'Unwinding the water's chains': Spring, Thaw, and Some Anglo-Saxon Poems

BL Cotton Nero C IV, f. 40v (with the beginning of 'ver' on 7 February)

Three months ago, on 7 November, I looked at some poems marking what was in early medieval calendars considered to be the first day of winter - what one Anglo-Saxon poem calls 'Winter's Day'. 92 days later, we've now reached the first day of spring. The same poem, the Old English Menologium, says of 7 February:

And þæs embe ane niht
þæt we Marian mæssan healdað,
cyninges modor, forþan heo Crist on þam dæge,
bearn wealdendes, brohte to temple.
Ðænne þæs emb fif niht þæt afered byð
winter of wicum.

And then after one night [of February]
we keep the feast of Mary,
mother of the King, because on that day Christ,
the Ruler's child, she brought to the temple.
Then after five nights winter is
carried out of the camps.

'Five nights after Candlemas' might look at first glance like an arbitrary date, but these calculations were worked out with great precision by experts in the science of computus: early February falls halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and as spring lasts from now until May, the equinox will fall in the middle of the season.

In case you're objecting 'if it's officially spring now, why is it still so cold?', I can only refer you to the poem Maxims II, which notes:

Wyrd byð swiðost, winter byð cealdost,
lencten hrimigost, he byð lengest ceald.

Fate is most powerful, winter is coldest,
spring is frostiest, it is the longest cold.

Spring may not be the coldest season, but it's cold for the longest time (or maybe it just feels like it, because we're impatient for the weather to improve). Ælfric, in his De Temporibus Anni, a vernacular summary of learned scientific opinion on time, the seasons, and the natural world, explains (perhaps anticipating similar questions from his audience) that in spring 'the lengthening day is cold because the earth is permeated with the winter chill, and it takes a long time before it is warmed again'. Early spring is also wet and muddy, as you can guess from the fact that one possible interpretation of the Old English name for February, Solmonaþ, is the unappealing-sounding, yet undeniably accurate, 'mud-month'.

Diagram of the months (BL Harley 5431, f. 4)

But there's much more to spring than coldness and mud, and in this post I want to gather together a few assorted extracts from Old English poems which, when read together, have some interesting things to say about the power of spring. There are others I could have chosen; this is just an exercise in juxtaposition, really.

If, as we saw in November, winter is a time of confinement, when the earth is held prisoner by ice and snow and people are trapped within their houses, spring is when everything gets free again. An extract which I quoted in my post on winter makes the point beautifully; it's from a poem known as Maxims I:

Forst sceal freosan, fyr wudu meltan,
eorðe growan, is brycgian,
wæter helm wegan, wundrum lucan
eorðan ciðas. An sceal onbindan
forstes fetera, felamihtig God.
Winter sceal geweorpan, weder eft cuman,
sumor swegle hat. Sund unstille,
deop deada wæg, dyrne bið lengest.

Frost must freeze, fire burn up wood,
the earth grow, ice form bridges,
water wear a covering, wondrously locking up
shoots in the earth. One alone shall unbind
the frost’s fetters: God most mighty.
Winter shall turn, good weather come again,
summer bright and hot. The never-resting sea,
the deep way of the dead, will be the longest hidden.

Spring is a liberation, a loosening of the chains; everything is free again, and the waters run. In selecting extracts from Old English wisdom poetry like Maxims I, it's always hard to know where to stop the quotation: many of these phrases sound like stand-alone proverbs, but they've been put together for a reason, and the relationship between each maxim and its surrounding context can be an intriguing thing to consider. Here I've included a little more than the last time I quoted this extract, another line and a half: 'The never-resting sea, the deep way of the dead, will be the longest hidden'. What's the link between the turbulent waters of the deep - mysterious, concealed, and never still - and the return of spring? It does make sense: as the frost's chains are unwound, water's covering (helm) is broken, and the sea surges. All waters on the earth are related, after all; as Ælfric expresses it in De Temporibus Anni:

Ælc sæ, þeah heo deop sy, hæfð grund on ðære eorðan, 7 seo eorðe aberð ealle sæ, 7 ðone micclan garsecg, 7 ealle wylspringas 7 ean ðurh hire yrnað. Swa swa æddran licgað on þæs mannes lichaman, swa licgað ða wæteræddran geond þas eorðan.

'Every sea, however deep it may be, has its bottom on the earth, and the earth carries all the seas and the great ocean, and all wellsprings and rivers flow through it. Just as veins lie in a man's body, so these veins of water lie throughout this earth.'

The world with its rivers and seas, from an 11th-century map (BL Cotton Tiberius B V)

Only God can unbind the frost's fetters, and even the sea, with its mysterious depths, is not hidden from his sight:

He selfa mæg sæ geondwlitan,
grundas in geofene, godes agen bearn,
and he ariman mæg rægnas scuran,
dropena gehwelcne. Daga enderim
seolua he gesette þurh his soðan miht.

He himself, God's own Son,
can look beyond the sea, the bottom of the ocean,
and he can count the rain-showers,
every drop. The course of days
he set himself through his true power.

This comes from the beginning of a poem known as Christ and Satan, part of a description of the creation of the world, and it juxtaposes God's oversight of the waters with his establishment of times and seasons. Things which seem beyond human power of counting - days and raindrops - God can calculate better than any student of computus. (Even Bede himself.) There is a Biblical basis for this, of course - Job 38 is a particularly relevant example, and we can also compare Psalm 147: he "giveth snow like wool: scattereth mists like ashes... He sendeth his crystal like morsels: who shall stand before the face of his cold? He shall send out his word, and shall melt them: his wind shall blow, and the waters shall run." In the Old English translation of the psalm:

He snaw sendeð samed anlice
swa þu wulle flys wolcnum bringe,
and þone toweorpeð wide swa æscean.
He his cristallum cynnum sendeð
swylc swa hlafgebrece of heofonwolcnum;
for andwlitan celes þær ænig ne mæg
him standan stiðe mode.
He his word sendeð þuruh windes gast;
blaweð beorhtlice, burnan floweð
and to wætere weorðeð sniome.

When the waters run, they infuse all the world with life. It's in this context of God's power over the waters, seasons, and the spring thaw that we can place an extended simile from Beowulf (lines 1605-11), which I also quoted in the other post. It comes when Beowulf has ventured into the underwater cave where Grendel and his mother live. After his own sword fails him he picks up a huge sword which happens to be in the cave, and is able to kill Grendel's mother and cut off Grendel's head. Their blood surges up to the surface of the water, where Beowulf's companions think it's his, and begin to grieve for his supposed death. Meanwhile, down in the cave, the giant sword has begun to melt away:

Þa þæt sweord ongan
æfter heaþoswate hildegicelum,
wigbil wanian. Þæt wæs wundra sum,
þæt hit eal gemealt ise gelicost,
ðonne forstes bend Fæder onlæteð,
onwindeð wælrapas, se geweald hafað
sæla ond mæla; þæt is soð Metod.

Then that sword began
to waste away because of the war-sweat,
the blade into battle-icicles. That was a great wonder:
it all melted, just like ice
when the Father loosens the bonds of frost,
unwinds the water's chains, he who has power
over times and seasons. He is the true God.

heaþoswate, 'war-sweat', is a kenning for blood; the sword melts like an icicle in its heat, blood and water mingled together. Again we see the link between the thaw and 'he who has power over times and seasons' - þæt is soð Metod. Metod is a common epithet for God in Old English poetry, but it's not a straightforward one: it seems to mean something like 'the one who metes out', the force which controls not just frosts and times and seasons but the shape and duration of human lives. You can translate it as 'the Measurer', the one who controls fate and time and all the mysterious chaos of the never-resting waters.

The winds (BL Harley 3667, f. 5v)

He his word sendeð þuruh windes gast;
blaweð beorhtlice, burnan floweð
and to wætere weorðeð sniome.

He sends his word through the spirit of the wind;
it blows clear, the rivers flow,
and swiftly turn to water.

The wind which makes the waters run in spring is the west wind, Zephyrus, described by Ælfric as follows:

se blæwð westan, 7 ðurh his blæd acuciað ealle eorðlice blæda 7 blowað, 7 se wind towyrpð 7 ðawað ælcne winter.

'It blows from the west, and through its breath all earthly plants quicken and bloom, and that wind casts away and thaws each winter.'

At the breath of the wind, and the surging waters of life, everything in the world ðawað and acuciað - human beings too. I've previously quoted here Ælfric's sermon for Ash Wednesday, where he says that although it is true that 'you are dust, and to dust you shall return',

Nis þis na gesæd be manna sawlum
ac be manna lichaman þe formolsniað to duste
and eft sceolan on domes dæg ðurh ures drihtnes mihte
ealle of eorðan arisan þe æfre cuce wæron
swa swa ealle treowa cuciað æfre on lenctenes timan
þe ær þurh wyntres cyle wurdon adydde.

This is not said about the souls of men,
but about their bodies, which moulder to dust,
and shall again on Judgement Day, through the power of our Lord,
rise from the earth, all who ever lived,
just as all trees quicken again in the season of spring
which were deadened by the winter's chill.

'The season of spring' is lenctenes timan; from lencten we get the name for the period we now call Lent, but in Old English (and in Middle English too) it referred to the whole season of spring. In spring, and especially through the observance of Lent, human beings can be quickened with life like the natural world around them. This quickening can manifest as an eager, restless longing to be out and abroad, to search for new things and a new life. In The Seafarer, the return of spring urges the restless spirit to set out to sea, to put out into the deep waters:

Bearwas blostmum nimað, byrig fægriað,
wongas wlitigað, woruld onetteð;
ealle þa gemoniað modes fusne
sefan to siþe, þam þe swa þenceð
on flodwegas feor gewitan.
Swylce geac monað geomran reorde,
singeð sumeres weard, sorge beodeð
bitter in breosthord. þæt se beorn ne wat,
esteadig secg, hwæt þa sume dreogað
þe þa wræclastas widost lecgað.
Forþon nu min hyge hweorfeð ofer hreþerlocan,
min modsefa mid mereflode
ofer hwæles eþel hweorfeð wide,
eorþan sceatas, cymeð eft to me
gifre ond grædig, gielleð anfloga,
hweteð on hwælweg hreþer unwearnum
ofer holma gelagu. Forþon me hatran sind
dryhtnes dreamas þonne þis deade lif,
læne on londe.

The woods take on blossoms, towns become fair,
fields grow beautiful, the world hastens on;
all these things urge on the eager mind,
the spirit to the journey, in one who thinks to travel
far on the paths of the sea.
The cuckoo too gives warning with mournful voice,
summer's watchman sings, foretells sorrow,
bitter in the heart. Of this that man knows nothing,
the warrior blessed with wealth, what some endure
who furthest tread the paths of exile.
And so now my spirit roams beyond the confines of the heart,
my spirit over the sea-flood;
it wanders wide over the whale's home,
the expanse of the earth, and comes back to me
eager and greedy; the lone flier cries,
incites the heart to the whale's way, irresistible,
across the ocean's floods. And so to me
the joys of the Lord are warmer than this dead life,
lent on land.

The speaker leaves the comforts of life on land to journey across the whale's way (hwælweg), over the cold waters to find 'warmer joys' in heaven. He becomes a pilgrim, of a sort; to compare a later but probably more familiar example, you might remember that it's when springtime signs of life appear in the natural world - singing birds, the sap rising, and Zephyrus 'with his swete breeth' - that, Chaucer tells us, "than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages".

Through Lent and spring we come to Easter, of course. Spring is a yearly liberation from the confines of winter, but it can also be read as a confirmation, through the signs in nature, of the greater liberation brought about by Christ's death and resurrection. At the moment of Beowulf's victory, blood and water gush forth, as if from Christ's side upon the cross; in The Dream of the Rood, both Christ and the tree bleed blood and water, beswyled mid swates gange, and 'all creation weeps' thawing tears. In Norse mythology, just such a liberating thaw almost weeps Baldr out of the underworld, 'as all things weep when they come from frost into warmth' - a spring-like resurrection vividly re-imagined by C. S. Lewis in his description of Aslan's return to Narnia.

The diagram above is from BL Harley 3667, a manuscript made at Peterborough Abbey in the twelfth century. It was designed by the monk Byrhtferth of Ramsey, and shows the correspondences between the four seasons of the year, the months, elements, winds, astrological signs, and more, as well as the seasons of human life, from childhood to old age. It's a work of art as well as a clever act of synthesis; the course of the year is a complex interweaving of patterns, and the intricacy of the arrangement has a beauty of its own. To begin to appreciate this view of the world is to see all the universe as interconnected, with pattern and order running through it like those 'veins' of rivers which thread across the earth. In this view all the seasons of human existence have their correspondences in the heavens and in the year, and our lives, which can seem so random and meaningless, are part of a great pattern as ancient and as huge as the universe.

'A noise of great good coming into earth'

Last weekend I took a stroll in Addison's Walk, in the grounds of Magdalen College in Oxford, where a few years ago the above plaque was installed, bearing this poem by C. S. Lewis:

'What the Bird Said Early in the Year'

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.

What could be more appropriate to contemplate in Magdalen on a sunny day in early spring? One appealing thing which makes this poem so apt for its setting is that Addison's Walk is circular - so it does indeed always bring you back to the place you started from, like the cycle of the year. (Well, unless you double back on yourself. But who would wilfully spoil such a perfect metaphor?)

The other version of Lewis' poem suggests that in writing this he was actually thinking of a period slightly later in the spring than March. Magdalen, where they sing madrigals at dawn on May Morning, has always seemed to me nearly synonymous with May, and in May its grounds are covered in flowers (this is what they look like in April); so perhaps this should be thought of as a Maytime poem. At the moment it's still very early in the year; the trees are mostly bare, and the fritillaries for which Magdalen's gardens are famous are still lurking underground, but there are snowdrops, daffodils and crocuses in plenty.

After a winter of rain the rivers are full, and at the moment are sounding louder and looking browner than usual. The Cherwell is generally a very placid river, not giving to roaring; but it's proved itself a formidable force this winter, and is still swollen beyond its usual banks.

This spring a poem by Lewis has been in my mind; not 'What the bird said early in the year', but this, the conclusion of his narrative poem Dymer, published in 1926:

A leap--a cry--flurry of steel and claw,
Then silence. As before, the morning light
And the same brute crouched yonder; and he saw
Under its feet, broken and bent and white,
The ruined limbs of Dymer, killed outright
All in a moment, all his story done.
...But that same moment came the rising sun;

And thirty miles to westward, the grey cloud
Flushed into answering pink, long shadows streamed
From every hill, and the low-hanging shroud
Of mist along the valleys broke and steamed
Gold-flecked to heaven. Far off the armour gleamed
Like glass upon the dead man's back. But now
The sentinel ran forward, hand to brow.

And staring. For between him and the sun
He saw that country clothed with dancing flowers
Where flower had never grown; and one by one
The splintered woods, as if from April showers,
Were softening into green. In the leafy towers
Rose the cool, sudden chattering on the tongues
Of happy birds with morning in their lungs.

The wave of flowers came breaking round his feet,
Crocus and bluebell, primrose, daffodil
Shivering with moisture: and the air grew sweet
Within his nostrils, changing heart and will,
Making him laugh. He looked, and Dymer still
Lay dead among the flowers and pinned beneath
The brute: but as he looked he held his breath;

For when he had gazed hard with steady eyes
Upon the brute, behold, no brute was there,
But someone towering large against the skies,
A wing'd and sworded shape, whose foam-like hair
Lay white about its shoulders, and the air
That came from it was burning hot. The whole
Pure body rimmed with life, as a full bowl.

And from the distant corner of day's birth
He heard clear trumpets blowing and bells ring,
A noise of great good coming into earth
And such a music as the dumb would sing
If Balder had led back the blameless spring
With victory, with the voice of charging spears,
And in white lands long-lost Saturnian years.

'If Balder had led back the blameless spring / With victory'. The epithet describes Baldr, not the spring, but they're one and the same - he is the blameless god, innocent and beautiful, whose unmerited death is perhaps the most devastating moment in Norse mythology. Killed by the malice of Loki, Baldr is confined in the underworld ruled by the goddess Hel. His grieving mother, Frigg, extracts a promise from Hel that she will release Baldr if all things in the world, alive or dead, will weep for him, 'as all things weep when they come from frost into warmth' (as the Prose Edda puts it). All creatures weep to bring the much-loved god back from the underworld - except one, Loki in disguise, and so Baldr must remain with Hel. There he stays until Ragnarök, the end of the gods, when the world is destroyed after endless winter, fire, and water. But the world will be reborn, and then Baldr will come back to dwell on the green and fertile plains of the new-born earth. Later interpretations have seen Baldr as a Christ-figure, a solar god, and god of the spring - as he is here for Lewis.

There are parallels here with Lewis' description of the miraculous spring which accompanies Aslan's return to Narnia in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. It was Baldr, we learn from Surprised by Joy, who gave Lewis one of his early experiences of Joy:

The third glimpse came through poetry. I had become fond of Longfellow's Saga of King Olaf: fond of it in a casual shallow way for its story and its vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from such pleasures, like a voice from far more different regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner's Drapa and read:

I heard a voice that cried
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead---

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.

In the poem quoted here, Baldr is 'God of the summer sun, fairest of all the Gods'. Lewis recreates his moment of Joy for the children and the reader in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when they (and we) first hear the name of Aslan:

And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning – either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.

Some pages later:

"Oh, yes! Tell us about Aslan!" said several voices at once; for once again that strange feeling - like the first signs of spring, like good news, had come over them.

"Who is Aslan?" asked Susan.

"Aslan?" said Mr Beaver. "Why, don't you know? He's the King. He's the Lord of the whole wood, but not often here, you understand. Never in my time or my father's time. But the word has reached us that he has come back. He is in Narnia at this moment... He'll put all to rights, as it says in an old rhyme in these parts:

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

'The beginning of summer... like the first signs of spring, like good news.' This 'old rhyme' echoes, I think, the description of the world reborn after Ragnarök in the Norse poem Völuspá: 'böls mun alls batna, / Baldr mun koma', 'all harms will be healed / Baldr will come'. A very old rhyme indeed!

After Narnia's fimbulvetr spring comes with a great rushing thaw, as when all creation weeps for Baldr:

Now they were steadily racing on again. And soon Edmund noticed that the snow which splashed against them as they rushed through it was much wetter than it had been all last night. At the same time he noticed that he was feeling much less cold. It was also becoming foggy. In fact every minute it grew foggier and warmer. And the sledge was not running nearly as well as it had been running up till now. At first he thought this was because the reindeer were tired, but soon he saw that that couldn't be the real reason. The sledge jerked, and skidded, and kept on jolting as if it had struck against stones. And however the dwarf whipped the poor reindeer the sledge went slower and slower. There also seemed to be a curious noise all round them, but the noise of their driving and jolting and the dwarf's shouting at the reindeer prevented Edmund from hearing what it was, until suddenly the sledge stuck so fast that it wouldn't go on at all. When that happened there was a moment's silence. And in that silence Edmund could at last listen to the other noise properly. A strange, sweet, rustling, chattering noise - and yet not so strange, for he'd heard it before - if only he could remember where! Then all at once he did remember. It was the noise of running water. All round them though out of sight, there were streams, chattering, murmuring, bubbling, splashing and even (in the distance) roaring. And his heart gave a great leap (though he hardly knew why) when he realized that the frost was over. And much nearer there was a drip-drip-drip from the branches of all the trees. And then, as he looked at one tree he saw a great load of snow slide off it and for the first time since he had entered Narnia he saw the dark green of a fir tree. But he hadn't time to listen or watch any longer, for the Witch said:

"Don't sit staring, fool! Get out and help."

And of course Edmund had to obey. He stepped out into the snow - but it was really only slush by now - and began helping the dwarf to get the sledge out of the muddy hole it had got into. They got it out in the end, and by being very cruel to the reindeer the dwarf managed to get it on the move again, and they drove a little further. And now the snow was really melting in earnest and patches of green grass were beginning to appear in every direction. Unless you have looked at a world of snow as long as Edmund had been looking at it, you will hardly be able to imagine what a relief those green patches were after the endless white...

Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down on to the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops.

Soon there were more wonderful things happening. Coming suddenly round a corner into a glade of silver birch trees Edmund saw the ground covered in all directions with little yellow flowers - celandines. The noise of water grew louder. Presently they actually crossed a stream. Beyond it they found snowdrops growing.

"Mind your own business!" said the dwarf when he saw that Edmund had turned his head to look at them; and he gave the rope a vicious jerk.

But of course this didn't prevent Edmund from seeing. Only five minutes later he noticed a dozen crocuses growing round the foot of an old tree - gold and purple and white. Then came a sound even more delicious than the sound of the water. Close beside the path they were following a bird suddenly chirped from the branch of a tree. It was answered by the chuckle of another bird a little further off. And then, as if that had been a signal, there was chattering and chirruping in every direction, and then a moment of full song, and within five minutes the whole wood was ringing with birds' music, and wherever Edmund's eyes turned he saw birds alighting on branches, or sailing overhead or chasing one another or having their little quarrels or tidying up their feathers with their beaks.

"Faster! Faster!" said the Witch.

There was no trace of the fog now. The sky became bluer and bluer, and now there were white clouds hurrying across it from time to time. In the wide glades there were primroses. A light breeze sprang up which scattered drops of moisture from the swaying branches and carried cool, delicious scents against the faces of the travellers. The trees began to come fully alive. The larches and birches were covered with green, the laburnums with gold. Soon the beech trees had put forth their delicate, transparent leaves. As the travellers walked under them the light also became green. A bee buzzed across their path.

"This is no thaw," said the dwarf, suddenly stopping. "This is Spring. What are we to do? Your winter has been destroyed, I tell you! This is Aslan's doing."

"If either of you mention that name again," said the Witch, "he shall instantly be killed."

While the dwarf and the White Witch were saying this, miles away the Beavers and the children were walking on hour after hour into what seemed a delicious dream. Long ago they had left the coats behind them. And by now they had even stopped saying to one another, "Look! there's a kingfisher," or "I say, bluebells!" or "What was that lovely smell?" or "Just listen to that thrush!" They walked on in silence drinking it all in, passing through patches of warm sunlight into cool, green thickets and out again into wide mossy glades where tall elms raised the leafy roof far overhead, and then into dense masses of flowering currant and among hawthorn bushes where the sweet smell was almost overpowering.

They had been just as surprised as Edmund when they saw the winter vanishing and the whole wood passing in a few hours or so from January to May. They hadn't even known for certain (as the Witch did) that this was what would happen when Aslan came to Narnia. But they all knew that it was her spells which had produced the endless winter; and therefore they all knew when this magic spring began that something had gone wrong, and badly wrong, with the Witch's schemes. And after the thaw had been going on for some time they all realized that the Witch would no longer be able to use her sledge. After that they didn't hurry so much and they allowed themselves more rests and longer ones. They were pretty tired by now of course; but not what I'd call bitterly tired - only slow and feeling very dreamy and quiet inside as one does when one is coming to the end of a long day in the open. Susan had a slight blister on one heel.

They had left the course of the big river some time ago; for one had to turn a little to the right (that meant a little to the south) to reach the place of the Stone Table. Even if this had not been their way they couldn't have kept to the river valley once the thaw began, for with all that melting snow the river was soon in flood - a wonderful, roaring, thundering yellow flood - and their path would have been under water.

What these pictures can't show you, of course, is the sound: the sound of the river, of the bells, of the birds, 'a strange, sweet, rustling, chattering noise', 'a noise of great good coming into earth'.

Myth and Mystery and The Cherry Tree Carol

What excuse can there be for blogging about such a well-known piece as the Cherry Tree Carol?  Well, Saturdays used to be folk music days on this blog, so there's one sort of reason; and I'll justify it to myself by including the oldest English version of the story, which is from the late medieval period. That definitely falls into my purview.

The story of the cherry tree appears in a mystery play about the Nativity, in the cycle known as the the N-town plays, which probably derive from the wealthy cultural hub that was fifteenth-century Norfolk (...that sounds like sarcasm, but it's not!). The section relevant to the Cherry Tree Carol comes at the opening of the Nativity play, as Mary and Joseph are travelling to Bethlehem. This is my modernised version of the Middle English text, which can be found here.

JOSEPH  Lord, what trouble for man is wrought!
Rest in this world there comes to him none.
Octavian, our emperor, firmly hath besought
Our tribute him to bear: folk must forth, each one,
It is cried in every town and city by name.
I that am a poor timber-wright,
Born of the blood of David,
The emperor's commandment I must hold with,
Or else I were to blame.
Now, my wife, Mary, what say ye to this?
For surely, needs I must forth wend
Unto the city of Bethlehem far hence, iwis,
Thus to labour I must my body bend.

MARIA  My husband and my spouse, with you will I wend,
A sight of that city fain would I see.
If I might any of my family there find,
It would be great joy unto me!

JOSEPH  My spouse, ye be with child; I fear you to carry,
For it seems to me it were a work wild, [a crazy thing to do]
But you to please right fain would I -
Yet women are easy to grieve when they are with child!
Now let us forth wend as fast as we may,
And Almighty God speed us in our journey.

[they set off...]

MARIA  Ah, my sweet husband, would ye tell to me
What tree is yon, standing upon yon hill?

JOSEPH  Forsooth, Mary, it is called a cherry tree.
In time of year, ye might feed thereon your fill.

MARIA  Turn again, husband, and behold yon tree,
How that it bloometh now so sweetly!

JOSEPH  Come on, Mary, that we may sleep at yon city,
Or else we may be blamed, I tell you hastily.

MARIA  Now, my spouse, I pray you to behold
How the cherries grow upon yon tree;
To have thereof right glad I would be,
If it pleased you to labour so much for me.

JOSEPH  Your desire to fulfill I shall assay, certainly.
Ow! To pluck you of these cherries, it is a work wild,
For the tree is so high, it will not be easy!
Let him pluck you cherries who got you with child.

MARIA  Now, good Lord, I pray thee, grant me this boon,
To have of these cherries, if it be your will.
Now I thank God - this tree boweth to me down!
I may now gather enough and eat my fill.

JOSEPH  Ow! I know well I have offended my God in Trinity,
Speaking to my spouse these unkind words,
For now I believe well it may none other be
But that my spouse beareth the King's Son of bliss.
May he help us now at our need.
Of the kindred of Jesse, worthily were ye born:
Kings and patriarchs go before.
All these worthy of your kindred were,
As clerks in story read.

MARIA  Now, gramercy, husband, for your report. [words]
On our way wisely let us forth wend.
The Father Almighty, may he be our comfort;
The Holy Ghost glorious, may he be our friend.

Joseph and Mary travelling to Bethlehem (BL Yates Thompson 13, f. 88v)

The story of the tree which miraculously bends down its branches for Mary has its ultimate roots in a miracle performed by the baby Jesus on the flight into Egypt, described in the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew:

And it came to pass on the third day of their journey, while they were walking, that the blessed Mary was fatigued by the excessive heat of the sun in the desert; and seeing a palm tree, she said to Joseph: Let me rest a little under the shade of this tree. Joseph therefore made haste, and led her to the palm, and made her come down from her beast. And as the blessed Mary was sitting there, she looked up to the foliage of the palm, and saw it full of fruit, and said to Joseph: I wish it were possible to get some of the fruit of this palm. And Joseph said to her: I wonder that thou sayest this, when thou seest how high the palm tree is; and that thou thinkest of eating of its fruit. I am thinking more of the want of water, because the skins are now empty, and we have none wherewith to refresh ourselves and our cattle. Then the child Jesus, with a joyful countenance, reposing in the bosom of His mother, said to the palm: O tree, bend thy branches, and refresh my mother with thy fruit. And immediately at these words the palm bent its top down to the very feet of the blessed Mary; and they gathered from it fruit, with which they were all refreshed. And after they had gathered all its fruit, it remained bent down, waiting the order to rise from Him who had commanded it to stoop. Then Jesus said to it: Raise thyself, O palm tree, and be strong, and be the companion of my trees, which are in the paradise of my Father; and open from thy roots a vein of water which has been hid in the earth, and let the waters flow, so that we may be satisfied from thee. And it rose up immediately, and at its root there began to come forth a spring of water exceedingly clear and cool and sparkling. And when they saw the spring of water, they rejoiced with great joy, and were satisfied, themselves and all their cattle and their beasts. Wherefore they gave thanks to God.

Parts of Pseudo-Matthew were translated into English as early as the Anglo-Saxon period, and its apocryphal stories about Mary and the childhood of Christ have long been part of Christian tradition. The development of the legend to place this event before the birth of Christ rather than afterwards makes it possible to incorporate the aspect of Joseph's distress over Mary's pregnancy, a popular subject in folk carols; compare 'Marvel not, Joseph', 'When righteous Joseph wedded was', and 'Joseph being an aged man' (or as I like to think of it, the 'dearest dear' carol).  The Cherry Tree Carol was and is still the foremost example of this theme. The carol has many different variant forms - attesting to its widespread popularity - but here's one version:

Joseph was an old man
And an old man was he,
When he wedded Mary
In the land of Galilee.

Joseph and Mary walked
Through an orchard good,
Where was cherries and berries
So red as any blood.

Joseph and Mary walked
Through an orchard green
Where was berries and cherries
As thick as might be seen.

O then bespoke Mary,
With words so meek and mild,
'Pluck me one cherry, Joseph,
For I am with child.'

O then bespoke Joseph,
With answer most unkind,
'Let him pluck thee a cherry
That brought thee now with child.'

O then bespoke the baby
Within his mother's womb,
'Bow down then the tallest tree
For my mother to have some.'

Then bowed down the highest tree,
Unto his mother's hand.
Then she cried, 'See, Joseph,
I have cherries at command.'

O then bespake Joseph,
'I have done Mary wrong;
But now cheer up, my dearest,
And do not be cast down.

'O eat your cherries, Mary,
O eat your cherries now,
O eat your cherries, Mary,
That grow upon the bough.'

Then Mary plucked a cherry,
As red as any blood;
Then Mary she went homewards
All with her heavy load.

Perhaps the most famous choral setting is this chirpy, dancey arrangement by Stephen Cleobury:



I like this a lot, but it's the folk versions which really have my heart.  Here are two from youtube, first Jean Ritchie:



And the British band Kerfuffle:



There are lots more on youtube, but if I attempted to be comprehensive we'd be here all day!

It is so wonderful to me that the key line "Let him pluck you cherries who got you with child" is the same in the carols as in the play. Stories passed down in oral tradition often centre on one single line like this - and it's usually a line of dialogue, a memorable utterance or a joke or a pun - and while the details of the story change, the central line remains stable.  These varying details are nonetheless worth savouring. The versions which locate the incident in an orchard, instead of by the roadside, highlight an elegant contrast to the couple and the tree of the Garden of Eden: Mary is the opposite of Eve (her 'Ave' reversed Eve's very name) and so here the woman asks her husband for fruit, rather than offering it. I also like how some of the folk versions call Mary 'Queen of Galilee'; the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew has a story about Mary's childhood where, as she is weaving cloth with other young girls, the girls laughingly tell her 'because you are the youngest, and you weave the fine white cloth, you can be our queen'. An angel appears and tells them that they are right: Mary will be queen of all the world. (This story was translated into Old English, where Mary was to be, of course, 'queen of middle earth'.)  The characterisation of a jealous Joseph in this story is perhaps not surprising, but it is remarkable to find Mary exulting in her triumph: 'See, Joseph, I have cherries at command!'  Queen or not, a wheedling, cherry-craving, exulting Mary is a more human figure than Christian literature usually permits the Virgin to be.

The carol continues:

As Joseph was a-walking,
He heard an angel sing:
'This night there shall be born
On earth our heavenly King;

'He neither shall be born
In housen nor in hall,
Nor in the place of Paradise,
But in an ox's stall.

'He neither shall be clothed
In purple nor in pall,
But all in fair linen
As wear the babies all.

'He neither shall be rocked
In silver nor in gold,
But in the wooden cradle
That rocks upon the mould.

'He neither shall be christened
In white wine nor red,
But with fair spring water
As we were christened.'

Then Mary took her young son,
And set him on her knee:
Saying, 'My dear son, tell me,
Tell how this world shall be.'

'O I shall be as dead, mother,
As stones are in the wall;
O the stones in the streets, mother,
Shall sorrow for me all.

'On Easter-day, dear mother,
My rising up shall be;
O the sun and the moon, mother,
Shall both arise with me.'

My favourite version of the carol is sung by Waterson:Carthy (not, alas, on youtube); this site gives the source of their lyrics:

Joseph was an old man, an old man was he,
When he married sweet Mary, she's Queen of Galilee.

Now Joseph had wedded Mary and home had her brought.
Mary proved with child, but Joseph knew her not.

Oh, Joseph and Mary went walking in the grove,
They saw cherries and berries as red as any rose.

And up spoke young Mary, so meek and so mild,
“Oh, pick me cherries, Joseph, for I am with child.”

Then Joseph flew in anger, in anger flew he,
“Let the father of your baby pick cherries for thee.”

Then up spoke the baby Jesus, all in his mother's womb,
“Bow down low, you cherry tree, let my mother have some.”

And the very tall branches bowed low to her knee,
And Mary picked cherries by one, two and three.

Now Mary had a young son which she dandled on her knee,
“Come tell me, sweet baby, what will this world be?”

“Oh, this world,” he said, “is no other than stones in the street
But the sun, moon, and stars will sail under thy feet.

“And I must not be rocked in silver or gold
But in some wooden cradle like the babes are rocked all.

“And on the sixth day of January my birthday will be,
When the skies and the elements will tremble for me.”


Those last four verses are just wonderful - "the sun, moon, and stars will sail under thy feet!" The baby Christ predicting his future is a device used in a number of medieval carols, of which my favourite is 'As I lay upon a night' (at nearly forty verses long, surely the most extensive example); also relevant is the carol 'Under a tree', where the pregnant Virgin imagines her future with her holy child. Like the Cherry Tree Carol, these poems are interested in the interplay between human and divine knowledge - what Mary knows but Joseph doesn't, what the baby Christ knows but Mary doesn't, and what nature knows and the human characters don't - and in narrative time, positioning themselves at a moment in history when the events of the Gospel were the future in human time and not the distant past. It's all a kind of thought experiment with ignorance and knowledge, as if to better approach an understanding of the moment when Wisdom entered into the human world. It is important that the natural world understands this better than the humans do - not only the cherry tree, but also the stones in the street and the 'skies and elements', which will wordlessly acknowledge Christ even while Mary still hardly knows what he is.

I like the Cherry Tree Carol, and I'm glad that people still sing it, but there's a disconnect between the way this carol is usually presented today and my own response to this story. It's this: modern audiences seem to find the story funny, and I don't. The usual tone in modern references to the carol is a cutesy knowing kind of attitude towards Joseph's frustration - exemplified by the introduction to this otherwise perfectly nice rendering of the song - with implicit agreement that we clever moderns, starting with that honorary modern Chaucer (who may be partly parodying this story in The Merchant's Tale), can rather patronisingly enjoy the naivety of this simple tale. I can see the appeal of the light-hearted approach, and humanising the story in this way does have its advantages, but for me it takes away the whole power of the thing. I know I'm an outlier; most people seem to like the funny bits of medieval culture far more than the serious stuff, and just as I may be the only person in the world who prefers manuscript images of saints and angels to the quirky marginalia which surrounds them, I may also be the only person who prefers a serious take on the Cherry Tree Carol! Certainly the N-town play is supposed to be humorous, but the story itself is strange and angry and raw, and to take away any of that by winky jokes about cuckoldry and old men with young wives (as the play rather does, though the carols don't) is to lose a great deal.

There is big, dark, difficult stuff here. The Cherry Tree Carol finds what's unpredictable in the story of the Incarnation, what's dangerous about it: an angry man caught up in events he cannot understand or control, a child speaking from the womb, a tall tree which suddenly bows low, a baby who says he will make the skies tremble. Gods should be unpredictable; they should be outside human knowledge. One of the things which appeals to me most about medieval Christianity, by contrast with the modern variety, is that it has space for these kind of strange, uncomfortable stories. If you want a religion which appears reasonable and amenable and sophisticated and modern (and certainly not that dreaded word, medieval), you have to take away these myths and miracles, leaving only what can be argued about; this is how we get a church which can only talk about ethics and law and morality, without ever mentioning mystery and wonder and the supernatural. It bears the same relationship to medieval Christianity as the Thor superhero movies do to the dark, violent, world-shaking gods of Norse myth (even they do a better job of balancing comedy with the mythic than most Christian preachers manage today...). Earlier this year I spent a period of time utterly absorbed in Norse mythology, more deeply than I have ever been before, and although I've always found it interesting I for the first time found it moving, powerful, and real. I almost wept for the killing of Baldr, the bright innocent thing whose death is the beginning of the end of the world; I was almost afraid at the apocalyptic chaos of Ragnarok, when all fettered evil things go free. I came closer than ever before to understanding what C. S. Lewis meant when he talked in Surprised by Joy about Norse myth seeming to him, as a teenager,

a bigger thing than my religion... because my attitude toward it contained elements which my religion ought to have contained and did not. It was not itself a new religion, for it contained no trace of belief and imposed no duties. Yet unless I am greatly mistaken there was in it something very like adoration... Sometimes I can almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself. 

So I come to Christmas this year wondering why Norse myth does seem to me 'bigger' than Christianity, and why Christmas, in particular, feels so small. Part of it is simple familiarity, but it's also cultural. When I was a child I had an anthology of Christmas poems which included the Cherry Tree Carol, illustrated with Mary and Joseph depicted as little children, as if in an infant school's nativity play. The book was lovely, but that's utterly wrong (and a tiny bit creepy). I don't mind a cosy Christmas, but I do object to a nursery-school one - as if there is nothing in the story of the Incarnation which can occupy the mind and the imagination of anyone above the age of five. Leave 'Away in a Manger' for the children, and let adults keep the Cherry Tree Carol! We all know that 'Christmas is for the children' (and their parents), but it has to mean something for the rest of the world too; just because it involves babies and stars and donkeys doesn't mean it has to be safe and comfy. It should be strange and unfamiliar, every year. The Cherry Tree Carol seems to me like the exact opposite of the comparisons well-meaning preachers like to bring out at Christmas - 'Mary was a single mother! Mary and Joseph were refugees!' That kind of thing exploits the Gospel story to make it prove whatever point the preacher wants to highlight (worthy issues, of course); it makes the story smaller and safer, reframes it in our terms, so that the people in it become projections of our society's opinions and experiences. The Cherry Tree Carol, despite the very English setting of a cherry-orchard, does the opposite: it digs deep into the mythic heart of the story and strips away the cosiness and the familiarity to get to the core of strangeness. It becomes a story in a true sense, not a pretty picture but a narrative, with its characters real people who can feel big emotions like anger and shock and fear. While the terrifying baby of the Cherry Tree Carol is not as capricious as the entirely wise but utterly irrational Odin (or as cruel as Christ is shown to be in some folk carols, like On Christmas Day), he is much closer to myth than to our idea of rational religion. We should find this story scary; what's the point of an incarnation that doesn't shake the world?

C. S. Lewis the Medievalist: Baldr, Brunanburh, Athelstan, and Edmund the Just

King Athelstan in a tenth-century manuscript (image from wikipedia)

Today the internet is full of people paying tribute to C. S. Lewis, who died fifty years ago on 22 November 1963. It's difficult to say anything about Lewis that hasn't been said before, but I wanted to pay my own tribute anyway; he's been important to my imaginative life ever since I learned to read, and (although I only realised this rather late in the game) he was a big part of the reason I became a medievalist.  The Chronicles of Narnia are a splendid introduction to medieval literature, because Lewis delighted in cramming in as many allusions as possible from all kinds of literary sources, often, it seems, just for his own scholarly amusement. I've talked about this before in reference to Lewis' wonderfully playful attitude to literary language in the Chronicles; the language soars far above the average child reader's vocabulary to experiment and luxuriate and delight in different registers of literary discourse. Today I went and re-read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe in the Bodleian - quite without shame, because I'm old enough to read fairy tales openly now! - and was pleased to be reminded of one lovely instance of this: by the end of the book, when the children have reached adulthood in Narnia, they've started to speak in the most ridiculously brilliant medievalese:

Then said King Peter (for they talked in quite a different style now, having been Kings and Queens for so long), "Fair Consorts, let us now alight from our horses and follow this beast into the thicket; for in all my days I never hunted a nobler quarry."

"Sir," said the others, "even so let us do."

So they alighted and tied their horses to trees and went on into the thick wood on foot. And as soon as they had entered it Queen Susan said, "Fair friends, here is a great marvel, for I seem to see a tree of iron."

"Madam," said King Edmund, "if you look well upon it you shall see it is a pillar of iron with a lantern set on the top thereof."

"By the Lion's Mane, a strange device," said King Peter, "to set a lantern here where the trees cluster so thick about it and so high above it that if it were lit it should give light to no man!"

"Sir," said Queen Lucy, "by likelihood when this post and this lamp were set here there were smaller trees in the place, or fewer, or none. For this is a young wood and the iron post is old." And they stood looking upon it. Then said King Edmund,

"I know not how it is, but this lamp on the post worketh upon me strangely. It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before; as it were in a dream, or in the dream of a dream."

"Sir," answered they all, "it is even so with us also."

Absurd, but so much fun! The narrator plays along too - 'answered they all' is straight out of Le Morte d'Arthur. And then the first thing that comes back to them as they return to England is their ordinary everyday language:

So these Kings and Queens entered the thicket, and before they had gone a score of paces they all remembered that the thing they had seen was called a lamppost, and before they had gone twenty more they noticed that they were making their way not through branches but through coats.

Within a sentence the narrator has switched back from 'a score of paces' to just 'twenty more'; we are back in the modern world.  I adore this kind of thing, and it's a fantastic introduction to the idea of literary language and appropriate styles of discourse; Lewis was forming his child readers into little literary critics.

This is true on another level too, because - rather like the Canterbury Tales - the Narnia books are a compendium of literary genres, a joyous introduction to all the different kinds of things literature can do. The Magician's Nephew plays in the world of E. Nesbit's children's stories, The Horse and His Boy in the world of the Arabian Nights; Prince Caspian offers the dynastic conflicts of Shakespeare's history plays, its hero a fine Tudor prince properly educated in the quadrivium (!); The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is all Mandevillian 'Travels in the East', complete with sea-serpents and monopods; The Silver Chair starts with Middle English romance (Sir Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) and gets progressively more Norse as the story goes north, until we end up in the Prose Edda; and The Last Battle takes us to apocalypse by way of Brave New World.  This is something deeper than pastiche; it's born of a great love of literature and its many possibilities. From a spiritual point of view, Lewis famously talked of the 'baptism of the imagination' which literature could provide; he envisaged the Narnian stories producing an effect which was only to be fully realised in later life, when the reader encountered an idea (or image or story) which they recognised as having met before. According to his biographer:

His idea, as he once explained to me, was to make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life. He hoped that they would be vaguely reminded of the somewhat similar stories that they had read and enjoyed years before. 'I am aiming at a sort of pre-baptism of the child's imagination.'

But this 'pre-baptism' works on a literary level as much as a religious one; reading the Chronicles of Narnia as a child prepared me to appreciate a whole range of genres before I knew what genre was, to love literary exploration and experimentation before I had much idea what 'literature' consisted of. "So is there in us a world of love to somewhat, though we know not what in the world that should be" - as Lewis, quoting Thomas Traherne, heads the chapter in Surprised by Joy where he talks about his own childhood reading. It's a particularly good baptism for a medievalist, and I know that in some indefinable way Narnia (especially the three books of Narnia's Middle Ages, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair) prepared me for the work I do now.

So it occurred to me that today I might post one thing I stumbled across in my medieval reading which made me think of Narnia (here's another I posted about previously).  If this parallel has been pointed out by anyone else, I would like to know - I don't keep up with Lewis scholarship!  It is, I think, the only bit of Anglo-Saxon literature to feature in Narnia - though I could be wrong...

Unlike Tolkien, Lewis was a late-medieval/Renaissance scholar by taste and training, and most of the medievalism in the Narnia books reflects that, apart from an occasional nod to the Norse texts which had inspired in him, as a child, a deep love of 'pure Northernness'. It seems to me that the moments of Northernness, although rare, actually occur at some of the most emotionally significant moments in the books: consider what it means that in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe the witch's reign is one long fimbulvetr, and that the return of Aslan is accompanied by a thaw such as that which, according to Norse myth, would have wept the god Baldr back to life again. It was Baldr - specifically, a line from Longfellow's Tegner's Drapa, 'I heard a voice that cried, "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!"' - who gave Lewis one of his earlier experiences of Joy:

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.

Lewis' love for Norse mythology was far more than literary appreciation; he continues in Surprised by Joy:

At the time, Asgard and the Valkyries seemed to me incomparably more important than anything else in my experience—than the Matron Miss C., or the dancing mistress, or my chances of a scholarship. More shockingly, they seemed much more important than my steadily growing doubts about Christianity. This may have been—in part, no doubt was—penal blindness; yet that might not be the whole story. If the Northernness seemed then a bigger thing than my religion, that may partly have been because my attitude toward it contained elements which my religion ought to have contained and did not. It was not itself a new religion, for it contained no trace of belief and imposed no duties. Yet unless I am greatly mistaken there was in it something very like adoration, some kind of quite disinterested self-abandonment to an object which securely claimed this by simply being the object it was. We are taught in the Prayer Book to "give thanks to God for His great glory," as if we owed Him more thanks for being what He necessarily is than for any particular benefit He confers upon us; and so indeed we do and to know God is to know this. But I had been far from any such experience; I came far nearer to feeling this about the Norse gods whom I disbelieved in than I had ever done about the true God while I believed. Sometimes I can almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself.

It's no surprise, then, that when Lewis came to write his own myth he drew quite openly on Norse motifs, circling round again to the literature which had first baptised his imagination. [ETA: for discussion of Lewis' lifelong engagement with Old Norse myth, see now this book.] By comparison, Anglo-Saxon literature is not well represented in the Narnia books; I don't get the impression that it had the same emotional or spiritual resonance for Lewis as the Norse texts did (or as Old English literature did for Tolkien, whose direct and indirect 'quoting' of Old English poems like The Wanderer and Christ I held a deep personal significance). But there is one exception, which may or may not exist only in my own head.  See what you think.

It's about Peter and Edmund, or rather, about their names. Now, the inspiration for the name of Peter is obvious; Wikipedia helpfully observes that it was the only one of the four children's names to be there from the early stages of planning The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and it must have seemed like a natural choice for the boy who was to be High King. If Aslan is Christ, Peter is - well, St Peter; a High King over other kings is prima inter pares. That's straightforward enough - one of the most common English male names, and one full of Christian meaning. 

Edmund, however, is not anywhere near as common (even in the early twentieth century, when it was more popular than today). It's an Anglo-Saxon name, and there are three famous Anglo-Saxon Edmunds to whom we might look as Edmund Pevensie's namesake. St Edmund of East Anglia, king and martyr, is perhaps the best-known, but in the Anglo-Saxon sources he is so simply purely virtuous that he doesn't have much in common with the more human Edmund, the traitor. Then there's the valiant Edmund Ironside, but this too doesn't feel quite right: the fictional Edmund is not known for his skill in battle, but for his hard-won wisdom. I think instead we should look to another King Edmund, brother of King Athelstan, because it may have been that brotherly relationship which inspired Edmund's name.

Wordplay on St Peter's name is a key part of his story: Peter means 'rock', and thus, 'You are Peter, and on this rock will I build my church'. Etymological wordplay of this nature was dear to the medieval mind, as Lewis knew very well; names mean things, and those meanings tell you something about the person who bears the name. Take the wordplay one step further into Old English, and there is no better equivalent for 'Peter' than Æthelstan, a name which means 'noble stone'. Athelstan is less well-known today than some other Anglo-Saxon kings (notably his grandfather, Alfred the Great) but he had a truly magnificent reputation in the Middle Ages, as a wise and pious king who was also triumphant in battle. He appears in later medieval chronicles as the greatest of the English kings, and also features in a Middle English romance or two; his reputation endured.

Athelstan's most famous triumph was his victory at Brunanburh in 937 over the combined forces of Constantine of Scotland and Óláfr Guðfriðsson. This is perhaps the greatest victory in Anglo-Saxon history and it is commemorated in an important Old English poem, The Battle of Brunanburh, known to every student of Anglo-Saxon literature. Lewis would certainly have known this poem. Apart from being a standard text, it had obtained some degree of popularity in the nineteenth century, as witnessed by the fact that Tennyson wrote a poetic version of it (which this useful site compares with the Old English poem). The poem is preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and is the only surviving example of an Old English poem celebrating victory in battle (rather than glorious defeat!). It begins like this:

Æthelstan cyning, eorla dryhten,
beorna beahgifa, and his broþor eac,
Eadmund æþeling, ealdorlange tir
geslogon æt sæcce sweorda ecgum
ymbe Brunanburh.

Æthelstan king, lord of earls,
ring-giver to men, and his brother also,
Edmund the prince, eternal glory
won in battle with the sword's edge
around Brunanburh.

This poem is a panegyric, an unabashed glorification of the kings of Wessex - and key to it is the mutual triumph of Athelstan and his brother, joint-victors in this crucial battle. This praising of king and prince together is unusual in Old English poetry and springs probably from the poet's desire to extol the whole royal line; since Athelstan had no children, Edmund inherited the kingdom from his brother. The brotherly relationship struck some later medieval historians as significant: William of Malmesbury, who esteemed Athelstan very highly because he was buried at Malmesbury, claimed that Athelstan was notable for his kindness to his brothers. (Athelstan is also famous among medievalists for marrying his sisters to foreign rulers, something earlier Anglo-Saxon kings had not really done - and which forms a plot point in The Horse and His Boy.)  So if Lewis, having chosen the name Peter for all its many associations, was musing on an appropriate name for the king's brother, 'Eadmund aetheling' would be a natural namesake.

I don't know whether these two brother-kings and their victory at Brunanburh were really in the back of Lewis' mind as he wrote The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, but two more details make me think they might have been. One, we are told that after many years in Narnia Edmund becomes known as 'Edmund the Just' - a name also given to King Edmund by some later historians Lewis might have known (here's an example).  And two: although the battle which Peter and Edmund fight together receives little attention in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (far less than in the recent film), we do learn that it takes place at Beruna - close enough to 'Brunanburh' for me!

'The city by the fording': Some Oxford Poems

I learned just yesterday that Tolkien wrote a poem about Oxford. It's untitled, and it goes like this:

From the many-willow'd margin of the immemorial Thames,
Standing in a vale outcarven in a world-forgotten day,
There is dimly seen uprising through the greenly veiled stems,
Many-mansion'd, tower-crowned in its dreamy robe of grey,
All the city by the fording: aged in the lives of men,
Proudly wrapt in mystic mem'ry overpassing human ken.


According to this book, the poem was written in October 1911 (Tolkien's first term in Oxford) and published in 1913 in the Exeter College student magazine.  It seems to anticipate to an almost absurd extent - for just six lines! - the interests of Tolkien's later work: willows and towers and things 'aged in the lives of men', not to mention the etymologising touch in 'the city by the fording'.  The willows in question grow at Iffley (shown in the picture above), from where I personally have never been able to see the towers of Oxford - but perhaps things were different a century ago.

'Tower-crowned' is a particularly nice description of Oxford (and not the cliche it might seem at first); the city's crenellations do look like crowns, especially from a distance. To me it recalls one of the most famous poems written about the city, Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'Duns Scotus' Oxford':

Towery city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;

Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural, rural keeping — folk, flocks, and flowers.

Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;

Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;
Who fired France for Mary without spot.


Even the form of Tolkien's 'many-mansion'd, tower-crowned' seems to echo that distinctive series of compounds, 'bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded' - but it doesn't seem possible that Tolkien can have read Hopkins' poem, which (although written in 1879) was not published until 1918.

For comparison, this is C. S. Lewis' poem 'Oxford', published in Spirits in Bondage in 1919, when he too was a young undergraduate (although he had already been to war, and thus knew more about 'red battle's animal net' than most):


It is well that there are palaces of peace
And discipline and dreaming and desire,
Lest we forget our heritage and cease
The Spirit’s work — to hunger and aspire:

Lest we forget that we were born divine,
Now tangled in red battle’s animal net,
Murder the work and lust the anodyne,
Pains of the beast 'gainst bestial solace set.

But this shall never be: to us remains
One city that has nothing of the beast,
That was not built for gross, material gains,
Sharp, wolfish power or empire’s glutted feast.

We are not wholly brute. To us remains
A clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams,
A place of visions and of loosening chains,
A refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams.

She was not builded out of common stone
But out of all men’s yearning and all prayer
That she might live, eternally our own,
The Spirit’s stronghold — barred against despair.


Just as 'From the many-willow'd margin' reflects Tolkien's fascination with memory and time, you might say that this poem points to Lewis' abiding interest in the tension between the bestial and the spiritual within human nature (though it's possible to take this kind of thing too far...) Speaking of echoes, conscious or unconscious, I've always wondered whether that last verse deliberately recalls Kipling's hymn to England in Puck of Pook's Hill:

She is not any common Earth,
Water or wood or air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare.

(Note that the rhyme is the same - air/prayer). Lewis wrote of his admiration for Puck of Pook's Hill in a number of letters from c.1915, so perhaps this is conscious homage. 'Gramarye' is not a place-name but a noun, from Middle English gramarie, and it means both 'magic' and 'learning'; perhaps Lewis saw a connection between Merlin's Isle and the city whose enchantment is cast by her scholarly ideals, 'a place of visions and of loosening chains'.

I'm surprised that Lewis and Tolkien's poems about Oxford aren't better-known, given how eager both city and university are to cash in on anything related to the Inklings. But since both poems like to imagine the city as essentially unworldly, or other-worldly, perhaps we should be glad they remain relatively obscure.