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Mental elf through the ages

Arthur Rackham illustration from his Allies Fairy Book

Fairies: A History

Francis Young, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2026, 340pps.

LIAM GUILAR admires a fair-minded and well-informed treatment of an often-scorned subject

Towards the end of the 12th Century, an English writer called Laȝamon added a story to the French poem he was translating. He wrote that at king Arthur’s birth, the baby was visited by magical beings who took charge of him with strong magic and gave him gifts[i].

The magical beings are called aluen. I had always assumed these were elves, but the word has also been translated as fairies. The Middle English Compendium cites this quotation and offers: “Fairies or Elves of either sex” as a translation. Take your pick. But what did Laȝamon visualise when he wrote the word? Could he distinguish between an elf and a fairy? And if he did, what were they? A study of elves in his poem concludes, somewhat unhelpfully, that the term is “prone to shapeshifting. It can connote disease causing organisms, witches, nymphs, sea monsters fairy mistresses, nightmares.”[ii]

In search of answers, I have been reading scholarly works on fairy belief and Francis Young’s A History of Fairies is the most thorough treatment of the subject I’ve found. Ranging widely over time and geography he puts together a comprehensive and readable history of the idea of fairies. He does this even though his introduction explains why it is impossible to write a history of Fairies in the way someone could write a history of ‘The French’ or carpentry.

The problem is that defining the subject is not straightforward. Although some kind of fairy belief has been a characteristic of British and many other cultures throughout history, today the words fairy and elf point in the wrong directions – to cute little winged creatures with a wand (thank you 19th century and Disney) or beautiful folk with pointy ears (thank you Professor Tolkien and Peter Jackson.).

Throughout history people encountered supernatural beings, but discovering which beings they encountered is problematic. In the past the names used to describe ‘fairies’ were often deliberately vague or euphemistic to avoid either naming or offending the ‘good people’ who were often everything but good. Though there are stories of encounters from the Middle Ages onwards, they were usually recorded by educated men using Latin terms which may or may not reflect the words used by their vernacular speaking informants. To compound the problem, the supernatural beings in these encounters didn’t introduce themselves as fairies or elves, or boggarts, nor are they usually identified using such names[iii].

Young’s solution is to define fairy as: “A frequently invisible population of uncanny, non-human (yet human like) living beings, reported by folklore who share our world,”[iv] Having done so he demonstrates how to write a history of a subject that can’t be clearly defined based on evidence that is unreliable for so many reasons.

He traces the possible origins of fairies to the animism of prehistory, and later what he calls the godlings of non-Christian belief. For most of Europe’s Christian history the fairies have been the unsanctioned supernatural, sitting aslant a theology that was more comfortable with angels and demons, ghosts, God and the Devil.

As the narrative moves towards the present, it moves on to firmer ground. There is more evidence, and the bias and error are perhaps easier to see. Folklore became a respectable subject by the 19th century and educated people started to take an interest in the beliefs and practices of ‘The Folk.’ Ironically, some of them didn’t just record fairy belief but (perhaps inadvertently) invented some and repackaged others.

Stepping neatly through the problems of evidence and contending arguments. Young is even handed in summarising various points of view, while tentatively offering his own. At times this even handedness makes the book feel like a symposium where everyone is on their best behaviour.

Given the limitations of the evidence there’s an unavoidable familiarity to much of the material. However, a history of fairies that didn’t mention Elidyr or the Cottingley fairies, or Bridget Cleary, would be deficient. Young’s emphasis on each is his own. Summarising the story of the Cottingley photographs, he explores their consequences for subsequent fairy belief. The death of Bridget Cleary comes in the context of how belief can be denigrated as superstition and used for political ends.

It’s a history where there are few certainties. There are crucial problems that never will be solved. The contemporary relationship between the fairies of medieval literature and the fairies of popular belief is impossible to untangle. Why the church and civil authorities moved from a long-standing dismissive attitude towards popular ‘non-sanctioned’ supernatural beliefs to what Young aptly calls a lethal credulity will never be known.

At times this uncertainty and the lack of definition threaten to subvert the attempt to discuss the subject. Across time and geography, the accounts are so various, the practices so widespread, so similar yet different that it must be difficult to know what can be excluded from the discussion.  

What is missing, inevitably, are the fairies themselves. As Young acknowledges, a history of fairies must be a history of the opinions of educated, literate people, then and now, about other people’s beliefs (p.24). I still don’t know what Laȝamon thought aluen were, but the book is a reminder of how ‘vast and various’ the human imagination is, and how unpredictable people can be. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of that most rational of detectives, was a believer in the Cottingley photographs. Hugh Dowding, who led RAF Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain, was a firm believer in fairies, belonged to the Fairy Investigation Society, and feared the next war would be between fairies and humans.

A History of Fairies stands out amongst the ones I’ve read for several reasons. The book ranges widely over its subject in time and geography. While he focusses on Europe, Young acknowledges that a belief in fairylike creatures spreads much further. While acknowledging the role of Ireland in fairy lore, the geographic range of Young’s examples prevents him from falling into the trap of suggesting fairies are ‘Celtic’ or that all elves come from Iceland.

While adopting a neutral stance as to their existence, he insists that “Fairies are part of the rich history of human experience and I do not see why belief in them or claims of encounters with them are any less worthy of respect than say, religious beliefs or reports of religious experiences” (p.2). Coupled with this is his refusal to fall into the modern trap of ‘explaining’ fairy belief. Modern writers who reach for an explanation which appeals to them as rational can sound like adults in a primary school playground and their explanations usually raise more questions than they answer[v].

Because he takes his subject seriously, Young can suggest that more is at stake in a history of fairy belief than the question of when fairies were first portrayed as being tiny, cute creatures with wings: “Belief in non-human populations of supernatural beings existed all over Europe, and not just in those countries where it was endlessly discussed and self-consciously revived by romantically inclined intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth century” (p.205).

If this belief in a human-like, non-human social being was so widespread, for so long, does it reveal something about the ways humans made sense of the world and their place in it? What does the disappearance of this belief as a widely held assumption suggest about modern consciousness? The book raises these questions while admitting their answers are beyond its scope.

Fairies: a History also has a significance beyond its subject matter. It is an effective demonstration of how difficult it is to understand or discover what people believed in the past. I started with Laȝamon and his story about aluen. He was a parish priest, for part of his life at a small church in Worcestershire. He and his parishioners would have identified themselves as Christian without hesitation. However, we know nothing about what ‘being Christian’ meant to them, what they knew of Christian doctrine or how much they understood it, or how it shaped their behaviour or their imaginative, emotional and intellectual lives. We sometimes know what an elite group of highly educated men thought everyone else should believe. We know what some snarky high-ranking ecclesiastics thought of ‘parish priests’ in general, but of their faith we know as much as we do about their interactions with the local aluen.

Fairies: A History is an eloquent reminder that confident assertions about the beliefs of the mass of any population in the past are about as trustworthy as those famous photographs taking in a garden in Cottingley.

[i] ‘Sone swa he com an eorðe; aluen hine iuengen/ heo bigolen þat child; mid galdere swiðe stronge.’

[ii] Cyril Edwards, ‘Layamon’s Elves’ in Laȝamon: Context, Language, and Interpretation, Edited by Rosemond Allen, Lucy Perry and Jane Roberts. P.95

[iii] A point made by both Jeremy Harte in Fairy Encounters in Medieval England and Richard Sowerby in Natural and Supernatural in Early Medieval England

[iv] This is similar to Alaric Hall’s suggestion in Elves in Anglo-Saxon England that the early Old English evidence suggest Elves were ‘Corporeal anthropomorphic beings mirroring the human in groups which believed in them.’ p.68. Such definitions give historians room to manoeuvre even if they aren’t very helpful for the reader

[v] See for example Matthias Egeler’s ‘Explanation’ of some of the practices associated with fairy abduction in Elves and Fairies: A short history of the Otherworld, p.61

Posted on by Liam Guilar

An interview with Josh Simon Harris

JOSH SIMON HARRIS has recently completed a translation of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Brazen Head poetry editor LIAM GUILAR asked him about it.

Tell us a little about your language background and your day job. What brings a scientist to translation? Which other texts have you translated, are translating?

I’ve always been interested in language and poetry; I wrote my first poems in third grade (I would have been about eight or nine years old), inspired by the great poets of my childhood like Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. At the same time, I was always good at math as a kid, and when I took my first Physics classes in high school, I was blown away at how precisely the natural world can be described by mathematical models. In college, I kept up both interests; I was a double major in English and Materials Science and Engineering. It was there that I first fell into translation. I had taken a bit of Spanish, and I really liked Pablo Neruda’s poem, “Puedo escribir” (Poem 20 in his collection, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair). I had heard it in Spanish without fully understanding all the words, and I was struck by how much better it sounded in Spanish than in translation. I wrote my own translation of it (which likewise doesn’t hold a candle to the Spanish original), and eventually translated the whole collection over the course of a summer (I wasn’t able to publish it until a few years later when it entered the public domain, and even now, it is only available in the United States due to copyright).

At some point in college, I also took a World Literature class where we read Homer and Dante, among other authors. I’ve had a fascination with Greek and Roman mythology ever since I was a kid (I used to love this book, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, which is more or less Ovid for children; I’ve been reading it again with my son recently), so of course Homer and Dante pulled me right into the deep end. We talked in class about terza rima, the rhyme scheme of Dante’s Commedia, but the translation we were using didn’t rhyme at all. I thought it would be fun to write a translation in the original rhyme scheme, and my professor agreed to let me try my hand at the first canto instead of writing a final essay. I ended up translating the first five cantos. I didn’t know any Italian at the time, but I knew a little Spanish; and with a combination of online resources like Wiktionary and existing translations, I was able to pick it up readily enough. From there, I just got sucked in.

I had no idea what I was getting into, of course. To translate Dante, I essentially had to become an amateur Dante scholar. While translating, I read countless commentaries, essays, biographies, and translations of Dante’s other works and primary sources. It took me about ten years to finish the Inferno. During that time, I graduated college, wrote a novel based on the Greek tragedy Philoctetes (which probably about a dozen people have read), went to grad school for Computational Materials Science, met my ex-wife, had a kid, got married, got my PhD and got accepted for a postdoc position. Dante shadowed me through all these major milestones of my life; as Virgil guided Dante through the Inferno, so Dante guided me in my journey to become a better poet, translator and human being.

I can’t even explain how it felt when I finished the Inferno. It was like a breath of fresh air that is still somehow suffocating—relief and regret at the same time. I was about halfway through translating Dante’s Vita Nuova, a shorter, earlier work of prose and lyric poetry; but I had to get away from Dante for a while. I started translating Homer because I wanted to try writing in the epic hexameter (and became convinced that I could after reading Longfellow’s Evangeline). But the problem with the Iliad is that it is very, very long, and I also wanted a project that I could finish on a reasonable timeline. That, plus an interest in alliterative verse, is what led me to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and here we are. Along the way, I have also translated a lot of shorter poems from various languages and poets (Sappho, Bertran de Born, an anonymous Old English poet). I even translated a Norwegian short story for a contest (I didn’t win, but the translation that won was better than mine anyway). Now that I’m done with Gawain, I’ll get back to translating the Iliad, and I will eventually make my way back to Dante. I’m also working on a second novel, which is a science fiction story with inspiration from biblical mythology (sounds a bit like Dune when I put it that way, but it’s not).

Today, I’m still a scientist for my day job; I work at a small pharmaceutical company using AI and machine learning for drug discovery and toxicology (essentially making models to predict whether a molecule might be toxic or might have therapeutic effects). I remain intensely interested in science and mathematics, and for now it pays the bills better than poetry. But creative writing and science are both deeply ingrained in my soul. I’ll always do both.

Why alliterative verse? And while we’re here were you ever tempted to translate Sir Gawain or Saint Erkenwald into another, perhaps more modern verse form?

Verse form is one of my favorite things about poetry. Even in free verse, form is what distinguishes poetry from prose. Part of the fun of translation, for me, is the challenge of translating a poem into a new language while keeping the verse form intact. With Dante, it was terza rima; with Homer, it’s dactylic hexameter; and with Gawain, it’s alliterative verse (and the “bob and wheel” at the end of each stanza, of course). I became interested in alliterative verse purely for this reason. I translated a short Old English alliterative poem, “The Wanderer,” and I really enjoyed it; alliteration requires a different kind of mindset from meter and rhyme. After writing a lot of alliterative verse, I also noticed how prevalent alliteration is in our language and in a lot of my favorite books (Tolkien is a great example).

I haven’t really been tempted to translate Gawain or Erkenwald into another verse form, but I think it’s a really interesting idea. This is essentially what Pope did with Homer (he translated Homer into heroic couplets). Likewise, Dante translated the Lord’s Prayer into Italian in terza rima in order to fit it into the Comedy. There are a couple of Sappho poems that I’ve translated into a different form than the original, essentially because there is no good English equivalent of their original meter; it is kind of fun to try to fit a poem into a new box in that way. So I think it’s worth considering.

Why Sir Gawain? From your Introduction it seems you hadn’t read the poem before you started translating it? Is that correct? And how did you feel about the poem when you’d finished? Impressed? Disappointed?

That’s right. I had heard of Sir Gawain, and I knew other people who had read it, but I had never read it myself before I started translating it. As I mentioned, I had already done an alliterative verse translation of “The Wanderer,” and I really wanted to try a longer alliterative poem. The obvious choice in Old English would be Beowulf, but I was never a big fan of Beowulf, so I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of devoting a chunk of my life to it. Besides, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf is pretty much as good as it is ever going to get, in my opinion (I really love the poetry in his version, even though I find the narrative kind of dull). So Old English was out. What about Middle English? I did a bit of research into alliterative poetry, and the general consensus seemed to be that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was the best alliterative poem in Middle English. I didn’t read the poem first, I just took a leap of faith and started translating. I was kind of looking for something quick and easy after working with Dante and Homer, and I thought a Middle English Arthurian romance would be sort of a light and fun adventure. I wasn’t expecting great depth and complexity—man, was I surprised. The poem was way, way more impressive than I thought it would be; it exceeded my expectations in almost every way. The Gawain poet is deeply concerned with form and symmetry, and it comes across in each line, each stanza, the structure of the poem as a whole, and the structure of the narrative. On top of that, his characters (particularly Gawain and the lady of the castle, whom he meets) have rich inner minds in a way that is unusual for old Arthurian tales; the poet explores emotion and psychology in surprisingly modern ways. So I think it’s fair to say I was impressed.

How do you translate? What’s your process? Is translating Gawain different from how you might approach Homer?

My translation process has evolved over time, and it is definitely different depending on the text. With Dante and Homer, I first translate the original text word by word into a kind of pidgin language with English words but the original syntax; the pidgin language reads like a kind of code, with symbols indicating certain things to me about the original language. To do this, I use a combination of online dictionaries (Wiktionary is a good general resource with etymologies, etc.; and there are specific dictionaries for Ancient Greek and Middle English), plus other resources if there is a unique word or context that is unclear or perplexing. With Dante, I’m also reading Singleton’s commentary while writing the pidgin translation, keeping notes on anything relevant (e.g. if Dante’s word choice alludes to something famous, I want my word choice to do the same). With Homer, I’m checking for repetition, because I want to make sure that if Homer repeats a phrase verbatim, I do the same (repetition is very important in Homer, since it derives from semi-improvised oral poetry). After completing the pidgin-language version, I go through and write my translation in verse (still referring to the original text as well as the pidgin text, and often consulting other translations and commentaries).

With Gawain, because the original language is Middle English, I don’t bother with writing the pidgin text first. When you get the hang of it, you can more or less read big chunks of the Middle English text without a dictionary; I still look up most of the words, since the meaning of several words has changed over the centuries, but it is easier for me to scan through than Italian or Ancient Greek. As I write, I also consult other translations and commentaries to make sure I’m getting the correct meaning (and not missing any subtext or anything). So the common thread of my translation process is that I am essentially close-reading the text as I write, looking up each word individually while considering the passage as a whole.

Were there parts of the story that gave you problems, were more difficult to translate, made you wish you could do a little editing?

Oh, there were many. Sometimes, especially with Middle English (where the words can often be quite close to Modern English), you find yourself just rolling along without any problems. But when you bump into a challenging passage, you might be stuck for a day or longer trying to find a solution. It’s hard for me to think of specific examples after the fact, though. I ended up happy with most of the alliterative lines, because there is a lot of freedom to render them in different ways. If there are some rough edges on the translation, they would probably be in the “bob and wheel” sections, the five lines of rhyming verse at the end of each stanza. Those lines can be very difficult to translate, given the short lines combined with the tight rhyme scheme. As always, translation is a compromise between several conflicting ideals.

Were there any parts of the original that I wished were different? Of course. While the poem is surprisingly modern, the medieval sensibilities of its author often show up in unexpected ways. But it’s not my job as a translator to edit the original, it is my job to bring it into Modern English. So I stayed as faithful as I could to the original text.

Gordon and Tolkien in their introduction to their edition of the poem thought the story was almost perfect but the three hunting episodes were excessive. What do you think of them?

On my first reading, I might have agreed that the three hunting scenes were excessive—after all, the same sequence of five scenes is essentially repeated three times in a row: the lord goes hunting, the lady tries to seduce Gawain, the lord’s men carve up their quarry, Gawain and the lord exchange spoils, and finally, Gawain and the lord renew the terms of their game. But when I was working on the notes, I realized that this repetition of five scenes mimics the shape of the pentagram (a five-pointed star): to draw a pentagram, you draw a sequence of five overlapping lines, and the fifth line brings you back to the start. The pentagram is thematically important to the narrative—it is represented on Gawain’s coat of arms, and the poet links it explicitly to Gawain’s virtues (he calls it a “token of truth”). The poet very cleverly mirrors the structure of the pentagram in the structure of his verse. But the thrice-repeated sequence of scenes is not exactly the same each time; there is a progression in which Gawain’s virtue slowly breaks down, and at the end of it the structure of the pentagram is broken too. I talk about this in more detail in the notes, of course.

What is your take on the ending? Gawain is mortified and thinks he’s failed. The people at Arthur’s court reject this and insist on wearing what he thinks is a badge of shame as a badge in his honour. What do you think?

I love the ending. I think it is an uplifting reminder of the importance of being part of a supportive community. In the first half of the poem, Gawain does not grow as a character—he is presented as a knight already at the peak of perfection (in terms of chivalric virtue, anyway). He readily trades his own life for his king’s, he bravely goes on a quest that will almost certainly end in peril for him, and he defeats ogres and dragons along the way as if they were a mere inconvenience. But nobody is perfect. The poet puts Gawain in a situation where even his chivalric virtues cannot sustain him, and Gawain fails. It is a small failure, really, but he takes it hard. When he comes home, he confesses everything to Arthur and his courtiers; but instead of shaming him, they completely turn it on its head. His imperfection is not shameful, it is only human; his shame is excused by the mere fact that he is ashamed, that he continues to strive to be virtuous. Perfection may be the ideal of knighthood, but no knight is perfect in practice.

How would you sell your translation to a possible buyer? What will they get from your translation they can’t get from any of the existing ones?

Probably the biggest thing that distinguishes my translation from others is that I adhere to the original form of the poem using natural-sounding language (not using awkward diction, syntax inversions, etc.), while still staying true to the meaning of the text. The verse form of the Middle English original is really interesting: each stanza consists of (on average) twenty lines of alliterative verse, capped off by a short five-line rhyming section. Other translators have certainly carried this verse form into Modern English; but often they sacrifice clarity, or a good word choice, or (worse) the mood of the poem in order to pull it off (I certainly don’t want to judge too harshly; there are a number of good translations already out there). Not that I never make any sacrifices; translation is all about making choices to balance the meaning, form, and emotion of the original text. But I like to think that my translation strikes a pretty good balance.

Additionally, I have included lots of goodies besides the poem itself. Instead of line-by-line notes (which are common enough in translations of classic poetry), I opted to write commentary in the form of a conversational essay in which I’m walking through the poem along with the reader. I analyze the text of course, but also provide some historical background, discussion of the poetics, etc., in relevant places as I go along; I think readers who enjoy the poem will find the commentary interesting and worthwhile. I also have a bibliography intended more for readers and enthusiasts than scholars; a pronunciation glossary with names, places, and medieval titles, arms and armor; King Arthur’s family tree; a timeline of the narrative; a historical timeline of events relevant to the poem; and several hand-drawn images (a map of Gawain’s journey through England and Wales, a drawing showing the armor of a medieval knight, and more). Finally, I’ve capped off the book with an original poem which has a rather interesting verse structure (it’s complicated, but it is based on the shape of the pentagram, which is central to the themes of the narrative). There’s also a link in the back of the book to a project I’m working on, which is a “choose your own adventure”-style version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (I’m putting it online as I write it; it is not nearly complete yet).

Your book has an extensive section of commentary and notes. What do you think a reader will learn from them that is new?

Most works of classic literature have editions with notes or commentary, but I’ve found that the commentary is sometimes rather dry and uninteresting to anyone but scholars (this is certainly not always the case, but it is common enough). I wanted to keep my own commentary engaging throughout. When I’m out driving or doing chores, I like to listen to podcasts that walk through narrative poems, films and video games while providing commentary and analysis along the way. Inspired by that format, I wrote my notes in something of a conversational style; I basically walk through the narrative discussing everything I find interesting along the way. I consulted the notes of several different Gawain translations as well as online resources to ensure I didn’t miss anything important. My commentary is designed so that it can be read on its own after reading the poem, without flipping back and forth to see what lines I’m referring to. In this way, I get to do a close reading of the poem with the reader. I’m not familiar enough with the full body of Gawain scholarship to know how novel my commentary really is, but it isn’t meant to be a work of rigorous scholarship anyway. I can say with confidence that there’s a lot that you won’t find in the notes of other translations. Above all, I think (I hope) readers will find it interesting and thought-provoking.

The poet is anonymous but generally regarded as one of the great poets of Middle English. You’ve spent a long time in his company. Do you have a sense of ‘The Gawain Poet’? 

The Gawain poet lived in the late fourteenth century in the northwest part of the English Midlands (scholars deduce this from his dialect). He has a strong voice and occasionally inserts himself into the narrative, providing a little clarification or observation in first person. He’s obviously intelligent and well-read, and he seems to have a good deal of familiarity with matters of both church and court. On the one hand, he is learned in Latin, theology, and ecclesiastical rites, suggesting an education in the Church; on the other, he displays an intimate knowledge of chivalry and courtly affairs, suggesting some role in the English court. And yet, he doesn’t seem like a man tied too tightly to the cloth or the crown; he doesn’t shy away from low language and bawdy humor, and he seems unusually attuned to the inner minds and outward concerns of people from many different backgrounds. As a historical person, he is an enigmatic figure; and yet, his personality often shines through in his writing. He is passionate, curious, fair-minded, empathetic, intelligent, and a deep thinker in all sorts of subject areas. He’s funny when he wants to be, and somber when he needs to be. Overall, he’s just a fantastic writer. So yes, I feel like I do have a sense of who the Gawain poet is—even if, paradoxically, we may never know his true identity.

I just want to say thank you for giving me the opportunity to discuss my translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I spent a lot of time working on this in solitude, so it’s wonderful to finally share it with other people. Thank you!

Publication information

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Anonymous, J. Simon Harris (translation and commentary)

Nostra Vita Books

To be published 9 November 2026

Posted on by Liam Guilar

King and Conqueror – taking the history out of historical fiction

LIAM GUILAR finds a much-hyped recent TV series worse than vacuous

The dust has settled and King and Conqueror has faded away to wherever TV series go to be forgotten. Nominally based on the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, it attracted criticism for its many historical inaccuracies. The history was wrong; the changes to chronology dizzying; characterisation was preposterous; the costumes and the armour were bad; men said fuckalot and everyone and everything was permanently dirty. Some of its defenders pointed out that it was not a documentary but “historical fiction”. 

If the history was so inaccurate it can’t be called ‘historical’, the fiction was the latest instalment in a collective infantilisation of the Middle Ages. Instead of the rich strangeness of the past appearing in historical dramas, film makers insist on confusing history with fantasy while erasing the differences between past and present. By leaning on the tropes of modern film, and fantasy films in particular, they present an adolescent version of the past which is rarely as dramatic as the reality it pretends to dramatize.

There’s a probably apocryphal story about the screening of the film, Titanic. Someone in the audience started to object, loudly, because the pattern of the rivets on the ship’s hull was not historically accurate.

Every historical film brings out the Rivet Counters. Harold’s cloak is fastened incorrectly. The armour is wrong. The hairstyles are wrong. It gives people with specialised knowledge the opportunity to air their expertise. King and Conqueror has given the Rivet Counters many reasons to object. You will find their objections on YouTube.

Not all historical objections are rivet counting, and more is at stake than the lack of colour in the clothing or the preposterous attempts at ‘armour’, especially in this case because those involved with the production have repeatedly claimed their version is historically accurate.

A consulting company called SceneSpan claims on its website:

King And Conqueror.

In this project, history was the script. Brought in during early development, we advised across the script to ensure historical authenticity from the ground up: story arcs, character motivations, political dynamics, and cultural detail. Set during the Norman Conquest, the series required careful navigation of both Anglo-Saxon and Norman worldviews. Our role helped ground the drama in the lived realities of 11th-century power and identity.

[Emphasis theirs][i] 

What grounds a story in the ‘lived realities’ of the past is a question: in this place and time, would a character of this rank say this, or act in this way?[ii] The failure to consider this ruins King and Conqueror and almost every other film set in and around this period.

In the first episode characters are ignorant of their own history. When William and Matilda are arguing with the king of France, the latter scornfully suggests that only a fool would try to sail an army across the channel. It’s meant as dramatic irony, given that we all know that’s what William will do, but the historical king of France would have known armies had been sailing back and forth across the Channel and the North Sea for centuries. How else did he think Sweyn Forkbeard conquered England or the ‘Normans’ got to ‘Normandy’?

At other times characters act with no knowledge of the lived reality of their world. William rides away from the coronation on his own. He’s a Duke. In a culture where public display was essential, there should be a retinue and all the other signs and symbols of his wealth and status. He’s also a royal guest, which meant the king was responsible for his safety and would have provided guides and an escort. He had been ambushed on the way there, but apparently this doesn’t make him cautious on the return journey. How was he going to find his way to Pevensey on his own? Did the writer imagine a modern road with signposts?[iii]

The changes to chronology are dizzying. William was born in 1028. Even if he had attended the coronation (he didn’t) you can work out his age. In King and Conqueror an adult William leaves the pregnant wife he didn’t marry until the 1050s to attend the coronation in 1043, where he is introduced as the victor of Val es Dunes, a battle he didn’t fight until 1047. The events at Dover, which are being plotted at the coronation, and which will lead to Godwin being banished, happened in 1051.

If time is treated loosely, characters are melded together, their names are changed, or they are left out. The evil Earl of Mercia is called Morcar. At the time of Edward’s coronation, Leofric, was earl of Mercia. His grandson, Morcar, became earl of Northumbria when the locals rose against Tostig and deposed him in 1065. Making him earl in 1043 means the devious goings on of 1065, which potentially reveal so much about Harold’s character, have been erased[iv].

The defence against these objections, and even in the first episode there is so much more to object to, is that this is not a documentary, but historical fiction. It’s a sound defence. Some historical inaccuracies need not ruin a film, and accuracy does not guarantee a film will be entertaining.

The Middle Ages have often been caricatured or infantilised. First image: William the Conqueror by an unknown artist, c. 1580. Second image: The Battle of Hastings by Francois Vivares (c. 1780). Third image: Llandaff Historical Pageant, 1952 by Geoff Charles. All: Wikimedia Commons

If you take the history out of historical fiction the characters are left flapping in the wind. In the complex context of their time, their choices and actions defined them. Remove that context and the characters are just names. Remove the history as context, and something must replace it. In King and Conqueror, the replacement is always so much less than what it replaces.

The period between the coronations of Edward the Confessor and William 1st is covered by well-written, historically accurate books aimed at a non-specialist audience. Without learning Old English, Anglo-Norman and Latin, it’s easy to stack a shelf and be up to date with the current knowledge of the time and the characters. It is depressing to think that the writer and producers of King and Conqueror didn’t bother. It is even more depressing to think that they did and then decided to throw out the history because they thought their version was better.

Godwin was banished in 1051 because of an incident in Dover. The facts are murky. Different versions of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle give slightly different versions of the events. Returning to the continent, Eustace of Boulogne and his men were involved in an altercation with the inhabitants of the town. There were deaths on both sides. Eustace seems to have raced to the king and given his version of the story. Without waiting to ask Godwin to investigate, Edward called on him, as the relevant earl, to reestablish the king’s justice by punishing the town[v].

When Godwin refused, and according to some versions demanded Eustace’s men be punished, he was called on to answer charges of treason. Turning up to court without guarantees of safe conduct, including the formal exchange of hostages, was never a good idea. Godwin was old enough to remember at least one culling of the earls. He refused to appear and called out his armed supporters. The king was expected to keep the peace and punish wrongdoing. Edward could not withdraw the order without losing face. Edward and the Witan found Godwin guilty of treason. The other earls sided with Edward. Godwin fled and his family scattered into exile. [vi]

Earls were not kings, they were the king’s appointed officers, and their job was to enforce the king’s rule. When Godwin refused the order to ravage Dover he was challenging the king’s authority. For nearly ten years he had been the most powerful man in the country. His daughter was the queen. He must have thought he was secure enough to ignore a royal order.

Why did Godwin refuse a direct order from his king: arrogant self-confidence that reveals his own bad judgement and his poor opinion of Edward? Or was he feeling his influence slide, his advice ignored, his proteges passed over and trying to assert himself? Did he have a personal dislike of Eustace, or of the ‘foreigners’ who Edward seemed to be favouring?

Was Edward overconfident? Not thinking clearly? Desperate to please a foreign relative? Was he looking for an excuse to break Godwin’s hold over him. Did he expect Godwin to protest and then back down and was taken by surprise when he didn’t?  

No ‘personal’ records survive from this period. We don’t know what the characters were thinking. The writer of historical fiction is free to explore the possibilities within the framework of the historical events. 

King and Conqueror replaces this with simplistic nonsense about Godwin being accused of ‘breaking The Treaty’. It’s clear to the audience that whatever happened in Dover was due to the machinations of the Evil Mercian Morcar and the Wicked Queen Mother. Godwin becomes the ‘Good Guy’ done over by ‘The Baddies’. It’s childish in the most derogatory sense of that term.

Fictional characters don’t have to be realistic, but they need a coherent story world in which to operate. Mangle the history, and the possibilities of coherence become increasingly small. The fashion for presenting characters in ‘the past’ as though they were modern people with the approved attitudes and fashionable responses adds to the mess[vii].

In the first episode, Sweyn has sex with a bride on her wedding night as it’s his ‘right as her lord’[viii]. His brothers are disgusted, and he has to threaten Tostig to prevent him from telling their father. Their disgust is a modern reaction. If it were his right, legal and customary (which to be clear, it wasn’t) why would they have been disgusted? They would have normalized the behaviour.

Harold promises his mistress he’ll never let his father force him into a ‘church marriage’ with anyone else. This is the romantic, individualistic modern lover of popular fiction speaking. If Harold Godwinson ever said that to Edith Swanneck, they would have both known that he was lying[ix]. 

Without the historical context, King and Conqueror settles for importing the adolescent tropes of modern fantasy. The result is fiction as bad as the history.

Emma, the queen mother, is the only woman in history to have married two kings of England and had two sons, by different fathers, who ruled the country. She survived the reigns of five kings before Edward, her son by her first marriage, was crowned. Matilda alludes to all this before William leaves for England. Yet the writers do not have Emma behave with the subtlety of a survivor and successful political operator. She is a strident pantomime witch. Harold is a tousled haired womble with daddy issues. He likes to bite noses during combat. He’s dominated by his mistress and portrayed as an untrustworthy liar. You’d think twice about following him to the pub.

The characters are juvenile, leaning heavily on the tropes of popular film. We know these are hard men because they say fuckalot. Both William and Godwin have wandered in from a film about gangland struggles for control of the neighbourhood. Godwin seems to be the last survivor of the Kray Brothers gang. And there’s the ‘Bromance’[x].

The film industry has a long record of treating the Middle Ages as a vague backdrop and mangling history in the process. In the general slop of cheap art chasing money at a time of rising historical ignorance, it would be surprising if King and Conqueror wasn’t the mess it was.

Does it matter that King and Conqueror is less true to the eleventh century than House was to a modern American Hospital?

We knew House was fiction. But King and Conqueror has been presented as history. This is not a story about fictional characters in the past. It uses the names of historical persons in a way that suggests this is a representation of those people in their specific historical setting. Publicity for the series made repeated claims for its accuracy as history.

Responding to criticisms about historical inaccuracies, James Norton, the actor who plays Harold, stated:

The truth was, they were friends. They met at the coronation, we know that William invited Harold over to Normandy to fight against the Baron of Brittany, he did swear, he acknowledged William’s rightful claim to the crown over the relics – whether he meant it or not, we don’t know. But so much of what we tell, in terms of their relationship and friendship, is true.[xi] 

It is not the truth. They were not friends. They did not meet at the coronation. They probably didn’t meet in person until 1065 when Harold was (possibly shipwrecked) on the continent [xii].We don’t know why he was on that ship but none of the suggested reasons include an invitation from William ‘to fight against the baron of Britanny’. We do know Harold was in William’s custody. We do not know what oath Harold made, if he made an oath, over relics while he was there. William had no ‘rightful claim’ to the crown of England.

Whether this is ignorance or indifference, the insidious lie, ‘This is true’, is where the damage is done. One can guarantee that there are now people who believe this is ‘the real story’ because James Norton said so, and for them an actor is a more reliable source of information than any historian. There are people who believe Clive Owen’s King Arthur revealed the identity of the real king Arthur because the film was advertised as “The untold true story that became the legend”[xiii]. No amount of fact-based refutation is going to change their minds. They saw it on the screen. 

Perhaps it’s a minority view, but King and Conqueror turns a period of unusual historical importance into a pantomime. It would be naïve to expect any film maker to treat the past with respect or have any respect for people who do. Art chasing money doesn’t have a conscience. The idea art should, or could, be responsible, seems quaintly, almost embarrassingly, old fashioned. The period between the coronations of Edward and William I is crucial in the history of the British Isles. Old fashioned as it seems, it’s possible to believe it deserves better than to be presented as a second-rate episode of Game of Thrones or Bored of the Rings without the attempted humour.

[i] https://scenespan.com/our-work/ Their emphasis in bold. The kindest thing to say about this quote is that perhaps they worked on a different King and Conqueror to the one we all watched.

[ii] To be very clear I don’t mean they should be speaking Old English or a faked version of it.

[iii] William never learnt to speak English, so he couldn’t ask for directions either.

[iv] Tostig, was unpopular as Earl of Northumbria. In October 1065, while he was away at the royal court, the locals killed his followers, and marched south. They were joined by the Mercians under their earl, Edwin (Eadwine). The Northumbrians then offered the earldom to Morcar, Edwin’s brother. King Edward wanted to call out the army and crush the rebellion. The army refused to muster. Harold acted as mediator, and Morcar became earl and Tostig was banished. The date is not known but either before or after the uprising Harold married the sister of Edwin and Morcar. Harold swore he was not involved in planning the uprising. Tostig was probably not the only person who didn’t believe him.

[v] Ravaging towns that broke the King’s peace was not unusual. Godwin, Leofric and Seward ravaged Worcester for three days under the previous king after two of the king’s men had been killed in the town.

[vi]  King and Conqueror begins by stating that England is emerging from decades of ‘bloody civil war’.  This is historically wrong. Cnut had ruled from 1016-1035, and while there was disagreement over the succession, it didn’t lead to ‘a civil war’. Despite the popular idea that medieval people went to war at the drop of hat, there is evidence to suggest that those in power in England at the time preferred to avoid armed conflict. Thismight explain why the Earls first sided with Edward, and then the ease with which Godwin was allowed to return.

[vii] For an extreme example, see ‘The King’ (2019) in which Henry V is presented as a pacifist who is shocked to discover his courtiers are making money from the war against France.

[viii] The idea of ‘Premier Noce’ or ‘Droit de seigneur’ or ‘jus primae noce’ has been shown to be a myth invented by much later writers. The historical Sweyn was banished after eloping with an Abbess and murdering his cousin.

[ix] Calling Edith his mistress is unavoidably and unintentionally derogatory. She was his wife ‘after the Danish fashion’.  This was a marriage that was not sanctioned by the church but regarded by everybody else as a marriage. It allowed aristocratic men to choose a wife, knowing that when the time came and they entered into a church marriage for political reasons, (and all aristocratic marriages were political), they would not be entering into a bigamous relationship.

[x] I dislike this term as it cheapens friendship but it’s exactly what is presented in King and Conqueror.

[xi] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/king-conqueror-stars-address-criticism-nikolaj-coster-waldau-james-norton_uk_68b034efe4b0bbcc3f8e4d8a For similar claims see https://www.televisual.com/news/james-norton-on-king-conqueror/

[xii] There is not only disagreement about what happened but about when it happened. Edward’s most recent biographer puts it in 1065. William’s opts for 1064.

[xiii] This phrase appeared on the poster for the film, popularising the candidature of L. Artorius Castus for the role as ‘the real king Arthur’. However, King Arthur is a good example of a film that is both entertaining and historically inaccurate.

Posted on by Liam Guilar · 2 Comments

The tale of the oldest animals (The freeing of Mabon mab Modron)

LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain

This is from a translation of Culhwch and Olwen, ‘the oldest surviving Arthurian tale’ from medieval Welsh prose to modern English Verse. The story tells how Culhwch marries Olwen, the giant’s daughter. However, before he can marry her, he must complete forty tasks for her father. Many are obviously impossible; some merely extremely difficult. The tasks are completed not by Culhwch but by King Arthur and his men. What follows is the second and third task.

The complete translation, How Culhwch won Olwen, a verse translation of the oldest Arthurian tale, will be published by Shearsman in 2026. See
https://www.shearsman.com/store/Liam-Guilar-trans-How-Culhwch-Won-Olwen-p767786031

The translation is based on Culhwch and Olwen. An edition and study of the oldest Arthurian tale, by Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans, (University of Wales Press, 1992)

The tale of the oldest animals (The freeing of Mabon mab Modron)

After they’d told Arthur all that had happened,

he said, ‘Which of these wonders should we seek first?’

‘It’s best to seek Mabon mab Modron

And to find him we need his kinsmen,

Eidoel mab Aer.’

Arthur and his knights arose,

and sought throughout Britain

until they came to the outer walls of Gliwi

where Eidoel was a prisoner.

Gliwi stood on the top of his fort:

‘Arthur, what do you want?

Life’s bad enough on this crag 

without you coming to ruin me.

I have neither wheat nor oats,

nor goods nor pleasure.’

‘I haven’t come to harm you,

I seek your prisoner.’

‘You can have him, although

I never intended to give him up.

And on top of that my help and support.

The men said to Arthur: ‘Lord, go home.

You cannot go with your host,

to seek such a petty thing as this.’

Arthur replied: ‘Gwrhyr the Translator,

It is good for you to go on this quest,

You know all the languages of men,

and some of the animals and birds’.

Eidoel, it is good that you go with my men

to seek Mabon, as he is your cousin.

Kei and Bedwyr, it is my hope

that whatever you seek you will find.

Go on this quest for me.’

They went until they found the Blackbird of Gilgwri.

Gwrhyr asked her: ’For God’s sake,

Do you know anything of Mabon mab Modron,

who was taken from between his mother and the wall,

when he was three nights old?’

The Blackbird replied:

‘I was a young bird

when first I came here

and found this anvil.

It hasn’t been touched

except by my beak,

tapping each evening.

Today you can see

all that’s left is the size

of a nut. God’s

vengeance on me

if I know of this man

you ask me about.

However, I will do

what is proper for

Arthur’s messengers.

There is another

creature God made

before me, and I

will take you to him.’

They went until they found the Stag of Redynure.

‘Stag of Redynure, we are messengers of Arthur,

we know of no animal older than you.

Say if you know anything of Mabon mab Modron,

who was taken from between his mother and the wall

when he was three nights old.’

‘When first I came here,

I had but a single tine

on either side of my head.

There were no trees but a single sapling.

That sapling grew into an oak with a hundred branches.

Then it fell to the earth, and now

there’s nothing of it left but a red stump.

Though I’ve been here from that day to this,

I’ve heard nothing of this man you mention.

But because you are Arthur’s messengers,

I will be your guide to an animal God made before me.’

They came to the place

where they found the Owl of Cwm Kawlwyt.

‘Owl of Cwm Kawlywt these are messengers from Arthur.

Do you know anything of Mabon mab Modron

who was taken from his mother on the third night?’

‘What I do know, I will tell to you.

When first I came here

the great valley you see

was thick with trees.

Then came a race of men

and laid waste the wood.

A second wood grew.

You now see the third.

The roots of my wings

are mere stumps now.

From that day to this

I have heard nothing

of the man you are seeking.

But I will be a guide

for Arthur’s messengers

until you come to the oldest

creature in the world

who has travelled the furthest:

the Eagle of Gwern Abwy.’

Gwyhyr said: ‘Eagle of Gwern Abwy

We have come, as messengers of Arthur,

to ask if you know anything about Mabon mab Modron

who was taken from his mother

when he was three nights old?’

The Eagle replied:

‘I came here

a long time ago

and when I first came here,

I had a stone,

and each evening,

from the top of my stone

I pecked at the stars.

Now it is not a handsbreadth in height.

From that day to this I have been here.

I have heard nothing of this man.

However,

when I was seeking my food in Llyn Llyw,

I sunk my talons into a salmon,

thinking he would feed me for a long time

but he pulled me down into the depths.

It was with difficulty I got away.

What I then did,

with all my kinsmen,

was to launch an attack.

We sought to destroy him.

He sent messengers

to me

to make peace,

then came

to me,

in person,

to have fifty tridents

removed from his back.

Unless he knows something

of the man you mentioned

I don’t know of anyone who does.

However, I will take you to him.’

They came to the place where he was.

The eagle said: ‘Salmon of Llyn Llyw,

I have come to you with Arthur’s messengers,

to ask if you know anything of Mabon mab Modron

who was taken from his mother on the third night.’

‘As much as I know I will tell you.

With every flood tide I go up the river

until I come to the bend

beneath the walls of Kaer Loyw.

Never in my life have I encountered,

such misery as I found there.

So you may believe me,

let one of you climb

on each of my two shoulders.’

Kei and Gwrhyr climbed on his shoulders.

They travelled upstream until they came

to the other side of the wall from the prisoner.

They could hear a-weeping and a-wailing.

Gwrhyr said: ‘What man laments

in this house of stone?’ ‘Alas, man,

I have cause for lamentation.

Mabon mab Modron is the prisoner here.

And no one has ever been imprisoned so cruelly,

neither Llud Silver hand nor Greit mab Eri.’

‘Is there hope of obtaining your freedom,

with gold or silver or worldly goods?

Or will it require assault and fighting?’

‘Whatever you can get of me,

will be got by fighting.’

They returned to Arthur

and told him where Mabon was.

Arthur summoned the fighting men of the island,

and they went to Kaer Loyw.

Kei and Bedwyr went upstream

on the shoulders of the salmon.

While Arthur’s warriors were attacking the fort,

Kei broke the wall, fighting with the men inside,

even when he was carrying the prisoner on his back.

Arthur came home with Mabon a free man.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

The watchful Muse

With a Stranger’s Eyes

Jeremy Hooker, Swindon: Shearsman, 2025, 86pps., £10.95

LIAM GUILAR salutes a wryly observant yet engaged poet

With a Stranger’s Eyes is Jeremy Hooker’s third book of poems since the publication of Selected Poems 1965-2018 (Shearsman 2020) and arguably the best of this later group.[i] The poetry is divided into three sections, with a fourth, short prose ‘Reflections on Two Welsh Words.’ The first two sections record people, places and incidents from his past and present in non-English speaking countries, moving from memories of Holland to Wales, to a final section which looks outwards. The poet moves from being a stranger by nature of nationality and language, to a stranger in the world by reason of being human. The title reflects Hooker’s sense of not belonging. “I am a stranger in the area in which I live, and a stranger to the tragic history of the area. Being a stranger has affected my idea of myself as a poet (p.83).”[ii] This awareness saves the poems from sentimentality and egotism.

If we include 2016’s Ancestral Lines, then these four poetry books are what used to be called ‘a significant and important body of work,’ in their own right, because of the way they explore a maze of writing problems and offer one way out.

Hooker has quoted David Jones’ “one writes with the things at one’s disposal” which seems incontrovertible. However, biography is one of those things, and if biography is what makes writers who they are, then how do they write autobiographically without falling into the trap of producing something that is either private or, perhaps, worse, a lyric poem that begins and ends with the egotistical /I/? Hooker describes the problem: “I distrust the autobiographical impulse with its temptation to egotism and assumptions of finality. […] nostalgia came with a horror of being stuck in an idealised version of the past.” (‘A Note on Autobiographical Poetry,’ Preludes p. 79).”

The danger becomes more pressing for a man in his eighties, who has reached a time in his life when looking back seems inevitable. Ancestral Lines was Hooker’s direct confrontation with the problems of writing autobiographically. In ‘Lyric of Being’ the essay that ends that book, he wrote: “My concept of the poet was that of one who struggled to keep open a channel between self and the world and the living and the dead, as opposed to writing a verse beginning and ending with the self (Ancestral lines p.76).”

Born in 1941, in the south of England, Hooker has acknowledged his earliest literary influence was Richard Jefferies. If Jefferies taught him to pay attention to the world around him, he also gave Hooker his lifelong interest in the idea of ‘Ground’ – a word which has developed in his writing from referring to the significant place for the writer, to the complex relationships that link the individual to community, literature, history and geography. By acknowledging that grounded relationship, the poet can move away from both egotism and sentimentality.

His literary influences include some of the great modernists, particularly T. S. Eliot and David Jones, and his work negotiates the complicated legacy those writers left for those who admired them. Poetry is a serious activity. The poet exists as practitioner of an art that is both contemporary and ancient, both specific to the language spoken and yet open to poetry in all languages. Above all, those writers bequeathed a distrust of the whining Ego and what might loosely be called ‘confessionalism.’ There is an irony here, which should be acknowledged. For so many writers these are not problems. What Hooker is trying to avoid is the only thing they know how to do.

Another irony is that for a man who admires David Jones and George Oppen, he writes like neither of them. Bunting’s praise of Scarlatti describes Hooker’s poems. Initially it might seem strange to link Scarlatti’s sixty-four notes to a bar ripple and rush with Hooker’s uncluttered verse.

It is time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti

condensed so much music into so few bars

with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence

never a boast or a see-here, and stars and lakes

echo him and the copse drums out his measure

snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight 

and the sun rises on an acknowledged land.

(Basil Bunting, Briggflatts)

                                                           

But in the verse, there is no pyrotechnical ‘see here,’ no pretence to ‘poetic thoughts’ no one ever had except when trying to write a ‘poetic poem’ – no congested cadence of jumbled syntax, no boastful ‘look at the vocabulary I pillaged from the thesaurus’ or ‘be impressed by my references to things you’ve never heard of.’

In ‘Reflections on Two Welsh Words’, Hooker writes: “In tune with the thinking of modernists such as T. S. Eliot, David Jones, and George Oppen, I conceive of the poem as a made object, a thing that stands apart from the poet, an act in a transpersonal ‘conversation’ (p. 84).”

His poems have a conversational tone that only someone who is tone deaf would call artless. However, art as conversation means more than just tone. He has acknowledged his debt to Martin Buber’s I and Thou.[iii] According to Buber, the destructive tendency is to turn every ‘you’ into an ‘it,’ into something that can be instrumentalised, or used, or packaged – in poetic terms, to see oneself, like a Wordsworth, as the centre of the universe. The challenge, simplifying Buber, is to see and celebrate the other in all its specific otherness AND not lose the /I/ that is interacting with it. [iv]

Hooker achieves a balance between the person writing and the subject of the writing. ‘Rowan Tree’ offers the most straightforward example. From Wales, or the Welsh poetic tradition, he took the idea of poetry as a vehicle for praise. ‘Rowan Tree’ is a song of praise but made new by the poet’s refusal to pretend the tree cares about him.

It pleases me

that you are no thing

of words, but indifferent

to all I say or think.

Yet having contemplated the tree in all its seasonal and historical variations, the poem ends.

Rowan tree

that enchants my days

be to me, if only

in imagination,

an old man’s staff.

Let me stand with you

against Atlantic gales.

Allow me to warm myself

with your leaves’ red glow

against the coming cold.

To write about the tree is to acknowledge what the tree means to the writer. The difficulty is to see the subject not as an extension of self, but as something in relation to self. As he writes about people who were important to him, he preserves their essential strangeness while celebrating what they meant to him. In ‘Gwenallt,’ for example:

But I will not insult the man

with elegy, or lessen his ferocity

with emollient words.

                        Let me see him

as the Jeremiah he was,

                                    prophet

of the death we have dealt a nation,

and the doom we are bringing on our own.                                        

Living and working in Wales exacerbated the problem. Acutely conscious of his strangerhood, in a country whose language he didn’t master, Hooker was an unwilling representative of the race some of the Welsh writers he admired and championed saw justifiably as The Enemy. The pressure of this alterity may not be comfortable for the individual, but it is bracing for the poet. It acts against any tendency to ‘egotism and assumptions of finality.’ It makes nostalgia uncomfortable and reminds the poet of the difference between reality and any ‘idealised version of the past.’

The Welsh poetic tradition also began in commemoration. The poem offers both poet and reader the possibility of learning how to see and different ways of understanding. Hooker’s poems deal with places made memorable by the people he associates with them, or where tragedy happened. The poet commemorates by finding the image to bring events to the reader’s attention and understanding in ways that journalism cannot. In ‘Passing through Aberfan,’ fourteen lines of understatement manage to capture the horror of an event that once reverberated through British culture. ‘On the Road to Senghenydd’ confronts the problem of writing about another, perhaps less well-known disaster.[v]

Do not imagine you can imagine it.

Do not suppose you know

what grief is, or terror, or courage

of men entering an inferno

to rescue their kind. Today

you may think the scene medieval,

like a picture of hell.

But you will know nothing

unless you catch a distant echo

from the very ground, where

a father calls for his son,

and a son cries for his father.

Following Buber’s lead, the poems explore the rich variety of life. There is anger, and sadness, and humour. ‘Haunted House’ begins as any rural ghost story:

Children called it

the haunted house.

It may have been because

an angry man lived here.

But the swerve at the end is both unexpected and highly effective.

Whatever it was, I do not know

why children passed this house

with a tremor of fear.

What I do know are days and nights

when I would have given my life

to feel the touch of a ghostly hand.

It’s easy to confuse ‘serious’ with humourless, but in Hooker’s case that would be a mistake. To be human the poems have to smile occasionally. This is from ‘On the Painting called Peace:’

But the artist’s soul was in it.

It wasn’t his fault

that he was a Victorian.

This is from ‘In Memory of Norman Schwenk:’

An American in Cardiff

you were always a man from Nebraska –

though a follower of Glamorgan cricket,

which in recent years

has been a hopeless pursuit.

I turn a page and read ‘Dialysis: reading Ibn ‘Arabi:’

Love is my creed.

Wherever love’s caravan

turns along the way,

that is my belief.

Briefly, an image

of holiday traffic on the M4

passes through my mind.

One of the ways out of the problem of the ego, is the figure of the man at the window.[vi] Looking outwards has been a common theme in Hooker’s recent books. Poems frame a space for thinking through and in language, inviting the reader to look and think again. As he writes in ‘David Jones at Capel-y-ffin,’

                        And yes, it is true
the universal is revealed
through the particular thing.

‘On Gelligaer Common’ begins: “A wild horse with its hoof trapped/in the rusted springs of a mattress.” If the poem is ‘about’ the weight of history, the way it traps and tangles the present, then the ‘about’ is carried in the images rather than in prose-like argument. Nor does poem or poet have to offer a conclusion or preach. ‘On Gelligaer Common’ ends; “The wounded horse strains to free itself/ but the rusted springs hold.”

Seagulls have been the subject of several memorable Hooker poems, and we come across them again in ‘Man at a Window: six observations:’

Gull, gull,

lover of sea

and rubbish dump

devotee of plough

take me with you,

the observer asks,

                        let me share

a world that is alive,

where sea roughens

with flying spume

under the west wind.

If you live on the coast no poem can make you see seagulls ‘for the first time’. But a poem can colour the way you see them, so the irritating, chip-scavenging noise-makers will never be the same again.

‘Man at a Window: six observations’ ends the book. The sixth poem offers an image that might stand for Hooker and his most recent work. The Man at the Window is alone, separated from what he’s observing, but not trying to conscript what he sees to his own purposes, while celebrating what he sees and what it evokes for him. It begins:

One bright star

solitary, it seems

in the whole night sky.

Not knowing the star’s name it reminds him of

[…] the young poet
who never died, but lives
steadfast,
for the holiness that is love.

You might miss the allusions to Keats; you might think the ‘young poet’ is the poet’s younger self. It could well be, but it’s hard to miss the affirmation of one possible role of poetry. The passage quoted earlier about T.S. Eliot, David Jones and George Oppen continues. “I differ in emphasising its nature as an emotional process. I have finally come to recognize that I am primarily a lyric poem and a love poet.”

Love is a dangerously imprecise word. I’d suggest that for Hooker, ‘love’ is not just the confusion that drives adolescents to attempt poetry but a mature working through of Buber’s ideas about the possibilities of human relationships, and how the self relates to the world’s variety of people, writings, history and places. ‘Love poetry’ describes an open-ended conversation, grounded in what Keats called “the holiness of the Heart’s affections.”[vii]

[i] Word and Stone (2019) and Preludes (2024). In the last five years Hooker has also published a book of essays, and three books of mixed poetry and prose in a genre he has made his own: The Art of Seeing (2020), The Release (2022), Addiction, a Love story (2024) and Presence and Place (2025). All  of them have been published by Shearsman. To do it justice, With a Stranger’s Eyes, should be considered in the context of this group of later work, reaching back to include 2016’s Ancestral Lines. But that requires more words than an essay offers. 

[ii] Unless otherwise stated quotations and page numbers refer to With a Stranger’s Eyes.

[iii] The Austrian-Israeli philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) published Ich und Du in 1923, published in English in 1937 as I and Thou – a meditation on human relationships, and a critique of objectification and over-abstraction.

[iv] ‘Simplifying’ here is an extravagant understatement.

[v] In 1913 an explosion at the pit head killed 439 men and boys. It was the worst mining disaster in British history.

[vi] I’ve written about the man at the window in the context of The Release. https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2022/02/jeremy-hookers-release-part-three-poems.html  I’ve reused the Bunting quote from that essay.

[vii] John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated 22 November 1817.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Verse for today

Barcoo, Queensland, 1906. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Foal in the Wire

Robbie Coburn, Lothian, 2025, 121 pps.
LIAM GUILAR finds insubstantiality in the Outback

Set in rural Australia, The Foal in the Wire is a book length narrative of short, individually titled poems.

The story is told by Sam, an adolescent boy. One night he finds a foal caught in a barbed-wire fence. He and his neighbour’s daughter, Julia, save the injured animal. As they help it regain its health, they draw closer together. Sam’s parents’ marriage is falling apart; he’s bullied at school, and Julia’s father is an abusive drunk. Some things are resolved: some can’t be.

Australia has a tradition of narrative poetry that shows how rich and varied the ‘verse novel’ can be. The three best known, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune, and Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers, demonstrate different ways a writer could approach ‘narrative verse.’ They are all book-length stories, their lines don’t go all the way to the right margin, and they are marketed as poetry. Their differences are greater than these similarities. Porter’s narrator, Jill, is the literary granddaughter of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Told as a sequence of short, free verse poems, Porter’s lines and images create a modern, laconic private eye. Fredy Neptune is a masterclass in controlled rhythm, and the story, progressing through tightly controlled eight-line stanzas, reads like a picaresque novel. Wearne’s The Lovemakers, with its huge cast of characters, written in a variety of verse forms, reads like nothing and no one else, and at 800 pages is one of the longest verse narratives.

At the same time, staying in Australia, there’s a tradition of verse novels aimed at what is now described as the Young Adult market. Pioneered by writers like Steven Herrick, whose A Place Like This still reads well after thirty years, these books range from Herrick’s teenagers trying to find their place in modern Australia to work as different in both form and content as the dystopian science fiction of Lisa Jacobsen’s The Sunlit Zone.[i]

The Foal in the Wire, aimed at the YA market, sits comfortably in such company. It would make an excellent short story. The question anyone writing narrative poetry is forced to confront, sooner or later, is why not write the story in prose? Part of the answer, as suggested above, is that there is a range of techniques for organising words and creating effects with words which are available to someone writing verse.

Coburn has chosen to make little use of those resources. If organised sound is the essential characteristic of poetry, there’s little poetry in the book. The Foal in the Wire opens:

As I run down the veranda steps
in the dark

I can still hear them screaming
at each other
inside the house.

he doesn’t love her
and she doesn’t love him
but they stay.

Read aloud, I can’t hear a significant difference if the lines were written out as prose: As I run down the veranda steps in the dark, I can still hear them screaming at each other inside the house. he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t love him but they stay.[ii] It is a very popular stye of verse. The internet is awash with poets who write declarative sentences chopped into short lines. Some of them have had astonishing commercial success.[iii] For anyone brought up on this kind of poetry, and that includes many of the current YA market accessing poetry outside of school, Coburn’s style is going to be immediately familiar and comfortable.

In short poems, the style has very little to commend it. It sounds like a clumsy effort to plunk ‘Three Blind Mice’ on a Stradivarius which has recently been used by a virtuoso to play Bach’s Solo Partitas for violin.

However, as Coburn’s poem in The Brazen Head for Spring 2025 suggest, style here is a choice, a balancing of possible loss and gain, and such a plain style has definite advantages when used to write narrative verse. 

No one speaks in poetry but it’s easy to imagine someone telling this story. If Sam were speaking in iambic pentameter or tightly controlled Spenserian stanzas, littering his story with clever literary allusions, he would not sound like a lost teenager in rural Australia.[iv]

The other major advantage is pace. The story moves with the inevitability of a folk tale or a parable. Like a folk tale it can deal with cruelty and loss without romanticising or sensationalising either. 

Like a folk tale there is a characteristic blend of the general and the specific. Small details give the story credibility while there is an absence of details that would identify where and when the story takes place. The Foal in the Wire is located somewhere in rural Australia, on two properties that run horses. There is little to fix when the story happens. Having moved away, Julia writes a letter and sends it through the post. Although she and Sam take the bus to school, they don’t use computers or phones to communicate.[v]

Balanced against this is a careful use of detail making the story believable. Sam sneaking out at night:

“making sure to stay on the clover

lining the sides of the path

to avoid the potholes and depressions

left in the ground by horses.

tells us he’s done this many times. Both children, having watched their fathers, know how to help the foal.

Julia has bought another bottle of formula

and I have a bundle of hay

I gathered

from inside the shed.

dad won’t notice.

whenever hay is lifted

stalks fall from the bale

and gather on the floor. 

Style allows the story to become its own metaphor. The foal is both a particular foal, and a symbol of those who are damaged and survive. None of this needs to be underlined or emphasised. 

It would be a brave writer, especially in a first book, who trusted the reader enough to let the story do all the work. And ‘story’ isn’t everything. The book has a therapeutic potential. It’s offering its readers a realistic message of hope. Coburn occasionally gives those readers a gentle nudge towards the preferred reading as the narrative unfolds but comes close to labouring the point at the end.

The story ends at ‘After’, which concludes:

I want to write down everything

about my brother and Julia and the foal

I am no longer ashamed of who I am

and where I come from.

I can hold on and be anyone.

Two poems follow and both make the same point without adding to the story. The last piece, ‘Wounded Animal’ ends:

Maybe this

scarred and haunted body

is enough–

the wounded animal

is capable of survival.

If this seems to be restating what was already obvious, it is in keeping with the narrator’s character in a book aimed at adolescent readers and dedicated ‘for those who are wounded and surviving.’

There is a contemporary tendency to read poetry through the life of the writer. To claim that the writing is ‘authentic’, ‘raw’[vi] or ‘based on experience’, can set up a defence which frames any criticism as cruel, irrelevant or a personal attack on the writer.[vii]

But as made art, published and offered to strangers, what should matter is the quality of the product. No matter how intense the experience, or the emotion it engenders, once it’s written down and offered to a stranger, it is an unpleasant fact that even trauma is a cliché of life and literature. The more literate the reader, the greater the chance they’ve read versions of this story before. As humans we sympathise with people who suffer, but readers deserve something more for their money than a stranger telling them how bad their life was.

In the wrong hands The Foal in the Wire would be a string of YA Fiction cliches: a family disintegrating after the death of a child, a narrator lost, isolated, contemplating suicide, bullied at school, first love, first sexual experience, a drunk abusive father, some form of reconciliation.

What is therefore most impressive about Coburn’s handling of his material is that at no stage does his book read like a string of clichés. ‘First Time’ is that rare piece of writing, a description of a first sexual encounter that doesn’t sound coy, crude or clinical. It manages to capture the baffling nature of the experience:

like holding a body

and cradling a ghost

at the same time.

Bunting’s injunction: ‘Emotions first – but only facts in the poem’ might be too austere for a modern audience, but Coburn’s book comes close. There is no self-pity, no attempts to exaggerate the horror of the situation and no unrealistic Hollywood ending in which everything is made good and Sam and Julia live happily ever after, running their own shelter for abused horses. 

Whether or not the story is based on lived experience, Coburn’s triumph is to make it believable.

[i] The list of book length narratives could be extended, but these examples give some idea of their variety. Verse novel is no more a genre than prose novel.

[ii] This review was written with an uncorrected proof copy so quotations may vary in the final, published version. In the version I used, sentences within poems consistently begin without a capital letter.

[iii] Why readers buy books containing poems they themselves could have written while they were still at high school is one of life’s mysteries.

[iv] This is not to suggest that there are no literary teenagers in rural Australia. One of the criticisms levelled against Fredy Neptune was that its central character was too eloquent.

[v] There are possible reasons for a lack of phones and computers but their absence adds to the effect.

[vi] Although it seems I’m in the minority, ‘raw’, when applied to writing, is not a compliment. It suggests a lazy chef slapping uncooked food on the diners’ plates and leaving them to do his or her job.

[vii] The other version of this is to dismiss the writing without reading it because ‘everyone knows’ the writer is guilty of unacceptable behaviour, beliefs or opinions. Both popular extremes tend to ignore the actual writing.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Six go in search of a bride

This translation by LIAM GUILAR is from the medieval Welsh prose tale, Culhwch ac Olwen. Having enlisted the help of his cousin, King Arthur, Culhwch and his companions set out from Arthur’s court to find Olwen, the daughter of Ysbaddaden Pencawr (Ysbaddaden Chief Giant)

Six go in search of a bride

And so they travel ‘til they come to a vast plain,

and they see the biggest fort they’d ever seen.

All that day they struggled towards it,

but ‘though they thought they were advancing,

they were no nearer than when they started.

And the second and third day they travelled,

and with difficulty approached the fort.

As they closed the distance, they saw a flock of sheep,

so vast they couldn’t see the ends of it. 

On the top of a mound, a shepherd, dressed in skins,

was guarding it and by his side a shaggy dog

bigger than a horse nine winters old.

He had never lost a lamb much less a full grown sheep.

No troop had ever gone past

without him doing it hurt or harm.

His breath would burn to the ground,

any dead bush or tree on the plain.

Kei said to Gwrhyr Interpreter of Tongues:

‘Go talk to that man.’

‘Me? I promised to go as far as you did,

I didn’t say I’d go any further.

We’ll go together.’

Menw mab Tiergywaed said:

‘Don’t worry about the hound,

I’ll glamour it and you’ll be safe.’

‘It is fine you are, shepherd.’[i]

‘May things be no better for you than they are for me.’

‘God’s truth, you are the chief.’

‘No one can harm me except my wife.’

‘Whose sheep do you guard and whose is that fort?’

‘Stupid men. Everybody knows

that fort belongs to Ysbaddaden Pencawr.’

‘And you, who are you?’

‘Custenhin Amhynwyedic and on account of my wife,

my brother Ysbaddaden Pencawr has ruined me.

And you, who are you?’

‘We are Arthur’s messengers,

come to ask for Olwen.’

‘Oh men, may God protect you.

For all the world don’t do that.

No one ever came on that errand

and left with his life.’

The shepherd arose from the mound.

As he arose, Culhwch gave him a golden ring.

He tried to put it on, but it wouldn’t fit.

He put it in the finger of his glove, went home,

and gave the glove to his wife. 

‘Where did you find this ring

It’s not your usual scavenging.’

‘As I was walking down by the sea side.’

‘A long way from your sheep?’

‘I was looking for seafood.

I saw a fine corpse tossed up by the tide

and found this gold ring on his finger.’

‘Take me there, husband,’ the wife replied.

‘If the sea won’t swallow a dead man’s treasure, 

show me his fine looking corpse.’

‘The dead man will soon be washed to our gates

so be patient a little and linger.’

‘His name, husband, tell me his name?’

‘Culhwch, your nephew, your sister’s son.

He’s come here looking for Olwen.’

‘Bittersweet is your news, husband,

I’ll see my nephew at last:

but that’s a quest no one’s survived.’

Hearing the noise of their approach

she rushed out to greet them.

As she opened her arms to embrace him,

Kei snatched a log from the woodpile

and placed the stake between her hands.

She squeezed it until it was a twisted withy.

‘Ha woman,’ he said, ‘that was an evil loving.

If you’d hugged me like that, no one

would ever make love to me again.’

They were welcomed into the house.

After a while, when all were busy,

she opened a chest beside the hearth,

releasing a youth with curly, golden hair.

‘It‘s a shame to conceal such a lad,’ said Gwrhyr.

‘I know it’s not his crime that’s being punished.’

‘He’s all that I’ve got left,’ she said.

‘I had 23 sons and Ysbaddaden Pencawr

has killed them all.

I’ve no more hope for this one

than I had for his dead brothers.’

‘Be my companion,’ said Kei, 

‘and no one will kill either of us,

unless they kill us both.’

As they continued eating,

the woman asked:

‘What errand brought you here?’

‘We have come to seek Olwen.’

‘For God’s sake, turn back;

before you’re seen

by someone in the fort.’

‘God’s truth, we will not,

until we’ve seen the maiden.

Does she come to a place

where we could see her?’

‘Every Saturday she comes here to wash her hair

and every Saturday she leaves her rings in the bowl.

Neither she nor her servants come back for them.’

‘Will she come if she is sent for?’

‘God knows I will not harm my friend.

I will not betray one who trusts me. 

But if you give me your word

she won’t be harmed, I’ll send for her.’

‘We give it.’

And so they sent for her.

[i] Throughout the story, there are conversations like the one which follows, which sound as though the participants are in a scene from a Beckett play. 

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Three translations from Culhwch ac Owen

LIAM GUILAR is the poetry editor of The Brazen Head. These are three of his translations from the medieval Welsh prose tale, Culhwch ac Olwen (i.m. Michael Alexander)

Translating Culhwch ac Olwen

In popular films the sexy treasure hunter/archaeologist

(they conflate the two, much to my trowel wielding friends’ dismay)

who’s fluent in every lost forgotten ancient language,

confronting the inscription on the recently uncovered wall,

or gazing at the long lost rediscovered legendary text,

looks, then translates, without a pause, the symbols

into fluent, idiomatic, contemporary American.

The reality goes more like this:

Kilyd son of Kledon Wledic

Wanted a wife as noble as himself.

Here is the woman he wanted.

Goleudyt daughter of Anlawd Wledic.

So far so good.

After they stayed together What? Gwest Ah, see note.

They spent the night together. Is that too direct?

The verb’s related to the one for copulation.

They came together. After they were married

….bland. After they slept together,

no, the story teller could have used kysgu gan.

The cruder options? No. Not here. What follows?

The country went to pray they ?might have? offspring

And they got a child/boy through the prayers of the country.

And from the hour she captured, caught?

The next word’s definitely ‘pregnant’. Another note.

‘Became pregnant’ though literally ‘caught pregnancy’.

As though it were an illness, perhaps better than ‘fell pregnant’

which evokes abrupt decline, or woman, falling?

Then she went wild/feral. Another note.

‘She went mad’. Mad or wild is somewhere you go to

in this case beyond the civilised boundaries.

She’s gone mad and won’t go near a building.

Wouldn’t enter a building?

And from the time that she was pregnant,

She went wild and wouldn’t enter any building.

And when her time came, she came to her good sense.

You go mad but come to your senses. The payoff’s here, 

the sudden twist estranging your own language.

You go out of your mind as though it were a car,

and you could leave in the car park to return to

when finished being mad and needed it again. Anyway,

what’s next? Pigs!? What? We’re up to line 7, only

one thousand two hundred and thirty eight to go.

May I marry your daughter?

(The giant Ysbaddaden Pencawr knows he will die when Olwen, his beautiful daughter, marries. Understandably, he doesn’t welcome her suitors. But Culhwch has been told that if he doesn’t marry Olwen, he will never marry anyone. He and his six companions set out to ask the giant for her hand in marriage. What isn’t stated but becomes obvious is that the giant can’t be killed until his daughter is married.)

They killed the nine gatekeepers,

and not a man cried out.

They killed their nine huge mastiffs;

not one so much as squealed.

And so they came into the hall.

‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr! Greetings

in the name of God and man!’

‘You, where are you going?’

‘We seek your daughter, Olwen,

for Culhwch son of Kilyd.’

‘Where are those rascal servants?

Where are those ruffians of mine?

Raise up the forks under my eyelids

so I can see my future son in law.’

This they did. ‘Come back tomorrow

I’ll have an answer for you then.’

He had three stone spears beside him,

each tipped with poison.

As they turned to go he seized one

and flung it after them.

Bedwyr caught it and hurled it back,

piercing the giant through his knee cap.

‘Cursed savage son in law!

It will be worse for me when I go downhill.

Like the sting of a gadfly,

the poisoned iron has hurt me.

Cursed be the smith who made it

and the anvil on which it was forged.‘              

They stayed that night at Custennin’s house.

And on the second day, they set out to the hall,

in majesty, with fine combs in their hair.

‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr,

give us your daughter.

In return for her dowry and marriage fee

to you and her two kinswomen.

And if we don’t get her from you;

you’ll get your death from us.’

‘Her four great-grandmothers

and her four great-grandfathers

are still alive. I must consult them.’

‘You do that. We’ll go eat.’

He took the second spear

and hurled it after them.

Menw mab Teirgwaedd

caught it and threw it back.

It pierced the centre of his chest

and sprung out the small of his back.

‘Cursed savage son in law.

The pain of this hard iron

is like the sting of a horse-leech.

Cursed be the forge wherein it was heated.

Now, when I go uphill,

there will be a tightness in my chest,

stomach aches and frequent nausea.’ 

They went to their food.

On the third day they came to the court.

‘Ysbaddaden Pencawr,

stop throwing spears at us.

Do not wish hurt and harm

and death upon yourself.’

‘My eyelids have fallen over my eyeballs –

Where are my servants, raise up the forks

so I may look on my future son in law.’

They arose, and as they rose,

he took the third spear

and hurled it at them. This time,

Culhwch caught it and threw it back,

and as he wished, it pierced the eyeball

went through and out the back of his neck.

‘Cursed savage son in law.

As long as I live the sight in one eye

will be worse than the other.

Whenever I walk in the wind it will water.

I’ll have headaches and giddiness

at the start of each moon.

Cursed be the forge that heated it.

Worse than the bite of a mad dog

is the sting of its poisoned iron.’

Next day they came to the court.

‘Don’t attack us anymore.

You’ll bring hurt and harm

and martyrdom to yourself.

Give us your daughter.’

‘Which one of you was told to seek her?’

‘Me, Culhwch, son of Kilyd.’

‘Come here so I can see you.’

A chair was placed under him,

so they could be face to face.

‘Is it you who seeks my daughter?’

‘I do.’ ‘Give me your word

that you’ll be just?’ ‘I give it.’

‘When you give me what I name,

then you will have my daughter.’

‘Name what you want.’

The Lame Ant

(Ysbaddaden gives Culhwch forty impossible tasks. This poem tells how one of them is achieved. Gwythyr is one of Culhwch’s companions.)

As Gwythyr mab Greidawl

was crossing a mountain,

he heard lamentations:

a most bitter wailing.

Dreadful this noise.

He rushed towards it

drawing his sword,

cutting the anthill

off at the ground

saving the ants from

the blistering flames.

‘God’s blessing and ours upon you,’

they said to him.

‘And that which no man can recover

we will recover for thee.’

These were the ants

who collected the flax,

all the nine hestors

Ysbaddaden demanded.

But one seed was missing.

Until just before sunset.

it was finally brought in

by the last, limping ant.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Forest fantasy

Image: Leonhard Lenz. Wikimedia Commons

Seren of the Wildwood  

Marly Youmans, Wiseblood books, illustrated, hb., 72pps., US$16

LIAM GUILAR is beguiled by a dream of tangled trees

The Wildwood holds the remnants of the past, / Strange ceremonies that the fays still love / To watch – the rituals of demon tribes / Who once played havoc with the universe, / And everything that says the world is not / Exactly what it seems is hidden here, / But also there are paths to blessedness.

So begins Seren of the Wildwood, Marly Youmans’ narrative poem that drifts the reader through a tale that seems both familiar and strange.

Traditional fairy and folk tales have been a resource for many modern writers and film makers. The old story is usually rewritten to correct a perceived ideological bias, or to rationalise the magic, or to make it acceptable to modern audiences, whose ideas of story have been shrunk by mass market films. With notable exceptions, rewriting fails to produce anything that comes close to the originals in their ability to unsettle and entertain. Writers can study archetypes, read the psychoanalytical literature, immerse themselves in Joseph Campbell et al, naturalise Propp’s Morphology, and still produce a story that fails to hold an audience.[i]

The stories Walt Disneyfied are closer to inappropriate dreams that don’t care about your daylight ideology, or your preferred version of the world. They exist in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, recalling a time when the wolves were real and the forest was a dangerous place. Marly Youmans’ story moves bodily into that space, where nothing is quite what it seems, and never quite what it should be, where hope and disappointment are as commonplace as leaves and what we might label cruelty is just the way the world is.

Her poem is not a retelling of a previous story – but is rather a new story, inhabiting old spaces to make them new again. Seren grows up on the edges of the Wildwood, her childhood overshadowed by the death of her brothers, which the story ascribes to her father’s ill-chosen words. Constrained at home by her mother’s care, she is lured into the trees by the promise of friendship and adventure. She meets characters who harm and help her, moving through a dream-like landscape, made real by Youmans’ descriptions, until she finds her way home.

The poem is written in sixty-two stanzas, each consisting of twenty-one lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter ending with a ‘Bob and Wheel’. The Bob is an abrupt two syllable line, the Wheel four short lines rhyming internally. They break the visual and aural monotony even the best blank verse can produce over a long narrative; they can summarise the stanza, comment on it, or provide an opportunity for epigrammatic statement:

[…]Next, a King

Not young but middle-aged his curling beard

Gone steel,

His mind turned lunatic,

His body no ideal

Of grace and charm to prick

Desire: man as ordeal.

The Bob and Wheel, famously used in Gawain and the Green Knight, inevitably evoke medieval precedent, as does the walled garden Seren finds but can’t enter. Although the Wildwood is not the harsh landscape Gawain rides into before returning home, the Knight of Romance rode into the forest to seek adventures because the forest was the place where the normal social rules and expectations did not apply. There is often a didactic element to such stories, but fortunately Youmans avoids the temptation to turn hers into a sermon.

Her poem is full of good lines:

Like some grandfather’s pocket watch wound tight

But then forgotten, Seren moved slower

And slower.

The descriptions of the landscape anchor the fantastic story. In the following quotation Seren is heading towards a river she must cross and discovers a waterfall:

And so she travelled toward the roar of rain

With thunder, apprehensive as she neared

The lip where torrents catapulted free

From stone and merged into a muscular

And sovereign streaming force – the energy

That shocks the trembling pebbles into flight

And grinds the massive boulders into bowls.

Occasionally it is not easy to decide if a line is padded or what might be padding is deliberate stye: ‘It seemed satanic, manic, half insane’, but this is so rare that the fact it’s noticeable is a tribute to all the other lines where it isn’t.  

The poem is rich in images and incidents and packed with a diverse cast of characters, but what does it mean? This is the wrong question. In school we are taught ‘how to read a poem’. For ‘read’, understand ‘analyse’ and the purpose of the analysis is to explain ‘what the poem means’ or, in its most depressing formulation ‘what was the poet was trying to say’. These questions and the approaches they require have little to do with the experience of reading poetry outside the academy.

Stories, poems, and narrative poems especially, can be a way of thinking in and through language, in a non-linear, perhaps non-rational, associative way. The story works for the reader when it activates memory, prior reading, knowledge and experience. The question therefore should be, what does the story do for you while you’re reading it, and afterwards, when a phrase, an incident, or an image remains in your memory.[ii]

Youmans’ poem encourages such a line of thinking; there are numerous allusions to other stories, tying Seren into a network of intertextuality, (at one point she is helped in the story by remembering the stories she has been told), there are images, which evoke a host of medieval precedents, but Youmans avoids the simplification of neat equivalence or the temptation of a tidy conclusion.

In terms of traditional narrative arcs, if you believe in the importance of such things, the story ends abruptly and very little is explained. There are questions left unanswered and threads that were run out but not neatly tied together at the end. The reader is being treated with respect and left alone with the story. It is a book that invites and rewards multiple rereading.

Reading is made easier because the book itself is a beautiful object. Wiseblood books are to be commended on producing such a fine hardback at such a low price. Printed on good quality paper, one stanza to a page, Seren of the Wildwood is illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. His black and white images complement the tone and mood of the story.

[i] There are obvious exceptions to this generalisation and to be precise everyone who has told these stories has altered them; the Grimms were notorious revisers.

[ii] The undeniable consequence of this line of thinking is that the book that haunts one reader is the same book another reader can’t be bothered to finish, regardless of the reviewer’s praise or condemnation. This seems especially true of narrative poetry. 

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Taking Possession

LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of the Brazen Head. His most recent book is A Man of Heart (Shearsman, 2023)

Normans on the great north road

somewhere in England in 1071.[i]

Hubert, lord of these grey riders,

fought at Senlac, and since then

has been useful to the King

His reward, the manor he rides towards,

larger than the home he left in Normandy.

Walter, his seneschal, riding beside him,

fought at Senlac with distinction,

rallied the savaged in the Malfosse .[ii]

Between them, non-armoured, long haired,

Aelfric, an Englishman. Their local guide.

Their translator. He makes them awkward

in ways they’d struggle to define.

If pushed, Walter might reply;

he has no scars: his hands are soft.

The manor is wooden, unfortified.

Too easy to attack and futile to defend.

All this, thinks Hubert, I will change.

After the automatic military appraisal,

the childlike revelation: this is mine.

All mine. A group waits, women, children,

men so old they can’t stand straight.

The lady of the manor steps towards him.

Hubert remembers that in the English time

she could have run this place without a husband.

Now she and it are forfeit to the crown,

the crown bestowed them both on him

and he has come to take possession.

That thought will take a long time growing old.

He examines her the way he will inspect the cattle,

fields, fish weir and the little mill.

Tall, straight, young, blonde: she will do.

‘Where are the men?’ Vague images 

of those long legs, fine hips and breasts

do not make him stupid. ‘Where are the men?’

He has lost friends who were not so cautious,

in this green folded landscape, where the trees

and ditches hide those desperate for revenge.

Aelfric translates the question.

‘Where you should be.’ He ducks his head

til he remembers he rides with the victors

and she’s the one who lost and all her pride

will not avert the fate that rides towards her.

‘Her brothers, father, uncle, nephews died

at Stamford bridge and Senlac hill.

Their tenants and dependants died with them.’[iii] 

The idea that Englishmen are long-haired,

beer swilling, effeminate, will creep

into the Norman mind but not in Hubert’s

even if he lived a long and idle life.

Those longhaired drunkards stood their ground,

all day. Charge after charge breaking

on that obdurate line of shields. 

Anyone who’d seen a horse and rider split

by one swing of an axe would think twice

about disparaging the man who swung it.

But Aelfric swung no axe. That much is obvious.

2

After inspecting the boundaries,

a wary country ride with scouts,

after the inspection of the manor house,

after the welcome meal, Hubert decided

it was time to inspect his human property.

The men at arms were organised.

Guards posted, tasks allotted.

Walter thanked, allowed to leave.

Hubert talking to his Lady through Aelfric

was reminded of those shields.

When he was polite, she seemed insulted.

When he had tried to show an interest

she had seemed offended. He sensed

that what he said was not the words she heard.

She was nobility, understood the world

and what would happen next and so he doubted 

his tame Englishman was being honest.

He would have to learn her language,

some words at least, while she learnt his.

Bed, he thought, could be his classroom.

He stood up, took her hand. She did not move.

‘If you don’t go with him’, said Aelfric 

he’ll strip you for his men at arms.’

It was a stupid lie. This Norman was no fool

who’d break his prize possession out of spite.

Aelfric ignored the look she cut him with.

Once she’d been too proud to notice his existence

now she was this Norman’s mattress

and whatever in his character was broken,

or unfinished, rejoiced at her humiliation.

The curtains closed behind them.

Aelfric edged towards the drapery,

heard the sound of fabric falling,

imagined the pale body emerging.

He heard Hubert’s belt and sword unbuckled 

then set down, heard them move together.

Imagined his hands, heard Hubert grunting,

then making garbled noises like a stricken pig.

A female hand, the curtain parted.

She was naked, radiantly naked,

white flesh tinged pink about the throat.

Aelfric moved. She was majestic,

desire erased the thought that he’d been caught

erased the room, erased his name

and everything except desire

for the body moving closer to him

small hands reaching for his belt.

Who knows a dead man’s final thoughts?

Perhaps he was thinking mine at last,

perhaps he heard her say, ‘You should have died

with all the others’, and perhaps, before the knife

sliced the artery in his throat and geysered blood,

he realised she had spoken flawless Norman-French.

She caught him as he fell, pulling him down

screaming in English, help, help, murder, help.

Walter, sword drawn, running, saw

the Englishman raping the frantic lady

thrashing on the floor, hauled him away

one quick blow striking off the head.

The woman, sobbing, pointing at the curtains.

Behind them Hubert’s naked corpse,

twisted, reaching for the knife stuck in his back.

While the bodies were removed

Walter held the shuddering woman.

The King still owed him for the Malfosse.

Perhaps this manor. He would need a wife.

Hands skilled in settling a skittish mare

gentled the shaking body

aware of its taut lines, soft curves,

its bloody promise. She would do

when he came to take possession.

[i] This date is entirely arbitrary.

[ii] When the English army finally broke and ran at the Battle of Hastings, a small group turned and savaged the pursuing Normans at a place the Normans called The Malfosse.

[iii] Fulford Gate, Stamford bridge, Senlac, the three battles fought by the English in 1066. Many of the victors at Stamford Bridge died at Senlac (Hastings).