Louise MacNeice: Autumn Sequal revisited.

I read a fine essay about Louis MacNeice and Autumn Journal by Mathew Lyons, which you can read by following the link: Here 

If you don't know anything about either the poet or the poem, it's a fine place to learn about both and comes with the added bonus of a clip of MacNeice reading from his work. 

Any discussion of Autumn Journal inevitably raises the spectre of Autumn Sequel.  The latter has few supporters though Mathew did send me a link to this defence of Autumn Sequel 

It seemed a good time to revisit Autumn Sequel. What follows is deliberately descriptive rather than critical.

Autumn Sequel revisited. An attempt at a description.

 

How little, a precious little, in life is fixed:

On the one hand this but on the other that;

Justice must lie between and truth betwixt. 

                                                     (Canto I)

 

Autumn Journal is documentary poetry. In a note for Faber, MacNeice had claimed: ‘The writing is direct, anyone could understand it’. They can and it remains in print. But while it had been successful, MacNeice wasn’t happy with it. In a note to his Collected poems 1925-1940, he claimed it was ‘in a sense a failure; it fails in depth.[i]’ 

 

He told Eliot in 1944 that he was planning a long poem.  

 

I can’t tell you much about the project at this moment, except 1)that the main characters will be imagined contemporary individuals, but will exist on two planes, i.e the symbolic as well as the naturalistic. (2) that there will be some inter-shuttling of past and present (though in a much more modified way than in Ezra Pound’s Cantos). (3) That the total pattern will be very complex and in fact rather comparable to the ‘Faerie Queen’ in its interlocking of episodes, subplots and digressions which aren’t really digressions. 

 

It’s reasonable to assume the Project, however begun, would lead to Autumn Sequel. 

 

In February 1954, writing to Philip Vaudrin, who would be his American publisher at Knopf, MacNeice introduced the finished Autumn Journal: 

 

It is a good deal less occasional than its predecessor and , also, I think differs from it in many ways. There is a good deal less of sheer topicality to it, but on the other hand there are a good many more characters, these being mainly people I know but throughout represented under pseudonyms. […]. What I think myself should be most interesting about this work is the balance I have tried to achieve between the realistic and the contemporary on one hand and the mythical or historical on the other.’

 

He finishes the letter by telling Vaudrin that for the advance publicity he would like him to ‘bring out that, while in one way this long poem has affinities with Byron’s Don Juan, in another way it has affinities with quite different works, say Goethe’s Faust or The Fairie Queen.’ 

 

While claiming to have written a poem that has affinities with two such different works might strain the reader’s imagination, the claim was important enough to MacNeice for him to make the same request about advance publicity to Eliot, who was his publisher at Faber, ‘While AS may have affinities with Don Juan it also may have some with the Faerie Queen. [ii]’

 

The second poem was therefore designed to be substantially different to the first. 

The most obvious difference is the form. 

 

In Autumn Sequel MacNeice abandoned the flexible quatrains of the Journal, which ‘saves it from monotony[iii]’  and tied himself to the difficulties of Terza Rima. Macneice had made a point in the letter to Vaudrin that he used Terza Rima with ‘pure rhymes throughout’. Critics have challenged this claim.  

 

The general consensus seems to be that while this form worked for Dante in Italian, it doesn’t work so well in English. Put simply the form requires sets of three full rhymes, and English just doesn’t have that many. 

 

Glyn Maxwell was adamant: ‘Autumn Sequel fails because it is in Terza Rima’. He ends an essay praising Autumn Journal  by eviscerating the first six stanzas of Canto I of the Sequel, claiming ‘The formal infelicities are almost too numerous to mention’ and concluding his brief discussion a page later with ‘Therefore I would surmise that Autumn Sequel failed before it even began, at the moment MacNeice chose to give it the form he gave it.[iv]’  

 

Leaving aside form and the demands it placed on the writer and reader, the major difference between the two poems is that they create very different Model Readers. 

 

Autumn Sequel is very clever, very literary poetry. Depending on your point of view those terms are descriptive or pejorative. For a growing number of poets and critics in the 1950s they were pejorative. MacNeice knew this. 

 

To take one Canto as an example. MacNeice’s friend, Dylan Thomas died when he was writing Autumn Sequel and Canto XVII is ‘about’ that death.

 

Whether the emotion feels genuine, or whether like Tennyson he wasn’t so much grieving as writing a poem about grief, the whole Canto is self-consciously literary. The opening lines set the tone. 

 

Lament for the Makers. Monday comes; at noon
Gwilym died in New York: if it was late 
For his strange kind of poet: it was soon

 

For all who knew him and we need not wait

To meet his like : his like is seldom born,
Being admitted through the Ivory Gate

 

Where most of us must enter through the Gates of Horn.

You will need a key to the Sequel to know that Gwilym=Dylan Thomas and the name of the other dead poet who is mentioned later in the canto.[v] ‘Lament for the Makers’ is the title of a poem by William Dunbar. The gates of Ivory and Horn are from Virgil.

 

In the 43 stanzas of this Canto, MacNeice alludes to works by Skelton, Dunbar, Virgil, Milton, and Dylan Thomas himself, as well as The Mabinogion, The Tain, The Bible (Ecclesiastes) and the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. He will name Taliesin, Silenus(and his ass?) , Damoetas, Skelton’s Parrot, Lycidas, Dionysus,  a poet called Reilly who came from Connaught (F.R.Higgins), Deirdre and Naisi, the Three Kings (who followed the star to Bethlehem) and refers, amongst other things, to the first ascent of Everest and a donkey cropping Asphodel. He also mentions Evans, Calum, Price, Devlin and Gorman[vi]. Lacking a classical education I may have missed something. Inevitably one also starts to suspect allusions where none may be intended. Is the bear that grumbles after the bees Winnie the Pooh. Is MacNeice adding Milne to his long list of literary references? 

  

Some of the many references are internal. A poem with affinities to the Faerie Queen would be structurally intricate and the Sequel is very carefully constructed. The reference to climbing Everest, far from being arbitrary, links to a previous Canto, where MacNeice had described his day job writing a commentary for a documentary about the ascent of Everest. The question he asks there, is answered here. And the idea of losing someone on the summit bid seems as natural as the Three Kings who appear throughout the poem as it moves chronologically towards Christmas and the Parrot who represents the kind of poet MacNeice doesn’t want to be, amongst other things. 

 

The Model Reader not only has a classical education but an impressive breadth of literary knowledge and takes pleasure in noting how skilfully the poem is constructed.

 

The danger of writing a poem with such an erudite Model reader is obvious. The poem needs footnotes. A list of all the allusions to literary works and literary and historical characters would be very long. Whether it would add anything to the reading experience is moot. It seems unlikely any Real Reader would know them all. The pertinent critical question is whether all these references could cohere for anyone other than the poet. The practical question is how many baffled readers will  keep reading.

 

Another way into the differences between Journal and Sequel Is offered by Al Alvarez.  In ‘Lament for a Makar’, an article published in the New Statesmen soon after Autumn Sequel was published, he wrote that MacNeice ‘used to be a poet of two voices’. 

 

When most himself he was a reflective poet and- this was least fashionable- unpretentious. Things, situations, ideas interested him more than his own case-book. He was sensitive, not nervy. […] That was his own voice.

The other voice was that of the Oxford Man, ‘smart, irreverent, quick with his cultured references, one of the Auden Gang. It did not ring true[vii].

 

Whether Alvarez was correct in establishing such a rigid binary, his distinction is useful. Most of Autumn Sequel is ‘smart’ and ‘quick with his cultured references’. In places it does not ‘ring true’. 

 

However, if MacNeice had two voices, his ‘other voice’ is also present. He can still sparkle, still be the poet who read the paper and loved drink, sporting events and women. 

 

In the same stuffed Canto XVII he provides a memorable image of Thomas standing at the bar, and later in the same Canto, he is describing the memory of listening to Thomas talk, an experience he had described in Canto II, and the abrupt, painful, recurring realisation that it will not be repeated: 

 

…We would bask

 

As though in a lush meadow in any room
Where that voice started, trellising the air

With honeysuckle or dogrose, bloom on bloom
]

And losing bees between and a bear,
To grumble after the bees. Such rooms are still
Open to us but now are merely spare

 

Rooms and in several senses: damp and chill
with dust sheets over the furniture and the voice
Silent, the meadow vanished, the magic nil.

 

While Terza Rima might be one of the reasons Autumn Sequel doesn’t work, the abrupt line endings at still, spare and voice and the slight pause which makes the first two ambiguous, before the following word defines them, seems effective. But the image in the last stanza ‘damp and chill/with dust sheets over the furniture and the voice/silent’ does all the necessary work and makes honey suckle dogrose and bloom on bloom redundant and excessive.  

 

This ‘first voice’ is swamped in the poem. 

 

Finally, in Autumn Journal the future is an ominous presence, the Second World War is arriving slowly. In Autumn Sequel the future is absent, unless it is the Christmas the poem is moving towards. The poet endures the present, finding some pleasure in visiting friends, but so much of the poem is spent looking backwards. Yeats said passive suffering was not a fit subject for poetry, and while ‘suffering’ might be too strong a word to describe an intelligent  man trying to make do in a bad time, Autumn Sequel might prove W.B.Ys point.

 

On the one hand, the Sequel lacks much that made the Journal a success. On the other hand, it has different ambitions, is a different king of poetry, belongs to a different time and is written by an older poet. It is easy to see why it has fewer partisans.

 

 

---

[i] The preface is reprinted in Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald Fber 2007. 

[ii] The four quotations from letters are taken from Letters of Louis MacNeice, Selected and Edited by Jonathan Allison Faber and Faber 2010. Pages 312, 449-450, 571-2 and 573 respectively..

[iii] Letter to T.S.Eliot November 1938. In op cit page 312

[iv] ‘Turn and turn against Autumn Journal’ in Incorrigibly Plural: Louise MacNeice and his legacy. Edited by Fran Bearton and Edna Longley. Carcanet 2012.

[v] The key is presented as Appendix A in John Stallworthy’s biography ‘Louis MacNeice’. Norton 1995

[vi] Friends of both men, but you need the Key to find out who they are. If you have a copy of the Biography. 

[vii] Qtd in Stallworthy’s biography p. 411 

A review of Fairies a History, by Francis Young.

 

A slightly different version of this review first appeared online in The Brazen Head for September 2026.

Fairies A History, by Francis Young. Polity Press Ltd. 2026. 340 pp

 

Towards the end of the 12^th Century, Laȝamon added a story to the French poem he was translating. He wrote that at king Arthur’s birth, the baby was visited by magical beings who took charge of him with strong magic and gave him gifts. 

 

Sone swa he com an eorðe; aluen hine iuengen

 heo bigolen þat child; mid galdere swiðe stronge.

 

The magical beings are called aluen. 

 

I had always assumed these were elves, but noticed recently the word had been translated as fairies. The Middle English Compendium cites this quotation and offers: ‘Fairies or Elves of either sex’ as a translation. Take your pick.  Could he distinguish between an elf and a fairy? And if he did, what were they? But what did Laȝamon visualise when he wrote the word? 

A study of elves in his poem concludes, somewhat unhelpfully, that the term is ‘prone to shapeshifting. It can connote disease causing organisms, witches, nymphs, sea monsters fairy mistresses, nightmares[i].’

 

In search of answers, I have been reading scholarly works on fairy belief, for obvious reasons mostly centred on the Middle Ages, but Francis Young’s A History of Fairies, is the most thorough treatment of the subject I’ve found.

 

Ranging widely over time and geography he puts together a comprehensive and readable history of the idea of fairies. He does this even though his introduction explains why it is impossible to write a history of Fairies in the way someone could write a history of ‘The French’ or carpentry. 

 

The main problem facing him is the difficulty of defining the subject. Although some kind of ‘fairy belief’ has been a characteristic of British and many other cultures throughout recorded history, today the words fairy and elf point in the wrong directions: to cute little winged creatures with a wand (thank you 19^th century and Disney) or beautiful folk with pointy ears (thank you Professor Tolkien and Peter Jackson.). 

 

Throughout history people encountered supernatural beings, but discovering which beings they encountered is problematic. In the past the names used to describe ‘fairies’ were often deliberately vague or euphemistic to avoid either naming or offending the ‘good people’ who were often everything but good. Though there are stories of encounters from the Middle Ages onwards, they were usually recorded by educated men using Latin terms which may or may not reflect the words used by their vernacular speaking informants. To compound the problem, the supernatural beings in these encounters didn’t introduce themselves as fairies or elves, or boggarts, nor are they usually identified using such names[ii].

 

Young’s solution is to define fairy as: ‘A frequently invisible population of uncanny, non-human (yet human like) living beings, reported by folklore who share our world[iii].’ Having done so he demonstrates how to write a history of a subject that can’t be clearly defined based on evidence that is unreliable for so many reasons. 

 

He traces the possible origins of fairies to the animism of prehistory, and later what he calls the godlings of non-Christian belief. For most of Europe’s Christian history the fairies have been the unsanctioned supernatural, sitting aslant a theology that was more comfortable with angels and demons, ghosts, God and the Devil[iv].

 

As the narrative moves towards the present, it moves on to firmer ground. There is more evidence, and the bias and error are perhaps easier to see. Folklore became a respectable subject by the 19^th century and educated people started to take an interest in the beliefs and practices of ‘The Folk’. Ironically, some of them didn’t just record fairy belief but (perhaps inadvertently) invented some and repackaged others.

 

Stepping neatly through the problems of evidence and contending arguments, Young is even handed in summarising various points of view, while tentatively offering his own. At times this even handedness makes the book feel like a symposium where everyone is on their best behaviour. 

 

Given the limitations of the evidence there’s an unavoidable familiarity to much of the material. However, a history of fairies that didn’t mention Elidyr or the Cottingley fairies, or Bridget Cleary, would be deficient. Young’s emphasis on each is his own. Summarising the story of the Cottingley photographs, he explores their consequences for subsequent fairy belief. The death of Bridget Cleary comes in the context of how belief can be denigrated as superstition and used for political ends. 

 

It's a history where there are few certainties. There are crucial problems other than definition that never will be solved. The contemporary relationship between the fairies of medieval literature and the fairies of popular belief is impossible to untangle. Why the church and civil authorities moved from a long-standing dismissive attitude towards popular ‘non-sanctioned’ supernatural beliefs to what Young aptly calls a lethal credulity will never be known. 

 

At times this uncertainty and the lack of definition threaten to subvert the attempt to discuss the subject. Across time and geography, the accounts are so various, the practices so widespread, so similar yet different that it must be difficult to know what can be excluded from the discussion.   

 

What is missing, inevitably, are the fairies themselves. As Young acknowledges, a history of fairies must be a history of the opinions of educated, literate people, then and now, about other people’s beliefs (p.24). I still don’t know whatLaȝamon thought aluen were, but the book is a reminder of how ‘vast and various’ the human imagination is, and how unpredictable people can be. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of that most rational of detectives, was a believer in the Cottingley photographs. Hugh Dowding, who led RAF Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain, was a firm believer in fairies, belonged to the Fairy Investigation Society, and feared the next war would be between fairies and humans.

 

A History of Faires stands out amongst the ones I’ve read for several reasons. The book ranges widely over its subject in time and geography. While he focusses on Europe, Young acknowledges that a belief in fairylike creatures spreads much further. While acknowledging the role of Ireland in fairy lore, the geographic range of Young’s examples prevents him from falling into the trap of suggesting fairies are ‘Celtic’ or that all elves come from Iceland.

 

While adopting a neutral stance as to their existence, he insists that ‘Fairies are part of the rich history of human experience and I do not see why belief in them or claims of encounters with them are any less worthy of respect than say, religious beliefs or reports of religious experiences (p.2)’. Coupled with this is his refusal to fall into the modern trap of ‘explaining’ fairy belief. Modern writers who reach for an explanation which appeals to them as rational can sound like adults in a primary school playground and their explanations usually raise more questions than they answer[v].

 

Because he takes his subject seriously, Young can suggest that more is at stake in a history of fairy belief than the question of when fairies were first portrayed as being tiny, cute creatures with wings. 

 

Belief in non-human populations of supernatural beings existed all over Europe, and not just in those countries where it was endlessly discussed and self-consciously revived by romantically inclined intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth century. (p.205)

 

If this belief in a human-like, non-human social being was so widespread, for so long, does it reveal something about the ways humans made sense of the world and their place in it? What does the disappearance of this belief as a widely held assumption suggest about modern consciousness? The book raises these questions while admitting their answers are beyond its scope. 

 

Fairies a History also has a significance beyond its subject matter. It is an effective demonstration of how difficult it is to understand or discover what people believed in the past.

 

I started with Laȝamon and his story about aluen. He was a parish priest, for part of his life at a small church in Worcestershire. He and his parishioners would have identified themselves as Christian without hesitation. However, we know nothing about what ‘being Christian’ meant to them; what they knew of Christian doctrine or how much they understood it; or how it shaped their behaviour or their imaginative, emotional and intellectual lives. We sometimes know what an elite group of highly educated men thought everyone else should believe. We know what some snarky high-ranking ecclesiastics thought of ‘parish priests’ in general, but of their faith we know as much as we do about their interactions with the local aluen. 

 

Fairies A History is an eloquent reminder that confident assertions about the beliefs of the mass of any population in the past are about as trustworthy as those famous photographs taking in a garden in Cottingley. 

 

 

---

[i] Cyril Edwards, ‘Layamon’s Elves’ in Laȝamon: Context, Language, and Interpretation, Edited by Rosemond Allen, Lucy Perry and Jane Roberts. P.95 

[ii] A point made by both Jeremy Harte in Fairy Encounters in Medieval England and Richard Sowerby in Natural and Supernatural in Early Medieval England. 

[iii] This is similar to Alaric Hall’s suggestion in Elves in Anglo-Saxon England that the early Old English evidence suggest Elves were ‘Corporeal anthropomorphic beings mirroring the human in groups which believed in them (p.68).’ Such definitions give historians room to manoeuvre even if they aren’t very helpful for the reader.

[iv] For a focussed discussion of Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church, see, Richard Firth Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars. 

[v] See for example Matthias Egeler’s ‘Explanation’ of some of the practices associated with fairy abduction in Elves and Fairies: A short history of the Otherworld, p.61. 

King and Conqueror. Taking the History out of Historical Fiction.

This article first appeared in the June 2026 issue of The Brazen Head. 

https://brazen-head.org/2026/06/15/king-and-conqueror-taking-the-history-out-of-historical-fiction/ 

Warning. Opinionating in progress.

The dust has settled and King and Conqueror has faded away to wherever TV series go to be forgotten. Nominally based on the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, it attracted criticism for its many historical inaccuracies. The history was wrong; the changes to chronology dizzying; characterisation was preposterous; the costumes and the armour were bad; men said fuckalot and everyone and everything was permanently dirty. Some of its defenders pointed out that it was not a documentary but ‘historical fiction’, a sensible defence undermined by repeated claims by those involved with the series that it was historically accurate.

 

If the history was so inaccurate it can’t be called ‘historical’, the fiction was the latest instalment in a collective infantilisation of the Middle Ages. Instead of the rich strangeness of the past appearing in historical dramas, film makers insist on confusing history with fantasy while erasing the differences between past and present. By leaning on the tropes of modern film, and fantasy films in particular, they present an adolescent version of the past which is rarely as dramatic as the reality it pretends to dramatize.

 

There’s a probably apocryphal story about the screening of the film, Titanic. Someone in the audience started to object, loudly, because the pattern of the rivets on the ship’s hull was not historically accurate. 

 

Every historical film brings out the Rivet Counters. Harold’s cloak is fastened incorrectly. The armour is wrong. The hairstyles are wrong. It gives people with specialised knowledge the opportunity to air their expertise. King and Conqueror has given the Rivet Counters many reasons to object. You will find their objections on YouTube. 

 

Not all historical objections are rivet counting and more is at stake than the lack of colour in the clothing or the preposterous attempts at ‘armour’, especially in this case because those involved with the production have repeatedly claimed their version is historically accurate.

 

A consulting company called SceneSpan claim on their website: 

 

‘King And Conqueror.

In this project, history was the script.

Brought in during early development, we advised across the script to ensure historical authenticity from the ground up: story arcs, character motivations, political dynamics, and cultural detail. Set during the Norman Conquest, the series required careful navigation of both Anglo-Saxon and Norman worldviews. Our role helped ground the drama in the lived realities of 11th-century power and identity.[emphasis is theirs]’[i]  

 

What grounds a story in the ‘lived realities’ of the past is a question: in this place and time, would a character of this rank say this, or act in this way?[ii] The failure to consider this ruins King and Conqueror and almost every other film set in and around this period. 

 

In the first episode characters are ignorant of their own history. When William and Matilda are arguing with the king of France, the latter scornfully suggests that only a fool would try to sail an army across the channel. It’s meant as dramatic irony, given that we all know that’s what William will do, but the historical king of France would have known armies had been sailing back and forth across the Channel and the North Sea for centuries. How else did he think Sweyn Forkbeard conquered England or the ‘Normans’ got to ‘Normandy’?

 

At other times characters act with no knowledge of the lived reality of their world. 

 

William rides away from the coronation on his own. He’s a Duke. In a culture where public display was essential, there should be a retinue and all the other signs and symbols of his wealth and status. He’s also a royal guest, which meant the king was responsible for his safety and would have provided guides and an escort. He had been ambushed on the way there, but apparently this doesn’t make him cautious on the return journey. How was he going to find his way to Pevensey on his own? Did the writer imagine a modern road with signposts?[iii]

 

The changes to chronology are dizzying. William was born in 1028. Even if he had attended the coronation (he didn’t) you can work out his age. In King and Conqueror an adult William leaves the pregnant wife he didn’t marry until the 1050s to attend the coronation in 1043, where he is introduced as the victor of Val es Dunes, a battle he didn’t fight until 1047. The events at Dover, which are being plotted at the coronation, and which will lead to Godwin being banished, happened in 1051.

 

If time is treated loosely, characters are melded together, their names are changed, or they are left out. The Evil Earl of Mercia is called Morcar. At the time of Edward’s coronation, Leofric, was earl of Mercia. His grandson, Morcar, became earl of Northumbria when the locals rose against Tostig and deposed him in 1065. Making him earl in 1043 means the devious goings on of 1065, which potentially reveal so much about Harold’s character, have been erased[iv].

 

The defence against these objections, and even in the first episode there is so much more to object to, is that this is not a documentary, but historical fiction. It’s a sound defence. Some historical inaccuracies need not ruin a film, and accuracy does not guarantee a film will be entertaining. 

 

If you take the history out of historical fiction the characters are left flapping in the wind. In the complex context of their time, their choices and actions defined them. Remove that context and the characters are just names. Remove the history as context, and something must replace it. In King and Conqueror, the replacement is always so much less than what it replaces. 

 

The period between the coronations of Edward the Confessor and William 1^st is covered by well-written, historically accurate books aimed at a non-specialist audience. Without learning Old English, Anglo-Norman and Latin, it’s easy to stack a shelf and be up to date with the current knowledge of the time and the characters. It is depressing to think that the writer and producers of King and Conqueror didn’t bother. It is even more depressing to think that they did and then decided to throw out the history because they thought their version was better.

 

Godwin was banished in 1051 because of an incident in Dover. 

 

The facts are murky. Different versions of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle give slightly different versions of the events. Returning to the continent, Eustace of Boulogne and his men were involved in an altercation with the inhabitants of the town. There were deaths on both sides. Eustace seems to have raced to the king and given his version of the story. Without waiting to ask Godwin to investigate, Edward called on him, as the relevant earl, to reestablish the king’s justice by punishing the town[v].

 

When Godwin refused, and according to some versions demanded Eustace’s men be punished, he was called on to answer charges of treason. Turning up to court without guarantees of safe conduct, including the formal exchange of hostages, was never a good idea. Godwin was old enough to remember at least one culling of the earls. He refused to appear and called out his armed supporters. The king was expected to keep the peace and punish wrongdoing. Edward could not withdraw the order without losing face. Edward and the Witan found Godwin guilty of treason. The other earls sided with Edward. Godwin fled and his family scattered into exile. [vi]

 

Earls were not kings, they were the king’s appointed officers, and their job was to enforce the king’s rule. When Godwin refused the order to ravage Dover he was challenging the king’s authority. For nearly ten years he had been the most powerful man in the country. His daughter was the queen. He must have thought he was secure enough to ignore a royal order.

 

Why did Godwin refuse a direct order from his king: arrogant self-confidence that reveals his own bad judgement and his poor opinion of Edward? Or was he feeling his influence slide, his advice ignored, his proteges passed over and trying to assert himself? Did he have a personal dislike of Eustace, or of the ‘foreigners’ who Edward seemed to be favouring? 

 

Was Edward overconfident? Not thinking clearly? Desperate to please a foreign relative? Was he looking for an excuse to break Godwin’s hold over him. Did he expect Godwin to protest and then back down and was taken by surprise when he didn’t?  

 

No ‘personal’ records survive from this period. We don’t know what the characters were thinking. The writer of historical fiction is free to explore the possibilities within the framework of the historical events and to offer an interpretation.  

 

King and Conqueror replaces this with simplistic nonsense about Godwin being accused of ‘breaking The Treaty’. It’s clear to the audience that whatever happened in Dover was due to the machinations of the Evil Mercian Morcar and the Wicked Queen Mother. Godwin becomes the ‘Good Guy’ done over by ‘The Baddies’. It’s childish in the most derogatory sense of that term. 

 

Fictional characters don’t have to be ‘realistic’, but they need a coherent story world in which to operate. Mangle the history, and the possibilities of coherence become increasingly small. The fashion for presenting characters in ‘the past’ as though they were modern people with the approved attitudes and fashionable responses adds to the mess[vii].

 

In the first episode, Sweyn has sex with a bride on her wedding night as it’s his ‘right as her lord’^[viii]. His brothers are disgusted, and he has to threaten Tostig to prevent him from telling their father. Their disgust is a modern reaction. If it were his right, legal and customary (which to be clear, it wasn’t) why would they have been disgusted? They would have normalized the behaviour. 

 

Harold promises his mistress he’ll never let his father force him into a ‘church marriage’ with anyone else. This is the romantic, individualistic modern lover of popular fiction speaking. If Harold Godwinson ever said that to Edith Swanneck, they would have both known that he was lying[ix].  

 

Without the historical context, King and Conqueror settles for importing the adolescent tropes of modern fantasy. The result is fiction as bad as the history. 

 

Emma, the queen mother, is the only woman in history to have married two kings of England and had two sons, by different fathers, who ruled the country. She survived the reigns of five kings before Edward, her son by her first marriage, was crowned. Matilda alludes to all this before William leaves for England. Yet the writers do not have Emma behave with the subtlety of a survivor and successful political operator. She is a strident pantomime witch. Harold is a tousled haired womble with daddy issues. He likes to bite noses during combat. He’s dominated by his mistress and portrayed as an untrustworthy liar. You’d think twice about following him to the pub.

 

The characters are juvenile, leaning heavily on the tropes of popular film. We know these are hard men because they say fuckalot. Both William and Godwin have wandered in from a film about gangland struggles for control of the neighbourhood. Godwin seems to be the last survivor of the Kray Brothers gang. And there’s the ‘Bromance’[x].

 

The film industry has a long record of treating the Middle Ages as a vague backdrop and mangling history in the process. In the general slop of cheap art chasing money at a time of rising historical ignorance, it would be surprising if King and Conqueror wasn’t the mess it was. 

 

Does it matter that King and Conqueror is less true to the 11^th century than House was to a modern American Hospital? 

 

We knew House was fiction. But King and Conqueror has been presented as history. This is not a story about fictional characters in a vaguely rendered past. The distinction seems important. It uses the names of historical persons in a way that suggests this is a representation of those people in their specific historical setting. Publicity for the series made repeated claims for its accuracy as history. 

 

Responding to criticisms about historical inaccuracies, James Norton, the actor who plays Harold, stated: 

 

The truth was, they were friends. They met at the coronation, we know that William invited Harold over to Normandy to fight against the Baron of Brittany, he did swear, he acknowledged William’s rightful claim to the crown over the relics – whether he meant it or not, we don’t know. But so much of what we tell, in terms of their relationship and friendship, is true.[xi] 

 

It is not the truth. They were not friends. They did not meet at the coronation. They probably didn’t meet in person until 1065 when Harold was (possibly shipwrecked) on the continent [xii].We don’t know why he was on that ship but none of the suggested reasons include an invitation from William ‘to fight against the baron of Britanny’. We do know Harold was in William’s custody. We do not know what oath Harold made, if he made an oath, over relics while he was there. William had no ‘rightful claim’ to the crown of England. 

 

Whether this is ignorance or indifference, the insidious lie; ‘This is true’, is where the damage is done. One can guarantee that there are now people who believe this is ‘the real story’ because James Norton said so, and for them an actor is a more reliable source of information than any historian. There are people who believe Clive Owen’s King Arthur revealed the identity of the real king Arthur because the film was advertised as ‘The untold true story that became the legend’[xiii]. No amount of fact-based refutation is going to change their minds. They saw it on the screen.  

 

Perhaps it’s a minority view, but King and Conqueror turns a period of unusual historical importance into a pantomime. It would be naïve to expect any film maker to treat the past with respect or have any respect for people who do. Art chasing money doesn’t have a conscience. The idea art should, or could, be responsible, seems quaintly, almost embarrassingly, old fashioned. The period between the coronations of Edward and William I is crucial in the history of the British Isles. Old fashioned as it seems, it’s possible to believe it deserves better than to be presented as a second-rate episode of Game of Thrones or Bored of the Rings without the attempted humour. 

 

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[i] https://scenespan.com/our-work/ Their emphasis in bold. The kindest thing to say about this quote is that perhaps they worked on a different King and Conqueror to the one we all watched.

[ii] To be very clear I don’t mean they should be speaking Old English or a faked version of it. 

[iii] William never learnt to speak English, so he couldn’t ask for directions either. 

[iv] Tostig, was unpopular as Earl of Northumbria. In October 1065, while he was away at the royal court, the locals killed his followers, and marched south. They were joined by the Mercians under their earl, Edwin (Eadwine). The Northumbrians then offered the earldom to Morcar, Edwin’s brother. King Edward wanted to call out the army and crush the rebellion. The army refused to muster. Harold acted as mediator, and Morcar became earl and Tostig was banished. The date is not known but either before or after the uprising Harold married the sister of Edwin and Morcar. Harold swore he was not involved in planning the uprising. Tostig was probably not the only person who didn’t believe him.

[v] Ravaging towns that broke the King’s peace was not unusual. Godwin, Leofric and Seward ravaged Worcester for three days under the previous king after two of the king’s men had been killed in the town.

[vi]  King and Conqueror begins by stating that England is emerging from decades of ‘bloody civil war’.  This is historically wrong. Cnut had ruled from 1016-1035, and while there was disagreement over the succession, it didn’t lead to ‘a civil war’. Despite the popular idea that medieval people went to war at the drop of hat, there is evidence to suggest that those in power in England at the time preferred to avoid armed conflict. This might explain why the Earls first sided with Edward, and then the ease with which Godwin was allowed to return. 

[vii] For an extreme example, see ‘The King’ (2019) in which Henry V is presented as a pacifist who is shocked to discover his courtiers are making money from the war against France. 

[viii] The idea of ‘Premier Noce’ or ‘Droit de seigneur’ or ‘jus primae noce’ has been shown to be a myth invented by much later writers. The historical Sweyn was banished after eloping with an Abbess and murdering his cousin. 

[ix] Calling Edith his mistress is unavoidably and unintentionally derogatory. She was his wife ‘after the Danish fashion’.  This was a marriage that was not sanctioned by the church but regarded by everybody else as a marriage. It allowed aristocratic men to choose a wife, knowing that when the time came and they entered into a church marriage for political reasons, (and all aristocratic marriages were political), they would not be entering into a bigamous relationship. 

[x] I dislike this term as it cheapens friendship but it’s exactly what is presented in King and Conqueror. 

[xi] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/king-conqueror-stars-address-criticism-nikolaj-coster-waldau-james-norton_uk_68b034efe4b0bbcc3f8e4d8a For similar claims see https://www.televisual.com/news/james-norton-on-king-conqueror/

[xii] There is not only disagreement about what happened but about when it happened. Edward’s most recent biographer puts it in 1065. William’s opts for 1064. 

[xiii] This phrase appeared on the poster for the film, popularising the candidature of L. Artorius Castus for the role as ‘the real king Arthur’. However, King Arthur is a good example of a film that is both entertaining and historically inaccurate. 

Ian Brinton reviews 'How Culhwch won Olwen' in Long Poem Magazine.

 

The imaginative absurdity of this early Arthurian romance is caught by Guilar with both humour and music and this is presented to the reader, or the listener, from the moment of Culhwch’s arrival at the king’s court and is greeted by the gatekeeper:

 

      The boy asked, ‘Is there a porter?’

 

      ‘There is and may your head not be your own for asking.

      I am Arthur’s porter on the 1st of January,

      for the rest of the year my deputies are Goodhearer,

      Littlemeatman, Slowstep, and Penpingpong,

      who goes upon his head to save his feet,

      neither earthwards nor heavenwards,

      but like a rolling stone on the floor of the court.’

 

As Guilar’s note to this tells us these names (Huandaw, Gogigwr, Llaeskemyn, Penpingyon in Welsh) are an abrupt indication that the hero accompanied by us as readers is about to enter ‘a different version of the world.’ 

You can read the whole review here:

https://longpoemmagazine.org.uk/reviews/how-culhwch-won-olwen-by-liam-guilar-shearsman-books-2026-and-in-the-shadow-of-the-yew-by-john-barnie-cinnamon-press-2026/