The Wake (34 page)

Authors: Paul Kingsnorth

Tags: #Literary, #General, #Historical, #Fiction, #Historical Fiction

What we now call ‘Old English’ was the language of the English people until the invasion of
1066
, when it rapidly began to mutate with the arrival of Norman French, the language of the new ruling class. This novel is not written in Old English – that would be unreadable to anyone except scholars. It is written instead in what might be called a shadow tongue – a pseudo-language intended to convey the feeling of the old language by combining some of its vocabulary and syntax with the English we speak today.

The language of this novel evolved as I wrote it over a period of three years, often seeming to do so beyond my control. Eventually, in an attempt to prevent things getting entirely out of hand, I tried to hem it in with some rules.

The first and most important rule was that I wanted to use only words which originated in Old English. The vast majority of the vocabulary of this novel consists of words that, in one form or another, existed in English
1000
years ago. The exceptions are cases where words did not exist for what I wanted to say, or where those that did were so obscure today, or hard to pronounce or read, that they would have detracted excessively from the flow of the tale.

The second rule was that I did not use letters which did not exist in Old English. The OE alphabet was more limited than ours. There was, for example, no letter ‘k’ – it is replaced by ‘c’, which is always pronounced like the modern ‘k’, never like the modern ‘s’. There was no ‘v’ either; ‘f’ takes its place in words like ‘seofon’ (seven). ‘J’ and ‘q’ were similarly absent.

The matter of spelling was more complicated. I wanted to render as many OE pronunciations as I could on the page, rather than translating them into their modern equivalents. So the OE words daeg (day), for example, or deorc (dark) – though pronounced in much the same way as they are in modern English – are offered up with their OE spellings intact. This is a rule that I found I had to break more often than I wanted to – if I had stuck to it with every word, the novel would have been ten times harder to read. I had to use my judgement as to when to use OE spellings and when to modernise them, and if so by how much.

Choosing OE, or pseudo-OE, forms for the novel’s vocabulary means that the reader has to initially wrestle with OE pronunciation. This can be tricky to compute at first, but once grasped it becomes, I hope, second nature. So ‘sc’, for example, is pronounced ‘sh’ – as in biscop. ‘Cg’ makes a ‘dg’ sound in words like bricg (bridge). ‘G’ can be pronounced both as a hard letter, as in mergen (morning) or as a soft equivalent of ‘y’ when it appears in words like daeg. ‘Hw’ sounds like ‘w’ in words like hwit (white).

Finally, it’s worth stressing the catholicism of my approach to the language, old and new. To achieve the sound and look I wanted on the page I have combined Old English words with modern vocabulary, mutated and hammered the shape of OE words and word endings to suit my purpose, and been wanton in combining the Wessex dialect with that of Mercia, Anglia and Northumberland – and dropping in a smattering of Old Norse when it seemed to work. The syntax used is mine, its structure often driven by the limitations placed on me by the available vocabulary.

There was one final rule I set myself, and it was this: all of the previous rules could be overridden, if necessary, by a meta-rule, which functioned as a kind of literary thegn: do what the novel needs you to do. This, in the end, was a matter of instinct, which means that I have no-one to blame for the results but myself.

Why bother with all this? Why make life harder for myself and for the reader? There are two answers to this question. The first is that I simply don’t get on with historical novels written in contemporary language. The way we speak is specific to our time and place. Our assumptions, our politics, our worldview, our attitudes – all are implicit in our words, and what we do with them. To put
21
st-century sentences into the mouths of eleventh century characters would be the equivalent of giving them iPads and cappuccinos: just wrong.

Which leads on to the second reason for playing with language in this way. The early English did not see the world as we do, and their language reflects this. They spoke their truth, as we speak ours. I wanted to be able to convey, not only in my descriptions of events and places but through the words of the characters, the sheer alien-ness of Old England.

The early English created the nation we now live in. They are, in a very real sense, the ancestors of all of us living in England today, wherever our actual ancestors come from. Despite this link, though, their world was distant from ours; not only in time but in values, understanding, mythopoesis. Language seemed the best way to convey this.

This novel is written in a tongue which no one has ever spoken, but which is intended to project a ghost image of the speech patterns of a long-dead land: a place at once alien and familiar. Another world, the foundation of our own.

The Norman invasion and occupation of England was probably the most catastrophic single event in this nation’s history. It brought slaughter, famine, scorched-earth warfare, slavery and widespread land confiscation to the English population, along with a new ruling class who had, in many cases, little but contempt for their new subjects. It wasn’t until
1399
, over three centuries after Duke Guillaume of Normandy launched his successful invasion, that England again had a king who spoke English as his first language.

The cataclysm of
1066
sparked nearly a decade of risings, rebellions and guerrilla warfare across the country, as populations in north and south struggled unsuccessfully to repel the invaders. This resistance finds contemporary parallels in the struggles of the Viet Cong against the US army or the French against the Nazis, yet today the English are remarkably ignorant of this period of our history. This is all the more regrettable as the effects of Guillaume’s invasion are still with us. In
21
st-century England,
70
% of the land is still owned by less than
1
% of the population; the second most unequal rate of land ownership on the planet, after Brazil. It is questionable whether this would be the case had the Normans not concentrated all of it in the hands of the king and his cronies nearly
1000
years ago.

Other Norman legacies remain with us too, or have only recently been purged from our society. Automatic hereditary monarchy, the ‘ownership’ of a wife by her husband, the inheritance of land and titles by the first-born son, the legal ownership of all land by the monarch: all are Norman introductions. Historians today tend to sniff at the old radical idea of the ‘Norman Yoke’. History, like any academic discipline, has its fashions. In my view the Yoke was very real, and echoes of it can still be found today.

Though any resemblance between most of this book’s characters and any person living or (more likely) dead is coincidental, the narrative is hung carefully on the known facts about the history of the period and the religion and mythology of the Old English. The green men are not a fiction, and Buccmaster’s tale is built around the known timeline of post-
1066
resistance to the Norman occupation. Events like the northern rebellion of
1068
, the risings of Eadric and Hereward and the construction of the castles were all realities. The various instances of atrocities committed against the English by the Normans are either taken from or are in keeping with contemporary reports.

There are, however, three deliberate historical anomalies in the text (I leave it to readers to spot the accidental ones).

The first is Buccmaster’s name: it is not an Old English name. But it came to me and refused to yield to anything more historically correct, and so, it stays.

The second anomaly is the allusion to the word wake (wacan or waecnan, meaning awake, or to become awake) in reference to Hereward, leader of the Ely resistance, who is popularly referred to today as Hereward the Wake. While Hereward was certainly real, as is the tale of his remarkable last-ditch stand against the Norman king, there is no evidence that this nickname was. ‘Hereward the Wake’ does not appear in any contemporary records; the name appears to have surfaced late in the
12
th century, when the Wake family of Lincolnshire began claiming ancestry from Hereward, and it was later popularised by Charles Kingsley’s patriotic Victorian novel
Hereward The Wake
. Novelists can do that sort of thing.

The third and final anomaly is the timing of the kidnap of Bishop Turold. Unlike the other speaking characters in this novel, Turold was a genuine historical figure, and his kidnap and eventual ransom is said to have occurred (it was claimed for Hereward and his men) in
1070
. I have taken the liberty of bringing it forward two years, along with his accession to the bishopric of Peterborough. Since historians seem to agree that the kidnap tale is of dubious veracity in any case, I consider this to be merely a continuation of the original storyteller’s artistic licence.

I swam through a deop mere of books and articles in piecing this tale together, as well as as spending time tramping and mapping the fens, and exploring their landscape. Key among the written sources were Peter Rex’s
The English Resistance
, and his companion volume
Hereward: the last Englishman
. For the myths and religious beliefs of the pre-Christian English, I looked to the two Brians, Branston and Bates, whose
The Lost Gods of England
and
The Way of Wyrd
were invaluable. In developing the language of the novel, I referred extensively to Stephen Pollington’s
Wordcraft
, J.R. Clark Hall’s
A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary
and Douglas Harper’s
Online Etymology Dictionary
(etymonline.com).