Riding Through the Glen

I've always been a sucker for the whole Robin Hood malarkey. I'd say 'mythos', but that's obviously the wrong word, though a passable holiday beer. But yeah, when I was small one of my prize possessions was a hefty Robin Hood comic, bought at a fete in Celbridge if I remember rightly, and I followed it up by reading Robin Hood books by Enid Blyton, of all people, and by the wonderful Roger Lancelyn Green.

Robin of Sherwood was on the telly, of course, with the peerless Judi Trott playing Marion, being almost as foxy as the heroine of the Disney version of the tale.

I'm afraid my weakness for the legends didn't die with my childhood; over the years, for very different reasons and in very different ways, I've been deeply fond of the gritty Patrick Bergin take on the story, the swashbuckling Errol Flynn version of the tale, and the beautiful, tender, and heartbreaking Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn version.

I'm afraid, however, that I've not been won over by the current BBC attempt at the legend, and not just because of how one of the cast was once mean to someone very dear to me when she was four. No, I just think it's naff.

Not as naff, mind, as the Kevin Costner absurdity that was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Oh dear me, no. Not as naff as that.

All of which is a clunky way of saying that earlier today, chatter here in El Casa led me to discover the Guardian's hilarious Reel History series, which comically shreds various pseudo-historical films. The piece on Prince of Thieves has some gems:

'Before you know it, Robin of Loxley has escaped a Turkish (or possibly Saracen) jail, along with improbable Moorish sidekick Azeem. They arrive back at Dover, where Robin cheerfully proclaims that it will only take them until nightfall to walk to his father's castle. Even if you had a car, from Dover to Loxley would take you five hours. Robin and Azeem only have feet. Worse still, Robin takes the scenic route, via Hadrian's Wall – a diversion of another 300 miles...

Having bonded over anachronistic swearing, Robin and his band build a sort of Ewok village in a bosky glade, complete with rope ladders, engineered lifts, mood lighting, canopy-level walkways, and a mosque for Azeem. If medieval peasants, with nothing but the natural resources of the forest around them, could build this sort of thing, why did they mostly live in filthy huts made of sticks and manure?

... The Sheriff's scribe frets about the cost of Robin's larceny: "We reckon he's nicked three to four million in the last five months, sire." Bearing in mind that the exchequer receipts for all of England in 1194 came to £25,000, this is impressive thievery. Even if the scribe is counting in pre-decimalisation pennies, Robin has managed to steal more than the entire crown revenue for five months, notionally equivalent to around £250bn today. Admittedly, with that sort of cash, Robin probably could have had as many canopy-level walkways as he wanted. Still, you'd think people would stop driving money carts through Sherwood Forest after the first billion or so.'

And so forth. To be fair, the cliffs at the start aren't those of Dover in Kent, but are the Seven Sisters in Sussex, but the point stands, I think: you'd have to be a hell of a walker to make it from Sussex to Hadrian's Wall and back to south Yorkshire in under a day. Read it and snigger.

Outstaring the Gorgon

One of the things that keeps amusing me is how appalled -- and amused, it must be said -- my friends tend to be when faced with the uncomfortable plot summaries that are so crucial to the creepy parlour game of Name That Film. And for what it's worth, of yesterday's 22 plots, I've already been contacted with correct answers to thirteen of them, which is pretty good for less than a day.

But the odd thing is that if you try this with Greek myth, say, people just shrug, because such horror is entirely normal there. If I say to you something like 'Jilted wife murders husband's new wife and own children in act of vengeance, Gods approve,' you'd just think, 'Yes, it's obviously Medea, what's your point, Thirsty G?' Likewise if I go 'Man stubbornly insists on primacy of letter over spirit of law, son and wife kill themselves, locals chalk it up to experience,' you don't even blink and say, 'Antigone,' wondering what all the fuss is about, as you have probably always wondered why Sophocles didn't name the play Creon.

So here are ten more Classical plots for you to play with. If you're a Classicist and don't get them within about three seconds, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. If you're not, a lower and slower strike rate is forgiveable, in this philistine age. Give it a shot in the comment box, if you like.

1. Poor loser takes out anger on livestock, commits suicide.
2. Townspeople pay token respect to handicapped transsexual, but frequently disregard his advice.
3. Traumatised veteran returns home and butchers wife's guests.
4. Bisexual man kills perfect husband and mutilates corpse to avenge death of gay lover.
5. Musician has difficulty accepting wife's death, is assaulted and murdered by drunken gang.
6. Exotic dancer helps new lover murder her deformed half-brother.
7. Beautiful young wife trapped in unsatisfying daily routine, having to get up early for work while decrepit husband invariably stays in bed, muttering to himself.
8. Man keeps daughter captive, and is horrified when girl becomes pregnant after golden shower; daughter's son later kills man at sports event.
9. Scientist attempts murder of nephew, builds sex toy and dungeon, causes death of son.
10. Woman's brother kidnaps and rapes her daughter, woman develops eating disorder.

Ah, the things that every educated Westerner used to be expected to know. I wonder how Bible stories would work when written this way.

The Other God Who Died in the Reign of Tiberius

Every so often, in perusing the auld books, I come across a fascinating little nugget that begs to be turned into the kind of story Neil Gaiman used to tell so well in Sandman. I came across a marvellous one the other week, when looking through Plutarch's Moralia.

‘As for the death among such beings, I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. The father of Aemilianus the orator, to whom some of you have listened, was Epitherses, who lived in our town and was my teacher in grammar. He said that once upon a time, in making a voyage to Italy, he embarked on a ship carrying freight and many passengers. It was already evening when, near the Echinades Islands, the wind dropped, and the ship drifted near Paxi. Almost everybody was awake, and a good many had not finished their after-dinner wine. Suddenly from the island of Paxi was heard the voice of someone loudly calling Thamus, so that all were amazed. Thamus was an Egyptian pilot, not known by name even to many on board. Twice he was called and made no reply, but the third time he answered; and the caller, raising his voice, said, “When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.”

On hearing this, all, said Epitherses, were astonished and reasoned among themselves whether it was better to carry out the order or to refuse to meddle and let the matter go. Under the circumstances Thamus made up his mind that if there should be a breeze, he would sail past and keep quiet, but with no wind and a smooth sea about the place, he would announce what he had heard. So, when he came opposite Palodes, and there was neither wind nor wave, Thamus, from the stern, looking toward the land, said the words as he had heard them: “Great Pan is dead.”

Even before he had finished, there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement. As many persons were on the vessel, the story was soon spread abroad in Rome, and Thamus was sent for by Tiberius Caesar. Tiberius became so convinced of the truth of the story that he caused an inquiry and investigation to be made about Pan; and the scholars, who were numerous at his court, conjectured that he was the son born of Hermes and Penelope.’

(Moralia 419)

We've no idea how well-known this story was in Antiquity, but it seems pretty clear that it did no harm to Pan's cult which continued to thrive throughout the Graeco-Roman world. As far as his devotees were concerned, reports of his death -- if they even heard of such tales -- had evidently been greatly exaggerated.

Early Christians, on the other hand, were only to glad to seize hold of this story, which though it cannot be traced earlier Plutarch -- who wrote around 100 AD , and was hardly the most careful of historical magpies -- nonetheless was thought to have taken place several decades earlier, during the reign of the emperor Tiberius. It was during the reign of Tiberius, as you surely know, that the ministry, death, and resurrection of Our Lord took place. In fact, having mentioned Pan, it's probably worth adding that was in the Panium, in the vicinity of the great shrine of the shepherd Pan at Caesarea Philippi, that St Peter first recognised Jesus as the Messiah, and was in turn honoured as the kepha, the rock on whom Our Lord would found his church.

It's not really surprising that early Christians liked this tale of Pan dying. Easter just struck me as a good time to share it with you. Happy Easter.

In the Company of Wolves

The other day, talking about Christopher Hitchens, morality, and the 'Golden Rule', I raised the question of whether being nice is the same thing as being good; I might as easily have asked whether it's the same thing as being right. I'm inclined to agree with Little Red in Sondheim's Into the Woods who -- chastened by her experiences -- declares that 'nice is different than good'.

Into the Woods was my introduction to Sondheim, long before I was captivated by Sweeney Todd; a musicologist friend of mine loaned me her copy, after raving about it for months, and washed away all my ingrained contempt towards musicals. Heavily influenced by The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim's fascinating study of the importance of fairy tales, it's immensely clever and really quite hilarious in how it interweaves and interprets the stories of Rapunzel, Jack the Giant Killer, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty to enthralling and enlightening effect. If you ever get an opportunity to see it -- whether in the theatre or in the American Playhouse version -- you shouldn't miss that chance.

Bettelheim's analysis of the Red Riding Hood story is primarily based -- like pretty much all modern retellings -- on 'Little Red-Cap', as the Brothers Grimm version of the tale in entitled. He sees this as a fairy tale for inquistive children who've outgrown 'Hansel and Gretel', and sees its value in how it allows children to give vent to their oedipal fantasies while ensuring that the natural order is ultimately restored.

While it's the Grimm version that interests him most, Bettelheim doesn't ignore the tale's prehistory and devotes special attention to Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Charles Perrault's 1697 French version of the tale, the earliest published form of the story. Unlike the Grimm version, Perrault's version is a cautionary tale that ends with the girl being devoured. There's no rescue by a woodman, no snipping open of the wolf's belly with a scissors, no filling of the wolf's belly with deadening stones. Nope. The girl and her grandmother are eaten, that being the end of them, and in case Perrault's point isn't blindingly obvious, he hammers it home by tagging on a moral:

Children, especially young ladies – attractive, courteous, and well-bred – do very wrong to listen to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide a wolf with dinner. I saw ‘wolf’, for there are various kinds of wolf. There is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy nor hateful nor angry, but tame, obliging, and gentle – who pursues young women in the streets, even into their homes. And alas! Everyone must know that it its these gentle wolves that are the most dangerous wolves of all!

Perrault also seems to have been responsible for introducing the red hood itself to the story; it doesn't appear to have been part of the oral tales from which he drew his Tales of Mother Goose, at least insofar as they can be established, although there was a tale current in the Eleventh Century of a red-capped girl found in the company of wolves.


It seems that Perrault may have toned the story down a bit too, removing elements he apparently deemed unsuitable for his polite audience; this rendering of the tale, taken with just one adjustment from Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, is representative:

Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother. As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going.
"To grandmother's house," she replied.

"Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?"

"The path of the pins."

So the wolf took the path of the needles and arrived first at the house. He killed grandmother, poured her blood into a bottle, and sliced her flesh onto a platter. Then he got into her nightclothes and waited in bed.

"Knock, knock."

"Come in, my dear."

"Hello, grandmother. I've brought you some bread and milk."

"Have something yourself, my dear. There is meat and wine in the pantry."

So the little girl ate what was offered; and as she did, a little cat said, "Slut! To eat the flesh and drink the blood of your grandmother!"

Then the wolf said, "Undress, and get into bed with me."
"Where shall I put my apron?"

"Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more."

For each garment -- bodice, skirt, petticoat, and stockings -- the girl asked the same question; and each time the wolf answered, "Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more."

When the girl got into bed, she said, "Oh, grandmother! How hairy you are!"

"It's to keep me warmer, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What big shoulders you have!"

"It's for better carrying firewood, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What long nails you have!"

"It's for scratching myself better, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What big teeth you have!"

"It's for eating you better, my dear."

And he ate her.

Darnton has the girl taking the path of the needles rather than the path of the pins, but Bettelheim notes that early versions of the story describe the girl choosing the path of the pins, and explain the significance of the choice by saying that it is easier to fasten things together with pins than to sew them together with needles; as such the girl is choosing the pleasure principle over the reality principle, and suffers accordingly.

I first read this version of the story in a slightly abridged form in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, as told by Gilbert -- Gaiman's Chestertonian embodiment of a very special place -- to Rose Walker, the heroine of The Doll's House. It's apparently a pretty accurate reflection of the story as it was told among the peasantry of Eighteenth Century France, at around the same time as Perrault's somewhat sanitised version was gaining popularity among the literate classes; you'll probably have been rather startled both its cannibalistic element and by what Darnton describes as 'the strip-tease prelude to the devouring of the girl'.


Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, notes that other retellings seem to preserve a different tradition again. She describes how some versions indeed have the wolf tricking the girl into eating the flesh and drinking the blood of her grandmother, but with the girl refusing to get into bed with the wolf, saying that she needs to relieve herself. The wolf encourages her to join her anyway, saying she can relieve herself in the bed, but as the girl persists in her refusal he ties her to the bed post with a long cord that allows her to leave the cottage but go no further; once outside, the girl undoes the knot and escapes.

Warner makes much of how the wolf takes the place of the grandmother in the story, eschewing Bettelheim's psychoanalyical interpretation to point out that both the wolf and the grandmother are marginal figures in the story: both dwell in the woods away from people and are in need of food. This parallel seems to reflect and embody the peasant fantasies of early modern Europe, where the werewolf was a male counterpart to the female witch or crone.

If you've seen The Brotherhood of the Wolf, you might be familiar with the story of the 'Beast of Gévaudan', upon which the film is loosely based. The Beast terrorised a part of south-central France between 1764 and 1767, killing at least sixty people. More than a hundred years later, Robert Louis Stevenson described it as 'the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves':

What a career was his! He lived ten months at free quarters in Gévaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and children and ‘shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty’; he pursued armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the king’s high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing before him at the gallop. He was placarded like a political offender, and ten thousand francs were offered for his head. And yet, when he was shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for that.

It's not surprising that the locals had been so terrified, and indeed superstitious. The nightmare of the loup-garou -- the werewolf -- was deeply embedded in the collective psyche of the peasantry of early modern France. Throughout the Sixteenth Century, with the countryside apparently being plagued by lycanthropic attacks, thousands of people were accused of being werewolves. Although torture was often used to educe confessions, there were cases where the evidence against the accused was clear in relation to charges of murder and cannibalism, albeit not to association with wolves!

The whole phenomenon, strikingly similar to the witch-trials that were so common throughout Europe at the time, petered out after it was decreed in a 1603 trial that 'the change of shape existed only in the disorganised brain of the insane'. With lycanthropy now seen as a delusion rather than a real supernatural phenomenon, werewolves faded from the French courtroom, but they clearly remained fixed in the French popular imagination, being trasmitted down through the centuries through folklore, fairy tales, films, and even parlour games.

The Ill-Made Knight

Most of the action in Black Dossier takes place in 1958, and involves the theft of the 'Black Dossier' by Allan Quatermain and Mina Murray, and their pursuit by various agents of British Intelligence. Aside from allowing Moore to link 1984 and Frank Richards's 'Greyfriars' stories with almost every British spy story you care to think of, this serves as a framing sequence for the Dossier itself.

The eponymous Dossier consists of an assortment of documents which, viewed in their entirety, detail the history of the League over the centuries, and indeed place it in a broader historical context, just as the 'New Traveller's Almanac' in League Volume II had mapped out the geography of the world in which League is set. The documents include part of a lost historical play by Shakespeare entitled Faerie's Fortunes Founded, an account by Bertie Wooster of the manifestation at his Aunt Dahlia's home Brinkley Court of Lovecraft's Elder Gods, and an extract from a beat novel by Sal Paradyse featuring characters based on Mina, Allan, and the grandchildren of Fu Manchu and Professor Moriarty.

The chronological backbone of the series is laid out in the eighteen-page 'Life of Orlando', presented in the form of a 1950s boy's adventure comic. That's part of the charm and the brilliance of this book -- it's a triumph even as an object, with each pastiche looking absolutely perfect, whether resembling a yellowed paperback or a Tijuana bible. Anyway, Moore merges the different Orlandos that have been written over the years into one immortal character of mutable gender and -- it would seem -- species, and uses him to mark out the major events in the history of the world of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, such as, for example, the brief flickering candle of Camelot.

1958, the year in which Black Dossier is set, was also the year in which the Candle in the Wind, the fourth part of T.H. White's Arthurian epic The Once and Future King, saw print, detailing the destruction of the dream that was Camelot. It can hardly be a coincidence then that in describing Arthurian Britain, Orlando refers to 'awesome, monstrously ugly Lancelot', who you can see here, hacking his way across the battlefield.

White's Lancelot, introduced in 1940's The Ill-Made Knight, is as brave and mighty as any other take on the character, but unique among Lancelots in being spectacularly ugly -- White describes him as ape-like. There's no doubt then that this is meant to be White's take on the hero, not least because, as Keith Kole rightly observes on Jess Nevin's annotations site, there is a marked similarity between Kevin O'Neill's depictions of Lancelot, Caliban, and Edward Hyde.

On top of that, White's Lancelot is a sadist. It's not just that he's merely good at beating people up and killing them; he actively enjoys doing so and takes pleasure in inflicting pain on others. He's not just monstrously ugly, as Orlando opines, he is -- in effect -- himself a monster, slaughtering in the service of his queen. But that shouldn't surprise you, really, considering yesterday's observations on another rather more contemporary sadist.

I think it's fair to say that Lancelot's a far more attractive character than Bond, though. He may be a sadist, but he knows it, and is horrified by it. Deeply good, rather than ruthlessly amoral, his whole life is dedicated to controlling the beast that he is, to harnessing his monstrous tendencies so that his extraordinary abilities can be used for good, rather than evil.

It's rather tempting to consider Lancelot as a sort of proto-Hyde figure, considering not just his appearance but how Edward Hyde's character developed over the first two volumes of League.

It's also worth noting in this respect that O'Neill depicts Lancelot as looking suspiciously reminiscent of Sláine, the Celtic hero of 2000AD. Look at his armlet, and at that wide and ornate metal belt, and then note that that's pretty much all he's wearing: everyone else is wearing generic Celtic armour. Why? Well, the implication must be that that like Sláine and Cúchulainn, the Irish hero upon whom Sláine is largely based, Moore and O'Neill's Lancelot is warped, prone to berserker furies that transform him into a creature more like a beast than a man, and utterly invincible in battle. Echoes of Hyde again, methinks...

I know, it's a lot to get from just one panel, isn't it? That's Alan Moore for you, though. And if you turn the page you'll see that O'Neill's depiction of Beowulf rather spectacularly echoes his Lancelot; this Beowulf wears a similar armlet on his right arm, and a wide and ornate metal belt and not much else. With his ragged mane and his broad grin he looks more than a little like Sláine as he used to be drawn by Mike McMahon, back when O'Neill and Moore were still working for 2000AD. Is Beowulf a berserker too, then? Possibly -- after all, Orlando observes that he's 'still not really sure what Beowulf was, exactly.' He's right to wonder, and if you watch the film in the cinema at the moment, you'll be hard pressed not to agree with Grendel's mother that beneath his heroic glamour, Beowulf is a monster just as much as her son.

I even wonder whether we're meant to see parallels with Orlando's description of Ajax as 'a confused brute', or of Mina's reference to Bulldog Drummond as 'a big ape', but if I were to get started on that, I'd never talk about anything else.

Moore tomorrow so. Same League time, same League channel.

What's that coming over the hill? Is it a monstah?

Having had the line 'And I WILL kill your monstah!' stuck in my head for the last few weeks, it was only ever going to be a matter of time until I went to see whether Mr Carder was right to damn Beowulf as he did, so I went along last night, having heard good things in advance from a couple of friends and from the Brother, who had enjoyed it despite being troubled by the occasional eerie blankness of the characters' eyes.

I loved it. Sure, the weaknesses of motion capture are most obvious in the quiet moments when people are talking and it's as though you're watching a rather dull computer game, but the scenery is breathtakingly beautiful at times, the action scenes are utterly exhilarating, and there's one heartstoppingly horrific moment where Beowulf wakes to a scene more nightmarish than that from which he's woken. And perhaps most importantly, it's a fine story.

I can sympathise with people muttering that it's not the same as the poem, that Beowulf should kill Grendel's mother rather than sleep with her, and that he should return to his own kingdom rather than inherit Hrothgar's. But the thing is, that's kind of what the film is about.

Much as I'd like to, I haven't read Beowulf: the Script Book, but even from watching the film once it's pretty obvious what Gaiman and Avary are trying to do: the film's a study in myth-making, implicitly purporting to tell the real story of Beowulf but showing the forces that will transform that story into the canonical version we all know.

Watch the ritualised dramatisation of Beowulf's fight with Grendel, noting how it's pretty much identical to the poem, and compare that with the fight as shown in the film. Think of Beowulf's description to all and sundry of his battle with Grendel's mother, and consider how Beowulf himself would have been the sole source for the story. Mightn't he have embroidered it somewhat? Bear in mind that he brought back no trophy to prove that victory. Look at Wiglaf's absolute loyalty, and his determination to preserve Beowulf's reputation no matter what, even if that means refusing to listen to his lord's attempts to remove the lustre from his legend. And finally, pay attention to the sprouting seeds of Christianity which will in time overcome this world of pagan heroism.

Certainly, the film is different to the poem. But it doesn't so much contradict it as encompass, foreshadow, and explain it. Referring to these differences on his blog, Neil Gaiman expressed disappointment in the official educational pack that had been done to accompany the film.

Part of the point of the Beowulf movie that Roger and I wrote is the places it diverges from the story of Beowulf, and the ways it explores the relationship between a person and a story about a person. I don't think they should be putting the stuff we made up on material intended for schools -- it seems like a way of justifiably irritating teachers, who have enough to put up with when they try to teach Beowulf without us making their lives harder. It would have been much more interesting to have put up either the original, or one that talked about the differences -- I'd absolutely encourage high schoolers to see our version and talk about what changed and why.

I'm hoping that when the DVD comes out it'll have a running commentary with the writers, who'll be able to explain along the way what they changed, why, and how. That'd be priceless..

After all, while Alexander is a spectacular pile of tosh, the DVD commentary with Oliver Stone and Robin Lane Fox is invaluable from an educational point of view; it's amazingly instructive to listen to the film's director and historical advisor try to justify their film's rather flexible attitude to historical orthodoxy. I can't imagine teaching a credible course on cinematic representations of the Classical world without having that as required viewing; I'm curious as to whether the DVD of 300 has any similarly mitigating features that might justify my purchasing that farcical bloodbath.

Beowulf is a far superior film to Alexander, but I'm pretty sure that a decent DVD commentary would be just as fascinating and no less useful than that which -- to some degree -- redeems Oliver Stone's classical trainwreck.

He'd seen how civilized men behaved...

I have a weakness, as I remarked to a friend the other evening, for stories of redemption and revenge. I'll take either any day, and both together given a choice.

Both? Well, yes. revenge may be a dish best served cold, but it's rarely filling. In the end, revenge is empty, as Inigo Montoya realised having finally slain the six-fingered man - redemption beats it hands down. Think of Orestes, or the Beast in whatever version of the fairy tale you care you sample, or Darth Vader, or best of all Edmond Dantès, the eponymous antihero of The Count of Monte Cristo. Yes, for all that that masterpiece of nineteenth century pulp fiction is focused on revenge, it ultimately gains much of its power from Edmond's eventual rediscovery of the humanity that he had lost in the darkness of the Château d'If. It is only through learning how to forgive and remembering how to love that he finds peace.

But sometimes, sometimes, you can get a hell of a story just focused on revenge. Or justice. There can be times when it's difficult to tell which is which. That's just one of the ways that friends come in handy - if you're in danger of losing your moral compass it's useful to have a few stars to navigate by. Life without friends can be as perilous as it can be dull.

All of which leads me neatly to the great Stephen Sondheim's greatest masterpiece.

Sweeney Todd, due to be hitting our screens in a month or two, depending on where you are, and surely not to be missed, is an astounding story of a wronged man who, consumed by a desire for vengeance, becomes a monster.

By turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and horrifying, it is about as profound a study of greed, hypocrisy, and obsession as you'll ever see. It's magnificently written and thrillingly scored, and features at its centrepiece what must be the finest and funniest attempt at linking cannibalism and capitalism in the history of music.

(I've no idea if there are others, but if so, I'm confident they pale next to the wonderfully witty wordplay of 'A Little Priest'.)

To say I'm a fan of the show is to put it mildly. I've seen it twice in Manchester, the first production there being probably the best thing I've ever seen on the stage, and twice just a few months ago in Dublin, a production described by the Guardian as a 'miracle'. Not content with occasionally seeing it in the theatre, though, I have a DVD of a 2001 concert performance, and two versions of it on CD.

Yes, I know, I've yet to acquire the DVD of the show with George Hearn and Angela Lansbury as Todd and Mrs Lovett, but I'll get round to it eventually. There's no rush.

With so much invested in the show, I have to admit that I've been a little bit worried about the prospect of the film. Granted, all the ingredients seemed fine - I can't imagine a director better suited to this than Tim Burton, and the likes of Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall look perfectly cast. Even Sacha Baron Cohen could prove an inspired choice as Pirelli. But what of Jonny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter? They look great, and can certainly act, but can they sing? That's where this will stand or fall, after all, as unlike the kind of musicals I grew up hating on telly, Sondheim's shows don't involve people strolling along chatting and then unaccountably bursting into song; they're almost entirely sung, with only the occasional bit of spoken dialogue bridging the songs.

I'm not worried anymore. The early word is good, and the trailers look encouraging. I have a feeling that this is a tale we can look forward to attending.

Episcopal Action

A couple of weeks back I mused here on how a lengthy passage from Dante, about the torments that would befall those who refused to take sides during moral crises, had been paraphrased by John F Kennedy in Bonn in 1963, and how Kennedy's exaggerated paraphrase has since mutated and proliferated further so that the line is to be found scattered throughout the internet, almost invariably attributed to Dante albeit saying something he'd not quite said in rather less words than he'd used to say something slightly different.

It's a common phenomenon.

Think, for example, of that line so often attributed to Edmund Burke, whose brazen form adorns College Green to this day: 'All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.' It's a fine sentiment, marvellously expressed; the only problem is that Burke appears never to have said it.

He did, however, say 'When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.' That's not far off the more famous saying, and has the advantage of foreshadowing Martin Niemöller's famous lament about the dangers of silence and self-interest in times of persecution.

Or, more recently, there's that quote that famously adorned Colin Powell's desk, quoting Thucydides as saying 'Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most'. I spent ages looking it up once, because although I didn't recognise the line it certainly sounded like Thucydides, and surely must have featured either in his Mytilene Debate or his Melian Dialogue. I looked in vain, and in retrospect that's to have been expected as it seems that the line is nowhere to be found in the writings of the great Athenian.

On the other hand, to be fair, you'll find the sentiment, if not the words, attributed to Nicias in Thucydides' account of the doomed 'Sicilian Expedition'. Thucydides records the unfortunate and reluctant leader as opining 'And as to us, the Hellenes there would be most in awe, first, if we should not come at all; next, if after showing our power we should after a brief interval depart. '

If Thucydides, Dante, and Burke can be misquoted, you'll hardly be surprised to learn that the same fate has befallen the venerable GKC, and not just for perhaps the wisest and most famous thing he never wrote.

Coraline, Neil Gaiman's deliciously sinister novel for children, is prefaced by a perfectly balanced aphorism by Chesterton: 'Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.'

It's a fine line, only slightly spoiled by Gilbert never actually having written it. Having sought in vain for ages, starting with 'The Ethics of Elfland' from Orthodoxy and rifling through volume after volume of Gilbert's wise and witty words, I eventually a couple of years back wrote to Dale Ahlquist at the American Chesterton Society, asking did he know where I could find it.

He never said it, apparently. He said something pretty close, though, in an essay from Tremendous Trifles called 'The Red Angel':

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him by a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these infinte enemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

The point stands, I think.

Happy Hallowe'en, by the way. Trick or treat, if you prefer.

For the Fairest

And so, today not merely being the Feast Day of those marvellous co-patrons of Europe, Saints Cyril and Methodius, but also International Hallmark Day, it seems a fitting day to write in honour of the greatest woman who never lived.

When I was up in foggy Nelson the other week, my friend and I got talking about how the tales we read, hear, and see in our childhood tend to mould who we are. My friend's childhood seems to have been saturated by stories of teams of misfits who somehow beat all the odds and rise to the top. And as I was about to cut in, he preempted me: 'It's the Mighty Ducks, basically.'

Me, I don't think I read any books quite as often as a child as I did Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of the Greek Heroes and King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Those battered old paperbacks came to Manchester with me, and still have pride of place on my bookshelves, defiant in their refusal to be mothballed in the attic in this, my sanctuary year in Dublin. And one way or another they've had a huge impact on my through my life - I'll talk about the Arthurian cycle another day, but the influence of Green's retelling of the Greek myths is blatantly obvious when you consider what I'm doing with my life right now.

Anyway, among other matters along the way I've become entranced by certain characters in Greek myth - Perseus, Heracles, Theseus, and Jason when I was younger, Achilles and Odysseus after starting university, and all along the way the immortals Hermes and Athena.

Hermes is all too easily ridiculed, with Ross Leckie in his Bluff your way in the Classics scorning him merely as a messenger boy, the god the other Olympians send to the shops to get cigarettes for them, but in truth he's a far more impressive figure than that, a master of trickery and illusion, a cunning and prudent negotiator who prefers persuasion to violence, and perhaps most intriguingly, the one who crosses boundaries and walks between the realms. . .

If Leckie is scathing towards the Prince of Thieves, his comments on Athena are no more flattering, and indeed decidedly unfair. 'Female bluffers,' he says, 'should be aware that if they find themselves called 'veritable Athena', they should not, whatever the circumstances or the lighting, construe this as a compliment.'

On the contrary! In fact, I'd go so far to say that when it comes to weighing up the Immortals against one another, Paris was an idiot. Who in their right mind would pick Aphrodite, pretty and charming as she no doubt was, over either the regal Hera or the surpassing excellence of Athena?

I mean, seriously, what was he thinking? Athena may not have been the sex-kitten that Aphrodite surely was, but she was tall, beautiful, graceful, and serene, with a long, slender neck and with sea-green eyes that may not have petrified people like those of the gorgon whose head Athena bore on her shield, but which fascinated the Greeks nonetheless. Glaukopsis, they called her, but did they mean her eyes were grey, green, greenish grey, blueish green, bright, silver, or even owl-like? And her appearance, magnificent though the Greeks must have believed it was, especially when rendered by Pheidias in his sadly long-destroyed gold-and-ivory statue of her in the Parthenon, was surely the least impressive thing about her.

After all, the Maiden is the goddess of wisdom, in a sense a reincarnation of her mother Metis, herself a representation of a type of resourceful intelligence. She's calm, rational, always in control - her perpetual virginity is not based on notions on purity, but on control, on self-reliance. She refuses to be the possession of any man, to be defined by any man, to rely on any man. Athena defines herself on her own terms.

And then there are her skills, for Athena is surely the most skilful of the Immortals, patron not merely of the traditional women's crafts such as spinning and weaving, but of far more masculine crafts too - metalworking, ceramics, carpentry. Patron of the arts and of industry, she was also a goddess of justice - and if you haven't read the Oresteia yet, you really need to! And she's a gifted warrior too, though a far more prudent combatant than the impulsive Ares - and her prudence extends to others too, as we see at the start of the Iliad when she restrains the greatest of the Greek warriors from slaying his leader.

Athena might not be defined by men, but that doesn't mean she doesn't associate with them - it's just that she does so on her own terms. Look at the heroes she admires and aids, standing by their sides, helping them, advising them, restraining them when they go too far and driving them when they don't go far enough - Odysseus, Heracles, Perseus, Achilles, Orestes, Bellerophon, Telemachus. . .

And then of course, she's the patron goddess of Athens, to where I'm very glad to say I shall be returning in a few weeks.

It still astounds me that the magnificent temple to Athena the Virgin - for that is what Parthenos means - was never deemed one of the wonders of the ancient world, especially housing as it did a giant chryselephantine statue by Pheidias that was surely a match for his gold-and-ivory Zeus at Olympia. I'm looking forward to standing again at the ruins of the greatest shrine to the greatest of the immortals, and looking out over the city that bears her name, to the sea over which her navy, having lost the city itself, once defied the mighty Persia to ensure the freedom of Greece. . .

The greatest woman who never lived, hands down. Happy Valentine's Day.

Let's Ragnarok and Roll!

Have I told youse about Viking religion? I haven't, have I? I've mentioned the World Ash, of course, but I don't think I've said anything else about those savage ancestors of mine.

 

Yes, mine. It's a safe bet. I may have a Gaelic name, but it's fairly improbable that my Celtic blood hasn't been diluted by Norseman, Norman, and Englishman along the way.

 

So anyway, Viking religion was potent stuff. There was a real worldview in play there, a dark and fatalistic view of life in all its stages. It's no surprise that the imaginations of the young Tolkien and Lewis were captured and intoxicated by it. Taking a leaf from Rich Greydanus's book, allow me to quote the great Christopher Dawson on the subject:

 

'The Eddic conception of life is no doubt harsh and barbaric, but it is also heroic in the fullest sense of the word. Indeed, it is something more than heroic, for the noble viragos and the bloodthirsty heroes of the Edda possess a spiritual quality that is lacking in the Homeric world. The Eddic poems have more in common with the spirit of Aeschylus than with that of Homer, though there is a characteristic difference in their religious attitude. Their heroes do not, like the Greeks, pursue victory or prosperity as ends in themselves. They look beyond the immediate issue to an ultimate test to which success is irrelevant. Defeat, not victory, is the mark of the hero. Hence the atmosphere of fatalism and gloom in which the figures of the heroic cycle move. The Nibelungs, like the Atreidae, are doomed to crime and disaster by the powers behind the world, but there is no suggestion of hubris -- the spirit of overweening confidence in prosperity. Hogni and Gunnar, or Hamdis and Sorli, are conscious that they are riding forth to death, and they go to meet their fate with open eyes. There is no attempt, as in the Greek way of life, to justify the ways of gods to man, and to see in their acts the vindication of external justice. For the gods are caught in the same toils of fate as men. In fact, the gods of the Edda are no longer the inhuman nature-deities of the old Scandinavian cult. They have been humanised, and in a sense spiritualised, until they have become themselves the participants in the heroic drama. They carry on a perpetual warfare with the powers of chaos, in which they are not destined to conquer. Their lives are overshadowed by the knowledge of an ultimate catastrophe - the Doom of the Gods - the day when Odin meets the Wolf.'

 

Nifty, eh? All my life I've known what Valhalla was, but until recently never knew what it was for. It's not simply the place where those who've died gloriously, defeated while fighting heroically, would while after their afterlife in combat and carousing. No, it's a training ground, the world where the mightiest warriors to have been defeated in this life would train in the afterlife so that they would be ready to fight by Odin's side in that final battle at Ragnarok. And lose.

 

Don't worry, I've not quite given up yet. There's more bad news by the day here, and the forces of darkness seem to be gathering, but there's always hope. At night a candle's brighter than the sun, as they say.

Green-Clad Babies

The Better Half and I infuriatingly wound up at cross-purposes this evening after watching an episode of Robin of Sherwood. I'd borrowed the first series on DVD from Gareth yesterday, keen to revisit a cherished part of my childhood and see if it had stood the test of time.

I needn't have feared. Despite the involvement of a Muslim sidekick for Robin and the omnipresence of the Dark Arts, this was no Hollywood farce. Admittedly, it lacked the technicolour exhuberance of the Errol Flynn version, the grim authenthicity of the Patrick Bergen rendering, the tenderness of Robin and Marian, and the sheer delight of the Disney version, replete with an exceedingly foxy Maid Marian... but it somehow settles nicely between all these well-known tellings of the tale.

In fact, I'd go as far to say that this is pretty much the definitive Robin Hood. Michael Praed may not be quite as swashbuckling as Errol Flynn, but at least his deeds stay just about on the line of plausibility.

In fact, this Sherwood is as a whole more plausible than any with the exception of the Connery and Bergin versions - and yet it manages to be a richer world than those. Partly this is through there being a constant atmosphere of oppression, of how the Normans have come to England under a pretext of civilising it but really with no aim other than to milk Albion dry; Robin's band are an inspiring bunch of guerrillas, fighting for English freedom against England's armoured conquerors.

But it's not just this; through the introduction of mystical elements that had hitherto been avoided in modern retellings, this version gives a new depth to the story, weaving extra strands into the tapestry of the Greenwood, strands that have been eagerly if clumsily taken up in more recent retellings.

The Sheriff is magnificently cynical, a Machiavellian pragmatist with a great line in dry wit. His Abbot brother is exquisitely amoral, a Chaucerian nightmare. Gisborne is nasty, self-righteous, hotheaded, none-too bright, and somehow genuinely dangerous. And the rogue's gallery doesn't end there... there are plenty of chilling minor villains.

Do Liberators Always Come In Sevens?

And as for the 'Merry Men'? Ray Winstone's Will Scarlet is cynical, bitter, and somehow charming, a deeper and more interesting character than in any other version. Judi Trott may not be quite the luminous beauty that Olivia De Havilland was, but her Marian manages to combine an elvish beauty, a fiery temperament, a sharp mind, and a better eye than any of the merry men to make her almost certainly the sexiest Marian to have lit up any screen - yes, even the great Uma must bow before her.

The silent Saracen Nazir is a mesmerising character, a Muslim answer to Kurosawa's Kyuzo in Seven Samurai. He's a wonderful addition to the Sherwood mythos, and a far more convincing figure than the deus ex machina that is Morgan Freeman's Moor in Prince of Thieves. Much is endearingly dim, and while this version adds little to the characters of Little John and Friar Tuck, there's not a fault to be seen in either their roles or their performances.

Anyway, I've digressed in spectacular fashion.

What Exactly Does 'Happily Ever After' Mean Anyway?

As the second part of the series ended we got to talking about the characters and I mentioned to Herself that in some version of the legends I'd read as a child - probably the Roger Lancelyn Green version - it mentions Friar Tuck and Little John moving to Ireland and eventually dying in Dublin after Robin's death.

I wasn't quite prepared for the reaction.

'Robin Hood dies?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?'

It turns out that if you know Robin Hood mainly from cinema, and if you haven't seen Robin and Marian, you tend to think that the story ends in 1194 with Richard I returning from his imprisonment in Austria, Prince John being driven from office, Robin's nobility reinstated, and Robin and Marian getting married and presumably having lots of green-clad babies, living happily ever after...

The problem with this is that it leaves out the fact that of his ten-year reign, Richard spent only ten months in total in England. And once he was dead, sans an heir, his conniving brother took the throne once more. John ruled from 1199 to 1216, memorably signing the Magna Carta on the way. You can imagine how he might have borne a grudge against such a notorious old enemy as Robin.

I won't babble about how the legendary lord of the Greenwood supposedly met his end. You can read about it yourself, or at the very least go and watch Robin and Marian.

But anyway, this got us arguing about whether Robin's death should be part of the tale or not. Me, I'm in no doubt of the matter, and completely take the view of the great Alan Moore in his fine introduction to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns:

'All of our best and oldest legends recognize that time passes and that people grow old and die. The legend of Robin Hood would not be complete without the final blind arrow shot to determine the site of his grave. The Norse Legends would lose much of their power were it not for the knowledge of an eventual Ragnarok, as would the story of Davy Crockett without the existence of an Alamo.'

There's obviously no right and wrong way to approach these things; it's obviously just a matter of temperament. For me, I suppose, a life isn't complete until it's over - nobody can be judged until they're in the grave. After all, there's a reason why King Oedipus has traditionally been taken to end with the injunction to call no man happy until he's dead.

I'm not sure what it says about my worldview, but all too often it seems to me that a story's not over till the hero's dead. I need Cuchallain to strap himself to the pillar, and the armies of Ireland to shrink back from him until the raven lands on his cold shoulder. I need with Bedivere to watch the hand take Excalibur back into the lake, and then to see Arthur being taken away to Avalon. Herakles has to put on the poisoned robe. Jason needs to be betrayed by Medea and die beneath the rotten hull of the Argo.

The Iliad, perhaps more than anything else I've ever read or seen, glorifies this tragic view of life, presenting it as something genuinely epic. In the Iliad, the Gods live forever, and as such their lives are meaningless, trivial, inconsequential things. But the mortals on the plains before Troy? They'll die, every single one of them, sooner or later. And knowing that they'll die, it falls to them to make their lives count for something. Mortality gives their lives meaning. Death makes Life matter.

I think.