Review of Eftwyrd by Bob Beagrie, pub. Smokestack Books 2023
J K Jerome remarks somewhere that he understands Scots fairly well, because “to keep abreast of modern English literature this is necessary”. Were he with us today, he might be brushing up his Anglo-Saxon, or at least the dog-Latin-like version of Old English that a surprising number of recent poems and novels have employed to evoke their world.
This is the sequel to Beagrie’s Leasungspell, in which a monk called Oswin was travelling from his monastery at Herutea (Hartlepool) to Streonshalh (Whitby) with letters from Abbess Hild in 657 AD, the year of the Synod of Whitby. His journey was interrupted, to put it mildly, by a river-witch called Peg who captured him as he tried to cross the Tees and held him underwater. Eftwyrd begins with his escape from her and his resumption of his journey.
Leasungspell was conceived primarily as a spoken performance, in which format its blend of Old English, modern English and Northumbrian dialect would be easier to follow, as you can see and hear from various clips on YouTube (eg here ). The poem also had a website, still called leasungspell.com but now occupied by something in Japanese about motorbikes. I assume this sequel will be similarly performed, but this is a review of what’s on the printed page. The casual browser, seeing lines like these
þa hwæles eþel hweorfeð wide þruh eorþan sceatas,
grandleás ġerārum begeondan æl eorþan cynedómas,
an’ te gǣlde oferlang wiðin hits níedgráp nēþaþ
overprice mi, tóslítness, multen me int’ sealt sprutan
might lose heart on the spot. But some of the words, especially when sounded, will reveal their meaning - “sealt sprutan” is not a million miles from salt spray, and remembering that the ð of Old English was our “th” gives you “within”. Many of the poems are in fact followed directly by translations into modern English. Some, particularly later on, have partial translations, prose summaries or even just a vocabulary. In effect, then, there are two versions of most of the poems. Will readers tackle both, and will they benefit from so doing? Let’s come back to that later.
Leasungspell opened with the words “Huisht, lads, haad ya gobs”, quoted from the folk song The Lambton Worm, and Eftwyrde too is a gallimaufry of quotes and influences. Many are from folk tales and myths; some from more surprising sources:
Then I eat the plum fruits, so sweet, so cool, wondering if some
one was saving them for breakfast before they were given to me.
Beagrie’s description of Oswin’s quest as a “fool’s journey” would seem borne out by the fact that Oswin’s letters not only get lost en route, they hardly matter, since when he gets to Whitby he finds Hild already there. But in folk-tale tradition he finds other things along the way, and possibly also loses some, notably his faith. He starts out from Hartlepool a Christian, but by the end he is questioning the effect of organised religion on human behaviour and realising how it can be used as a means of control and self-enrichment.
The narrative has a lot of tension, which is my excuse for skipping some of the OE versions to get on with the story. But that is what one does on a first reading; it doesn’t mean I would necessarily do it again.
Back, then, to the dual versions. Do they add anything to the concept? Something, certainly. A layer of distance, also some fruitful ambiguities. “Eftwyrd”, for instance, immediately suggests “afterwards”, and it is indeed a sequel to the former story. But given that an eft is the terrestrial phase of a newt and “wyrd” in OE means fate or destiny, it could also suggest the strange physical state Oswin is in after his sojourn underwater; he has become a sort of human/water creature hybrid whose appearance frightens others and leads to his being taken for some sort of demon. “Fish-on-land-fate” (or “fish-out-of-water-fate”) is not a bad summing up of what happens to him, both physically and metaphorically, during a journey that sees him become detached and alienated from the world he lived in when he set out.
Next time I read, I probably will try to get by without the translations. For now, though, they were for me where the development in Oswin’s thought-process became clearest, signalled by the change in his lexis and imagery between this:
smoke coiling up from the harbour homes beneath
like steam from a bowl of warm hearty broth;
they cling like limpets to the strip of earth,
to this:
yet without recognising the materials of the craft
or where we set off from in the beginning,
the freedom to transform across endless newness
to the joy of the gods of betweenness
with our overpassing bodies, where these gods
almost believe in us and would trust
us to stay with them without transfiguring
into the next thing the way clouds pretend
to be ten thousand things we hold by name