therefore didn’t buy your book, but I was subsequently given it and loved it because it
isn’t a conventional thriller.’ Equally it can work the other way; people buy it because it a
thriller but it turns out it’s not what they mean by ‘thriller.’ It is much harder to market books
like mine that don’t fit neatly into the centre of a genre. Even literature awards, reviews,
arts programmes seem to reinforce this division into genres and the separation of literary
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and popular fiction. I honestly don’t know how we resolve it and still retain the short-hand
reference of ‘type’ of book which seems to be the key to marketing.
I can only say that, even now, I don’t write with a genre in mind. I probably should, but
I write to tell that story I am desperate to tell, about people who I am fascinated by, in a
period that seems to have limitless possibilities to explore. The voice, the choice between
first or third person and so on seems to arise naturally from the combination of the story and
characters, rather the conscious choice.
There’s a huge interest in this past today, seen right across popular culture. How do you
account for this phenomenon? How important is it, do you think, to keep ancient stories alive
and how best might we do this? Are there any stories you’d like to see in wider circulation?
What is it about them that interests you?
It is said that historical fiction becomes more popular at times of recession or crisis. Are we
avoiding facing the present reality and are retreating into a golden age as a form of escapism?
Perhaps it is to comfort ourselves with the idea that however bad things are now, at least
we are not having to live in the days of plague and no plumbing? It may be that we like to
be reassured that we have lived through terrible times in history and the human race has
survived, so it will do again.
I think too we are searching for roots in a culture which is increasingly migratory. There has
seldom been such an interest in researching family history and I think this is again back our
craving to belong, our longing for home and for a sense of identity. In spite of broadcasting
every detail of our lives on social networks individuals seem that have lost a sense of who they
are. On Facebook and other social sites people almost seem to be desperately asking others
‘who am I?’
Even the current love-affair with antiques I don’t think is entirely down to investment.
People want to touch hands with the person who made or owned this object 100 or 500 years
ago. It’s almost like the laying on of hands in the consecration of bishops, which eventually
leads back to Peter then Christ. There is a psychological need to bury your roots in the past
when the future is uncertain.
Our present culture and literary heritage are built on ancient stories. They may be buried
under the layers of reinterpretation, but they are the foundations of our civilisation, our
art and our religions. It is important to translate them into good modern English, because
the language is not the important element. It’s the form and structure, the archetypes and
symbolism which are the key not only to the past, but to our own present culture and those
of the elements that need to be retained. The danger is that we sanitise and explain the
stories, trying to give motives to characters and reasons to events which were not there in the
original. We keep the plot, but lose the point.
I’d love to see the tales collected by William of Newburgh (1136–98 ) in his Historia Rerum
Anglicarum more widely known. They are supernatural and revenant stories, which tell you
much about the way people thought about death, the supernatural and the afterlife and reflect
the enormous influence of the Danish and Viking sagas and mythology on Christian Medieval
belief in England.
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Do you have any thoughts on the form these afterlives might take? For you, it’s the novel
but so much of what I’ve read of you is visual and filmic. Might you have a screenplay or
a TV drama in the offing? What next for you, what are your future writing plans or is that
something you prefer to keep quiet?
For the near future it will be writing novels for me, but obviously I’d love to see a book
translated to the small or big screen, as would most novelists. Though I am reliably informed
that producing convincing rain in films is one of hardest and most expensive things to do, so
I’ll have to start writing about slightly drier medieval periods.
But I think in terms of where we are generally heading, we will see far more interactivity
between readers and books. We already have flourishing re-enactment societies and living history
events such as The Festival of History one held every year at Kelmarsh, Northhamptonshire
(and people love to take on historical fantasy characters in web games. With e-books there is
a potential for more interaction between author and reader, and between the reader and the
novel; that maybe something historical fiction writers increasingly have to consider. What
will the reader want to get out of this historical world they are reading about? How will they
want to enter it, get closer to it, become part of it? What aspect of the medieval world will
they want to be part of? Time travel has been a long cherished dream for centuries and while
we can’t actually do it, we may be coming close to a point where we can fake it. I think some
readers will actually want to do more than read the book or visit a historical theme park. They
will want to enter that story.
I’d like to end by talking about the pleasures of texts. After a lifetime teaching and/or studying
them, the seeming gulf between what it’s okay to use there and what many of us read in
private still surprises me (back to genre!). Reading your work took me straight to the joy of
a text, something my jaded palate has missed of late. What do you write for Karen? What is
that pleases you about reading, writing, performing?
That is such a lovely thing to say. Thank you!
As a small child I loved to go to bed in the dark and tell myself a series of adventure stories.
I also used to love listening, illicitly, to murder mystery plays on a tiny radio concealed under
the bedclothes. I think at a basic level, I am just playing with stories as I did as a child. I love
telling them; I love reading them; I love hearing them.
I get childishly over-excited when I discover a medieval fact, an incident or belief and I
want to share it. I do that in the novels, but equally there is a huge thrill in chatting to an
audience and telling them about the beguines, or that one of the pieces of evidence that
convicted Joan of Arc as a witch was that she carried a mandrake into battle. I love to see
people suddenly become interested in some aspect of history or myth because of something
I’ve said or written and rush off to find out more.
And as I said earlier, I can’t bear the thought of people living and dying without trace. I
want to give a voice to those who died and lie somewhere beneath our feet, those who left
no name, no record, people who suffered terribly at the hands of others and people who
fought hard against the odds to build a life for themselves. I hope that even if my characters
are fictional, occasionally a reader might think about what life was like for certain sections of
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society. Even if we only remember them as a group, as long as we do remember they continue
to live. They’ve shaped us, as much as they have shaped our landscape and towns.
Is there anything else you’d like to draw my attention to or comment on at this stage?
It’s been a pleasure and thank you so much for inviting me to take part and for your
fascinating questions which I have really made me think about what I do and why I do it. And
thank you so much, for your really kind and very generous comments on the novels and for
reading them.
Many, many thanks for taking part in this project Karen.
GAIL ASHTON IN CONVERSATION WITH CATHERINE
FISHER: CROWN OF ACORNS (HODDER, 2010)
(January 2012)
www.catherine-fisher.com
Catherine Fisher is an acclaimed poet and novelist with a fascination for myth and history.
Her poetry volume Immrama won the WAC Young Writers’ Prize. She won the Cardiff
International Poetry Competition in 1990. Her first novel, The Conjuror’s Game, was
shortlisted for the Smarties Books prize and The Snow-Walker’s Son for the W.H.Smith
Award. Equally acclaimed is her quartet The Book of the Crow, a classic of fantasy fiction. The
Oracle, the first volume in the Oracle trilogy, blends Egyptian and Greek elements of magic
and adventure and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Books prize. The trilogy
was an international bestseller and has appeared in over twenty languages. The Candleman
won the Welsh Books Council’s Tir Na n’Og Prize and Catherine was also shortlisted for
the remarkable Corbenic, a modern re-inventing of the Grail legend.Her futuristic novel
Incarceron was published to widespread praise in 2007, winning the Mythopoeic Society of
America’s Children’s Fiction Award and selected by The Times as its Children’s Book of the
Year. The sequel, Sapphique, was published in September 2008.
Let’s start with the BBC’s Celtic Myths Project (www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/sites/catherinefisher/). How did you get involved with this? Is there anything you’d like to say about the
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story you chose to tell, ‘Becoming Merlin’, about its modern-day appeal perhaps, or what you
were trying to convey through it, how it calls to you as a writer?
I became involved simply by the producer phoning and asking me if I’d like to contribute
a story about Merlin. I have not seen the TV show, but the obvious story to me was the
‘original’ myth in Geoffrey of Monmouth, so I asked if I could do that. As I wrote it, it struck
me that the underground dragons were as symbolic of Merlin’s latent powers struggling to
escape as anything else. Like all myths, it has something for every age.
I’m interested that the stories are not presented as simple word-text but involve sound, visuals,
some interaction or animation to become what is for me a perfect example of textuality, a
performance —complete with professional writers, actors, artists—reminiscent of its Celtic
and medieval roots. I’m especially fascinated by the more interactive elements of its online
media which, of course, brings a community of readers and listeners directly into the telling. Is
there something you’d like to comment on here? Are these the kind of things you’re conscious
of in your own writing, or something you consciously seek out?
I have only looked at the animated version a few times and don’t know how to do the
interactive things. I’m interested you say a ‘simple ‘ word text, because to me of course the
words are the most important and complex thing. I think visuals can add to a story but they
can also severely detract, allowing the viewer only one interpretation, or simplifying imagery
to the banal or literal, for instance. But some of these images are stimulating, and I appreciate
that young readers will find them attractive.
The stories in this project are in English and Welsh. Was that part of the attraction for you
(I’ll have more to ask about the vernacular later if you don’t want to comment at length here
or feel you’ve already responded to this)?
I was glad the stories would be in both languages.
Finally I note the Myths fall under the remit of BBC Wales, History, and not Literature as
many might expect. What’s at stake here for you and its consumers, do you think?
That is interesting. Perhaps myth is the lovechild of history and literature! Certainly they
occupy a position between the two.
If I could move to your fiction now . . . Much medieval and romance writing (what we’d now
call fantasy fiction) uses the vernacular, often for the first time. It comes too, as you know, at
the crossroads of print and oral culture. Would you agree that this informs your own work or
like to comment on this further?
I like the fact that some medieval work retains the patterns and devices of oral storytelling,
the repetitions etc. These patterns do creep in and become part of the poem or story.
So, too, medieval romance poetry—and the Arthurian legends in particular—was concerned
with notions of identity, including trying to come to terms with national and foundational
myths. How conscious are you of having a dual identity or of having to negotiate the media,
the literary, and the wider world as (or in) English, rather than Welsh? How would you
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describe yourself and what impact does this have on your writing? You make use of The
Mabinogion, The Chronicles of the Princes, old Celtic legends, and the contested status of the
Arthurian cycle in your writing. What is it about those stories that draws you time and again?
Is Arthur’s myth Welsh history as far as you’re concerned?
Nationality is very complex. In terms of family heritage and religion I am Irish as well as
Welsh which makes me a triple-aspected being. Very Celtic. However being born and bred
in Wales and speaking the language to a small degree, I feel I am allowed to use the Welsh
material freely, as a medieval poet would.
The power of the stories is still very strong— their allusive nature, their use of
transformations, their emotional situations, still have great depths and a lot of potential for
modern retellings.
Arthur could be myth or history. In terms of the stories it doesn’t really matter.
Could you say more about Bladud’s story in Crown of Acorns and also about the ancient
Druid legends you weave?
Bladud is the legendary founder of the sacred spring at Bath; there are other legends about
his learning to fly, etc. The fragmentary nature of the story is what makes it attractive. I needed
a figure who would resonate right through the book in different ways, who is enigmatic and
who has a sense of lots of other stories behind him. The idea of a man who tries to fly is one that
interests me a lot; it became part of the story, as did the image of birds trapped in a room.
The druidic ideas in the book are very much an 18th century antiquarian view of druidism,
of course, as are the links with stone circles. The sort of ideas John Wood or Stukeley had.
What druids really were is uncertain.
There’s a huge interest in this past today, seen right across popular culture. How do you
account for this phenomenon? How important is it, do you think, to keep these ancient
stories alive and how best might we do this?
Perhaps it has to do with the speed of change in these days, that we look back to those
ancient periods of time where very little changed for hundreds of years.
Also, they are intrinsically unknowable; even archaeology gives us only the material
remains, never the gods and the stories. So they are ripe for the imagination to revisit over
and over.
I think it’s very important to keep the old stories we still have alive and vibrant, and we can
only do this by telling and retelling them. If they speak to something important in the human
psyche, they will survive.
I see so much in your fiction that is ‘medieval’ in spirit and enterprise. I’m thinking of your
elegy to the natural world and the seasons, to place or landscapes, to loss and desire, to defamiliarised worlds and transformations, even your images and tropes: rivers, woods, water,
dreams, birds . . . Is this something you’re conscious of, or make deliberate use of, or is it
more of an intuitive or emotional resonance for you? How much are we shaped by landscape
and the languages we speak?
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It’s intuitive. These things—landscapes, weather, birds, are what carry the story for me. I
have read very widely in medieval romance and literature—there is something about the bright,
hard colours, the clearness of it that appeals to me. The way the world and the otherworld
are so matter-of-factly side by side. The best symbol is that tree in Peredur—half leaf, half in
flame—both at once and with no explanation. That’s what I like. Visually clear enigma.
I recognise too family stories and genealogies (your own and mythical ones), an abiding
interest in ancestors and forebears, and everything held in a ‘medieval’ web of time where
time tracks back and in on itself and several times run concurrently. Is it that stories shape
memory and meaning, do you think, or is something else at play here? And what of the
discontinuous times running concurrently in Crown of Acorns?
Yes I am interested in families and genealogy, where people come from and where they end
up. Certainly stories about the past reshape it.
In Crown of Acorns I wanted three different times in one place, but there is a sense in
which they are all happening now, because now is all there is.
I’m also intrigued by the huge visual appeal of your novels. Crown of Acorns, for example,
has your usual ornate cover but also uses different fonts/print styles. So, too, its symbols
and illustrations are key not just to the story, I feel, but to ways of reading your text that are
almost medieval. Again, how important is this to you?
It was a difficult book to find a cover image for. The one they chose is very literal, but
attractive and enigmatic. The different fonts were my way of expressing the three different
characters, in order to make it easier for the reader to know where they are. The chapters
were each headed by drawings by my sister, the artist Maggie Davies, of the metopes on the
Circus at Bath; images that are really the very heart of the book. It was the mystery of what
these mean—if they indeed mean anything—which caused me to write the novel. Maybe the
book is my attempt at deciphering them. I do respond to images and symbolism and that is a
very medieval trait.
I’m struck by the filmic qualities of your work and could easily see Crown of Acorns adapted
to a number of other genres. What is it about fiction that especially draws you? Regardless
of where you’re placed on the bookshelves who is your audience do you think, who do you
write for and why? Have you considered other forms, or have plans to turn Crown—or any
of the others—into a TV script?
I don’t usually see my books in other media because I am always disappointed by films and
TV versions of fiction—they just never seem to have the complexity and detail and always
lapse into the obvious. What draws me to fiction are the words. It is the most intimate of
media, and yet it allows you great freedom—breaking off, going away, thinking about it,
coming back to exactly the same point—re-reading, comparing passages etc etc .
My audience is difficult to guess at. I get a huge amount of response from young adults—
both girls and boys—for a book like Incarceron (Hodder, 2007), but for things like Crown
of Acorns there is generally silence. Perhaps because those who read that book are older and
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less likely to gush in praise or moan in complaint. So I think different books have different
audiences. Certainly many adults read the books.
I don’t really want to write scripts—what interests me is developing the story and finding
out what happens. Once it’s finished, and I know, I don’t want to go back to it. So I would
have to leave the scripts to others, and then almost certainly not like the results. I don’t like
the way TV and film fix a book and make it visible in only one way. For me the written or
orally told story is the best way of doing things.
Are there any other novels you’d especially like to draw attention to? What of your ongoing
work or future plans?
I am hoping to write a series of adventure novels involving time travel. Also I want to
do a set for younger children reinterpreting fragments of stories from the Welsh Triads etcthe first of these—The Cat with Iron Claws—will come out from Pont books next month
February 2012).
I also have an idea for a one-off book. So lots of ideas to try and explore.
REVIEWS
SIMON ARMITAGE’S TRANSLATIONS OF
ALLITERATIVE ARTHURIAN POETRY
By Victoria Shirley
Victoria Shirley is a doctoral candidate in the School of English, Communication, and
Philosophy at Cardiff University. Her thesis focuses on the rewriting of, and response to,
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain in late medieval England, Scotland,
and Wales. More broadly, she is interested in Arthurian literature (medieval and modern),
chronicles and historical writing, medievalism, medieval cultural studies, and nationalism and
nation studies.
Since he published his translation of Homer’s Odyssey in 2007, Simon Armitage has been
attempting to establish himself as a translator in a similar vein to poets such as Seamus
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Heaney and Ted Hughes, who both undertook translations of notable medieval and classical
works (most notably Beowulf and Ovid’s Metamorphoses), and who re-imagined them in
the course of their poetic process. Leah Haught has pointed out that Armitage has steadily
been acquiring ‘cultural capital as a popular translator’ and his decision to translate two
of Britain’s Arthurian poems from the fourteenth-century alliterative revival stems from his
desire to make these works more accessible to a contemporary audience. Armitage, a man of
West Yorkshire origin, shares an affinity with the anonymous Northern alliterative poets who
composed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Death of King Arthur, and his recent
translations of these poems published in 2007 and 2012 have transformed and revitalised
these texts, bringing them to the forefront of the popular imagination.
These two poetic translations are not Armitage’s first venture into an Arthurian subject
matter. His short story King Arthur in the East Riding (1998) follows the events of a Yorkshire
Working Men’s club who go on tour with their pantomime that features a cast of Arthurian
characters (played by an all-male company). The back stage dressing room exposes the slightly
ridiculous nature of the characters and their costumes as ‘King Arthur blots his lipstick on
a napkin, and Merlin clamps his stick-on beard to his chin’ (p. 30); but the real comedy of
the pantomime is when ‘Arthur yanks the plywood sword from the papier mâché stone’
(p. 31), and when Merlin shoots the king with a World War Two revolver ‘because he wasn’t
up to the job’ (p. 32). Armitage makes the Arthurian world, which was typically one of high
romance and chivalry, into something much more demotic and ordinary which also verges
on the comic.
Armitage’s ability to make the Arthurian legend appear more natural and more
commonplace is also prevalent in his translations. As he writes in his introduction
to his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ‘to the trained medievalist, the
poem is perfectly readable in its original form; no translation necessary . . . [but t]o the
untrained eye, it is as if the poem is lying beneath a thing coat of ice, tantalizingly near
yet frustratingly blurred’ (p. 11). Armitage’s desire to familiarise modern readers with the
text is well demonstrated in his description of the Green Knight, which conveys both the
strangeness and ‘Otherness’ of the intruder to the Arthurian court in a more recognisable
linguistic register, and Armitage describes him as a ‘mountain of a man’ (l. 127) and a
‘hulk of a human’ (l. 128), who is the ‘mightiest of mortals’ (l. 141). In comparison to
the original, the ‘aghlich mayster’ now becomes a ‘fearful form’ (l. 136), and the ‘Half
etayn’ is described instead as ‘half giant’ (l. 140). This is not, of course, a word-for-word
translation, but one that conveys the sense of the poem through modern language; however,
Armitage does often uses some colloquial and idiomatic forms: for example, the Green
Knight interrogates and insults the court by calling them ‘bum-fluffed bairns’ ‘(l. 280) and
‘lightweight adolescents’ (l. 282) who do not live up to their ‘big-mouth bragging’ (l. 312).
Here, then, the discourse of medieval honour and courtesy has been transformed into one
of quasi-street style ‘respect’.
Armitage’s translation of the Alliterative Morte Arthur – or The Death of King Arthur – has
not met quite the same acclaim as his version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. C. E. J.
Simmons’ review of the poem for Tower Poetry Review was particularly critical, and he focused
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on what he saw as the poem’s ‘failings’, namely Armitage’s choice of a literal translation;
the translation of certain Middle English words; it’s lack of style. However, Armitage’s
translation has won some recognition as his translation made the short list for the 2012 T. S.
Eliot prize for poetry. The Morte, as Armitage points out, features a variety of ‘[s]tock phrases
and alliterative formulations’ (p. xiii) that do not, perhaps, allow for the same level of poetic
invention in translation process. Nevertheless, Armitage works with his material, and some
of the extended set piece descriptions in the Morte create the strongest and most vivid images
in the text through inventive language choices. The cannibalistic giant of Mont Saint Michel
becomes ‘guzzling and gorging’ (l. 1044), grinning with ‘grisly fangs / Then groaned and
glowered with a menacing grimace’ (ll. 1075–6. The word choices are quite distinct from the
equivalent passage in the fourteenth-century original, but the gruesome effect is remarkably
similar. Equally memorable is the description of Lady Fortune, who is ‘trimmed and tapered
with tassels of gold / and with badges and brooches and buttons and coins’ (ll. 3254–5). Her
wheel is ‘beset with red gold and royal stones / and arrayed all around with rubies and rich
gems’ (ll. 3262–3), and the Nine Worthies which cling to the spokes are made subject to her
will. These highly alliterative and rich descriptions create a text that, as Armitage writes of Sir
Gawain (and which is equally applicable to the Morte), is designed ‘not only for the eye, but
for the ear and the voice as well’ (SGGK, p. 14).
Armitage’s prowess in adapting alliterative poetry is evident in both of his translations. In
his version of Sir Gawain, Armitage writes that ‘alliteration is the warp and weft of the poem’
(p. 12), and he has chosen to retain this aspect of the poem to a considerably high degree.
Such adherence to the poetic convention is evident when Gawain is staying at Bertilak’s
castle, and Armitage’s translation reads that he was ‘careful to be courteous and avoid
uncouthness, / cautious that his conduct might be classed as sinful / and counted as betrayal
by the keeper of the castle’ (ll. 1773–5). These three lines do not alliterate together in the
Middle English version, but the effective repetition of the ‘c’ sound unites ideas of courtesy,
codes of conduct, and correct behaviour when being hosted as a guest at court. The repetition
of alliterative sounds over several lines is a recurring trope in Armitage’s translations, and
Alex Mueller has noted his preference to insert more alliteration into his translation than
present in the original work. This is perfectly demonstrated in Arthur’s lamentation on the
death of Gawain in the Alliterative Morte, as when the Round Table has been defeated,
Arthur bewails that he is ‘cut to the core’ (l. 3956) and that ‘such pain overpowers’ him.
(l. 3965). Arthur pays tribute to his nephew’s reputation, recognising that he was ‘captain
among my knights who lived under Christ’ (l. 3961), and in his eulogy he proclaims that his
‘wealth and worth throughout this wide world / Were won by sir Gawain through his wisdom
alone’ (ll. 3963–4). The repetition of ‘c/k’, ‘p’, and ‘w’ in these lines animates the sound of
the text, and some of the more harsh tones convey Arthur’s sense of intense pain and grief
that he experiences after the loss of his nephew. Not all of these sounds match the alliteration
in the original text (compare ‘For pity said Arthur such pain overpowers me’ to “Alas,” said
Sir Arthur, “now eekes my sorrow!”) but there is a real sense of musicality about the text for
which Armitage must be commended.
By taking on the bold task of translating two of the Britain’s best Arthurian poems, Simon
Armitage has certainly proved he has the gall, gumption, and the guts (SGGK, l. 291) to
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re-invent these texts and to promote the importance of medieval literature to contemporary
readers. The high chivalry of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the bloody battles of the
Alliterative Morte Arthur are not lost in translation; rather, they are transformed and their
afterlives prolonged as their medieval subject matter meets modern language.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Armitage, Simon, Homer’s Odyssey (London: Faber and Faber, 2007)
— (trans.), The Death of King Arthur (London: Faber and Faber, 2012)
—, King Arthur in the East Riding (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005)
— (trans.), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation by Simon Armitage (New York
and London: W. W. Norton, 2008 [2007])
King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed.
Larry D. Benson (Kalamazoo, M.I.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University
Press, 1974; revised 1994)
Secondary Sources
Coussens, Catherine, ‘British National Identity, Topicality and Tradition in the Poetry of Simon
Armitage’, Çankaya Üniversity Journal of Arts and Sciences 9 (May, 2008): 17–38.
Muller, Alex, ‘Simon Armitage, trans. The Death of King Arthur: A New Verse Translation’, Arthuriana
22.4 (Winter, 2012): 190–2.
Sánches-Martí, Jordi, ‘Simon Armitage, trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 20.3
(Fall, 2010): 119–122.
Online Sources
Kermode, Frank, ‘Who has the gall?’, London Review of Books, 29.5, 8 March 2007.
Available at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/frank-kermode/who-has-the-gall [accessed 28/02/2014]
Armitage, Simon, ‘The knight’s tale’, The Guardian, 16 December 2006. Available at http://www.
theguardian.com/books/2006/dec/16/poetry.simonarmitage [accessed 28/02/2014]
Armitage, Simon, ‘Poetry should be subversive’, The Guardian, 12 June 2012. Available at http://
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/12/poetry-should-be-subversive [accessed
05/03/2014]
Bates, Linda, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. by Simon Armitage’, Marginalia 7
(2008). Available at http://www.marginalia.co.uk/journal/08confession/bates.php [accessed
28/02/2014]
Crossley-Holland, ‘Green giant’, The Guardian, 3 February 2007. Available at http://www.theguardian.
com/books/2007/feb/03/poetry.simonarmitage [accessed 25/03/2014]
Crown, Sarah, ‘A life in writing: Simon Armitage’, The Guardian, 9 December 2011.
Available at http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/dec/09/life-in-writing-simon-armitage [accessed
05/03/2014]
Haught, Leah, ‘Armitage: Death of King Arthur’, Medievally Speaking, 27 April 2013.
Available at http://medievallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/armitage-death-of-king-arthur.html
[accessed 28/02/2014]
Hirsch, Edward, ‘A Stranger in Camelot’, The New York Times, 16 December 2007.
Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/books/review/Hirsch-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[accessed 28/02/2014]
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Kellaway, Kate, ‘The Death of King Arthur by Simon Armitage – review’, The Observer, 19 February
2012. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/19/death-king-arthur-simonarmitage-review [accessed 28/02/2014]
Lezard, Nicholas, ‘There’s life in the green giant yet’, The Guardian, 8 March 2008.
Available at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/08/simonarmitage [accessed 25/03/2014]
Noel-Tod, Jeremy, ‘The Death of King Arthur by Simon Armitage: review’, The Telegraph, 16 January
2012. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9018796/The-Death-ofKing-Arthur-by-Simon-Armitage-review.html [accessed 28/02/2014]
O’Brien, Sean, ‘The Death of King Arthur - review’, The Guardian, 23 December 2011.
Available at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/23/death-king-arthur-simon-armitage-poetryreview [accessed 05/03/2014]
Odasso, Adrienne J., ‘Past Tension’, The Oxonian Review 19.5, 18 June 2012. Available at http://www.
oxonianreview.org/wp/tag/simon-armitage/ [accessed 28/02/2014]
Rahim, Sameer, ‘Simon Armitage leads TS Eliot Prize contenders’, The Telegraph, 23 October 2012.
Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9628005/Simon-Armitage-leadsTS-Eliot-Prize-contenders.html [accessed 05/03/2014]
Simmons, C. E. J., ‘The Death of King Arthur, translated by Simon Armitage’, Tower Poetry Review,
2012, Available at http://www.towerpoetry.org.uk/poetry-matters/news-and-events/news-and-eventsarchive/504-cej-simons-reviews-the-death-of-king-arthur-translated-by-simon-armitage [accessed
28/02/2014]
Todd Fordham, Chloe, ‘Sir Gawain finds his voice after 600 years’, The Observer, 28 January 2007.
Available at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jan/28/poetry.simonarmitage [accessed
25/03/2014]
STEWART BROOKES REVIEWS ADAPTATIONS OF
BEOWULF IN ‘GETTING ANIMATED ABOUT BEOWULF’
In December 2007, as I squelched my way through slushed-up New York snow in shoes illfitted to the purpose, my heart leapt at the sight of a twenty foot high poster of Ray Winstone
proclaiming ‘I am Beowulf!’. Beowulf. At the centre of Times Square. Amid the flashing lights
and ever-moving screens. At the very heart of the glitz and glamour. What could be better
than that? My toes might feel as if they were on the verge of frost bite, I thought, but the Old
English poem was finally on the map! A second cause for excitement were the review snippets
on the poster lauding its use of computer-animation and the advances these represented
for the field of motion capture graphics. With an interest in animation older even than my
fascination with the poem, this seemed the perfect combination. When I later read that the
film was not entirely faithful to the poem (litotes alert!), I was nevertheless eager to watch it
and discover what Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture computer techniques had brought to
the story.
Read more: It cannot be said that Zemeckis skimped on the visual effects budget for his
version of Beowulf. More than a million dollars were spent for each minute of film footage.
And over 450 graphic designers worked on the film. That seems like people enough to have
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rendered the computer animation redundant had they all donned helmets and armour to
stage traditional film battle scenes (though materialising a dragon would, admittedly, have
still presented an actual challenge). The motion capture technique (‘mocap’ to its friends)
Zemeckis used in the film involved squeezing actors into lycra bodysuits covered in sensor
dots. As the actors played their parts, the computer tracked their sensor-dotted movements
and gestures and the graphic team then used this data to refashion the visual appearance of the
actors in line with Zemeckis’s vision. Thus, Ray Winstone, for instance, becomes thirty years
younger, grows several inches taller, and is buffed up with impressive muscles. In interviews,
Winstone claimed with a playful wishfulness that the muscular hero that the artists had created
was a facsimile of his youthful self. Be that as it may, the quantity of data that was generated
to achieve all of this (the film, not Winstone’s eight-pack) was so unwieldy that five months
were spent on optimising the ‘save’ and ‘load’ system just so that the computers could display
the images at faster than a snail’s pace. And yet, despite all of that effort, the film falls foul
of the so-called ‘uncanny valley’ identified by roboticist Masahiro Mori: while, for example,
the anthropomorphised Donkey in Shrek can engage our empathy because there is never any
suggestion that he is anything but cartoonish, this feeling is absent when we encounter the
characters in Zemeckis’s Beowulf who have expressionless eyes and awkward movements and
yet get close enough to a human look as to make their not-quite humanness unnverving. As a
result, while the film showcased pioneering motion-capture techniques and 3-D visual effects,
it also illustrated how much further there is to go before the motion capture medium ceases
to be a distraction to the story-telling.
Zemeckis’s was not the first animated foray into the world of Beowulf. The accolade for
this goes to the Australian animated film with songs, Grendel Grendel Grendel (1981). Its
inspiration is John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) and, like Gardner’s novel, the film is narrated
from the perspective of Grendel, setting the ‘monster’ centre-stage in opposition to a pathetic,
small-minded and viciously corrupt humanity. Although some of Gardner’s narrative is
retained, the philosophical angst and unsteady, tortured wisdom of his creation are entirely
undercut by the lumpy, green, spotted Grendel conjured up by the animators. The vision of
Grendel here is the opposite of the evocative reticence found in the Old English poem, with
the syrup of an opening song spelling out everything about his appearance:
Your mother loves you Grendel.
Standing there all twelve feet four, or more of you.
Mother loves . . . every hair, every scale, every tooth, nail and fang and claw of you [. . .]
But other people, Grendel, may not even like you, Grendel.
The feel, the size and scale of you,
the smell, the eyes and wail of you.
Are all too much, and much too scary,
perhaps if you weren’t so green and hairy?
The film looks and feels like a children’s animation from the 1970s, but its treatment of the
story contains violence and sexual content that makes it unsuitable for a younger audience.
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In line with the unsophisticated portrayal of Grendel, some of the more serious aspects of
Gardner’s text are exchanged for apparent whimsy. For example, Gardner’s Grendel fashions
himself as ‘shadow-shooter, earth-rim-roamer, walker of the world’s weird wall’ (pp. 2–3),
a homage to the kennings of Beowulf. What we get in the animated film in place of this are
continual references to Grendel as the ‘Great Boogey,’ a figure invoked with a mix of fear,
worship and indifference by the Danes; as Hrothgar puts it in the opening scene: ‘Great
Boogey? There’s no such thing. It’s just superstitious hobblegobble.’ This notion of the ‘Great
Boogey’ lies at the heart of Grendel Grendel Grendel, expanding upon a scene in Gardner’s
Grendel in which the dragon insists that Grendel should terrorise the Danes:
You improve them my boy! Can’t you see that? You stimulate them! You make them
think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what
they are [. . .] You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define
themselves. (p. 62)
Echoing this sentiment in an introduction to the film, the writer and director, Alexander Stitt,
insists that Grendel is:
deserving of our sympathy and our thanks. For without our monsters, our misunderstood
monsters, who are after all only doing their job which is to stimulate our imaginations and
encourage social cohesions, we wouldn’t be in the civilised mess we are in today.
Hand-in-hand with this reclaiming of the ‘monster’ is a debunking of the herioc worldview.
‘Our version of Grendel,’ Stitt explains, ‘is seen through twentieth-century eyes, when
perhaps we’re a little suspicious of the military hero and more inclined to see humanity in
a monster.’ This is very much inspired by Gardner’s Grendel who articulates an unrelenting
mockery of the Danes, meticulously peeling away all pretensions to the heroic and exposing
all their grand motivations as hypocrisy. In an imagined backstory to the Old English poem,
Gardner has Unferth pursue Grendel to his underwater dwelling, barely surviving the swim.
Lying on the cave floor, cross-hatched with cuts from the firesnakes, Unferth is too weak to
lift either himself or his sword from the floor. ‘I didn’t know how deep the pool was,’ he
gasps. ‘I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. It’s all a hero asks for’ (p. 77). For all
his protestations of heroism, all Unferth really wants is to die because Grendel has humilated
him in front of his fellows. In a somewhat watered down version in Grendel Grendel Grendel,
we see Unferth choke and wheeze:
It will be sung. The glorious song of Unferth. The shaper will sing that <cough> Unferth
went down through the burning lake and gave his life in battle with the <cough> great
boogey. Know you that a hero stands here, unafraid to die. For mark me well, one of us
will die this night. All a hero asks for is that he might die in a . . .
But Grendel has other plans, and carries Unferth back to the meadhall, ignoring his protests
that his reputation as a hero is in tatters.
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There are splashes of knowing humour, the most memorable of which come in the Shaper’s
song, offered in response to Hrothgar’s request for a tune about the Great Boogey:
We know a lovely monster, who often comes to call,
we eagerly anticipate his visits to our hall.
Oh, oh his visits to our hall
An amicable monster, beloved by one and all,
We listen as his gentle tap demolishes the wall.
Oh, oh demolishes the wall. [. . .]
An ambidextrous monster, whose claws are none too small,
Removal of an arm or two might benefit us all
Oh, may benefit us all.
Hrothgar acts as the foil to this prescient rhyme, asking ‘Aye up. What’s all this “lovely
monster” talk?’ His advisor responds that he expects that the reference is ironic. This too is
lost on Hrothgar, who has to have the concept of irony explained. What is not lost on anyone
is the referent of the Shaper’s final lines, with its double entendre:
We know a lovely monster, who often comes to call
Removal of his apples might benefit us all.
Unferth, who was humiliated in front of everyone when Grendel threw apples at him, is livid.
He loses his temper when Hrothgar’s children mock him, threatening them with his axe.
In doing so, he further discredits the notion of the heroic, a stance which the film hammers
home again and again. While the message of the film may be clear, its childish dialogue and
simple story-telling prompt the ever-present question: who is this aimed at?
In contrast to the very free use of the material from Beowulf and Garner’s Grendel in
the preceding film, the BBC’s animated Beowulf (1998) pays close attention to its source
material. The film begins in a stylised and deeply mythic mode, featuring lightning, druids,
and a man morphing into a dragon (inspired by the legend of the dragon Fafnir alluded to in
Beowulf). While the narrator speaks, we see a heroic Beowulf standing on a burial mound,
hair and cloak swept by the wind, a foreshadowing of his encounter with the dragon at the
end of the poem:
Men have told the tale of treasure hoards
carried to earth’s keeping by an ancient race.
Wondrous wealth became a worm’s guarding.
No man could enter until one proved worthy.
This sense of the mythic lingers, adding depth to the narrator’s version of the first line of
Beowulf: ‘We have heard of the glory of the kings of the Danes in days gone by.’ There are
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many such Beowulf-derived lines in the film, from the anticipation of the death of Æschere
(‘a terrible price one man paid for his night’s rest’) to Wiglaf ’s ‘To die in battle is better for
any warrior than to live in shame.’ While the narrative and dialogue are only loosely derived
from the poem, there is a clear desire to create a sense of authenticity and so alliteration and
archaisms are frequent:
A demon from the depths endured that sound.
With cruel torment the creature writhed, roused itself from darkness,
raged at joy, it could not rest until it wrecked this gladness.
With stealth the creature stole upon the slumbering hall thanes.
This attempt to remain close to the poem is visible at the level of vocabulary also, with the use of
kennings from Beowulf, such as ‘whale road’, ‘swan’s riding’ and ‘wordhoard’. The metaphors
help sustain the mythic otherness, complementing the animation which is often surreal, a poetry
in itself. For example, we never see Grendel or his mother clearly, they are shadowed, shapeless,
shifting creatures of the unconscious. More than this, there is a suggestive storytelling in the
way they are presented: the shadow cast by Wealtheow and Hrothgar morphs into Grendel
and his mother, reminding of what the poem tells us, which is that Grendel and his mother are
outcasts but they are the descendants of Cain and therefore close kin to humankind.
Returning to that walk through the snow toward the huge poster for Zemeckis’s Beowulf,
it has to be admitted that the film did not make enough impact to gift the Old English
poem with more than the clichéd 15 minutes of fame. That the films considered here all take
such different approaches, have their own satisfactions and disappointments, alerts us to the
potential that the poem has to be adapted for film. What is clear, is that no film, animated or
otherwise, has come close to achieving a fully-formed vision of the poem.
Bibliography
Gardner, John, Grendel (New York: Knopf, 1971; repr. Robin Clark: London, 1991)
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S MEDIEVALIST
POSTMODERNISM
By Robert S. Sturges
David Foster Wallace’s short-story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999)
includes a story called “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” that both exemplifies and
critiques postmodern mash-ups of earlier mythologies. As the title suggests, Wallace’s story—
set in “medieval California”—recombines the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde with the
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classical myth of Echo and Narcissus, among others. It tells the story of media mogul Agon M.
Nar’s success in endlessly recombining ancient myths into modern television programming.
His surgically enhanced and passively beautiful daughter, Sissee Nar, is his biggest star, and
attracts the obsessive and violent attentions of Reggie Ecko, Nar’s down-on-his-luck rival. In
the background hovers the controlling media conglomerate known as Tri-Stan, three old men
named Stan reminiscent of the classical Graeae (they share one TV remote among them). In
the story’s title, the proper name Isolde becomes the active verb “I Sold”: in the postmodern,
late-capitalist, media-dominated world, the obect of Tristan’s or Tri-Stan’s love is no longer
a person, but the act of selling. Tri-Stan’s only passion is profit, and the selling of Sissee leads
to her violent death at the hands of her stalker Ecko.
The term “eternal return” recurs throughout the story, a reference to Jean Cocteau’s film
about Tristan and Isolde, L’Éternel Retour, as well as to Nietzsche; Isolde herself is mentioned
near the end of the story, when it is presented by its supposed narrator Ovid the Obtuse
as a “high-concept miscegenation-of-Romantic-archetypes-type metamyth.” That Tristan
and Isolde can be paired with Echo and Narcissus in “a kind of hot-tub swingers’ incest”
both parodies postmodern citationality and simultaneously questions the very notion of
periodization—an effect of much medievalist discourse, and one of which Wallace seems
acutely aware.
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1/28/2015 4:06:58 PM