Archive for July, 2008
Ruin II – “Sheep”, Thought I.
12:42 am
My apologies in advance if this piece doesn’t turn out to be quite as elegant as some of its predecessors, but I’ve got a great deal on at the moment and unless I get it written and published soon, it risks falling by the wayside.
Right, it’s been a month or so since I published the first piece on the Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin and in that time, I’ve made every effort to contact mediaeval specialists, both in Britain and abroad, in the hope of getting an opinion on what I’ve written, even if it’s one that fundamentally disagrees with me. There’s been a deafening silence by way of reply, so we must make of this what we will. One uplifting episode occurred two weeks ago, however, when I travelled from Exeter to London to speak with a mediaeval specialist who met me to discuss The Ruin, but he completely rejected the idea that the poem was inspired in any way by Stonehenge. Instead, he was certain that The Ruin, despite its lack of overt Christian themes, was a reflection of the Fall of Babylon as depicted in the Bible, so at least this was a firm opinion, even though I’m not inclined to agree with it. Nonetheless, it’s worth considering and we must also make of this what we will.
Mediaeval depiction of the Fall of Babylon
I’m not particularly skilled at the use of search engines, but I’ve looked on the internet as best I can for any discussion on The Ruin with a specific reference to which physical location it may refer to. I’ve found numerous suggestions that it refers to Bath, while I’ve discovered even more numerous studies of the riddles contained in The Exeter Book, where The Ruin is to be found, but I’ve been unable to locate a single piece looking in any depth at all at The Ruin and its possible inspiration. I admit that I’m at a complete loss to understand this, because The Ruin’s a famous enough poem and as it describes, in a detailed fashion, some ruined site that’s presumably in Britain, I’m baffled as to why no one’s looked into the matter in any detail before.
The whole business puts me in mind of what I wrote last year about Pytheas of Massilia and the City of Apollo. In the course of writing these posts, I became aware of a few previous attempts to locate this mysterious structure and I’ve referred to these efforts in the articles. Someone wrote in to tell me that the late, great Robert Graves had looked into the matter in his book The White Goddess, so it’s not as if it was a completely obscure subject by any means. The main interest in what Pytheas wrote has been centred around his description of a notable temple, but most people seem to have completely overlooked his specific reference to a city of Apollo that, by clear inference, was closeby.
Quite a few people wrote in to me to say that they never knew that such a place once existed, to have become lost shortly afterwards, and that’s fair enough. I’m absolutely certain that there are any amount of fascinating archaeological subjects I’ve not heard of myself and the proof of this came a few days ago when Tim Jones at Remote Central wrote to tell me about the Knowes o’Trotty, but this was just the latest in a long line of ways in which I’ve been enlightened by others since I set up Eternal Idol, all of which I’m extremely grateful for.
Be all that as it may, some helpful readers occasionally tell me about inane comments that have been posted up, always anonymously, of course, savagely criticizing what I’ve written about Pytheas and his Lost City of Apollo, not that I habitually lose a great deal of sleep over nameless posters. It’s a simple matter: Pytheas wrote about a city in 350 BC and its precise location has been a mystery ever since the fragments of his account were rediscovered. I think I know precisely which structure he was referring to, I’ve written about it in great detail and in the absence of anyone writing in to make a detailed case against it, I remain convinced that Pytheas was referring to what we now know as Vespasian’s Camp. To be sure, I’ve had emails suggesting that it could be Silbury Hill, but I’m really not persuaded, so until I read a convincing argument against Vespasian’s Camp, I’m sticking to my guns and repeating that I think it was the City of Apollo as described by Pytheas.
What has all this got to do with The Ruin? Well, I hardly think that a detailed search for any possible references to Stonehenge in written sources before Henry of Huntingdon’s description of the place in 1130 falls into the same category as the quest embarked upon by the Nazis for an entrance to a Hollow Earth; in fact, it seems a perfectly reasonable and constructive one and I intend to pursue it for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, there’s an incredibly marked difference in the responses I get to what I put up on this site.
On the one hand, I’m sometimes asked to do radio and television interviews, while there are occasional articles in newspapers and magazines as well. I get a steady stream of phone calls, emails and comments that are invariably fascinating, while the jewel in the crown must be Alun Salt’s wonderful description of “Sky People” in response to a piece I wrote about our ancestors pondering the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. I’ve had contributions from a senior Vatican official and other experts in their fields, and it’s clear from the stats page that there are many people “out there” with a deep and abiding interest in Stonehenge that goes far beyond a simple commentary on what they’ve recently seen on television or in a book. Many of you have ideas and suggestions that show that a great deal of careful thought has gone into the various subjects you write in about and once more, I’m extremely grateful to everyone who posts a comment, because that way, we all profit.
On the other hand, I occasionally encounter a stony silence when I try to look into a particular matter, in this case, in trying to get an opinion from mediaeval experts on which location, if any, inspired The Ruin. To this we can add the sheer outrage felt by some archaeologists over what they see as their inaccurate portrayal in Bonekickers, a reaction I struggle to understand, but I’m far more clear about why some jealous and inadequate souls resent the series of posts that deal with the Altar Stone and the Lost City. I’m looking forward to dealing with the Wilfully Ignorant and Intellectually Bankrupt on another occasion when I’ve got some leisure time, but it’s apparent that there’s a sharp divide between those with questing and informed minds, and those who are personally affronted whenever others decide to take Mike Pitts up on his suggestion – no, recommendation, that anyone with a genuine interest in Stonehenge should try to work out the mystery for themselves ( see Hengeworld, page 299).
Be all that as it may, let’s have another look at The Ruin. One obvious objection to the idea that this poem could refer to Stonehenge lies in the translation of various Anglo-Saxon place-words as a city, but I’ve already gone into that in detail in the previous posts, while anyone who’s interested should really read the extensive and detailed contributions made in the comments on The Ruin by Michael Goormachtigh.
In short, as Professor Drout pointed out, the Anglo-Saxon word ‘burg’ can mean anything from a village to a fortified place to a city, so it’s by no means certain that the original place the poet had in his or her mind’s eye was larger than Stonehenge, although it certainly grew in physical stature when it was embellished in the haunting poem. It seems to me that we have a perfect example of this exaggeration of size when we consider the matter of El Dorado, a name that literally means “The Gilded Man“.
In 1537, the conquistador Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada encountered the Muisca people, a nation in the highlands of Colombia. The rituals these people performed included covering their king in resin, then blowing gold dust all over him, after which he travelled by raft to the middle of a lake and swam in the water; as the gold dust washed off his body, it became an offering to the gods, along with other treasures transported on the raft that were thrown into the gloomy depths.
El Dorado, or "The Gilded Man."
This account seems clear and unambiguous enough, but as early as 1541, Francisco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro set off on an expedition to find a lost city named El Dorado and the usage of a city has persisted to this day. Within the space of a mere four years, the perception and understanding of the words El Dorado, or The Gilded Man, grew from that of an adult human being to something the size of a sprawling Inca city, so it doesn’t seem remotely unlikely that the perception of Stonehenge, a substantial enough ruin to begin with, could metamorphose into something the size of a fortified place or a settlement abandoned by the Romans, especially if it were recorded in a poem.
So, it seems to me that there are a number of trains of thought concerning The Ruin and the place from whence the poet drew their inspiration. The first train of thought is the “don’t know, don’t care” notion, to which many people clearly subscribe, but fortunately, there are others. There’s the case for Bath, which I personally find unconvincing, but the case nonetheless exists if only because it seems to have been taken for granted for so many years.
As I’ve recently discovered, there’s also the notion that The Ruin is a reflection of the Biblical description of the Fall of Babylon, so if we assume that there was indeed a Christian mindset behind the poem, despite the lack of overt Christian references in the poem itself, then I suppose it’s not out of the question that a cataclysmic event in the Middle East should be reworked many centuries later with an Anglo-Saxon flavour. After all, The Ruin is a poem and not part of a mediaeval tourist guide or a history, so it seems to me that this option is a distinct possibility.
Be that as it may, I’m still inclined to believe that The Ruin came into being as a result of the poet hearing a traveller’s tale of Stonehenge. The parts that don’t fit with Stonehenge seem to me to be standard aspects of any ruined settlement of the time, or to paraphrase Julian Richards, they convey a clear idea of “what old should look like” and I imagine that they’re what an audience of the time would’ve expected to read. Aside from the descriptions of broken gates, collapsed tile roofs and others, there are baffling elements of giants, curved walls, master-masons, men skilled in building rounded structures, an internal courtyard or temple building made of stone and suchlike, while there’s also the truly fascinating suggestion made by Michael Goormachtigh in the comments to the previous post on The Ruin that the word ‘ringmere’ doesn’t refer to a round pool, but to a circular moat, albeit a dry one, something that leaps out at us when we look at Adam Stanford’s superb photo of Stonehenge. Stonehenge is unusual inasmuch as it possesses an internal bank and exterior ditch, so this conveys the suggestion of an encircling moat or ‘ringmere’ far more so than other ancient earthworks possessing an external bank with an interior ditch.
As well as Julian Richards’ observation about our expectations of the appearance of something that’s old, there’s a more specific point that Mike Pitts made about Stonehenge in the context of the Anglo-Saxon execution that took place there. As you’ll see for yourselves, the above link contains the following paragraph:
“When we identified this execution as an Anglo-Saxon event, it changed everything.” Although the word “stonehenge” means “stone gallows” in early English, archaeological evidence indicates that executions were not normally conducted there in Anglo-Saxon times. “So there was something exceptional about this event, that could have been quite powerfully frightening and mythologically very important. The feelings these people had toward Stonehenge at that time, not least the poor bloke who had his head cut off, were obviously very real and significant, and until now we had no idea at all.” (My italics).
It’s apparent that at least one senior archaeologist specialising in the study of Stonehenge has pointed out that the ruins made an enormous impression on people of the time, which is in sharp contrast to other points of view I’ve heard, where the logic seems to be “The Anglo-Saxons didn’t (specifically) write about the place (that we know of) therefore it was completely irrelevant and invisible to them.” However, in addition to what Mike Pitts has to say, there’s another indication that the ‘broad domain’ where the graves of the warriors and builders were sited, according to The Ruin, may have had a physical reality as far as the Anglo-Saxons in the Stonehenge landscape were concerned.
We know that the Saxons were sufficiently impressed by the remains or ruins of the Neolithic flint mines in the East of England to name them “Grim’s Graves“, after a sinister aspect of their god Woden.
We also know that a cluster of Bronze Age barrows to the west of Stonehenge near Winterbourne Stoke were surrounded by a pentagonal ditch that was dug in Saxon times, something I wrote about a long time ago in this post. I know little about the place, but the mere fact that the Saxons pointedly interacted in some way with the graves of the ancient dead of the Stonehenge landscape seems to me to be in keeping with what Mike Pitts wrote about the Saxon view of Stonehenge, of how there would have been something frightening and mythologically important about the place, especially after the execution there in the sixth century.
Of course, the existence of these Saxon ditches doesn’t automatically prove that The Ruin was inspired by nearby Stonehenge, but I suggest that they, along with what Mike Pitts had to say about the cultural repercussions of the execution that took place among the ruins, throw a different light on what the poet wrote about broad domains and the burial places of warriors and builders. Until such time as someone else writes in with a suggestion, or something else comes to light, I pretty much rest my case as far as my idea that The Ruin was inspired by Stonehenge is concerned, but it turns out that there’s another way to view the matter.
If anyone’s seriously interested in the details, then you can do no better than read through Michael Goormachtigh’s comments on the previous post investigating The Ruin; in brief, he thinks there’s a strong case for the word ‘stanhofum’ to represent a farm, or a deserted farmstead. I can’t hope to do justice to what he’s written, while he’s also stressed that these are simply his opinions, but they’re food for thought in and of themselves and they’re particularly valuable in the almost complete absence of any other informed commentary on the subject.
I was fascinated by what he had to say, but I was so immersed in the detail that it proved to be a perfect case of “he who stares too hard into the mist trips over the stone at his own feet.” If it was possible for an eighteenth century traveller to spot Stonehenge from a distance and mistake it for, or interpret it as a castle, albeit momentarily, then it’s perfectly possible, I suppose, for others to regard it as some form of abandoned farm or corral, however unlikely this might seem to our twenty-first century questing eyes with a wealth of knowledge of archaeological matters behind us. As Pete Glastonbury pointed out, there are many illustrations of Stonehenge that pointedly include sheep in the detail of the composition, such as this one, below, which goes some way towards bolstering the idea that the stone structure was perceived as a farm or deserted farmstead.
Then there’s this picture, which also contains sheep in abundance, even if some of the poor creatures have perished, along with the shepherd, as a result of a lightning storm.
Here’s yet another picture, this time showing Stonehenge at the centre of a large flock of sheep, in a way that suggests that the ruins are in some way deliberately connected with the creatures.
Here’s another picture showing sheep and it’s one I included in the first post on The Ruin, but I was so taken with the idea of showing Stonehenge as a fortified place, or resembling such a thing, that I paid little attention to the sheep in the foreground.
Finally, there’s another bizarre aspect to this notion that some of the words in The Ruin may refer to an abandoned farm building and the prevalence of sheep in pictures of Stonehenge supporting this possible perception of the place. Of course, Stonehenge was built by Neolithic farmers over 4,500 years ago, and as far as I’m aware, the ruins have been surrounded by land used as farmland almost continually ever since.
However, on page 39 of his book Stonehenge Complete, Christopher Chippindale publishes a picture of an area of sarsen stones in Wiltshire with the accompanying caption “…This view of Fyfield shows the grey wethers spreading, as if in a grazing flock, down the dry chalk valley.” A ‘wether’ is an Old English name for a sheep or a castrated ram, and we know from numerous sources that these stones, as Christopher Chippindale has pointed out, were known as ‘grey wethers’. With this in mind, it’s curious that one person should see in the vocabulary for The Ruin a word or words that possibly describe a farm or farm building made of stone, that another should notice the prevalence of sheep in illustrations of Stonehenge, and that the local words used to describe the stones the ruins are mainly comprised of should be ‘grey wethers’ or grey sheep.
I’m not sure if there are any constructive conclusions we can draw from this business of the grey wethers, but if nothing else, it’s food for thought and it’s what Eternal Idol’s all about. I am sure, however, that scouring written sources for possible accounts of Stonehenge prior to Henry of Huntingdon’s description in 1130 is a highly worthwhile and profitable pursuit, so as I’ve just about exhausted my thoughts on Stonehenge as far as The Ruin is concerned, it’s off to pastures new….
Words by Dennis Price. Stonehenge photograph reproduced with the kind permission of Adam Stanford of Aerial Cam and Archaeology Safaris Ltd. Photograph of Stonehenge beneath Lunar Eclipse copyright Pete Glastonbury 2008. The quote about sheep in the subject line is from the late, great Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and I wasn’t originally thinking about Stonehenge or four-legged herbivores when I typed it out.
Tiers of joy
11:59 pmNew Stonehenge photo gallery
3:31 pm
If anyone’s interested in seeing a large gallery of previously unseen photographs from the 2007 Stonehenge Riverside Project, Adam Stanford from Archaeology Safaris has posted up an extensive gallery that you can see and study on this link, while there are some particularly good photographs of the excavations at the western end of the Cursus that clearly show just how deep and well-defined the massive encircling ditch was.
Adam was responsible for taking the above photograph, which in my opinion is just about the best photo I’ve ever seen of the ruins. If you’re interested in seeing or learning more, just click on any of the links provided above.
Words by Dennis Price. Stonehenge picture reproduced with the kind permission of Adam Stanford of Aerial Cam and Archaeology Safaris Ltd.
I’m extremely grateful to Pete Glastonbury, and not for the first time, for bringing something of great interest to my attention. On this occasion, anyone who is curious about the possible background to Episode II of Bonekickers may well like to read and consider this article from The Guardian, while you may also care to read and ponder this submission in the BritArch archives.
Bearing in mind that the mission statement of the “Bonekickers is an embarrassment to archaeology” Facebook site is to defend the honour of the profession, it’s just possible that one could form a not entirely favourable opinion of the way some excavations are conducted from the content of the above links, but you can decide for yourselves. If I hear of anything putting an opposing view, then I’ll be sure to post it up, so all submissions in this vein are welcome.
Bonekickers – it’s a dirty job…
2:47 am
Right, Bonekickers is a new BBC drama series dealing with the exploits of a group of archaeologists based in the west of England. When I learned that it was being made by the people who were responsible for Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, my expectations shot into the stratosphere for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who’s been fortunate enough to see either of these truly superlative series. Suffice it to say that the first episode, at least, was deeply disappointing, and it provoked a large and impassioned response on the internet.
Show me more… »
