During the Christmas break I went for a walk round Castle Ring. I hadn't been in years. The last time I was there I guess I was on my bicycle, weary from cycling up the hills around it (certainly not as weary as I would be now, with my post-Christmas coat of body fat...) Castle Ring is the highest point on Cannock Chase and is the site of an Iron Age hill fort. There's not much to it really, just some perimeter earth works shaped, yes you guessed it, in a ring with a path situated on the top of them allowing you to walk around. It does offer wonderful views of the surrounding countryside though and Rugley Power Station in all its concrete and mushroom-cloud glory. It wasn't the views though that over-whelmed me on that cold and snowy Sunday: it was the Ring itself, its presence. Im not sure if it was because the 'world's candle' was intense, low, and dazzling giving each branch, bramble and blade of grass extra definition or the crunch of the snow under foot and the soft sound of an inevitable thaw, but Castle Ring had a definite presence that day I had not experienced before. The thought that 1900 years ago people were living on this hill, exposed to the elements with only their wiles and hardiness to keep them alive was quite astounding. It's as if they were there in front of me. Pots boiling, mead running, scop's singing or reciting rhymes (I may be mixing my Celt's and Anglo-Saxon's here). It was all happening in front of me. I was there, with smoke stinging my eyes and shit stinging my nostrils. True it was all in my mind but I had travelled back 1900 years.
This displacement in time, to steal a phrase from Vonnegut, may be because I'm interested in Old English literature and one of ambitions, as useless as it will be, is to learn Old English. This interest started when I first read Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. Beowulf is important for the history of these Island's as it's probably the oldest surviving long poem in Old English. Having always been a fan of Tolkien and immersing myself in his world of Middle-Earth during my teen years, I was always going to enjoy it due to the influence of Old-English and Nordic literature on his works. Beowulf is a triumph and everyone should read it (whereas no one should watch the awful film - 'tarn hag' would not be the first words I'd use to describe Angelina Jolie... they would be fake and self-important). Beowulf is rich in ubi sunt, a nostalgic meditation on morality and the transience of life. As Christianity was only just settling into these lands the Anglo-Saxons had little conception of an after-life. They believed that their lives lived on in glorious deeds and honourable actions rather than an immortal soul. This led them to ask 'ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?' ('where are those who were before us?') Where are those who were before us? That's a question and a half and who hasn't thought it. Where are those who were before us? It is the melancholy of Old English literature, this theme which I find so wonderful. Without the influence of any mass organised religion they treated the question with such sorrow and compassion as in the poem 'The Wanderer'. It wasn't shrugged off with the concept of an immortal soul. It was an unknown. Beyond human reasoning. It was sad. Still is and always will be.
This is what I was thinking on that bright afternoon, blinded by the same sun that blinded them and chilled by the same air. Walking on earthworks built all those years before by hands long since perished. Where are those who were before us? Of course I didn't have the answer and I still don't. I guess that will only become apparent when the inevitable happens (I must remember to steer clear of sailing boats in 2019...) Still, they were there in the humble marks that they had left in the earth. I did not know what they had looked like, I did not know any of their names, but I knew they had been. I knew they once were and I could appreciate their existence. What more can we ask for? Anyway, it was this question that stuck with me and led to the poem below. It's my poor attempt to write a poem in alliterative verse, the form used by the Anglo-Saxons. I hope it's ubi sunt but read Beowulf if you want the real thing.
Castle Ring
Time travels and
ticks eternal,
Without wonder
or word for man,
But carries the
cruel chaos of life,
Fickle-fires
forgotten and snuffed.
The past not
present presides here,
A lingering
labour of love from old,
From the
visionless void and vacuum of time,
Its endless
eclipse. Enter the ring.
As frost-fetters
forgo and thaw,
An era of
earnest expression and honour,
A land of lore
and law is in grace,
Seductive in
simplicity, sundered from now.
I am ice-bound,
an impression of modernity,
Foreign to
forgotten forefathers and kinsmen,
A native of
nowhere, no-time or place.
Songs of sorrow
and sworn oaths,
Kingly
kindnesses and kinsmanship sigh,
Breathe memories
through barren branches,
Redolent rhymes
rich in life-blood
Of weather weary
wanderers lost.
The past not
present presides here,
Eternal in this
earth it endures iron-like,
Though departed,
doomed to death, it sings,
Lyre-licks of
lamentation linger in the mist,
The prayer-plume
of pious pyres,
Heating mortal hearts
with heaven-bound thermals.
Solitary I stand
silent and free,
From portents of
my profiled past,
My imagined
identity impartially created,
Of a lonely
lover and lost soul.
Time still toils
and tolls for us,
And our life’s
legacy will lessen,
Dwindle while
dwelling on departures and regret,
But timeless and
tireless territories will remain,
Earth will
endure enshrined in ice,
Secure in
swirled and scarred beauty,
The fortune of
friends and family gone,
Not from now to
nowhere, to time eternal.
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