*
A mild south-easterly – waves breaking crest-on to the breakwater with wild streaming spray, sea surface very choppy but little swell. Today feels lighter – only 10 days on from the solstice, and heavy overcast, but the planet’s axis feels to have tilted away from the thick inspissated gloom of mid-December. I was keeping a weather eye out for dorsal fins, but saw nothing more predatory than two eider ducks and a drake, and a few gulls.
*
St Columba, pray for me.
St Cuthbert, pray for me.
Columba and Cuthbert are often paired in scholarly conversation. Their island monasteries, Iona and Lindisfarne, flank Britain like the pans of the scales held by St Michael for the weighing of souls at the Last Judgment. Iona is the higher, the lighter of the two, floating free of the western coast of Mull, whereas Lindisfarne is tethered to Northumbria by its tidal causeway. Iona is also older, founded by the Irish exile Columba in the 560s. The Pictish kingdoms of eastern Scotland, including Orkney, were converted at Columba’s behest. It was to Iona that Oswald, the Irish-educated King of Northumbria, sent when he needed inspiring men of God to enthuse his nominally converted people in the early seventh century; and thus Iona’s daughter house of Lindisfarne was conceived.
But that paragraph I’ve just written doesn’t even begin to capture their charisma.
Columba is a hero from epic, his every recorded deed larger than life. His story reads as though he should have had a career like one of the Irish superheroes of legend, Cúchulainn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, a member of the king’s warband, battling gods and monsters, except that Christ got in the way. When in Pictland Columba made the River Ness safe for swimmers by driving away a man-eating monster.
Cuthbert’s energy is gentler. A shepherd boy from the Scottish Borders who had visions of angels. One of nature’s hermits, he only reluctantly took up the administrative burden of a bishopric. Like me, he sneaked out of the house when he hoped no one was watching, to go down to the beach. Though he only went into the sea up to his neck he stayed in much longer than I do, singing psalms all night. Otters came to him afterwards and warmed him.
Back in my early twenties, when I was roaming around looking for somewhere to invest my energies – teaching English in Athens, tourist-guiding in London, anything that kept me mobile, flexible, independent – I had no intention of being an academic. There was a big world out there. But the early Middle Ages kept pulling me back, so many beautiful objects, so many stories, so many unanswered questions. When working as a London Blue Badge Guide and taking my foreign visitors round the sights I had to be careful. Left to myself I would have lingered so long in the British Museum’s Anglo-Saxon and Viking gallery that we had to skip the Parthenon marbles; or speculated interminably on what Westminster Abbey might have looked like in the eleventh century when the visitors really – understandably – wanted to know about the Gothic splendours and royal tombs in front of them. They wanted to know about what they could see; I was haunted by what was lost.
One evening in 1992, at a friend’s party in Highgate, I found myself sharing a sofa with a nice young man. I don’t remember how we got there, or where the conversation took us, but I have a very clear memory of my earnest voice, slightly slurred with wine, trying to explain to him the difference between St Cuthbert and St Columba, and why it was so terribly important. Not long after that I gave up the struggle and applied to York to do an MA in Medieval Studies.
Saints are lenses: ways of looking at particular times and places and their relationship with the transcendent and the eternal. They give the abstract a human face. Columba and Cuthbert help me to think about the ways in which Christianity converges on pagan Pictland, including Orkney, in the sixth and seventh centuries, from the English south and the Irish west. Columba and Cuthbert engage with the natural world; they challenge warlords; they are pioneers of a new faith, carving out a living from a hostile, uncomprehending world.
Columba went to tiny Iona as an exile from Ireland, but his monastery became a political powerhouse and a key creative centre in the seventh and eighth centuries, producing fabulous metalwork, stone sculpture and manuscripts. The Viking tide swept over Iona in the ninth century, though, just as it did over Orkney; and only scraps survive. Far and away the most famous of these bits of flotsam is the great gospel manuscript, the Book of Kells. In my working life I spend a fair bit of time teaching and writing and thinking about the art of the Book of Kells. But I go there for escape as well: it’s like plunging into a parallel space/time, letting the artists’ wonderland logic work its spell. Especially now that all 680 pages of the manuscript are available online: it’s so easy to take a deep breath and dive, drifting from folio to folio, following motifs… There are lots of fish swimming through the intertwining kelp-forests of Kells. And mermen.
Columba looks monsters in the eye, and they flee. The Book of Kells is full of monsters, and teeth, and menace. It makes you face your nightmares.
There are no monsters in Cuthbert’s story, but he is the patron saint of otters, and of those who need warming up after being in the sea for too long. (I made up that last bit, but it’s true now. You can footnote me. It’s in print.) And his contemporary St Ronan of Iona is the patron of seals, his name, rón-án, means ‘little seal’.
*
Both sunrise and wind notably more easterly this morning. High thin cloud. Frost white on grass and windscreen, roads slick, flooded fields skimmed with ice. The tide was high, only a little swell but a strong roll and drag to the incoming waves tugging me out towards Eynhallow and the Atlantic. The oystercatchers have started to flock and peep again. One black-backed gull riding at anchor. One unsinkable shag. I thought that – yet again – there were no seals. A little sad, I started swimming with great energy, several lengths’ worth of breaststroke and crawl, zigzagging, heading out past the breakwater – swimming FAST – and had to slam on the brakes to stop myself crashing into a common seal who popped up only a couple of yards away. We both laughed, retreated, bobbed up again, swam companionably side by side for another five minutes or so.
*
St Magnus, pray for me.
St Rognvald, pray for me.
The saints of Orkneyinga Saga. This complex narrative, spanning centuries, justifying the claims of Orkney’s jarls and giving them mythic origins, was almost certainly not written in Orkney, or by an Orcadian. Its very existence reminds us how embedded the people of Norse Orkney were in their wider world, and that their world was not Scotland or Britain, but the North Atlantic. Iceland and Orkney were part of a cultural continuum.
The greatest export of medieval Iceland was its literature. Praise-poets, scholars and historians thrived in that fertile volcanic landscape and scattered across the wider world of the Norse diaspora, singing the fame and recording the deeds of kings and jarls and heroes from Newfoundland to the Bosphorus. No king counted unless he had an Icelander in his retinue; and after the conversion of the Norse world to Christianity the poets adapted their word-hoard and stayed in business. Poems and histories were to medieval Iceland as silver jewellery is to modern Orkney: high value and easy to export. In around 1200 someone – probably the jarl, or one of his circle who wanted to please him – commissioned an Icelandic expert to create the saga. Our saga-smith knew Orkney well enough that you can navigate the modern topography, Penguin Classic in hand.
Magnus turns up everywhere you go in Orkney, this man of blood who (the saga-writer claims) took the gospel so seriously. He was killed on Egilsay, just visible over there to my right, by his cousin and rival Hakon. These islands aren’t big enough for the both of us. Magnus tried everything he could to save his neck – exile me, imprison me, blind me, but don’t kill me. The saga-writer insists that this was not cowardice but a noble attempt to keep the sin of murder from his cousin’s hands. Hakon paid no attention, and got the cook, a handy man with an axe, to butcher him.
Magnus had the last laugh.
We have a lot of material ab
out Magnus: two versions of St Magnus’s saga, as well as Orkneyinga Saga. St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall was built as his shrine. He unites Orkney, Presbyterian and Episcopalian as well as Catholic. Uniquely – bizarrely – the cathedral belongs to no Christian denomination, but to the people of Orkney, and is run by Orkney Islands Council. Its incumbent is a Church of Scotland minister, but when floods closed the Catholic church for a couple of years the congregation from Our Lady and St Joseph was made welcome in the cathedral, and an area at the east end given over to the celebration of the Mass for the first time since the Reformation four and a half centuries earlier. Father Ronnie, the octogenarian priest who cared for Orkney’s Catholic population when we first moved here, was convinced that the archipelago remains such a wonderful place to live because St Magnus still holds it cupped in the palm of his hand.
There are three chief places in Orkney connected with our holy jarl. Egilsay where a round-towered kirk marks the site where he was killed and first buried. Birsay in the north-west of Mainland, the site of the first cathedral, where his bones were first translated. The twelfth-century cathedral in Kirkwall, where he now resides. Land and water separate these sites, but if you climb high into the Harray hills, in the West Mainland, there is one spot from which all three St Magnus-kirks can be seen. That too was a place of pilgrimage, a watershed in the hills where the parishes of Evie, Rendall and Birsay meet, a suitably liminal setting for contacting otherworldly powers.
I love the word translation, from the Latin irregular verb, fero – one of the first words you learn, fero, ferre, tuli, latum – I carry, to carry, I carried, carried. Transfer and translate both come from it, both meaning to carry across. We could so easily say the saint is transferred, but no, the process of moving the bones to an ever more holy and prestigious grave is given this analogy with language. When Cuthbert died in 687 he was all alone on his hermit island of Inner Farne. His monks collected his body and took it home to Lindisfarne for burial, and he was translated into his first shrine eleven years later. Further translations took him to Chester-le-Street and where he is now, in Durham. Columba’s bones were divided in the ninth century and translated from Iona to Kells in Ireland and Dunkeld in Scotland – all his shrines are now lost. Magnus and Rognvald were finally translated into hiding at the Reformation: secret graves in pillars in the cathedral, as though in some Gothick romance. The American writer Archibald MacLeish defined poetry as ‘that which is lost… in translation’, but the opposite is true of saints: the successive translations of saints’ bones take them further away from the prosaic and mundane, the ordinarily human; translation imbues them with ever more poetry.
St Magnus is said to be present in the white spear-thistles which flourish in Orkney. They grow along the route the saint’s body was carried when he was translated for the second time, moved across the West Mainland from Birsay to his new shrine in the purpose-built cathedral in Kirkwall. Ghost thistles, tall and delicate despite their weapons, their petals looking as if they are already thistledown, not fully of this world: just right for that warrior-trained jarl-saint who sat on deck and read the psalms while arrows whistled past his ears during a sea-battle off Anglesey.
But Magnus isn’t nearly so interesting as his flawed and fully human nephew. The sandstone cathedral in Kirkwall was founded by the most attractive man in the whole of the Norse world (he certainly thought so), the real hero of Orkneyinga Saga: the poet-warrior Kali Kolsson, who took the name of Rognvald when he became Jarl of Orkney. Rognvald is the name by which he is generally known, but I think of him in two guises: Kali the man, and Rognvald the saintly construct. Kali is also the Swahili word for fierce, dangerous. Signs at house-gates in Nairobi proclaim Mbwa Kali – ‘Fierce Dog’. That coincidence of syllables is random, meaningless in academic terms, but the two meanings chime in my brain: they give Rognvald Kali an extra edge, an unpredictability, a gleam of teeth.
We know about Rognvald Kali only from Orkneyinga Saga, and the saga-writer knew him primarily by his poetry, which is quoted so incessantly that if a biopic were to be made of Kali’s life it would have to be a musical. He undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, devoutly sacking castles and attacking other ships on the way. He also had a fling – or claims to have had a fling – with Ermengarde of Narbonne, one of the most glamorous and powerful rulers in southern France. He dared to compose tough, bloody skaldic verses mashed up with erotic amour courtois convention in praise of this patroness of troubadours, one of the women who invented the courtly love tradition, civilizing sex and making it into an art. Among his other talents, Kali was a keen swimmer, and on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land he swam the River Jordan.
Magnus is the big saint in these parts, but he’s never seemed real to me. Rognvald Kali remains my true love. I hope he swam for pleasure in Orkney’s cold sea, as well as in the Jordan under the pomegranate trees, the olives and the date palms. When I visit the cathedral, it is his pillar on the north side beside which I linger, not Magnus’s. Every year, my students fall in love with him. After his death, there was a valiant attempt to have him canonized, as St Rognvald, but his cult never came to anything outside Orkney, and possibly not much even within the islands. The author of Orkneyinga Saga claims with great authority that he was canonized by Pope Celestine in 1192, but this is fiction at its purest. No one in Rome has ever heard of St Rognvald. There are no miracles associated with his bones, although the bloodstains on the stone where he was murdered renewed themselves no matter how often they were scrubbed away.
Perhaps Kali-the-man is as much fiction as Rognvald-the-saint; he is just too dashing to be true. The only time he ever did anything graceless was when he caught his foot in his stirrup, in the late summer of 1158. He had been hunting, both deer and an exile called Thorbjorn, across the flow country of Caithness. When Kali stumbled in dismounting, one of Thorbjorn’s men fatally stabbed him with a spear.
In many ways Rognvald Kali is the least Orcadian of men: the biggest sin in Orkney is to be bigsy about yourself, your talents and achievements. Given his bragging, his self-promotion, his infinite capacity for telling his listeners how great he is as an oarsman, archer, chess-player, killer of men and lover of women, his dubious sanctity comes as no great surprise.
Magnus and Rognvald help me to think about Orkney in the high medieval centuries, part of Scandinavia, not Scotland. A northern world edgily integrating with the Mediterranean culture of troubadours and courtly love and Crusades.
Kali reminds me that men have other attractive qualities besides saintliness.
*
Sights while swimming at Evie just now: gulls and terns mobbing a raven; fulmars playing touch-and-go; three fearless shags diving within feet of me; a tern almost landing on my head; indignant eiders; two curious but cautious seals; and (on the beach) a lion’s mane jellyfish over 2 feet across.
*
St Tredwell, pray for me.
I’ve done this out of order. Columba and Cuthbert belong in the sixth and seventh centuries; Magnus and Rognvald in the eleventh and twelfth. Tredwell comes somewhere in between, in more senses than one. The energy and aggression of those four male saints were turned outwards, towards political and spiritual enemies. Hers was vented on herself. No one doubts the historical reality of those men, even if it’s a struggle to discern something resembling fact through the fogs of fairy tale and cliché. But, while she has a story, and a ruined chapel on a broch mound by a loch on tiny Papa Westray, Tredwell probably never existed in the solid, sunlit world. She’s known outside Orkney by the Latin name Triduana, which means a three-day fast in reparation for sin; and maybe she’s just the embodiment of an idea, the voice of conscience, penance given a face, born from a hunger for stories, like Aphrodite from the foam of the sea.
One version of events says Tredwell was an idealistic girl from Turkey who came to Pictland to spread the Gospel, and was rather taken aback when the king made a pass at her, telling her she had lovely eyes. I imagine her with a soulful dark g
aze, Frida Kahlo brows, a creamy oval face, dark ringlets escaping round the edges of her veil, like the Fayum mummy portraits painted in encaustic wax in Egypt. Other female saints found a range of solutions when confronted with a similar erotic challenge: Uncumber grew a beard; Frideswide hid in a pigsty; Etheldreda married her king but refused to have sex with him.
Tredwell told the king’s messenger, ‘Your master can have what he wants.’ She went into a dark corner and gouged out her eyes, sending them to the king, skewered on a stick, like olives in a martini. An article in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, of all places, suggests she was acting on the instructions of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 18, verse 9: ‘If your eye offends you, pluck it out.’ But did Tredwell really so internalize the idea that women’s bodies are offensive merely by existing? She’s in a noble line of female saints who got into trouble when they rejected suitors and insisted on retaining their virginity. I’m using the prettified language here of conventional retellings of saints’ lives – unwanted suitors and so on – but these are really stories about resisting rape. And not merely bodily rape and the loss of physical virginity but the wrenching away of these women’s lives from the career path they wanted to follow. We tend to see virginity as an innocence, an ignorance, a lack, but in medieval Christian thinking a virgin – male or female – was an unbroken vessel, strong and integral. In Freud’s essay on the uncanny, he equates a fear of having one’s eyes gouged out with a fear of castration. Perhaps Tredwell would have agreed with this: I like to think her response to unwanted sexual attention was not a masochistic act stemming from fear of violation, but an assertive in-yer-face battle-cry: Look how strong I am. If I can do this to my eyes, what will I do to your balls?
Swimming with Seals Page 7