The crown in the jewel

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'The Lay of Havelok the Dane' is a thirteenth century Middle English poem written in the transitional language between the inflected Germanic of Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer's more modern tongue.  It is an engaging if unremarkable tale of a young Danish prince who discovers his royal origins and claims his stolen birthright - a kind of fairy-tale Hamlet - written in the period's characteristically fast-paced short rhyming couplets of four stresses.  For the antiquarian the main point of interest is that the step-father of the eponymous hero is called Grimsby, and the Lay purports to explain how he came to found the town of the same name.

More intriguing for the general reader is the plot device used to reveal Havelok's princely birth.  As he lies sleeping, a blinding ray of light issues from his mouth.  This unprepared irruption of the fantastic into an otherwise naturalistic tale may be surprising but it is by no means unique: a more famous and rather better poem in Middle English, 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', has a knight who is not only literally green, but who calmly submits to a beheading, then picks up his head and walks off with it.  The link with folklore's figure of the Green Man who dies and rises again - itself based on myths surrounding the cycle of planting and reaping crops - seems patent, as is the thoroughgoing permeation of the Arthurian cycle concerning the Quest for the Holy Grail with references to other pre-Christian vegetation rites.

Havelok's royal light is proof that he, like all kings and queens, is an extraordinary being, endowed with an angelic radiance.  It is an idea that has been part of the iconography of royalty since the very first representations, albeit in a sublimated form: the crown.  Those blinding rays may come from the head not the mouth, but in essence they are the same.  The gleaming crown is a physical embodiment of the halo of semi-divinity which has always clung to kinghood.

To reinforce this idea, the gold and silver of crowns have habitually been embellished with jewels.  Though the initial impulse may have been vanity and a love of manifest pomp, this development was no simple mindless display of the monarch's wealth.  These otherwise useless lumps of mineral were held precious when cut because they radiated another royal light, one that amplified the luminescence of the crown they adorned.

The imagery of gems is so faded, and our perception of them so dulled, that we forget too easily the tremendous presence of a fine jewel.  And if we can lose touch with the simple primitive awe owed to a single stone, how much greater is our need to be reminded of the humbling presence of a magnificent crown?  A useful corrective is a visit to the Jewel House at the Tower of London.  To see close up the Imperial State Crown with its thousands of brilliants, rubies and sapphires, or the noble and ancient St Edward's Crown, to witness the glinting prismatic rays of the Koh-i-noor diamond or of the Sceptre's huge Star of Africa is to experience afresh the raw power of the precious stone, to regain the sense of the mysterious and the transcendental in a true crown, and to reach back to the ancient knowledge that lay behind Havelok's strange but veridical proof of royalty.

(1990)

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Placing words in English

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Words are like pebbles.  In thousands of years of sliding through our throats they have lost their edges, become smooth and effortless.  Now we are hardly conscious we use them; speech has become an exchange of signifiers - so easy that at times it may even seem to be a direct communication of signifieds.

This is a measure of language's success: it has lost its strangeness, it has passed from being something in itself, to being diaphanous, a means to an end.  And necessarily: everyone has experienced the horror of a familiar word - 'from', say - disintegrating into incomprehensible shards as language reverts to its primitive roots of arbitrary concatenations of sound.  But what we have gained in facility through familiarity we have lost in linguistic racination: with our anaesthesia to the grain and surface of words, we have forfeited the possibility of holding on to their Englishness.  And a land without a tongue is a people without a heart, as every invader bent on subduing utterly a conquered nation knows.

To be sure, the Englishness of the English language is problematic.  More than any other tongue, English has gladly accepted linguistic immigrants: from Latin and Anglo-Norman, from many European languages and finally from the speech of the rest of the world, its embrace of foreign cultures and ideas growing as the British Empire grew.  As a result, some words remain barely assimilated: 'gnosticism' will never be an English word, if only because it is a rare rock whose angular edges are never likely to be smoothed.  And even coinages like 'prestidigitation' - each of whose elements is English enough - will never truly be part of the language because of their factitious polysyllabicity.

This is not to doom the non Anglo-Saxon vocabulary to some kind of chauvinist limbo; many thousands of Romance words have entered the language so deeply, and taken on the native colouring so naturally, that it comes as a shock to discover that they are later invaders - just like the Normans who brought them - words like 'beef' and 'boon'.

Nonetheless it seems clear that the most English of English words do have a recognisable look and sound.  As foreigners still relatively unfamiliar with languages such as French or Italian or German, and with their inflections and orthography, we Anglophones retain a fresh ear and eye for their characteristic forms, for their Frenchness and Germanness.  If we have lost this for the English of everyday speech, where can we hope to find new English words that are paradoxically both unknown to us - and therefore uncommon - and yet which offer the quintessence of the language, the very heart of commonness?

The answer lies in words that swim quietly about in the great sea of English like coelocanths: the place-names.  In Spridlington, Bawdrip, Moze and Lulsley, we feel simultaneously the shock of the unknown and the shock of recognition; names like Wawne, Yackleton, Hodsock and Themelthorpe are clearly totally English, and miraculously we can perceive them as such; in the breathing fossils of Whaplode, Ible, Appledram and Kexbrough, the dead elements of speech come back to life, and we reclaim our linguistic roots.

(1989)

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Ludwig van who?

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In our apotheosis of the greatest artists we strip them of the very humanity that lies at the root of that greatness.  Too often we elide the life, thinking of the works, not the men and women who made them.  We may know in a purely abstract way that they were born on such a date, studied here, married there, produced this masterpiece under those conditions, but these remain disembodied statements: they have no person at their centre.

Because of our awe, we tend to think of Beethoven, say, as a kind of Platonic essence, the common divine factor to all his music.  We forget that he was ultimately a deaf, smelly old man who died in great loneliness.  More importantly, we forget that he was born at a time when the classical idiom in music was reaching its maturity; as a result, he happened to arrive on the scene when there was a perfect framework for the kind of compositional iconoclasm that forms the core of his achievement.  In a word, as far as timing was concerned, he was lucky.

This may seem an outrageous thing to say about one of the supreme musical masters; but it does not detract from that mastery: the music he wrote still required an incomparable genius to write it.  But the fact remains that just as his time needed someone with exactly his skills to produce the works he did, so Beethoven himself needed precisely that time.

Take the same man - the same physical and psychological make-up, though obviously with an upbringing changed in details - born now in the fourteenth century.  Music was fundamentally different in its sound, its structure, its scale, and in its performance.  A fourteenth century Beethoven might well have produced masterpieces within those conventions, but they would never have had the impact of works which could draw on the rich and complex possibilities of the classical language at its peak.

The same is true of all the greatest artists.  Shakespeare needed the English language to be poised exactly as he found it - a fresh and subtle blend of powerful Anglo-Saxon roots with infinitely variable Latinate extensions.  Born a hundred years later and his works for the stage would have been incomprehensible doggerel.  Rembrandt too absolutely required the Renaissance's anthropocentric assumptions, and his milieu's painterly techniques, to make the final searing self-portraits possible.  Picture him during the impressionist era, an eccentric and obsessive academician.

If the key creators are great partly because of their eras, it follows that there may well be hidden among us Beethovens and Rembrandts or equivalent figures, whose particular cast of genius is at odds with today's artistic currents; they are like powerful orators forced to use a bad phrase book to communicate awkwardly in a language not their own.

But we should not mourn these losses too much; after all, there are for certain greater tragedies.  For example, the millions of gifted children who will never realise or even discover their vocation, through being born in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in a desperate poverty which makes art a superfluity.  There are Beethovens out there, for sure; but we will never know their names.

(1989)

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