wore a green hat with a dashing pheasant feather and played games of Robin Hood, running through woodland, shooting bows and arrows. The thin child’s mother looked on, in an agony of embarrassment and uncertainty about this behaviour. The thin child watched her mother, and took notes. But her mother did inhabit the countryside and its stories. The boys she taught clearly loved her. They gave her living creatures – a hedgehog dripping fleas on the carpet, a tank full of great crested newts who tried to escape at breeding time and died, shrivelled, under the gas cooker. The hedgehog was released into the field at the bottom of the garden, and its donor was told it had escaped. He brought another, equally flea-ridden the next day, which was also released. There were vast slimy clumps of frogspawn, and then tanks full of inky tadpoles who ate each other. The thin child’s mother went on walks, in those days, and lovingly named all the flowers. The thin child had a complete collection of books of Flower Fairies with well-written verses and elegant pictures. Dogrose, Lords and Ladies, Deadly Nightshade, violets, snowdrops and primroses.
The long-awaited return took the life out of the thin child’s mother, the thin child decided many years later. Dailiness defeated her. She made herself lonely and slept in the afternoons, saying she was suffering from neuralgia and sick headaches. The thin child came to identify the word ‘housewife’ with the word ‘prisoner’. Fear of imprisonment haunted the thin child, although she did not quite acknowledge this.
The outdoor spaces of her wartime, the wheat-field, the meadow, the ash tree, the hawthorn, the hedgerow, the muddy pond, the tangled bank, became a thing in her mind like the black slate or basalt. They were compressed to a spherical tuft with pushing roots and shoots, with creeping, crawling, flying and swimming things, with a patch of fierce blue sky, another of green grass, another of golden corn, and another of the dark earth under the dense hedge. It was a small world, into which she had been exiled or evacuated. It was the earthly paradise that once had been.
She still read in bed at night, returning often still to
The thin child’s father said it must come down. It was a wild tree, out of place in an urban garden. The child loved the tree, and loved her father, who had been restored to her against all her grim expectations. She watched him take an axe to the tree, singing as he hacked, making logs, a stump, bundles of brushwood out of the living wood. A gate closed in her head. She must learn to live in dailiness, she told herself, in a house, in a garden, at home, where there was butter again, and cream, and honey, good to taste. She must savour peacetime.
But on the other side of the closed gate was the bright black world into which she had walked in the time of her evacuation. The World-Ash and the rainbow bridge, seeming everlasting, destroyed in a twinkling of an eye. The wolf with his hackles and bloody teeth, the snake with her crown of fleshy fronds, smiling Loki with fishnet and flames, the horny ship made of dead men’s nails, the Fimbulwinter and Surtr’s conflagration, the black undifferentiated surface, under a black undifferentiated sky, at the end of things.
ROCKS IN THE RIESENGEBIRGE
THOUGHTS ON MYTHS
Myth comes from ‘muthos’ in Greek, something said, as opposed to something done. We think of myths as stories, although, as Heather O’Donoghue says in her introduction to her interesting book on the Norse myths, there are myths that are not essentially narratives at all. We think of them loosely as tales which explain, or embody, the origins of our world. Karen Armstrong, in her ‘short history of myth’, says that myths are ways of making things comprehensible and meaningful in human terms (the sun as a chariot driven by a woman through the firmament) and that they are almost all ‘rooted in death and the fear of extinction’, Nietzsche, in
Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.
Nietzsche’s heroes were Aeschylus and Sophocles whose characters are mythic beings. He did not approve of Euripides, who tried to humanise the actors in these stories, give them individual ‘characters’ and personalities.
Even as a small child I was aware that there was a difference between reading myths and reading fairy tales, or stories about real people, or stories about imaginary real people. Gods, demons and other actors in myths do not have personalities or characters in the way people in novels do. They do not have psychology, though Freud used the mythical life of Oedipus as a way of describing the machinery of the unconscious. They have attributes – Hera and Frigg are essentially jealous, Thor is violent, Mars is warlike, Baldur is beautiful and gentle, Diana of Ephesus is fertile and virginal. I remember, seeing that goddess in the stony flesh for the first time, with her many-layered breasts, that I understood there was a sense in which she was more real than I was or would ever be – more people believed in her, thought about her, saw their world in ways dependent on her existence.
Mythical beings are also more and less real than characters in novels. Don Quixote tries to enter the world of myth and the disparity between his real and his imagined worlds becomes almost a mythical force in itself. Anna Karenina, Prince Myshkin, Emma Bovary, Gustav von Aschenbach are human characters with idiosyncrasies and individuality – but their tales are complicated by the presence in them of impersonal myths. Aschenbach is a battleground for Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysos; Prince Myshkin is a human being trying to be a Christlike man. For several years I used to teach an evening class on Myth and Reality in the Novel in which we looked at the mythical forms which found themselves as one thread in more (or less) realist fictions. My own novels also have threads of myth in their narrative, which are an essential part of the thought and the form of the books, and of the way the characters take in the world.
I chose the Norse myth of Ragnarok because my childhood experience of reading and rereading
