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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ISLES THROUGH 80 EXTRAORDINARY CREATIONS, FROM BEOWULF AND THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY TO BANKSY, STORMZY, AND BEYONDA companion book to the landmark BBC series, Brilliant Isles tells the story of these islands through art, music, buildings and literature – the creations of visionaries, mavericks and rule-breakers who responded to their times and shaped the future. Whether read cover-to-cover or dipped into, this is a vibrant, surprising and witty guide to a unique culture, by one of our sharpest writers'Hawes's view of English history is sharp and vivid and extremely persuasive'PHILIP PULLMAN'At last a chance to get to grips with the entire history of England, and all in a few hours!'MAIL ON SUNDAY'An engaging, informative sprint through the story of our little island'INDEPENDENT'thorough and absorbing... [Hawes] brings the story right up to date, able to step back from the current madness with admirable clarity NEW EUROPEAN'A fantastic read. I would recommend it to anyone.'PAT KENNY, Newstalk Ireland'Such a thought-provoking read...
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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BRILLIANT ISLES
ART THAT MADE US
James Hawes
iv
CONTENTS
ix
‘What are we? What the hell are we?
And what are we doing here?’
antony gormley
x
INTRODUCTION
A century ago, the British Empire comprised a quarter of the world, so people were naturally fascinated by the way it did things. Even the mighty Americans: in The Great Gatsby (1925) the hero tries to make his murky New Money respectable by speaking in a bizarrely ‘British’ way.
Well, goodbye to all that. We now rule nobody but ourselves, and even who ‘we’ are is doubtful: if Scotland goes its own way, Great Britain (1707) and hence the UK (1801) are history. So you might think that what goes on in our heads would nowadays be of little interest to the rest of the world.
Yet – Empire or not – our visions still play around the globe. The diplomats know that our creativity is a vital part of our ‘soft power’ but there’s nothing soft about the part it plays in our economic well-being. The creative industries pour more into our national coffers than the cars we make, the planes we build, the fuels we extract and the Life Sciences we do – all put together. And they are growing faster.
The US diplomat, Dean Acheson, said that the British had lost an Empire but failed to find a role. Perhaps we have found one. No longer the workshop of the world, we have become instead a great workshop of humanity’s dreams.
But why are our dreams so potent? How is that what we write, compose, build and otherwise create should have such reach? It is because of our extraordinary past, which whispers every day in our ears, whether we know it or not, and makes us what we are. Our creative DNA is rooted in our strange, fractured and still-unresolved history.
So where should we begin?
1. LIGHTS IN THE DARKNESS
Spong Man
Y Gododdin
The Staffordshire Hoard
Aberlemno Stones
The Lindisfarne Gospels
Beowulf
Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi
The Bayeux Tapestry
Stories don’t begin at the beginning.
There’s always a ‘set-up’, a state of things which could go on forever. Then something crashes in from outside – Christians call it ‘the Word’, screenwriters call it the ‘inciting incident’, astrophysicists call it ‘the God particle’ – and everything changes forever.
Our ‘set-up’ is that nothing unusual occurred in these islands between the last great Ice Age and about 450 ad. Throughout the Palaeolithic, the Mesolithic, the Neolithic, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, what happened here was basically the same as what happened in the rest of Western Europe. Any small differences can be put down to the simple logistics of us being off the edge of the Continent, meaning that innovations arrived here a bit later, hence more fully-formed.
This didn’t change even with the coming of the Roman Empire and written history. ‘Roman Britain’ was just that – the cultural and political outer edge of a vast monoculture spanning all Western Europe and the Mediterranean, though it barely touched Ireland.
Fittingly, the real story of culture in these islands, of how it has constantly had to react to radical changes, begins with the greatest shift in European history: the Fall of the Roman Empire. It was only then that something really happened here, something that would make life on these islands – and therefore the art produced here – unique.
Spong Man
Unknown artist | ca. 420 ad | Norwich Castle Museum
He’s on a chair that is maybe a bit like a throne. He has a place in the world – but he is confronting a place where none of that has meaning anymore.
antony gormley
The moment we see this, we know it’s some ancestor of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’. When we learn that it stopped up a cremation urn, it’s hard not to see some god of the dead, contemplating eternity. One Cambridge scholar has argued that he may be none other than Woden/Odin himself. For this is pagan Germanic art – but not from Germany.
Spong Man, from Norfolk, is the first known three-dimensional, 5 figurative art created here by the people who migrated from Germany into late Roman Britannia. They came as mercenaries, and the first tribe to come in numbers were the Saxons. By the time Spong Man was made, the fortified coast of south-eastern Britannia was officially called the litoris Saxonum – the Saxon Shore – and to this day every other culture here calls the English the Saxons (Saeson/Sassenach/Sasanach).
Germanic warriors were a common sight in the late Roman Empire: by 400 ad, ‘Roman’ armies were largely made up of them. When the Western Empire fell in 476 ad, such warriors took over, from modern-day France to North Africa. It happened here too, but with a vital difference that would change the whole story of these islands, indeed of the world. That difference was the Channel – not as a barrier, but as a great sea-road.
Elsewhere, the new rulers stayed a Germanic warrior elite. Their own tribes never joined them: infants, nursing mothers, and the elderly could not survive great land-treks across the ravaged former Empire. So the new elites married local women from the old elites. Since language and culture are transmitted by mothers, a sub-Roman world endured all over Western Europe. The pagan Germanic Franks, old allies of the Saxons, soon turned into the Christian, sort-of-Latin-speaking French.
Here, though, the pagan Germans, already manning the Channel forts, could easily invite their entire clans to cross by ship in a day or two, women, culture and all. The early sources speak clearly of messages home to Germania and successive waves of migrants. So, in lowland Britannia, and there alone, the new elite stayed pagan and kept their own language.
This is the real beginning of our story, the original parting of the ways from Western Europe. It is why Woden, god of the obscure tribes who made Spong Man, is still unthinkingly honoured around the world, every time someone says Wednesday. And it was the birth of a tension between the English and non-English on these islands that still haunts us all.
explore further | Silver amuletic pendant, poss. Woden (7th c. ad; Brit. Mus; 2001,0902.1) • ‘The Thinker’ by Auguste Rodin (1904; Musée Rodin) • ‘Another Place’ by Antony Gormley (1997; Crosby Beach)
Y Gododdin
Aneirin (attrib.) | ca. 7th c.
The fact that a story like this, a poem that was probably spoken for the first time 1,400 years ago, is still here – that I can stand here and say those words and be in that chain – is a miracle. It was about their identity, about who they were, their very existence.
michael sheen
The further the English (as in, German) newcomers advanced from their bridgeheads, the stiffer grew the resistance from the Romano-British, whom the English called (and still call) the Weahlas. At times deals were cut: one early Saxon king had at his command an elite cavalry unit, the cyninges horsweahl, which translates handily as ‘The King’s Welsh Horse’. Yet though modern nationalism was still centuries away, some of the 7Romano-British felt they were battling these illiterate pagans not just for local power or status, but for cultural survival. That feeling, then as now, is the most potent recruiter.
Y Gododdin, written around 600 ad and preserved in a 13th-century manuscript, where it’s ascribed to the poet Aneirin, lives on in a very different way from The Battle of Maldon, a similar Anglo-Saxon tale of warriors who die heroically resisting an invader. English speakers today would need months of training before attempting to decode The Battle of Maldon, but any modern Welsh-speaker can make some sense of this tale about doomed young warriors from south-western Scotland, which was then still joined with Cumbria, Wales and Cornwall in a western continuum.
The fighters who perished in the vain attempt to resist the Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon tide (after a whole year of solid feasting, according to the bard) have no physical monument, nor is it even agreed where they died. Yet these unknown soldiers of the Dark Ages are remembered in Wales to this day, thanks to the power of art. For glorious though the deed may be, it is creative artists who mould it and confer immortality.
a boy with a man’s heart,
on fire for the front
restless for war…
as the singer of this song,
I lay no blame
but only praise for him,
sooner gone to the battlefield than to his marriage bed,
sooner carrion for the crow,
sooner flesh to feed the raven…
Meanwhile, Northumbria extended its power northwards to Edinburgh and beyond, bidding for supremacy right across Britain – until it ran into an unlikely and deadly alliance.
explore further | ‘The Battle of Maldon’, poem, author unknown (10th c. ad?) • Book of Aneirin, various poets (13th-c. copy of 9th-c. original; Nat. Library of Wales) • ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, poem by Alfred Tennyson (1854)
The Staffordshire Hoard
Unknown artists | 570–650 ad
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Museums have approached modern-day jewellers and asked, Can you do this? And some of the best jewellers in the world have said, No, we just can’t. We don’t know how they did it.
heather pulliam
This is the greatest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, and the most mysterious. It consists of priceless weapons, armour and warriors’ accoutrements, some of them with obvious Christian elements, which were deliberately destroyed before burial. One extraordinary object, a mighty steel-and-gold 9plumed helmet which must have belonged to a warrior of the highest status, was smashed into over 1000 pieces. Everything points to the ceremonial aftermath of a triumph over enemies who were far more than just local rivals. Fascinatingly, we know of one great battle, from this very period and this very region, which fits the bill.
Oswald of Northumberland (whose recent forebears had defeated the warriors of Y Gododdin) was now driving southwards in his quest to dominate the island. But in 642 ad he came up against the last pagan English ruler, Penda of Mercia, a warlord who had already killed three rival neighbouring English kings and had an ace up his sleeve. On Penda’s western border, the Welsh still held modern-day Shropshire and Cheshire: though Christians, they were determined to keep their own, Celtic rites. Despite worshipping Woden, not Christ, Penda somehow forged an alliance with them. Together, pagan English Mercians and Christian Welshmen smashed the Christian English Northumbrians. The site of the battle is uncertain. Some have suggested Oswestry (‘Oswald’s tree’) in Shropshire, but most experts agree that closer to the Northumbrian-Mercian border is more likely. The Staffordshire Hoard is in the right place at the right time, and grand enough to be the relic of this no-prisoners-taken, three-way culture-clash.
Whether or not that great helmet, so deliberately pulverised, belonged to Oswald himself, the Hoard is a glorious, vital twist in our creative story. For it shows that though this was indeed a Dark Age in terms of written records, and an era of deadly rivalries and baffling alliances, creativity of the highest order didn’t just survive, but positively flourished. Whatever else art in these islands needs, it doesn’t seem to need peace and tranquillity. Which was a good thing in the 6th and 7th centuries, for peace was in short supply not just on the western limit of the English advance, but on the northern one too.
explore further | Norrie’s Law Hoard (6th c. ad; Nat. Mus. of Scotland) • West Yorkshire Hoard (7th–10th c. ad; Leeds City Mus.) • Watlington Hoard (870 ad; Ashmolean Mus.)
Aberlemno Stones
Unknown artists | ca. 6th–9th c. | Aberlemno
It is possible that it portrays a battle in 685 ad, around a century before it was made – a decisive battle in holding back the English tide from central and eastern Scotland.
gareth williams
How are we to understand this strange mixture of heroic and Christian art? Of all people of these islands in the Dark Ages, the Picts are the most mysterious. Modern scholars can’t even agree on what language they spoke, though most believe it was the northernmost variant of Brythonic (the root of modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton). They were named by Roman writers, whose term ‘picti’ have meant ‘painted people’, 11and described a powerful barbarian tribe or confederation of tribes who harried Romano-British civilisation from beyond Hadrian’s Wall. However, in the 5th century, the Picts themselves were invaded – not by the Saxons fresh from Germany, but by the Scots who (confusingly to us, with our modern ideas of nationalities) came over from Ireland. By the seventh century, a Gaelic-speaking elite had taken over, though English sources still call them ‘the Picts’.
Under this new leadership, the Picts in 685 ad won a great victory over the Northumbrians at Dun Nechtain (to the English, Nechtansmere). This was so important a battle – the Northumbrian king himself, Ecgfrith, was among the dead – that it is recorded in unusual detail by both Anglo-Saxon and Celtic sources. Most experts agree that the location was modern Dunnichen, just a few miles from the Aberlemno stones.
Still, we can’t prove it. And even if we could, we couldn’t prove that the stones are anything to do with the battle. That’s what makes the Dark Ages essentially a period of archaeology, not of history. As with all archaeology, the absence of records means we need to use our imagination.
We still make monuments to our fallen heroes, often employing our greatest artists to create them, and on certain days we gather about them to recall the glorious dead. If, as the sources suggest, the battle of 685 was a turning-point in our island history – the fight that ended Northumbria’s supremacy and ensured the survival of the lands beyond Hadrian’s Wall as a separate entity (if not a Pictish one) – people might well have gathered there two or three generations later, to hear again the stories that had been handed down, and to commemorate the day with the help of their finest artists.
Perhaps, to understand the Aberlemno stones, we just have to imagine a modern version, and recall that all lasting art, though produced by individual minds and hands, has some communal echo. That is certainly true of our next artefact.
explore further | Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal (645–635 bc; British Museum) • The Trenecatus Stone (6th c. ad; Nat. Mus. of Wales) • National Memorial Arboretum (1997; Alrewas, Staffs.)
The Lindisfarne Gospels
Eadfrith | ca. 8th c. | British Library
Heaven was portrayed as a place of jewelled sumptuousness, so if you were trying to give people in this life a glimpse of what lies beyond, you would build magnificently, you would paint richly, you would ornament gorgeously, because you were giving people a sense of the heaven that awaited them.
rev. richard coles
Northumbrian churchmen of the 8th century were the spiritual wing of a heroic, martial culture. While earthly warriors yearned, like Beowulf, for lof (kudos), priests saw 13themselves as shock-troops of the Roman Church, fighting devils, English pagans and Celtic Christians alike for the ultimate glory of the next world. They showed their heroism by choosing to live and work monastically in remote and storm-tossed locations shunned by ordinary farming folk. The most extreme – and hence, the holiest – was the monastery at Lindisfarne. Here, in around 721 ad, a Bishop called Eadfrith created one of the most glorious books in the history of all Europe, an extraordinary synthesis of the Latin word of God and local Anglo-Celtic art-forms.
This mixture of styles was quite deliberate, for here, as so often, art had a hidden political mission. Despite the great defeat of 685 ad (p.11), the Kingdom of Northumbria still stretched north to beyond modern Edinburgh. This meant that it had Pictish and Gaelic subjects, as well as English. How was a churchman, fighting against both pagans and Celtic Christians, best to spread his message of obedience to Rome in this ethnically and linguistically complex realm? Over a century before, Pope Gregory the Great, planning the conversion of the English, had laid down the plan of action, advising St Augustine that ‘places are to be loved for the sake of the good things in them’. In other words, missionaries should enlist whatever rites worked for local populations. Eadfrith’s great new Bible did exactly that.
By using the blend of creative styles known to later historians as Hiberno-Saxon, Eadfrith made sure that wherever in Northumbria his mighty new book was ceremonially revealed, on high days and holy days, his awestruck flock (who were, of course, completely illiterate) would see images that were splendidly, magnificently new – yet also, at some level, familiar. The Lindisfarne Gospels owe their glorious uniqueness to the fact that they were created for a multicultural audience.
And it was yet another coming-together of different cultures on this island that gives our next work its meaning and its strange power.
explore further | Book of Deer, earliest Scottish ms (ca. 850 ad; Cambridge Univ. Lib.) • Black Book of Camarthen, earliest Welsh ms (13th c.; Nat. Lib. Wales) • Act of St Takla of Haymanot, Coptic illuminated ms (1700–1750; Brit. Lib.)
Beowulf
Unknown writer | ca. 10th–11th c.
There are 30,000 surviving lines of old English poetry, and yet there is only one poem that we ever remember – Beowulf.
clare lees
Remember it, yes – but understand?
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
Our ‘national epic’ might as well be in a foreign language. Even in its own day there was something curious about this 15story: though it’s written in Anglo-Saxon, all the action happens in southern Scandinavia. It seems that the English of the 9th century retained a sort of early-medieval dual citizenship in the lands across the North Sea.
A dual mental world, too. The scribes who set down this much older, oral legend were undoubtedly Christians, yet there’s no mistaking the enthusiasm when they describe pagan, heroic warrior values. Indeed, compared to the power of those sections, the attempts to bolt on a Christian moral world-view (stressing good deeds as the way to heaven, and so on) often feel like half-hearted asides. Look at the great description of Beowulf’s funeral pyre. There’s no sign of a Christian God, and the church of the day strictly forbade cremation, but there was no choice: the story said Beowulf’s body was burned, so Beowulf’s body burned. Just as Beowulf himself hopelessly fights the dragon, the scribe hopelessly fights the power of his ancient tale. It’s like reading a modern writer trying to re-tell a famous story and having to keep moments which just can’t be left out or changed, no matter how culturally unacceptable they now are.
And perhaps Beowulf owes its survival precisely to this uneasy blend of pagan and Christian, which made it the right story for the political times. In 868 ad, England was split in two between Christian Wessex and the pagan, Viking-ruled Danelaw. Alfred the Great and his descendants spent the next century and a half trying (unsuccessfully) to unite these two nations and cultures. Beowulf was the perfect tale for this drive. Written in English but set in Scandinavia. A tale of pagan heroic values with a modern Christian gloss that didn’t change the vital, ancient elements. The ideal story, in fact, to persuade a pagan Danish warlord that he could convert and become a subject of Wessex without giving up what really mattered of his own world.
With Beowulf, as so often in our history, the fascinating strangeness of our art grows out of its conscious or unconscious quest to bring together rival cultures.
explore further | Hero Myths and Legends of the British Race, illust. John Henry Frederick Bacon (1910) • Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney (1999) • ‘Beowulf’, film, dir. Robert Zemeckis (2007)
