Another Man's War by Barnaby Phillips, speaker at February 2016 meeting.

Richard Thomas has invited Barnaby Phillips, the author of the very well-reviewed "Another Man's War", to address the Literary Society.  He has agreed, and will be our speaker on 19 February 2016. Richard kindly provided the following introduction, which will be of particular interest to members of the Book Group who recently discussed Richard Flanagan’s book:  

“Another Man’s War is about the vital part played by colonial West African troops in Slim's campaign in 1944-45 to drive the Japanese out of Burma ("a forgotten army in a forgotten war").  It focuses on the astonishing and very moving story of one of these soldiers, Isaac Fadoyebo, whom Phillips got to know while he was the BBC Correspondent in W Africa.  I found it unputdownable, and it should form an interesting counterbalance to "The Narrow Road to the Far North".   

Richard Thomas on "Sagas". Meeting on 27 February 2015

A packed Court Hall heard Richard Thomas's fascinating talk on Sagas. As mentioned below, (see post below, dated 15 January), Richard spent some years in a diplomatic service posting to Reykjavik. Here is a summary of his talk:

" In modern English the word “saga” means a long, often tedious account of a series of events or misfortunes.  It is in fact Old Norse or Icelandic for “story”, and has for centuries denoted a corpus of some hundreds of mediaeval prose works, written in Iceland in the thirteenth century.  The greatest of them, the so-called “family sagas”, are mainly about real people who lived at or soon after the time of the settlement of Iceland, two or three hundred years earlier. They were written from folk memory, and combine actual history with imaginative fiction. They are characteristically composed in spare, often humorous, prose, and range in length from about thirty to three hundred pages.  Half a dozen or so of them are among the greatest works of medieval, or indeed any, literature, including Njal’s Saga, Laxdaela Saga, Egil’s Saga and Hrafnkel’s Saga.

The sagas survive mainly in the form of vellum manuscripts, repeatedly copied out in the isolated manor farms in which most mediaeval Icelanders lived.  In a country with few archaeological remains these precious objects serve as its principal historical artefacts.  But the sagas survive also as a spirit or feeling that informs almost everything that is thought about in Iceland, a country unlike anywhere else. From the settlement, in the late tenth century, until the end of the thirteenth, it was a kind of republic, free of the malign rule of kings, largely free even of the priestly grip on education exercised by the mediaeval church in the rest of Western Europe. This state of affairs, combined with the scattered and isolated nature of the farms and churches, served mainly by amateur priests, meant that ordinary Icelanders became literate, hundreds of years before their counterparts in the rest of Europe.  The amazing oral transmission of Iceland’s laws was mirrored by the way folk memories and the country’s history, in particular of its settlement, were eventually written up and preserved as sagas, which were read and recounted time and time again, right up to modern times, in evening “saga entertainments”.

There is plenty of fiction in the sagas, including accounts of monsters and other supernatural beings.  But this is mixed with apparently straightforward history, including in the two Greenland Sagas the story of Leif Eiriksson’s “discovery” of North America, five hundred years before Columbus, dismissed as a fairytale by many sceptical scholars until confirmed by the discovery of clear archaeological evidence in Newfoundland in the Nineteen Sixties. 

Leif had set out from Brattahlid, the farm a thousand miles away in Greenland which his father, Eric the Red, had built ten or twenty years earlier, when he established the Icelandic colony there at the end of the tenth century – a colony that was to survive for five hundred years.  Eric was a pagan, but his wife Thjodhild was a newly converted Christian, and her wish to build a church was granted by her husband provided it was out of sight from the main buildings at Brattahlid.  Archaeologists in the Nineteen Thirties found further proof of the historical accuracy of what the sagas describe when they discovered the remains of a tiny church, hidden by a small hill, only yards from Eric’s house.  That little church, by a fjord in Greenland, has since been reconstructed, to stand as a lonely and poignant monument to the toughness and humanity of those Viking explorers and colonizers whose deeds are known to us through a wonderful corpus of mediaeval literature known as the Icelandic Sagas."

For more information on Sagas, including full texts of English translations of some of the Sagas mentioned by Richard, click here to access the Sagas Database website. If anyone would like a copy of the text of Richard's talk, e-mail me at lyoulten@aol.com 

Poetry reading by Jonty Driver with violin recital by Peter Field, 11 July 2015

As part of the 2015 JAM (John Armitage Memorial) Festival in the Romney Marsh churches, on Saturday 11th July at 4-00 p.m., in the church of St Mary in the Marsh,  C.J.Driver (Jonty) will read his long poem, REQUIEM, first published in 1997/8, with Peter Fields, the violinist, playing transposed excerpts from Bach’s Cello Suite No 1, in between the seven sections of the poem. 

1. “Before Sunrise” and 7. “Late `Night: Waking” balance each other, so do 2. “Love-song in Twelve Fragments” and 6. “Love-song in Old Age”;  so do 3. “I shall keep my mouth as it were with a bridle…(Psalm 39)” and 5. “Three Elegies"; and 4. “Halfway to Heaven” holds the arch in place.  The poem moves from early morning to mid-afternoon to late night; from winter to spring to high summer; from time present to time past and back to time present; from despair to rage to acceptance - and the forms balance not only each other but the structure, raining from rhymed quatrains to the pentameter (broken and fragmented) to leisurely syllabics.  Yet, for all its technical variety, the voice of the poem is utterly personal: quiet, experienced, sombre, vulnerable. 

REQUIEM provided the words for an order of evening service in Westminster Abbey in November 2014, read then by Chris Chivers, with a cellist, Bryan O’Kane, providing the accompaniment. Details of this event, including the text of the poem, can be seen below in a blog entry dated, appropriately, 11 November 2014.