NIGHTJAR AKA THE GOATSUCKER, by Jane Borodale

‘Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-notes unvaried,

Brooding o’er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.’ George Meredith

Caprimulgus europaeus

It’s an obvious thing to say, but some aspects of the past are utterly gone. But every now and then we’re lucky enough to get a fleeting, unexpected taste of what the past might have been like, a tiny hint or reminder – what the painter Winifred Nicholson might have called ‘glimpses through’. I had one of those moments yesterday, when I heard a nightjar.

I’d just gone out to shut the henhouse for the night and was watching a bat flicker across the open space between the hedge and wood. Dusk in May is so deliciously fresh – every evening a little longer, a little more promisingly nearly-summer, and here was a nightjar as well – what a bonus. Tantalisingly, I had to wait for quiet stretches between the noise of passing traffic to listen properly to this strange voice from the past, calling from a time when such things were plentiful in the countryside…

The European nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus) is a nocturnal summer visitor from warmer places. Although on the increase again, they number just over 4600 breeding pairs in the UK.

It isn’t hard to understand why this modest, reclusive, mysterious bird became associated with the uncanny. Its associated myths pre-date Aristotle, who recorded them, and throughout Europe folklore insisted that the nightjar stole milk from goats’ udders – earning it the name Goatsucker, by which it’s known in many places, from Spain to Russia. Other country names in Britain include ‘Flying–toad’, ‘Fern-owl’, ‘Night-hawk’ and ‘Moth-owl’, which seems exactly right, given that it must surely be the nearest thing to a moth one could ever see in bird-form.

Infrequently seen as they sleep during the day (unless you stumble upon a female sitting on her eggs on the ground), but its appearance lends itself easily to legend. The nightjar has wide, black eyes that shine like a cat’s if caught in torchlight. It has camouflaging, mottled brown feathers like lichen, or a reptile. Its pink gape opens very wide for swallowing large moths, craneflies, chafers and dor-beetles, and the beak is surrounded by bristles, presumably to more efficiently hoover up supper on the wing.

It looks, in short, like a cross between a cuckoo, a moth and a catfish. It is very agile in flight, and has a peculiar serrated middle claw which it uses for preening.

It is also called ‘Corpse Fowl’ and ‘Puckeridge’ – nightjars were also wrongly accused of pecking the hides of cattle and causing the disease called puckeridge (a condition caused by the warble fly which lays its eggs under the skin’s surface).

Naturalist and curate Gilbert White (1720-93) in his Hampshire parish of Selborne often recorded the presence of nightjars or fern-owls, and noted:

‘The country people have a notion that the fern owl … is very injurious to to weanling calves … [but] the least observation and attention would convince men that these birds neither injure the goatherd nor the grazier, but are perfectly harmless and subsist alone on night insects. … Nor does it anywise appear how they can … inflict any harm among kine, unless they possess the powers of animal magnetism, and can affect them by fluttering over them.’

He says ruefully that:

‘It is the hardest thing in the world to shake off superstitious prejudices: they are sucked in as it were with our mother’s milk … and make the most lasting impressions, become so interwoven into our very constitutions, that the strongest good sense is required to disengage ourselves from them.’

In Yorkshire nightjars were said to be the souls of unbaptised children, condemned to wander the world forever.

Poets love the nightjar, occupying as it does that crepuscular, liminal half-place between day and night where changes happen. Dylan Thomas mentions it in his poem ‘Fern Hill, and Wordsworth describes it like this: ‘The Night-hawk is singing his frog-like tune/ Twirling his watchman’s rattle about.’ (Though he later changed the lines to the rather vaguer: ‘The buzzing Dor-hawk round and round is wheeling.’) Poet and naturalist Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) wrote, ‘While, by the lingering light, I scarcely discern/The shrieking night-jar sail on heavy wing.’ John Clare (1793-1864) mentions it frequently.

The warm undulating churring of its song sounds almost mechanical, like an old Singer sewing machine, or a spinning wheel; or crickets. John Clare described it in a letter as ‘a trembling sort of crooing noise’. The male call is the churring one, at 1,900 notes per minute, which it can sustain for several minutes at a time.

To hear it for yourself, click here to go to a sample recording (Xeno-canto: Sharing Bird Sounds From Around The World).

Listening to the nightjar’s song in the field produces a peculiar sensation – as if the ground itself were vibrating inside your head, almost felt rather than heard, and very hard to pinpoint in terms of location – the nightjar seems to throw its voice like a ventriloquist. If you didn’t know what it was, or if you were fairly steeped in superstition as a way of life, your blood might well momentarily run cold with the eerieness of it. It’s a fabulous, spooky bird. If only there were more. Bring back the nightjar!

Can anyone think of any other wild creature so unfairly maligned?


www.janeborodale.com

Suzanne Valadon by Imogen Robertson

The Hangover  (Portrait of Suzanne Valadon)
Henri de Toulouse Lautrec

I normally steer clear of using real characters in my fiction. I find myself so caught up in trying to make a portrayal accurate that it silts up my imagination, but there is always an exception to any rule and the artist Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) plays a significant role in The Paris Winter. I just couldn’t resist her. Mind you, she was one of those people round whom stories and legends seemed to grow like weeds even within her lifetime, so I feel sure she wouldn’t mind me involving her in the fictional adventures of my characters. After I posted about women artists of the Bell Époque last week, someone foolishly suggested I write more about some of them, so I'm delighted to have the chance to write about her again.

Maurice playing with slingshot
- Valadon 1895

Valadon was born in Bessines, but her mother left there for Paris soon after Suzanne was born and, apparently seduced by the sight of the windmills on the hill, her mother picked Montmartre as the place to live. Suzanne, grimy, mischievous, unteachable ran wild there. Sometimes she’d follow funeral processions in the hope of tips from mourners, at others she’d get other children to model for her and draw their portraits on the pavements, once she stopped a runaway horse. She also said that as a young child she saw Renoir painting and told him to keep working at it and not be discouraged. She became a circus performer (possibly) and a model  certainly. She appears in works by Renoir, Toulouse Lautrec and Degas, and was mistress and muse of Puvis de Chavannes. 

La Poupée Abandonnée -Valadon 1921
(The National Museum of Women in the Arts,
Washington)

She also began to draw and paint herself and Toulouse Lautrec was her first customer and advisor, though he treated her as an equal. Her work has a boldness - strong lines and fierce, deep colours. There is also an clear-eyed honesty to her work. Her paintings are frank studies of family relations, sexuality and ageing. She had a great deal of success with her work, allowing her to keep her ramshackle family of mother, alcoholic son, lover, goats, dogs and friends afloat for years. Apparently she claimed to feed her bad drawings to the goats. The alcoholic son’s fame as a painter in the end eclipsed her own. Maurice Utrillo used his empty cityscapes to pay his bar bills, even when his works were selling for thousands in the commercial galleries of the city.

His parentage is uncertain. One story says that his official father, Miguel Utrillo, agreed to acknowledge paternity, because who, after all, wouldn’t happily sign their name to a work of Renoir or Degas? Suzanne was also at one point the lover of Erik Satie, in fact he was so devastated when she left him he never had another relationship.

Andre Utter and his Dogs - Valadon 1932

At the time of The Paris Winter, late 1909, Suzanne had just given up an experiment with bourgeois living. She had moved to the suburbs with a banker for a while, but the comfort of such a life was no replacement for artistic cut and thrust of Montmatre and she returned to live there with her new lover, another artist who was three years younger than her son called Andre Utter. They stayed together until 1934.  

She had a great line in telling people what she thought. One year when her work was shown in the Paris Salon alongside a more academic painter with a similar name, he wrote to her suggesting a way they could sign their work to avoid confusion. She wrote back a note saying, fine or you could just sign yours ‘merde.’

I’ve linked to a few more of her works below, and I recommend June Rose’s biography of her, Mistress of Montmartre. She is not as celebrated as she should be, but they still know who she is in Paris; if you’ve ever taken the funicular up the hill to Sacre Coeur, you caught it in the tiny but perfectly formed Suzanne Valadon Square. 

Works of Suzanne Valadon 

'Time Travel and the Unknown Hero' by A L Berridge

Writers and readers both find it easy to visit the past. A few words, a little stir of the imagination, and we’re on a street in 17th century London as if we’d just stepped in a time machine.  But while readers observe what’s around them as discreetly as visitors to a museum, writers are a bunch of vandals who barge joyously into the midst of it and create characters of our own to interfere with the outcome. The past to us is a field of freshly fallen snow, and we can’t resist leaving our dirty footprints all over it.

Go on.... You know you want to.

 All harmless fun, of course, but I remember the film ‘Back to the Future’, where the hero’s visit to the past jeopardises his own future by inadvertently messing up the first meeting between his parents.

That’s a sci-fi fantasy, but the principle of a fragile time continuum applies to historical fiction too. Unless we’re writing ‘Alternative History’ we can’t whizz into Tudor England, kill Henry VIII at age 10, throw the subsequent six hundred years of history into chaos, then calmly stroll off whistling.

Well, we can, and we'll all have our own personal rules on these things, but I’m of the school of writers who like to leave the past as we found it. My own criteria are that nothing in my novels should ever contradict a genuine primary source, or require a single word of a reputable history text to be rewritten to accommodate them. Omissions are acceptable, and I don’t expect current history texts to mention my entirely fictitious heroes, but what was said must be said, what was done must be done, and credit must always be given to those who historically deserved it.

That’s quite straightforward where our main characters genuinely existed.
Hilary Mantel's ‘Wolf Hall’ gives us wonderful fictional insight into Thomas Cromwell’s mind, but as long as his body does what the record says it did, then history rolls on its way undisturbed.
A safer option is to keep our characters beneath the historical radar altogether – a romance between a Greek slave and a Roman soldier won’t make so much as a ripple in the tide of time. But if (like me) you want your characters to have an impact and still remain fictional, then that’s a lot harder.

It can be done. The first method is the dreaded ‘Helpful Friend’ scenario (aka the ‘By Jove, I think you’ve got it!’) virtually patented by the late great G.A. Henty, but growing in popularity ever since. This is the one where Julius Caesar is at a loss at the Rubicon until an obscure centurion clears his throat and says ‘Excuse me, Caesar, but might it be a good idea to cross it?’ Naming no names, but I’ve read one novel where the same hero advises both the Duke of Wellington and General Blücher, carries almost every message that was ever sent, and tops off his day by ensuring the battle is called not ‘La Belle Alliance’ but ‘Waterloo’.

 The second is arguably more elegant, and that’s simply to steal the actions of someone else. Most readers would raise an eyebrow if America were to be ‘discovered’ by Eric Smith rather than Christopher Columbus, but provided the subject is sufficiently obscure it’s possible to get away with it. Alexandre Dumas did it all the time, and it never bothered me when I was reading him. The same action happened, it was glorious and exciting, and the whole thing seemed more relevant and personal because it was performed by characters I knew rather than those I’d never heard of.

Yet I can’t quite bring myself to do it in my own novels. It would only mean a tiny change in history, only the substitution of one name for another, but to me it seems somehow immoral, like robbing the dead of their laurels.

Changing history in more ways than one

I recently read a Crimean War novel where the hero led a raid which was actually commanded by Colonel Egerton of the 77th Regiment of Foot, and the knowledge made me squirm. I wondered what Egerton’s descendants would think of the book if they read it, and how they’d feel. I knew how I’d feel. I know how I felt when I saw U-571 and realized Hollywood was glorifying Americans for a raid actually performed by British submariners in U-110.

But it’s the story that matters, and my smug moral superiority won’t do me the slightest good if my own characters are creeping round the margins of the action in awe of the real-life heroes shaping events in the middle of it. How can I get them at the centre of the action without compromising historical integrity?

Enter (modestly) the Unknown Hero. 

The Unknown Hero is as old as time. He (or she) has been there forever, a kind of ageless Forrest Gump who crops up at all of history’s greatest moments and sneaks away before anyone has time to ask for an autograph. He’s the sweating horseman who brings the news ‘the French are out’, the wounded soldier who rallies his comrades with the reminder that they are ‘Queen Victoria’s soldiers’, the sole voice in the crowd that cries ‘Vive le Roi!’ to give comfort to Louis XVI on his way to the guillotine. Time and again he (or she) makes a contribution worthy of the history books, but when it comes to the record no-one knows his name.

Which is why vultures like me are able to steal it. If it ‘could have been anyone’, then it’s jolly well going to be one of my characters. I scour the sources for his spoor, and for ‘In the Name of the King’ I was lucky enough to find several traces of his presence. 

 Somebody (no-one knows who) passed a copy of the conspirators’ secret treaty to Cardinal Richelieu – so in the novel it’s my fictional André de Roland. Somebody (no-one knows who) warned the Prince du Condé that the Spanish army had an ambush waiting in the woods at Rocroi – so here comes André again, panting heroically as he delivers his message. My character earns the title of ‘hero’ by making a difference, yet nothing in history is changed.

There’s nothing new in this. Historical novelists have always pillaged in this way, and the master of it has to be George MacDonald Fraser.

The real Kavanagh at Lucknow

His Flashman pops up at every historically significant event, and frequently in the skin of the Unknown Hero. One of my favourite instances is during ‘Flashman in the Great Game’, when MacDonald Fraser casts him as T. Henry Kavanagh’s ‘unknown companion’ in the daring break-out from the Siege of Lucknow in the Indian Mutiny. It’s true the original companion is described in some sources as an Indian – but Flashman makes the journey disguised as a mutinous sepoy, and once again history is undisturbed.

But the Unknown Hero has an equally valuable counterpart we neglect at our peril - the Unknown Villain. He’s just as pervasive throughout history, and in the Crimea I found he’d left footprints as big as a Russian Yeti’s. 

What else could a writer possibly make of an ‘unknown officer’ who repeatedly told British soldiers not to fire on the advancing Russians, who ordered disastrous retreats, who mysteriously appeared and disappeared but always with ludicrous orders that favoured the enemy? I know what I made of it, and this wonderfully useful man gave me the entire plot spine of ‘Into the Valley of Death’. It’s pure fiction, but I don’t think there’s a word in it that doesn’t chime with known historical fact – thanks to the Unknown Villain.

And really, of course, these two valuable entities are the same person. Villainy or heroism depends entirely on which side the reader’s on in the first place, and Forrest Gump can become Форест Гамп at the click of a mouse. All that matters to scavengers like me is that they should be unknown, unoccupied, empty vessels into which we can pour the fiction without disturbing the outside world. Historians may knit their brows at unexplained events, but we leap past with our sleeves rolled up, shouting ‘Out the way, fact-meisters, it’s our turn now.’

That doesn’t mean we don’t care about facts. They matter more than ever, as we construct our stories from every tiny scrap of information we can find and try to ensure the final result fits with every one of them. The hardest task I ever had came in ‘In the Name of the King’ when the conveniently mysterious death of the conspiratorial Comte de Soissons was attributed by different witnesses to suicide, an accident, death in battle, and assassination by an agent of Richelieu.

The very dodgy Comte de Soissons

With my hero straining at the leash it was pretty obvious which 'unknown agent' I was going to go for, but I still had to make it not only possible but likely that the known primary sources would still have written exactly what they did. Easy enough just to say ‘Yeah, well, those other accounts were just lying’, but to me that would be cheating. I used existing eyewitness accounts to create a possible version of the ‘battle death’, and choreographed the real death to fit with both the forensic evidence and the three other versions. When we know the Comte de Soissons genuinely had a habit of lifting the visor of his helmet with the barrel of his own pistol, then that’s not as hard as it seems…

But it’s round about now that the word ‘sad’ comes into play. What does it matter, for heaven’s sake? Tell a good story, see it doesn’t mess too much with the facts, and Bob can be your great-great grandfather if you like.

Only it does matter. I’ve only got a ‘visitor’s pass’ into the past as long as I don’t abuse it. I need to be like a responsible visitor to the countryside, who takes nothing with me, leaves nothing behind, and if I open a gate I need to close it behind me. 

 Dumas knew that. Nobody created more havoc than he did, and when it comes to crashing through facts we’re not talking so much about a coach and four as a bloody London Bendy Bus - but he always knew how to come home when it was over. In ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’ he even gives Louis XIII a secret twin brother, but the story ends in such a way that we can still read the history books without needing to change a word. 

That’s what I want. If someone who’s read my novels goes on to read a history book, I don’t want them to think I’ve told them a pack of lies. History and fiction can co-exist, and each can make the other more real. All we need to do is wipe away our footprints and remember to close the door when we leave.

CROPPING AND CREATING - Teresa Flavin on writing her latest novel 'The Shadow Lantern'............. by Theresa Breslin

This post is a response to request from a follower of the History Girls Blog who asked for insights into writing. It follows on from various conversations I’ve had with the writer and illustrator Teresa Flavin, and to satisfy my own curiosity and fascination with labyrinths and magic lanterns and other sic things.

 Teresa Flavin is a Glasgow-based children’s author and illustrator. Her illustrated fantasy novel for 9-14 year olds, The Blackhope Enigma, was published in 2010 by Templar Publishing and was long and short-listed for numerous book awards, including the 2011 Scottish Children’s Book Awards. The sequel, The Crimson Shard, was published in 2011 and was also nominated for several awards. The final book in the trilogy, The Shadow Lantern, was published on 1 May.  
http://www.templarco.co.uk/fiction/teresa_flavin.html

I knew Teresa first as an illustrator. Originally from the U.S.A. she moved to Scotland a number of years ago and we met at a writers’ conference. The first thing I wanted to know was why, as an established artist and illustrator, was she attracted to writing novels for young people? She replied:

I had been illustrating children’s books for some time so the idea of writing children’s stories was a natural progression. I wanted to illustrate a wider variety of stories and decided to try my hand at creating texts that would excite me artistically. I also knew of editors who were interested in seeing picture book manuscripts from author/illustrators and set out to write stories that I could present with a dummy book and one or two finished sample images. But as I worked on texts of just a few hundred words, I was attracted to many complex ideas that were far more suitable for longer stories. They began as what Tim Bowler calls “a whisper in the head”, then became an insistent buzzing and eventually pulled me away from picture books altogether. I began to discover my inner fourteen-year-old and became caught up in telling the fantastic adventures of two art-enthused teens that bore similarities to myself at that age.

So then of course, the question that many of us are asked…. Why historical? In Teresa’s books this is a thread within the stories. She told me that she doesn’t recall making a conscious choice about this, and went on to say…

Preliminary sketch of Blackhope Tower for The Shadow Lantern.

I had been reading an intriguing and spiritual book about labyrinths and they were very much on my mind. My first novel, The Blackhope Enigma,was an exploration of this daydream/question: what if a young person could walk around a labyrinth and be so transformed by the experience that he or she is transported someplace else? And what if that place is below the surface of a Renaissance painting? I have been fascinated with such paintings since I was very young and have always wondered what it would be like to enter one.

I reckoned that for such a thing to happen there would have to be enchantment involved, but I was unprepared for what I found when I poked around the history of Renaissance art and magic. I became completely lost in research for some time, endlessly reading about grimoires and memory palaces, Hermeticism and alchemical imagery. Suddenly the idea of hidden worlds below a painting did not seem so far-fetched; plenty of people in sixteenth-century Europe would have believed it possible in a world where one was surrounded by magic and wonders.

One historical path led to another and I was discovering so many amazing things that my stories acquired layers, characters and details I could not have imagined at the start. I was hooked. I wanted to unearth and weave more fantastic elements into new stories, to bring odd bits of history alive in the adventures of young contemporary characters.

Teresa’s books are special in that Art and Language are melded in the narrative and I wondered how she tackled doing this. Her answer tells me as much about her views on painting as it does about language.

I wanted young readers to see and feel the richness and strangeness of the worlds I created, but I had to be careful not to weigh them down with description. When I make a painting, I hope that it’s not overworked or leaden; it needs to “sing” to the viewer. Therefore my approach has to be simple, confident and from the heart. I’ve come to think that writing about art is the same. There needs to be just enough detail to entice and to set the reader’s imagination alight. It’s a delicate balance and involves just as much cropping as creating.

I love that expression “as much Cropping as Creating”. I also loved the first book (and the rest!) and really wondered how she'd approach any follow up story and indeed how they would be linked them to each other.

The second and third novels, The Crimson Shard and The Shadow Lantern, grew organically out of The Blackhope Enigma. There was no over-arching story, no grand plan from the start. Instead there were fascinating strands to take up and some new elements to explore, such as trompe l’oeil murals, alchemy and art forgery in The Crimson Shard. Early magic lanterns and spirit photography were inspirations for The Shadow Lantern. I enjoyed digging into these elements, putting them together and seeing what could happen.

I discovered how easy it is to lumber a narrative with too much background information! I ended up identifying with young readers who had not read the first or second book. What do they need to know? Will they become confused? How can I help them? The problem was that I was a bit too ‘helpful’ at times and there was a lot of back-story pruning that had to be done. Again, this is a delicate balance, achieved after much feedback from my editors.

One of the great pleasures of writing a trilogy was in spending more time with my main characters. At the beginning I had the daunting prospect of getting to know them, challenging them, making them grow and change. By the second book, I had a good idea of who they were and how they moved through the world; by the final book, it was a pleasure to be with them and to find out how they would approach the next obstacle I placed in front of them.

It would be great to have feedback on Teresa’s thoughts and books – please do get in touch.

I’ll leave her with the last word about writing the series, and hope that others have the same experience in their own writing.

It’s been a wonderful journey…

The Shadow Lantern has recently been published in the UK by Templar Publishing. To learn more about Teresa’s novels and artwork, visit her new websites at http://www.teresaflavin.com/



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Twitter: @theresabreslin1

LATEST BOOKS
Spy for the Queen of Scots shortlisted for the Young Quills Award
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...And All That Jazz - Celia Rees

On Wednesday of this week, a new film version of the Great Gatsby opens in the UK, amid much hype, or ballyhoo as people might have expressed it in the 1920s, and much discussion as the whether it is a good film, or a bad film, does it do justice to the book, or doesn't it, before any of us here have had a chance to see it at all. I remember the 1974 Great Gatsby with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. Lovely to look at - so pretty - and Mia Farrow was a good choice, too.

In the weightier Sundays there have been further discussions about what The Great Gatsby might have to say about Our Times: bankers, corruption, fame and celebrity, gossip, the press, and all that jazz, because The Great Gatsby is one of those books like Catch 22, or 1984, or Brave New World, or Animal Farm, which have become shorthand terms for something or other: state of the world, state of mind, human behaviour, where we've been, where we are heading; books that have become ubiquitous labels used in all sorts of contexts, from journalism to promoting new fiction; books that are frequently invoked without having been read, which as far as modern dystopian fiction is concerned is far too often, much to be regretted and should be banned, but that is probably the subject of another blog. Like the great dystopian fictions, The Great Gatsby is a book that people claim to have read and perhaps they think that they have. David Nixon, the artistic director of Northern Ballet, asked an audience after a performance of Gatsby the ballet, how many had actually read the book. 10%. 10%! And that's an audience who had gone on purpose to see a ballet version, so how would that translate to the general population? And yet people think they know this book. 

Anyone who has not read The Great Gatsby should do so immediately because going to see the film is simply not enough. I haven't seen the latest version, but I agree with Gore Vidal that the book doesn't translate well to the screen. For him, it has to do with the voice of Nick Carraway, the narrator. Anyone who wants to know about Voice and how it should be done - this is the one. I think it the great strength of this novel that it has proved so difficult to transfer to the brasher medium of cinema. It is quintessential fiction. Perhaps one of the greatest novels ever written. I say that, even though I have an aversion to listing books in any kind of order: Best of, Top 10/20/100. I don't even like saying which is my favourite. Favourite what? Favourite when? It changes. I'm a Gemini. There are works and authors however, whom I admire. That's a different thing. F. Scott Fitzgerald has few rivals.

 

A few years ago, I was in his home town Minneapolis St Paul. I was there for a Book Fair. This plaque was on a patch of green outside my hotel. My hosts were happy to take me on a tour of the bars he drank in, show me the streets and houses where he'd lived. I was paying homage, making a pilgrimage. I can aspire, that's all I can say, like a mole might aspire to climb Everest.  For me, he is the writer's writer. Every sentence, every word is exactly chosen. Each image is diamond bright yet as as fresh as the waters of Long Island Sound. His prose is light but profound. The book is short. Easy to read. You could read it in an afternoon but it will stay with you for a lifetime.

When I was writing Witch Child, I had the following passage pinned up on my notice board.

'As the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. It's vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder.'

Useful to Man: An Interlude with a Riddle. From Penny Dolan.

I recently collected this anonymous 10^th Century poem from a wall display at the Book of Kells exhibition in Trinity College, Dublin.

When I read it, I felt that both the riddle and the voice deserved a space of its own.

So, today, on History Girls, seems like a good day for that purpose. To me, the language is far more powerful than any game or guessing, although I've added the answer below.

After all, where would writers be without their basic materials - even if we are unlikely to use this exact example?

  

One of my enemies ended my life,

Sapped my world strength 

And afterwards soaked me,

Wetted in water . . .

Set me in sun, where soon I lost

The hairs which I had. 

And then the knife edge cut me . . .

Fingers folded me, and feather of bird

Traced all over my tawny surface

With drops of delight . . .

Then for trappings a man

Bound me with boards, bent hide over me.

Glossed me in gold and so I glistened,

Wondrous in smith-work, wire encircled.

Say what I am called,

Useful to man. Mighty my name is,

A help to heroes and holy am I.

 

Answer: Vellum

 

Posted by Penny Dolan.