Tuesday, 31 March 2015
Undiscovered poems in the Black Book of Carmarthen?
Exciting news from the National Library of Wales, where ASNC doctoral student Myriah Williams, and her supervisor Professor Paul Russell, have been working a thirteenth-century manuscript, the Black Book of Carmarthen. By scanning the manuscript with ultraviolet light, they have revealed that its sixteenth-century custodian may have erased one or two things. The great hope is that, by using photo editing software, some of the 'vanished' text may still be recovered. For more information, read the this post on the National Library of Wales website.
Monday, 23 March 2015
A Centenary: David Jones, Y Gododdin and the Great War
When Varsity finally get round to asking me about my favourite piece of
art in Cambridge, I’ll say ‘Vexilla Regis,
by David Jones’. It’s on the ground floor in the house at Kettle’s Yard, just
behind Jim Ede’s bedroom door. It is an easy thing to miss. There’s barely room
to turn around, so you can only see the picture up close, and you get it to
yourself. Also in the room: a bed, an arrangement of pebbles on a table top,
and a shelf with Henry Moore’s Head (which
is like something dug up by an archaeologist: or ‘first and foremost a stone’, as Ede put it). Over
the bed, pictures by Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson. Ede’s household gods,
perhaps.
There are lots of things I like about Vexilla Regis. One is the title, taken
from a hymn by a Merovingian court poet:
Vexilla
regis prodeunt,
fulget
crucis mysterium,
quo carne
carnis conditor
suspensus
est patibulo.
The
standards of the king come forth,
the secret
of the cross revealed:
there in
flesh, the flesh’s maker
by the beam
is hung.
Another is that it is secretive as well as secret.
It’s done with graphite and water colour, and it’s pale and knotty. Once you make
out the hills and trees, it starts to feel like a map. You spot bits and pieces
of ruined masonry, overgrown pillars, wildness and wreckage but also things
sprouting and running. Certainly it has something to do with the end of Roman
Britain, but I’ll leave it at that.[1]
Mapmaking was a skill Jones had learned on the
Western Front, mostly while crawling around no man’s land at night-time.[2] He
was at the front for more than two years, far longer than most of his fellow
war-poets, and had arrived there in time to see what had been a relatively ‘intimate,
domestic life’ turn into relentless mechanical slaughter. Conscription plugged
the gaps with strangers. The loss of companionship affected Jones profoundly.
![]() |
Trench map by David Jones © National Library of Wales |
This year marks the
centenary of Jones’ entry into the Great War. Precociously aware of his
father’s Welsh origins, Jones had been desperate to join a Welsh regiment. In
the end, he enlisted with a ‘London Welsh’ battalion, and crossed to France in December
1915. The previous spring, during basic training near Llandudno, Jones recalled nights spent on
guard duty, watching the sea from the Great Orme and pretending he was a
lookout for the king of Gwynedd.
![]() |
On the Great Orme, Llandudno |
Thoughts like this shaped Jones’ war. The idealism
didn’t last long, but his connection with the past only grew deeper and more
real. Aware that he was fighting in a new kind of war, Jones felt that being in
battle was, for the private infantryman, essentially the same experience it
always had been. Distinction between past and present, at times, virtually
broke down. The battle honours of the regiment liturgised Namur, Blenheim,
Salamanca, Sevastapol, but ringing in Jones’ head were Brunanburh, Camlann,
Catraeth, and ancient, vaguer ‘border antipathies’. Most of the soldiers around
him had their own versions, the result not of propaganda or jingoism, but the
simple fact of being there.
![]() |
Battle Honours of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Jones' regiment |
All through his time in the trenches, Jones
carried, alternately, the Oxford Book of
English Verse and Palgrave’s Golden
Treasury in his pack. Reading them almost constantly, he grew frustrated
that the ‘greats’ of Quiller-Couch and Palgrave now felt remote, too comfortable,
for ‘they knew no calamity comparable with what we knew’. Thomas Dilworth, in
his excellent David Jones in the Great
War, argues that literature predating the canonised poetry of the anthologies
had more resonance for Jones in this strange, particular reality.
Jones didn’t start writing In Parenthesis until the end of the 1920s. (On finishing All Quiet on the Western Front he reportedly
responded with ‘Bugger it, I can do better than that. I’m going to write a book.’[3]) The
poetry in In Parenthesis is intensely
vivid, and allusions to Jones’ private world are integral to its sense of
reality. No man’s land is recalled as a
place of ‘enchantment’, like Pennant Govid or Annwn; explosive upheavals in the
earth bring Twrch Trwyth to mind; men asleep in trench corners are ‘like
long-barrow sleepers’. The allusions are not there to romanticise, but to
present the Great War as Jones himself experienced it, and to align this
catastrophe, symbolically, with other, older ones.
![]() |
Christopher Williams, Battle at Mametz Wood (1918) |
Jones furnished each of In Parenthesis’ seven parts with lines from Y Gododdin (a poetic compendium of war and disaster from medieval
Wales). Y Gododdin has been praised
for its realism: Gwynn Jones thought the soldier’s advance gan wyrd wawr, ‘with the green dawn’, the phrase of a man who had
seen first faint morning ‘with a poet’s eye’. In Parenthesis finds matching lyrical detail amidst devastation. On
the title page, Jones used what he took to be the most significant line of all:
Seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu,
‘his sword rang in mothers’ heads’. The deaths of Britons at Catraeth and at Mametz
Wood, where Jones’ battalion suffered one hundred and eighty causalities and he
himself was badly wounded, were to him rehearsals of the same ‘loveless’ defeat.
![]() |
David Jones |
The author
wrote simply that In Parenthesis is
‘about some things I saw, felt, and was part of’. Eliot, Auden, Greene, Yeats and Stravinsky all counted
it among the greatest of any Modern poetry.
*****
Last October I met Colin Wilcockson, former ASNC
and Emeritus Fellow of English at Pembroke, for lunch at his college. Colin had
been friends with Jones and, like everyone else who had met him, described him
as the warmest and kindest of men. Afterwards, in the SCR, Colin unsheafed a
portfolio he had with him and carefully spread the contents over a table. Unexpectedly,
each bundle was a handwritten letter from Jones, glossed and re-glossed,
sometimes illuminated, bursting with marginalia. In one of them, I glimpsed a
mischievous return address, ‘Saes Canol’. Jones had rented a room in Harrow,
Middlesex, in the 1950s. It was, he said, ‘his dug-out’. He died in 1974.
[1] Kettle’s Yard closes for
refurbishment on 21st June 2015, and will not reopen until 2017: see it now!
[2] Jones sometimes thought of
himself as ‘Walter Map’ (Walter being Jones’ rapidly-discarded Christian name,
and Walter Map the name of a twelfth-century Welshman who served Henry II).
[3] Incidentally Jones writes
delightfully on swearing: ‘Private X’s tirade of oaths means no more than “I do
not like this Vale of Tears”… the “Bugger! Bugger!” of a man detailed, had
often about it the “Fiat! Fiat!” of the Saints’.
Labels:
David Jones,
Great War,
In Parenthesis,
Philip Dunshea,
Y Gododdin
Monday, 2 March 2015
CCASNC 2015
Caitlin Ellis,
a doctoral candidate in ASNC and president of the CCASNC committee, writes:
Our annual graduate-led conference, the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (CCASNC), took place in the English Faculty on 7th February 2015.
This
year was the largest, best-attended CCASNC—both conference and dinner—to date
and our wonderful, engaged audience ensured that discussion never ebbed. Our
popular bookstall with a range of publications from our Department, the University
of Wales Press and the Viking Society for Northern Research provided another
focal point. Selected proceedings of this conference itself will appear in a
forthcoming edition of Quaestio Insularis.
![]() |
CCASNC 2015 Committee: Ben Guy, David Callander, Nicholas Hoffman, Katherine Olley, Caitlin Ellis, Rebecca Shercliff |
The
theme of this year’s Colloquium was ‘Communication and Control’. We welcomed
our keynote speaker Professor Stefan Brink and ten postgraduate speakers from
several countries. Despite the breadth and variety of subject matter, common themes
emerged from the papers: modes of contact
between societies; the diffusion of cultural concepts; the intentions of
authors, compilers and scribes.
The Department’s own Julia Bolotina kicked off proceedings with the first session of the day. Bolotina examined
the Lacnunga, a compendium of Anglo-Saxon medical remedies,
arguing that it was a deliberate and highly valued production: a suggestion
with important implications for the study of other manuscripts. This was
complemented by Ryder Patzuk-Russell of Birmingham’s
lucid exposition of the influence of Latin grammatica, exemplified by
Bede and Alcuin, on the Old Norse theory of language, as seen in the vernacular
Málskrúðsfræði and the First Grammatical Treatise. In exploring
this area, Patzuk-Russell thereby underscored a common history of
grammatical learning.
Having
sated our appetites for beverages and biscuits, our second session focussed on
sustenance of a more religious nature. Exequiel Monge-Allen of the National
University of Ireland, Galway, considered the Céli Dé movement, especially the
responsibilities and importance of the spiritual directors (the anmcharaid, more literally ‘soul-friends’) in penance and
confession. Monge-Allen also drew interesting parallels with other Old Irish
religious texts. We were then reminded of
the great value of art history by Stephenie McGucken,
Edinburgh, who discussed the imagery of the sumptuously illuminated manuscript
the Benedictional of St Æthelwold in relation to the cult of St Æthelthryth, the
seventh-century Northumbrian virgin queen turned saint. This highlighted concepts of femininity and royalty
in Anglo-Saxon England.
Our
keynote address was delivered by Stefan Brink, Chair in Scandinavian Studies at
the University of Aberdeen, who presented us with a masterful overview of
medieval Scandinavian laws, particularly the regional differences in various
Swedish law codes, and a reflection on historiographical trends. Brink employed
a various forms of evidence, including runic inscriptions, such as that on the
intriguing Forsa ring. This talk was connected to the exciting international
project on Medieval Nordic Law funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Brink
himself. For more information on the project, which will produce translations and
commentaries of all the Nordic provincial laws from the period, see here.
After
we adjourned for an excellent lunch, Samuel Ottewill-Soulsby, from the
neighbouring Faculty of History here at Cambridge, brought a more international
perspective to proceedings. Ottewill-Soulsby considered the context of the eleventh-century
Andalusian geographer al-Bakrī’s account
of the Bretons, touching on the channels of communication between the Christian
and Muslim worlds and relations between the Franks and Bretons. William Norman,
ASNC, also centred on the contact between cultures, looking at
thought-provoking episodes in the Íslendingasögur of interaction between
Icelanders and Celts, both in Iceland and the British Isles, and how this was
influenced by knowledge of each other’s languages. Next, we received an
insightful comparative study of the poetic form of the list in the Old English Fortunes
of Men and the Old Norse Rígsþula, from Alexandra Reider of Yale,
who revealed the multiple possible functions of the list, in these instances
elucidating the course of a human life and the different rungs of society.
Following
further refreshments, we returned to the colloquium’s final session, which emphasised
language and power. Albert Fenton, ASNC, outlined the role of Anglo-Saxon writs
as distinctive documents, stressing their linguistic and diplomatic
characteristics, especially the rights of
sacu and socn (‘sake and soke’) which were granted by the king. This
provided a timely reconsideration of Florence Harmer’s work on writs. Once this
Anglo-Saxon legal background had been established, Jacob Hobson of Berkeley
gave us a closer reading of the charters of Æthelstan A, adeptly analysing
their theological and exegetical aspects, in particular through the proem,
dispositive clause and anathema clause. Last but not at all least, Alexander
Wilson of Durham evaluated the construction of monstrosity in Sverris saga
by drawing tantalising comparisons with more well-known outlaw narratives in
the Íslendingasögur, looking at specific terminology for monstrous
behaviour and applying theories of dehumanisation and super-humanisation.
![]() |
CCASNC dinner, Gonville and Caius College |
At
the close of the day, heartfelt thanks were offered to our
speakers, organising committee, team of undergraduate helpers and the Department at
large. We had gained an
appreciation over the course of the Colloquium
of how individuals and institutions communicate their control of a
particular sphere––whether political or ideological,
whether real or imagined––and control communication through
administration, composition, selection and transmission. After drinks in a local pub, the
merriment continued with a delicious conference dinner in the medieval
surroundings of Gonville and Caius College.
![]() |
Members of the department in conversation with keynote speaker, Stefan Brink |
In short, many thanks to
all of the wonderful people involved in CCASNC 2015 - your time and enthusiasm
is much appreciated. We hope to see you again soon!
[All photos courtesy of Myriah Williams].
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