Who was Hengist's daughter Part 2

In which she first appears, silent, serving the booze.

Hengist’s daughter first appears in the Historia Brittonum, which may or may not have been written by ‘Nennius’ and is dated to the early decades of the 9^thCentury. 

She is not given a name. Hengist holds a banquet for Vortigern and tells his daughter to serve the alcohol. When Vortigern is drunk, Satan enters into his heart and makes him desire the girl. He asks for her and offers half his kingdom in return. Hengist asks for Kent, the deal is struck and Vortigern marries her. The girl disappears from the story. Later, we are told Vortigern favoured the barbarians ‘because of his wife’, and even later Hengist saves him from the massacre of the British leaders ‘for my daughter’s sake’. When, St. Germanus prays Vortigern to death in his tower, ‘he dies with all his wives’.

That’s all. 

More words are spent on Vortigern’s incestuous relationship with his own daughter or on the confused and equally pointless encounter with Merlin. 

Although four centuries separate the story from the time it’s set in, historically, its bones are not improbable. If the leader of a group of mercenaries had a daughter, he might marry her to his employer as a way of improving his own situation.

But the Historia Brittonum reads like an accumulation of anecdotes. And this anecdote sounds like a shard of a folk tale. The only thing we learn about her is that she is beautiful and she is Hengist’s daughter. Her only recorded action is to serve drinks at a banquet. She has no character. She’s not an Eve type, tempting Vortigern. The devil enters his  heart. Her sole value lies in her relationships to men: Hengist's daughter, Vortigern's wife. It’s not even possible to call her a passive object of desire: she has no opinions or reactions. She does not speak. 

However, if the bones of the story are not improbable, the details are. The audience is asked to believe that the ruler of Britain, a hard-headed war-lord, is so smitten by this girl at their first meeting, that he will trade half his kingdom, alienate his supporters and his sons, risk his life and position and put himself in Hengist’s debt so that he can get her into bed as fast as possible. That does seem improbable. 

It has been suggested that by the ninth century there were two versions of Vortigern’s story circulating amongst the British storytellers. In one he is an honoured ancestor. In another a villain who is responsible for the downfall of Britain. 

The Good Vortigern story eventually disappears. There’s no reason to think Geoffrey of Monmouth knew it had existed. 

The story of Hengist’s daughter makes sense as vilification, if Nennius was supporting his patrons by blackening the reputation of the ancestor of a rival dynasty. For the clerical, Christian writers of the middle ages, sex was dangerous. Excessive, uncontrolled sexual desire was an obvious external marker of an evil character.

Vortigern’s inability to control his desire for Hengist’s daughter is mirrored by his inability to control his desire for his own, with whom he has an incestuous relationship. Both relationships indicate the flawed moral character of the man. As vilification it makes sense, as history, it’s an almost irrelevant slur.

But in this folk tale, the nameless girl might signify Vortigern’s failure as a ruler in other ways. Not only is he is dangerously incapable of controlling his desires but he inverts the relationship he should have with his mercenary. He asks permission when he could demand, offering to buy the girl from his inferior, putting himself in the subordinate position. 

I don’t know which marriage customs are supposed to be operating here but there’s no sense that Hengist is offering any dowry to the bridegroom.

From this limited beginning, the story will be expanded, first by Geoffrey of Monmouth, then by Wace and Laȝamon. It’s possible to watch each storyteller interpreting the story he inherits. The later writers obviously felt something important was happening but in seeking for narrative coherence and significance in their sources, they made explicit what is not suggested in the original. By the time Laȝamon was finished with her, Hengist’s daughter, named and acting of her own volition, will be an essential part of a recurring pattern that structures the Legendary History. 

Which is the next post in which she gets a name and does more than serve the drinks.

Who was Hengist's daughter?

A Presentment of Englishy ends with a poem that looks forward to the story of Vortigern, Hengist and his daughter.

The Matter of Britain

(Western Britain, 450 AD).

Mog the Magnificent

in his daub and wattle hut

lord of the scattered rocks

and the wind scarped ridge

watching the sheep he’s counted

penned on the wet hillside.

The members of his retinue

huddled round the fire,

dozing. The harper

droning stories of Vortigern

Hengist and Rowena.

They say it’s easier to look into the sun

Than look at her. They say,

she is the dawn and when she rises day begins.

Vortigern, traitor,

expert in evil,

skilled in deceit

sold his country

for a pagan witch.

Hengist, a cunning man,

a secret, silent, scheming

man, who pimped

his daughter for a crown

he could have seized.

But I was there when Rowena walked into the hall.

She lifted up the goblet, ‘Wes þu hal, Vortigern cyning’

and I swear, Hengist had pitched her at the son

at Vortimer. She swerved. She chose

and with that choice swerved history and Britain fell.

Anyone who reads A Presentment carefully will know that that last italicised section should not be taken seriously as historical fact.

But who was Hengist’s beautiful daughter?

In the next post, her earliest appearance in ‘The Matter of Britain’.  

'A Presentment of Englishry' is now available for purchase online

A Presentment of Englishry is now available from the American, British and Australian Amazons, as well as from the bookdepository, direct from the publisher https://www.shearsman.com/store/-p121791246 and from the shop on www.liamguilar.com.

A Presentment of Englishry.

Are you English?

A Presentment of Englishry in the 11^th century was the offering of proof that a slain person was English (therefore unimportant), in order to escape the fine levied upon hundred or township for the murder of a ‘Frenchman’ or ‘Norman’. Sometime in the 12th century, Laȝamon, a priest living in the small settlement of Areley Kings wrote the first English version of the Legendary History, tracing the story of Britain from the arrival of the Trojans to the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon domination of the Island. 

His 16,000 lines can be read as A Presentment of Englishry. That was certainly his stated intention: to tell the noble deeds of the English, who they were and where they came from. 

 'A Presentment of Englishry' retells his stories, treating his work the way he treated his sources. It also explores a possible version of his life, taking off from the little that is known about him. Stories from Bede and Gerald of Wales are also retold, and the final section takes the story to the end of Roman Britain as a prelude to the story of Vortigern. 

The book is now available on line, from Shearsman Books at A Presentment of Englishry 

and from the bookdepository at https://www.bookdepository.com/Presentment-Englishry-Liam-Guilar/9781848616622?ref=grid-view&qid=1550755372197&sr=1-12

You can also hear a reading of the title poem here

Rewriting the Middle Ages, James Harpur's 'Kells' 3/3b

This is the fourth, final post about James Harpur's 'Kells'. 

Opinionating in progress. 

Does it matter if Harpur’s Gerald doesn’t fit what is known about his historical namesake? I think it does, in this case. ‘Scribe B’ can be ‘generic early medieval Scribe with (possibly modern) attitudes’ but there is nothing generic about Gerald of Wales. Nor is this the rivet counter's question of historical accuracy which dogs historical fiction. Harpur’s poem is not an episode in a Netflix pseudo historical costume drama whose sole purpose is to entertain the largest possible audience and to hell with the details. 

The poem is a well-written consideration of spiritual questions. It seems to want to be taken seriously. And therefore the argument it proposes or explores is diminished by a mismatch between poem and history. 

And there are two of these. The first is the obvious one. Tact and Humilty are hardly qualities that one can associate with Gerald. 

The second is less obvious.

It’s difficult not to read the Medieval church backwards. Over the last few decades the modern Christian Church, as an institution, has not had a good press. We have been treated, repeatedly, to the news that men of God, some with positions of power and authority, have behaved in an abominable fashion. The medieval Catholic church can be read through the contempt of its protestant critics at a time when it was undoubtedly corrupt. 

It’s dangerously easy to imagine that any career orientated cleric in the 12^thcentury, must, as in this poem, have made a choice between individual spirituality and public advancement and been, if not corrupt, then corrupted.

1)     But I’m not convinced that this is true. What Gerald believed, his own ‘spirituality’ is probably much more complicated, and possibly unknowable, but I don’t think he can be used to represent an opposition he would not have recognized. 

2)    Earlier in the poem Bernard of Clairvaux and Abbot Suger are offered as two different approaches to the numinous. Bernard was unimpressed by art, Suger gilded his church. This is true, but like most apparent binaries it’s the extreme points at either end of a continuum.

3)    This is complicated by the story of Christ’s temptation in the desert which is referenced at the head of the poem. This seems to qualify 2 because it suggests the worldly, rather than being a conduit to the numinous becomes an end in itself. This shift in the argument is not marked in the poem but instead drifts.

4)    Gerald then becomes a representative of one who a) encounters the spiritual through art and b) turns aside for the pursuit of worldly power and c) regrets doing so in his bitter Old age.

5)    I’m not convinced you can use Gerald to epitomize 2 or 3. I think the simple binary ‘spirituality or worldly success’ or, in the poem’s term’s ‘a will to advancement vs spirituality’’ is a modern one based on a modern concept of Individual ‘spirituality’, tainted by modern attitudes towards the church.  

6)    The story about Kells that Gerald tells (See first of these posts) is just one more story in a life time body of work that is an anthology of wonder stories. The miraculous book is one of many miracles. Gerald does not recount any kind of epiphany when he sees the book. He merely writes at the end of his description, if you saw the book ‘…you will not hesitate to declare that these things must have been the result of the work, not of men, but of angels’. He then tells the story of the book's miraculous creation (see first post in this series) then he writes…’And then we shall set out those things that happened in more modern times’ and proceeds to tell the story of a talking cross in Dublin.  The world for Gerald was a place of wonder and miracle. He has been accused of being a credulous audience for wonder tales, but it’s also possible to argue that for Gerald the world was a site of wonders which pointed towards the God who had made it.

7)    Gerald’s attitude towards the spiritual and the worldly was much more complex than a simple binary would allow. Towards the end of ‘The Jewell of the Church’, having gone to great and often funny lengths to castigate the ignorance of priests, he realises he has suggested that all bishops are damned, recoils and qualifies his point. (Gemma Ecclesiastica trans John J Hagan Distinction ll, chapter 38). His attitude to power and spirituality is not straightforward. He was quite happy to lecture the pope when he thought the Pope was wrong. He admired both Beckett and Langton, both of whom played major ‘political’ roles. He was against prelates who did not do their job properly, and who were out for personal gain, or who were lackeys of the King, but he was not against the temporal power of the church. The structural hierarchy, and the responsibilities of any position in that hierarchy are taken as given. His ‘will to advancement’ is as much a sign of his spirituality as the chosen isolation and poverty of a hermit he admired.

8)    Gerald failed in his attempts to become Archbishop of Wales, or Bishop of Saint Davids, and he may have lived out his years at Lincoln, amongst his books, but it’s difficult to imagine him saying at the end of his life ‘everything is meaningless’ without qualifying it in some way. (Harpur has him say this twice, p59 and p63).

9)    With scribe B, once the background is established, there is room for invention. As I suggested in the previous post, that room isn’t infinite. With Gerald, it’s much more difficult to go from ‘Medieval Attitudes towards X’ to “Gerald’s attitudes towards X’. Only martyrs and lunatics are rigidly consistent, and if it’s difficult enough to work out ‘medieval attitudes towards spirituality’ it’s even more difficult to imagine what Derek Attridge calls ‘idioculture’; the unique configuration of cultural forces which combine in any individual. What Gerald believed, his own ‘spirituality’ is probably much more complicated, and possibly unknowable, but I don’t think he can be used to represent an opposition he would not have recognized. 

10) Poems, with their generic tolerance of ambiguity, are ideal places to explore the contradictions that characterise belief and the awkward alterity of the past. 

11) Am I criticizing Harpur for not writing the poem I would have tried to write in his position. No. I’ve written poems about Gerald and rewritten some of Gerald’s stories. Am I guilty of rivet counting?  It’s a poem, not a history essay? 

12) A literary character is nothing but a set of attributes and actions collected round a proper noun. Scribe B, emerging from the established ground of ‘anonymous Irish Medieval Scribe’ offers the writer some freedom to create a ‘character’. But when the proper noun also belongs specifically to a historical, biological entity, who is knowable, then I think this isn’t nit picking. If a writer is going to advance an argument, or use a character to represent or personify that argument, I think being faithful to the original becomes necessary. 

13) This in no way detracts from Harpur’s achievement, because most people reading the poem won’t care and he’s not writing an historical essay. He’s writing poems, which is something he’s very good at. 

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14) It’s just possible that Harpur is quoting Gerald. Perhaps somewhere he found the words he uses. In which case everything changes, or would if there was some form of annotation indicating what was found and what was invented. 

End of opinionating....

Old and Early Middle English

Perhaps obvious, but still interesting to compare readings of Old English with Laȝamon's early Middle English.
'Maldon' was obviously written after the battle in 991, Laȝamon's 'Brut' sometime between 1155 and the mid 13th Century. 

http://www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/1/24/from-laamons-brut-the-conception-of-king-arthur

http://www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/1/15/old-english-from-the-battle-of-maldon-byrhtnoths-reply-to-the-viking-messenger