29 - White Horse VIII: Sign
Quote of the Week from Marion Montgomery, victory at Ethandune, and a new short fiction
"The high tide!" King Alfred cried.
"The high tide and the turn!
As a tide turns on the tall grey seas,
See how they waver in the trees,
How stray their spears, how knock their knees,
How wild their watchfires burn!
"The Mother of God goes over them,
Walking on wind and flame,
And the storm-cloud drifts from city and dale,
And the White Horse stamps in the White Horse Vale,
And we all shall yet drink Christian ale
In the village of our name.
"The Mother of God goes over them,
On dreadful cherubs borne;
And the psalm is roaring above the rune,
And the Cross goes over the sun and moon,
Endeth the battle of Ethandune
With the blowing of a horn."
For back indeed disorderly
The Danes went clamouring,
Too worn to take anew the tale,
Or dazed with insolence and ale,
Or stunned of heaven, or stricken pale
Before the face of the King.
For dire was Alfred in his hour
The pale scribe witnesseth,
More mighty in defeat was he
Than all men else in victory,
And behind, his men came murderously,
Dry-throated, drinking death.
And Edgar of the Golden Ship
He slew with his own hand,
Took Ludwig from his lady's bower,
And smote down Harmar in his hour,
And vain and lonely stood the tower--
The tower in Guelderland.
And Torr out of his tiny boat,
Whose eyes beheld the Nile,
Wulf with his war-cry on his lips,
And Harco born in the eclipse,
Who blocked the Seine with battleships
Round Paris on the Isle.
And Hacon of the Harvest-Song,
And Dirck from the Elbe he slew,
And Cnut that melted Durham bell
And Fulk and fiery Oscar fell,
And Goderic and Sigael,
And Uriel of the Yew.
And highest sang the slaughter,
And fastest fell the slain,
When from the wood-road's blackening throat
A crowning and crashing wonder smote
The rear-guard of the Dane.
For the dregs of Colan's company--
Lost down the other road--
Had gathered and grown and heard the din,
And with wild yells came pouring in,
Naked as their old British kin,
And bright with blood for woad.
And bare and bloody and aloft
They bore before their band
The body of the mighty lord,
Colan of Caerleon and its horde,
That bore King Alfred's battle-sword
Broken in his left hand.
And a strange music went with him,
Loud and yet strangely far;
The wild pipes of the western land,
Too keen for the ear to understand,
Sang high and deathly on each hand
When the dead man went to war.
Blocked between ghost and buccaneer,
Brave men have dropped and died;
And the wild sea-lords well might quail
As the ghastly war-pipes of the Gael
Called to the horns of White Horse Vale,
And all the horns replied.
And Hildred the poor hedger
Cut down four captains dead,
And Halmar laid three others low,
And the great earls wavered to and fro
For the living and the dead.
And Gorlias grasped the great flag,
The Raven of Odin, torn;
And the eyes of Guthrum altered,
For the first time since morn.
As a turn of the wheel of tempest
Tilts up the whole sky tall,
And cliffs of wan cloud luminous
Lean out like great walls over us,
As if the heavens might fall.
As such a tall and tilted sky
Sends certain snow or light,
So did the eyes of Guthrum change,
And the turn was more certain and more strange
Than a thousand men in flight.
For not till the floor of the skies is split,
And hell-fire shines through the sea,
Or the stars look up through the rent earth's knees,
Cometh such rending of certainties,
As when one wise man truly sees
What is more wise than he.
He set his horse in the battle-breech
Even Guthrum of the Dane,
And as ever had fallen fell his brand,
A falling tower o'er many a land,
But Gurth the fowler laid one hand
Upon this bridle rein.
King Guthrum was a great lord,
And higher than his gods--
He put the popes to laughter,
He chid the saints with rods,
He took this hollow world of ours
For a cup to hold his wine;
In the parting of the woodways
There came to him a sign.
In Wessex in the forest,
In the breaking of the spears,
We set a sign on Guthrum
To blaze a thousand years.
…
Far out to the winding river
The blood ran down for days,
When we put the cross on Guthrum
In the parting of the ways.
- from “Book VII: Ethandune – the Last Charge”, The Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton
Quote of the Week – Marion Montgomery
“One matures, then, through an ordered consent to the passion stirred in us by desire for some worthy object. And it is intellect’s office to make consent orderly and proportionate to worthiness. But it is more usual to us, because we have lost the virtues of intellect, to be left lamenting the death of passionate desire, confused as to whether any object is worthy.” – Marion Montgomery, “The Recover of the Permanent Things: Eliot circa 1930”, in Permanent Things edited by Tadie and McDonald
There are any number of exceptionally controversial things you might say in the political and social arenas – taking a “right” or a “left” perspective, a “progressive” or a “traditional” perspective – you might make a great deal of sport from such postulations – but I wonder if Montgomery doesn’t here offer the most controversial, if subtly phrased, psychological comment on the market. He says that we have “worthy ends” (in the sense of telos, that which we are naturally meant for), that passion and intellect are related by an act of the will, and that intellect is to rule (for the curious, see Plato’s Phaedrus for more), determining worthiness, and finally he says that “we” have culturally lost the virtues, the strengths and qualities, of intellect, which leads us to our worship of pure and unharnessed passion, thus of youth, thus of appetite, thus everything else that follows. This is a bombshell claim, with bombshell implications, and a bombshell pathology – that for all our techknowledgey and our social scientia, it is our failure to cultivate strong, curious, and ordered minds that has led us to forget what is obvious when we look at the seed going into the dibhole and the flower growing up next to it: that we are beings of great and intrinsic purpose.
White Horse VIII – Sign
We are approaching the end, and we reach the dramatic crescendo here – the final book is falling action, reckoning with what has happened already. But here we come to the result of the cliffhanger in Book VI, of the death of Colan and the high hour of the Danes, and thence to the strange calm in the hurricane that is the sign that comes to Guthrum.
The long section quoted above is the theme today, but the whole Book is quotable, and analyzable. The opening section is on Alfred’s childlike joy which – Chesterton suggests – is why he was so successful historically. Then Alfred gives a really very rousing speech to the English remnants, rallying them for the “The Final Charge”, accepting defeat but not disgrace.
Then Alfred sees a second strange vision – and that is a sure structural sign that this is the dramatic conclusion to the Ballad, as the vision in Book I is the opening:
The King looked up, and what he saw
Was a great light like death,
For Our Lady stood on the standards rent,
As lonely and as innocent
As when between white walls she went
And the lilies of Nazareth.
One instant in a still light
He saw Our Lady then,
Her dress was soft as western sky,
And she was a queen most womanly--
But she was a queen of men.
Over the iron forest
He saw Our Lady stand,
Her eyes were sad withouten art,
And seven swords were in her heart--
But one was in her hand.
Gorgeous language, and a response to Alfred’s faith since the vision. He made no promises to the Chiefs, as Mary made no promise to him – but like Job, he accepted all these things, and now defeat, in precisely the way we have seen the ideal knight and king described through the whole Ballad, including in the opening to this Book, describing Alfred’s childlikeness. And so, all unlooked for, Mary appears to reveal that she fights beside him. (Mary, rather than St Michael, or even St James of Compostela or some such figure, is a remarkable visual choice, worth reflecting upon at another time.)
The English surge forward and shatter the Danish front line and slay Ogier, who I imagine rather like Gothmog the Orc in the movie of Return of the King looking up in realization as the Rohirrim surge upon his own line. Then we get to our section today.
An aside:
The high tide and the turn!
How often do we wish we could cry that, in our own travails?
Alfred sees Mary borne by cherubs passing across the Norse line, and the pagans fall into disorder – though this is “coordinate”, not simply because of the visionary miracle, but (also?) because of Alfred, who now achieves his moment of arete. As I said last time, each Chief has his moment of Homeric excellence, and now it is Alfred’s turn. Ogier was the final Danish Chief to have his moment, and it culminated with the great sermon of the Strong, Blind Gods. It was a celebration of destruction in simple.
For back indeed disorderly
The Danes went clamouring,
Too worn to take anew the tale,
Or dazed with insolence and ale,
Or stunned of heaven, or stricken pale
Before the face of the King.
For dire was Alfred in his hour
The pale scribe witnesseth,
More mighty in defeat was he
Than all men else in victory,
And behind, his men came murderously,
Dry-throated, drinking death.
This will seem bloodthirsty to some, and we have addressed that point before now. Here we should note the contrast to Ogier. Ogier slays Mark in the previous Book thus:
But hate in the buried Ogier
Was strong as pain in hell,
With bare brute hand from the inside
He burst the shield of brass and hide,
And a death-stroke to the Roman's side
Sent suddenly and well.
Mark is outpacing Ogier, has more skill than Ogier, but Ogier has more hate. Hate is the substance of his arete, and fills his victorious speech.
Alfred is “more mighty in defeat. . .than all men else in victory”. We have just seen Ogier in victory inaugurating the very end of the world, and Alfred is more mighty than that though beaten. Why? Because, against all evidence except the miracle in the sky, against the unstoppable floodtide of the Strong Gods’ emissary, Alfred simply does not know that he is beaten, but trusts to better, quieter days:
"The Mother of God goes over them,
Walking on wind and flame,
And the storm-cloud drifts from city and dale,
And the White Horse stamps in the White Horse Vale,
And we all shall yet drink Christian ale
In the village of our name.
Ogier looks with hate but relief towards the end of the world, where he shall go laughing over the edge in the endless cascading waterfall. Alfred looks to the proper end and fruit and result of victory: peace. Peace, and a pint of ale.
Alfred combines what in Tolkien are distinct characteristics in Theoden and Faramir. His joy in battle is surely Rohirric; he is the very Saxon King upon whom Theoden could be based:
“Theoden could not be overtaken. Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Orome the Great in the battle of the Valar, when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.”
And yet Alfred’s motive is distinctly that of Faramir, explaining why he fights:
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
Alfred is mightier in defeat than all other men in victory because the childlike, joyful Alfred has faith that ultimately we may return at nightfall to our own places and enjoy peace. This is, I confess, rather chastening; how easily we despair, how quickly we surrender to political idolatry and cool and detached practicality. Alfred knows nothing of any of this. He is rather like Chesterton’s “joke” Englishman, in fact, in the poem of that name:
St George he was for England,
And before he killed the dragon
He drank a pint of English ale
Out of an English flagon.
And perhaps he fights by the same instincts as the speaker of “The Rolling English Road”:
I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
At any rate, Chesterton rather associates Englishness with drinking ale. I have proposed some deeper meanings, but there may be shallower, and you are invited to find them at the bottom of a pint of Badger or Marston’s.
Alfred, anyway, proceeds to slaughter his enemies, with a remarkable and rather poignant catalogue set forth, again in Homeric fashion. Yet we have heard he is still “in defeat”, for all his confidence and the apparition of the Virgin. What seals the matter is a rather unsettling reinforcement from the rear of the Danes:
And bare and bloody and aloft
They bore before their band
The body of the mighty lord,
Colan of Caerleon and its horde,
That bore King Alfred's battle-sword
Broken in his left hand.
And a strange music went with him,
Loud and yet strangely far;
The wild pipes of the western land,
Too keen for the ear to understand,
Sang high and deathly on each hand
When the dead man went to war.
The surviving Gaels have rallied and hearkened to the horns of Alfred, playing their own pipes in response. What we are brought to look upon, though, is not the reinforcing Gaels themselves but their dead chief, raised high. Guthrum’s Great Heathen Army carried hrafnsmerki, a Raven Banner carrying the magic of Odin. (The last Raven Banner we know of, I believe, was the one that ended covered by the dead baresarks of Harald’s army at Stamford Bridge.) Alfred’s banner was the Golden Dragon of Wessex – thus in Book V:
Then Alfred, King of England,
Bade blow the horns of war,
And fling the Golden Dragon out,
With crackle and acclaim and shout,
Scrolled and aflame and far.
And under the Golden Dragon
Went Wessex all along,
Past the sharp point of the cloven ways,
Out from the black wood into the blaze
Of sun and steel and song.
One last bloody banner is raised, a dead Gael holding a shattered sword who goes to war surrounded by a fae music. Old Britain may have died, and we know how bitterly Colan recalled that fact, and how just his resentment is; but new England has taken up into herself the remains of old Britain, and here we see the alliance, the dripping gore of the old giving strength, in blood sacrifice, by Colan’s shrouded druidism, to the new.
It is worth reiterating the point here: the union of the old and new inhabitants, healing past old harms and united by a common “White Lord”, is what physically brings victory at Ethandune, and the point is made explicit:
As the ghastly war-pipes of the Gael
Called to the horns of White Horse Vale,
And all the horns replied.
The named “Lieutenants” of the English army now – a Saxon, a Christian Norseman, and a Cornishman – now lead the counterattack, the historic succession of generations of the folk. The Raven Banner falls:
And Gorlias grasped the great flag,
The Raven of Odin, torn;
Now matters begin to still, because the dramatic culmination of all this is not in a violent flood, or even in the moment that Alfred imitates Diomedes in his excellence, but when the final of the eight original named key characters has his arete – but Guthrum’s arete is not one of war and violence, but a better thing:
And the eyes of Guthrum altered,
For the first time since morn.
As a turn of the wheel of tempest
Tilts up the whole sky tall,
And cliffs of wan cloud luminous
Lean out like great walls over us,
As if the heavens might fall.
As such a tall and tilted sky
Sends certain snow or light,
So did the eyes of Guthrum change,
And the turn was more certain and more strange
Than a thousand men in flight.
For not till the floor of the skies is split,
And hell-fire shines through the sea,
Or the stars look up through the rent earth's knees,
Cometh such rending of certainties,
As when one wise man truly sees
What is more wise than he.
What happens in Guthrum’s eyes, as he truly sees, is a more powerful and mighty thing than the rout of the Danish army. Armies rebuild and return; Rome seemed to lose a thousand battles against Hannibal, but it won at Zama, and that was the last. The Sun King lost five times to Marlborough, but Denain made good for all. Alfred sees victory won, and Saxon England largely secure until Canute’s time, by a change not in the mathematics of war, but in Guthrum, who Chesterton depicts as a wise, and therefore despairing, king.
Guthrum, indeed, was a great man – like Alfred, his name comes down to us. To Chesterton, Alfred is characterized by a certain innocence, childlikeness, a lack of self-seriousness; he laughs at being struck for a bad servant by a simple country woman, he takes up the challenge of the Earls as he sits in disguise at their fireside and degrades himself, but praises God; he takes the moment before battle to repent; and he faces defeat smiling, as we hear the start of Book VII:
And as a child whose bricks fall down
Re-piles them o'er and o'er,
Came ruin and the rain that burns,
Returning as a wheel returns,
And crouching in the furze and ferns
He began his life once more.
He took his ivory horn unslung
And smiled, but not in scorn:
"Endeth the Battle of Ethandune
With the blowing of a horn."
Guthrum is great for a different reason, or pair of reasons, processed chronologically:
King Guthrum was a great lord,
And higher than his gods--
He put the popes to laughter,
He chid the saints with rods,
He took this hollow world of ours
For a cup to hold his wine;
In the parting of the woodways
There came to him a sign.
He had mastery of that part of the world to come within his reach. He humbled the great spiritual and temporal leaders of the vast, submerged Roman behemoth. He was wise enough to neither trust the Strong Gods for their strength, nor join them in their hate. As the bloody banner-man and the Golden Dragon swept away the magic hrafnsmerki, Guthrum was so great as to be able to see the truth, even if he could not see the Virgin in the sky.
Now, the cynic might say – well, historically Guthrum converted, surely, for peace. He had lost a battle and did the clever thing. Perhaps. If so, it is very strange that one of the most successful warleaders of his age, ruling the balance of England, with strong and greedy Norse kingdoms behind him, honoured the Treaty of Chippenham, and spent his time building churches instead. The high Norman spires towering over the flat Anglian lands are, in a sense, his legacy: the joining of the Norse kingdoms to the gestalt culture of England, bonding many peoples together under a World Civilization that claims no political power itself but has directed political power ever since Constantine saw the Cross above the Milvian Bridge.
In Wessex in the forest,
In the breaking of the spears,
We set a sign on Guthrum
To blaze a thousand years.
Dawn
There would be a setting down, as there had been a taking up. For now, there was a bearing. The swollen stream, brown with its rain rapine, ran past the bald bridge piers beside him. He glanced up the hill, away, into the dark fringe of wood. Pushing aside giant rhubarb, dodging nettle, keeping the precious load away from thorn and sting. The scrubby pines here had spread from the overgrown plantation to the ancient heaps, immune to the soil’s wash of acid. There was a glimpse of grey light through the canopy, and he hove for it.
At the end of the stand of trees, a silver gold washed the grassy field beyond. The dawn sun had risen above the ridge to the north-east, and quivered in the moist air, an egg yolk hitting the pan over fire. Downhill, north and east, towards the sun, the shadow rendered the grasses silver; uphill, the flowing light began to paint the seedheads golden.
Past the grass, on a half-worn path beside a tangled hedgerow. The earth, where bare, was a washed blue and red, the exposed clay melting and cracking with the weather. A jolt: some ancestor shrine, a few new flowers amongst the sepia stems, not cleared away but left as sacrifice. He had stepped on broken stones, shattered old brick. There had been an ancient chapel here, a penance house, when the world was rising and believed in redemption; the ancestor shrine was set amongst it, he realized, a half-known reinstitution of the old rites. The oak tree above the shrine was the tribute of the land. A hare started across the tall grass at the edge of his sight, seeming to crest the tops like a dolphin through the waves.
Up and on to the faded roadway, past the Lapidary’s. They called it that, the plane-shrouded house with dark windows behind high, moss-eaten walls. He had never dared step beyond the boundary. Was it full of jewels? Did anyone dwell there now? Was it an abandoned haunt, or home to some coven, or a mask and shield put up by some poor senescent hiding from a rotted world? He turned away and down the roadway, to a tunnel of pines fled from the plantation.
The sun was too strong, today – rarely strong – to be cut out by these pony-riding, ravaging pines. One day, even a hot strong day would not pierce the umbral threads rising over the scrub here, but today it lit his way. Then into a deathly quiet village, the yards overgrown with willowherb and ragwort, the old church boarded, the metalwork rusted, the trees riding up the road to live amongst the dead.
He nearly stepped on the man on the floor. Lying on his side, a metal cup of something in front of him. Another traveller, or a wandering man, as like to kill him as beg from him? He smiled wanly, adjusted the load, walked on quicker.
He ascended into birdsong, a sudden wash of sound out from the scrubby meadows as the sun roused the flowers and the birds and the rabbits into life.
A single jackdaw on a rusted sign to nowhere, rising towards the dawn at his approach.
Visible now, crowned by Helios across the horizon, home, the safe harbour for the holy burden on his back.
How tantalizing! And really good. The details of the land and its vegetation are excellent; nothing puts me in a place like that sort of detail. I hope you'll do more fiction! Do I detect some Cormac McCarthy influence?