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Pagan Underground
I had a long chat with Dad,' said Quintin, 'and he told me why he wanted me to do this project.' Quintin stopped to gather his breath and gazed out towards Poole Bay and the distant cliffs of Dorset as Miranda approached from a perusal of the remains of a Bronze Age round barrow near where they had been standing, on the summit of Headon Heath in the far west of the Isle of Wight. She made a scrunching noise over flint gravel and turned to look in the same direction as Quintin. The sun made a spectacular display on the sea as it burst through a cloud.
'It was an old Victorian book of Arthurian legends I know,' she called back, shielding her eyes from the glare. 'I had a long chat with your father as well, while you were down with your grandmother at the co-op.' She shifted her foot on the awkward slope, just caught herself and regained her balance. 'He said that the constant repetition of a certain theme in these old Medieval stories had struck him very strongly when he was researching it, and he was surprised that nothing more had been made of it. But do you know the most incredible thing about those swords?
'The ones that were thrown into rivers over two thousand years ago?' called Quintin, shielding his own eyes from the glare. 'I can remember the rain in Lincolnshire last week – and the ancient swords from the sediment of that river we visited. Didn't it say that they had been thrown in as a sort of Iron Age religious statement? From a time that Julius Caesar records the druids believing in reincarnation? Swords have been found there dating from the Iron Age, from the succeeding period when the Romans had conquered most of Britain, from the Viking age and even down to late-medieval times.'
'And that shows that ancient pagan traditions were alive and well when all the medieval romances and Arthurian stories were being composed,' called down Miranda. 'English noblemen were throwing swords into a river, like pagan Iron Age warriors, when tales like Floris and Blancheflour, Ipomadon, William of Palerne and the Breton lai Guigemar were being composed. And the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes.'
'I was reading those last summer when I was night-portering at the Farringford Hotel,' said Quintin as Miranda came to a stop beside him.
'And Tennyson, whose house it once was, wrote:
'These words are like the rest,
no certain clearness, but at best
a vague suspicion of the breast.
'I cannot make this matter plain,
but I would shoot, howe'er in vain
a random arrow from the brain.
'It may be that no life is found,
which only to one engine bound
falls off, but cycles always round.
'As old mythologies relate,
some draught of Lethe might await
the slipping thro' from state to state.'
from The Two Voices, by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
'Yes, I bet it was spooky there, in the middle of the night, with the ghost of a famous English poet looking over your shoulder,' agreed Miranda.
'But poetic intuition is the most perceptive of all. And Dad has read nothing of Euripides and Aristophanes, or Homer. Doesn't even know what Plato wrote. He knows little of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, or William Blake's Jerusalem, or the Icelandic saga of the Ere-dwellers, or Hervor and King Heidrek the Wise, or even the poems in the Poetic Edda. He did know about Thorstein Mansion-Might...'
'Who!' laughed Miranda as she skipped down a gravel gully, sending a cascade of stones ahead of her.
'The Icelandic saga of Thorstein Mansion-Might,' Quintin called after her. 'A massive Norwegian Viking. And it struck Dad as peculiar that when Thorstein receives a broomstick from the occupant of a barrow, just like the one up there, and flies upon it down into a river, down through the river and into a land that is obviously a land of the dead, 'cos what else would it be when you reach it from a burial mound, it struck him as curious that the people there can be killed. He thought it was weird that people in an afterlife can be killed by Thorstein, as though he had just gone back into the real world again. And it got him thinking even more about where these stories came from and what they are supposed to mean.
'Well come on then!' Miranda sent another cascade of flint gravel rolling down the slope as she turned back to face Quintin. 'Let's go on a journey beneath England!' she cried, throwing Quintin a broomstick. 'Cheddar Gorge? Derbyshire? Cornwall? London rests on the same ground too. Look! There is London Clay in the cliffs of Alum Bay. Lets follow it to its source!' and they launched themselves from the hillside, flew in a graceful arc over the Solent, skimmed over the yachts at Lymington, swept over the heathland and woodland of the New Forest, over Hampshire farmland, the North Downs of Surrey and plunged into the River Thames at Rotherhithe and into the Pagan Underground.
