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. 

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/

Review of How Culhwch won Olwen: a verse translation of the oldest Arthurian tale

 

The review concludes.

'Guilar’s reimagining of the story of Culhwch and Olwen blows away the cobwebs and allows us to read this classic work of medieval Welsh literature and foundation stone of the Arthurian cycle with fresh eyes. It’s a triumph.'

 

The full review is here. 

https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2026/04/27/celtic-matters/

 

Along with a review of Book of Inversions, Kit Fryatt & Harry Gilonis,  which sounds fascinating.

The Invention of Charlotte Bronte by Graham Watson

 This book tells the stories of Charlotte Bronte’s last years and the writing of Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography. Unusually, Watson takes the command ‘show don’t tell’ and applies it to the writing of a biography, narrating events, but leaving his readers to draw their own conclusions. The style, with its obsession with the weather, hard journeys, long descriptions of the interior of houses, lingering descriptions of death bed details, and the portrayal of his characters as martyrs, echoes the novels of his protagonists. 

 

1

 

Perhaps after all, the truth about Charlotte Bronte was just as Elizabeth expected from the moment she had met her seven years earlier: that after a life time of emotional starvation and grief, one of the most talented women of her generation was harried and manipulated by the men around her into their serf, that her wish for concord, balance and stability had been exploited into defeated compromise by all those who needed none and, broken in spirit, she crawled, she knelt, then she tremulously stood until the hammer blows of tragedy rained upon her again (p. 231).

 

 It's a fine paragraph. It epitomises a version of Charlotte’s life.  It also reveals what’s wrong with this book. Charlotte is often, as here, presented as a victim. But her life is not all that different to thousands of women of her class, in her position. They served as governesses, and hated it. They worked as teachers when they didn’t want to in a system that ground down teachers and pupils. They looked after widowed fathers or unmarried brothers because their society had no other outlet for them.  And compared to millions living in the new urban slums, her life was one of genteel ease. Howarth parsonage was not an isolated place on the moors. There were people in the village. If the Brontes didn’t want to socialise with people they thought of as inferior that was their choice. 

 

“One of the Most talented women of her generation”. One of the most talented writers perhaps, but Charlotte and her sisters were lucky to be talented in a way their culture found acceptable for women. Women who might have been talented in other ways had no chance. There were no doctors, or lawyers. Universities were barred to them, the visual arts and music were difficult to access. ‘Harried and manipulated’ are value judgements this book doesn’t investigate. After the publication of Jane Eyre doors opened in the literary world she and her sisters had dreamt about. That she couldn’t walk through doesn’t mean they weren’t open. 

 

Specific to this book is that ‘perhaps’ which begins the sentence.

 

In a book about ‘The invention of Charlotte Bronte’ you might expect some analysis of this ‘truth’, or some attempt to see how such a story came to dominate alternative ones. Watson offers no such analysis.

 

If you’re looking for some new information or insight into Charlotte’s life, or Gaskell’s biography, there isn’t any. The perspective provided by over a century of fossicking in the small details of Charlotte’s life is missing. The material has been picked over since Charlotte’s death. The essential debates: was Cowan bridge school a nightmare; was Charlotte’s childhood as grim as she presented it, what exactly was her relationship with three men: her father, her husband, and her Belgian Professor? If you’re waiting for a verdict, a weighing of the evidence, or even a statement of the current consensus, you will be disappointed. The book is happy to narrate. 

 

The subtitle of the book points to its structural flaw. It has two halves, and they don’t seem to have been introduced to each other. Logically, Charlotte’s relationship with her future biographer could be the subject of the first half, but Gaskell fades in and out and it’s padded with familiar stories from her last few years. The only coherence is chronological. The second part details the writing of Gaskell’s biography and its immediate reception. Presumably this is the ‘scandal that made her’ though it could be argued Jane Eyre deserves that title. The jacket blurb hints at ‘Illicit love’. 

 

The title suggests the ‘real Charlotte’ has gone missing, has been recreated out of the facts as a figure that that isn’t ‘factual’, but there’s no analysis to distinguish between  ‘truth’ and ‘invention’. 

 

2

 

What the book does, perhaps inadvertently, is demonstrate the problems of writing a biography and the dangers of using biography to illuminate a writer’s work. 

 

Charlotte and her sisters wrote fiction. They took the material available and transmuted it into novels that people are still reading and admiring over a century and a half later. For Charlotte, her version of her childhood gave her material for Jane Eyre. What should matter for fiction is what she did with her memories, not how accurate the memories were.  

 

Since the publication of Jane Eyre, people have been rummaging through Charlotte’s books in search of ‘the originals’ for places, characters and incidents. The search has fuelled, and been fuelled by, a Bronte industry with Howarth its official shine and the sisters as secular martyrs. 

 

The Wikipedia entry for William Carus Wilson bluntly states:

 

William Carus Wilson was an English churchman and the founder and editor of the long-lived monthly The Children's Friend. He was the inspiration for Mr Brocklehurst, the autocratic head of Lowood School, depicted by Charlotte Brontë in her 1847 novel Jane Eyre.

 

Jane Eyre was published as an autobiography ‘edited by Currer Bell’. But the literary game Charlotte was playing became a stick to beat her art and her books even when the pretence was dropped. The desire of readers to track down ‘originals’ suggests an inability or reluctance to accept fiction as invention, and a preference for gossip and scandal over the pleasures of reading. Or perhaps suggests gossip and scandal were as much an essential part of the pleasures of reading fiction over 150 years ago as they seem to be today. 

 

Readers will  either be convinced imaginatively by the horrors of Lowood school and repelled by the bigoted hypocrisy of Mr. Brocklehurst or dismiss both as incredible. What or who these were ‘based’ on is irrelevant. Fiction is a culturally sanctioned form of lying.  For a reader who thinks Lowood and Brocklehurst are overdone, being told that they are based on Cowan Bridge and William Carus Wilson, and both were that bad in reality doesn’t make the portrait any more believable. It just adds a qualification: this is unconvincing even if it’s based on real people and places. 

 

Once the game of ‘who is based on whom’ was underway the ‘public truth’ mattered for the owners of Cowan Bridge school, or William Carus Wilson and his son, or the Hegers, and for Mr. Bronte. Madame Heger may have resented Charlotte not because she suspected she was having an affair with her husband but because the identification of her school with the one in Villette ruined the school.  

 

The factual, provable truth, matters for a biographer. But often it’s not possible to establish it beyond doubt. Charlotte’s relationship with Monsieur Heger. Was their relationship sexual? Was it reciprocal? Or did Charlotte invest her imagination in a fantasy that was never requited? 

 

Who was Charlotte Bronte? There are versions of her, there were versions of her even in her own lifetime. Is ‘the truth’ the point where all the versions overlap, the total of them all, or one out of the many? Watson implies Charlotte was trying to control the narrative, telling the story of her harsh childhood and schooling to everyone who listened. She tried to control the reception of her sisters’ work when their books were posthumously reissued. She was determined to establish her version.

 

Gaskell had met Charlotte and was able to interview many of the key characters in her life. She struggled to find objective truth, dealing with perception, memory and bias. Eyewitnesses did not remember or remembered and then recanted. Others didn’t feel able to speak publicly about what they knew.  

 

When Gaskell started to read her correspondence, she discovered that Charlotte presented a different version of herself to different correspondents. Each batch ‘presented to her a different woman, remade to something more agreeable than Charlotte felt herself to be from each of her contacts’. One of those contacts, Harriet Martineau, reading Charlotte’s letter to others, ‘concluded Charlotte had been disingenuous’. Others called her a pathological liar. 

 

The problem of the truth wouldn’t go away. The story of Branwell’s ‘affair’ with his employer’s wife required tact as the lady in question was still alive. There were versions but who to believe: Branwell? Charlotte? The wife? Even at the time establishing the truth of what happened was impossible. 

 

Watson tends to present Elizabeth Gaskell in a positive light, but she must have known that ‘telling the truth’ would hurt people who were alive. Some of Charlotte’s friends encouraged this as a form of second hand revenge, but the publisher’s lawyers were always going to be nervous and the second edition of the life was suitably altered. 

 

For anyone who deals with time periods much earlier than the 19^th century, it’s a common thought that if only more information survived, we could know the characters in our histories so much better. In an absence of diaries, letters, journals, the testimony of people who knew our subjects, they are often little more than a name and some dates. 

 

What this book shows is that even with an abundance of evidence, even when the eye- witnesses and participants can be interviewed, beyond the dates and places, ‘who was Charlotte Bronte’ was not and is not a simple question. 

 

That thought has to undermine any approach to her fiction, or anyone else’s, which justifies itself by recourse to biography. We can know Jane Eyre, because all the information about her is in the book that bears her name. We cannot know Charlotte Bronte with similar confidence. Trying to use Charlotte’s life to illuminate her novels is using one fiction to read another.

Review of Robbie Coburn’s The Foal in the Wire

This review originally appeared in the Brazen Head, July 2025.

Robbie Coburn’s The Foal in the Wire (Lothian, 2025, 121 pages) 

 

Set in rural Australia The Foal in the Wire is a book length narrative of short, individually titled poems. 

 

The story is told by Sam, an adolescent boy. One night he finds a foal caught in a barbed-wire fence. He and his neighbour’s daughter, Julia, save the injured animal. As they help it regain its health, they draw closer together. Sam’s parents’ marriage is falling apart; he’s bullied at school, and Julia’s father is an abusive drunk. Some things are resolved: some can’t be. 

 

Australia has a tradition of narrative poetry that shows how rich and varied the ‘verse novel’ can be. The three best known, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune, and Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers, demonstrate different ways a writer could approach ‘narrative verse’. They are all book-length stories, their lines don’t go all the way to the right margin, and they are marketed as poetry. Their differences are greater than these similarities. Porter’s narrator, Jill, is the literary granddaughter of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Told as a sequence of short, free verse poems, Porter’s lines and images create a modern, laconic private eye. Fredy Neptune is a masterclass in controlled rhythm, and the story, progressing through tightly controlled eight-line stanzas, reads like a picaresque novel. Wearne’s The Lovemakers, with its huge cast of characters, written in a variety of verse forms, reads like nothing and no one else and at 800 pages is one of the longest verse narratives.

 

At the same time, staying in Australia, there’s a tradition of verse novels aimed at what is now described as the Young Adult market. Pioneered by writers like Steven Herrick, whose A Place Like This still reads well after thirty years, these books range from Herrick’s teenagers trying to find their place in modern Australia to work as different in both form and content as the dystopian science fiction of Lisa Jacobsen’s The Sunlit Zone.[i]

 

The Foal in the Wire, aimed at the YA market, sits comfortably in such company. It would make an excellent short story. The question anyone writing narrative poetry is forced to confront, sooner or later, is why not write the story in prose? Part of the answer, as suggested above, is that there is a range of techniques for organising words and creating effects with words which are available to someone writing verse.

 

Coburn has chosen to make little use of those resources. If organised sound is the essential characteristic of poetry, there’s little poetry in the book.

 

The Foal in the Wire opens:

 

As I run down the veranda steps
in the dark

I can still hear them screaming
at each other
inside the house.

 

he doesn’t love her
and she doesn’t love him
but they stay. 

                                    ‘Foal’

 

Read aloud, I can’t hear a significant difference if the lines were written out as prose. 

 

As I run down the veranda steps in the dark, I can still hear them screaming at each other inside the house. he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t love him but they stay.[ii]

 

It is very popular stye of verse. The internet is awash with poets who write declarative sentences chopped into short lines. Some of them have had astonishing commercial success.[iii] For anyone brought up on this kind of poetry, and that includes many of the current YA market accessing poetry outside of school, Coburn’s style is going to be immediately familiar and comfortable.

 

In short poems, the style has very little to commend it. It sounds like a clumsy effort to plunk ‘Three Blind Mice’ on a Stradivarius which has recently been used by a virtuoso to play Bach’s Solo Partitas for violin.

 

However, as Coburn’s poem in the Brazen Head for Spring 2025 suggest, style here is a choice, a balancing of possible loss and gain, and such a plain style has definite advantages when used to write narrative verse.  

 

No one speaks in poetry but it’s easy to imagine someone telling this story. If Sam were speaking in iambic pentameter or tightly controlled Spenserian stanzas, littering his story with clever literary allusions, he would not sound like a lost teenager in rural Australia.[iv]

 

The other major advantage is pace. The story moves with the inevitability of a folk tale or a parable. Like a folk tale it can deal with cruelty and loss without romanticising or sensationalising either.  

 

Like a folk tale there is a characteristic blend of the general and the specific. Small details give the story credibility while there is an absence of details that would identify where and when the story takes place. The Foal in the Wire  is located somewhere in rural Australia, on two properties that run horses. There is little to fix when the story happens. Having moved away, Julia writes a letter and sends it through the post. Although she and Sam take the bus to school, they don’t use computers or phones to communicate.[v]

 

Balanced against this is a careful use of detail making the story believable :

 

Sam sneaking out at night:

 

making sure to stay on the clover

lining the sides of the path

to avoid the potholes and depressions

left in the ground by horses.

                                                      (‘Furtive’)

 

tells us he’s done this many times. Both children, having watched their fathers, know how to help the foal. 

 

Julia has bought another bottle of formula

and I have a bundle of hay

I gathered

from inside the shed.

 

dad won’t notice.

whenever hay is lifted

stalks fall from the bale

and gather on the floor. 

                                    ‘Waiting’

 

Style allows the story to become its own metaphor. The foal is both a particular foal, and a symbol of those who are damaged and survive. None of this needs to be underlined or emphasised. 

 

It would be a brave writer, especially in a first book, who trusted the reader enough to let the story do all the work. And ‘story’ isn’t everything. The book has a therapeutic potential. It’s offering its readers a realistic message of hope. Coburn occasionally gives those readers a gentle nudge towards the preferred reading as the narrative unfolds but comes close to labouring the point at the end. 

 

The story ends at ‘After’, which concludes:

 

I want to write down everything

about my brother and Julia and the foal

 

I am no longer ashamed of who I am

and where I come from.

 

I can hold on and be anyone.

 

Two poems follow and both make the same point without adding to the story. The last piece, ‘Wounded Animal’ ends: 

 

Maybe this 

scarred and haunted body 

is enough--

 

the wounded animal

is capable of survival. 

 

If this seems to be restating what was already obvious, it is in keeping with the narrator’s character in a book aimed at adolescent readers and dedicated ‘for those who are wounded and surviving’. 

 

There is a contemporary tendency to read poetry through the life of the writer. To claim that the writing is ‘authentic’, ‘raw’[vi] or ‘based on experience’, can set up a defence which  frames any criticism as cruel, irrelevant or a personal attack on the writer.[vii]

 

But as made art, published and offered to strangers, what should matter is the quality of the product. No matter how intense the experience, or the emotion it engenders, once it’s written down and offered to a stranger, it is an unpleasant fact that even trauma is a cliché of life and literature. The more literate the reader, the greater the chance they’ve read versions of this story before. As humans we sympathise with people who suffer, but readers deserve something more for their money than a stranger telling them how bad their life was. 

 

In the wrong hands The Foal in the Wire would be a string of YA Fiction cliches: a family disintegrating after the death of a child, a narrator lost, isolated, contemplating suicide, bullied at school; first love; first sexual experience; a drunk abusive father; some form of reconciliation. 

 

What is therefore most impressive about Coburn’s handling of his material is that at no stage does his book read like a string of clichés. ‘First Time’ is that rare piece of writing, a description of a first sexual encounter that doesn’t sound coy, crude or clinical. It manages to capture the baffling nature of the experience:

 

like holding a body

and cradling a ghost

at the same time. 

 

Bunting’s injunction: ‘Emotions first- but only facts in the poem’ might be too austere for a modern audience, but Coburn’s book comes close. There is no self-pity, no attempts to exaggerate the horror of the situation and no unrealistic Hollywood ending in which everything is made good and Sam and Julia live happily ever after, running their  own shelter for abused horses.  

 

Whether or not the story is based on lived experience, Coburn’s triumph is to make it believable.

 

---

[i] The list of book length narratives could be extended, but these five examples give some idea of their variety. Verse novel is no more a genre than prose novel. 

[ii] This review was written with an uncorrected proof copy so quotations may vary in the final, published version. In the version I used sentences within poems consistently begin without a capital letter.

[iii] Why readers buy books containing poems they themselves could have written while they were still at high school is one of life’s mysteries. 

[iv] This is not to suggest that there are no literary teenagers in rural Australia. One of the criticisms levelled against Fredy Neptune was that its central character was too eloquent. 

[v] There are possible reasons for a lack of phones and computers but their absence adds to the effect.

[vi] Although it seems I’m in the minority, ‘raw’, when applied to writing, is not a compliment. It suggests a lazy chef slapping uncooked food on the diners’ plates and leaving them to do his or her job. 

[vii] The other version of this is to dismiss the writing without reading it because ‘everyone knows’ the writer is guilty of unacceptable behaviour, beliefs or opinions. Both popular extremes tend to ignore the actual writing.

1217 The battles that Saved England by Catherine Hanley A review of sorts

1217 The Battles that Saved England. By Catherine Hanley. Osprey 2024

 

1217 tells the story of a siege and two battles; one on land, one on sea, that ‘saved England’.  As a story it has a great plot and a fascinating cast of characters. But while Hanley writes with the skill of a novelist, her story is true and grounded in a careful use of the available sources.  

 

Background.

 

By 1215 King John and his barons were at an impasse. He had been forced to concede what later became known as Magna Carta, but he had placed England in the hands of the Pope. In a radical about face, the Pope moved from excommunicating John and putting England under Interdict, to declaring the Charter null and void and threatening to excommunicate anyone who rebelled against the rightful King.  In response some of the barons invited Louis, the son of the French King, Phillip Augustus, to become the King of England. 

 

The first French contingent landed in December 1215. Louis set sail with a small invasion fleet in 1216, landed unopposed in May, and was proclaimed King of England on the second of June 1216. Proclaimed, but not crowned. Hanley suggests this was a crucial error while accepting that as an excommunicate he couldn’t take part in a church service.

 

John died in October 1216.  Hanley sees this as the best thing he could have done to help his cause. To anyone placing bets it looked like the Angevins were finished. Large parts of the country were in rebel hands and John’s son, Henry, only nine years old, and surrounded by a shrinking group of royalists. However, while John had often seemed to go out of his way to alienate everyone, Henry was surrounded by a small group of exceptionally capable men. Their acknowledged leader was William the Marshall, ‘Europe’s greatest Knight’. His loyalty to the royal family was both famous and so unshakeable that it could be described as pathological. 

 

 

1217

Hanley tells the story of how those loyal to Henry  staged an improbable military comeback to insure that an Angevin King would stay on the English throne. It is far more entertaining and interesting story than most fictional ones set in the Middle Ages.

 

How much was at stake in 1217 is hard to see in retrospect. For the 90 percent of the population living below the nobility, would it have mattered if a French (Capetian) or a French (Angevin) king were ruling them? 

 

However, Hanley presents the events as crucial in the development of a sense of Englishness. She frames the sea battle off Sandwich as an English fleet defending England against a French invasion. The defeat of the French fleet is compared to the later, more well-known destruction of the Spanish Armada, with Hanley arguing the latter was of lesser consequence.  Hanley also suggests that throughout the war there is a definite shift towards a sense of ‘England vs France’. 

 

At the time, however, nationality might not have played a decisive role: it may have seemed clear cut. Henry was the King’s son. The royalists risked everything and stood by him.

 

Not all the rebels stood by Louis. As the war went on there was significant wavering in their ranks. This may have had little to do with nationalism either. Men who had hated John had no reason to hate his infant son and if successful Louis would be obliged to reward his French followers, but at whose expense? 

 

Hanley has a healthy scepticism about some of the leading players. Without denying the Marshall’s role in the war, she acknowledges his failure to protect the citizens of Lincoln and notes his acquisitiveness.  The Marshall’s flattering biography is one of the chief sources for the period: Hanley avoids both uncritical acceptance and uncritical dismissal. 

 

Likewise, while acknowledging Hubert de Burgh’s essential role in the defence of Dover, her description of his actions at the battle of Sandwich, often claimed as his great victory, doesn’t make his participation a deciding factor in the battle.

 

IF 1217 has a great plot, it also has an outstanding cast. At the centre, though missing from the action for obvious reasons, is Henry III, a nine-year-old boy whose father was disliked by almost everybody, overwhelmed by his coronation. William the Marshall, ‘Europe’s greatest knight’, who at 70 was given the task of regent and the job of saving the Angevin line, enthusiastically charging into battle at Lincoln. Eustace the Monk, renegade pirate who had turned his coat so many times no one knew which was inside or out anymore, leading Louis’ fleet. Wilkin of the Weald, a commoner who led a ‘guerilla’ war against the French; Blanche of Castille, Louis’ wife who could be described as formidable without any exaggeration.

 

Hanley’s contribution to the story is to bring others into the limelight. Phillip D’Albini, who may have been as responsible for victory at the battle of Sandwich as De Burgh. Nichola de la Haye, who in her sixties held Lincoln for the Royalists, held her nerve throughout the siege, and was rewarded by being removed from her post so William Longespee, who had swapped sides during the war, could be rewarded. Hanley describes the regency’s treatment of Nicola as ‘one of the most astonishing acts of ingratitude imaginable’ but adds in a footnote that it was Nicola who ‘had the last laugh’. 

 

If one of the advantages of a book like this is it gives 254 pages to events that are covered in one paragraph of David Carpenter’s biography of Henry the Third, some characters still seem inscrutable. 

 

Louis is a shadow in the narrative. His father had refused the military and financial support that would have given him a formidable invasion force. His campaign stalled first in front of Dover Castle, and then came to a halt when, after the defeat of his army at Lincoln, the reinforcements sent by his wife, Blanche, were destroyed off Sandwich. He wasn’t present at either of the two decisive battles. Hanley’s narrative suggests one of the contributing factors to the French defeats was that no one seems to have been in overall command at crucial times.

 

Floating through this, as invisible as usual, is Isabella of Angouleme. John’s marriage to her in 1200 had been politically disastrous. In 1207 she had given birth to John’s first legitimate child, Henry, and had then given birth to three more children.  She was offered no part in the regency. This seems strange but so was her response. She returned to France at the end of 1217, leaving her son a crowned King, but a child surrounded by advisors. 

 

Because of the limitations of the evidence, there are always questions that will never be answered, but the book also shows history as a series of accidents. Dover did not fall to Louis because it was a strong fortification held by a commander who held his nerve and Louis didn’t have the manpower he needed. But the battle of Lincoln was lost by the French when an inexperienced commander miscounted the oncoming royalists and instead of going out to meet them, where superior French numbers might have won the day, decided to stay inside the city walls. There’s also the secret entrance no one seems to have noticed which would be considered a unacceptable flaw in a fictional account. If the wind had been in the right direction when the French relief fleet originally sailed, then the English would have struggled to meet it, and the reinforcements might have landed. If …

 

1217 surprised me. I don’t like writers who use the first-person plural. Although it used to be common in factual writing it has become corrupted by politicians using it as an invidious positioning technique. But Hanley returns it to its courteous usage. Her style is that of a well-informed, capable guide, and while the tour goes round the usual places, she paces it carefully and stops to provide useful background information. She is very clear in her discussion of the sources. 

 

Books about the Middle Ages that focus on battles tend to misrepresent the period. There’s so much more to Edward III’s reign than Sluys, Crecy, Poitiers and deeds of daring do, but in this case the siege/s of Dover castle, the battle of Lincoln, and the sea battle off Sandwich are crucial events in a pivotal year.  There are times history swings on a hinge and at the end of 1216 a King of France on the throne of England was a distinct possibility. 1217 as a date would then have had had the same prominence in collective memory as 1066. Hanley’s excellent book, ironically, explains why this isn’t so.   

 

 

From Base Materials by Jenny Lewis, a review of sorts.

 Jenny Lewis, From Base Materials, Carcanet, 2024

Well-written poems provide the pleasure that only well-written poetry can provide, a fact that sometimes get lost on a generation of writers who think that making declarative statements and chopping them into short lines constitutes the best that can be done with the art.

From a re-imagining of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, via  short illustrated poems reminiscent of Edward Lear, to the outrage and indignation that seethes through her poem for Sarah Everhard, the pleasure of reading Jenny Lewis’s From Base Materials comes from the excellence of its writing and the variety of its content.

Lewis’ previous book include an acclaimed version of the Epic of Gilgamesh and her translation of  Adnan Al-Sayegh’s Let Me Tell you What I Saw. The latter is a book anyone interested in modern poetry, especially long form poetry, should read. The former is the most readable version of Gilgamesh you’re likely to find.

While tightly themed collections of poems all on the same subject allow reviewers to sound profound and provide publishers, if they still publicise books, with snappy publicity shorts, the reading experience can be dreary. There was a time when books had titles like ‘New poems’ and ‘36 poems’. Poets are people who live in the real world, and the real world is various and as humans their reactions to it range widely so why shouldn’t their poems?

From Base Materials moves from the private-domestic, from personal poems in which the writer describes dealing with a mastectomy and the loss of friends, the reality of ‘love in old age’, the wit of ‘Tales from Mesopotamia’ where Gilgamesh’s barber and a street dancer are grumbling, to short translations, humour, moments of reflection and outrage.

 ‘Hearsay’ is a sequence of three short poems (38 lines in total) about Guinivere, Arthur and Lancelot and illustrates many of the strengths of the collection,

If poems are a way of thinking through and in language, then this sequence should offer both the pleasure of itself as a well-made verbal artefact, and comment on the story of Arthur and Guinevere.

The sequence might be asking: Who is Guinevere? In answer, it suggests there are only versions: she seems unsure of, or unhappy with, her identity, while both Lancelot, and Arthur are sure they know who she is, though their versions differ.

In the first poem, ‘Guinevere’, a restless woman, shifts amongst possible identities, waiting for the miracle of recognition.

The poem begins with subversion:  ‘like eve she names the birds/while waiting for miracles’. In the Christian tradition, Eve does not name anything, nor did she wait for miracles. An Eve who did these things would be rebelling against her traditionally assigned role.

However, the line refers to another poem in the collection, ‘As Adam lay sleeping’. Two pages earlier it ends: 

where she, hearing clearly for the first time
the tumultuous singing of the birds,
could set about the task of naming them.

Between ‘As Adam Lay Sleeping’ [with its possible acoustic nod to the repeated line in Kipling’s  ‘Four Angels’] and ‘Hearsay’ is ‘Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee…’ dedicated to ‘Eve, born 6 January 2020’, which ends with the poet describing her wishes for the newborn.  The title, as the poem acknowledges, is a line from Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’.

The sequence ‘Hearsay’ is itself part of a sequence, gaining meaning from other poems in the book, and gaining power by drawing on the wider poetic tradition.   

The birds Guinevere names: ‘owls, peacocks, ptarmigans, doves- ‘ provide a shifting set of possible roles which can only ‘brush against her thoughts’. The list, suggesting restlessness or uncertainty, is followed by suggestions of unhappiness. 

While waiting for miracles, she is ‘polishing the round table, wanting praise.’

A literal reader might object that queens don’t polish tables. But there is a tradition of stories in which queens and princesses are punished by being forced into menial labour or into roles that are at odds with their status. In these stories the essential identity of the woman is either not recognised or not given its due. Here the queen is ‘wanting praise’. Wanting in both senses, lacking and desiring. The phrase suggests her dissatisfaction with her role, with actions that are not in keeping with her sense of her own identity, and explains why she is waiting for miracles.

She does ‘polish’ the Round Table. She brings grace to the gathering and gentles an association of expert killers. She feminises the knights. But that turns her into an adornment, something less than an individual. The fact she wants praise suggests something too about her husband’s attitude. Polishing the table in this sense is a useful activity, but the fact she keeps doing it over and over again suggests no one appreciates her efforts.

In the bath she is ‘angelic, pure, mother of pearl with light bursting from her’. Still not human. As her lover removes his armour piece by piece, ‘the naked hand that held cold steel finds/the warmth of her bird filled body’ while Arthur looks away and sees snipe and plover fall into the net.

Arthur ‘looks away’. Is he looking away as the lovers meet, or is he just watching something else. One of the questions in Malory’s version of this story is at what point does Arthur know his wife is having an affair? The second poem of the sequence, ‘Windhover’, describes the moment he realises the rumours are true.

Like many in the collection it’s a technically impressive poem, and like so many of the poems it draws on literary tradition. While windhover is a dialect name for a kestrel, it’s also the title of one of Gerard Manley Hopkins most famous sonnets. Not only has Lewis used Hopkins title and rhyme scheme, her lines end with the same words as Hopkins’, with one exception, where sillion has been replaced with stallion. The swing and swerve of the world Arthur is looking at is mirrored in the rhythm of the first eight lines.

Such technical excellence is impressive, but on its own it suggests the workshop exercise that proves little but linguistic virtuosity. The question that often goes begging is ‘to what purpose’? Here it suggests Arthur’s complicated relationship with his wife. The sense of awe that pervades Hopkins poem carries over to Arthur’s thoughts about her. But whereas Hopkin’s poem celebrates the glory of creation made specific in a single bird, who masters the elements around it. Arthur is locked into the rhyme scheme of his own misery and his vague awareness of clouds and nameless birds can’t save him from the thought of his wife and friend. Hopkins’ poem also ends;

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

There’s no sense of this transformation into beauty here.

He is out riding. The same clouds Guinivere saw from her bath in the previous poem, ‘like scarves stretched  by the wind’ he only sees as ‘a sky full of clouds’. The poem captures the moment when he knew ‘what his heart had been hiding’….that what ‘they said about her must be true’.

Lancelot, riding on a white stallion, [Arthur’s mind slipping on the crude connotations of riding so close to white but saved by stallion instead of mare] has taken away his dear ‘his lady her raven locks her white body and her lips that burn vermillion’. Unlike Hopkins who labours to capture the singularity of a specific bird, if Arthur sees Guinevere at all he only sees surface. Lancelot has not taken away a friend, or a lover, just a ‘dear’ [with its double meaning of object of affection and something expensive] collection of cliched body parts which do not individualise her but reduce her to type. The woman with lips redder than blood, hair darker than the raven’s wing, skin whiter than the snow is today a figure familiar in fairy tales but goes back to medieval times. Such women are also often tragic figures or participants in a tragedy.

The last poem is ‘Falconer’.

He only saw her whiteness, I

saw her as brindled, wild

            like a spirit you call in

across the darkening fields,

I watch her stoop, then come

            to me with flying jesses

her ferocious eyes unhooded

            unerringly mine.

 

While the pronouns in the first line are unattributed, it’s logical to think ‘he’ is Arthur, who mentions his wife’s ‘white body’. The /I/, presumably Lancelot, sees a different version of the woman. [If this were a stand-alone poem the /I/ becomes far more ambiguous and could be both Lancelot and the poet.]

The first line is a criticism of Arthur’s inability to recognise his wife. For Lancelot, she is ‘wild’ ‘a spirit’ her eyes are ‘ferocious’. She is not soft, or prey but predator. Rather than white, he describes her as ‘brindled’, which might be an odd word to describe a woman, since the dictionary associates it with cats and fur, but it is a word Hopkins used in another famous sonnet, ‘Pied Beauty’ which begins:

Glory be to God for dappled things – 
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

That poem celebrates:

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 
Whatever is fickle, freckled…

 

Lancelot recognises a version of Guinivere that is perhaps more nuanced than Arthur’s doomed fairytale princess. In her meeting with him her eyes are ‘unhooded’…both the falcon whose hood is removed to let it hunt, and the woman who no longer has to pretend. Does he see her as ‘counter, original, spare, strange’?  Has she achieved the kind of life the poet wishes for Eve at the end of ‘Therefore all season shall be sweet to thee…? Lancelot and Arthur both seem to have found themselves, like Adam in Kipling’s ‘Four Angels’;

Till out of black disaster
He arose to be a master
Of Earth and Water, Air and Fire,
But never reached his heart's desire!

The words in ‘Falconer’ undermine any temptation to accept the final poem as a description of Guinevere’s ‘true nature’. He’s not thinking of her as an individual woman but as a hunting bird. By the end of the sequence, she’s still not free, still defined by her relationship with a man. If she’s the falcon and he’s the falconer, however wild the bird, she has been tamed; she can be ‘called in’. He can proclaim she is ‘unerringly mine’. She isn’t even one of the birds she named. Someone else has named her.

Does she love Lancelot because he sees her as she is? Or does he simply offer her a miracle of limited recognition, an improvement on her husband’s inability to notice her? If so it seems a limited improvement. Beyond this, there is a suggestion that their relationship is dangerous to both of them. The contrast is between a spirit that is wild, and one that can be ‘called in’. Restrained, limited. Brought back to its owner. While the phrase ‘she stoops’, beyond its technical meaning in falconry, and the sense of the bird falling towards the thing it will kill, has an inevitable resonance with the phrase ‘She stoops to conquer’ [a phrase which has floated free of its origins to mean something more threatening], suggesting Lancelot’s self-confidence might be misplaced.  

Reading ‘Hearsay’ like this is not meant to be exhaustive or definitive. But hopefully it suggests some of the qualities of the verse in From Base Materials and the pleasure of reading it.

From Base Materials is an impressive collection. You should read it.