Night at Rhosybeddau

I was afraid of the night
as of an enemy,
but first was the moon
shining on his dark face
and as he drew near
I saw the birds of dawn
lay sleeping in his wild black hair.

“Don't be afraid”, he said,
"for the golden flame of the sun
has touched your heart,
and there I may not enter.”

I wonder now,
if that glow should ever fail,
would the birds of dawn
sleep in my hair?
Would the moon
illuminate my face?

Hags, cranes and hammers

Photo by John Eagle

Writing about the sour-apple hag reminded me that I’d meant to tidy up and put on my web site an account of a journey I made in 1997 to visit the Hag of Beara in Ireland. It describes visiting some special places on the Beara Peninsula as well as musing about my own mid-life journey through the rather uncomfortable hinterland between the ages of mother and the hag. So here it is at: Pilgrimage to the Hag of Beara

I used Noragh Jones’ Meditations for Hag Sacred Sites on the Beara Peninsula as a template for the journey and posted that as well. If you are not able to go to the Beara Peninsula it can still work as a guided meditation for the mid-life journey: Meditations for a Hag Pilgrimge

I also ruminated a bit more about the old woman as spinner and winder of yarn, remembering the three hags in the Irish tale of Finn in The Enchanted Cave of Keshcorran. In the story Finn and his band were hunting in Northern Connacht and so incurred the wrath of Conaran, a Danaan lord, who sent his three daughters to capture them:

"Finn, it is said, and Conan the Bald, with Finn's two favourite hounds… came upon the mouth of a great cavern, before which sat three hags of evil and revolting aspect. On three crooked sticks of holly they had twisted left-handwise hanks of yarn, and were spinning with these when Finn and his followers arrived. To view them more closely the warriors drew near, when they found themselves suddenly entangled in strands of the yarn which the hags had spun about the place like the web of a spider, and deadly faintness and trembling came over them, so that they were easily bound fast by the hags and carried into the dark recesses of the cave. Others of the party then arrived, looking for Finn. All suffered the same experience - they lost all their pith and valour at the touch of the bewitched yarn, and were bound and carried into the cave, until the whole party were laid in bonds, with the dogs baying and howling outside." (Silva Gadelica, Standish Hayes O'Grady)

Like the Greek Fates, these three old women are connected with spinning yarn. In this case it is enchanted yarn, having been spun left-handwise, against the course of the sun and hung on holly sticks. The association of hags and spinning yarn, as I surmised in my last hag post, does seem a natural one. Spinning and winding the yarn could be an occupation suited to elderly women since it doesn't require too much exertion or mobility – and it was a skill which was essential to the well-being of the community since it provided the means to make cloth for clothing, blankets, hammocks, bags, rugs, baby-carriers and so on. As an Irish triad says: "Three slender things that best support the world - the slender stream of milk from the cow’s dug into the pail, the slender blade of green corn upon the ground, the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman." These crafts are believed to be among the earliest and most primitive invented: there is evidence of woven articles from Turkey and Mesopotamia 7000 to 8000 BC.

It was a way in which the grandmothers could have been ‘economically viable’ and earned their keep. I can imagine it being quite pleasant – women perhaps getting together and working while chatting, gossiping and… spinning a few yarns. Some of the matters of the community were no doubt chewed over and some things set in train that might well have affected the fate of some of its members – marriages decided upon, a word here and there in the ear of a son or son-in-law about the suitability of someone for this task or that.

The Grandmother Hypothesis suggests that there is some evolutionary advantage for women having such a long post-fertile period; that there is some 'genetic intention' for postmenopausal women. Some anthropologists believe that the human species took a leap forward when people started living long enough for grandmothers to survive and be able to look after the children – thus freeing their sons and daughters to do other work: hunting, gathering, building shelters, fetching water and so on. Others dispute the hypothesis, arguing that the grandmother herself would use up resources that could be used for new young. But perhaps spinning, winding yarn and weaving were also their contribution?

There is evidence from all over the world of old people being dispatched or abandoned when they became a burden by consuming resources without contributing anything in return. David Rorie gives some interesting examples from Scotland, England and Brittany which suggest that once violent acts may have given way to ritual and incantation. Also interesting is the association with cranes. In Easter Alves, in Morayshire, there is an account of ‘ringing the Millen Bridle’ – a method by which the death of a sick old woman was hastened. It seems likely from the account that the Bridle – whatever it was, for the word in Scottish may refer to a particular piece of wood used in carpentry or the piece of iron fastened on the end of a beam of a plough as well as the more familiar meaning – was kept by a guardian and during the ‘ringing’ of it, a magical formula was recited:

Cran’s flesh or wran’s flesh
Come oot thy way.

Campbell, in The Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands recounts that if someone is thought to have lived too long and it is desirable to get rid of them, their death may be brought about by shouting three times through the key-hole of his room:

Will you come, or will you go?
Or will you eat the flesh of cranes?

Anne Ross states that according to Julius Caesar in the first century BC the ancient Britons refused to eat the flesh of cranes in case it had been human in an earlier life and Giraldus Cambrensis (12th cent.) observed the same taboo in Ireland.

In Brittany there is a report of an elaborate ceremony to hasten the end of an old person by use of er mel béniguet, the holy hammer. The beadle of the chapel was the guardian of the hammer which was kept in the recess of the church wall. When it was brought to the sick person’s house, the oldest person, a woman, held the stone to her chest, bent by the weight of it, and made the sign of the cross with her right hand three times and then raised the stone above her head: “waving it and saying: ‘Mathô-Talen, for the last time commit they soul to God, for here is what will relieve thee from the agonies of death, and lift from thee the burdens of life’. The ends of his fingers having been wet with holy water, he slowly made the sign of the Cross with the right arm. Lowering the stone little by little with both hands, she at last placed it gently on his forehead, steadying it with her left. Then again raising her right, she cried in a shrill voice: ‘By the Holy Trinity, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, thanks to the holy hammer of Saint Meltro, the deliverer of the aged, rest in peace, Mathô-Talon, for thou hast lived well!’ Hardly had she finished when the old man drew his last breath: his limbs stiffened and he gave up the ghost while saying, ‘God be thanked!’” There were known, apparently, several such ‘holy hammers’.

Aubrey gives a similar account from seventeenth century England where a ‘holy mawle’ was hung behind the church door and when a father was seventy and of no more use, the son could fetch the hammer and knock the father on the head with it.

Rorie notes, “the word for hammer or maul (mell) is the same in both Scots and Breton, and it brings us in touch with the ‘millen’ of the ‘bridle’; for ‘to mill’ in the Scottish vernacular, is ‘to give one a beating, to drub’. *

On a rather more heart-warming note, here is an Irish example of a wide-spread folk motif of grandchildren coming to their grandparents’ aid:

'A man had a father who had grown too old to do anything but eat and smoke, so the man decided to send him away with nothing but a blanket. "Just give him half a blanket," said the man's son from his cradle, "then I'll have half to give you when you grow old and I send you away." Upon hearing this, the man quickly reconsidered and allowed his old father to remain after all.' (Irish Folktales, Henry Glassie)

* All accounts above from David Rorie, Folk Tradition and Folk Medicine in Scotland unless specified otherwise.

Some words about poems and poets

Beryl Cook: Poetry Reading

This, I think, is my favourite definition of poetry:

"... a poem is made in language and lives in its readers' multiple interpretations. Even in the most apparently lucid poetry, light doesn't shine directly on a single meaning but is refracted by metaphor and splintered by patterns of sound or relationship to other texts - or, to shift to another metaphor, the poem is always out of the office, and even at its most compliant it's rarely wholly subordinate to the structures of meaning that would pin it down".
Zoë Skoulding (Poetry Wales, Vol 44, no 3)

I also like this which says something more about the poem's relationship with the reader:

"But a poem is reciprocal, it insists
on adult relations, to exist
it pre-exists in you or not at all.

Severed from me you hold its future, make
it open up between us. You must take
a poem like a lover.

God give you guts to see it: When it works
poetry is an orgasm. The O.K. word
is resonance."

It’s an excerpt from a poem written by a one-time tutor and mentor of mine, Peter Fison, who first really brought the wonders of literature alive for me.

T.S.Eliot, of course, had a lot of interesting things to say about poetry. Such as:

“…the poet is occupied with the frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meaning still exists.”

***

Finally, to go back a few centuries here is a triad from the Llyfr Coch Hergest, the Red Book of Hergest,

"Tri pheth a beir y gerdawr uot yn amyl: kyfarwydyt ystoryaeu, a bardoniaeth, a hengerd. "
‘Three things that give amplitude to a poet: knowledge of histories, the poetic art, and old verse.’

Although it comes from a very different society to ours, it still has relevance. The 'knowledge of histories' refers to the inherited native tradition. The triad appears in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess as:

"Three things that enrich a poet: myths, poetic power, a store of ancient verse."

Poets are still enriched by knowing history and myth, possessing poetic skill and being familiar with the poetic canon.

Sour-apple hag, a winder of string

Illustration by P J Lynch

Gwrach gallawdyr groenllawdyr gravellin – horawc
gwrach lechawc gwrach lychwin
gwrach abrec ynychegin
gwrach afylsur llywyadur llin.

Stalk of an old hag, trouser-skinned, gravelly, swine-lousy,
rickety old hag, soiled old hag,
old hag with a blot on her kitchen,
sour-apple hag, a winder of string.

Translated by Gwyn Williams

Yesterday, the blot on my kitchen being too large to be ignored, I spent some time cleaning and idly thinking of this excerpt from a poem about an unnamed hag by Madawg Dwygraig, a 14th century Welsh poet. There is something almost attractive about her foulness – in the way things or people which are perfectly themselves have a kind of beauty. The language of the poem with its harsh ‘ll’, ‘ch’ and ‘c’ sounds almost mimics a kind of hissing and spitting though and I don’t think Madawg Dwygraig’s intention was to portray her in a favourable light! (He also wrote an extremely nasty poem about Mallt, the Irish mother of the poet, Gryffudd Gryg, a contemporary of his.)

The englyn made me think about Jenny Joseph’s poem Warning which describes an old woman, rather genteel in comparison with our gwrach, who merely does such things as wearing purple with a red hat that doesn’t go, spending her pension on brandy and summer gloves and running her stick along public railings “to make up for the sobriety” of her youth (although she does want to learn to spit). Joseph wrote it when she was still a young woman and the poem is a reminder or warning to have some fun while you’re young, to do what you’d like to do sometimes, dare to be unconventional or - God forbid! – a teeny bit rebellious, doing things like running your stick along railings .

Our 14th century hag would not have had the luxury of a pension and reading about hags of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries I wonder if some old women who didn’t have husbands or families fostered the image of the witch with magical powers to protect themselves. People would give them food and clothing when asked, out of fear that they would blight the crops or curdle the milk. Sometimes though this would backfire and they would be attacked or killed.

Jane Pugh, telling the story of an old woman cornered in Llanidloes, writes: ‘It was the year 1839 and witches were a favourite topic in Wales, as well as all over Britain and many poor old women came under suspicion, harmless though they might be. They only had to be old, wrinkled and ugly with a prominent nose and life became very hard for them as if in those days it was not hard enough for the poor. Few old women ventured very far from their homes and most avoided town at all costs, just in case someone started up a cry of “witch”.’ 1 Apparently in Wales only three witches (four were convicted but one escaped) were hanged during the time of the Penal Witchcraft Act of 1563 – 1736; this was a very small number compared to those hanged or burned in England and Scotland. There is, however, no record of how many were killed without trial.

Hags do, of course, appear in mythology and folk-tales where they are often powerful figures, sometimes conferring sovereignty on the young hero. The hag is, in fact, a symbolic figure, drawing her power ultimately from the archetype of the Terrible Mother. The hag is the female figure, no longer fertile with life-giving qualities, but associated with death and destruction. However she is still one aspect of the Great Mother who is allied to the Land and the king rules only with her approval. There is perhaps an echo of this concept in the Mabinogi story ‘Peredur, Son of Evrawg’ where nine hags are ravaging the land and Peredur gets the better of one of them in a fight. She teaches him to ride and bear arms and then gives him a horse, weapons and armour. There are stories from Ireland in which the hag appears to a young man and when he kisses her, transforms into a beautiful maiden and confers the kingship upon him.

The hag seems a fitting figure to associate with sovereignty. The maiden is attractive to the young hero and therefore he wants to possess her. She in turn would have been driven by social imperatives as well as by biological ones to appeal to young men, and therefore her actions and behaviour were intrinsically linked with his. There were not many jobs open to a young girl in ancient Ireland; even though women could become poets, lawyers, healers etc they were rare and special circumstances probably prevailed. Before Christianity, which at least offered the alternative of becoming a nun, the role of wife and mother was probably the main or only pathway open to a woman, which made her dependant on being chosen by a man. The hag, however, was another matter. Not being attractive to the young hero she was not bound to please him and had greater freedom to please herself. She was sovereign, in the sense of independent, and he had less power over her. Perhaps because of this she seemed more threatening.

Our ‘stalk of an old hag’, being unnamed and therefore having no identity, takes on mythic proportions. She is a ‘winder of string’, reminiscent of the old women known as the Moirae or Fates of Greek mythology who controlled the destinies of each person: Clotho would spin the string that represented the life of the person, Lachesis would decide the length of it and Atropos would cut the string at the appointed time, signifying the end of the person’s life. The three Fates were, inevitably, very powerful and instilled fear even in some deities. Maybe the winding of string and wool was a job particularly suited to old women and that is why they became associated with it.

Whoever she was, this sour-apple hag had enough power to get under the poet’s skin to the point where he thought it worthwhile to spend his time and skill on composing a very accomplished poem of seven englynion to her, each line beginning with the word gwrach and the end-rhyme remaining the same throughout. Perhaps she was his mother-in-law?

1. Welsh Witches and Warlocks by Jane Pugh, Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, Capel Garmon, 1987

The Irish Oral Tradition

The Blasket Islands

Robin Flower wrote the following about an experience he had on one of the Blasket Islands, which were eventually evacuated in 1953:

“Some years ago I was wandering idly one day along a road upon an island which lies three miles out into the Atlantic beyond the most westerly point of Ireland. The island is entirely Irish in speech, and the older inhabitants still preserve a rich treasure of song and story. As I strolled along I heard a call from the next field, and clambering over a wall, I found myself in the presence of an old man of over eighty years who yet retained something of the strength and happy spirit of his youth. As I came up he spoke: ‘You have an unsociable way with you (Tá cuma fhiadhain ort). Don’t you give folk a greeting when you go by them on the road?’ ‘Yes’, I said, ‘I greet people. But I didn’t see you over the wall.’ ‘A man should have his eyes in every corner,’ he said. ‘But sit down now and we’ll have a crack together.’ He had been digging potatoes in a furrow of the field, and now laid the potato spade cross-wise over the furrow and, sitting down on one end, courteously signed to me to take my place on the other end. I did so and without further preamble or explanation, he fell to reciting Ossianic lays.

For half an hour I sat there while the firm voice went steadily on. After a while he changed from poetry to prose, and began to recite a long tale of Fionn and his companions and their adventures throughout the world, how they came to Greece and what strange things befell them there. At times the voice would alter and quicken, the eyes would brighten, as with a speed which you would have thought beyond the compass of human breath he delivered those highly artificial passages describing a fight or putting to sea, full of strange words and alliterating rhetorical phrases which, from the traditional hurried manner of narration, are known as ‘runs’. At the end of one of these he would check a moment with triumph in his eye, draw a deep breath, and embark once more on the level course of his recitation.

I listened spellbound and, as I listened, it came to me suddenly that there on the last inhabited piece of European land, looking out to the Atlantic horizon, I was hearing the oldest living tradition in the British Isles. So far as the record goes this matter in one form or another is older than the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and yet lives still upon the lips of the peasantry, a real and vivid experience, while, except to a few painful scholars, Beowulf has long passed out of memory. To-morrow this too will be dead, and the world will be the poorer when this last shade of that which once was great has passed away. The voice ceased and I awoke out of my reverie as the old man said: ‘I have kept you from your dinner with my tales of the fiana.’ ‘You have done well,’ I said, ‘for a tale is better than food’, and thanked him before we went our several ways.

In such memories, and in an odd quatrain still surviving from the byplay of the schools, the tradition of the poets is still alive in the spoken tongue. And in the great manuscripts written in the schools of poetry and history and law we can see them busy at their task of preserving the old tradition which their order had been instituted to guard. They stood firmly over the ancient ways and had but small capacity of adapting themselves to the change of times. Their existence was bound up with that of the aristocratic order which they served, and with it they fell. But their memory and their influence lived after them and, if the spoken Irish of today is perhaps the liveliest, the most concise, and the most literary of the vernaculars of Europe, this is due in no small part to the passionate preoccupation of the poets, turning and re-turning their phrases in the darkness of their cubicles and restlessly seeking the last perfection of phrase and idiom.”

From The Irish Tradition by Robin Flower, Oxford University Press, 1949

Dazlious

I like the word ‘dazlious’ invented by the character, Linda, in the film Snow Cake (see my last blog post). The Urban Dictionary defines ‘dazlious’ as “an exclamation of beauty and awe” and gives a transcript of Linda’s story which puts the word in context:

"Mr Fantastic from the Fantastic Four, he's got arms made of elastic so they can stretch for two, maybe three hundred miles.
He's been imprisoned in a cave for seven days with no food and no water and no light. But on the 8th day he manages to loosen a rock and push his way up through the top and up into the daylight. Just as the sun is coming up over the mountains and filling the sky with this white-yellow light. And there's this stillness, and in the few minutes he's got before his captor, the evil Dr. Doom returns, he stops for just one second. And all he can hear is his own breathing. But he's totally overwhelmed by how big the world is, how small and unimportant he is. And as he turns around you see his face look to the sky and he says very quietly, so that no one can hear him, he says 'Dazlious.'"

I am one of those ‘charmed by cute contrivances like “dezlious” [sic]’ as one critic in the New York Times puts it. Dazlious is a word I have a use for; I seem to find the world increasingly dazlious. When I do, I want to express it and I have a few stand-by lines from various poems that sneak into my mind. If, for instance, the night is full of stars with a bright moon half-hidden by clouds yet illuminating them, I always think of Keats’ lines: “When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face / Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” and I say them to myself -- it helps for some reason to express my feelings of awe at the beauty and mystery of the night.

At other times, perhaps coming out of the house into a glorious Spring day, early in the morning when the world seems young and fresh, I find Wordsworth’s lines on the French Revolution on the tip of my tongue: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven!” At other times, on a day which just seems full of wonder and possibility I might wave my arms around a bit and recite “ O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! he chortled in his joy” -- although obviously not when there are people around.

So 'dazlious' is a word I've added to this little repertoire. I think we can say a bit more about it than that it’s an exclamation of beauty and awe. To begin with it’s an adjective. It has the adjectival ending “-ous” which gives the meaning “abounding in, characterised by, of the nature of”. Its root is fairly obviously ‘dazzle’ meaning “to blind temporarily or confuse the sight of by overpowering brightness, tempt or delude or startle by brilliant display or prospect”. So we could say it has the meaning ‘an abundance of being dazzled’. However if we simply added ‘–ous’ to ‘dazzle’ we’d be most likely to get ‘dazzlous’ -- dazz-lus, which sounds very lacklustre, the stress is too even and uninspiring. But with ‘dazlious’, just the addition of the ‘i’, giving the sound i: as in ‘deep’, transforms it into a much more delicious word. It makes us linger over the ‘daz’, stressing it, elongating the word and our experience of it: daz-lee-us. The sound itself is uplifting.

One day last week, having been hunched over the laptop for hours, I decided to go out for a walk. The sun had started to go down behind the hill and there was a hint of frost in the air. As I set off, zipping my coat against the cold, a flock of geese suddenly flew over, heading towards the coast. Because the sun was low in the sky it shone brightly onto their white underparts and as they beat their wings the shafts of light were broken, causing a rhythmic flashing as the geese moved soundlessly across the sky above me. I watched, entranced, until they disappeared into the west. Then, standing in the middle of the lane, my head still turned to the sky, I said, very quietly so that no-one could hear me, “Dazlious!”

Snow Cake

Snow Cake is one of my favourite films. Not because it has a Welsh director, Marc Evans, or music from Welsh bands Stereophonics and Super Furry Animals or even because Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman are in it... although these things certainly contribute.

It’s a drama focused on the friendship between a high-functioning autistic woman, Linda, (Sigourney Weaver) and a man, Alex, (Alan Rickman) who is traumatized after a fatal car accident. I came across it on television one evening and was intrigued by it. Unlike the usual Hollywood films which have fairly predictable patterns of narrative, I didn’t know what this film was going to be about, where it was going, what would happen. The people in it seem as if they could be real people, unlike the polished and air-brushed version of people you habitually see at the cinema. And there was a lot of silence, meaning I had time to observe.

Apart from this, Snow Cake portrays, to some extent at least, the concept that we are all differently-abled. At times the able-bodied/minded characters are completely disabled by their emotions. Linda finds it difficult to form relationships with people but so does her neighbour Maggie. The story suggests that we all have handicaps of one sort or another. Ideally by helping each other we can learn from our differences and enjoy things about each other – but the film doesn’t sentimentalise this or make it look easy. The script was written by Angela Pell who has an autistic child herself.

I love Linda’s invention of ‘Comic Book Scrabble’. In this version of the game the players are allowed to make up words using their available letters. The catch is that they then have to use the word in a story or sentence relating to a Comic Book character.



I’d like to try it out. As well as being fun, I think it would be instructive to play with words and intuit meaning from the way they sound, to employ that part of the brain that makes up stories.

The film finishes on an uplifting note but you know that isn’t the end of it. I think it shows us something about how life is. As Paul Gallico puts it in 'The Lonely':

“For you could be a man [or woman] only when you could be the things you were and face up to the truth without flinching and denying it. And the truth was that in life on earth there was no such thing as happiness without pain, victory without defeat. There was joy and enchantment and beauty to be garnered on the path, but at all times too, there were burdens to be born.”

All the characters, in the parallel universe that fictional characters must surely inhabit, will still have burdens to carry, but they have all garnered some joy and enchantment and beauty along the way and hopefully will continue to do so.

Oh, did I mention it's also funny?