HWÆT! It’s the first official Peregrini blog post! The main body of this post will be the first part of The Adventures of Sir Orfeo, more information on that below. But first up, some fun facts about early August from the year in folklore.
Lammas
Three days ago, on the 1st of August, was the Lammas festival (England, from Old English hlaf-mæsse, Loaf-Mass), or Lughnasadh in Celtic cultures (Lugh, god of various things inc. light, craftsmanship, the arts). I’ve always had a deep love for the Harvest Festival, since I first brought in a tin of beans in Year 2 for the Harvest Festival collections, and sang ‘Cauliflowers fluffy’ at the school assembly. Growing up in a farming-heavy area, harvest-time made me feel especially connected to my community and landscape. Harvest festivals have always had a huge draw for me, as a setting for plays and scripts: aesthetically and thematically they burst with life and colour. Life is at their very heart; the life of the harvest, nourishing the community by which its cultivated.
Lammas pre-dates the Harvest Festival most people know and celebrate today, which was popularised by the church from the beginning of the 19th century, especially through the work of Victorian vicar Robert Harker at his parish of Morwenstow in Cornwall (but more on him in October) . Celebrated specifically at the time of the grain harvest, celebrated through baking and the making of corn dollies, Lammas likely has origins stretching far back before Christianity. It’s one of the eight festivals in the Bristish Isles that celebrates the cycle of the year in the sun and the land. A community coming together to celebrate the source of their food, and bless the harvest for the following year. Lovely.
The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle has some lovely angular corn dollies on their website here.
[This is just a skim, a fun fact segment – let me know if you want to hear more about Lammas and I’ll do a focussed post one day…]
St Oswald
There are saints’ feast days peppered absolutely all over the shop, all throughout the year and all over the Christian world. In the UK, we’ve historically celebrated both Roman-era saints and Medieval ones, often depending on locality and community connection to the saint (e.g. St Boniface, patron saint of Germany is celebrated in Crediton, Devon, his birthplace). St Oswald’s feast day is the 5th of August, the day he was killed in battle.
As far as Medieval saints go, Saint Oswald was a pretty big deal. He had a lot of name drops, and a big old chapter in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and was pals with Aidan of Iona. Oswald was the OG Christian king of Northumbria in the seventh century, and played a huge role of the conversion of the North of England. Oswald ascended the throne of Northumbria in 634 according to Bede, and gifted the Isle of Lindisfarne to Aidan and the monks of Iona. They established a community there, allowing Irish Christianity to flourish and spread throughout the North East. He was an overall good egg: ‘Though he wielded supreme power over the whole land, he was always wonderfully humble, kind, and generous to the poor and to strangers’ (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, trans. Colgrave, Oxford 2008).
He ruled for only nine years before he was killed in battle against the pagan king Penda of Mercia. He was ritually dismembered by the pagan army, which only served to promote his status as a martyr across northern Europe. However, interestingly, Bede doesn’t refer to him as such. Victoria Gunn argues that emphasis is placed more by Bede and contemporaries on Oswald’s saintly status as a result of his deeds in life, rather than the manner of his death. He is also omitted from several key martyrologies of the period (Gunn, Bede and the Martyrdom of St Oswald, Studies in Church History 61, Cambridge 1993). He was succeeded by his brother Oswiu, who continued his work in promoting Christianity.
After death, he was quickly canonised and multiple cults for him sprung up around the country, especially in Oswestry (the location of his death) and crucially, Hexham (near Heavenfield, the site of his victorious battle in 634). The story goes that Oswald was executed against a tree – hence the shortened name Oswestry (Britain’s Pilgrim Places, The Bristish Pilgrim Trust, 2020). When his brother Oswiu recovered Oswald’s body in a later raid, so the story goes, a raven carried off one of Oswald’s arms and dropped it nearby. On the ground were the arm fell, a holy spring appeared, which is the site of Oswald’s Well in Oswestry today.
There is a fab pilgrim route I’d love to walk one day, devoted to Oswald. Find out more at the British Pilgrim’s Trust Website . His head is currently resting at Durham Cathedral, alongside some of St Cuthbert’s relics, and not too far from Bede himself. His arm was once held at Peterborough, though this has since been lost, and was likely destroyed during the reformation. I find Oswald and Oswiu incredibly interesting. Two brothers, exiled as children, making major waves politically, religiously, and personally on their return. Dibs on writing the film. I hope they don’t cast Timothee Chalamet. If Sam Fender moves into acting, the job’s his.
The Adventures of Sir Orfeo – #1
Now for the main event. For the first installment of the blog, I thought it made sense to start with the first installment of another project: The Adventures of Sir Orfeo.
I recently started writing poetry again after a very long hiatus. I enjoy writing the odd bit of poetic prose, but poetry somehow feels more intimidating. So, rather than bearing my soul on the internet, I’ve decided to have some fun with it instead. I’m using the legend of Sir Orfeo as a jumping-off-point to get back into it. Sir Orfeo is a poem that I came across in my final year of university that I completely fell in love with. It’s a 13th/14th century Middle-English Breton Lay (the Lais are rooted in Brittany, and later, the crossover and dialogue between Brittany and Breton, Cornish and English stories), which is an Irishised/Anglicised, folkicised, and generally zhuzhed-up version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. The leads are called Sir/King Orfeo and Heurodis, go figure. To give you an idea of the poem, the opening lines in the original read as such:
We redeth oft and findeth y-write,
And this clerkes wele it wite,
Layes that ben in harping
Ben y-founde of ferli thing:
Sum bethe of wer and sum of wo,
And sum of joie and mirthe also,
And sum of trecherie and of gile,
Of old aventours that fel while;
(Can be found at this wonderfully helpful website: https://metseditions.org/texts/A4GxkPrUzD59hz0LcavGPc7152ZE6Wz )
Just look at that wonderful rhythm! Who doesn’t want to hear about old adventours that fel while? I know I do! Trecherie and gile? Shocking! Joie and mirthe? FAB. Who needs Belgian crime dramas? Someone get me a knave with a harp and let’s go.
I’ve always been enamoured with the idea of otherworlds and otherworld journeys. The most potent otherworld journey I’ve ever experienced is the feeling of understanding, of transportation, the connection across hundred of years or even millennia, between a writer and a reader. Someone in 14th c. Britain or Brittany (or likely earlier! The earliest extant manuscript is 14th century, though the language suggests the poem is slightly earlier – see Introduction to Sir Orfeo here) felt that connection to a millenia-old myth (though a 12th century French source is likely) and decided to rewrite it. And I, 700 years later, feel that same connection.
Reading texts in their original language is a form of Otherworld travel, a form of time travel. Connecting to ancient people and understanding the way they think, the themes that interest them, and the lives they lived helps me to position myself in my own community and culture. It’s a valuable exercise. In a modern world where communities and people are ever-polarised, paying forward that culture of understanding and empathy to connect with people is more important than ever.
Aside from all that emotional and cerebral stuff, I wanted to have a go at writing something rhythmic, narrative, and fun! I do this very much in a freewriting style. What appeared in my notebook this week and what’s on this page are very similar indeed. My editing process is light-handed to say the least. I’m working on accepting that perfection is overrated. The #1 entry in this Sir Orfeo series is certainly not going to be the first chronologically, and I imagine that after 30 or so installments, we’ll have a rather avante-garde jumbled mess of an adventure timeline, with the odd signpost so we don’t get too lost. But what a perfect setup for an adventure.
We start in a mysterious copse…
Taken down into the darker dell, our hero saw a sight,
An old and crusty ne’er do well in old and crusty tights.
‘What ho, old witch!’, he cried aloud, in brash and honking tones,
‘Why stay you ‘neath this gath’ring cloud, with rank and scraping bones?’
‘Old witch?!’ cried she, tempestuous mad, laying down her finished dinner,
‘Why, watch your tongue, you upstart cad, you rude young man, you sinner!
I know you seek a gateway sir, that only I can find,
You called me ‘witch’, a grave error – it pays to be more kind.
The truth is, sir, I am a witch, though I take offence at ‘old’
Youth and beauty count for little when there’s wisdom to uphold.
I’ll help you find the gate you seek, just for a little fee –
I’ll join you in the Otherworld, and you make me up some tea.’
Orfeo stood there, quite perplexed, at what he had just heard.
He felt a rising heat, like shame, for breaking his good word.
Before he left, rememb’ring now, a promise he had made,
Standing before his people, every laird and lord and knave:
‘I go to seek my precious queen, hence lifted by the fae,
Uphold with strength and honesty, with kindness truth and grace.’
A lump the size of Grendel’s face was rising in his throat,
By way of an apology, these gentle words he spoke:
‘Dear lady, please, forgive me for my brash and awful ways,
To tell the truth I’ve been through hell for the last couple days.
My wife’s been nicked by fairies, my dog’s abandoned home,
I mistook your tasty rack of ribs for evil divining bones.
My head’s an awful mess and I’ve been a proper tit,
If your kind offer is still standing, I’ll take you up on it.’
The woman, she surveyed him with her piercing tawny eyes,
For unbeknownst to him, and this may come as a surprise,
She had the gift of truest sight, the last left on the earth,
Knobheads, liars, and meddlers would all give her a wide berth.
She looked into Orfeo’s eyes and saw no malice there,
In fact she saw he’d lost his way, but a sweetling soul so rare.
She had the strangest feeling — perhaps they’d met before?
It can’t have been that recent – gosh – a hundred years or more?
She bounded over limestone crags, the mushrooms, roots and leaf
Closing down the distance in one vast ungodly leap.
‘Chin up!’ she said, and pushed his head with force towards the sky,
‘this is just the beginning, we have many miles to try.’
Sir Orfeo, reeling from the whiplash, still broke out in a grin:
‘So you will help me recover my lost and beloved kin?’
‘Of course, young man, that’s who I am, I love a good adventure –
I must away, to pack my cane, my dice, my wand, my dentures!’
With that, she slipped into the trunk of an enormous tree,
Peeling back the barky door with air of practiced ease.
Orfeo smiled, now quite alone, in dark and wooded grove
For the first time in a week he had good cause to hope.
There was light at the end of the tunnel,
Resolution fluttered in his heart,
Never would have guessed he had a witch to thank, with her ancient witchy art.
On the horizon…
More from Sir Orfeo to come! I’m not sure what I’ll write next. Feel free to give me a suggestion. I feel a bit like flexing my travel writing muscles, so I might write up an old walk, or maybe find a new one. Who knows? That’s the joy.
See you next time! P.
PEREGRINI 