2014 Man Booker Prize longlist

That time of year again. The 2014 Man Booker Prize long list has been published. The competition is open to American novelists for the first time but a deluge of transatlantic entries feared by some has not materialised. Of 154 entries only 40 are by US writers.

In the long list only four of the thirteen writers are American. Britain has six authors including the Indian-born Neel Mukherjee, with one novelist each from Ireland and Australia with Irish-American Joseph O'Neill being claimed by both countries.

Paul Kingsworth is the debut novelist up against some previous winners (Howard Jacobson winner in 2010) and shortlisted writers (Ali Smith 2001 and 2005 and David Mitchell 2001 and 2004).

There is a wide range of genres represented  from Kingsworth's account of life in England post 1066 told in an invented language some way between Middle and Modern English, Howard Jacobson's futuristic love story J and David Mitchell's metaphysical thriller The Bone Clocks.

This reminds me my own current novel Death Runs After is no further forward. Must get on.

Viking exhibition at the British museum

I went yesterday to Bloomsbury to the Viking exhibition at the British Museum as this is the last week. A bit later than my period but similar in many ways. The new Sainsbury Gallery is impressively large but nearly entirely taken up by the reconstruction of the ship. Other replicas I have seen were quite small but this one would hold the 300 men you read about. There were also some beautiful gold brooches and I liked the replica rune stone which has been painted to show how it would originally been coloured (which you can't do with the original). It's very eye-catching and would have been visible for miles.

A History of Post-Roman Britain 400-600:The High Kings

For those who have been following my research diary the first part of my study has been published exclusively on Kindle. It went live yesterday. If you don't have a Kindle you can get a free Kindle app for your laptop or pc.

New TV show for internet entrepreneurs

Reuters reports from San Francisco that a new TV show, brainchild of internet entrepreneur Joe Beninato, has made its debut. Internet entrepreneurs have already been featured in a new comedy 'Silicon Valley' first aired last month. The new show's concept is a self-help call-in show in which hi-tech future moguls can get advice from industry experts anonymously.

The new weekly programme called Founderline will discuss topics like raising funding. The show's creator expects most of the show's audience to watch online (of course) with episodes streamed live as well as posted on sites such as YouTube. It will be produced and aired on a local community cable TV channel in Mountain  View California, the Silicon Valley town where Google has its headquarters.

It will at least make a change from the endless run of chefs, estate agents and property developers.

April 2014 Literary Events

The Essex Book Festival 2014 Adventures with words
1 March to 31 March. 2014
Various venues across Essex

Cambridge Literary Festival
1-6 April
Various venues across Cambridge

New Writing South Build your social web presence
2, 9 , 16 April
The Writer's Place, 9 New Street, Brighton BN1 1UT

The Sword in the Stone and the Castle of Glass

In my translation of The Sword in the Stone mentioned in previous blogs I pointed out that the stone in which Arthur finds the sword has a special significance.  The sword is described as thrust into an anvil which is in turn contained within a block of nearly transparent stone.  This indicates that it has come from Caer Bannwg, Castle Foursqaure also known as the Turning Castle or the Castle of Glass which is the home of the Celtic Gods.  I suggested that the writer might have had in mind a block of transparent marble but it seems I was wrong.

Although the action in the Sword book nearly all takes place in the Spirit World the topography throughout is of the physical world of the fifth century or earlier.  I had assumed that the Castle of Glass was a figment of a poetic imagination but it seems I was wrong there too.  Just outside Inverness is the vitrified hillfort of Craig Phadrig built by the Picts around the 4th century BC.  It was built of granite but following a great fire which some archaeologists think might have been deliberate the inner and outer walls have vitrified, that is to say they have turned to glass as a result of immense heat.  Furthermore within the fort is a smal tumulus of earth cobtaining a stone at the centre. (T Wallace 1921) 

By the fifth century the Picts were Druids and in the mid-sixth century St Columba is said to have visited this site where he had a bit of a row with the Pictish Archdruid when he tried to persuade them to join the Celtic Church so this is a site which had meaning both for the Picts and for the Christian Druids.  It is still not really known how the stone became vitrified since it would require an intense heat up to 1300 degrees Centrigrade for the stone to turn to glass.  It is not surprising that 800 years on people might have concluded this could only have been the work of the gods but it seems quite possible that although the Castle of Glass itself exists only in the Spirit World (and can indeed move around) the writers of the book were aware of the existence of this physical castle of glass in Scotland.

I can't wait to go and visit.  Details of the site can be found at http://canmore.rchams.gov.uk/en/site/13486/details/craig+phadrig or just google craig phadrig to find a selection of entries.

The Synod of Whitby and its Aftermath

 

In my previous blogs I have argued that the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’cemeteries to be found scattered across Britain within Iron Age enclosures dating from 450 – 650 AD are not Anglo-Saxon at all but evidence of Christian Druid monasteries and from the evidence of bed burials from Wiltshire to Northumberland around the latter date many of these seem to have been double monasteries run by women.

The cemeteries ceased to be used after about 650 AD suggesting that the community living there at the time of the Synod of Whitby (664 AD) when the Roman church gained the support of the then High King (Bretwalda) Oswiu of Northumberland and thus official ascendancy over the Christian Druid (Celtic) church.

The question for archaeologists and historians is did this phasing out of double monasteries occur in a single purge, like the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16^th century, or was it a more gradual process?

Here archaeology is no help because the dating is not precise enough but we are not in the realms of pre-history in the 7^thcentury and documents give us the answer.

In 668 AD the distinguished Greek monk Theodore of Tarsus was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Vitalian. Theodore was well-versed in the disciplines of astronomy and ecclesiastical arithmetic and lectured basing his knowledge of the calendar on the movement of the

planets in the Ptolemaic universe, one in which the earth was at the centre of the solar system and the planets, including the sun, moved around it.

 In my biography Columbanus: Poet, Preacher, Statesman, Saint I describe how Columbanus fought tooth and nail against the church adopting this fallacious argument which was in part designed to support the political claim that the earth was the centre of the universe, the Emperor in Byzantium the centre of the earth and therefore God’s representative on earth and as such the sole possessor of absolute power.  Columbanus was arguing strenuously for the paramount importance of rationality and empirical truth not to mention the political independence of western Europe and by inference the individual. 

 When Theodore was born in 602 AD the Byzantine Empire (the eastern Roman Empire as was) was under threat from Persian and Arab incursions along its eastern borders and succeeding Byzantine Emperors began to look at the potential for expanding westwards and reclaiming the old western Imperial provinces including Britannia. Theodore’s appointment should be seen in this light. He was very much the imperial choice. Pope Vitalian was still one of the five patriarchs answerable to the Emperor in Cosntantinople which was besieged by the Arab fleet in 670 AD.  Tarsus, Theodore’s home town, had been taken by the Ummayad caliphs in 661 AD so in 668 Ad he was effectively a refugee.  He brought with him not only an impressive array of Greco-Roman learning but also the icons, art-forms, silk and purple vestments, the liturgy, relics and veneration for eastern saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Theodore was no fool.  He knew he could not just impose these things on the British Church.  Instead he attempted to create a fusion between the Roman Catholic Church and the Celtic Church.  His efforts at even-handedness are witnessed by the fact that he restored the Roman Catholic Wilfred to the Bishopric of York and the Celtic/Irish saint Chad to that of Lichfield. 

 He advocated the use of the penitential developed by the Celtic Church (see Columban’s version of Finnian’s penitential) but with a few crucial differences.

Included in his rules are a few that indicate why the cemeteries ceased to be used after 650AD or thereabouts.  Theodore ordered (before 690 AD when he died) that churches may be moved without new consecration and adds that any church may be moved just with the consent of the local bishop and his chapter.  He also insisted that women were not to be allowed to offer penance (hear confession and grant absolution) which meant that effectively they could not be priests.  Monks incidentally were not priests either but the injunction is not applied to men.

  It seems therefore that moves were afoot from the 680s onwards to close down the double monasteries, move their communities off the Iron Age sites which established continuity between the new Christian church and its Druid past, and push women back into an inferior position within the church.

That this was a new development in the late seventh century we can tell from the fact that in 633AD a double minster was founded at Lyminge in Kent, not far from Canterbury, for Aethelberg, the daughter of Aethelbehrt, the King of Kent.  There is nothing in the ruins to indicate any separation between nuns and brothers in the nave.  Yet in the 670s a scandal is reported involving the double monastery at Coldingham in the far north of Bernicia (Northumberland/Scottish borders) headed by Abbess Aebbe, the sister of King Oswiu and aunt of King Ecgfrith.  Scandals did arise from time to time of course but the timing of this one is suspicious.  When the monastery was destroyed by fire in 679 AD it was deemed to by a divine judgement.  Had Aebbe resisted the attempts to close her down?

 Nevertheless it appears that the phasing out was more gradual than the dissolution of the monasteries.  As late as 704 AD Abbess Aelfled is still influential enough to attend an important synod and be asked to give her advice.

 It is at this time that the Benedictine Order , more amenable to accepting the control of the church, makes its appearance in Britain.  Most of England’s mediaeval cathedrals offer foundation dates between 690 and 710 AD and most of them were originally Benedictine monasteries which suggests that the Benedictines were able to establish themselves quite quickly by transplanting Christian Druid communities from their Iron Age locations to the sites of the new abbey churches.