a gallimaufry

a return to Narnia

Things I should be doing right now:

• Beginning to revise for my exam on ‘Teachers and responsibility’ next week
• Marking exam papers for my English language class
• Setting the oral exam for my English language class
• Taking a deep breath and hurling myself at the mountain of paperwork I need to submit to the school where I teach
• Finishing a report on someone’s novel
• Editing a friend’s poetry collection
• Sleeping
• Scraping the weeks of accumulated filth off the house...

But instead I am writing here... Two things have helped me through the past few weeks – well, two non-human things, my family have been lovely supportive human things – cheese and Narnia. I don’t have much to write about cheese and certainly nothing of interest, but I do want to write about the Narnia books. So I shall.

I hadn’t reread all seven books since I was a child and I was a little hesitant. I remember loving the stories very much, but since then they have come in for a lot of criticism, notably from Philip Pullman (another writer whose work I love). I didn’t really want to return to Narnia and find all the magic rubbed off and just a bundle of twigs of racism, misogyny and religious propaganda remaining.

(Lucy and Mr. Tumnus, illustration by Pauline Baynes for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950; found at Brian Sibley His Blog, which has a nice piece about Baynes)

Well, I reread all the books, which makes it quite obvious that I enjoyed them (very much!). However, I was scrupulous in amassing evidence for and against the charges brought against C.S. Lewis, and while I’m sure that Lewis has more than enough advocates I feel impelled to write my reactions here, why were web-logs invented if not for this sort of bellyaching? Since I’m feeling all bullet-pointy and subheadingy today:

 

Religious propaganda

Lewis is an expert synthesiser of myths, religions and fairy tales. In Narnia he has picked out all the best bits from especially Greek but also English, Norse and Western European literature – fauns, centaurs, satyrs, dryads, giants, talking animals, magic potions, etc. – to create a world we all want to inhabit too. There are echoes of the Odyssey in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a play on Hamlet in Rilian’s relationships with his parents and the Lady of the Green Kirtle and endless allusions to the mediaeval English literature Lewis knew so well. Christianity is also a clear reference point, most obviously in the figure of Aslan and his sacrifice to save others in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Eustace’s ‘conversion’ and the words of the lamb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and the life beyond death in The Last Battle.

(Aslan by Pauline Baynes, from The Magician’s Nephew, London: The Bodley Head, 1955; found here)

But propaganda? Now I know you can have really quite insidious forms of propaganda, but aren’t you at some point supposed to make it clear that you should vote for Cyril or join the Purple Party or stop eating cauliflower? I realise that personal experience isn’t in any way statistically significant, but I’ve yet to encounter anyone who, as a child, even noticed the religious symbolism, let alone felt curious enough to visit a church as a consequence. It passed me by and I was brought up as a Catholic. Lewis could write ‘propaganda’ – because I suppose you could classify The Screwtape Letters as that – so it seems surprising that if he wanted to lure children to his Christian ways he didn’t do it more effectively. (Ha ha, here I show my bias...) It does seem odd now, because to Adult-Helen the Christian themes were very obvious.

(Bacchus and entourage by Pauline Baynes, from Prince Caspian, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1951; found here)

For me, the Christian element is part of the rich mix of sources on which Lewis drew to write the Narnia books. It informs the values he upholds and the behaviours he approves in his characters – kindness, honesty, courage. Yet these values are not held exclusively by Christians, I don’t think that by promoting them he is being particularly sectarian. His religion was important to Lewis personally, but it also contains some very good stories – stories which, as he might have known, often have their roots in still older religions and cultures. These stories include creation myths and gods (and goddesses) who die and are reborn. Although Christianity is no small part of the books, I can’t help reading them as celebrating not just religious values but, intertwined with them, the value of imagination. Yet with a different religious upbringing, how would I feel about this?

(Puddleglum, illustration by Pauline Baynes for The Silver Chair, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954; found here)

 

Racism

As a white European, it’s more than possible that I miss subtle – maybe even not-so-subtle – racism, or dismiss it. Is this what I am about to do?

(Tashbaan by Pauline Baynes, from The Horse and His Boy, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1953; found here)

It is the Calormenes who attract the accusations of racism on the part of Lewis. If you read the books in the order in which Lewis wrote them, they first appear in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where they are described as having ‘dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-coloured turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people’. They also deal in slaves. Much of the action in The Horse and his Boy occurs in Calormen, the land from which the children and the Talking Horses are trying to escape. Calormen lies to the south of Narnia across a desert, and its climate seems to be hotter. Pretty early on skin colour is remarked upon by a Calormene noble who wishes to buy Shasta from his foster-father: ‘This boy is manifestly no son of yours, for your cheek is as dark as mine but the boy is fair and white like the accursed but beautiful barbarians who inhabit the remote North.’ I did feel more uncomfortable reading that. There’s nothing overt, just the alignment of beauty with the fair and white, and the contrast with the dark. The ruler of Calormen, the Tisroc, is a clever, cruel despot with a sense of humour; his son is brave but rash and greedy. The other Calormenes live in fear of their absolute ruler and are good at baths, gardens and intrigue. In The Last Battle they ally with Shift the Talking Ape to infiltrate Narnia and conquer it. In this book their worship of Tash and dedication to him of human sacrifices is more prominent, as is their skin colour – the Dwarves, admittedly characters we are not intended to like, repeatedly call them ‘Darkies’, which draws attention to this.

(Lasaraleen and Aravis by Pauline Baynes in The Horse and His Boy, as before)

But the Calormenes are not the only villains in the Narnia books. Narnia and the children are generally threatened by outsiders, and the White Witch/Jadis, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, Uncle Andrew, the giants, the Telmarines and the slavers of the Lone Isles are apparently all white-skinned, or at least we are not told that they are dark which, I believe, for a white British author of the mid-twentieth century comes to the same thing. Moreover, there are sympathetic Calormene characters: Aravis, Emeth and to a lesser extent Lasaraleen.

My conclusion, after a lot of thought, is that it is the Calormene culture rather than race which Lewis is portraying as Other and in opposition to the culture of Narnia. Religion is included in that. I see the Calormenes as the imaginative, cultural and religious Other Lewis chose to create. To do so, just as he used one set of literary and cultural references to create Narnia, so he used another to create its opposite: chiefly, I think, the Arabian Nights but also Ottoman history and the history of ancient cultures. The society he imagines is, in Edward Saïd’s term, Orientalised, a fantasy on several levels and too general to be linked to any one ‘real’ society. And yet I think that it can make us uncomfortable, at least, it did me in The Last Battle, because of its conflict with Narnia. There’s a distinct whiff of ‘my English, classically educated and Christian culture is better than your vaguely foreign and exotic culture’ which, being part of his culture, I didn’t notice as a child. So, I don’t find the books to be racist, but perhaps rather Little Englander sometimes.

(The stranger with Arsheeh and Shasta, by Pauline Baynes in The Horse and His Boy, as before)

 

Sexism

It’s hard to argue that Lewis is really sexist when he has created characters like Lucy, Jill and the tomboy Aravis. There are some casually sexist remarks bandied about, occasionally by the narrator, but when the girls hear them they usually challenge them:

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Susan. ‘I can’t remember all that.’

‘That’s the worst of girls,’ said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. ‘They never can carry a map in their heads.’

‘That’s because our heads have something inside them,’ said Lucy.

Nobody argues with Father Christmas when he says ‘battles are ugly when women fight’. Would you argue with Father Christmas though? Is this view unusual even today? And is the view of a character necessarily that of the author anyway? Susan, Lucy and Jill all fight with bows and arrows. In The Last Battle Jill is not only given a knife in lieu of a sword (she’s too small for an adult one) but apparently dies in battle.

(Tea with the beavers by Pauline Baynes, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as before; found here)

The adult women in the books are rather different. For a start, there aren’t many: Aunt Letty, who takes a no-nonsense approach to Jadis; Digory’s mother, Queen Helena and Caspian’s wife, who doesn’t even get her own name, who are all pretty characterless; the grotesque giant Queen of Harfang, whose seeming motherly feelings for the children disguise her literal desire to eat them; and of course Jadis/the White Witch and the Lady of the Green Kirtle, who is both substitute mother and intended wife for Rilian. With the notable exception of Mrs Beaver  – whom I believe I can include in this discussion of adult females – the only admirable woman of any real note is the grown-up Polly, who never marries and somehow retains the spirit of Narnia into old age. But when you are a child reading these books, do you notice or care? You identify with the children, not the adults. It’s quite possible that Lewis had some interesting ideas or complexes about women and mothers in particular, but I don’t think any girl would read these books and come away diminished because of her gender. Still, perhaps your experience is different?

(The White Witch and Edmund, by Pauline Baynes, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as before; found here)

And then of course there is Susan. Pullman claims that Susan is cast into hell for liking boys and clothes, but this is not how I read it. Susan, like Peter, visits Narnia twice before being told by Aslan that she is too old to return. But Susan isn’t just too old, she is changing. Already in Prince Caspian she is sceptical, closing herself off to the wonders of Narnia. At the end of The Last Battle, when all the other children are finally back in Narnia together, her absence is explained thus:

‘Sir,’ said Tirian, […] ‘Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?’

‘My sister Susan,’ answered Peter shortly and gravely, ‘is no longer a friend of Narnia.’

‘Yes,’ said Eustace, ‘and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says, “What wonderful memories you have! Fancy you thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.”’

‘Oh Susan!’ said Jill, ‘she’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.’

‘Grown up, indeed,’ said the Lady Polly. ‘I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.’

I interpret Susan’s ‘crime’ as rejecting Narnia and what it stands for – religion, the imagination. This isn’t necessarily a consequence of growing up, as Polly, Digory and Peter have all remained true, but becoming an adult does often coincide with a curbing of creativity, imagination and the religious impulse and a more worldly attitude. Perhaps Lewis wanted to make this point and needed to choose a character to show this. She’s not cast into hell, as Pullman says, there’s no suggestion she’s even on the train when it crashes, but she is shut out of Narnia, albeit of her own volition.

But – it is so unfair! This is Susan, who watched over Aslan after the White Witch had killed him and who danced with him in the beautiful dawn! Aslan seems to give everyone else a second chance…

(Pauline Baynes, cover illustration for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as before; found here)

 

Conclusion

My amazing and original conclusion: C.S. Lewis was a product, perhaps even a rather conservative one, of his time. He had religious convictions and these, like his literary loves, are present in the Narnia books. He wasn’t a card-carrying feminist but gives us some great heroines and some powerful villainesses in a very male-dominated culture. His Calormen is definitely Orientalised and presented as anathema to Narnia, but unless you believe that culture is the inevitable product of race, I don’t think you could argue that it’s racist. It is not unproblematic though. Overall, I acquit Lewis of all charges – except for being utterly mean to Susan, as a character rather than as a female. How could he do that to one of the Pevensies?

If anyone has managed to read this far without dying of combined boredom and exhaustion – what do you think of the Narnia books? Do you think that they are less innocent than I suggest?

(Surely everyone’s favourite mouse? Reepicheep, illustration by Pauline Baynes for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952; found here)

The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge

If you have noticed that my reading of late – the little I’ve actually mentioned here – inclines towards children’s books, you’d be right. I consulted my list of books read, and this year I’ve only managed seven ‘grown-up’ books (not including Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna, by which I really did try to do my duty but within whose pages I just couldn’t find anything to interest me, sorry Barbara) – and twenty-seven ‘children’s’ books (if you include The Nutcracker). And the latest of these is The Little White Horse, a childhood favourite I last re-read only a couple of years ago – and yet I’d forgotten so much of it.

[Sir Benjamin said,] ‘In our family, Miss Heliotrope, we spell Wrolf with a W, for we are of Viking ancestry and great fighters.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Miss Heliotrope. ‘When Maria was little, I had great trouble in getting her to eat rice pudding.’

Those who are going to read The Little White Horse have probably already read it. Unless they are still a small child. It’s a delightful story about the reconciliation of opposites (female and male, night and day, moon and sun, good and evil) suffused with a rather pantheistic High Anglicanism I mentioned when I wrote about another of Goudge’s books, Linnets and Valerians). In fact, I would go so far as to say it’s a righting of Adam and Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden, but with a girl as the redeemer and the place as England. The orphaned Maria Merryweather is sent to live with her cousin, Sir Benjamin Merryweather, in a beautiful Devon valley quite secluded from the rest of the world. It is a bucolic idyll, there is even a Paradise Hill upon which stand the ruins of a monastery. However, all is not perfect: the Black Men who live in the pine forest steal sheep and lambs (and other, less Biblical things, like cider and cake), and the Merryweather family lives with the consequences of pride and greed (which sins were also the causes of the Fall). Female curiosity (for which Eve was blamed) is a vice which must be conquered if Maria is to right past wrongs and restore peace and harmony to the valley. The presence of, among several intelligent and helpful animals, a lion and a unicorn who assist Maria in her task gives a specially English flavour to it all, I can’t help but think of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, the re-imagining of Christ’s story in England.

(C. Walter Hodges, illustration of Maria, Wiggins and Miss Heliotrope in a carriage, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, London: University of London Press, 1946; found here)

Accompanying Goudge’s trademark humour are luscious descriptions of food. All the Merryweathers take their food seriously, and the power of a shared meal to reconcile plays its part in Maria’s dealings with the Black Men. The novel (almost) ends, as I shall, with the masterpiece of meals, Maria’s wedding feast:

The white-iced wedding-cake was the size of a cartwheel at its base and was six feet tall, mounting up like a pyramid. It was decorated with sugar flowers and fruit and birds and stars and butterflies and bells, and right at the very top there was a tiny sickle moon and a tiny sun enclosed within a silver horseshoe. There were lots of other kinds of cake, of course, and every possible sort of sugar biscuit and iced bun, and all the different kinds of sandwiches it is possible to think of, and dishes of candied cherries and crystallised ginger and sugared almonds and chocolates. And there were jellies and creams and syllabubs and ices, and hot coffee and iced coffee, and tea and lemonade and sherbet, and mulled claret and champagne.

Everybody had lots to eat and drink, and everyone enjoyed it, but nobody ate or drank too much, because they did not want to spoil this happy day by having aches in their insides later on; they wanted this day to be happy right through to the end.

i'm in conversation with an authoress, please advise

Have you ever found yourself, after attending a reading, standing speechless and gormless before the Authoress? Have you ever cornered a Lady Writer and had your compliments on her needlework savagely thrown back in your face? Fear not – there is help.

(Pensive female, writing – treat with caution; ‘Yes or No’, steel engraving by unknown artist, plate from unknown book, 1882; found here)

While practising work-avoidance techniques instead of writing one of my papers for the teacher-training course – the actual task isn’t so bad, but having to look up every other word in the dictionary in order to write it in Flemish has turned it into a job of monumental tedium which makes me want to cry and scratch at the walls, an entirely grown-up response of course… Anyway, while surfing the internet I found the answer to your problems: Chapter 20 of Miss Leslie’s Behaviour Book: A Guide and Manual for Ladies as Regards their Conversation; Manners; Dress; Introductions; Entree to Society; Shopping; Conduct in the Street; At Places of Amusement; In Traveling; At the Table, Either at Home, in Company, or at Hotels; Deportment in Gentlemen’s Society; Lips; Complexion; Teeth; Hands; The Hair; etc. etc. (originally published in 1834, I believe) (via this piece from the Huffington Post). This handy chapter explains to you the conduct proper towards female writers. Don’t say that you think her plots are improbable. Don’t ask her to dish the dirt on other writers. Miss (Eliza) Leslie’s tone is pleasingly cutting:

Never tell an authoress that ‘you are afraid of her’—or entreat her ‘not to put you in her book.’ Be assured there is no danger.

And most important of all:

If, when admitted into her study, you should find her writing-table in what appears to you like great confusion, recollect that there really is no wit in a remark too common on such occasions, ‘Why, you look quite littery,’—a poor play on the words literary and litter.

That’s a mistake I make all the time. But now we all know better, eh?

Actually, I don’t mean to mock Miss Leslie. It’s hard not to believe that she herself has been on the receiving end of these inanities, and one cannot but marvel at how insensitive people can be. Nor can one help noticing that there’s no chapter on dealing with literary men. I would like to think this is  because Miss Leslie doesn’t give a tinker’s about the feelings of the writing gentleman, but fear the real reason is that, while literary men did come in for their fair share of jokes about littery desks, they were treated with a tiny bit more respect than their feminine counterparts.

I looked up Eliza Leslie on Wikipedia, the fount of all knowledge. She was born in Philadelphia in 1757 and lived to the respectable age of seventy. Wikipedia rather charmingly notes:

Her first compositions were in verse. In her fortieth year she published her first prose work, a cookery-book, which met with a large sale. Later, after obtaining a prize for her story ‘Mrs. Washington Potts,’ which was published in Godey’s Lady’s Book, she adopted literature as a profession.

She seems to have written one novel, Amelia; or, A Young Lady’s Vicissitudes (1848), which I hope is racy (alas, it is not available on Project Gutenberg although another work, Stories for Helen, is). And here is a picture of Miss Leslie, also from Wikipedia:

The Nutcracker, by E.T.A. Hoffmann

(Gennady Spirin, my favourite illustrator of ‘The Nutcracker’, no further information given, found here; his website is here)

My daughter, who has just turned three, is obsessed with the ballet ‘The Nutcracker’ as only a very small child can be. For the past few months she has watched it practically every day (when she was ill, sometimes twice a day), and her current favourite version is the Royal Ballet production (with Miyako Yoshida as the Sugar Plum Fairy, Iohna Loots as Clara and Gary Avis as Drosselmeyer). When I’m falling asleep, re-potting house plants or boiling the kettle, Tchaikovsky’s music swirls round my brain… 

Of course, I became curious about the Hoffmann story on which the ballet is based (in a roundabout way: Alexandre Dumas wrote a version of it which is the actual basis of the ballet), and since I had just survived a rather gruelling part of my teacher-training course I clearly deserved rewarding with a new book or two. The Anthea Bell translation (published by Pushkin Press in one of their delightful little volumes along with another of Hoffmann’s stories, ‘The Strange Child’) arrived at exactly the right moment. For the last few weeks I’ve been in a state of inertia – I have two part-written posts languishing on my computer and no energy or inspiration to complete them, and I’m feeling anxious about my course without this anxiety translating into anything as useful as action. So, curling up with a story for which the word ‘charming’ must have been invented was precisely what was in order.

(Dagmar Berková, illustration for ‘The Nutcracker and the Mouse King’, edition published in Prague, 1964; found here)

As with many fairy tales, there’s a lot of plot (although the characters are much more delineated than the characters tend to be in the Grimms’ folk tales) and part of the pleasure of the story is Hoffmann’s inventiveness so I won’t spoil it here by explaining much of what happens. One Christmas the three Stahlbaum children receive the present of a nutcracker doll from Godfather Drosselmeier, a councillor who can repair clocks and make amazing mechanical toys. Drosselmeier is a mysterious figure, both benevolent and slightly sinister, a manipulator perhaps of people as well as toys and, as the teller of the tale of Princess Pirlipat, a possible alter-ego for the narrator-Hoffmann who himself intrudes in the text.

(Maurice Sendak, ‘Drosselmeier’, illustration for Nutcracker, New York: Random House, 1984; found here)

Seven-year-old Marie immediately forms a strong bond with the Nutcracker:

You couldn’t have called him an imposing figure, for his rather long, straight torso was set on thin little legs, and his head seemed far too large. However, his elegant clothes made up for it, showing that he was a cultivated man of good taste. [...] Marie kept gazing at the dear little man, whom she had loved at first sight, and she saw what a kind face he had. His pale-green, slightly protuberant eyes expressed nothing but friendliness and goodwill. And the neat cotton-wool beard on his chin suited the little man very well, setting off the sweet smile of his bright-red mouth.

He is no ordinary Nutcracker, as Drosselmeier later tells her, and Marie is drawn into his struggle with the seven-headed Mouse King and his sad history. Hoffmann manages to write in a way which is both witty and apparently innocent, and this seems perfectly to capture the wonder and sensitivity of children, as well as the frustrations of their dealings with adults (who stupidly will not believe that the Nutcracker can come alive) and the nightmares of which they are capable. The sweetness of the story is balanced by the cruelty with which Mistress Mousie and her children are treated by Princess Pirlipat’s parents, the destruction of the little sugar people, the ingratitude of Pirlipat to Nutcracker and the horror of the abominable Mouse King. After the initial battle with the mouse army, the Mouse King torments Marie night after night, demanding the sacrifice of more and more of her toys as the price of the Nutcracker’s safety:

Oh how anxious poor Marie was that night! She felt something icy pattering up and down her arm, and something rough and disgusting touched her cheek, and there was a squealing and a squeaking in her ear – and she saw the terrible Mouse King sitting on her shoulder, with his seven pairs of blood-red jaws open and slobbering at her, and his teeth grinding and chattering. He hissed at the poor child, who was rigid with fear and horror, ‘Hiss, hiss, beware, beware... won’t go in the trap to feast in there – won’t be caught, not me, hiss hiss! I’ll have your picture books, miss, and your pretty dress too, or I’ll never leave you! Just so that you know, for Nutcracker must go, bitten in two he’ll be, hohoho, hee-hee! Squeak!’

Ugh! Imagine waking up to that!

(Artuš Scheiner, illustration for ‘The Nutcracker and the Mouse King’ in an edition published in 1924 in Prague; found here)

Despite the scoffing of the rest of Marie’s family, it’s very clear that what happens to Marie is ‘real’, not a dream or a story she’s made up, or some sort of hallucination. Hoffmann believed that the Enlightenment represented an attack on the imagination, and his work champions other realities than those which are empirically verifiable, such as the worlds Marie discovers. He wrote the story in 1816 for Fritz and Marie, two of the children of his friend Julius Eduard Hitzig, and as well as naming two of his characters after these ‘real’ children he frequently addresses them directly:

As I was saying, the room was very well furnished, and you may believe me, because I don’t know whether you, my attentive little listener Marie – yes, you know the little Stahlbaum girl’s name is Marie too! – well, as I was going to say, I don’t know whether you too have a little doll’s sofa with flowered upholstery, several dear little chairs, a sweet tea table and above all a very nice, neat little bed where your most beautiful dolls can rest.

further blurring the lines between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, as well as giving the text a playful, chatty tone which perhaps nods to the writing-down of oral fairy tales by the Grimms and others. The playfulness as well as the horror and a streak of cruelty prevent the story from ever threatening to be saccharine, even when Marie visits the Land of Toys and marvels at it:

Soon the sweetest of scents wafted towards them from a wonderful little wood opening up on both sides. There was such a gleaming and a sparkling in the foliage that you could see gold and silver fruits hanging from brightly coloured stems, and the trunks and branches of the trees were adorned with ribbons and bunches of flowers, like happy brides and bridegrooms and their cheerful wedding guests. And when the scent of orange blossom wafted like a gentle breeze, the branches and leaves rustled, and thin, shiny strips of metal foil crinkled and crackled in the air, making a sound like cheerful music, while the sparkling little lights hopped and danced up and down.

Everything seems to be alive, even the lights and the foil (which I suppose makes sense if you are visiting a world in which seemingly inanimate toys and sweets have a vital existence). 

This really is a wonderful story and I insist that every visitor to this blog read it by the end of the year – you owe it to yourselves, dear readers, and you will not be disappointed... (but do take the trouble to find Anthea Bell’s translation as it is obviously superior to other widely available versions).

(Gennady Spirin again, this time the picture was found here)

naughty mediaeval cats

(Cat’s paw prints on fifteenth-century manuscript in the State Archives of Dubrovnik, photographed by Emir O. Filipović; found here)

(Worse than paw prints! In about 1420 a scribe in Deventer, the Netherlands, returned one morning to continue work on his manuscript to discover a cat had weed on it! In a rage, the scribe drew a picture of the cat and wrote ‘Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam. Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum ostum in nocte Daventrie, et consimiliter omnes alii propter illum. Et cavendum valde ne permittantur libri aperti per noctem uni cattie venire possunt’ – Here nothing is missing, but a cat urinated on this during the night. Cursed be the pesky cat that urinated over this book during the night in Deventer and because of it many others [other cats] too. And take very good care not to leave books open at night where cats can come. Cologne, Historisches Archiv, G.B. quarto, 249, fol. 68r, found here)

What were cats doing in mediaeval libraries anyway? Read this post to find out...  It contains a link to this charming ninth-century Irish poem, translated by Robin Flowers:

The Scholar and his Cat, Pangur Bán

I and Pangur Bán my cat,
’Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
’Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.

’Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

’Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
’Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

(Picture of cats and rats from unidentified mediaeval manuscript)

Sonnet, by Edward Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cherbury

You well compacted Groves, whose light and shade
    Mixt equally, produce nor heat, nor cold,
    Either to burn the young, or freeze the old,
But to one even temper being made,
Upon a greene embroidering through each Glade
    An Airy Silver, and a Sunny Gold,
    So cloath the poorest that they do behold
Themselves, in riches that can never fade,
    While the wind whistles, and the birds do sing,
While your twigs clip, and while the leaves do friss,
While the fruit ripens which those trunks do bring,
    Sensless to all but love, do you not spring
    Pleasure of such a kind, as truly is
A self-renewing vegetable bliss.

(1620, ‘Made upon the Groves near Merlow Castle’; from Henry Woudhuysen (ed.), The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509–1659, selected and with an introduction by David Norbrook; London: Penguin, revised edition 2005)

On Shakespeare’s anniversary I am not posting a poem by him... Today is also England’s national day, and what could be more English than a daydream of horticultural perfection from the gardens of a castle? Although maybe the castle was in Wales.

I am fond of these country house poems, Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ and Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ are also lovely, and I particularly like the couplet: ‘While the wind whistles, and the birds do sing, / While your twigs clip, and while the leaves do friss’, they sound very spring-like.

Curious French cat, by Sylvia Plath

I do think there is something so delightfully and purely cattish about this little drawing (by Sylvia Plath, 1956; from here).

In a Shoreham Garden, by Samuel Palmer

(Samuel Palmer, ‘In a Shoreham Garden’, watercolour ca. 1830; from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection)

I was a leetle over-optimistic the other day when I thought that I would again have time for writing here. During the last couple of weeks I have been entirely occupied with work for my teacher-training course. I do believe that I am almost at the end of the busiest part... I don’t have time even to write about fairy tales at the moment, but I didn’t want to neglect this place as I did before. Therefore I’m just putting up cheaty quick posts, so you know I’m still here... And who knows, maybe you will enjoy them?

Charlotte Mew’s poem ‘I Have Been Through the Gates’ is one I love very much and it never fails to give me the chills. And I am also very fond of this painting by Samuel Palmer. Spring is finally touching Belgium and while we don’t yet have any beautiful blossom like that Palmer painted, daffodils and buds of new leaves are pricking the browns and greys of our surroundings with brighter colours.

'I Have Been Through the Gates', by Charlotte Mew

His heart to me, was a place of palaces and pinnacles and shining towers;
I saw it then as we see things in dreams,—I do not remember how long I     slept;
I remember the tress, and the high, white walls, and how the sun was always     on the towers;
The walls are standing to-day, and the gates; I have been through the gates,     I have groped, I have crept
Back, back. There is dust in the streets, and blood; they are empty; darkness     is over them;
His heart is a place with the lights gone out, forsaken by great winds and the     heavenly rain, unclean  and unswept,
Like the heart of the holy city, old, blind, beautiful Jerusalem;
                     Over which Christ wept

(First published in The Farmer’s Bride, 1921 edition; Charlotte Mew, Collected Poems and Selected Prose, edited with an introduction by Val Warner, Manchester: Carcanet, 1997)

the pack of no-good, low-life ruffians

Back to the Brothers Grimm, and a short tale of rampant naughtiness. I’m not going to type it all out here but you can read a translation of it by D.L. Ashliman (from 2001) here. A Cock and Hen go up the mountain to gather nuts but when dusk comes neither of them wants to carry all the heavy nuts home, so the Cock builds a cart of nutshells, but then neither of them wants to pull the cart... According to the notes at the bottom of the Ashliman translation, this story has been given many different names so you might find it in another collection of Grimms’ tales as ‘The Adventures of Chanticleer and Partlet: How They Went to the Mountains to Eat Nuts’, ‘The Vulgar Crew’ or ‘Riffraff’, to give just a few. The German title is ‘Das Lumpengesindel’ which, apart from being a lovely word in its own right, means something like ‘mob’, ‘riff-raff’ or ‘rabble’.

(Horst Lemke, Die Schönsten Märchen der Brüder Grimm, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Lesering, 1965; found here)

Joyce Crick, who translated the Oxford World’s Classics edition which I have, tells us that this one was contributed by August von Haxthausen ‘from the Paderborn region’. An exuberant celebration of out-and-out knavery, it lacks the cruelty of ‘Cat and Mouse as Partners’, the other ‘beast fable’ I’ve read in this collection, although I did wince for the poor innkeeper’s face and bum. What carries it along is a certain charm and good humour:

When they [the Cock and Hen riding in the cart drawn by the Duck] had gone part of the way they met a pin and a needle going on foot. These called ‘Stop! Stop!’, saying it would soon be dark as stitch, and they couldn’t go a step further, and the road was so muddy, mightn’t they ride in the cart for a little. They’d been staying at the tailor’s hostel outside the town gate and had lingered over a beer. As they were very thin and didn’t take up much room, Cock let them both get in, but they had to promise not to tread on his toes, nor on Hen’s neither.

The Grimms and Joyce Crick have been at pains here to retain the sense of a storytelling voice (rather than text) through little colloquial touches and it all bounces along with cheery energy – it’s pretty much all narrative, there are no extraneous flourishes. The birds, needle and pin are of course being used to reflect human weaknesses but the storyteller isn’t really condemning them, he’s indulging our fantasies, our wish to identify with the tricksters who take what they want and never have to pay the price. There is a moral at the end, given to the unlucky innkeeper:

Then he made an oath that he would never again take a pack of low-life ruffians into his inn, who would eat his pantry empty, pay not a penny, and on top of that, by way of thanks, get up to all sorts of no good.

But this isn’t his story: it’s a sensible oath for an innkeeper but I think most of us have flown away with the fowls.

(Edited to add: I’ve just remembered that it’s April Fool’s Day, so a good moment to be thinking of misrule, tricksters and ne’er-do-weels.)

Next week: ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’.