What happened to silence?
With more than 80% of Americans living in metropolitan areas (and only 2% living as I do in towns of fewer than 25,000 people), nobody knows what real silence is anymore. http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Population/ Writing historical fiction requires that you project yourself into that long ago past. As the modern world hurtles headlong into the future, this becomes more and more difficult. Trying to find spaces where it’s possible to get a sense of that historic time is getting harder by the day. Like light pollution, noise pollution is everywhere. This winter in the Olympic National Forest and on the Quinnault Indian Reservation, my husband and I experienced the silence of the natural world, though it is presently threatened by the air routes over it into Sea-Tac airport south of Seattle. In Eastern Oregon, the silence can be complete–and loud–to the point of ringing Read more…
The Pelagian Heresy
The Pelagian heresy is an important part of any discussion of religion in Wales during the era formerly known as the Dark Ages. Pelagius was a British monk, born around 350 AD, who moved to Rome and was a contemporary of St. Augustine. His crucial fault was that he believed that the notion of original sin–that all men were condemned because of the actions of Adam–was false. Unfortunately, our primary source of his writings are not the writings themselves, but the reaction to them on the part of his opponents. He was condemned as a heretic by Augustine, whose teachings became predominant in the church. http://www.brojed.org/IE/pelagius.php; for a list of primary sources: http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/pelagius.php The two differing paths are: Augustine: 1. Death comes from sin, not man’s physical nature; 2. Infants must be baptized to be cleansed from original sin and those who die without Read more…
Arwystli
Today is a guest post from Brynne Haug, history major at Whitman College and co-conspirator in the study of all things Welsh. Thanks for stopping by! _________ Arwystli seems an insignificant place—just a small piece of land in the middle of Wales, bordering on the northern kingdoms of Gwynedd and Powys. But Arwystli became instrumental for Wales’s survival in the War of 1282. In February of 1278, when Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Gwynedd and Wales, faced down King Edward I of England, on the surface he asked only for Arwystli. Although Llywelyn had agreed to cede it to Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, the lord of Powys, when Gruffudd swore fealty to him in 1263,[1] he later laid claim to it on the grounds that Gruffudd had given up his rights when he betrayed him to the English Read more…
Red, Black, and White Books
In Lord of the Rings, Frodo leaves Sam the Red Book of Westmarch, in which to record the goings on of Middle Earth after he is gone. Tolkein himself says that his inspiration for the fictional book was the Red Book of Hergest in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which he knew well. In Wales, there were three such books of which we know: The Red Book of Hergest The Black Book of Camarthan The White Book of Rhydderch The Red Book of Hergest was written between 1375 and 1425 by Hywel Fychan fab Hywel Goch of Fuellt, for his employer, Hopcyn ap Tomas ap Einion of Ynys Tawe. In it are some of the most famous Welsh texts, including the Chronicles of the Princes, The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Ruin and Conquest Read more…
The Weather in Wales
When my son took his American History class, he read to me from the diaries of Lewis and Clark when they wintered on the Oregon coast after coming all the way across the country. Mostly what they did was complain about the rain: “Rained again today.” “Rained all night long and into the morning.” “Rained all day for the third day in a row.” Having grown up in western Washington State, I know all about this problem. Having lived through the last two years in Eastern Oregon, I am intimately familiar with this problem. We had frozen rain and hail on May 17th. Wales, climate-wise, is nearly identical to the Pacific Northwest coast. This was our experience. Here’s Dolbadarn Castle. In the rain. This is the forecast for Bangor, Wales for the rest of the week: Five-day forecast (Details) Tomorrow 19 MayFair Read more…
If you were David, a time-traveling Prince of Wales . . .
My After Cilmeri series follows a family (two teenagers and a mom) who travel in time back to the Middle Ages. One passage in Prince of Time prompted me think about all those products we buy here. How many–were we to take them back with us to the Middle Ages–would truly prove useful? Like David in the book, imagine walking into a pharmacy with a backpack and trying to decide with which items to fill it, if that was all you could take back in time. David focuses primarily on medicines like antibiotics, antibiotic cream, and antihistimines. Somewhere I read that we’ve lost more knowledge in the last 2000 years than we’ve gained, and while I don’t think that’s necessarily true, medieval people did have pharmaceuticals. Many herbal remedies can be very effective. Some of what they used even resemble what we have today. Read more…
The Kingdom of Mercia
After 500 AD, the Kingdom of Mercia became one of largest and strongest Saxon kingdoms in England, and only faded with the transcendency of the Kingdom of Wessex under Alfred the Great (ruled 871-899). The first Mercian king to truly dominate England was Penda, ruling from 626-655 AD. Both Bede and Nennius describe the swath he cut across Britain, sometimes in alliance with others (Cadwallon and Cadfael of Gwynedd to name two) and sometime on his own reconnaissance. His paganism was a particular sore point: “In his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, written in the early eighth century, Bede of Jarrow describes him as ‘a barbarian more savage than any pagan’ with ‘no respect for the newly established religion of Christ’” and “In the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, Nennius describes Penda as ‘victorious through the arts of the Devil, for he was not baptised, and never believed in Read more…
The Roman Fort of Caerleon (and King Arthur’s Camelot?)
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Caerleon, a word derived from the Welsh ‘fortress of the legion’, was the seat from which King Arthur ruled Britain. He wrote: http://www.caerleon.net/history/arthur/page7.htm “When the feast of Whitsuntide began to draw near, Arthur, who was quite overjoyed by his great success, made up his mind to hold a plenary court at that season and place the crown of the kingdom on his head. He decided too, to summon to this feast the leaders who owed him homage, so that he could celebrate Whitsun with greater reverence and renew the closest pacts of peace with his chieftains. He explained to the members of his court what he was proposing to do and accepted their advice that he should carry out his plan in The City Of The Legions. Situated as it is in Morgannwg (Glamorgan), on Read more…
Things Fall Apart–the End of an Independent Wales
Things Fall Apart is the name of an excellent book written in 1958 by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, describing his main character’s fall from grace where he loses his power, his family, and ultimately his life (he hangs himself). It is an equally apt phrase for defining what happened in Wales immediately after the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd. J. Beverley Smith writes: “By the beginning of 1283, but not very long before, Llanrwst and Betws became bases for English operations in the upper Conwy valley, and it seems that a crossing of the river had been forced by then. The Welsh forces faced an advance made in two directions. One army moved upstream along the Conwy and Lledr valleys to Dolwyddelan, a key position in the defensive preparations of the princes. By 18 January the castle was in the king’s Read more…
The Poetic Tradition
Tonight the hall of my lord is dark, With neither fire nor bed. I will weep a while, then still myself to silence. Tonight the hall of my lord is dark, With neither fire nor candle. Who will give me peace? Tonight the hall of my lord is dark, With neither fire nor light. Grief for you overtakes me. Darkness descends on the hall of my lord The blessed assembly has departed, praying That good comes to those of us who remain. This poem (interpreted for my own purposes from the original: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sechard/492llyw.htm) is from the Welsh poem Canu Heledd. The poem tells a story of Cynddylan, or Cynddylan ap Cyndrwyn, a seventh century ruler of a sub-kingdom of Gwynedd. His father allied with Penda of Mercia, but died before 642: “In the aftermath of victory Penda and Cynddylan seem Read more…
Writing and re-writing: A Novel of King Arthur
I normally blog about dark age and medieval Wales, and just touch on the writing that has preoccupied my life for the last five years. But I’ve just put up my new novel, Cold My Heart: A Novel of King Arthur, and I thought I’d talk about the process that created it, particularly for my long time readers and followers who will have seen a blurb to this book in another form not long ago. The most important thing I’ve learned in writing fiction over the years is, of course, never give up. The second most important thing is that no book is ever set in stone. It’s really hard to see that when you’re in the process of writing it, but every single one of my books has gone through a transformative process from when I first began writing Read more…
Welsh Independence (part . . . 227?)
A reader of this blog, Joe, asked me a question the other day. He said: “I was recently listening to the audio version of “The Economist” and heard an article about the Welsh vote on devolution. One of the article’s lead sentences was (I’m paraphrasing) : “On a cold day in Cardiff, it’s hard to catch any talk of devolution, and even harder to find anyone who cares much about it”. Do you agree with this assessment? And if so, do you think there’s a historical or cultural aspect to why some people in Wales feel they way they do? (I’m curious because, if I lived in Wales, I think I would be very likely to have a strong opinion on the matter.) —————– I think that the perspective on Welsh devolution varies according to where an individual lives (including Read more…
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