The Devil's Chair

By Hannah Green:

We are sitting at the foot of the Devil’s Chair. Because of the fog, and haziness of memory, we thought it was still some way off along the ridge, but as my stepfather peers at the map on his phone screen we realise we’ve been here all along. It’s New Year’s Day, and bitterly cold. Not as cold as it should be (and it never seems to be) but after twenty minutes sitting hunched on damp rock, extra hats and pairs of gloves begin to emerge from the depths of my mother’s rucksack. It’s my birthday. I am twenty-two. I think that perhaps I should be somewhere else - among friends, perhaps, recovering from New Year’s Eve celebrations with a fry up and a thick head. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.

We have tramped up the muddy, frost-laced lanes to the edge of the moor, overtaking other families also on their New Year’s Day walks thanks to my mother’s unremitting marching stride. When I was younger her constant disappearance off into the distance, around corners, over hills and away from me was a source of exasperation and hot teenage rage. Now it reassures me. It was clear when we set out, bright and sharp with the white light of the winter sun stripped-back and pure, the curves and dips of the landscape clear-edged and poised as we drove through the slow country lanes. This journey always makes me carsick, and I had pressed my temple to the cool glass of the window as hedgerows and ridges and dark hollows passed in a sickly carousel of snatched images.  

The Stiperstones had risen up grey and veiled with mist, eerily so amidst the hazy brightness of the rest of the countryside and comically forbidding. As we climbed, the damp air became soft and celestial, soothing the brittleness of the midwinter sun. There is a lull about the Stiperstones even on clear days - perhaps it is because they are so suddenly high that you feel lifted almost against your will, away from the rest of Shropshire and the Marches, which become tiny and surreal. There’s the bareness of them too - the rough rocks and heather, then the large boulders rising up hard and sharp from the moor, like teeth, or ruined fortresses. It is hard not to feel the hostility of it as well as the strange beauty. This is where we pick bilberries in August, where we played on the rocks and among the springy heather as children, but it is also where the snow falls the deepest and where the landscape is the most unremitting, and the closest thing we have to wildness. 

Or so it seems  - the sharp rocks and the scrubby heather and the autumn gold of the bracken are thick with walkers and picnics and family days out whatever the time of year, whatever the weather. We smile and nod as we pass other walkers, and make faces at each other if we think the other party hasn’t been sufficiently friendly. It’s all a charade - really we want the land all to ourselves, we want it pure and quiet and as it is, even if ‘as it is’ is maintained by careful grazing, heather burning, coppicing, path maintenance and boundary fencing. It’s the closest thing we have to wilderness, but it’s closer to a theme park of wilderness than the thing itself, meticulously preserved by people who love it, and people who live on it. 

Despite its state of suspended preservation, of a land in formaldehyde, this place is humming with stories. It lends itself. My favourite was always Wild Edric, a Welsh rebel with a faerie bride whose hunt rides these hills searching for her still. It’s been a long time since the Welsh rebelled, open hostility lulled to gentle piss-taking over the centuries. Edric took his bride by force when he saw her dancing in the woods with her sisters. She was a faerie, of course, and this tale is full of the usual tropes - our hero spies on the faerie gathering, rushing three times into the magical clearing only for the party and its revellers to disappear, before he finally snatches the most beautiful of the dancers to be his wife. She promises this on the condition that he never mock her sisters. An oddly specific promise, and perhaps one she knew he’d have trouble keeping. Of course he breaks it, and of course she vanishes, and of course he rides with his ghostly hunt to this day, the call of the trumpets and the baying of dogs echoing in the narrow gullies and ringing out on the pasture land, searching, searching, searching. Women always seem to be disappearing -  from Scottish selkies turning back to the sea to Eurydice sinking into Hades, they love to slink away back into the woods, the cold sea, the dark and cavernous underworld. I imagine it’s more peaceful there, although the woods here are far fewer and far between than they once were. 

The other story is about the devil. He seems to feature quite a lot locally -  he makes the Wrekin, inhabits demon bulls, tries to trick old women and presides over witches’ covens in stone circles. Is it chilling that he is so active, or comical? This story is both. For some reason, the devil was furious with a nearby village - they were too godly, or not godly enough, or perhaps he was having a bad day. However it came about, the Devil took it into his head that he was going to cover them in rocks, which he collected in his apron (this, for me, is the comic part). It’s a long walk from Hell, so the Devil stopped for a rest on the ridge of the Stiperstones, on a large rocky outcrop. Perhaps it was too comfortable, and he dozed off, or perhaps it was too uncomfortable, and he was shifting around - in any case, he lost his grip on the apron and the rocks came tumbling out, landing sprawled on the hillside. This was too much for the Devil, who gave up and went home, leaving the rocks to lie there, and the village unscatherd, where they both remain to this day. 

My practical, natural sciences mother explains the glacial history of the region to us - the enormous stones carried and dropped by huge sheets of ice rather than demonic ire. But I prefer to think about the remote mining villages and hill farming communities with their hard churches and long roads repeating stories of Devils and faeries and Welsh brigands, creating this land over and over at every telling. I drink rapidly cooling coffee from our ancient thermos and balance a tupperware of birthday cake on my knee, and as the cloud lifts suddenly the whole world is spread out below me, bright and beginning again. 

***

Hannah Green is a writer from Shropshire, UK. She is deputy editor at ARCCA Magazine, and events officer at The Selkie, and is interested in ecology, place and community. Her work has appeared in The Cardiff Review and Quarterlife Magazine, and is upcoming in the Nonbinary Review and Pilgrim Magazine. You can find more of her writing here. 

Ravens and Bones – Icelandic sagas and places

Photo: Kai Müller

Our books editor Marcel Krueger has a new book out this week – Iceland - A Literary Guide for Travellers is published by I.B. Taurus on the 19 March. In this expanded excerpt he writes of his fascination with the Icelandic sagas and how they influence place names in Iceland today

Islands are places apart where Europe is absent.
– W.H. Auden, Journey to Iceland

Writing about an island should be easy. After all, it is surrounded by the sea, neighbouring lands far away. The boundaries are set. The outlook can only ever be inwards, away from the tides. 

Nothing could be further away from the truth in the case of Iceland. This is an island of many identities, of constant flux, just like its unruly volcanic ground. It was the last place in Europe to be settled, but the first democracy; a backwater under foreign rule, its population almost eradicated by catastrophe and neglect; emerging as a progressive Nordic democracy after the two World Wars; and finally from being one of the poorest members of the European Economic Area to becoming a major global financial player, only to be brought crashing down again by greed and failing banks. Today, Iceland is once again reinventing itself as the one destination on everyone’s holiday bucket list. To say that Icelanders have developed a certain resilience and ingenuity over the centuries, and a very peculiar way to express it, would be an understatement. An island settled by explorers and raiders, the view of its people was never just inward – and it manifested itself in a rich oral and literary heritage, something that to this day links Icelanders past and present. 

My personal fascination with Iceland began, as for many others, with the Norse myths and the sagas, with stories about Odin and Loki, about Víking raids and the discovery of Vínland. Kevin Crossley-Holland says it best in the introduction to Norse Myths – Tales of Odin, Thor and Loki (2017):

When I think about the Vikings or talk about the Vikings my eyes brighten, my heart beats faster, and sometimes my hair stands on end. Energetic and practical and witty and daring and quarrelsome and passionate, always eager to go to the edge and see and find out more: that’s how Vikings were. Their tough and stubborn and often beautiful women managed self-sufficient farmsteads in Norway and Sweden and Denmark and Iceland and Greenland, and were at least as capable and outspoken as their men. And for around three centuries – from the beginning of the ninth to the end of the eleventh – many of their husbands and not a few of their sons and daughters sailed south and east and west in their elegant and superbly made clinker boats as mercenaries, traders, hit-and-run raiders, settlers and rulers. And of course they took their gods and beliefs and language with them.

This is, of course, an idealised view of the Víkings and their mythology; but as the country settled by them is as much shaped by storytelling as it is by tectonic activity, Norse lore always served me well as a beeline into both country and Icelandic literature over the years. After all, its mountains and rivers, shores and valleys have all been named by the settlers and writers recording the tales of the settlement. It is both the otherworldliness of the landscape and the outward-looking culture of Icelanders that has made me return to the island time and time again.

There is some literary evidence that Irish monks, the so-called Papar, arrived in Iceland before the Norsemen somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries; however no archaeological evidence has been found to this day. The real show began in the ninth century, when the first Norwegian travellers and explorers, arrived. Their names and those of the areas in which they made their homes during this so-called ‘Age of Settlement’ were recorded in a number of chronicles written down between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, like The Book of Icelanders (Íslendigabók), The Book of Settlements (Landnámabók) and The Book of Flatey Island (Flateyjarbók). As Robert Ferguson puts it in The Hammer and the Cross (2009):

The Book of the Settlements [Landnámabók] is a full and often dramatic account of the colonisation of Iceland. Based on a lost original from the early twelfth century it contains the names of over 3,000 people and 1,400 places. 

According to the Landnámabók, Iceland was discovered by a man named Naddodd, who was sailing from Norway to the Faroe Islands when he lost his way and came to the east coast of Iceland instead. Only observing it from the safety of his ship, Naddodd called the country Snowland (Snæland), The first proper settler however was Hrafna (‘Raven’) Flóki Vilgerðarson, named after the fact that he took ravens with him on board ship and released them periodically. When they didn’t return he knew they’d found food and land. Hrafna-Flóki settled for one winter at Barðaströnd in the southern Westfjords region. His journey and stay did not start out well however: his daughter drowned en route, and then his livestock starved to death during the harsh winter. The Landnámabók records how this led Flóki to give the country its name: 

The spring was an extremely cold one. Flóki climbed a certain high mountain, and north across the mountain range he could see a fjord full of drift ice. That’s why he called the country Iceland, and so it’s been called ever since.

After that hard winter however the whole island started to turn green, making Flóki realise that it was habitable, so he returned to Norway to spread the word about this new fertile island he had discovered – but kept the name. The first permanent settlers after Flóki were Norwegian chieftain Ingólfur Arnarson and his wife Hallveig Fróðadóttir, who arrived around AD 874. According to the Landnámabók, Ingólfur threw his two highseat pillars (crucial parts of a Víking chieftain’s hall) overboard as he neared the island, vowing to settle where they landed. After wintering on the south coast in the first year, Ingólfur sailed along the coast until the pillars were found in a place he named Reykjavík, or Smoky Bay, after the geothermal steam rising from the earth – a place that would become the capital of modern Iceland. He was followed by many more chieftains, their families and slaves, who settled all the habitable areas of the island in the next decades, mostly along the fjords and river plains. These settlers were primarily of Norwegian, Irish and Scottish origin – most of the latter being female slaves and servants raided from their homelands. The stories of the Settlement Age and the next 200 years are recorded in the sagas, the most important Icelandic literary heritage – a fascinating canon of heroic and family stories written down between the ninth century and the fourteenth century, its structure and composition unlike anything written in contemporary Europe of that time. According to the sagas, the new immigrants arriving from Norway were independent-minded settlers fleeing the harsh rule of King Harald Fairhair, a man who makes an appearance in almost all of the Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur). 

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the power of independent local farmers and chieftains gave way to the growing power of a handful of families and their leaders. This period is known as the ‘Age of the Sturlungs’. The fighting became a proper civil war that ravaged the country. The Age of the Sturlungs also saw a veritable proliferation of sagas being written down, maybe in an attempt to reunite the country by making the stories of heroic deeds widely available. It also saw the emergence of the first giant of Icelandic literature, polymath Snorri Sturluson. A member of the Sturlungs and a politician, he is today best known as the author of the Prose or Younger Edda (Snorra Edda, thirteenth century), one of the two sources that have introduced the Norse pantheon and mythology to the modern world – the other being the Poetic or Elder Edda (Ljóða Edda), an anonymous collection of poems from around the same time. In the Prose Edda, Snorri might have recorded his own assessment of the age he was living in based on a quote he took from the Elder Edda: ‘A sword age, a wind age, a wolf age. No longer is there mercy among men.’

Highly-accomplished literary works of that time include Egill’s Saga (Egils saga Skallagrímssonar), the life of the warrior-poet Egill Skallagrímsson; the Saga of the People of Laxárdalr (Laxdæla Saga, a triangular love story set in West Iceland; the Saga of Gisli Súrssonar (Gísla Saga Súrssonar), the tragic tale of a heroic outlaw in the Westfjords; and the Story of Burnt Njál (Njáls Saga), generally considered the high point of Icelandic literary art, a complex and rich account of human and societal conflicts playing out across the fertile fields of south Iceland. 

Closely related to the sagas are the Eddas, among the main sources for the knowledge about Norse gods we have today. The Poetic or Elder Edda is a group of more than thirty poems on gods and human heroes preserved in oral tradition until they were recorded by an unknown chronicler (or group of chroniclers). The Prose or Younger Edda is the work of Snorri Sturluson and the most important source of modern knowledge on this subject, and also contains a guide to poetic diction and the kennings, a typically two-word metaphor found in Norse and Icelandic that stands in for a concrete noun: ‘bone-house’ (body), ‘whale-road’ (sea), ‘wave-horse’ (ship), ‘sky-candle’ (sun).

The sagas are still a central part of Iceland’s culture and continue to be taught in its schools, and most people are familiar with a good number, if not all of them. The sagas are certainly known to a much greater extent than British people are familiar with famous works of medieval literature. One key to understanding the power of the sagas lies in their relationship with the landscape itself. The sagas explain how place-names all around the country came to be: some of their explanations about events and characters gave names to natural places – like farms, hills or bogs – and have a historical basis, while others were invented by a saga-author but are nevertheless still used to this day. Because of this and despite their age, the sagas still live on in many of the local areas in which they are set – and have a life over and beyond the printed page. Not only have they served as inspiration for countless modern literary works, art and music, but there are also many new saga trails criss-crossing the country today, and living history museums, saga theatres and cultural centres allow both scholars and visitors to learn about the stories in the actual landscape where they took place. For me, it is often difficult to think of an analogy in another country where a corpus of medieval literature is so close to people’s hearts on a national scale.  It is always a delight to come back to the island and reconnect with its names and places.

Neon

IMAGE: Jeanette Farrell

By Jeanette Farrell:

Come spring time everybody migrates towards the park; it’s as if the humble daffodil emits an ultrasonic soundwave and suddenly there we all are, an entire borough marching in unison towards our gated hill all filled with colour and squealing and light. We are boisterously reclaiming our place in a city whose tightly woven streets can deaden the clatter of our chat and so, the park, come Spring-time, this is our release. 

Brockwell Park reveals itself on a slope with its grand house perched on top. Surrounded on all sides by a densely compacted population in one of the biggest metropolises – everybody is there and there isn’t a continent unrepresented in multiplicity. Cities absorb people by portioning us off into offices and houses and pubs and buses and so out there in our urban meadow, that’s where we mingle. There’s the skate park and the lido, quaint markers of the athletic desires we presuppose is our reason for being there; that we’ll run and stretch and swim, dipping in and out of the ever confounding combination of Brixton’s noise. But most of us are content with the prospect of lying down on the grass. 

There is a comforting familiarity to Brockwell Park, an unsophisticated elegance of ritual through which we make it our own year after year once the grey recedes. Here, the idea of public space is at its most civic; we walk around as if it were an extension of our own home, knowing its pockets and its shade. 

While basking in this kind of outdoor domesticity we feel content that everything has its place and pace. The sky will change throughout the day and we will retreat beneath the trees in a pantomime of weather, watching the rain beneath sheltering branches. Nurseries will empty and the park will fill up. School children will linger/rabble-rouse eating chicken and chips, tumbling into each other from gate to gate and watchful locals will sit on drift wood taking it all in. There will be dogs and there will be roller bladers, there will be cans of lager and weed in the air.  And then all of a sudden this spell of the expected is broken with the shrill warble of the neon green parakeet and we look up to stare at this glamorous interloper. 

We’re not really meant to have these beautiful birds around here and yet they thrive, roosting in tall trees and causing ruckus with that noise they make. There are lots of theories to account for their presence; that a couple absconded from Ealing Studios and populated the landscape; that a gang of them escaped from an open container at Heathrow airport; that an aviary collapsed during a storm; that the original pair belonged to David Bowie, or to Jimi Hendrix. They are a mad dash of colour amongst the rich green of this cloistered pocket of south London. They’re not gentle and serene like this dream of spring time and routine, they are flying fluorescent chaos. Apparently there are thousands of them about, an anomaly in an otherwise textbook geography but the first time they’re encountered they’re like a mirage – ‘a parakeet, that couldn’t be!’

Now when they’re spotted, or heard, rather it’s like welcoming an eccentric old friend. Thank goodness for the parakeets, we think.  A gentle nudge to remind us that anything is possible, that this world, regimented and predictable though it is, is unbelievable too. 

Jeanette Farrell is a writer based in London. 

Mystical Mount Koya

IMAGE: Pete Martin

By Pete Martin: 

Koya-san, which is 857 metres above sea level, is the base for the Shingon Buddhists, an esoteric sect of Buddhists. There are over one hundred and twenty temples on the mountain and there’s been a religious community here since 816. A monk named Kukai, who had studied Buddhism in China, founded the Shingon sect on his return to Japan. Legend has it that he threw his vajra (ritual sceptre) from China and it landed here in the mountains in Wakayama. The Imperial Court subsequently granted that Kukai was to build a place of meditation on the mountain. After his death, Kukai became known as Kobo Daishi. The monks to this day still believe Kobo Daishi to be alive, meditating in his tomb for the arrival of Miroku (the Buddha of the future) and they prepare three meals a day for him in Okunoin cemetery.  

I get off the bus at Okuninguchi for the Okunoin Cemetery. The cemetery is a sacred area and the pathway runs for two kilometres from here to Kobo Daishi's mausoleum. The path is lined with old, tall cedar trees and the cemetery contains over two hundred thousand gravestones and memorial pagodas. The trees are huge and close together blocking the sunlight. The graves are also packed together tightly, the dark grey stone, wood and black-grey marble give an eerie atmosphere. The ground is covered with snow and the base of the trees and the headstones are covered in moss. It’s not a place for anyone who is claustrophobic. The air is fresh, but the whole place is damp and slightly misty, adding to the enchantment. 

There are various signs in English and Japanese describing the legends that abound in the cemetery. This just adds to the ambiance. At the Sugatami-no-Ido (reflection well), legend has it that if a person looks into the well and does not see his reflection then he will die within three years. At the Ksitigsrbha Shrine, the bodhisattva Jizo is the Asekaki Jizo (sweating Jizo). The Buddha is made of black stone and is often moist due to the weather conditions. It is said that the statue is sweating because it bears the sufferings of others for their wrongdoings. At the Zenni Jochi memorial, a visitor can place his ear on the stone and hear the cries in hell. Near the end of the pathway, at the Mizumuke Jizo, the faithful pour water on the statues of the Buddhist deities for the peacefulness of their loved ones. Close to this is the Miroku-ishi, which is a stone that it is said to feel light to virtuous people and heavy to sinful people. I can't tell whether this is true or not, as it’s too heavy for me to lift. 

Along the path there are many gorinto (five-tiered stupas). The five tiers represent the five elements, from bottom to top, of earth, water, fire, wind and space, and these elements form the Buddha Mahavairocana, the fundamental deity of Shingo Buddhism, or the life force that is the origin of everything and that illuminates all. The goal of Shingon is the realization that each one of us is identical to Mahavairocana in nature, a goal achieved through initiation, meditation and esoteric ritual practices. 

Many of the statues have bibs, which provide the only colour in the cemetery. The bibs are placed on the statues by those who have lost children, in prayer to Ojizo-Sama, who is the guardian of children. It is said that the souls of children who die before their parents are unable to cross the mythical Sanzu River, as the children have not been able to undertake enough good deeds. Ojizo-Sama saves these souls from the eternal penance of piling stones on the river bank by hiding the children’s souls in his robes and this is symbolized by the bibs on the statues. 

At the end of the long pathway through the cemetery, there are three wooden temples in front of the stone bridge that leads to Kobo Daishi’s mausoleum. A group of four monks, again in orange robes and geta, walk noisily from temple to temple, stopping to pray and chant at each one. The stone bridge depicts the entrance to the precinct of the mausoleum of Kobo Daishi. The bridge was originally wooden but it’s now rebuilt in stone. It has thirty six stone planks that, with the bridge itself, mark the thirty seven Buddhist deities of the diamond world mandala, which is the representation of the unchanging cosmic principle of the Buddha. 

To the right of the mausoleum, up the steps from the bridge, is the Torodo, the lantern hall. This is a plain wooden building, a modern reconstruction of the prayer chapel of 1023, erected by the disciple Shinzen. In 1016, a poor woman sold her hair to buy a lantern to pray for the rest of her deceased parents. The Emperors, Shirakawa and Showa, donated lanterns also, in 1033 and 1948 respectively. These three lanterns are kept burning continuously in the hall. 

Inside the mausoleum itself, monks sit at stalls at the front copying sutras carefully. The wooden building is dark and atmospheric. Lanterns and pendants hang from the low ceiling. Two monks flank another who sits in the middle of the temple chanting. Incense burns and the only colour is from the orange robes of the monks. I feel I’m encroaching on a sacred service, but another monk waves me forward for a closer view. It feels very spiritual with the chanting and the incense. It even smells other-worldly. I’m apprehensive about intruding further. On my way out, to my embarrassment, I noisily slip on the wet entrance floor. Nobody notices. Outside I catch my breath. The tomb is usually closed. I was only inside for a matter of perhaps five minutes but it felt like time stood still inside. The gobyo (tomb) has an aura that I have felt only in a few other places.

Pete Martin’s book Revolutions: Wandering and wondering on a sabbatical year is a compelling tale of travel and change and is out now. More information can be found at www.wander2wonder.com.