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.

Book Group meeting Monday 16 February: 2014 Man Booker prize winner

Introduced by Lawrence Youlten, Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Far North, was of particular interest to those members whose friends or relations had personally experienced the conditions under which the prisoners of war captured at the fall of Singapore had been used as slave labour to build the Burma Railway. Many did not survive the appalling conditions, and deaths among the native population forced to work alongside the PoWs were also very high. This is a theme that has been treated in several notable films (eg The Bridge on the River Kwai) and books, both fiction and non-fiction (The Railway Man). Flanagan's novel draws largely on the recollections of his schoolteacher father who was such a prisoner. In the novel, the protagonist is a doctor who has to try and cope with the deprivations, illnesses and injuries suffered by the other Australian prisoners. The story of this phase of his life is interwoven with his experiences before and after the war, and one criticism of the book was that the interweaving of the stories did not succeed convincingly. Others were not impressed by the attempts to draw parallels between poetry by Tennyson and the haikus liked by one of the brutal camp guards. Some doubt was expressed about the authenticity of the descriptions of appalling violence directed against the prisoners, but a timely obituary of a British PoW survivor, Henry McCreath, published in theTimes on 20 February, included details every bit as savage as those in the book. Some of our members had found the book unreadable, and others, as I did myself, had found it a moving and thought-provoking story. These disparate opinions were parallelled by the reviews in the literary press,  that ranged from the vituperative, (London Review of Books) to the adulatory.(New York Review of Books). Two members of the book group who had lived in Tasmania, (where Flanagan was brought up), were able to provide some interesting background to the author. Whatever we thought of it, the Man Booker judges gave it the thumbs-up.

Our Speaker on 20 March: The King James Bible: from Word of God to Work of Art

Stephen Prickett is Regius Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature, at the University of Glasgow and honorary Professor of English at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He has also taught at the University of Sussex, the Australian National University in Canberra (where he had the chair of English), Duke University, North Carolina, and Baylor University, Texas, where he was Margaret Root Brown Professor, and Director of the Armstrong Browning Library. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, former Chairman of the U.K. Higher Education Foundation, former President of the European Society for the Study of Literature and Theology, President of the George MacDonald Society, and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Artois, in France.
    He has published one novel, nine monographs, ten edited volumes, and over a hundred articles on Romanticism, Victorian Studies and literature and theology. His fourteen-language, Reader in European Romanticism, (2010) won the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for the best book published in Romantic Studies that year, and his most recent publication is The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts (2014).
 

Desert Island Books for Cooks

Our first 2015 meeeting, on 16 January was a very enjoyable and well-attended talk on the literary aspects of cookery books by Sarah Giles, the latest in the long list of speakers introduced by Jonty and Ann Driver. (See post below). Sarah brought with her a number of examples from her treasure trove of books. She finished her presentation with her list of "Desert Island Cookery Books" which she has kindly allowed us to post here:

"1. Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course is top of my list. All the basics are in here – it’s so useful for when you forget the ratio of sugar, flour and butter for a crumble topping, which for some reason I often do, or need reminding of the oven temperature for choux pastry

2. would be Leith's Cookery Bible for pretty much every cookery technique known to man, plus some great recipe ideas for out-of-fashion ingredients like rabbit or beef cheeks.

3. A handwritten recipe book I put together when I was at school in the 5^th form - when I had much neater writing than I do now. I’d want this one with me if only for the most delicious lemon biscuit recipe it has in it. You can tell by all the rather unhygienic food stain on its pages how often this has been used over the years.

 

4. Larousse Gastronomique – apart from being an excellent reference book, this is the go-to book if you’re in the mood for a little foodie entertainment. For example, if you look up the word ‘supper’, it will give you a basic description – ‘a light meal taken in the evening’. It then goes on to describe this history of supper as a concept, including its late-night incarnation in 18C France, where it would include such treats as wild boar kidney, oysters with cream, cakes, tarts, salad - finishing, rather bizarrely, with peas poached with eggs.  And that’s all on one evening, by the way. 

5. My second-hand copy of Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book. I love the fact that it’s obviously been well used in the past and, even better, that when I bought it a whole host of cuttings and clippings fell out of it including a newspaper cutting referring to a recipe for what’s described only as ‘A Good Cake And Easy To Make’. The letter writer states this is  ‘much loved by the Navy’. 

6. Next on my list would be a slim little booklet which was produced by my friend and former editor of Good Food magazine, Orlando Murrin, when he was running a wonderful boutique B&B near Toulouse in France. The food there – all of which was cooked by Orlando himself – was wonderful and he was asked for recipes so often that he put together a series of these little books for guests. I love the descriptions that go with each recipe, including  one for what he describes as ‘The best-ever pommes dauphinoise’.

7. Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book: probably the most comprehensive book on vegetables ever written. There’s lots of history in here – Jane tells us, for example, that John Evelyn, whose salad and vinaigrette recipe I read out, used to order cauliflower seed and celery seed form Italy so that he could grow the best new varieties to cook. As someone who grows and cooks their own food, I like the idea that he was poring over seed catalogues in winter ready for spring, in the same way as I do. But as well as the historical facts, it’s also packed with marvellous recipes and clear instructions on the way to prepare everything from artichokes to watercress.

8. Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty would come next on my list. Yotam is a London chef who has become rather a celebrity over the past few years. Every recipe I’ve tried – and I’ve tried a lot of them – has worked beautifully. There are lots of Middle Eastern influences and I can heartily recommend his recipe for fried butterbeans with feta, sorrel and sumac which transforms a rather bland and tasteless bean into something truly wonderful.

9.  A Girl Called Jack by Jack Monroe. She became famous when she was interviewed by a newspaper about trying to feed herself and a small son while living in a tiny, damp flat with absolutely no money – rather than feeling sorry for herself, she decided to see it as a challenge and has come up with some wonderful recipes. You’d never know they were created with a strict budget in mind. Her Keralan Aubergine Curry is to be recommended!

10. And finally -  Levi Roots: Caribbean Food Made Easy. Levi was a successful applicant on the TV show Dragons' Den where people approach a group of millionaire business men and women to get them to invest in their business. Levi’s product was a bottled chilli sauce called Reggae Reggae and it wowed the millionaire panel, not least because he brought a selection of his own homemade Jamaican dishes to try with it. Some of these dishes are recreated here and for me, it brings back wonderful memories of a Jamaican holiday where the food was an unexpected highlight of that lovely Caribbean island."

27 February Meeting: Talk by Richard Thomas on "Sagas"

Richard Thomas spent three years in Iceland as part of a diplomatic career, having earlier studied a very little Old Norse when he was at university. Both experiences contributed to an interest in sagas.

Books for Cooks, talk by Sarah Giles on Friday 16 January, 2015

Sarah Giles is Editor of BBC Easy Cook magazine. Her passion for cooking started with the encouragement of two 'fantastically inspirational' home economics teachers at school and having learnt all the basic, essential recipes and good old-fashioned techniques from them, she went on to cook as a hobby for many years, eventually becoming a finalist on Masterchef in the early years of the show. 

She has an ever-growing collection of cookery books that is, to quote her words, "currently threatening to take over her home".