Earendel at Epiphany

BL Yates Thompson 3, f. 93v

For the Feast of the Epiphany, here's a curiosity for you. There are lots of medieval carols about the Epiphany ('Twelfth Day', as it was usually called in the Middle Ages) - I posted two last year, and you'll find more under this tag. This one, however, is a medieval pastiche - a carol written in a version of Middle English, with a bit of Old English thrown in, and published in 1899. 

'Eala Earendel

Engla beorhtast.'

I. They came three Kings who rode apace,

To Bethlem town by God's good grace:

Hail Earendel,

Brightest of Angels!

Pardie! It was a duteous thing,

Wise men to worship childë King:

Godlight be with us,

Hail Earendel!

II. They gave Him gifts of far-brought things,

Of Recells, Myrrh, and Gold of Kings.

Hail Earendel,

Brightest of Angels!

And setten there in strawy tent,

Their mystic signs of Orient:

Godlight be with us,

Hail Earendel!

III. The Gold and Frankincense and Myrrh

For King, for Priest, for digne Martyr.

Hail Earendel,

Brightest of Angels!

Upon the great Good Friday morn

Is't Crown of Gold or Crown of Thorn?

Godlight be with us,

Hail Earendel!

IV. From Calvary's Tree the Priestly hands

Are stretched in blessing o'er the lands:

Hail Earendel,

Brightest of Angels!

In Garden tomb His tired limbs sleep.

Bring Myrrh and Spices, Vigil keep:

Godlight be with us,

Hail Earendel!

V. O hymn we then these Orient Kings,

Who brought for Him their offerings:

Hail Earendel,

Brightest of Angels!

And grant in Holy Mystery

Ourselves His Sacrifice may be.

Godlight be with us,

Hail Earendel!

This poem is by Charles William Stubbs (1845-1912), who at the time it was published was Dean of Ely. The poem was included in his book Bryhtnoth's Prayer and Other Poems, which among other things features a number of poems inspired by medieval topics, especially relating to the Anglo-Saxon history of Ely. One is his 'Carol of King Canute', a Christmas carol based on a short verse which the 12th-century Liber Eliensis claims Cnut composed when visiting the abbey. Another poem on an Ely theme is inspired by the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, whose fallen hero, Byrhtnoth, was buried at Ely. Here's a taste of Stubbs' take on that:

This was his death cry,

Bryhtnoth the Ealdorman,

When to the earth at last

Fell from his failing hand

Sword of the mighty hilt...

Could he no longer then

Fast on his feet stand,

Bryhtnoth the Ealdorman;

Looked he to Heaven's King,

Meter of meeds:

“Thanks be to Thee, God, Ruler of nations,

For all the joy of life

Winsome and wealthful-

Bairns' love and wife's love,

Heart-trust of comrades,

War-weal and hearth’s-gear -

All I have here below

Fared for or gotten.

Now, oh my Maker mild,

Most need have I that Thou

Good speed my ghost:

Yea, that my soul to Thee safely may journey,

Safe to Thy Kingdom, Lord of the angels.”

Died then Earl Bryhtnoth

There by the Panta stream,

Slain in the battle, by

Maldon Blackwater.

Monks of the minster,

Monks of Saint Ætheldryht,

Thanes of the White Christ,

Brought him to Ely

Rowed they the death barge,

Down the long water-street,

Shimmering in moonlight;

Cold blew the night wind,

O'er the wan water: 

Far in the sedge reeds

Boomed the wild bittern;

High on the wall tower

Blickered the beacon.

If you know The Battle of Maldon you'll recognise some echoes of the poem here, but it's much augmented by faux-medieval archaisms in fine Victorian style! Similarly, Stubbs' Epiphany poem makes use of a refrain from a real Old English poem, part of the Advent Lyrics based on the O Antiphons:

Eala earendel, engla beorhtast,

ofer middangeard monnum sended...

O Earendel, brightest of angels,

sent to mankind over middle-earth...

In that poem 'Earendel' is used as a title for Christ, equivalent to the Latin 'O Oriens' ('O Dayspring'), the antiphon sung on the day of the winter solstice. Stubbs, however, accompanies his poem with a note saying that Earendel is 'the mythical name of the Star of Bethlehem'. I couldn't say where he got that idea, but 'Earendel' is used of different kinds of light in Old English and related languages - of a star, but also of the radiance of the sun and the first gleam of the dawn. And engla beorhtast, 'brightest of angels', really means 'brightest of messengers' - which the Star of Bethlehem was, of course. If the idea is that the Star to which the carol appeals is also Christ himself, 'Godlight', it's not so far from the Old English poem.

Stubbs also includes a note on the word 'recells', an Old English word for 'incense', pointing out where you can find it in an Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospels. Apart from these bits of Anglo-Saxondom, though, much of the poem is written in an imitation of Middle English - 'Pardie!', 'childë King', and so on.

'The Carol of King Canute' was set to music by T. Tertius Noble, who was organist of Ely Cathedral and also Stubbs' son-in-law. (Though it's through Benjamin Britten's setting that it's perhaps better-known.) Noble also set this 'Carol of the Star', in a slightly amended version. And look, it's even on Youtube:

I learn from this wonderful website that after Stubbs became Bishop of Truro, the carol was performed at his cathedral's 'Festival of Lessons and Carols' in 1911 - Truro being the place where services of 'Nine Lessons and Carols' first originated at the end of the 19th century.

That same winter, 1911, the young Tolkien had just finished his first term at Oxford. A year or two later, in the course of his studies, he stumbled across the Old English 'Earendel' poem, and its first lines had a remarkable effect on him:

I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened by sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.

Tolkien adopted Earendel into his own growing imaginative cosmos, as a mariner 'who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun... a herald star, and a sign of hope to men'. He later called the Old English poem 'rapturous words from which ultimately sprang the whole of my mythology'. His sense that there was something 'very remote and strange' about the words eala Earendel, engla beorhtast is one of those instincts no one can explain. Why these lines more than any other? What moved Stubbs to make them the basis of his Epiphany carol? No one really knows what 'Earendel' means, and yet perhaps it draws the imagination all the more for that, as the Star of Bethlehem drew the Magi on their long and weary way. Such is the magic of mystery, of words half-understood - of a glimpse of Godlight.

Bodleian MS. Douce d. 19

'Time's handiworks by time are haunted'

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, and it’s a strange one. Public worship is currently banned in England, though that’s supposed to end in a few days - but the first day of the new liturgical year will not begin in church, just as the most important feast of the Christian year couldn't be publicly celebrated back in the spring. We are in Advent where we were in Lent, preparing for a Christmas not much more cheerful than lonely Easter.

For many people, spring never really came this year. We never got out of the Long Lent; dreary February became anxious March, and then time stood still. I wrote back at Whitsun (also cancelled) about the unsettling feeling of living through unmarked time, cast adrift without the anchors of ritual, festival, and rites of passage. ‘Always winter and never Christmas’ was in the back of my mind as I wrote it, but then Christmas seemed like a long way away - and now here we are.

November, mid-afternoon

Everyone’s experience of this year has been different. Some people have been working much harder than usual, with no escape from work or the worry of unemployment; for them, time has not been plentiful. Many, especially those with caring responsibilities, probably feel as if they haven’t had a minute to themselves all year. That hasn’t been my own experience. I’ve mostly been very lucky; I haven’t lost my job, or lost anyone I love. (I did lose my home, so it’s not all been easy.) My experience has been one of emptiness: empty time and empty space. I’ve been working, and fortunate to have been so; but you can’t work all the time, and when there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do, the evenings and the weekends and all the time that’s not work can be very long and very empty. Of course you find ways to fill that time; nice ways, lots of them. But nine months of empty hours is a lot of time to fill.

As for empty space - I’ve spent a lot of time walking this year, through empty streets and empty fields, alone except for cows and birds. More recently, I’ve been going into my workplace, and it’s been very strange to be alone in rooms I used to know as full of crowds: communal spaces which were places of community and friendship, full of movement and chatter, now empty and silent. At times I’ve started to feel a bit like the ‘last survivor’ of Beowulf - an anonymous character who is the sole survivor of his vanished people, left with nothing to do but bury their treasures, because they are worthless with no one to share them. As he buries the treasures in the earth, he laments:

Death in war,

fierce deadly evil, has carried off

every man of my people who gave up this life, 

who saw the last of the joys in the hall. I have none to bear the sword

or carry the decorated cup,

precious drinking-vessel. The company has passed elsewhere...

There is no joy in the harp

or pleasure in the singing wood; nor does a noble hawk

swoop through the hall, nor the swift steed

stamp in the courtyard. Baleful death

has sent forth many of the human race.

He's describing a noble hall, once full of human joy and animal energy, now empty and desolate; all its precious trappings - sword, cup, harp - have lost their value now the people who treasured them are gone. Anglo-Saxon poets were fascinated by such empty places, which often evoked for them apocalyptic scenes of winter desolation (more on that in this week's Patreon post). We’re not quite at that level yet, but it’s the general sort of mood. Perhaps more the kind of thing is this reflection by Thomas Traherne:

I remember once the first time I came into a magnificent or noble dining room, and was left there alone, I rejoiced to see the gold and state and carved imagery, but when all was dead, and there was no motion, I was weary of it, and departed dissatisfied. But afterwards, when I saw it full of lords and ladies, and music and dancing, the place which once seemed not to differ from a solitary den, had now entertainment, and nothing of tediousness but pleasure in it. By which I perceived (upon a reflection made long after) that men and women are when well understood a principal part of our true felicity.

‘A principal part of our true felicity’ - I like that so much. What value are any of our treasures - tangible or intangible - if there is no one to enjoy them with? And many places usually full of people are currently standing empty - including churches, on the first Sunday of Advent.

Advent is a season for thinking about time, and I can't imagine that I'm the only person who has felt time pressing heavily this year. Some people have been confident, pretty much since the beginning, that all this will just be a blip - a brief pause in our lives, soon to be forgotten once we press the restart button and get life going again. Now that a vaccine is on the horizon, they’re convinced this will all soon be over, and they’re saying - just as they said back in March - that it’s simply a question of following the rules for a few weeks, and then everything will be back to normal. I admire the optimism, and I really do sympathise with the desire to believe this, but it seems to me unrealistic. You can’t press pause on life for a year and not expect that there won't be permanent and irreparable losses in the meantime. How hollow such ‘back to normal’ talk must sound to those who've lost their jobs and livelihoods, looking at years of work invested in businesses or careers which have been taken away from them and can’t be given back. All the parts of our lives which arise from our being humans with bodies and not virtual heads-on-Zoom can’t, fundamentally, be put on pause: we are all growing older all the time, and we can’t take a year off from that. Those who have this year lost months of good health, of fertility, of education, of time with swift-growing grandchildren or fast-ageing loved ones - they can never get that time back. Because of course time didn’t really stand still, just because we were unable to mark it: it carried us along on its inevitable forward progress, as it always does. And some people will have to live with the consequences of that lost time for the rest of their lives. 

Who can restore the year that the locusts have eaten? Nobody on earth. But this is Advent, and Advent, with its focus on Apocalypse as well as Incarnation, explores the possibility that there is more to understand about time than the little bit of it we live through. Pushing this belief that you can press pause on life to its logical conclusion, some of the ‘just a few more weeks’ people have recently been fantasising about delaying Christmas. Just push Christmas back to July, they say, when this will all be over! Again, I understand the impulse, and many people probably will choose to delay their usual celebrations, as indeed my own family are doing. But there’s perhaps no subject on which the UK media class are more consistently silly than manufactured controversies about Christmas and Easter, and of course 2020’s has to be lockdown-flavour. So journalists and commentators have been pretending not to understand why some people might feel deeply unhappy about not seeing family at Christmas, even if they accept it as necessary (‘what’s the big deal? It’s just one day!’), or pretending to be upset that a Christian festival is getting special treatment (conveniently forgetting that every other Christian festival this year has also been curtailed by lockdown - and also that in every other year these same journalists are making up a fake controversy about whether Christmas is actually a Christian festival at all.) It all feels very disingenuous, and really quite weird.

Like it or not, the reality is that in Britain just over 90% of people celebrate Christmas in some form, the majority as a secular rather than a religious festival. For most of those people, spending time with family is a key part of the celebration. So in terms of numbers alone, its loss affects many more people than the loss of other festivals (including other Christian festivals), and pretending not to understand why it poses a unique logistical challenge is little more than a cheap rhetorical trick. Since sneering at how other people celebrate Christmas is a regular part of journalistic ritual at this time of year, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that they also pretend to think that all people value about Christmas is food and presents - because then they get to roll out their yearly complaints about the supposedly selfish, greedy poor who spend all their money on turkey, garish lights, and piles of toys they can't afford (unlike good middle-class journalists, who keep a tasteful Christmas). Don't underestimate how much the tyranny of good taste underlies media chatter about how we 'ought' to celebrate Christmas, even in a time of pandemic.

Unless you're this particular kind of media person, it's not that difficult to understand why people invest money - and time, and thought, and planning and care - into making a happy Christmas for their families. The British festival year used to involve numerous seasons and holidays when people could gather together, in extended families and in local communities; now for many people in that 90% it's almost all concentrated on Christmas, and that's a lot of pressure. Of course advertisers exploit that pressure for their own ends, so many of us have a vision in our heads of the 'perfect family Christmas' which may bear little or no relation to how we have actually experienced the season. (I'm sure the journalists are attacking the imaginary advertisers' Christmas more than anything they've seen in real life.) 

It's typical of the modern Christmas, most of all in its focus on family and childhood, that it leads people to places of strong emotion, both good and bad. Whether your memories of childhood Christmas are happy or unhappy ones, when Christmas comes round there's no escaping them. Whatever your family is or isn't, or whatever you want it to be, this is the time when you are insistently pushed to think about it and to compare yourself to others. Any sense of loss or deficiency in the family is made worse by the contrast with images of other apparently perfect families, or by remembering past happiness, or imagining what could or should be. Grief is harder. Absences are more keenly felt. It's a season when one phrase or one note of a song can open floodgates of emotion, calling forth profound fears, griefs, and longings which in ordinary time we might manage to contain. Christmas used to be a season of ghost stories, and it's certainly a time when it's hard not to be haunted by memories - even happy memories, of 'those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light'.

You can call that sentimental, or irrational, but it's very powerful all the same. And it's no coincidence - of course it isn't - that this is all intensified because it takes place at midwinter, when the days are very short and the nights very long; when the weather is cold and hostile; when light is lowest, and the shadows longest. There's a reason we call this season 'the dead of winter', with all the sterility and hopelessness that implies. That makes the Christmas brightness all the brighter, or the darkness all the darker - the lights and the warmth and the company all the more welcome, or their absence all the more painful.

It's a bleak and lonely and isolating time of year, at the best of times; and these aren't the best of times. How much more endless the empty evenings seem now in November than they did in April, now they begin at four o'clock in the afternoon! The 'it's just one day' people can go on saying that as much as they like, but this particular day, after nine months of isolation or separation from family, is going to be hard for a lot of people.

None of that has much to do with the Christian meaning of Christmas; it's all as true of a secular Christmas as of a religious one. And yet of course it does, because in Britain the Christian festival and the cultural significance of this time of year have grown up together, over many centuries, rooted in a particular place and a particular culture which have formed and influenced a particular expression of both. This has been a Christian country for well over a thousand years (that's a historical fact, not a polemical point); so if you want to understand the modern British Christmas, you can't untangle one from the other. 

In Britain, as elsewhere in northern Europe, Christmas is a midwinter festival. (This is where people start shouting 'because it was stolen from the pagans!' so I'm now going to talk about that; but please proceed with an open mind, and don't just shout at me...) By the time early medieval missionaries came to convert the various peoples of Britain to Christianity, Christmas, like Easter, was already a well-established festival in the church. It's a common mistake in modern discussions of this question to massively overstate the influence of English-speaking culture within the medieval Christian church; I talked about that in relation to Easter here. So it's important to say first that the association between Christ's birth and the winter solstice, between the Son of God and the sun as a potent symbol of light and life, predates this country's conversion to Christianity by several centuries. The story of its establishment is more complex than is popularly believed, and long before the festival reached this country it was already linked up with a network of other liturgical dates, including Easter and the Feast of the Annunciation, which were thought to trace their origins back to the Gospel narratives of Christ's life and death.

But such ideas, communicated and shared throughout the international church, also manifested themselves in distinctive ways in different Christian cultures - and latitudes and climates. When Christmas reached this part of the world, it met some kind of pre-existing midwinter festival(s) with which it subsequently became entwined. As always, we know much less about these festivals than we would like to know, and much less than is often confidently stated in the media. But in the Anglo-Saxon regions of Britain, that midwinter festival was probably Geola (Yule), and what resulted from that meeting was a new expression of Christianity which went on to develop its shape and meaning within a particular cultural context. As a parallel, we might compare what happened when the very widespread tradition of Biblical and early medieval Christian 'sun' imagery for the 'Son of God' entered the English language, where the words for sun and son were very close - to a medieval way of thinking, a meaningful conjunction rather than a linguistic accident. Anglo-Saxon Christians knew perfectly well that their ancestors had celebrated a midwinter festival too, and they didn't pretend otherwise; but the new religion had given new meaning to it, and in their eyes, a meaning more true and powerful.

Religious conversion is a profound cultural shift, which involves rebuilding the social architecture of an entire society. That works itself out in different ways in different places, with an almost infinite amount of diversity and variety. In England, when it came to the festival year, it involved harmonising a new religion which had its roots in the Middle East and the Mediterranean world with the climate and agricultural calendar of a country on the edge of northern Europe. That was a complex process of synthesis and negotiation - not a matter of simply laying one calendar on top of another, or just celebrating old festivals under new names, but of reinterpreting and rethinking the intersections between the divine and the human, between religious observance and the rituals of daily life. One reason I find it frustrating when people ignore this complexity to rant about 'stealing pagan festivals' is that it denies the agency and intelligence of the converted peoples, as well as of those doing the converting. This was a process which required serious thought on both sides, and its result was an English festival calendar which had a remarkable longevity, lasting - not by any means unchanged, but very stable - from the seventh or eighth century up to just a few decades ago. Comparable, but distinct, processes took place in other parts of Britain and in Ireland, where new festival calendars were formed within these different contexts - no more or less Christian, but the product of differing cultural forces and forms of negotiation. Those variations are regularly glossed over in modern discussions of these subjects (see: Lammas, Halloween), as if all parts of what's now Britain and all forms of non-Christian religion were basically the same; but of course they weren't, and the differences are important to note.

I’m increasingly troubled by the discourse of cultural purity which surrounds the ‘stolen festivals’ myth, since it's not only historically inaccurate but also would imply, if taken to its logical conclusion, that no cultures are ever allowed to change or influence each other. I do wonder if the people who aggressively assert, more than a thousand years after Britain converted to Christianity, that Christian festivals are still a foreign imposition, unjustly supplanting some kind of native pagan religion, are really prepared to accept the implications of that argument. Are they truly suggesting that mutual influence between different cultures and religions can only ever be seen as illegitimate and corrupting? That there is one form of religion indigenous to the British Isles (paganism), and every religion introduced later has no rightful place here? That immigrants to a country should never be allowed to integrate or combine their religious traditions with those of their new home, and that even centuries after their arrival the traditions they've introduced - even if they have been widely and enthusiastically adopted - must always be stigmatised as inauthentic, not really British? I can't imagine how stultifying it must be to think of culture in such prescriptive terms, nor what it suggests about their attitude to religious diversity in general.

The medieval attitude to the development of religious festivals and seasons was considerably more flexible than such a rigid modern perspective would allow. In the early medieval period, liturgical calendars were organic in their growth, and very localised. Over time things became more standardised, but the story of the development of the Christian calendar in the first millennium is often one of feasts beginning in a particular place, where they're found to be meaningful and valuable, and then spreading elsewhere if that meaning could be translated to a new context. Some remained local, as many saints' feasts did; others started local but caught on, like All Saints' Day, or the Advent fast, and became more widely celebrated throughout the church.

In general, there's a balance between diversity and universality in early medieval practice which many people in post-Christian Britain struggle to understand. If they've only encountered one variety of Christianity - most likely a form of Anglo-American Protestantism, which they often know better from TV than from personal experience - they assume that its beliefs and practices must be universal, rather than culturally conditioned. If that's Christianity, they think, everything which varies from it must be deviant, and the easiest thing is to label those deviations 'pagan'. Some Christians are prone to this too, of course. This applies to many things, such as attitudes towards scriptural authority or interactions with the dead, but anything to do with the natural world - cycles of the earth or the sun and moon - is especially liable to fall into this category, even though it's self-evidently absurd to think that nature is somehow inherently pagan. (People who think lunar calendars are 'pagan' might want to take a look at some other major religions sometime.) How can the experience of living through the seasons, which is the most universal experience imaginable, belong to one religion more than another? What can it possibly mean to say that the feeling of living through midwinter, for instance, somehow intrinsically belongs more to paganism than it does to any other religion, such that it can be 'stolen'? The experience is the same: when it's cold and it gets dark early, people want light and warmth and the hope that this won't last forever. They may link those wants and hopes with their religious beliefs, or they may not; but surely no way of acknowledging those feelings and marking the season can be more or less right or wrong, pure or impure, native or stolen. It’s just human beings, living through time.

There are many troubling assumptions underlying this binary approach to religion, as well as a long history of what we now know to be faulty scholarship - in particular, that of 19th-century scholars who sought to identity pagan roots for Christian practices because they preferred that to acknowledging these practices' Jewish or Catholic history. One reason it would be good for the British media to take religion more seriously, and for journalists to attempt to educate themselves about a much greater diversity of religious practices, is that it would help to get away from these binary ways of thinking - basically, to understand that the world contains many more religious options than 'Anglo-American Protestant' and 'pagan'. They could, for instance, learn to recognise the kinds of symbolic language in which many religions speak about the divine, rather than insisting on taking everything with such a tired literalism ('but would it really snow in Bethlehem?'). Or they could try to understand the role of tradition and the interpretation of sacred texts in different religions, with all their complicated history and nuance (rather than thinking they're being clever by saying 'Jesus' birthday isn't mentioned in the Bible, so the date must be arbitrary!'). It would be nice to think that as we engage in another profound cultural shift, from Christian to post-Christian Britain, we could discuss these questions in more open and less intolerant ways.

'Christ was born...' (BL Cotton MS Tiberius B I)

To return to midwinter. Anglo-Saxon writers often use 'midwinter' as another name for Christmas, even in the most explicitly Christian contexts. 'Crist wæs acennyd... on midne winter' ('Christ was born at midwinter'), begins the most unambiguously liturgical Old English poem. Even in the eleventh century, when England had been soaked in Christian culture for many generations, Christmas could be called 'Midwinter's mass-day', as a completely unremarkable alternative name for the feast. That's certainly not because these writers were consciously or unconsciously still a bit pagan; it's because, like the early medieval church more widely, they were part of a culture fascinated by the intersection of liturgical time and natural time. As they saw it, God created time, like everything in the natural world; and so time and the seasons, like everything else, was pregnant with potential meaning. That meaning they understood by the light of their own environment and their Christian faith. It's no coincidence that Bede (who had thought very seriously about the transition from pagan belief to Christianity within his particular cultural context), chose a winter scene to illustrate something about that transition, giving voice to the thoughts of a pagan Northumbrian discussing whether or not to accept the new faith:

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad. The sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.

The point of this story is that not that Christianity, unlike paganism, protects you from the storms of winter. It's more bleak than that, more honest. The lighted hall, full of people and warmth and feasting (so different from Thomas Traherne's empty magnificence) is human society on this earth - all that we build to shield us from the cold and darkness. Pagan or Christian, an individual life coming into that society is still like the brief flight of a sparrow, fragile, vulnerable, transient. But the point is that if this new religion meant anything at all, it meant a glimpse of something outside the hall: of a different kind of time to that which is known to us. It meant the hope of a presence out there in the emptiness, a light in the midwinter darkness.

The company of the dead

There’s a particular horror in the idea of dying alone, and the fear of a lonely death haunts many of us. But in one or way another, death is always lonely. The grave is a solitary place, and death is a journey you have to undertake alone. Different cultures develop their own ways of lessening the loneliness of the grave, providing those who are grieving with some continuing connection to the dead. In the Christian Church, for the past thousand years, an important season for bridging the gap between the living and the dead has been the twin feasts of All Saints’ and All Souls’, on 1 and 2 November.

As the names suggest, both feasts offer the very opposite of solitude: they are opportunities to connect with multitudes, communities, vast companies of the dead. The first day celebrates the saints in heaven, the “cloud of witnesses” and the “great multitude which no man could number”, as they are described in Biblical texts read at this feast; the second day is for everyone else, all the “faithful departed” — an even greater crowd of souls.

By the later Middle Ages, these days formed a coherent and widely observed season of remembrance, known in medieval England as “Hallowtide”. The two days had distinct but related aims: All Saints’ was intended to celebrate the glorious dead and to ask for their prayers, but the purpose of All Souls’ was to pray for the dead, for those in Purgatory who needed the prayers of the living to help them in their passage to heaven. It was a time not only to remember the dead but to look after them, to give them assistance and comfort. On the nights of Hallowtide, church bells rang out to reassure the souls in Purgatory that the living had not forgotten them. It must have been profoundly comforting to the grieving, too, to feel that they could still do something to help those they had lost.

Caring for the dead wasn’t just for Hallowtide, though. In the Middle Ages, looking after the dead was a duty incumbent on believers all year round. Prayer for the dead, known and unknown, was a regular feature of medieval devotion, and was seen as an important act of charity. Believers were encouraged to pray for the souls of those they had known in life — their family, godparents, or benefactors — but also for those whom they had not personally known, but with whom they shared some connection: deceased members of their professional guild, or all the dead buried in their parish church. And they were asked to pray too, as many still do today, for those who had no one else to pray for them. No one was to be left alone in death.

I've written for Unherd about All Souls Day in this year of solitude; read the rest there. 

It's struck me so forcefully this year that whatever else you might say about the medieval church, they knew how to deal with death: learning how to face it, and how to talk about it, were seen as skills fundamental for living a good life as a thinking person in this world. For many modern people, the vast medieval literature about death and the rituals and structures for facing it are easily dismissed as superstition; but as we've seen this past year, ignoring the reality of death doesn't tend to make societies less irrational about it. Not wanting to talk about the inevitability of death doesn't make it go away; and if you don't learn to face the fear of death, the fear itself can consume you, and swallow up everything else you hold dear.

The Lives of Others

From my latest column for History Today:

‘One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other’, says the heroine of Jane Austen’s Emma, playfully trying to reassure her ever-anxious father that other people can enjoy amusements he would never himself like. In Austen’s novel Emma is often wrong, but she is certainly right about this. Over the past few months, it has been evident that there are some people for whom the pleasures of their fellow human beings are not only unappealing, but incomprehensible. As our society, like those across the world, has undergone rapid and disorienting changes within a short space of time, many have lost, at least for a period, access to the mundane pleasures that give joy to daily life.

Publicly acknowledging the painful, isolating effects of that disruption has not always been welcome. Whatever the activity – a visit to the pub, going to the beach, or browsing in a shop – the loss and then qualified return of non-essential pastimes caused storms on social media. Many on Twitter hastened to proclaim scornfully that they could not understand why anyone would want to do these things, not just in the middle of a pandemic, but at all. In ordinary times these are harmless pleasures, which many value not just for the sake of the activity but for the people they share it with: social joys of a kind social media cannot replace. Even if they are not to your taste, it is surely possible to hold two thoughts in your mind: that cancelling these activities might be necessary for the greater good, but that people can also justly mourn for their absence and wish for their return.

At the same time, it has been clear that one half of the world cannot understand the other’s troubles, either. The ‘new normal’ which some welcome is, and will continue to be, a real hardship for others. If you have a stable home, a secure source of income and a family situation which makes home-working straightforward, then your experience of this year has been very different from that of anyone who does not have those things. To see some in that fortunate position dismissing others’ struggles has been troubling.

Part of this incomprehension seems to be a lack of imagination. One person admits to finding a certain situation difficult to deal with; another responds by saying: ‘This isn’t a problem for me, so I can’t imagine why it would be for anyone else.’ The phrase ‘can’t imagine’ in such assertions is often a self-satisfied rhetorical tactic, but it is not anything to be proud of. Can we really not imagine why someone in different circumstances might respond differently to the same situation? Or are we simply unwilling to try?

Read the rest here.

Abingdon

 

If you were asked to guess the oldest town in Britain, you might not think of Abingdon. But the market town, which lies six miles south of Oxford, claims — and with some justice — to be the “oldest continuously occupied town” in this country. Situated on a loop of the Thames, in a green river valley, Abingdon was a densely-occupied and well-defended settlement by the Iron Age, surrounded by ditches which can still be traced in the plan of the modern town. Throughout the Roman and early Anglo-Saxon periods, the town’s population persisted, and by the tenth century had become the site of an important monastery.

Tourists who come to Oxford from around the world rarely make their way to Abingdon; it’s a working town, not a showplace. Its central shopping area was a casualty of post-war planners, a mass of modern concrete and chain stores; to the north, new housing estates are creeping ever closer to the famous university city. What might have been Abingdon’s chief tourist attraction, its cathedral-like abbey church, was destroyed five centuries ago.

And yet few towns are better proof of just how long and rich the history of apparently ordinary places can be. The two caveats in Abingdon’s claim to longevity (“town”, rather than city, and “in continuous occupation”) are significant, because it’s in these smaller communities — and the remarkable continuity of their institutions and collective lives — that the bedrock of British history lies.

Read the rest, on St Æthelwold and St Edmund of Abingdon, at Unherd. 

As a fantasy

'I wolde witen...'

I wolde witen of sum wys wiht
Witterly what this world were.
Hit fareth as a foules fliht;
Now is hit henne, now is hit here,
Ne be we never so muche of miht,
Now be we on benche, now be we on bere;
And be we never so war and wiht,
Now be we sek, now beo we fere,
Now is on proud withouten peere,
Now is the selve iset not by;
And whos wol alle thing hertly here,
This world fareth as a fantasy.

The sonnes cours, we may wel kenne,
Aryseth est and geth doun west;
The ryvers into the see thei renne,
And hit is never the more almest.
Wyndes rosscheth her and henne,
In snouȝ and reyn is non arest;
Whon this wol stunte, ho wot or whenne,
But only God on grounde grest?
The eorthe in on is ever prest,
Now bidropped, now al druyȝe;
But uche gome glit forth as a gest,
This world fareth as a fantasye.

Kunredes come, and kunredes gon,
As joyneth generations,
But alle he passeth everichon,
For al heor preparacions.
Sum are forgete clene as bon
Among alle maner nations;
So schul men thenken us nothing on
That now han the ocupacions;
And alle theos disputacions
Idelyche all us ocupye,
For Christ maketh the creacions,
And this world fareth as a fantasye.

Whuch is mon, ho wot, and what,
Whether that he be ought or nought?
Of erthe and eyr groweth up a gnat,
And so doth mon whon al his souht;
Thaugh mon be waxen gret and fat,
Mon melteth awey so deth a mouht.
Monnes miht nis worth a mat,
But nuyȝeth himself and turneth to nought.
Ho wot, save he that al hath wrought,
Wher mon bicometh whon he schal dye?
Ho knoweth bi dede ought bote bi thought?
For this world fareth as a fantasye.

Dyeth mon, and beestes dye,
And al is on ocasion;
And alle o deth, hos bothe drye,
And han on incarnation.
Save that men beoth more sleyghe,
Al is o comparison.
Ho wot ȝif monnes soule styȝe,
And bestes soules synketh doun?
Who knoweth beestes ententioun,
On heor creatour how thei crie,
Save only God that knoweth heore soun?
For this world fareth as a fantasye.

Eche secte hopeth to be save,
Baldely bi heore bileeve;
And echon uppon God heo crave.
Whi schulde God with hem him greve?
Echon trouweth that othur rave,
But alle heo cheoseth God for cheve,
And hope in God echone thei have,
And bi heore wit heore worching preve.
Thus mony maters men don meve,
Sechen heor wittes hou and why;
But Godes merci us alle biheve,
For this world fareth as a fantasye.

For thus men stumble and sere heore witte,
And meveth maters mony and fele;
Summe leeveth on him, sum leveth on hit,
As children leorneth for to spele.
But non seoth non that abit,
Whon stilly deth wol on hym stele.
For he that hext in hevene sit,
He is the help and hope of hele;
For wo is ende of worldes wele,
Eche lyf loke wher that I lye.
This world is fals, fikel and frele,
And fareth but as a fantasye.

Wharto wilne we forte knowe
The poyntes of Godes privete?
More then him lustes forte schowe,
We schulde not knowe in no degre;
And idel bost is forte blowe
A mayster of divinite.
Thenk we lyve in eorthe her lowe,
And God an heigh in mageste;
Of material mortualite
Medle we, and of no more maistrie.
The more we trace the Trinite,
The more we falle in fantasye.

But leve we oure disputisoun,
And leeve on him that al hath wrought;
We mowe not preve bi no resoun
How he was born that al us bought;
But hol in oure ententioun,
Worschipe we him in herte and thought,
For he may turne kuyndes upsedoun,
That alle kuyndes made of nought.
When al our bokes ben forth brouht,
And al our craft of clergye,
And al our wittes ben thorwout sought,
Yit we fareth as a fantasye.

Of fantasye is al our fare,
Olde and yonge and alle ifere.
But make we murie and sle care,
And worschipe we God whil we ben here.
Spende our good and luytel spare,
And eche mon cheries othures cheere.
Thenk how we comen hider al bare;
Our wey wendyng is in a were.
Prey we the prince that hath no pere,
Tac us hol to his merci
And kepe our concience clere,
For this world is but fantasy.

Bi ensaumple men may se,
A gret treo grouweth out of the grounde;
No thing abated the eorthe wol be
Thaugh hit be huge, gret, and rounde.
Riht ther wol rooten the selve tre,
Whon elde hath maad his kuynde aswounde;
Thaugh ther weore rote suche thre,
The eorthe wol not encrece a pounde.
Thus waxeth and wanieth mon, hors, and hounde,
From nought to nought thus henne we highe.
And her we stunteth but a stounde,
For this world is but fantasye.

This is a poem from the end of the 14th century, which survives in two famous manuscripts of that period, the 'Vernon Manuscript' and the 'Simeon Manuscript'. It's a fine and accomplished poem, which draws on well-established medieval tropes and language of the poetry of transience and loss - well-worn, and because ancient, timeless. In places it's specifically indebted to Ecclesiastes: 'Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun... I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.'

Here's a translation.

I want to know from some wise creature
Truly what this world may be.
It is like the flight of a bird:
Now is it hence, now is it here.
And however mighty we may be,
Now we are on the bench, now on the bier;
And be we never so watchful and strong,
Now are we sick, now are we well.
Now is there one proud, without a peer,
Now is the same of no account;
And whoever will all things truly hear,
This world passes as a fantasy.

The sun's course, we may well know,
Rises in the east and goes down in the west;
The rivers run into the sea,
And yet it is never the greater.
Winds rush here and there,
The snow and rain never cease;
How this will stop, who knows, or when,
But only God, greatest in the world?
The earth is ever alike beset,
Now drenched, now dry;
But every man glides away like a guest.
This world passes as a fantasy.

Kindreds come, and kindreds go,
As generations knit together,
But they all pass away, every one,
For all their preparations.
Some are forgotten, clean as bone,
Among all kinds of nations.
So shall people think not at all of us,
Who now have the possession,
And of all the disputes
Which vainly occupy us.
For Christ makes all created things,
And this world passes as a fantasy.

What is man? who knows, and what?
Is he something, or nothing?
Out of earth and air a gnat grows,
And so does man, when the truth is known.
Though a man may grow great and fat,
He melts away just like a moth.
Man's might is not worth a straw,
But it vexes himself and turns to nothing.
Who knows, save he who made all things,
Where man will go when he must die?
Who knows anything by experience, not only by thought?
For this world passes as a fantasy.

Man dies, and beasts die,
And all have one condition
And all one death, however strong they are,
And have one flesh.
Except that men are cunning,
It's all the same thing.
Who knows if the souls of men ascend,
And the souls of beasts sink down?
Who knows the thoughts of beasts,
How they cry out to their creator,
Except for God, who knows their voices?
For this world passes as a fantasy.

Each sect boldly expects to be saved
Because of their faith,
And each one cries out to God.
Why should God trouble himself with them?
Each one believes the others mad,
But all think they have God on their side,
And put their hope in God,
And justify their actions by their clever reasoning.
Thus people start many arguments,
And search their wits to understand how and why,
But God's mercy is necessary for us all,
For this world passes as a fantasy.

For thus men stumble and wither up their wits,
And wrangle over subjects many and various;
Some believe this, some that,
Like children just learning to speak.
But no one holds to anything that will last
When stilly death steals upon him.
For he that sits highest in heaven,
He is the help and hope of health;
For sorrow is the end of worldly joy.
Can anyone tell me that I'm lying?
This world is false, fickle, and frail,
And passes as a fantasy.

Why do we seek to know
The intricacies of God's secrets?
More than it pleases him to show,
We should not know, by any means.
A vain boast is that which is asserted
By a Master of Divinity.
Think that we live low here on the earth,
And God on high in majesty;
In the mortality of material things
We have a share, and no more power than that.
The more we trace out the Trinity,
The more we fall in fantasy.

But let us leave our disputations,
And believe in him who made all things.
We cannot prove by any reason
How he was born, who redeemed us all;
But, whole in our intention,
Let us worship him in heart and thought,
For he may turn nature upside-down,
Who made all nature out of nothing.
When all our books are brought out,
And all our clerkly skill,
And all our wits are sought all through,
We still pass as a fantasy.

Of fantasy is all our faring,
Old and young and all together.
But let us make merry and put by care,
And worship God while we are here;
Spend our goods and spare little,
And let each man encourage another to be cheerful
Think how we came here entirely bare.
Our way wends on, we know not where.
Pray we that the Prince who has no peer
May take us wholly to his mercy,
And keep our conscience clear,
For this world is but fantasy.

By this example you may understand:
A great tree grows out of the ground,
And the earth is not a tiny bit diminished,
Although the tree is tall, big and round.
The tree will still be rooted there
When old age has brought down his kindred;
Though there were three such trees rooted there,
The earth will not be enlarged by any degree.
Thus wax and wane man, horse, and hound,
From nothing to nothing from hence we fly,
And here we stay but a little while;
This world is but fantasy.

One of the clever things about this poem is that it mixes technical vocabulary of medieval reasoning, logic, and philosophy - occasioun, condicion, material mortualite - with blunt, homely images: 'fares like a bird's flight', 'forgotten clean as bone', 'not worth a straw'. It fits with the poem's insistent message about the futility of all human thought, speculation, dispute, argument, and wrangling, set against the inevitable and unavoidable reality of material existence: death.

The most striking example of a technical term is the poem's keynote, the word fantasye. At the time this poem was written, fantasy was a relatively new borrowing into English. The general sense in which it's used in this poem might seem not so far away from how we would use it today - 'something insubstantial and unreal' - but it has a more precise meaning: in medieval psychology, fantasy was the name for the faculty of imagination, the power of conjuring up in the mind thoughts or images of things which are not materially present. You might think of that as a relatively positive (or at least neutral) power, but since it deals with all things unreal, intangible and insubstantial, it can have strongly negative overtones too. As the Middle English Dictionary puts it, it may be 'a projection of deluded or illusory imagination... an appearance not having reality, an apparition, a phantom', and 'a deluded notion or false supposition; an unfounded speculation or suspicion; hence, untruth, a lie'. To the author of this poem, that's all the world is.

This poem has been in my mind lately, partly because I find a bit of medieval wisdom poetry helps a lot when everything is so unrelentingly sad. So many, many good things have gone in the past few months and they're probably never coming back, so it's genuinely useful to be reminded that always and everywhere, 'wo is ende of worldes wele'. Of course. What else is to be expected? Something about this particular poem's emphasis on 'fantasy' also seems an apt way of describing our strange 'new normal', where the virtual world, absent and insubstantial, is supposed to take the place of so many of the forms of tangible human contact we once knew and relied on. The fantasy of the virtual world creates the illusion of bringing people before us, but the moment the screen goes black they vanish into nothingness, much swifter than the flight of a bird. You're still alone in an empty room. And if virtual life isn't that, it's social media, with its hate and anger and violence, lurching from one crisis to the next, full of people utterly unwilling to extend kindness or understanding to strangers when they can shout at them instead. That's fantasye as phantom, nightmare. For me, real-life contact with other human beings is ordinarily what stops all that from becoming overwhelming, and makes it flee away like a bad dream. Often, one little friendly interaction with a stranger on the bus or in a shop has been enough to give me hope that most people aren't really be as awful as they seem on the internet. But that's gone; those harmless interactions are impossible now. Smiling faces are hidden, life's little grace notes of sympathy are silenced, while the howling roar of virtual rage goes on louder than ever. Well, that too isn't really new, but just the same endless wrangling which this poem warns against. 'Each side thinks the others rave'... A horrible new normal all this may be, but there's nothing new under the sun.

The Summer-Long Day

A post on Midsummer isolation and 'The Wife's Lament', which is a shortened version of something I originally posted on Patreon.