David Jones' Arthur

And what of Arthur in the 20th century (it is too early to speak of the 21st)?

There were T.H. White's whimsical offerings The Sword in the Stone and The Book of Merlyn but, amusing as they might be, and delightful in their own way, they cannot constitute any sort of serious Arthuriad.

There were the writings of Charles Williams, which certainly deserve to be taken seriously. His Arthurian Torso attempted an analysis of the significance of the material and his long poem Taliessin Through Logres, if eccentric, does attempt a contribution to the tradition rather than a restatement of it. But both of these, in literary terms, have vanished without a trace.

Which leaves David Jones. His luminescent account of Gwenhwyfar praying in a chapel at Christmas occupies a significant point in the labyrinth of his spectacularly labyrinthine writing The Anathemeta. Then there are the two poems (though called 'fragments') published in The Sleeping Lord. 'The Hunt' is an evocation of Arthur in the medieval Welsh tale 'How Culhwch Won Olwen' while 'The Sleeping Lord' poem itself presents Arthur as a densely symbolic figure.

These works deserve to be better known. T.S. Eliot put Jones in the same league as Ezra Pound and himself. But, in spite of 'The Waste Land', with its echoes of Jessie Weston's study of the grail legends From Ritual to Romance, in spite of Pound's self-conscious echoes of The Odyssey, neither of these came as close to a deep engagement with the mythological deposits they used as did Jones. Perhaps Joyce - a particular favourite of Jones' - did in thoroughly modernising his mythological engagement with the soul of Ireland.

Jones' "what's under works up" is nowhere more concisely expressed than in his Arthurian poems. In 'The Hunt' , Arthur hunts the boar Trwyth and engages him with due respect "life for life". 'The Sleeping Lord' on the other hand, presents a more passive figure, the very essence of the island of Britain rather than it's defender. Just listen to Jones cadences here and savour the wealth of symbolic detail:

(from the conclusion of a poem covering 26 pages):

Yet he sleeps on

very deep in his slumber:

how long has he been the sleeping lord?

are the clammy ferns

his rustling vallance

does the buried rowan

ward him from evil, or

does he ward the tanglewood

and the denizens of the wood

are the stunted oaks his gnarled guard

or are their knarred limbs

strong with his sap?

Do the small black horses

grass on the hunch of his shoulders?

are the hills his couch

or is he the couchant hills?

Are the slumbering valleys

him in slumber

are the still undulations

the still limbs of him sleeping?

Is the configuration of the land

the furrowed body of the lord

are the scarred ridges

his dented greaves

do the trickling gullies

yet drain his hog-wounds?

Does the land wait the sleeping lord

or is the wasted land

that very lord who sleeps?

Polytheism & Modern Sensibility

If you are a pagan and you follow a Greek or Roman tradition, you have the luxury of being able to read accounts of your predecessors writing about the gods as they experienced them. Homer, Virgil and other writings give an insider view of polythesitic people interacting with the gods on a daily basis, showing the way they were part of their lives. True, such writing can only have come from an elite, and what we are presented with is an idealised view, so we still can't say what it was like for ordinary people and how they regarded the gods. But things are much worse for those following other traditions such as those stemming from Britain and northern Europe. True, the Germanic gods are catered for in the work of Snorri Sturlsson and the poetry he drew upon from the Edda. And we have the sagas. But all of this was written down after the establishment of christianity. For the celtic traditions we don't even have direct stories about the gods and their attributes and have to reconstruct what we can from stories in which their presence lingers on in the guise of heroes and historical figures or in even more ephemeral tales of fairies. As for the druids, as Stuart Piggot pointed out, archaeology offers us nothing tangible, and contemporary witness, such as it is, is only a little better.

But we can reconstruct. Or can we? What must also be a problem even for those seeking to revive classical religious sensibility is that habits and modes of thought also change. The critic Northrop Frye suggested that the way that people thought in the time of Homer, the Old Testament of The Bible and other early stories up to the time of the Greek philosophers, was essentially different to habits of thought from the time of Aristotle up to the Middle Ages, and that modern modes of thought are different again. Homer, he suggests, offers metaphors which do not rely on a conscious placing of 'this for that', but simply accept both 'this' and 'that' similtaneously. For Plato, by contrast, 'this' stood for 'that' and allegory becomes the main metonymic mode. The first tends to go with polytheism. The second with monotheism. Today, Frye argues, there is only 'this' and 'that' is absent, so the dominant mode is atheism.

Can we escape the habits of thought of our age? Might the revival of polytheism suggest a new phase of thought closer to the Homeric? Can Rhiannon ride again without us asking what she represents or how she does the trick of moving at differential speeds? I think this might be a more serious problem than the lack of sources in the written record.