An Odyssey: Reflections on an Adaptation

 'It was outstanding,' wrote one of my classicist friends in a WhatsApp group after seeing Christopher Nolan's film of The Odyssey a couple of weeks ago. 'The best kind of adaptation, which makes unexpected choices that allow you to see the ancient text in a new way. Nolan understands the Odyssey better and deeper than any of the Muskrat critics.'

I'm inclined to agree, though in terms of considering it as an adaptation as distinct from purely as a film in its own right, I should admit that while I studied the poem in college, and went on to teach it for five years at university and three years at secondary level, and have since dipped in to it plenty of times, it's probably been twenty years or so since I've read the whole thing in depth. Watching the film the first time -- I've seen it twice, one on IMAX and once in 70mm -- was, perhaps appropriately, both a new and a memory-evoking experience. My take on it has generally been that it's a faithful but dynamic adaptation, one that avoids the traps of slavish fidelity and pedantic antiquarianism while highlighting some themes and ideas within the story that are of special relevance today, such that it shows to powerful effect why we should still care today about stories told and poems recited in a rocky corner of Europe almost three thousand years ago.

Not that it's perfect: the dialogue at times is dreadfully clunky. It's not all clunky, by any means -- Emily Wilson's comment that she would have been 'ashamed to have written any part of this script' is bizarre, not to mention unfair given her supposed gratitude for the film's existence and how she'll have done rather well on royalties since the film came out -- but there are definitely a few stinkers. Pretty much every time characters mention how their 'civilization' is under threat or their 'age of bronze' is ending I found myself wincing. Lines like these didn't ring true, in a way that references to the impending collapse of their world might have done. But beyond that? Honestly, I've no complaints.

Yes, there are a couple of choices I wouldn't have made -- it would never have occurred to me to lose the whole Phaeacians' sequence, with Nausicaa and Arete and Alcinous, and Odysseus showing off his surpassing excellence as an athlete and a storyteller, but think losing that meant the wanderings could be retold organically and cinematically, rather than as a giant info-dump, and could be presented in an immediate way, rather than as the hero's long-processed story about things that had happened years earlier. I missed too the visit to Nestor's palace at Pylos, though perhaps on screen having two sequences where Telemachus has inconclusive meetings with his father's old comrades might have felt somewhat repetitive.

So yes, I wouldn't have made those changes, but maybe that's why I'm not one of the most accomplished and successful filmmakers in the world.

It's the nature of adaptations to adapt, after all, and surely this must be all the more the case when a story transcends its geographical origins and becomes the property of all mankind, as is the case with the greatest stories. Even in Antiquity Greek poets realised this, as did the Romans who learned from them. The peerless Aeschylus described his plays, for instance, as slices cut from Homer's banquet, and it's interesting that the film opts to realise something akin to his version of the murder of Agamemnon rather than Homer's version, just as in the character of Sinon it draws from Virgil's account of the Fall of Troy. It's perhaps a relief, though, that it doesn't opt for Euripides' take on Helen: there's no suggestion here that Helen sat out the war in Egypt, while a phantom version of her distracted everyone in Troy. Interestingly, the final sequence in the film draws as much from medieval Dante as from Homer, with Odysseus and Penelope sailing off to the unknown West to make sacrifice; the Odyssey does feature an injunction that after restoring peace in Ithaca Odysseus must travel and make sacrifice, but Homer has him travelling inland, whereas it is Dante, who places Odysseus -- or Ulysses -- in almost the deepest circle of Hell, who has him sailing west beyond the Pillars of Hercules to his eventual death in the uncharted Ocean.

Visually, the scene resembles nothing quite so much as closing 'Grey Havens' sequence in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. This seems perhaps somewhat ironic given how Peter Jackson's 2003 adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork had itself cut the 'Scouring of the Shire' sequence that would have preceded that section, said sequence itself telling the story -- possibly via 'The Return of Ulysses', the closing chapter of The Wind in the Willows -- of an adventurer returning to his home and clearing out the louts who had taken it over. But that, after all, is the nature of stories that are retold: they change with the telling, fuelled by the inspirations of their tellers and the needs of their audiences. 

Does the film get the hero right? I think so. Certainly he's intelligent, brave, patient, and skilful in various ways, with his courage and fortitude being obvious. Look, he's not the swashbuckling Errol Flynn type character he can sometimes be in the poem, but much of the swagger of Homer's Odysseus is in the stories he tells and the ways he tells them -- the film opts to show the stories as recollections of directly experienced events, rather than relate them as rather boastful narratives, so I think reducing that dimension of Odysseus is pretty reasonable. I say reducing rather than losing, because I don't agree at all with the takes that say the film doesn't show him as cunning, clever, wily, or even dangerously arrogant. It does show him, after all, having devised the scheme with the Trojan Horse, figuring out with enough rope his soldiers would be able to tie enough straw to themselves to blend in among the Cyclops's sheep and escape him, foolishly insulting the Cyclops with a final arrow shot, and coming up with the idea of deafening his men to the Sirens while exposing himself to their song. And of course the final plan to take on the suitors is his.

So yes, the classic attributes of Odysseus are there, albeit in some cases less prominently than in the poem. There's a sense in which Nolan in his adaptation has adjusted the sliders on his graphic equaliser to tone down Odysseus' cunning and swagger and raise up his trauma and sorrow, with the latter being things Nolan evidently thinks matter today. The trauma and sorrow are definitely there in the poem, we should remember, with Odysseus sitting and weeping on the shore of Calypso's island or weeping again as he hears the bard Demodocus tells the story of the Trojan Horse, and Nolan leans in to this, presenting Odysseus as being, in a sense, a kind of traumatised veteran, guilt-ridden by the horrors he has unleased. On this aspect of the character, I wonder if Nolan's drawing in some sense from Jonathan Shay's 1994 study Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and its 2002 sequel Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. Certainly he seems to be highlighting the fact that war is a horrendous thing, and that even wars launched for supposedly just reasons almost inevitably entail the unleashing of horrors against innocent citizens; we do not see the rapes committed by Greek soldiers in Troy, but we hear the screams of women and girls.

What about the other characters? Here people will differ, of course, but I thought Robert Pattinson's Antinous superb, Anne Hathaway's Penelope excellent, and John Leguizamo's Eumaeus first-rate, while I felt Tom Holland, Zendaya, Elliott Page, Himesh Patel, and Samantha Morton all did fine jobs as Telemachus, Athena, Sinon, Eurylochus, and Circe. The only significant figures that didn't quite work for me -- almost, but not quite, were Calypso, in whom I think Charlize Theron is underutilised, and Menelaos, where it's hard at times to see behind other thuggish characters John Bernthal has played. And yet, maybe that's a good thing: Telemachus may be visiting him as a wise peer of his father, and as a sensible guide, but the thuggishness the actor carries helps sell the idea that he's responsible for the scars that mar his wife's face.

On which, advance discussion of the film focused, of course, on the decision to cast Lupita Nyong'o as Helen, with it being, apparently, unthinkable that Helen might be played by a black actress. I'm not entirely sure why anybody should have been especially distressed by this, not least because I'm not sure what the genetic composition of a demi-god who was sired by a god in the form of a swan and was hatched from an egg would be. Yes, Homer describes her as 'white-armed' but that's just a conventional term to indicate an aristocratic character without the sun-burning effects of manual labour. Perhaps more importantly, it seems churlish to complain in a world where we're used to that other great beauty of Greek legend, Andromeda, having been played by white actresses in both the 1981 and 2010 versions of Clash of the Titans, and having over the centuries been conventionally depicted by white painters as white. Andromeda, after all, was an Aithiopian princess, with 'Aithiopian' having been the standard Greek term for black Africans. Indeed, these Aithiopians were seen by the Greeks as especially close to the gods: in the first book of the Iliad we're told of the gods banqueting with them, a thing they don't seem to have done with anybody of a fairer-skinned persuasion, with the goddess Iris towards the end of the poem feasting with them again, while in the Odyssey we hear in the first few lines and again in the fifth book of Poseidon feasting with them. What's more, when speaking with the dead in the Odyssey, Odysseus says that the beauty of Achilles' son Neoptolemos was surpassed only by that of 'godlike Memnon' the Aithiopian king who fought alongside the Trojans. It's almost as though if a filmmaker wanted to present a character from Greek legend as being almost uncannily beautiful there's a decent case for picking a suitably attractive black actor, and that to find this inconceivable one would have to be straightforwardly racist or not especially clued in on the conventions of ancient legend and literature.

A major challenge with this sort of adaptation, of course, is how 'authentic' it should be. Some weeks ago I had a bizarre episode on The-Thing-That-Used-To-Be-Twitter where I'd tweeted about an annoying seminar I once attended and over three million sets of eyes, many doubtless digital, spotted this, with the owner of one set accusing me of carrying water for what he was convinced would be 'the least accurate Hollywood movie ever'. 'I dunno,' I said, 'in a world where U-571, Braveheart, Gladiator, Michael Collins, and Prince of Thieves already exist, I'd be loath to call any film I've not yet seen -- much less one significantly set in imaginary magical lands -- "the least accurate Hollywood movie ever".'

And that was without mentioning 300, of which my favourite lecturer, the wonderful late Victor Connerty, memorably spat: 'It. Was. Garbage.'

Other than Helen being black, what were the objections typically raised ahead of the film's release?

One was that the weather in the film, as shown in trailers and promotional picture, looked anything other than idyllic. Greece, so the cries went, is a sunny, bright, colourful land, and Nolan is misrepresenting it by showing it as dreary, almost like England. Now, I tend to think that people who said this sort of thing have almost certainly never visited Greece, or have hardly done so, and quite possibly haven't visited England either. I've been to Greece just a handful of times, though that's included spring and autumn visits, as well as two summers working on archaeological digs in the Peloponnese, and that's been enough for me to see lush fields under grey skies, lethally impenetrable fogs on mountain roads, and deluges like I have never experienced in Britain or Ireland. Greek weather, in short, can be awful. It's not usually so, of course, but it certainly can be, and far more often than the tourist brochures and influencers and people who don't understand how statistics work would have you believe. And that's not to get into how there were ancients who thought Odysseus' wanderings had taken him far beyond the Mediterranean, how Homer has Odysseus reaching Ithaca shrouded in a magical mist, and how it's a bit silly to assume that a few stills and trailers are representative of the film as a whole.

Another objection was that it was scandalous that Odysseus' ship is played in the film by a reconstructed Viking ship, tweaked in a few ways to look plausibly ancient Greek. I'm not sure if the people saying this wanted a CGI Greek ship, or several CGI Greek ships, or some reconstructed Greek ships built along what Mycenean or Classical lines. Whatever they wanted, though, I find it rather odd that people can accept French actors playing Italians and American actors playing Greeks and Brazilians playing Persians and balk at the idea of one inanimate object playing another one. Come to Ireland and hire a car so I can show you Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie, the Normandy Beaches, Edinburgh Castle, George Washington's childhood home, and the London prison where Paddington Bear made marmalade and where Michael Caine and Noel Coward planned The Italian Job. I'm not joking: George Washington apparently grew up just a couple of miles away from where I live now, it seems. Frankly, given Nolan wanted to film in rough waters, and to look convincing doing so, I'm not sure that it was a bad call to deck sturdy replica Viking ships up to look like ancient Greek ones.

Related to this criticism is the complaint that the costumes in the film aren't accurately Mycenean, the late Mycenean period being when the story is supposedly set, or at least late Archaic, that being when the story seems to have been written down. I think this is an interesting criticism, not least as I don't really think it's correct to say that the Odyssey was set in the Mycenean age. Yes, the later Greeks thought the Trojan War happened just after 1200 BC, but they would no more have said 'Mycenean Age' or 'Bronze Age' than they would have said 'Before Christ'. The Trojan War was pretty much the final chapter for them not of the Mycenean Age but of the Heroic Age, a magical never-never time from a long time before. As it happens, there's very little of the historical Mycenean period to be spotted in Homer -- the most obvious Mycenean detail in the Iliad is a reference to a boars' tusk helmet that's featured in a part of the book most scholars think was written later than the rest of the text, and the world of the Odyssey in particular seems to be a fantastic version of the world of late Archaic Greece. 

Perhaps, then, since it's a fantasy, the filmmakers could have gone with a more creative or inventive look for the characters' costumes, fusing together to a dazzling extent boars' tusk helmets and Argive panoplies and Dendra panoplies made of bands of bronze with helmets and cuirasses the likes of which the world has never seen, with gleaming gold decoration and even the brightest of enamel colours. Surely, after all, this would have been better than the dowdy brown bronze and leather of the Greek soldiers, outfits the likes of which we've seen in innumerable films?

Well, maybe. I can understand that argument. But I like how bland and functional the outfits worn by Odysseus and his men look. They're not distracting. They're about as familiar as can be. They look normal -- insofar as anything in this film looks normal. And that very normality, that very functionality, allows the strange white armour of the Trojans to look slightly alien, slightly unsettling, slightly 'other', and it enables Agamemnon's ridiculous, ostentatious costume to stand out as all the more preposterous. Look at him in his navy-enamelled and gold-embossed outfit, not a scratch on it anywhere, and him looming over his men. In his fascinating 1987 book The Mask of Command, the late John Keegan talked of 'heroic leaders' like Alexander, 'anti-heroic leaders' like Wellington, 'unheroic leaders' like Ulysses S. Grant, and 'false heroic leaders' like Hitler: dressed in his preposterous generalissimo outfit, decked out like the warrior he is not, Nolan's Agamemnon is the model of the fraudulent and narcissistic false heroic leader that Achilles describes in the first book of the Iliad as having the face of a dog and the heart of a deer. Agamemnon looms over the other Greeks in his ostentatious armour, whether looking down on Odysseus as the Ithacan king pays him homage, or standing Vader-like and imperious in the gates of Troy as his troops charge past him to murder, rape, and loot. He, himself, does nothing -- he shows no skill in combat at all, and as far as we can tell kills no Trojans, with the only person to fall by his hand in the whole film being his own young daughter. It's fitting, then, that when he finally sheds his cosplay armour he is immediately cut down by his wife. 

The sheer familiarity of the regular Greek outfits helps mark out too just how weird are their storm-tossed and confused encounters at sea, at least as recollected by Odysseus. Circe has the men remove their armour, of course, ahead of one of the most eerie and viscerally disturbing sequences in the film, while the alien character of the Laestrygonians' armour helps underline just how strange, how incomprehensible and terrifying that episode would have been for Odysseus and his men. The Laestrygonians, as they appear in the poem, are man-eating giants, but unlike the Cyclopes, to which they are related, they are civilized: they live in cities and have a king, unlike Polyphemos and his fellow anarchic pastoralists. Nolan's portrayal of them in fantastic armour that echoes Greek armour while being clearly alien -- there's an 'uncanny valley' quality to them -- marks out just how bizarre they are. And crucially, the film never explains them: this is simply a horrific and inexplicable episode that emerges from the lotus-drugged depths of Odysseus' memory, and no attempt at decoding the murderous episode is ever put forward.

This sense of confusion and shock is key to the  Cyclops episode too, of course, this being one of the real stand-out sequences of the film. Yes, gone is the wordplay and the Errol-Flynn-style swashbuckling that marks how Odysseus relates this adventure to the Phaeacians in Homer's poem, but instead we have a deeply unsettling, terrifying scene, a scene where the events are shown rather than told, and where the sheer aghast terror of Odysseus and his men in the face of this savage giant is palpable. Sure, it's easy to miss the 'Nobody' pun that's so familiar to people who have known this story since childhood, but aside from that being a tonal choice as much as anything, it's a gag that only works if Polyphemos is presented as just one of many Cyclopes, and I'm not sure the incomprehensible terror of that scene as painted by Nolan would have withstood the impact of the blinded monster chatting with a group of his cheese-making peers. And the impact of that story is retained, since in the poem it's as he's escaping that Odysseus reveals his real name and so brings down the wrath of Poseidon, while in Nolan's version the escape ends with a needless, foolish, cocky, infuriating final arrow shot, after which the crew point out to Odysseys that that insult would have repercussions, since the men had heard the Cyclops calling upon the god Poseidon as his father; in both poem and film Odysseus would have to pay for that impiety.

Questions of piety, it should be stressed, are at the heart of the film, not in the same way they would be in Virgil's Aeneid, of course, but they're there nonetheless, specifically with reference to the code of hospitality known as xenia, that religiously-bound code that is almost omnipresent in Greek literature, so much so that questions about hospitality in the Odyssey were long a staple of Leaving Certificate and first-year university exam papers. As presented by Nolan 'Zeus's law' appears to resemble nothing so much as the principle underpinning Christ's account of the Day of Judgment in Matthew's Gospel:

"When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left.

Then the King will say to those at his right hand, `Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.'

Then the righteous will answer him, `Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?'

And the King will answer them, `Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.'

Then he will say to those at his left hand, `Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.'

Then they also will answer, `Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?'

Then he will answer them, `Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.'

And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

Those who would claim -- as did Robert Kaplan twenty or so years back when he wrote Warrior Politics -- that 'leadership demands a pagan ethos' would do well to consider how some things we think of intrinsically Christian had pagan ancestry, or least expressed ideas that our Greek and Roman and German and Celtic forebears had thought of even before the Son of God taught them in a definitive way. The Greeks, after all, at least held to ideals of ritualised friendship with people from abroad, these relationships being bound by the code of xenia, blessed as they were by Zeus Xenios, Zeus of Hospitality or of Strangers. This code is referred to time and again in both the Iliad and Odyssey, and to unpick it it's not a terrible idea to read how the Roman poet Ovid considered the idea; as a friend has pointed out more than once, it can be hard to read Homer save through the lens of Ovid.

In the Metamorphosis Ovid relates a tale, probably based on an at least slightly older Greek original, of how Zeus and Hermes had wandered the earth in disguise and were denied hospitality by all and sundry, only being treated with respect by the elderly peasant couple Baucis and Philemon. Everyone else was punished for their lack of hospitality by being drowned in a great flood, while Baucis and Philemon lived out their years happily as stewards of the temple into which their home was transformed, eventually themselves being transformed into an intertwining pair of oak and linden trees. Why not, then, have the Greeks of the film believing that strangers should be cared for as we never know when divinity walks among us?

Xenia, or 'Zeus's law' as Nolan puts it, is central to the film and breaches of it are seen and mentioned time and again: Paris had stolen Helen away from Menelaos while his guest; Odysseus had landed at the town of the Cicones and ransacked the town rather than asking for hospitality; the Cyclops had attacked and eaten people who had waited in his cave in the hope of welcoming him home; the Laestrygonians had launched themselves at the Greeks who said they came in peace, slaughtering almost all of them; Circe turned her guests into swine; and most obviously Antinous and the other suitors had squatted for years at the palace of Ithaca, abusing the hospitality of Penelope and Telemachus while treating like dirt those beggars who sought simple hospitality in line with the code. And, of course, the Trojan Horse itself is presented as the supreme breach of the code, a supposed peace offering that was left for the Trojans as a kind of departing guest-gift, in reality being a sacrilegious vehicle for treachery, slaughter, rape, pillage, and arson.

Despite Odysseus' eventual lament -- his conviction that he had become death, the destroyer of worlds -- this did not in isolation break Zeus's law. On the contrary, the fact of the war itself showed that the code had been abused in the past. But perhaps, as Odysseus realises, this was the point at which the international code of the day, the norms of the day, the civilization of that legendary day were set alight. Never, after all, had anybody ever held up as a good thing Paris's abduction -- or seduction -- of Helen from Menelaos, with Hector in the Iliad being especially critical of this, but the Trojan Horse, that murderous weapon disguised as a peace offering, is presented in the Odyssey as a clever ruse of which the Greeks could and did boast.

It had, after all, shortened the war, and saved Greek lives in the process. In such circumstances, who would even mention whether this trickery, this poison-coated white flag of pseudo-surrender, might have been profoundly dishonourable? And weren't, in Homer's account, the gods in on this?

They were, in Homer's account anyway, Athena having helped Epeios to fashion the horse Odysseus had thought of. Not in Nolan's version, though. He is telling a story that he thinks we need to hear, a story of how if we cast aside our codes and manners, doing whatever it takes to get whatever we want, we set the world on fire. There's more to the film that that, of course, but that's certainly at the heart of it, a warning against being the sort of people who just want to watch the world burn, or who make weapons that enable that to happen.

And so the film ends, with the hero sailing to the ends of the world, while lamenting the end of the world and hoping a better one will rise from its ruins.

Honestly, I think this was a masterpiece.

Samildánach

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about specialisation, about picking one area and being known for being great at one thing. I’m not sure about this, though, because to take a pointer from Archilochus, the world surely needs foxes as much as it needs hedgehogs. One of the great insights in medical practice over recent decades has been that for all the status that accords to consultants, general practitioners are experts too: general practice is a specialism, as being good at many things is a remarkable gift, a speciality in its own right. Sometimes jacks of all trades are indeed masters of none, but sometimes too they are masters of many.

This reality has been recognised for millennia through the repository of human wisdom that is the world’s myths and legends, of course. Back in the seventh century BC Homer famously described Odysseus as polytropos – a word literally meaning ‘of many turnings’ – and also as polymētis (‘many-skilled’) and poikilomētis (‘dapple-skilled’). Even more than Achilles, the intense and shortlived hero of the Iliad, the hero of the Odyssey is a figure who excels in all manner of fields. As H.D.F. Kitto put it in a passage so memorably quoted in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

‘Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by song.  He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arēte.’

Irish legend has made the same point since time immemorial, with one of its most remarkable figures being the mercurial Lugh, hero of the wars against the Fomorians and eventual father of Cuchulainn. Lugh would be famously known as Samildánach  –  ‘equally skilled in many arts’, the story of how he came to Tara underlining how wide-ranging his abilities were. As told in the medieval Second Battle of Moytura, it goes something like this:

One day, after Bres the traitor had been banished and Nuada was once more king, the Tuatha Dé Danann were feasting and celebrating at Tara when a young and handsome warrior arrived at the palace’s gate. 

‘Who are you?’ asked Gamal and Camall, the palace doorkeepers. 

‘I am Lugh Long-arm,’ the young man answered, ‘son of Cian son of Diancecht and of Ethne, daughter of Balor, fosterson of Eochaidh and Tailtiu, daughter of the King of Spain.’

‘And what can you do? No one without an art enters Tara.’

‘Try me. I am a carpenter,’ said Lugh. 

‘Then we don’t need you. We have a carpenter already – Luchta son of Luachaid.’

‘I’m a smith too,’ said Lugh.

‘We also have a smith – Colum Cualleinech of the three new processes.’

‘I am a champion.’

‘We don’t need one! Ogma son of Ethliu is our champion.’

‘I’m a harper as well.’

‘We have a harper already, Abcan son of Bicelmos, who we chose in the fairy-mounds.’

‘Well, I am a hero.’

‘We’ve no need of one – Bresal is our hero.’

‘I am a poet, and I am a historian.’

‘En son of Ethaman is our poet and historian.’

‘I’m also a sorcerer.’ 

‘Sure, we’ve no shortage of sorcerers!’

‘I am a healer.’

‘No need. Diancecht is our healer.’

‘I am a cup-bearer too.’

‘We have nine of those already!’

‘I’m even a metalworker, skilled at working in brass.’

‘We don’t need you – Credne Cerd is already our brazier.’

Lugh paused, and then said: ‘Ask the king whether he has a single man in his whole household who has all these skills. If he has, I will not enter.’

And so Lugh was welcomed to Tara, where he became the greatest of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, and was known henceforth as Samildánach, for he had many skills. 

Sometimes a breadth of expertise and the vision that comes with that is the skill we are slowest to recognise, but it can be the most valuable skill of all.

Classic Comics: Thoughts from 1997

Most people think they know what comics are: “crude, poorly drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare” in the words of Scott McCloud in his groundbreaking 1993 work Understanding Comics. Recognising this to be a ridiculously narrow, not to mention subjective, definition, McCloud set out to discredit it. Starting from Will Eisner’s description of comics as “sequential art”, McCloud eventually reached a far more precise and comprehensive definition of comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

Having seen McCloud demonstrate how things as diverse as the Bayeux Tapestry and the Stations of the Cross can thus be regarded as comics, I began to consider whether or not the classical world might have contributed to the artform. When I was fortunate enough to meet McCloud in 1994, he persuaded me that there were probably plenty of examples of comics in classical art and a course in Roman relief sculpture later that year convinced me of this. 

In this article I shall not attempt a comprehensive survey of such examples, as, space restrictions aside, I am hardly qualified to do so. Instead, I shall focus on a very small number of art works that clearly illustrate that the principles of comics were quite evident in Greek art.

Narrative was a vital element in ancient art and by the middle of the seventh century BC Attic vase painters were painting pictures that often continued around vases, separated by bands of decoration. Having an oblong shape, the pictures lent themselves to subjects such as processions, races, and hunts, as, being essentially narrow friezes, they required many figures to fill them. Though these friezes did not always have a chronological element they certainly sometimes did, an excellent example of this being found on the Francois vase, painted by Kleitias around 570BC.

Along with more conventional subjects such as the procession of guests at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and the funeral games of Patroklos, the vase also illustrates the story of the pursuit of Troilos. The frieze extends halfway around the vase and shows a number of distinct scenes, clearly separate from each other in both time and place, on a continuous background. At the far left is a fountain house where a girl stands waiting for her hydra to fill. Next are the figures of Hermes, Thetis, and Troilos. After is Priam receiving the bad news in sorrow, and finally two of Troilos’ brothers can be seen setting out from the city gates to avenge his death. Assuming that the frieze is “read” in this way, its sequential nature is clear.

Greek art was clearly not “photographic” in nature, in that it was not taken for granted that a single image should represent a single moment. A good example of this is evident on the neck of a mid-seventh-century Attic amphora found in Eleusis. It features an illustration of Odysseus and his men blinding the Cyclops Polyphemos. In the Odyssey the story is clearly related: Odysseus plied Polyphemos with alcohol, the Cyclops then fell asleep, and Odysseus blinded him. Here, however, the Cyclops is depicted sitting up, with one hand trying to push away the heated stake wielded by Odysseus, while clutching his wine cup with the other. Clearly the wine cup, which really belongs to an earlier part of the story, is depicted in order to hint that the Cyclops is drunk rather than still drinking.

Perhaps the most well-known “non-photographic” image in Greek art is a scene showing Achilles and Ajax playing some form of board game on an Attic black-figure amphora made and painted by Exekias between 540 and 530 BC. 

This vase features “speech balloons”, perhaps the most distinctive element of modern comics, a device which through attempting to represent sound in a scene also introduces the concept of time. 

Extracts from Understanding Comics, explaining how in comics speech bubbles can subvert otherwise 'photographic' images.

Achilles says “four” and Ajax responds “three”, possibly referring to dice scores. It is not clear whether Ajax is responding to Achilles, Achilles is responding to Ajax, or both men are speaking at once; what is certain is that this image does not represent a single moment, but rather the length of time it takes the two men to speak.

The two heroes are labelled above their heads: Achilles is on the left, with Ajax on the right.

One black-figure vase, Boston 08.292, is a perfect example of Greek comics. This vase features what McCloud calls an “action to action” transition, probably the most common type of “panel to panel” progression in comics. One side of the vase shows a man in a vineyard courting a young boy. When the vase is turned around, however, the young boy is jumping to embrace the man. Though the background remains continuous, the pictures are clearly intended to represent the same couple, with one scene obviously following the other.

Greek vase painting, therefore, clearly provides examples of what would now be termed comics, but there are also examples to be found in architectural sculpture.

The low-relief metopes on temples offered an obvious opportunity to tell a story in pictures, but it is difficult to tell how often this opportunity was taken. The Parthenon metopes, for instance, seem to have been put in place in such a way that sequence was largely irrelevant, whereas the metopes on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, dating from the second quarter of the fifth century BC, may have been intended to tell a story.

The twelve metopes there represent the twelve labours of Herakles, and are ordered in such a way that Herakles is evidently older in the twelfth metope than the first. The final metope depicts the cleansing of the Augean stables, two places later than conventionally related, with the acquisition of the apples of the Hesperides and the capturing of Cerberus being brought forward to the tenth and eleventh places. This might suggest that the metopes are merely showing scenes for Herakles’ life in no particular order, but as the traditional order postdates the building of the temple at Olympia this seems an unsafe conclusion; it seems more likely that this collection may represent the first attempt to assemble the twelve episodes into one story.

Atlas offering the apples of the Hesperides to Heracles, with Athene watching.

The continuous frieze common to temples built in the Ionic order, however, can be seen to demonstrate principles of comics with remarkable subtlety. The Parthenon offers an excellent example of this.

The Parthenon’s Ionic frieze was about 160 metres long and showed an idealised version of the Panathenaic procession. Though the frieze was continuous and therefore seemed to be one image, there was clearly chronological progression in it. 

The western end, the first to be seen by people coming from the Propylaea, featured horsemen gathering for the procession, which begins at the south-west corner. Continuing along the northern side the procession had many elements –  horsemen,musicians, etc – before reaching the eastern end. Here it culminated with the gods looking on as a group of people held a peoplos, which would have been presented to the sacred olive-wood statue of Athene on the Acropolis. The south side of the frieze, which was not as visible as the other three sides, also had an eastwards direction converging at this scene.

The Parthenon frieze, assembled as one text, read from right to left and top to bottom.

Clearly this was sequential art, the appearance of which would have been heightened by the bright colours in which it was painted. 

The fact that it would have also been seen through gaps between columns would also have given it an added element of timing – the columns would have acted as “gutters” or panel divisions.

Overall, therefore, I think it can be plainly seen that the principles that make comics what they are were quite evident in Classical Art. Though I’ve only dealt with Greek art up to the mid-fifth century BC, the traditions of sequential art continued throughout the Hellenistic period as can be seen in the Telephus frieze surrounding the altar of Zeus at Pergamon and thrived in the Roman world, with Trajan’s column being but the most obvious example.

_________________________________

Originally published in UCD Classical Society Journal, 1996/1997, and tweaked here merely to amend the most clunky of sentences. I found this in the shed today, and was amused to see how my writing had changed. Glad, too. Mind, it has been a very long time. 

Christmas Trees, and Belgian Waffle

Few things exasperate me quite as much as the perennial ‘War on Christmas’ stories. They’re usually ill-founded, they leave otherwise sensible religious people sounding crazy, and their inevitable correction enables clueless sorts to start spouting anti-Christian nonsense of their own that almost invariably goes unchecked.

I'm not going to link to people about this one, because I'm annoyed with folk on both sides of this argument as I think they've all let themselves down, but today, for instance, we had the spectacle of people muttering darkly about Brussels having decided that instead of having its traditional Nativity Scene and Christmas Tree in the Grand Place, it would replace them with an ‘electronic winter tree’. 

Seemingly, the Brussels councilwoman Bianca Debaets believes that this decision was down to religious sensitivities, saying, ‘For a lot of people who are not Christians, the tree there is offensive to them.’ 

Philippe Close, president of Brussels Tourism is suitably dismissive of this attitude, saying, 

‘Let’s be clear. There’ll be a Christmas tree and a Nativity scene. Christmas traditions will be respected. The theme this year is Winter pleasures, at the huge Christmas market that has a worldwide reputation. We wanted to emphasise culture and modernity, so asked artists to reinvent the Christmas tree, which is actually a pagan symbol.’

So it seems the plan is to have the Nativity scene there as usual, although the tree is indeed to be replaced with a 25m installation with a vague tree shape, made from screens and with a viewing platform at the top. About 12,000 people have signed a petition asking that the traditional tree be restored, but I’m not clear on their reasoning; it may have been aesthetic or environmental as much as anything else, given that this ‘tree’ looks incredibly tacky and surely requires a ludicrous amount of power.

Mmmm. Tasteful, traditional, *and* environmentally-friendly. Go Brussels.

So, the main story here is a storm in a teacup. There’ll still be a crib, there’ll be something vaguely reminiscent of a tree, and this has nothing to do with placating the 25pc or so of Brussels’ population who are Muslims, which isn’t really surprising as Muslims tend to be grand with the whole Christmas thing. 

That said, I find myself wanting to kick furniture whenever I see people wittering about Christmas trees being pagan symbols. This, frankly, is historical ignorance and incompetence at its worst. It always amazes me to see people who shout and scream about evidence and scientific ignorance propagating such shameless rot.

It’s the same kind of claptrap as saying ‘People nowadays insult people by sticking up their fingers at them, and the archers at Agincourt did that, so that must be why people do it now.’ 

Leaving aside the fact that the evidence doesn't even suggest that the archers at Agincourt did any such thing, this is utter gibberish because it fails to demonstrate a connection. All it does is note two similar behaviours and proclaims a link between them. There might be correlation at work, but there’s no evidence of causation. 

People like to bang on about the pagan roots of Christmas, but doing so requires a) ignorance and b) a fair amount of unhistorical thinking. 

Yule live to regret this...

Sometimes they’ll say it’s based on Yule, for instance. The ancient Germanic and Norse festival of Yule, I mean, not the modern made-up form of Yule, which like all Neopaganism is really just a reaction to Christian practices and can’t be dated any further back than the nineteenth century.

The problem with this Yule is that it’s based on very flimsy evidence, which also happens to ridiculously Teutonocentric; it's a version of that Edwardian notion of everything worth talking about being German. Still, the big issue is its flimsiness.

Writing in the eight century, Bede says Yule was the name the Angles and Saxons gave December or sometimes December bleeding into January. Seemingly they had a big celebration on the same night as the Christians celebrated Christmas, calling it the mothers’ night, though Bede doesn’t know why. Even assuming that Bede was right about this festival, which he might not have been, given that Anglo-Saxon paganism was in its death throes when he was writing, this isn’t saying a lot.

Pretty much everything else we ‘know’ about Yule is from thirteenth-century Christian writers, who say that their Viking ancestors had celebrated a Yule feast, involving the mass slaughter of animals and the sprinkling of all present with animals' blood. Our sources say the Norse had shifted the date of Yule to coincide with Christian celebrations, but modern scholars seem to think that it could have fallen almost any time after the middle of November. 

So, given that Yule could have happened at any point between mid-November and January, and may have been shifted to synchronise with Christmas, and was described by our sources in a manner that rather differed from typical Christmas celebrations in certain obvious ways, it’s hard to see how people can credibly argue that Christmas was based on Yule in any meaningful sense.

Of course, if you want to get back to your imagined roots, why not go the whole hog? I’m sure nobody would mind if you massacred your family pets and smeared their blood all over yourselves and the walls of your houses to celebrate the days getting longer. Go for it. Knock yourself out.

I get rather Saturnine about this nonsense...

The other standard modern trope on this is that our dating of Christmas was purely a sanctification of a preexisting pagan feast. This idea seems to have been thought up by the German Paul Ernst Jablonski in the early eighteenth century, when he noticed that in the Julian Calendar the Winter solstice took place on 25 December; assuming that this must have been a pagan Roman festival, he cited this as another instance of the Catholic Church embracing paganism. 

The Benedictine Dom Jean Hardouin, while disagreeing with Jablonski’s interpretation, accepted his basic assumption without analysing whether it was correct, and so a modern myth was born.

Now, it is true that the Romans celebrated a winter festival called the Saturnalia, and it is also true that in 274 AD the emperor Aurelian instituted the feast of the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the celebration of the winter solstice under the guise of the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, the solstice falling on 25 December under the Julian calendar. 

It’s therefore understandable that people who can’t be bothered to look up sources might have assumed that the dating of Christmas to 25 December was simply a case of the Christianization of Roman festivals, especially in connection with the notion of Jesus as the Light of the World and the longstanding Christian tradition of having the Day of the Sun as the principal day of worship.

Thing is, though, this is little more than assumption, and there’s at least as much evidence against it as there is for it. 

For example, it seems that St Hippolytus of Rome, writing several decades before Aurelian’s institution of the pagan feast recorded the date of Christ’s birth as 25 December. In his Commentary on Daniel, Hippolytus said that Jesus’ birth took place ‘eight days before the kalends of January’.

(Granted, there's a possibility that this was a later interpolation, but it's hard to see an argument for this having been the case that doesn't depend on the circular argument that 'the date wasn't settled until after this, therefore any evidence for the date before this should be discounted'.)

That’s not to say that Jesus was born on 25 December, but to point out that the tradition of his being born then seems to have existed by 235 AD, when Hippolytus died, whereas the Romans didn't have Winter sun festivals until 274 AD. 

That date could have been roughly established by early Christians counting forward from the claims in Luke 1 that Jesus was conceived six months after John the Baptist, who was himself conceived when his father Zechariah was serving in the Temple at Jerusalem as a member of the priestly division of Abijah. Certainly, this was an argument used by St John Chrysostom, who died in 407 AD, using calculations based on how Rabbinical tradition had frozen the priestly schedule following the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.

Alternatively, it seems more likely that the date was largely derived from the Jewish tradition that prophets had an ‘integral age’, whereby they were thought to have died on the same date as that on which they were conceived or born. Since some early Christians dated the Crucifixion to 25 March – in connection with the Passover – it followed then that Jesus must have been born or conceived on 25 March. They ran with conception, as commemorated to this day with the feast of the Annunciation, and counted forward nine months to Christmas.

Again, I'm not saying that the early Christians got the date of Christmas right. I'm just saying that it seems they dated it based on Jewish tradition, not pagan ones. This shouldn't really surprise us, given just how Jewish the early Christians were.

So, for the third of my tree points here...

Are Christmas trees pagan symbols, or even more dramatically as I’ve seen them described elsewhere, pagan symbols of winter rebirth?

Well, they’re obviously not the latter. If we’re using evergreen trees, then they don’t die in the first place so by definition can’t be reborn. If we’re using deciduous ones, which I really hope we’re not, then they don’t get reborn in the winter, and indeed don’t show any signs of life till the Spring.

To be fair, this probably uses up a few auld watts too...

Were trees sacred to pagans? Well, yes, they often were. So were rocks, hills, rivers, fires, storms, doorways, you name it. Good luck trying to thinking of things that pagans could have thought of as sacred that pagans never thought of sacred. Frankly, it’d be hard to start any kind of modern tradition without some kind of pagan precedent. That doesn’t mean there’s a link.

Trees appear to have had an important role in the general mytho-religious matrix of the ancient and early medieval Germans, English, and Norse. The World Ash Yggdrasil, for instance, seems to have been utterly central to Norse myth,* and the story of Wessex’s own Saint Boniface shows just how important trees could be for the Germans in the period the less clued-in still call ‘The Dark Ages’. 

According to Willibard’s Life of Boniface, there was a sacred oak tree in Germany, in what is now northern Hesse. Boniface cut it down – the Life claims that he started to do so and a wind finished the job – and the locals were so amazed that they converted to Christianity. Boniface used the timber from this sacred oak to build a chapel, dedicated to Saint Peter, which became the nucleus of his second monastic foundation, which he established at Fritzlar. This was in the early eighth century.

Here’s the thing, though. The Christmas tree, as a phenomenon, seems to date back no earlier than the sixteenth century, and certainly no earlier than the fifteenth. 

Insofar as we can ascertain the origins of the Christmas tree, it seems to have been a development of the late Medieval Paradeisbaum. The Paradise tree featured in morality plays connected with the Garden of Eden, but whenever morality plays were put on in Winter it was necessary to decorate evergreen trees with apples and other props in order to make them look like a semi-credible fruit tree, suitable for the paradise that Adam and Eve lost. 

Tradition ascribes the creation of the Christmas tree to Martin Luther, but the story looks like a pious fiction. There is some evidence of trees being decorated after the fashion of Paradise trees in the guildhalls of late fifteenth-century Riga and Talinn, and it seems that during the sixteenth century Germans took to bringing evergreen trees into their homes, not merely decorating them with fruit but also adding pieces of gingerbread, wax ornaments, and strings of nuts. 

I've heard that they caught on as specifically Protestant counterpoints to Catholic cribs, but while that strikes me as very plausible, I've not seen any evidence on this one. I'd expect it to be out there, but I've no books on that topic, and the internet has a habit of coming up short on serious historical stuff. 

Granted, this phenomenon was a German custom, but there seems to have been an 800-year gap between Boniface hacking down the sacred oak and Germans starting to bring trees into their houses. If you really want to argue that Christmas trees were pagan customs, you need to produce evidence. 

Or, I suppose, you can just make things up.

_____________________________________________________________________________

* I say 'seems', of course, because pretty much everything we know about Norse myth is drawn from Christian accounts of the myths after they’d ceased to be part of a living religion; they are, in effect, Christian fairy tales based on long-lost legends. Oddly enough, Cracked more or less has it right.

The Dark Knight Rises: Hope does not Disappoint

Superhero films offer us a “faithless, modern mythology”, according to Tom Hiddleston, who played the renegade Norse god Loki in this summer’s Avengers Assemble. Writing in the Guardian this April, he observed that “In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.”

He’s almost right. Superhero films offer a modern mythology, but there’s nothing faithless about them. Modern morality plays, they’re expressions of a world built by Judaeo-Christian tradition, and embody not merely explicitly Christian ideas but also those universal images that J.R.R. Tolkien described in 1931 as having prefigured Christian truth: “The Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there,” he said, “while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”

The Norse myths Tolkien so loved, for instance, pointed to Christianity through such images as Odin hanging on the World Ash, or Baldr, the dying god, but it remained for Christianity to fulfil the truths to which they pointed.

Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow makes a very modern mistake in Avengers Assemble when she says of Thor and Loki, “These guys come from legend. They’re basically gods.”
“There’s only one God, ma’am,” replies Chris Evans’s Captain America, a recently revived relic of the 1940s, “and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.”

This isn’t simple religious chauvinism; rather, having some idea of what the word ‘God’ means, Captain America recognises Thor and Loki as mere men writ large.  The ancient Vikings would have understood what he meant; they knew that their gods and the God of the Christians were different not merely in degree but in kind.

Avengers Assemble develops this idea when Loki attacks a crowd of people in Germany and demands they kneel before him, embracing what he sees as their natural state. “In the end,” he says, “you will always kneel”.
“Not to men like you,” says an old man, willing to kneel before the right person but recognising that Loki is as mortal as he is.
“There are no men like me,” replies Loki.
“There are always men like you,” answers the old man, clearly recalling his youth, when so many of his countrymen showed themselves willing to prostrate themselves before the false gods of Hitler, the German state, and the earthly paradise the Nazi regime promised.

It might seem odd for an avowed atheist like Joss Whedon, writer-director of Avengers Assemble, to make such meaningful theological points, but Judaeo-Christian tradition has so formed our world that modern secularism and even atheism stand on Christian foundations. The light of Christian truth, if there is any truth at all in our art, must inevitably shine through.

Interesting though Whedon’s theological asides are, Avengers Assemble is ultimately a light – albeit immensely entertaining – piece of work. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, on the other hand, is far weightier fare, and one which repays repeated viewings.

2005’s Batman Begins shows the young Bruce Wayne falling down a covered well, crashing to the bottom and being terrified by the bats that launch themselves at him. “Why do we fall, Bruce?” his father asks after rescuing him, before answering his own question with the words that define the trilogy: “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

The motif of fall and rise pervades Nolan’s trilogy, reflecting its themes of sacrifice and resurrection and embodying an idea that has been central to the western mind for millennia. The Apostles, in the earliest sermons recorded in Acts, cast the Crucifixion as a prelude to the Resurrection, while Paul, in Romans 5, explained that the price we pay for the Fall is nothing compared to the grace we receive through the Incarnation, a mystery distilled by the Easter Exsultet into the seemingly paradoxical cry, “O truly necessary sin of Adam... O happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer.”

Few mythic figures are more iconic than the scapegoat who bears the price of others’ sins, and as Michael Caine’s Alfred says in Nolan’s second Batman film, 2008’s The Dark Knight, it’s a role for which the Batman is supremely well-suited. “Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point of Batman. He can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make – the right choice.”

The Dark Knight concluded with the Batman apparently guaranteeing Gotham City’s future by becoming a scapegoat for murders committed by the city’s deranged district attorney, Harvey Dent. The Batman’s sacrifice enabled others to build a new era of law and order upon Dent’s supposedly pristine reputation, but as this year’s The Dark Knight Rises makes clear, a victory built on a lie – no matter how noble – is a false victory.

Eight years after The Dark Knight, Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon is haunted by the lie which empowered him to clean up Gotham’s streets, and Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is a broken recluse, haunted by the death of his childhood love. The Batman is but a memory while the dead district attorney is idolised by a city unaware of his dreadful crimes. Gotham may be peaceful but the city's prosperity rests on rotten foundations, and it seems discontent is ready to boil over among the city’s poorest.

When the city’s underclass erupts from its sewers, it becomes clear that the Batman will have to face his greatest challenge, one that drives him to the darkest pit of despair and forces him to face the question of whether his city is worth saving.

The Dark Knight had answered that positively, but The Dark Knight Rises is more ambivalent; Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman points out that ‘innocent’ is a strong word to use for Gotham’s citizens, who seem to have revelled – or at best cowered – in the anarchy unleashed by Tom Hardy’s Bane. “You don’t owe these people any more!,” she says, “You’ve given them everything!”

“Not everything,” replies Batman, determined to save Gotham regardless of whether its people deserve it or not. A more convincing Christ-figure than at the end of The Dark Knight, the Batman is willing to go to his death for the guilty as much as for the innocent.

“Suffering produces endurance,” writes Paul in Romans 5, “and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” Batman has always been an adolescent revenge fantasy, but Nolan’s Batman suffers and endures until he learns to hope, transcending his self-imposed mask as an angel of vengeance, and is redeemed. The Dark Knight rises.

– from The Irish Catholic, 2 August 2012

Ninjas, Vikings, and Celtic Fancy

Those of you with long memories may recall how last summer I enlightened you both by exploring a remarkable episode of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in which the viridian foursome visited the Emerald Isle, there to stroll inconspicuously through a Dublin as empty as though the Queen were visiting, before shacking up in a castle that had somehow evaded the tender cares of An Taisce and thwarting an assault on my home city by the denizens of Dublin Zoo's pets corner.

No, really. Go and look.

Anyway, early in the lads' adventures Splinter takes them through Fusiliers' Arch -- that's Traitors' Gate to the more unreconstructedly nationalist among you -- into Stephen's Green, there to tell them of Ireland's history, with the aid of the many statues in the park. He homes in straight onto a statue of Ireland's principle patron saint, there to tell the boys that Ireland is a land of magical legends, including that of Saint Patrick, who drove all the snakes and other reptiles out of Ireland.

No, really, that's what Splinter says. 

Now, there are at least four things wrong with this. First, although there's legendary accretion around the character of Patrick, he was a real historical figure, rather than a magical legend. Second, Patrick supposedly drove the snakes -- and only the snakes -- out of Ireland, with the few lizards we have being left to roam freely. Third, there is no statue of Patrick in St Stephen's Green. Fourth, if there were, it probably wouldn't look like this:

So, anyway, I was reminded of this recently after reading a letter in the Irish Times a few weeks back.

I would have loved this when I was in primary school...

Seemingly the American O'Brien Clan Foundation has decided that there ought to be a statue to Brian Boru, the victor of Clontarf, in Dublin; in principle this is a nice idea, and one that I espoused myself in school when I was eleven years old. The letter begins:

'The Victorian ambiance of St Stephen’s Green seems perfect for a classical equestrian statue of Ireland’s greatest High King, Brian Boru, the millennium of whose death is fast approaching. 

We believe Brian Boru deserves the place at the centre of the park, where the statue of King George once stood. Once in place, it would appear to visitors as though the park was designed around the likeness of an Irish leader, rather than a foreign colonial ruler, or bed of flowers. 

In his address to the assembled troops before the Battle of Clontarf, Brian Boru spoke of Irishmen fighting for their country, surely the first ever mention of the notion of Irish nationality? Brian Boru was the first and only High King to unite the warring tribes of Irish into a nation. His was the greatest Irish life ever lived. Were the Office of Public Works to permit a monument to be erected, people would have the chance to pause and reflect about the sublime achievements of Brian Boru, and drawing inspiration from it, enrich their own lives.'

And it concludes:

'Texas Pastor Terrell O’Brien, who is also an accomplished monumental sculptor, famous for his statue of Rev Billy Graham, in front of the university he founded, has been chosen by the O’Briens to carry out the project. 

A photograph of a rough model he is working on is viewable at obrienclan.com/raising-a-monument-to-brian-boru. The scheme is simple: We will pay for the statue, and its erection, and hopefully the Office of Public Works, and the art adviser can help with the proper permits and approvals.'

Now, call me old-fashioned, but remarkably aquiline features aside, isn't this statue of Brian just a bit similar to the fictitious statue of Patrick in the Ninja Turtles cartoon? I'm not suggesting for even one moment that Terrell O'Brien copied his maquette from the cartoon's take on our patron saint, but it seems to me that it might be a bad idea to have a statue so similar to the cartoon Patrick in the very spot where the cartoon Patrick is supposedly located. It could confuse tourists, after all. Especially the sort who like to wear Hawaiian shirts and play frisbee in cities so desolate that Cillian Murphy could show up any minute.

Seriously, look how similar the statues are: you'll note that Brian appears to have inherited Patrick's clothes, and is brandishing two cruciform shapes just as Britain's greatest son is portrayed as doing. The horses are a mirror image of each other, once you correct for the fact that only a miracle could explain how Patrick's horse is balancing so elegantly on its left legs.

What might have inspired this pose, you might ask, other than that mounted Prima Porta rip off we know as the Marcus Aurelius statue on the Capitoline? 

Ah, folklore...

Well, the centrepiece of the Irish Times letter reads as follows, quoting, it says, from the Annals of Innisfallen to describe the 73-year-old High King engaging in a fine piece of battlefield exhortation:

'Their ranks had been formed before daylight, and as the sun rose, Brian rode through the lines of his soldiers with a crucifix in one hand, and a drawn sword in the other; he reminded them of the day selected by the pagan invader to offer battle, and exhorted them to conquer or die. Standing in the centre of his army, and raising his powerful voice, his speech was worthy of so great a king and so good a man:  

"Be not dismayed my soldiers, because my son Donough is avenging our wrongs in Leinster; he will return victorious, and in the glory of his conquests you shall share. 

On your valor rests the hopes of your country today; and what surer grounds can they rest upon? Oppression now attempts to bend you down to servility; will you burst its chains and rise to the independence of Irish freemen? Your cause is one approved by Heaven. You seek not the oppression of others; you fight for your country and sacred altars. It is a cause that claims heavenly protection. In this day’s battle the interposition of that God who can give victory will be singly manifested in your favour. 

Let every heart, then, be the throne of confidence and courage. You know that the Danes are strangers to religion and humanity; they are inflamed with the desire of violating the fairest daughters of this land of beauty, and enriching themselves with the spoils of sacrilege and plunder. The barbarians have impiously fixed, for their struggle, to enslave us, upon the very day on which the Redeemer of the world was crucified. Victory they shall not have! from such brave soldiers as you they can never wrest it; for you fight in defence of honor, liberty and religion – in defence of the sacred temples of the true God, and of your sisters, wives and daughters. 

Such a holy cause must be the cause of God, who will deliver your enemies this day into your hands. Onward, then, for your country and your sacred altars!".'

Stirring stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Still, without wanting to be a party pooper, I think it mightn't be a bad idea to inject some reality into this narrative.

A touch of history...

Firstly, I'm far from convinced this is from the Annals of Innisfallen. It might be from the eighteenth-century farrago of fact, folklore, and full-blown mythologising that's known as the Dublin Annals of Innisfallen, but if you look at the year 1014 in the actual Annals of Innisfallen, you'll find the following passage:

'Great warfare between Brian and the foreigners of Áth Cliath, and Brian then brought a great muster of the men of Ireland to Áth Cliath. After that the foreigners of Áth Cliath gave battle to Brian, son of Cennétig, and he was slain, with his son Murchad, royal heir of Ireland, and Murchad's son, namely, Tairdelbach, as also the princes of Mumu round Conaing, son of Donn Cúán, and round Domnall son of Diarmait, king of Corcu Bascinn, and round Mac Bethad son of Muiredach, king of Ciarraige Luachra, and also Tadc Ua Cellaig, king of Uí Maine, and many others. There were also slain in that battle Mael Mórda son of Murchad, king of Laigin, together with the princes of the Laigin round him, and the foreigners of the western world were slaughtered in the same battle.'

It's a bit dry, isn't it? It's certainly not the Mel Gibson-esque patriotic fantasy that the O'Brien's are quoting.

Here's the thing. Clontarf, contrary to popular belief, wasn't what we think it was, and it didn't really matter all that much.

The Vikings had been a spent force in Ireland for decades before Clontarf. Under Olaf Sigtryggsson, Dublin had ruled over a big chunk of north Leinster in the mid-tenth century, but at the battle of Tara, fought in 980, Máel Sechnaill II, King of Meath, defeated Olaf, forcing the Dubliners to pay tribute to the Irish henceforth; it was Tara, not Clontarf, that had decisively ensured that Vikings would not rule in Ireland.

Clontarf, on the other hand, is best understood as a battle between rival Irish kings. Máel Mórda, king of Leinster, had rebelled against Brian Boru, the High King of the day, and although Vikings made up a large part of his army, the Vikings of Dublin did not take part in the battle on their doorstep; indeed, although Sigtrygg Silkenbeard, king of Dublin, was Máel Mórda's son-in-law, he remained neutral in the conflict between the two Irish kings. And well he might, for Vikings served in Brian's army too, and Brian had been the third husband of Sigtrygg's mother!

The tale of Clontarf grew with the telling. Vikings remembered it as a heroic encounter between champions, while as time went by Dubliners grew embarrassed about their Viking heritage and recast the battle as a clash of nations. The reality is that the Vikings were an important presence in medieval Ireland following their defeat at Tara. Though they remained an important -- if decreasingly distinctive -- element in Irish life right up to the arrival of the Normans in 1169, after Tara they would never again threaten to be an dominant one; the Irish and Norse nobility were deeply intermingled, and it's schoolboy nonsense to think of Clontarf as a heroic Irish victory against sinister foreigners. 

Then again, schoolboy nonsense has its charms. I suspect Chesterton would have said that there's truth buried there, the kind of truth that academics too often forget. 

Almost Three Thousand Years of Self-Justifying Colonial Clichés

The other day's piece on the Parthenon Sculptures, and some reactions it's provoked, have reminded me of an article I read many years ago, whilst doing my master's degree.

We are hard-working, civilised, and responsible, but they are lazy, savage, irresponsible idiots...

Entitled 'Eaters of flesh, drinkers of milk: the ancient Mediterranean ideology of the pastoral nomad' and by one Brent Shaw, it argued that the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey should be understood as an ethnographic text, establishing a dichotomy in European thought that distinguished between barbaric pastoralists and civilized farmers.

It was hardly insignificant that the Odyssey was composed or at any rate came into being during the great age of Greek colonisation; the Cyclops episode is loaded with the rhetoric used by colonisers when seeking to justify why they would be far better stewards of lands than the savages who live there now, squandering their resources.

Here, for instance, is the key passage in the Cyclops episode in Odyssey IX:

'And we came to the land of the Cyclopes, a fierce, lawless people who never lift a hand to plant or plough but just leave everything up to the immortal gods. All the crops they require spring up unsown and untilled, wheat and barley and vines with generous clusters that swell with the rain from heaven to yield wine. The Cyclopes have no assemblies for the making of laws, nor any established legal codes, but live in hollow caverns in the mountain heights, where each man is lawgiver to his own children and women, and nobody has the slightest interest in what his neighbours decide.'

The binary contrast being set up here is pretty obvious: the Cyclops are lazy and lawless, caring neither for the bountiful land in which they live or for any society beyond their own front doors. Greeks, on the other hand, are by implication industrious and law-embracing, the kind of people who would be responsible stewards of their gifts and who would care for their neighbours. If you ever want an idealisation of what the Greeks thought of themselves as a lawful people, have a glance at Pericles' funeral oration, as penned by Thucydides perhaps three hundred years after the Odyssey was written :

'Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighbouring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.

The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty.

But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.

[...]

We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it.

Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and, instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.'

Note especially that penultimate observation that those who concentrate solely on private matters rather than serving society in general are regarded not so much as unambitious as useless. The Greeks had a word for such people: Idiots.

The Cyclopes, then, would have been regarded by the ancient Greeks as lazy, selfish, lawless idiots, unworthy stewards of the land they inherited.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch...

Let's leap forward two thousand or so years from the Odyssey, taking us to the thirteenth century or thereabouts, when the Saga of Erik the Red was written, describing the Norse discovery of America, the most fertile part of which they referred to as Vinland, the land of wine.

'Karlsefni and his people sailed to the mouth of the river, and called the land Hop. There they found fields of wild wheat wherever there were low grounds; and the vine in all places were there was rough rising ground. Every rivulet there was full of fish. They made holes where the land and water joined and where the tide went highest; and when it ebbed they found halibut in the holes. There was great plenty of wild animals of every form in the wood. They were there half a month, amusing themselves, and not becoming aware of anything. Their cattle they had with them. And early one morning, as they looked around, they beheld nine canoes made of hides, and snout-like staves were being brandished from the boats, and they made a noise like flails, and twisted round in the direction of the sun's motion.

Then Karlsefni said, "What will this betoken?" Snorri answered him, "It may be that it is a token of peace; let us take a white shield and go to meet them." And so they did. Then did they in the canoes row forwards, and showed surprise at them, and came to land. They were short men, ill-looking, with their hair in disorderly fashion on their heads; they were large-eyed, and had broad cheeks. And they stayed there awhile in astonishment. Afterwards they rowed away to the south, off the headland.'

Suffice to say that the Scraelings, for so the native Americans will be called, don't come out of this well; they're described as mere ignorant savages, easily duped, quick to fight, and incapable of taking advantage of the paradise in which they dwell. And what a paradise! Wild animals and fish in abundance, wheat springing up from the soil unsown and untilled, and grape-bearing vines growing everywhere without even needing a hint of human effort. These Scraelings live in a land as bountiful as the land of the Cyclopes, and are as incapable or as disinclined to take care of their land, to use it as it should be used; why, of course the Vikings should settle there. Sure wouldn't they use it better? Wouldn't they prove far more responsible stewards of these wonderful gifts from heaven?

And there's the little matter of home...

A hundred or so years earlier, the Anglo-Normans and Cambro-Normans who'd begun settling Ireland had played the same game. Here, for example, are some passages from Distinction III Chapter X of Gerald of Wales' History and Topography of Ireland:

'As if to prove that what [nature] is able to form, she does not cease to shape also, she gives growth and proportions to these people, until they arrive at perfect vigour, tall and handsome in person, and with agreeable and ruddy countenances. But although they are richly endowed with the gifts of nature, their want of civilisation, shown both in their dress and mental culture makes them a barbarous people. For they wear but little woollen, and nearly all they use is black, that being the colour of the sheep in all this country. Their clothes are also made after a barbarous fashion...

The Irish are a rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts - a people that has not yet departed from the primitive habits of pastoral life. In the common course of things, mankind progresses from the forest to the field, from the field to the town and to the social conditions of citizens; but this nation, holding agricultural labour in contempt, and little coveting the wealth of towns, as well as being exceedingly averse to civil institutions - lead the same life their fathers did in the woods and open pastures, neither willing to abandon their old habits or learn anything new. They, therefore, only make patches of tillage; their pastures are short of herbage; cultivation is very rare and there is scarcely any land sown. This want of tilled fields arises from the neglect of those who should cultivate them; for theirs are large tracts which are naturally fertile and productive. The whole habits of the people are contrary to agricultural pursuits, so that the rich glebe is barren for want of husbandmen, the fields demanding labour which is not forthcoming.

Very few sorts of fruit-trees are found in this country, a defect arising not from the nature of the soil, but from want of industry of planting them; for the lazy husbandman does not take the trouble to plant the foreign sorts which would grow very well here. Two of them are fruit-bearing trees, the chestnut and the beech; the other two, the arulus (or alarus - unsure of variety) and the box, though they bear no fruit, are serviceable for making cups and handles. Yews, with their bitter sap, are more frequently to be found in this country than in any other I have visited, but you will see them principally in old cemeteries and sacred places, where they were planted in ancient times by the hands of holy men to give them what ornament and beauty they could. The forests of Ireland also abound with fir-trees, producing frankincense and incense.

There are also veins of various kinds of metals ramifying in the bowels of the earth, which, from the same idle habits, are not worked and turned to account. Even gold, which the people require in large quantities and still covet in a way that speaks their Spanish origin, is brought here by the merchants who traverse the ocean for the purposes of commerce. They neither employ themselves in the manufacture of flax or wool or in any kind of trade or mechanical art; but abandoning themselves to idleness, and immersed, in sloth, their greatest delight is to be exempt from toil, their richest possession, the enjoyment of liberty.'

It's getting kind of familiar now, isn't it? The Irish are handsome, vigorous, and agreeable -- well, so far so accurate -- but are chronically lazy, and with no drive whatsoever to husband their country's marvellous resources in a responsible way. Okay, that bit might be true too, but I think we can accept that just because Gerald was right doesn't mean he wasn't also engaging in a frenzy of self-serving rhetoric.

Gerald goes on at great length here and elsewhere about the fertility of Ireland's soil, the multitude of fish and birds and animals to be caught, and the crops that grow as though unbidden, and is utterly scathing about the Irish disinclination to do anything that might impinge on their liberty and the time that is their own. Rude pastoralists, they didn't engage in agriculture let alone build towns -- most of Ireland's towns were Viking settlements.

In short, from the point of view of the twelfth-century interlopers, the Irish were savages who didn't deserve the marvellous land they'd inherited from their ancestors. Of course the Normans of England and Wales would be far more worthy stewards of such a beautiful and bountiful country. Of course. Why it was their duty to look after it as God would have wanted. The Irish couldn't be trusted. They were squandering God's gifts.

And it goes on...

You'll find exactly the same kind of rhetoric used by the Europeans who drove the natives on north and south America from their land time and time again from the sixteenth century on, and most egregiously by those engaged in the Scramble for Africa in the nineteenth century. It's the same line, whether used of Irish, Incas, Indians, or Africans: they're brutes who are wasting what they've got, so it's our obligation to go there and use those resources properly.

Yesterday one commenter observed of the Parthenon Sculptures that the main initial complaints about the Ottoman sale of things they did not own came from people who had treated the Acropolis as a quarry, and that Christian Athenians had damaged the Acropolis long before the Turks had come, while another said:

'To be perfectly blunt, if Greece can't even be bothered to preserve the Altar of the Twelve Gods, why on earth should we give them more antiquities to damage, destroy or otherwise fail to steward properly?

Rightful ownership is all well and good, but if the rightful owner is incapable or unwilling to adequately look after the property... '

Sound familiar?