Gone Medieval - Myths and Nature in Medieval Britain

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Humanity's relationship with the wilderness has been a theme of myths and legends for thousands of years. Such stories can offer a unique insight into the medieval mind and its concept of the wild.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman ventures out into ancient Selwood Forest in Wiltshire with Amy Jeffs - author of Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain - to reflect on our ancestors’ travels through fen and forest in the Middle Ages.This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. The Wild and the idea of wilderness has inspired poetry, myths and legends for millennia. Early medieval Britain was no different and places we can still visit today, fens, forests, caves and barrows are the focus of tales written down over a thousand years ago. These stories, as well as artefacts and artworks, give us a unique insight into the medieval mind,

and especially the concept of the wild, and even how that resonates in the world around us today. All of this is central to a brilliant new book called Wild, Tales from Early Medieval Britain by Dr Amy Jeffs. Amy is an art historian and artist, and also the author of the best-selling book Storyland, A New Mythology of Britain. And today, to find out more about her book, Amy has invited me to go away from my home studio and into the wilderness of Wiltshire. Okay, so here we go, we're in the woods, Amy. Thank you so much for taking me out into the woods today. Thank you for agreeing to. It's a really fun thing to come and forest bathe with you.

So tell me, though, why here? Where are we? And why exactly have you taken me here? We are in Selwood Forest, one of the medieval hunting forest, a great great. formidable natural barrier as it's called on Wikipedia. And it's appropriate, given your area of expertise, because I think Asa mentions it in 878. Alfred Mustard and Army with the communities around Selwood

to fight the Great Heathen Army, which I've been reading about in River Kings. And so this is a place that was gone on the borderlands with Mercia, so from Wessex, where there's more kind of security in Anglo-Saxon, England, so resided, and then beyond Selwood with wild and slightly more Danish. dangerous lands of the Viking incursions. Would you say that's about right?

Yeah, exactly, spot on, isn't it? And this is glorious. We're walking through damp, but beautiful, autumn day, really. And we're going through a large path of some description through the woods. But I think if we turn off somewhere, I'm sure we could quite easily be properly lost. It happens to me all the time. Should we go up here? Yeah, that looks good.

Can we get across? We might now fall in a ditch, listeners. so call the emergency services if there's complete silence the rest of this podcast. Just about safe, I think. We're in an oak forest. Okay, so there's lots of low holly bushes, lots of tall oak trees, quite gnarly. This isn't ancient woodland, but it is ancient enough for me. Well, it certainly dates back to the early medieval period, which is what we're interested, isn't it?

I think it's more that kind of definition of ancient woodland as a sort of ecological definition. So I think this is technically not, but it's still on the site of very ancient woodland. Fair enough. But it fits into the description of relatively wild, doesn't it? Which it obviously brings us to your book, which we're here to talk about. What I really enjoyed that you start out within your book is this whole idea of the wild and the idea of wilderness. And if we go back to early medieval period, what does that concept actually mean to people? What do they mean by wilderness? One of the things I started with was older words for the wild or the wilderness in old English and Welsh and Latin.

and they all share a kind of an idea that it's a place without paths. So in Old English we have a wayless place. In Latin there's Avia or Avium, a place without paths. So that's one idea. Another one is that it's a place that doesn't allow for cultivation. So it's a wasteland, not in the sense that we have it now, where it has been destroyed by industry or pollution, but actually somewhere that doesn't invite cultivation and farming.

So somewhere there's forest or the fens with peat bogs or whatever it. might be. So we're going to go into some of the types of wilderness that you talk about and write about really beautifully in your book. But as we're on a forest, we're going to have to jump to that chapter because one of the topics you do talk about is the forest. And in your book, you go through and you retell various legends, various stories. Some of them are direct retelling, some are more imaginative, very evocative of whatever part of that legend you're talking about. And the forest is obviously quite an important theme and the forest as a wilderness. So tell me about the particular story that you've chosen to talk about when you talk about the forest?

Absolutely. So the book itself is structured across seven themed chapters. Earth, Ocean, Forest, Beast, Fen, Catastrophe Paradise. And Earth and Ocean, those chapters, they focus on these Old English poems that are very isolated, very bare. So, for instance, in the Ocean chapter, the main character is out on the frozen ocean. He's all alone, he's spinning on the frozen sea, he's reflecting on memories of the Mead Hall and that community. and it seems to me that in that poem the ocean really is a metaphor for depression and psychological isolation.

The forest chapter that comes next, it's the opposite. It's still psychological turmoil, but it's a turmoil born of excess of the wilderness closing in, of this tangle. Even where we're standing now, you can see how effective that would be. There's this fallen oak tree with most of its barks come off its limbs

writhing around, it's covered in moss. There are weird fungi growing on it that look a little bit like something out of Mordal, these sort of black vertical things coming up. It's a really tangly, an overwhelming sort of environment. And I became interested in how the forest was somewhere that's associated in Celtic nature poetry

with hermits, with holy men and women, but mostly men going off into the forest to build a little hermitage. And you get this very bucolic sort of poetry that is soothing to the soul that keeps the body's tempers in check where there are many voiced birds. And there's a little stream babbling close by

and there's somewhere that you can grow wood sorrel to put on your tagliatele or whatever. But sometimes there is this risk that escape to the wilderness leads to excess and leads to madness. So in this chapter I trace the roots of the wild man, starting with the god Silvanus, the Roman god, moving to the Hebrew scriptural story of Nebuchadnezzar in the forest

and how he leaves the throne. This is in the book of David in the Old Testament, which is very folkloric. And he goes out into the wilderness and walks the deer paths and grows claws like a bird and hair on his body and descend into a kind of madness, but from that madness comes great wisdom. So you have this idea of the kind of wild man living in the forest.

He's out of control, he's lost his mind, and yet he might have prophetic abilities. We see this in Britain with the character of Mervynne Wilde, or Merlin Silvestris, Merlin of the forest, of the wilds, where he is mad, he is apart from society, but he also is of great political importance because when he does decide to re-enter civilization and speak, his words have immense moment and lasting relevance,

politically. I just want to ask you about some of the sources or the main source that you use, which you've also got translations of in the book. And that's the old English source called the Exeter Book. What is that? And why has that inspired what you've decided to write about? This is a book about Britain, which is why they're Celtic sources as well as English ones and Latin ones. The Exeter book is purely Old English. And it really is the pole star for the book. I encountered it first when I was 18. And I was starting a course at Cambridge and Angerner. Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, and I was going to go to my first Old English classes. And I think I had this expectation that Old English literature would be sword-swinging,

MacKismo, Beowulf stuff. And in reality, Beowulf is also quite a subtle text, but what I was amazed by was this collection of poems known as the Old English eleges, which concern these characters, these narrators who are alone in these wild landscapes, describing quite strange social and psychological situations. One of my favourites, is Wolf in Ayardwetcher, this first. female protagonist, she says, wolf is on Eilf is on Eiland, Fenneby Wurpa, wolf, and wolf is on an island, I'm on another, safe as that island surrounded by fens. She goes on to describe that when it was

rainy weather and she sat weeping, a warrior wrapped his limbs around her. She says, was me winterthon, was me huathra, it was joyful to me, but it was also hateful. And the word that's used for limbs is a word that can also mean the legs of an animal. And then a little bit later, have this really strange sort of plot twist where she said, You hear us to Eadwatcha, Can you hear me, treasure guardian, Wolf is bearing our wretched whelp to the woods.

So this figure Wolf, who she said she's longing for, she says, Wolfmin wolf, the hopes of you have dogged me. There's this amazing curveball in the narrative where wolf who she's been longing for is suddenly kidnapping her whelp. And she finishes by saying, it goes to show you can easily tear apart that which was never sewn together

our song or riddle. Again, this word that she just for song can also mean riddle. And this is one of the things. that really interested me about these elegies is that they're actually found in the Exeter book in a collection of riddles. So actually, I'll zoom out. The Exeter book was made in about 970. It ended up at Exeter Cathedral in 1072 upon the death of its owner, Bishop Leifrich, the first Bishop of Exeter. And it has been at Exeter Cathedral ever since, which is one of those amazing kind of isn't time, this fascinating continuum. It's not just a bunch of vignettes that we can dip into

photographs. It really is this ceaseless thing that passed, and it's just incredible. But the Exeter book contains some 95 Old English riddles, which if we didn't have them, we really wouldn't know how salacious our old English speaking forebears were. There's one where it says, I stand up straight in a bed, I'm hairy at my base, and I make the ladies cry, to paraphrase,

and it's thought that it's probably the solution is an onion, and it's meant to be double meaning. So you've got these really quite jocular riddles, but then in and amongst them, these elegies that seem perhaps to be riddles themselves, or perhaps just to be utterly mysterious, and that's a large part of their aesthetic appeal.

So that's my pollster. And then from there, I brought in some of the Welsh Anglignan, a poem called Clav Abikiyau, which is about a man who's been cast out into the forest because he's suffering from leprosy. And his poem, it's about the same period as these poems. And really related in genre, we can separate things out by language and treat them as units. But actually, there's a lot of cultural cross-fertilisation happening in this period. We see it in the manuscripts. We see it in the literature.

We see it in the art. These poems are related. And he describes the ivy growing on the oak stump. and the cuckoo calling in the tree and he says my clothes are growing loose i know i will be sick tonight and it's just in a very evocative and beautiful poem that's really how this book came into being was exploring the mystery of these elegies of these anglignon narratives and thinking about how they shed light on the wilderness as a physical phenomenon in the early middle ages but also as a way of describing emotion because often we think of our early medieval forebezz or any people from the past we often

often imagine them less emotionally sophisticated than us. And yet when you read these texts and look at some of the associated artworks too, you just can't carry on with that misapprehension. It's so clear that these are deeply feeling people who wrote beautiful poems about their thoughts. And you do so well in your retelling of them as well. It's making them feel much more modern. Because you also interweave your own experiences of going to some of these places. And sometimes when I was reading them, I couldn't quite tell it.

It's just you speaking or are you retelling something? So it's that's bringing it past emotions. and the connections with the landscape to the present, which I think you do very well. So that's very, really nice to read. But one of the things that struck me, and also when we talk about the forest and these people that you've talked about already, is the idea of whether the wilderness is always linked to solitude and loneliness,

because there's a lot of these outcasts, the wild men, they're outside and set apart from society. And you then also talk a lot about hermits and people who go, either for religious reasons or for the reasons, is the wilderness typically linked to that sort of solitude? Yeah, I think so one of the words that I became interested in my research for this book was Aschesis. It's where we get the word ascetic. And when we think of an ascetic person, we imagine the hermit living out on a rock in the North Sea.

We imagine St. Cuthbert or one of the Egyptian desert fathers. But in reality, in the Middle Ages, this idea of aschesis, it's Greek for exercise, was actually an idea of kind of a self-discipline built into your daily life that would help keep your physical and psychological, volatile components in check. and it could be practiced in a monastery as well within the community. And as the book moves on, so Wild begins in quite a dark setting, it travels through catastrophe and the sacking of Lindisfarne in 793 into paradise. And I hope then a quite a hopeful story,

but really the theme in those last two chapters is about community. It takes a wonderful story called the Voyage of St. Brendan, which is an early medieval kind of wonder narrative where St. Brendan and the group of monks set sail from the coast of Ireland off into the Atlantic without a rudder or any means of navigation, and they follow this strange securitist journey to several islands each year, the same islands, and end up at an earthly paradise. And it's thought that this sort of circuitous, repetitive journey they follow

is meant to be a kind of metaphor for the monastic lifestyle that through repetition and through routine, you're cleansing yourself. But one of the islands that they encounter, and they're extremely marvellous places, and some of them quite terrifying. But one, on Easter Sunday each year, they come to an island that has a great tree that is so huge, it stretches out over the edges of the island, and the tree is completely covered in an enormous flock of birds. And they're all singing, and they're singing the Psalms, including the Psalm,

how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity. And Brendan asks the birds who they are, and one of the birds comes forward and says, we are fallen angels, and when God casts down the rebel angels, we became trapped in the firmament, we didn't make it to hell. And we spend most of the year wandering the earth. And this theme of wandering trapped spirits is relevant earlier in the book and they seem quite dark, hopeless creatures. But this bird says, but once a year or on the five days and feast days,

we are permitted by God to take the form of birds, to come together and sing. And that really struck me as an incredibly beautiful idea. And that is one of the central ideas of the final chapter. And for that chapter, I write this short story for each chapter, I then go off and do some travel myself around Britain and write a kind of non-fiction commentary. I go to the Avalon marshes in Somerset to watch the Starling murmurations that happen there in the colder months of the year and became struck by this idea of how there is this amazing coherence to the wilderness that it can look chaotic, it can look mad, it can look excessive and out of control.

But when you watch a flock of however many thousand starlings tracing verse through the sky, you can't but long for that unity and that community. I love that. That's a really nice thought. How much of a tyrant really was Julius Caesar? And it's very interesting to think about why it's Caesar in particular when there have been many political assassinations in the past millennia, why Caesar's has been the one that is brought up again and again. Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs?

In the Jurassic, you see dinosaurs get bigger, and you see meat-eating dinosaurs grow into things like the size of buses. And did Helen of Troy really have the power to launch a thousand? ships. She is always derided as this sort of terrible adulterish, but at least as old as Homer, at least the 8th century BC, is a counter tradition in which Helen doesn't go to Troy. She's never Helen of Troy. She's Helen of Egypt. Well, you can expect all of this and more from the ancients on History Hit. Join us twice a week every week as we explore some of the greatest moments of our ancient past. Subscribe to the ancients wherever you get your podcasts.

So you talked about birds, you talked about creatures and that's another theme that keeps recurring in your book as well So let's just move on it. We've got a lovely spot in the forest I feel like we're getting a little bit more lost Which was I was hoping we would get quite lost today Yeah, and there are lots of these snaky ditches Which mean that getting back, the more panicked you get

About whether you're ever going to get home The more risk falling face first into squishy mud Yeah, I think that's a fairly good chance I've brought spare shoes so we'll be fine We are actually wandering the deer paths I can see deer footprints on the track we're following right now. Emulating Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel, aren't we? Fantastic.

And actually talking about creatures and things as well in nature and representation. So we've talked a lot about the written sources that you use, but your background is actually in history of art, isn't it? So your background really is from looking at representations. And you use that very much in the book as well, in addition to all the other sources. What particular examples do you use that show how this idea the wilderness, creatures, forest is also represented visually.

Yeah, I think that the objects and artworks offer us a really accessible way into periods of history that can feel quite mysterious and inaccessible. They provide paths. And one of the objects that I came across when I was first studying this period is called the Franks Casket. It's in the British Museum. It's a whale's bone casket about the size of a domino's box, if not a pizza box. You're the one for a that you might get in the pub. to play dominoes and it's carved with scenes from different legends from multiple different cultures.

So you've got the story of Wayland, who's a Germanic smith, so a goldsmith character, passing a drugged cup to Bayardahild and that's facing an image of the Virgin and Child, receiving the three kings. It's a really fascinating juxtaposition because Wayland, of course, in the story, he raped Bearderhild and impregnates her, and in the story of the birth of Christ, there's the incarnation, the immaculate conception, and so you've got these two kind of strange pregnancies with very strange circumstances and different sort of levels of female consent in them. You've got on the top face a scene of an archer character called Egil and that's a kind of mysterious one. On the back you've got the sacking of the temple in Jerusalem

of the tabernacle. You've got on the end faces, Romulus and Rima suckling the she-wolf. So we've got classical, we've got biblical, we've got Germanic. We've also on another face, but this very mysterious scene of a woman weeping over what seems to be either a funeral pyre or a barrow and runic inscriptions saying hoss mourns the fate that she suffered at the hands of Ertai and that is probably a Germanic legend that we've lost but one of the really interesting things about the frank's caskets which is eighth century it has a runic inscription on the front panel that refers to its own material it says the king of terror was sad when he swam up on the shingle whale's bone and so this object identifies with the emotion of a beached whale which is a really

beautiful idea and it leads you to think about the whale in the medieval imagination and this is something I then sprang from with the beast chapter. The whale, its belly is a figure for hell or a type for hell in the medieval Christian imagination so the Jonah in the Old Testament story is trapped in the whale's belly for three days and medieval thinkers would say so too Christ is in hell for three days harrowing hell and so we can understand the whale is a kind of precursor or a prefigurement of that New Testament moment. So we've got this strange idea of these pregnancies on the front that I've already mentioned, with Biaderhild and the Virgin, but also the casket itself as a vessel and the whale as a vessel. And it just led me on to this idea of the wilderness being full of allegory, full of meaning,

to help humanity achieve salvation. And some of it is extremely hopeful, and some of it is extremely dark. The whale features in the voyage of St. Brendan, which I mentioned already. The whale is posed as an island. And in the voyage of St. Brendan, there's a moment when he and his... monks come across an island that Brendan recognises as actually the back of a whale, but the brothers don't, and he smugly sits on the ship and says, okay, if you want to, you can go and build camp, and so they all run off.

And of course, once they light the fire and the whale feels the heat of the fire on its back, it begins to move. And this is part of a wider tradition of understanding the whale and the allegory behind the whale. So in the extir book, there's a poem called The Whale. It's one of three other poems about animals. It's also known as Fester to Ceylon, and that it has a great shape. back that it pushes above the surface of the waves so it can pose as an island and it waits for sailors to come along and more their boats and make their camp and build a fire and again as soon as the heat of the flames touches its skin it dives and it drag those men to the abyss and it says so too the devil will pose as a safe harbour in which we can make our camp only to drag our souls to hell and this has roots in a second century text in greek called the physiologa which applies these meanings to the natural world but what's i think one of the problems with this is idea of the whale, as we all imagine, a kind of smooth grey back, and we think, how on earth

would you mistake that for an island? But actually, although the old English poem calls it a whale, and although it's called a whale in the voyage of St. Brendan, in the physiologous, it's called Aspidocalone or Asp Turtle, and it's a mythical creature, and a creature with mountains and valleys and rivers on its back, it's enormous. It's a real leviathan, and when it pushes its back above the waves, you would be completely forgiven for thinking that this was Mauritius, whatever it might be, and mooring your boat and making your camp. And so that was a really fascinating discovery for me in the course of writing this book and then the opportunity to write a chapter about the whale and about this myth.

But I also think that there's this kind of contemporary resonance. Many readers of Wilde will probably not subscribe to the Christian allegorization of the whale, but they may well know that feeling of the ground shifting beneath your feet of thinking that you're somewhere safe and realizing you're not. So I think that we can mine earlier cultures, cultures that have completely different religions from our own or world views, and still find extremely human messages in them. Yeah, I love that. I suppose one question is, how widely known would these stories be and who were they meant for? Is it everyday people, or is it more a select audience?

Or is this something, do you think that in this period would have actually have spread out to the sort of you and me of the country? I think that there's several ways of answering that question. I do imagine that the poems in the Exeter book could have been the kind of thing recited in the hall at a feast and high and low did meet in the hall. It was the centre of the community in Anglo-Saxon culture.

There is a fascinating poem called The Dream of the Rood. It's not in the Exeter book. It's in another manuscript called the Vichelli book. And it's narrated by a dreamer who says he's entered this dream and he's kneeling on the ground

and before him is a great shining tree. By tree he sort of means a cross. You come to understand that he means a Christian cross and it's covered in jewels and it's absolutely beautiful and it's shining and while he's kneeling there

he begins to discern that behind the jewels and behind the gold the cross is bleeding and he can see ancient wounds and it's this very powerful and engaging image and then he says that the cross

begins to speak and it starts narrating the story of the crucifixion from its own perspective but as a perspective of a kind of warrior hero or retainer to a lord so it says that my lord needs to climb upon me

and be killed. And in the Germanic warrior culture, you would die with your lord, you would do anything to prevent his death. But this cross is being told that it must stand tall and submit to the execution of his lord for the ultimate victory. And it's a kind of subversion of the warrior culture ideal. It's an incredible poem. It starts Huatig Swephnichse, said John Willow. Lo, I want to tell you of the most choice of dreams that came to me in the middle of the night. It's just wonderful. So this survives in a, I think, a circa 1,000 manuscript. But it also, survives in ruins on the shaft of a high standing cross called Rutherwell Cross, it's up in Dunfreeshire, and that cross dates to, I believe, the 8th century, or the 9th century.

So it's considerably earlier than the manuscript in which this poem survives. It's also on a monument that would have been visible to anyone, and in a script that may well have been understood by people who didn't have a Latin education, and it's in Old English. Also, there's an incredible coincidence of something surviving on 8th century cross and also in a Circle 1000 manuscript does suggest that these aren't the two only examples of this poem and circulation originally.

So I think we can get from that a sense of this incredibly rich oral tradition. It's a little bit like the Sutton Who ship burial treasures. They really speak of vast trade networks, of very vibrant and cross-cultural communication of artistic exchange. They are this kind of blaze of light, and it's something of a dearth of evidence. And that's maybe what makes this period so exciting. We can't think of it as dark and empty.

as the poorer people being without any culture, and yet it's full of mystery. I absolutely love that idea also that you have these same stories over such a long period of time and in different parts of the country, and that's just such a nice thought. And it brings me to another thing that recurs throughout your book as well, is this idea of how the past is present in the landscape and it's recurring and people interact with the past in very physical ways, especially in terms of barrows and mounds. And this is one of my favorite things, actually, when I go through, forest. So you usually go mound hunting looking for burial mounds, which is one of my favorite

activities. There is an Iron Age ring fort somewhere near here. Is there? About 10 minutes in that direction. Oh, excellent. I'm never sure whether I'm on it or a mountain bike trail. That's the problem, isn't it? You don't quite know. But in so in the book, you start with the burial mound and you start with somebody, a bit of a sort of dark story, as you've already mentioned, who is essentially trapped in this mound. But tell me about that particular story. That was one of the kind of sparks for the book was a fascinating article by a woman called Sarah Semple, reflecting on a poem, one of the old English elegy is called the Wife's Lament, where there's a woman who says that she's been consigned to an earthen dugout under an oak tree by her lord, that all of her friends are dead,

that she has to wait in longing. She says, ancient is this earth hall, I am all longing. And it's a really mysterious poem. We don't know why she can't leave. We don't know the circumstances of her exile. Her kind of mourn for. lamenting narrative, sort of transmutes into a curse as the poem continues, a curse against this lord that's trapped her there. And Sarah Semple, who is working with a book called Deviant Burial Practices in Anglo-Saxon England by a man called Andrew Reynolds. She takes his idea or his observation that prehistoric barrows,

so considerably earlier than the sort of post-conversion Anglo-Saxon people were talking about in relation to this poem, were used as execution cemeteries in early Christian English. England and they often sit on the boundaries of territories and they're in quite wild places. And there's plenty of evidence that the people buried in them in the Anglo-Saxon period have maybe had their hands tied in front of them, that they suffered violent injuries to the back of their necks, suggestive of being executed perhaps with a broadsword, maybe even weighed down with millstones, also known as quern stones, and that they are outcasts of the society. They've been buried in this mound.

And she then, Sarah Semple, takes this idea and there's plenty of. of evidence in surviving contemporary literature that burial mounds were associated not only with territory boundaries, but also with pagan gods. When the Germanic migrants first arrived in Britain, there's evidence that they built pagan shrines on burial mounds. They also buried their own dead in brand new mounds.

She cites bear wolf in which there is a dragon inside a mound. The runaway slave steals a little cup and inspires the hobbit and she just cites other place names where Woden and elves and goblins are coupled with words for mound or barrow. She talks about the life of St. Gutlach, which appears in the Exeter book, where he goes off to live in the fens and make his home in a barrow, but first he has to exercise the sort of community of demons that are living in the barrow. And she suggests that the narrator of the wife's lament is in fact a woman who's been executed for her crimes, put into a burial mound.

her soul is trapped there. So what Stemple suggests is that these were believed to be places from which the soul could not escape, it would be trapped there by these malevolent spirits. And I just thought that was a really great springboard for a ghost story. She also suggests that the wife's lament shed light on the mysterious Germanic legend on the Franks Casket where it says, Hoss grieves over the sorrow round

about the pains that she suffered from Ertai. And fiction allows us to take these theories further, theories that may be very hard to prove, if not impossible to prove, but are just delicious. And I was going to say also for the commentary of the first chapter, I visited a barrow called Stony Littleton near here, and it was uncovered in the 19th century. It's a bronze age burial mound,

and a passage was found going through the middle of it, with chambers coming off either side, and the cremated and skeletal remains of numerous prehistoric men, women and children. And I wanted to experience crawling into a barrow. And one of the ideas that I found really compelling in the wife's lament was her description of the sun moving slowly past. She can see the sun, and yet she's in this earth and dugout. And when we went to Stony Littleton, it was freezing cold winter morning,

icy, misty, everything, it was absolutely beautiful. And I crawled into the passage tomb and passed these amazing rocks with fossils in them we could see in the raking light and all the way to the very, very back, and turned around. And I was in absolute darkness by this point, but I could see down the length of the passage and the winter sun, and it was about nine in the morning,

or something was perfectly framed by the entrance of the tomb. This idea of just this single ray of light that might be all you could see if you were this trapped soul really stuck with me. I love that. And they are so physically there in the landscape, as you say you can experience

them personally, and then if you also have some kind of ancestral link if you have burial amounts where you know that previous generations are buried, you have all those different layers, don't you, of connection? Which I think just really add to that. Yes, I think that I absolutely love going out into nature and I love being able to name the things that I'm looking at

might be oak trees or I have this ambition to be able to name fungi but I can't and I think that these stories I'm not an ecologist not all of us are ecologists but we need to explore ways to be amazed by the wild landscapes around us and inspire that kind of desire to protect and love and these stories are just sitting there waiting for us to discover them and to tell them to our children And you do that so brilliantly in your book, I have to say. It's a fantastic book that I highly recommend. Also, you've got your own illustrations in it as well? Yes, I do.

I've illustrated Wild with wood engravings. Storyland, my first book was illustrated with linocuts. I think it worked quite well with these slightly more playful myths. But for Wilde, I wanted to use a natural material. Wood engraving is different from woodcut, which is a late medieval medium. Wood engraving is a Victorian one. and it's when you take the end grain of very slow-growing, dense grain, timbers like boxwood, and you incise tiny lines into that end grain, and then you roll ink over the top,

you put paper on it, you put it into a press, and you bring the press down. The ink is transferred, and all of the lines that you carved will show up white on the finished print. And I think that one of the things that I love about relief printmaking, especially using black ink, is you can really make the most of negative space, these large areas of black that are almost like the visual counterpart to the gaps in our knowledge about this period and the mysteriousness of the stories. And I also wanted them to be printed to scale in the book because when you produce a book on a traditional press, you have the text block. And when you use wood engravings to illustrate it, the blocks are cut to exactly the right height so they can be dropped in to the text and pass through the press and printed as one. And although, of course, Wilders and mass-produced modern book, having,

the illustrations exactly 7.5 by 10 centimetres will hopefully give it that feeling of a crafted artefact and something that is connected to wood and to the forest and to all of those themes that are explored in the pages. Brilliant. So the book, if you want to check it out, and I highly recommend it. It's a great present for Christmas for people. It's by Dr. Amy Jaff's and it's called Wilde. And also check out her book, Storyland, which is her previous bestseller. Amy, we're going to have to try and find our way home somehow, aren't we? because I think we are a little bit lost. So yeah, let's try this direction.

Thank you all so much for listening. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval from Selwood Forest today. And my name is Dr. Kat Jarman. This is Gone Medieval from History Head. Do please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already so you don't miss an episode.

And we very much appreciate all your reviews that you leave us that help other people find it. We'll be back again on Saturday, my co-host Matt Lewis, and I will be back next Tuesday.