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Lindisfarne

5:55 AM

What will Old Rex think of my connection between the journey of Odysseus and the marauding of the Vikings with their battering ram prows? Will he strike me dead as a doornail D for arguing that the Epic Itself (may It rest in peace) is a glorified soundtrack to our assault against Nature and the innocents of the Earth? Dare I squeeze his Graeco-Victorian universe into a ball and say that Snorri's boys were very much like Agamemnon’s boys, Aeneas’ boys, Alexander’s boys, and very much like our Anglo and American boys — the ones with the big guns, from Dresden to Halong Bay, to the devastated infrastructure of Bagdad? 

Imagine what it was like to be one of those monks in the year before the Vikings descended…

9:55 AM

Fenrir the Wolf

Imagine the year 793, just before the Vikings pounced on the little red riding hood monks who had drifted north from Rome in their crimson vestiture to establish silk tasseled toeholds in Ireland and Northumbria.

Imagine the moment when the barbarians descended from the frozen North — the Geats, the ostragoths of Skandza, wolfhounds and devils in their devil-horn helmets glowing in the minds of the archbishops, their longboats dragon-prowed and descending on Lindisfarne in the year 793, once a “Holy Island” of monks, soon to become slaughtered monks and splintered rafters.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (which was begun in the 9th Century) three Viking ships arrived on the Wessex shore. The local reeve had been sent to greet them but he was killed on the spot. After this, "whirlwinds, lightning storms, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and on January 8th the ravaging of heathen men destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne." 

Imagine this: on January the 7th, 793, the domesticated monks were reading their illuminated Bibles, dreaming prophetically of Adam Smith and a future world in which they would be listening to Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” on a spinning disc labelled A Saucerful of Secrets, a soothing melody which seems to flow effortlessly (on my Playlist of Terror) into the song “Sheep,” spinning backwards on a disc labelled Animals, now playing on the time-travelling earphones of the monks.

The monks are hearing voices and the soft clanging of cymbals, which makes them feel like the lambs of God, or innocent sheep browsing in the green fields of England, blissfully unaware of the Ostrogoths of Skandza, or of Zarathustra and what he spake.

The mild shepherd directs their course, probably to a greener pasture they imagine. Meek and obedient, they follow their leader onto the road and into the market. A nation of shopkeepers wrapped in warm wool, they browse among the broccoli and the sweet peas, like Marie Antoinette buying this and that.

The sheepish customers are overwhelmed with the riches on display, the entire wealth of the nation, bought and sold by the London merchants and the Viking bankers from Vaxhölm who lap it up, good to the last drop, a goblin’s market of the soul.

Racked with guilty pleasures, candied slices, and honeyed ham, the monks of Lindisfarne are lost in the super market until the shepherd's furry tail points them back to where they started — their comfy nooks, their fireside chats, their Jute kith and kin telling them stories of Beowulf and Hrothgar, and how Geat and Dane together...

The chicken-stalk simmering on the stove and the smells drifting into the air lead the sharp but drowsy noses homeward, single file, pounds and kroners in hand, marching homeward sleepy and satisfied, eyes honey-ham glazed, elevator music for sheep playing in the background,

Roger Waters setting up the scene innocently enough till the sheepskin cloak of the shepherd slips a little to reveal the long thick hairs of Roger of Hauteville, last seen in Parma and Messina, also known as Ruggero d'Altavilla, le grand comte, Roger I of Sicily, descended from the earlier Hauteville adventurers Drogo and Drengot,

together with their eastern cousins the Varangians, down from Sweden, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, riverboats dragon-prowed, Роджер and Hrothgar, all the Norman Rogers come rogering from Chester to Antioch, Hrothgar-cum-Roger, cum itself an Anglo-Norman conjunction.

And now the wily shepherd, Roger of Leatherhead (last seen in Hastings and London, and Live at Pompeii) leads the monks with their noses in their books and all the happy children dancing to the tune of an elevator song about sheep, promising them croissants and French pastries,

the lupine piper of Hampstead and Honfleur leading his charges down a fork in the country lane, only one sheep yelling out “Hey, what big teeth the piper has!” but no one listens as they’re led into an unfamiliar alley,

the city is huge and a long way from Kansas, the picket fences streaked in red, as “Meek and obedient / They follow the leader / Into the valley of steel.”

Now come the splurting pink sawblade fiddles, and the electric violins at high-voltage fire “Bleating and babbling we fell on his neck with a scream / Wave upon wave of demented avengers / Marched cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.”

It was not, and did not, come to good.

❧

The Grand Inquisitors are strolling between the desks. From his high altar, Professor Kenneth Aristotle Rexroth surveys the groundlings and sighs. I roll my shirtsleeves up, and tentatively but firmly inquire of the Inquisitor: ❧

Is it possible that Odysseus, after sailing past the Gates of Hercules, and upon reaching the Western Isles, heaved his epic torch into the night sky? And is it possible that this torch came down, centuries later, under the guidance of his confidant, the messenger Hermes, and of his Muse, the fair Calliope, into the iron fist of his northern brother? 

While many scholars draw the epic line from Homer to Virgil to Dante, upward and onward in a Classical fusion with Christianity, from Hellenic beauty to the Cinquecento, isn't it also true that the Romans despised Homer and his Greek antics? 

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Begging your pardon, most numinous, most Oedipal Rex, but I feel compelled to remind you of that which you never mentioned in class, namely that ❧

Italian scholars have for centuries emphasized the fact that Odysseus tricked his way into the giant horse of Troy, that he committed adultery with Circe and Calypso, and with who knows what other mythological tramps whose names start with the letter C. 

What kind of a model is this for Roman gravitas, fine laws and civilized manners? We might recall that Homer called Odysseus “the wily one,” the Romans called him “the deceitful one”, and Dante placed him in the Eight Circle of Hell, far beneath Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood.  

Is it possible that Odysseus' real brothers were the Varangians, the Visigoths, and the Geats? Of course the epic goes from Greece to Rome, from the subtlety of Homer and Virgil to Dante, but in terms of history, doesn't it also go to England and Iceland? Doesn’t it also go from Iliad & Odyssey to Beowulf and Edda?

❧

I sense the impending red-fisted marking-pen anger of Tyrannosaurus Rex, his tail ready to swing destructively. I imagine that T. Rex's veins will pop from his monumental forehead when he hears the Romans criticizing the Greeks, which will sound to him like Persian scimitars and meteors falling on his forehead, which will drip like Frankenstein's into the blue ink of my tub’s blue scrawl, only to remind him of Thermopylae and Artemisium and all the bin Ladens of the ancient world.

But to me this suggests an owning up to history, after which one is free to sail into the future unencumbered by imaginary glory. To me, this suggests a surprising calm, like the Aegean and the Adriatic and the wide Mediterranean world all around, reminding me of blue goddesses and white ankles dipping into a sea-bath.

Perhaps I might soften my argument with a few marble busts, and a reference or two to the rosy dawn. Perhaps I might draw instead a portrait of a noble and handsome Odysseus, shipwrecked amid the salty waves with one last burst of strength in his collapsing body, passing the torch to his Northern brothers:

❧

That perfect body once girt with iron loins and powerful wrists like those of Achilles now bedraggled on the splintering deck, he heaves his powerful torso for one last fling with the sea-god and Fate up to its fullest height, at which point his right hand (which seemed to be groping on the deck) lifts up the fiery torch and flings it in one wild movement from ship deck to heavens, lighting the northern skies with a blast of Hellenic Grace.

❧ 

I imagine Tyrannosaurus Rex relaxing his high tense shoulders. My paper before him, he muses to himself: “This student, this Matthew, is a strange one, but he makes a provocative case. Perhaps I misunderstood him all along, the tight-lipped little asslicker!”

I'm aware that Oedipus Rex is a jealous man. On one occasion I watched his face shade toward scarlet when in the back row I poked Sylvia and made her laugh. I did this when he was developing his favourite theory about Greek homosexuals (may they rest in peace). All the students paused and looked up from their screens where they were writing to their friends on Twitter, or arguing with their slutty girlfriend on their cellphone, or trying to impress their geek boyfriend with videos of the recent hiphop genius who was telling his Ho to get down and suck it bitch. For about five seconds they raised their heads and realized that the professor was actually saying something interesting. Was it a confession? It seemed to them that mere anarchy was loosed upon Old Rex's world and that some personal revelation was at hand. I wasn't sure if he got all red in the face because Sylvia’s giggle disrupted his lecture, or because he was distracted at the very moment he placed his hand on the silky doorknob of the closet door. Perhaps he was just jealous that he, a full professor, had to remain serious behind his frosty beard while young students poked each other and flirted in the June sunshine of their youth.    

And there he sits, high on the dais in the auditorium, bow-tie in perfect symmetry beneath his sagging clean-shaven jaw. He has put on black gloves! But I won’t let that rattle me (who does he think he is, Ernst Stavro Blofeld?). No, I’ll keep my eye on Odysseus, now far away, across the salty waves, having come home from the eastern war only to be sent north by Dante and Tennyson on an errand to enlighten the Northern brutes.

I imagine Odysseus explaining it to his old wife, who just got used to having him back at home, and who just spent the last five years trying to forget the young suitor Apollonius, with his powerful forearms and curly black locks. Odysseus tells her that he can’t stay chained to this island, and that he needs to buy a red sporty boat and get back on the watery road. “Death closes all: but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done, / Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.” Penelope doesn’t bat an eye, and pretends to be resigned to her fate: “Just go then. Do what you want to do. Like always.”

❧

Sailing past the Pillars of Hercules, Odysseus tosses his flaming brand of Epic high into the Atlantic sky, lighting the heavens with the constellations of Hercules and Perseus, Pegasus and Aries. 

The utter savagery of the Greeks and Vikings must not blind us to the rugged beauty of their worlds.

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