From Spare Oom to War Drobe; Travels in Narnia with my Nine Year Old Self by Katherine Langrish, Reflections by Penny Dolan

I know Katherine Langrish as a friend but also as a remarkable children’s writer, storyteller, folk and fairy-tale expert and enthusiast, as well as for her richly wonderful blog Seven Miles of Steel Thistles.

Even so, when I heard of her forthcoming book about her love for C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia I did wonder how she would write about such an odd collection of characters and creatures.

Would the book be a nostalgic memoir of mid-century childhood reading, in the style of Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm? Or would it remind me of Nicholas Tucker’s study, The Child and The Book, about the influence of reading on a growing boy?  

What would Katherine Langrish’s book be?

 

 

 

 The slightly odd opening of the title is a clue, easily recognised by fans of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. These words are spoken by Mr Tumnus the Faun as he formally addresses the young heroine, Lucy, after she has told him how she entered the snow-bound land of Narnia.

“Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?” 

Unfortunately, there is more to his invitation than kindness . . .

 

 

However, the next part of the title – Travels with my Nine Year Old Self – is what makes this book such a delight for me. 

This reflection on the Chronicles is not a distant critical study but one involving Katherine Langrish both her present and her own young self. We meet her as a young reader, experiencing the Narnia books for the first time and loving the Lion in this story almost as fiercely as Lucy does. 

When her young hopes of entering Lewis’s magical kingdoms bumped up against reality, and less obliging wardrobes, she responded by filling notebook after notebook with her own stories: creating her own magic portal, and starting off on her own life as a writer. 

 

I enjoyed meeting this child, whose younger viewpoint sits firmly but lightly within the tone of the book: she is like an imaginative, companionable bookish school-friend. As she reads through the seven books, her main interest  was and is how dramatically satisfying she finds each story. What will happen next? Does it feel true?

This approach allows Langrish to bring the understanding, feelings and disappointments of a young reader to what is otherwise a knowledgeable, grown-up study. 

Freed from the role of “literary critic”, she suggests that as a child she did not "read" the Christian messages that angered the author Phillip Pullman, and that she simply read “as a boy” rather than feeling herself limited by the lack of female role models. 

Besides, she is happy to simply skim or skip bits that are dull or of no interest, Interestingly, she is quite content to have cruel justice dealt out to baddies, where an adult writer, now, might feel they should demonstrate exemplary compassion. 

 

Of course, the other voice in "From Spare Oom..." is that of Katherine Langrish today: fully-grown and well able to take the reader through all seven Chronicles which are presented in their narrative rather than their written order. 

In this role, she traces the sources and influences within Lewis’s writing, emphasising the rich seam threaded through the histories of Narnia. Lewis often mixed narrative cultures together, a practice that his friend JRR Tolkien apparently deplored and avoided in The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings. 

As she moves from one Chronicle to another, Langrish opens up Lewis’s “treasure house” - both the concious and unconscious rooms - for the reader. She reveals ideas drawn from British folk and fairy stories, from the collections of the Brothers Grimm, from the Tales of Romance, Arthurian legends, Celtic myths and from Arabian and Oriental folk tales. She also expands on literary echoes found within the titles, referencing Spencer’s “Faerie Queen”, Bunyans “Pilgrims Progress” and both Old and New Testaments. 

 

She examines the structure of the stories, welcoming their richness, but reminding herself that she would have ignored any puzzling or boring parts. She gives an occasional sharp reprimand to Lewis, for his casual unfair dismissal of the “worldly” Susan, the sin of “fatness”, his racist accounts of the dark-skinned Calormenes and more, as well as the interminable stretches of The Last Battle. She is shocked too, to find that, compared to the Tolkein’s warrior-filled sagas, Lewis’s supposedly gentler Narnian fantasies include vividly realistic gore, blood-thirsty attacks and casual slaughter.The young reader did not seem to noticed this overmuch.

Lewis’s ChroniclesTofered on particular gift that  offered the young Katherine. Each book has a different "flavour”, its own different inhabitants and its own sense of history and time. So, if the bold, young Prince Caspian can become the old, dying King Caspian between one book and another, might that mean that time moves differently between one world and another, or that there are worlds we cannot see? Could that be possible? Through his stories and writing Lewis gave his young reader a different way of thinking, introducing her to what later she would recognise as the concepts behind time travel, science fiction fantasy and philosophy. 

Through the Chronicles, his writing showed her that storybooks could be 

“as much about ideas as events”  

and so changed her understanding of the power of literature and writing.

As I finished squinting at my downloaded copy, I was very glad that my own order of “From Spare Oom” will arrive soon. This next time, I will read it with a set of the Chronicles of Narnia on hand for company and reference, as well as having my nine-year-old companion from Spare Oom sitting there too. We will enjoy a very fine reading adventure. 

 

 

Good wishes to you this Saint Walpurgis Eve, a time of year when the bonfires are lit, and a happy May Day to follow.

Penny Dolan

@pennydolan1

“From Spare Oom to War Drobe” is published in hardback on 6th May 2021.

The Defynnog Yew, a remarkable tree! by Katherine Langrish

One day in March this year,on a weekend in the Brecon Beacons, we stopped at the little church of St Cynog in the village of Defynnog to visit what some people claim may be the oldest yew tree in Europe - around 5000 years old! Whether this date is accurate is disputed - but experts agree it's very old indeed, at least 2000 to 3000 years.

We pushed through the lych gate and went up the path through the graveyard. There were venerable yews a-plenty - you can see one in the photo below -  but the one we were after is on the far side of the church - a church it of course predates by centuries, if not millennia.

St Cynog's has been here since the 11th century and may be older, though most of the structure is now 15th century. (The story of Cynog can be found at this link.) In the porch is a 5th century pillar stone carved with Latin and Ogham inscriptions commemorating 'Rugniatis son of Vendonius'. The yew was there before him, too.

And here it is. When you get near you can see it has two trunks and so looks like two trees, but DNA testing (I never knew you could DNA test trees) by Roslin Forestry research confirmed the two trunks are identical. Two trunks, a single tree. Moreover they found that the tree is 'monoecious', both male and female.

I bought a pamphlet in the church which put forward a number of theories about the yew (some mutually exclusive): that it was planted long ago to honour a tribal chief; that it could have been an accidental or natural germination; that it was been grown from a cutting taken from another sacred tree far away or even abroad; that it was a sacred tree which symbolised the axis mundi... clearly, nobody really knows. In the Middle Ages apparently it may have been a special meeting place, and the centre of Cantref Mawr, the Hundred of Defynnog. The best guess is that the church was built here because of the tree; the tree itself was sacred. And now it shelters the Christian graveyard.

The tree is so huge I couldn't get a close-up of more than parts of it. Here's me, glancing down at our dog Polly who was taking a great interest in the clefts and hollows of the two vast trunks...

One rare and interesting characteristic of the Defynnog Yew is that it produces 'golden boughs' - sprays of leaves with a blanched, yellow colour, very striking against the usual dark foliage. Was this so from the beginning, and is it what made the tree so very special?

I was also interested by the green fur of yew leaves covering parts of the trunk like a cloak.

The church pamphlet goes on to claim that Wales has the largest collection of ancient Yews on earth and that many were 'brought here as cuttings, branches or staffs from the Holy Land or Egypt, which were then planted in remote places so that their survival would be ensured, well into the future.' If so (no evidence is given in support for this practice and I have to say I'm a bit dubious - why in remote places? why not in established church yards? would a staff really root?) such cuttings would also post-date this particular yew. The church guide also makes the claim that the modern graveyard was once a neolithic burial site, which I would be happy to believe if - again - any evidence or reference were provided. It may be so...

In his book 'Superstitions of the British Isles'  Steve Roud says no one really knows why yew trees are so often grown in graveyards. "Accident can be ruled out, and a deliberate policy presumed, and there are numerous stories which are told to explain this." He investigates some - that yew wood was used for making bows, so it was ordered that yew trees should be planted in every churchyard - that because yews are poisonous, they were planted in churchyards where cattle could not reach them - and concludes there is no real evidence for any of them and though there was clearly "a traditional connection between yews and death or mourning in medieval times in Britain, its exact nature has yet to be discovered."

Robert Graves, in 'The White Goddess' has (characteristically) a lot more to say about the yew - that it's one of the Five Magical Trees of Ireland and the fifth letter (I fo Idho) in the Tree Alphabet, that it's "the death-tree in all European countries, sacred to Hecate in Greece and Rome", that in Ireland wine barrels were made of yew-wood so it was known as "the coffin of the vine", that yew stakes were driven through the corpses of the fated Irish lovers Naoise and Deirdre to keep them apart but that "the stakes sprouted and became trees whose tops eventually embraced over Armagh Cathedral," that "In Brittany it is said that churchyard yews will spread a root to the mouth of each corpse..."

Axis mundi, tree of death, tree of eternity, all of those things? Well... Yews are evergreen and sombre, lit with the little red berries of which the flesh is tasteless and the seed is poisonous, and they live practically for ever...

Maybe that's how it all began.



Visit Katherine's website at www.katherinelangrish.co.uk
and her blog at Seven Miles of Steel Thistles



Katherine left us a few precious posts before she stopped being a History Girl. We are very happy to use one today as it was Gillian Polack's turn and she has had to leave her home in Australia and relocate because of the air quality from the bushfires, Gillian will be back later this year but thanks, Katherine!

‘Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years’ - Review by Katherine Langrish

I want to sing the praises of an absolutely wonderful book: ‘Women’s Work, The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth and Society in EarlyTimes,’ by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (Norton, 1998). It’s about the long, long history and prehistory of spinning, weaving and designing textiles – work which, right up until the Industrial Revolution, was almost always done by women. 

Wayland Barber is an expert in prehistoric textiles. Her interest in the subject began in childhood as her mother loved to weave and sew and she grew up ‘constantly aware of the form, color and texture of cloth’.  Studying Classical and Bronze Age Mediterranean archeology at college, she began to notice patterns on pots and frescoes that ‘looked as if they had been copied from typical weaving patterns. But when I suggested this idea to archeologists, they responded that nobody could have known how to weave such complicated textiles so early.’

Undaunted, Wayland Barber decided to look into the data for early weaving technologies. Expecting to write a small article, she rapidly realised this was going to be a huge subject; the article eventually became a 450 page book: ‘Prehistoric Textiles’, Princeton 1991. ‘Along the way I kept running across wonderful bits of information about the women – virtually always women – who produced these textiles and about the values that different societies put on the products and their makers.’ Women’s Work is as much about the women, the makers of the cloth themselves, as it is about the textiles they created.

An experienced weaver herself, Wayland was able to experimentally replicate some of the earliest textiles we know of, like the woollen plaids from between 1200 and 8oo BCE  preserved in the Hallstadt salt mines in Austria. The salt ‘preserved the handsome green and brown colors as well as the cloth itself … and it looked for all the world like a simple plaid twill from some Scottish kilt. … Twill, like tweed, comes from the word two and refers to a distinctive method of pattern weaving in which the threads are paired.’  Attempting to replicate the weave provided all kinds of insights into the methods used for the original. It took many hours for her and her sister to string the warp threads on to the loom one at a time: only once the long warp threads have all been strung can you can begin to weave in the lateral weft: weft means literally ‘that which has been woven’. Wayland Barber notes: ‘that is where a helper really speeds the work: a friend to receive and fasten the other end of each long warp thread, saving all the time and energy of walking back and forth, back and forth, from one end of the loom to the other’:

We know, for example, that women sometimes helped each other with their weaving projects … because we sometimes find the wefts in ancient cloth crossed in the middle of the textile. This can only have been caused by two people handing spools of weft back and forth to each other as they wove simultaneously on different parts of the same cloth.

With her knowledge of the practicalities of textile work, Wayland Barber is able to shed light on the ways women have worked down the millenia, and the enduring persistence of techniques, traditions and even patterns. In her chapter ‘The String Revolution’ she makes the – once you think about it – blindingly obvious yet revelatory observation that you can do almost nothing without string. Forty thousand years ago, very likely even earlier, ‘while others were painting caves or knapping fancy flints, some genius hit upon the principle of twisting handfuls of little weak fibers together into long, strong thread.’

With string you can tie things together, make bundles, knot it into fishing nets and construct snares. You can string beads, stitch hides to make clothing, tents, coracles or bags to carry things in; you can string a bow. Sinew will work for some of those things, or strips of rawhide, but string is much better. And with string, or thread, you can weave cloth. The String Revolution may be co-eval with, or even predate the Stone Age: but string rots, so the evidence is hard to find. 

Lespugue Venus

Or is it? Wayland Barber points to the occurrence of bone needles in the Upper Paleolithic, 26,000 to 20,000 years ago, and of burials with shell beads. The Lespugne ‘Venus’ – a carved bone figurine of a woman dated c. 20,000 years BCE, wears a string skirt: a fringe of long cords hanging from a hip girdle; the sculptor has even carved the twists in the fibres. 

Almost all the Venus figures are completely naked, but a few others wear clothing. … A few… wear simple bands or sashes, but the Venus of Gagarino sports a string skirt: a shorter, tidier version than her French sister, and this time hanging only in the front, but covering just as little.  (p55)

Venus of Gagarino 

Wayland Barber provides examples of women wearing the string skirt ‘here and there in the same broad geographical area through the next twenty thousand years [my italics], and even around 1300 BCE, some actual string skirts [are] preserved or partially preserved for us in the archeological record’ including on the bodies of young women found in log coffins of the Bronze Age, such as the one from Egtved, Denmark,now in the National Museum of Copenhagen, dated to 1400 BCE. 

 

Egtved girl's skirt: detail

It's quite a sophisticated garment: the cords it is formed from were woven into a narrow belt at the top, which ‘wrapped around twice and slung low on the hips’ and was fastened with a knotted cord. Near the bottom of the skirt the cords are held in place by a lateral spacing cord ‘to keep them in order’, and below that are ‘looped into an ornamental row of knots,’ which Wayland Barber says give the bottom edge of the skirt heaviness and swing, like a beaded fringe. Frankly, it sounds a lot of fun to wear! But it wouldn’t keep you warm or preserve ‘modesty’:

Not only do the skirts hide nothing of importance, … if anything, they attract the eye precisely to the specifically female sexual areas by framing them, presenting them, or playing peekaboo with them. […]  Our best guess is that string skirts indicated something about the childbearing ability or readiness of the woman, perhaps simply that she was of childbearing age … [or]… was in some sense “available” as a bride.  (p59)

Wayland Barber goes on to examine the ‘girdle of Aphrodite’ from the Greek myths, described by Homer in the Iliad as a ‘girdle fashioned with a hundred tassels’ which confers the gift of irresistable sexual attraction on the wearer. It’s worn constantly by Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex, but when she lends it to Zeus’s wife Hera, Zeus forgets everything in his desire for his wife. Could this be the archetypal string skirt? Wayland Barber points to various south central and eastern European folk costumes: fringed aprons which women would put on at their betrothal and weddings. 

This Romanian apron above decorated with diamond lozenges symbolising fertility. 

In Mordvins, east of Moscow and west of the Urals, well into the 20^th century a girl would ‘don a long black string apron at the time of her betrothal. Hanging only in the back, like that of the Venus of Lespugue, but wider, it marked her as a wife’. Similar aprons were worn by women in Serbia, Romania, Macedonia and Greece; in the Argolid the garment was known as a zostra. It could be up to 12 feet long with a deep fringe, worn by women who wished to conceive and laid on the stomachs of those undergoing a difficult labour. Wayland Barber writes charmingly of her experience in trying on a Macedonian girdle owned by a friend:  

The front part consisted of a short woven apron with a piece appliqued onto it which exactly framed the pubic bone underneath. Below this hung a weighty fringe nearly double the length of the solid part. We tied it on to me and began to wrestle with the other half, a girdle perhaps twelve feet long, woven with white and black threads in opposite directions and terminating in a great fiery cascade of red fringe at either end. 

The belt wrapped around about six times and then looped through itself to form ‘a solid mass of apron and fringe in the back … so heavy it swung with a life of its own’. The black and white photo in the book, of the sash of girdle in question, does not reproduce very well, but the Macedonian girdle pictured below it, belonging to the British Museum, is clearly similar. The fringe is made of flame-red goat hair.

That was the greatest surprise of all: the independent life of what now enveloped me. I danced around the room from one mirror to the next, fascinated by the way the heavy fringes moved … I felt exhilarated, powerful; I wanted to make them swish and jump. My friend laughed and admitted that it made her feel the same way. …For days afterward I pondered the unexpected strength of the experience.

A sense of powerfulness? Is that part of the symbolism of the skirt? The ability to create new life must surely have been viewed as a form of ultimate power. Exhilaration in wearing it? Was that, too, part of the reason why this garment lasted for twenty thousand years? 

As well as spinning and weaving, the book considers the making and decorating of pottery, basket making, and the designing and creating of clothing, all women’s traditional work down the ages – and examines some of the many myths and fairytales in which spinning and weaving play a part. ‘Women’s Work’ really is an extraordinary and inspiring book. I must have read it two or three times by now, and it provides so many wonderful glimpses into the past and the lives and activities of our distant mothers and grandmothers that I’m certain I shall returning to it again. 

Visit Katherine's website at www.katherinelangrish.co.uk
and her blog at Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

Picture credits:

Hallstadt twill cloth from blogger Hibernaatiopesake 

Lespugue Venus: backview: Leroi-Gourhan A., 1982: Prähistorische Kunst - Die Ursprünge der Kunst in Europa, Herder-Verlag, Freiburg, 5. Auflage 1982

Egtved girl's clothes and coffin: National Museum of Denmark 

Egtved girl's skirt, detail:  National Museum of Denmark

Romanian apron, Metropolitan Museum of Art, US

Macedonian sash with fringe of flame-red goat hair, late 19th C, British Museum  

Tips from The New Family Receipt Book (1837) - Katherine Langrish

This book has been in my family since I was a child; I can only assume it's been handed down over generations, and it's given me and my mother quite a lot of amusement over the years. It is: The New Family Receipt Book, Containing one thousand Truly Valuable Receipts in various branches of Domestic Economy: London, John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1837
 

Yes, to set the scene, that's the same John Murray who was Byron's friend and publisher, though by 1837 Lord Byron had been dead for 13 years. In 1837 Charlotte and Emily and Anne Bronte were unknown schoolteachers. Jane Eyre would not be published for another ten years. In June 1837 William IV died and his niece Victoria ascended the throne: no one could guess it, but she would reign for the rest of the century; the Victorian Age was about to begin. In July Isambard Kingdom Brunel's ship the Great Western was launched in Bristol; Lea and Perrins started making their famous Worcestershire Sauce in August, and Spring-Heeled Jack was sighted in London in October.

While all this was going on someone, somewhere in my family, purchased this little book of remedies, recipies and practical tips. Here are some examples. 

Gargle for a Sore Throat (it sounds much nicer than anything you can buy in Boots, but why would you gargle with it and not drink it?):

Take half a pound of Turkey figs, put them into a quart of spring water, and let them simmer over a small fire till better than one-half is wasted [boiled down]; in the meantime take a large lemon, cut it in slices and between every slice put some brown sugar-candy; and let it stand before the fire to roast, then strain the figs, and squeeze them through a coarse cloth, and put the juice of the lemon into it. Gargle the throat with it, warm and the oftener the better. 

Avoid, as much as possible, living near Church-Yards (danger of getting fevers from the ‘putrid emanations’ which emanate from the ground in spring).

Rules for Preserving Health in Winter (wear a night-cap in bed, ‘go not abroad without breakfast, shun the night air as you would the plague, and let your house be kept from damps by warm fires’).

Preventive of Autumnal Rheumatisms (light fires even if it means dirt; ‘Follow your feelings’); To Promote Sleep (do not keep a ‘fire, rush-light or candle’ burning in your bedroom, for it ‘vitiates the air’ and also disturbs rest).

Drink ‘Tar Water’ – yes, that is actually tar dissolved in water –  to ‘Expand the Lungs of Public Speakers etc’ (though ‘it may be as well, especially at first, to try how it sits on the stomach’).

A German Method of Preventing Hysterics (surprisingly gentle, this one: pounded caraway seeds mixed with ginger and salt, spread upon bread and butter and eaten twice a day).

To Prevent the Mischief arising from the Bite of Mad Dog (cut out the bitten area or else cauterize the bite with a red-hot iron: ‘Nothing else is at all to be depended on’; did Emily Bronte own this book?)

Hints for Ventilating Stage Coaches (who knew they were so air-tight? This involves letting an air-tube into the roof, with a grid to prevent the hoi-polloi riding outside from dropping things through)

A Mode of Avoiding the Fatal Accidents of Open Carriages (here, though I’m rather puzzled by the penultimate sentence, I love the somewhat hopeless ending):

Jumping out is particularly dangerous (the motion of the gig communicating a different one to the one you give yourself from jumping), which tends very much to throw you on your side or head; many suppose it easier to jump a little forward and alight safe; ‘tis supposition; they will not find it so on trial. The method of getting out behind the carriage is the most safe of any, having often tried it, when the horse has been going very fast. – Perhaps it is best to fix yourself firm and remain in the carriage.

I will end with a truly stunning recipe for Genuine British Punch which - I have to say -  sounds a lot better than any punch I have ever tasted; our forebears clearly knew how to throw a party. I might leave out the capillaire syrup which 'may be added', though: it's also known as Maidenhair Syrup and is made from the leaves of the maidenhair fern, sweetened with honey and mixed with water or milk.

Procure half a dozen ripe, sound and fresh lemons, or a proportionate number of limes, and two Seville oranges. Rub off the yellow rinds of three or four of the lemons, with lumps of fine loaf sugar; putting each lump into the bowl, as soon as it is sufficiently saturated with the grated rind. Then thinly pare the other lemons as Seville oranges, and put these rinds also into the bowl; to which, adding plenty of sugar, pour a very small quantity of boiling water and immediately press the juice of nearly all the fruit, followed by a little more hot water. Blend the whole thoroughly with the punch ladle. The sherbet being thus prepared, to make it into genuine British punch, spirit should be added, to the quantity of a bottle of Jamaica rum to every pint of the finest cognac brandy. The above quantity of fruit, with a pound and a half of sugar, will make enough for a bowl that may contain two gallons; the strangth, or weakness, must be suited to the general inclination of the company. Pine-apple rum, and capillaire syrup, may be used if convenient.



Picture  credits 

Spring-Heeled Jack: wikipedia 
English Stagecoach, found at Jane Austen's London
Two gentlemen in a gig: wikimedia