Beowulf

Holiday reading: Seamus Heaney's Beowulf.

It was a tremendous read - I read it out loud (mostly to myself) - a wonderfully powerful account of the hero Beowulf and his three battles against monsters. I loved the idea that Grendal's mum was more dangerous than Grendal himself.

I also enjoyed the glimpses into an other world: of formal boasts, of status based in the capacity to give, of the culture of the mead hall.

I was also intrigued by the Christianity of the writer. It seems a fatalist faith: that God is all-encompassing and nothing happens without God's permission or action. Therefore victory is to those whom God favours. Yet God may equally withdraw his favour - he weaves his war-loom and, as the threads are placed, so goes the outcome of the conflict.

Underneath the story is a background of insecurity and violence which presumably accords well with a fatalist faith. Such security as there is is less in gold than in land - but tenure is not secure. Nor can the hero expect old age and a pension. In a passage Heaney quotes in his introduction:

He was sad at heart,
unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.
His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain:
it would soon claim his coffered soul,
part life from limb. Before long
the prince's spirit would spin free from his body.

F.M. Mayor, The Rector's Daughter

I found this book while browsing in a secondhand bookshop. I liked it for it's title (I'd heard of neither author or book before) and for the blurb on the back cover:

It is about love: filial love and married love and extreme sexual passion, and about the anguish, despair and intermittent bliss of every hopeless relationship between man and woman.

It's been a slow read. The book is really about the misery of love thwarted. The old Rector cannot speak his love for his daughter; the daughter has an infatuation based on no more than a brief affection and a kiss. The daughter's love and compassion for her disabled sister wholly ignored by their father. The object of her suppressed passion marries someone else after their own brief infatuation - and they have a very unhappy time until all is reconciled and transformed and they live happily together. The Rector's daughter dies after a 3 week illness.

Mayor writes with a sharp, distinctive style. Many of her paragraphs combine something that happens and comment - often sardonic - on the people concerned. At a rare and awkward tea-party:

There were the Archdeacon and his wife and spoilt daughter with painted lips, impressed at her goodness in coming. Canon Jocelyn [the Rector] thought the bustling Archdeacon was all a clergyman should not be. But the Archdeacon was a successful preacher; his Church of England's men's Society and his Retreats were highly popular. The Archdeacon disliked Canon Jocelyn's superiority; as a member of many more committees, and still in the vigorous years of life, he felt the old man should have looked up to him. In spite of mutual enmity, occasionally each entertained the other.

The book was written in 1924. I enjoyed the slang in the mouths of the County set (e.g. 'cram' for 'tell lies'); and no-one will ever again, surely, call even minor characters Lesbia and Brynhilda. At least, not with a straight face.

Kite Haiku

Primary colours
splash the slate sky; thin strings tie
dun earth to green sea.


Dream kite drank the sky,
ripped my fingers for freedom,
dragged me off my feet.


Unreliable
winds: my kite lifts, loops, crashes,
snaps my hopes in sand.


Picked up. Patched up. Climb
high on a steady breeze:
lift my heart again.


You smile, feint, escape,
soar away. I stand limp-stringed,
dropped, directionless.