Healthy, Wealthy And Wise

[poliphilo]

Here's a sign that I really have left Wicca behind me.

We bought a pumpkin and I was going to carve it into a jack o'lantern and I forgot all about it. So now there's an untouched pumpkin sitting in the kitchen somewhere and I need to figure out what to do with it. Pumpkin soup, I guess, which makes a nice meal whatever day of the year it is.

So Halloween passed me by, but I've been deeply affected by the putting back of the clocks. I grumble about it but I like it really. I get up earlier and I go to bed earlier and feel good about myself.

Early to bed and early to rise
Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Yesterday I noticed the windows darkening at four and it shot me right back to the winter evenings of my boyhood. I'm sitting at the kitchen table and the window is throwing slanting rectangles of light up the grassy bank outside. And the ragged black silhouette of the wood at the far end of our garden is slowly merging with the sky. Maybe there's a star hovering just above.

Maybe it moves and is an aeroplane.

Or I'm sitting by an open fire and we're roasting chestnuts. (Yes, really.) We line them up along the top of the grate and behind them the coals yawn to reveal great caverns of incandescence and I think, not exactly of hell, but of some mythic otherworld- perhaps of that place in Norse legends (yes, I'd read all that stuff at a pretty young age) where the fire giants live.

Muspellsheim

I had to look that up, of course. I open my copy of Myths of the Norsemen and the information I need sits across from the scary picture of Sutr the giant with the flaming sword who stands at the gates of Muspellsheim and chops up approaching ice-bergs.

He has stiff pointed moustaches and a low sloping brow. He looks like the sort who would chop first and ask questions afterwards. Or maybe not ask any questions ever.

The book was my grandfather's and it still smells of his tobacco. He's been dead now for 25 years.

The chestnuts, anyway, are lined up along the grate and I sit well back because once in a while- thrillingly- one of them will explode.

Pop.

Comments

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

I know; English literature begins with a Norse tale, doesn't it? Gosh; you're such a young country... And yes; Arthurian legend is not really the same; there isn't the same cosmic system, first of all, and secondly most of it seems to have been written in French. For some obscure reason I cannot help but think that Arthur might have a lot more to do with Britanny that Britain. (This might be because I have mainly read Crétien de Troyes tales of the Arthurian court; Lancelot du Lac, Le Chevalier au Lion and so on, and only in French. It makes it hard to transfer into an Anglosaxon (or pre-Anglosaxon?) realm...)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You mean Beowulf? Yeah, it's a Saxon mini-epic. I confess to my shame I haven't read it.

There are Arthurian stories in the (medieval Welsh) Mabinogion. Then there's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight- an Arthurian poem set in the badlands south of Liverpool- which is thoroughly English (and mythological) and owes nothing (so far as I am aware) to the French.

The guy who did most to shape the Arthurian material into a single whole was Sir Thomas Malory. He was working with French material (Cretien de Troyes et al)- but did a grand job of Englishing it.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

You ought to read it some day; it's great, or at least this Speardane thinks so... -And if you're not up for the original (brilliant as it is, though!), there is a very good translation by Seamus Heaney.

-And I've only read one The Green Knight, and that was by Iris Murdoch... :-P

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Murdoch's Green Knight is one of her best. At least I think so...

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

My clearest memory of it is the walking scenes through London; beautiful...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I remember the girl with the stone and how she develops a conscience about it and has to take it back to the place where she found it.