Books – Page 4 – derrickjknight

The Hundredth Story of A. E. Coppard

A.E. Coppard (born January 4, 1878, Folkestone, Kent, England—died January 13, 1957, London) was a writer who achieved fame with his short stories depicting the English rural scene and its characters.

Born in humble circumstances, his father being a journeyman tailor and his mother a hostler’s daughter, Coppard left school at the age of nine and worked first as an errand boy in Whitechapel, London, and later as a clerk in Brighton and Oxford. His love for literature, painting, and music led him to abandon his office career; he settled in a cottage in the country, and his first book of short stories, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, was published when he was 43. His talent was recognized and other collections of stories followed, including Fishmonger’s Fiddle (1925), which contained what is perhaps his best story, “The Higgler.” The charm of his stories lay in his poetic feeling for the countryside and in his amusing and dramatic presentation of rustic characters. https://www.britannica.com/biography/A-E-Coppard

Alongside the Title Page I have placed the Notice To Subscribers explaining why my limited edition is one of 1,000 copies instead of the planned 750.

The prose in this delightful book I most poetic, beautifully descriptive and rich in alliteration, simile and metaphor. Examples will be given with the four pages containing Robert Ribbing’s splendid wood engravings to follow. Here is another: “The soul of man is like a tree that in autumn is shedding its leaves, the golden fruit of his ideals. O vanity! They fall softly, serenely covering the sweet soil until they are trodden by some hoof or scattered by winds. A few lie safely in nooks and crannies – until they rot. But the tree lives on. …….. There are tens of thousands of trees in this forest, and on every tree each year there are thousands of leaves……..they are my companions, I love them……Few birds haunt these glades, and few animals. The trees sometimes die and fall and rot…..”

“Once or twice an hour a train came snoring across the viaduct with a racket that tore the sky and made the ornaments topple on the mantelpiece” is another.

Apparently based on his own life the author has written an emotional life of literature and loves in fifty eight pages.

The fictional protagonist doubts his own emotions, believing he can only feel through his characters. His love life is mostly transitory.

The story is well crafted, fluently written, and with a good grasp of dialogue.

Here are Robert Gibbings’s engravings which I would recommend enlarging in the galleries.

The Secret Garden

Last night I sat up late reading

My first Folio Society edition,

having boards and spine decorated by the artist comes in

a slip case bearing one of her drawings.

This delightful book, in fluent descriptive prose, charts the journey of Mary Lennox, born to an ex-pat English couple in India, until the age of ten when she was transported to Yorkshire. It is a tale of her transition of cultures and the consequent adaptations.

There is a touch mystery apart from that of the eponymous garden.

The prose contains many similes and metaphors, yet is itself a metaphor to the resurgence of neglected yet apparently pampered lives upon the introduction of loving kindness.

We learn how Mary encounters a kindred spirit with similar experience and emotional deprivation in the midst of wealth; and how this is balanced by a loving family with very slender means, but with a generous maternal mother who really knows children and their needs. Two of her children in particular are instrumental in Mary’s gradual learning to love.

We learn how crushingly destructive grief can be, but how it is possible to be helped to rise from despair.

I often find attempts at reproducing vernacular accents in speech, but Burnett uses it as a method of bridging cultures and engaging her characters. As Mary becomes closer to the Yorkshire people she learns their language. The dialogue in this book is faithfully rendered with the author’s perfect control.

The garden of the story, largely neglected for ten years, through the changing seasons, the gradual resurgence of plant life, and the lives of small living creatures, is the metaphor for life.

The robin, a particularly significant character threading a link through the story, first became imprinted on Ben Weatherstaff as a fledgling. Masterman’s drawings, although including many of the robin do not include a fledgeling. I am therefore taking the advantage to feature my

3rd August 2019 drawing of Nugget, who, still with blueish feathers and lacking his adult red breast, first arrived in our garden a short time before. Longer term readers will remember the many photographs in those earlier posts featuring him.

I have not included my usual quotations from the text, because there are many examples of the author’s prose alongside this selection of Dodie Masterman’s drawings. Those not taken from within the text are smaller tailpieces from most of the chapters except for the final one which might give too much away. I recommend enlarging these pages in the gallery.

The Lay, And The Tragedy, Of Horn-Skinned Siegfried

We have now reached Parts Three and Four of “The Legends of The Ring”. Each tells the story of Siegfried; Part Three as a poem and Part Four as a seven act play. Each of these has been translated by Elizabeth Magee who has done remarkably well to maintain the rhyming couplets and rhythm of the originals.

In her introduction to The Lay of Horn-Skinned Siegfried she tells us that it “is an anonymous work, written around 1500, probably in south Germany and possibly in Nuremberg itself…..Despite its popularity, no-one has ever suggested that [it] is world-class literature. Neither the quality of the poetry nor the structure of the poem would qualify for such an epithet.” I agree with her entirely. The lines are in ponderous iambic hexameter. Magee goes on to describe the work as “cobbled together……joints and couplings are so obvious, the starts and restarts, interpolations, contradictions and repetitions, that one begins to conceive an affection for the poet’s modus operandi and to regard these characteristics as part of the poem’s charm.”

The work does recount Siegfried’s full story of birth, adventures, achievements and death. “The youngster was so headstrong, so big and strong and tough/ , His father and his mother had soon had quite enough./ He wouldn’t serve another in all his livelong day,/ And all he thought and cared for was getting right away.”

The Tragedy of Horn-Skinned Siegfried, A Tragedy with Seventeen Characters in Seven Acts, by Hans Sachs, following the tale in the Lay, was written in 1557, with much smoother rhythm also in rhyming couplets. The speeches given to the dramatis personae, for example in the hammering of the anvil, add a certain comedy to the tragedy.

We have a prologue announced by the Herald who tells what the audience will be given and recounts the lessons learned in the Epilogue.

Both works explain “Horn-Skinned”

Here is a repeat of Simon Brett’s relevant engravings.

This completes my focus on The Legends of The Ring.

From The Saga Of Dietrich Of Bern

This is Part Two of Book Two of Legends of the Ring. It “was most likely composed in Norway somewhere between 1230 and 1250 by a well-travelled or well- read Norwegian, writing in Norse for the culturally flourishing court of Hakon IV.” (Magee).

This Folio Society selection, focussing on the Siegfried story, does not include the whole of the Dietrich saga, but the last in a series of duels is one between the two heroes. The main thread stitches together bloodthirsty battles between the Nibelungs and the Huns. The translation is by Edward R. Haymes.

In my review of The Nibelungenlied I state that “The powerful prose narrative lacks the beauty of the Icelandic poetry of Book one, although it presents the tale in considerably more detail.” https://derrickjknight.com/2024/08/04/the-nibelungenlied/. Maybe the more fluent and attractive prose in this saga of a now familiar story reflects the writing of someone more akin to the Scandinavian Source.

Dietrich is described thus: “He was long-faced and regular of features, light in colour, and had the best eyes of all men, dark brown in colour. His hair was light and fair and fell in curls. He had no beard, no matter how old he got. His shoulders were so broad that they measured two ells across. His arms were stout like a great trunk and hard as stone. He had fair hands. In the waist he was slender and well-formed, and his hips and his thighs were so stout that everyone thought that it was very strange how the man had been shaped. His legs were fair and well-shaped. And his calves and ankles were so stout that they could have belonged to a giant. His strength was greater than any man knew and he himself scarcely tested it. He was cheerful and modest, generous and a giver of great gifts, so that he did not hold back from his friends with gold or silver or treasure or with almost anything they would accept.”

The birth of Siegfried and his fostering by a hind is beautifully expressed: “A hind came along and took the [baby] boy in her mouth and carried him home to her lair. There she had two fawns. She put the boy down and let him drink for her. She raised him like her own young and he was with the hind for twelve months. Then he was as strong and big as other boys four years old.” Growing thereafter into a perfect match for Dietrich. When Mimir found the youngster and took him in “a hind came running up, went up to Mimic’s knees and licked the face and head of the boy. From this Mimir knew that the hind must have fostered the boy. For this reason he did not want to kill the hind and he took the boy and kept him with him. He intended to raise him as his son and he gave him a name and called him Siegfried.”

This is an example of the greater detail given in this saga to the material covered in previous sections of Legends of the Ring.

We also have more details of lengthy individual duels and battles with fast moving action described.

The position of women in this society obsessed with beauty and strong men of honour is somewhat complex. It was a fate worse than death for a man to be beaten by a woman and fathers are always speaking of giving their daughters to valued suitors. Yet queens and wives can be powerful, scheming and influential. We have clear indication of this in Chapter 5 of the saga extracts, The Bride-Winning of Siegfried and Gunther.

The first of Simon Brett’s illustrations to this section of the book has been placed above the relevant quotation. The others are in this gallery.

The Nibelungenlied

This is Part One of Book Two of The Legends of The Ring. This section of the volume deals with The Ring Legends of Germany – the work of an Austrian poet composed around 1200-1204 and thus the earliest in this collection of Ring legend literature. Collected and published from 1755 onwards, the work, translated in prose by A.T. Hatto transposes the Icelandic sagas to mediaeval court life setting telling a tale of conspiracy, murder, and heroic ruin. Thus we learn about feudal kingship, honourable jousting and chivalrous knighthood peopled with a parade of splendour, female beauty, and magnificent fighting men. “And now far and wide and in great number the good knights began a most noble sport: you could see many there whose youthful hearts fired them with great zest, all fine, gallant knights beneath their shields! Magnificent women and bevies of lovely girls adorned in all their finery sat in the windows watching the pastime of all those fearless men, till the king and his friends took the field.”

The powerful prose narrative lacks the beauty of the Icelandic poetry of Book one, although it presents the tale in considerably more detail. It is subject to repetition and frequent pointers to disasters to come. On the same page we have “And indeed, in days to come, Hagen gashed many a shield and helmet.” and “But King Etzel’s queen parted many such pairs in sorrow, in days to come.” Later we are told that “yet the time would come when they grew so hostile towards him that they had no recourse but to slay him”.

As the final inevitable slaughter nears we have a true reflection of one of the harsh realities of war: ‘Alas for my brother who has just been killed here! What harrowing news reaches me incessantly. I shall always mourn for the noble Rüdiger, too – this vast loss and pain affect both sides.’ An early plea for forgiveness and reconciliation.

These illustrations by Simon Brett are relevant to this section of the work.

The Mythological Poems Of The Elder Edda

This is Part Four of Book One of Legends of the Ring; like the Heroic ones it has been translated by Patricia Terry. I read it today.

“The mythological poems feature all the well-known Norse gods: Odin [often disguised, as for example a ferryman in the Lay of Harbard.], Fridge, Frey and Freyja, Thor, Loki and the fair god Balder. Giants and dwarfs have their share too. Sometimes the poems tell genuine stories about these characters. Both the ‘Lay of Thrym’ and the ‘Lay of Hymir’ are comic tales involving Thor, and the ‘Lay of Skirmir’ succeeds as a tale of romance.

“….knowledge is at the hub of the majority of these poems…..[which] convey knowledge of places, people, and events throughout the cosmos. They act as guides to the beginning of the universe, and its end, and contain the names and doings of all the major players on its many worlds.

“As with the heroic poems, much of the poetry takes the form of speech. Gods, giants and dwarfs, in turn act as the poems’ mouthpiece, climaxing in the great cosmic vision of the vala or sybil. Consequently knowledge, too, comes in spoken form: sometimes in monologue, more often in dialogue, principally in question-and-answer exchanges.” (Magee)

The first set of these poems is entitled WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.

‘The High One’ who offers the opening monologues ‘Sayings’ and the ‘Lay of Lloddfafnir’ is Odin, who, disguised as Gagnrad enters into a full dialogue with the giant Vafthrudnir in that eponymous lay. The advice given in the first of these reflects those given by Snorri, for example “if a man takes with him a mind full of sense/ he can carry nothing better;/ nothing is worse to carrot your way/ than a head heavy with beer.” The repetition of the first lines of a string of these verses is a common element in these lays. “Don’t stay for ever when you visit friends,/ know when it’s time to leave;/ love turns to loathing if you sit too long/ on someone else’s bench.” contains the now familiar penchant for alliteration. There are some nice similes in this verse: “Thus you’ll find the love of a faithless woman:/ like a smooth shod horse on slippery ice – / a sprightly two-year-old not yet trained,/ or sailing with no rudder in a frantic storm/ or a lame man on an icy hill running after reindeer.”

Then we have COMEDY AND INSULT.

“The Eddic interpretation of comedy is many-faceted: incongruous, preposterous, ridiculous; sometimes salacious, often insulting, and occasionally spiteful or downright cruel.”

In ‘The Lay of Thrym’ “Thunder-weilding Thor woke in a rage – / someone had made off with his mighty hammer;/ his hair stood upright, his beard shook with wrath,/ wild for his weapon the god groped around” (Again the alliteration).

The final selection represents QUEST AND PROPHESY.

This closes with ‘Sybil’s Prophesy’ quoted in “The Prose Edda”, describing the creation of the cosmos, its disastrous destruction by fire and tempest, and its ultimate hope of regeneration.

These two of Simon Brett’s engravings are relevant to this last section.

This evening, from tables in front of the TV while watching the Women’s rugby sevens Olympic match between Australia and Great Britain; the first round Olympic tennis doubles match between Britain’s Andy Murray and Dan Evans and Japan’s Taro Daniel and Kei Nishikori; followed by highlights of the third day of the third cricket test match between England and West Indies, we dined on roast pork, brambly apple sauce, Yorkshire pudding, boiled new potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, broccoli and meaty gravy cooked perfectly by the Culinary Queen, with which I drank Bajoz Tempranillo 2022.

The Prose Edda

This is Part Three of Book One of Legends of The Ring: The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) “an Icelander living during the remarkable literary flowering of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which produced among other things the great Icelandic sagas” (Magee).

The translation is by Jean I. Young.

It was the rich heritage of poetry, much of which he quotes, that provided Snorri’s material for his Edda. He blends Norse history and mythology in this work. “His opening ‘Delusion of Gylfi’, in which the main mythological events and characters are depicted, is presented inside an elaborate framework of illusion and deception, conforming to the Church image of heathendom as trickery.” (Magee)

“King Gylfi ruled the lands that are now called Sweden….[he] was a wise man and skilled in magic” says Snorri. Disguised as an old man he visited Asgard (home of the gods) to discover the secrets of the Aesir (the main body of the Norse gods). By question and answer he is fooled by Loki, the mischief maker, as a device for explaining the creation and ultimate destruction of the universe. Taking the poem “Sibyl’s Prophesy” as his source we learn that ‘In the beginning/ not anything existed,/ there was no sand nor sea/ nor cooling waves;/ earth was unknown/ and heaven above/ only Ginnungagap [primal void] / was – there was no grass’. Thus the sun and stars, the seasons, the winds, humanity, and everything else. The main Aesir are named and their stories told.

We learn of Yggdrasil and its meaning. This is the ash tree “the best and greatest of all trees; its branches spread out over the whole world and reach up over heaven. The tree is held in position by three roots that spread far out; one is among the Aesir, the second among the frost ogres where once was Ginnungagap, and the third extends over Niflheim [the Underworld]….[the serpent] Nidhogg gnaws at the root from below….the hart devours it from above…”

Here are more of Simon Brett’s powerful engravings.

Predictions of the end of the world include “Surt will fling fire over the earth and burn up the whole world” and “the serpent churns up waves”, but there is hope that “While the world is being burned by Surt, in a place called Hoddmimir’s Forest, will be concealed two human beings called Lif and Lifthrasir [Life and Desire for Life]. Their food will be the morning dews, and from these men will come so great a stock that the whole world will be peopled…..”

The second part of The Prose Edda tells of the deaths of Fafnir, Regin, Sigurd, Brynhild, and the last of the Volsungs.

The Heroic Poems Of The Elder Edda

This is Part Two of Book One of Legends of the Ring, taken from Patricia Terry’s “Poems of the Elder Edda” which she has translated apart from three versions from Elizabeth Magee. “compiled in Iceland round 1270 by an anonymous collector or copyist, the collection contains poems composed somewhere in Scandinavia during the tenth and eleventh centuries”. (Magee)

“Originally the poetry collection had no title. The name Elder Edda was adapted from the term Snorri Sturluson coined: Edda, which he used for his own prose work recounting Scandinavian pre-Christian beliefs…..the poems are clearly older than the prose, even if they were written down later……The poems fall into two main groups. One is a set of mythological poems, which we shall return to later. The second group is heroic, and it is these poems that interest us here.” (Magee)

These poems tell the story of Sigurd and his dynasty as mirrored by the Saga of the Volsungs, expressing the key moments and emotions in a much more beautifully poetic manner than could the prose narrative.

Whoever has been primarily responsible for the poetry in this book has presented luscious, flowing, language with a love of alliteration following the original expressive form of verse. Highlights of the story display intense emotions of passion, drama, and action, linked together with short prose passages.

Leaving the details of the tale for those wishing to read for themselves, I can say that these poems are in four groups: Of Heroes, Swanmaidens and Valkyries; Sigurd Ascendant; Sigurd’s Death; Death of the Niflungs; and End of the Line.

As has been seen in https://derrickjknight.com/2024/07/12/the-saga-of-the-volsungs/ myth plays a large part in the sagas.

“Swanmaidens fly through the air wearing their feathers; once they have landed, however, they set their feather cloaks aside and become as other women. A mortal man can gain power over a swanmaiden by hiding her feather cloak so that she can no longer fly away. ……….

….”the valkyries are Odin’s wish-maidens, who ride through the heavens, sway battles, select those heroes selected for Valhall, and serve the inexhaustible brew of ale to them when they arrive. Some are said to be Odin’s own daughters….” (Magee)

I offer a few phrases from the verses in order to illustrate the complexity of the alliterations:

“Blades were burning in bloody wounds,/ Long swords lowered….” from The Lay of Hakon

“He set bear steaks to roast on the fire -/ high blazed the faggots from seasoned fir trees,/ wind-dried wood, warming Volund.” from The Lay of Volund

“……….Grani’s bride/ gold-bitted, good at galloping; ” from The First Lay of Helgi Hunding’s Bane

“What kind of fish can swim the falls/ but fails to ward off woe?” from The Lay of Regin

“few things worry a worthy king” from The Lay of Fafnir

The poetry is rich in simile and metaphor.

Advice given to Sigurd by Sigrdrifa, the valkyrie in her eponymous lay is almost identical as that of Brunhild in https://derrickjknight.com/2024/07/12/the-saga-of-the-volsungs/

Here are Simon Brett’s muscular illustrations pertinent to this section.

The Saga Of The Volsungs

This is Part One of Book One of The Ring Legends of Scandinavia. “We begin with what promises to be the furthest-reaching, fullest possible version on the human side of the Ring legends. The Saga of the Volsungs stretches from end to end of the story, telling of the two great families: the Volsungs, into which Sigurd is born, and the Gjukungs, into which he marries….. The Saga… was composed by an anonymous author between 1200 and 1270, probably 1260 and almost certainly in Iceland. As such it belongs to the flourishing Icelandic saga culture of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” (Elizabeth Magee)

This version is based on the text edited and translated by R.G. Finch in London 1965.

This story involves myth, magic, superstition, deception, trickery, treachery, love triangles, family history, bloodthirsty conflicts, rivalry, and mystery.

Reminiscent of the death of William Rufus on a deer hunt in England’s New Forest, the tale begins with Bredi’s murder by Sigi, reputed to be a son of Odin. Throughout the saga Odin appears as a “man” with various descriptions and significant actions. Thus reality merges with myth, and magic, as in “….a large pair of stocks was fetched, and at a certain spot in the forest the ten brothers had their legs clamped in, and there they sat all day, and night came on. And at midnight an old she-wolf came out from the forest to where they were sitting in the stocks. She was large and evil-looking. What she did was to bite one of them to death, thereupon devour him, then go away…….on nine consecutive nights the same wolf appeared at midnight, and each time she she killed and ate one of them until all were dead and Sigmund alone remained.” Trickery is employed by Signy, daughter of King Volsung to outwit and destroy the wolf.

“Numerous spears hurtled through the air, and arrows, too, but his norns looked after him, so he remained unscathed….”. “Norns, according to Magee, “are semi-divine female beings who weave the web of fate: past, present and future; the valkyries are Odin’s wish-maidens, who ride through the heavens, sway battles, select those heroes selected for Valhall, and serve the inexhaustible brew of ale to them when they arrive. Some are said to be Odin’s own daughters….”

Most confusing for readers such as me is that names are variable and interchangeable. The Icelandic Sigurd is the German Siegfried. The Sigmund of the above paragraph is the father of Sigurd who also has a son Sigmund. I doubt that I will get my head around all these, although the translation is fluent and very readable, and there is a good glossary of names in the appendices; it is splendid story anyway.

In addition to the fluid prose we have much poetry such as “Gold is now rendered,/ recompense for you,/ much for my head./’Tis not luck will be/ the lot of your son:/ Death to you both it brings.” put in the mouth of Loki, the mischief maker of the gods. Brunhild’s comprehensive advice to Sigurd, beginning “War runes you must know/ if wise you would be. / On sword-guard grave them,/ on hilt sockets, / on hilt’s iron grip, / and twice say Tyr’s name” and continuing with such stanzas as “Speech runes you must know,/ to be spared, if you wish/ repayment of grief rendered./ Wind them about,/ weave them around,/ side by side set them/ there at that Thing/ where throngs shall come,/ all to full session faring”. Tyr is the god of war; Thing is the parliament. Further such advice such as “Watch out for trickery from your friends” is delivered in fluent prose.

As I explained earlier, Simon Brett’s powerful illustrations are given in a block between pages 360 and 361. This is because there is so much overlap in the stories that each engraving could serve more than one part of the book.

Here are today’s offerings which may well be repeated as we progress through the work.

This evening we dined on more of the roast lamb with the addition of mushrooms and fresh vegetables. Neither of us imbibed.

Reading And Listening

This afternoon Elizabeth visited for a while wishing me well as she was at a wedding on my birthday.

After this I listened to the Test Match between England and West Indies on BBC News when not reading the introduction to

The first of these images is of the boards, back and front, of my edition; the second the Title Page and Frontispiece by Simon Brett.

Elizabeth Magee has gathered and woven together the array of saga, myth, and legend from the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples drawn on by Wagner in his Ring series. Because of the nature of the collection, involving similar but differently told stories from differing sources, Simon Brett’s powerful illustrations are gathered together in one block.

In Scandinavian mythology Yggdrasil, the frontispiece image, is most significant. “Underlying it is a whole cosmos, a universe created by the interaction of fire and ice and embedded in the great void. Central to the cosmos is the World Tree, Yggdrasil. According to Snorri, the three roots securing it reach down to the underworld Niflheim, out to the frost ogres and up to the sky among the gods and light elves. Its branches spread up to heaven and over the earth. The world is formed of concentric circles, surrounded by sea. Midgard is the home of humankind; rimward are the giants, and right at the hub is Asgard, seat of the gods on earth. Bifrost, the rainbow bridge, brings the gods every day from earth to heaven. Within the earth dwell dwarfs and dark elves.” (Magee)

I will follow the editor’s sections and add the pictures as I work my way through the book.

This evening we dined at The Lazy Lion in Milford on Sea, where I enjoyed fish pie with a minted melange of peas and other green veg followed by a summer fruits créme brulée with which I drank Flack’s Double Drop; Jackie’s choice was sun-dried tomato and pesto with halloumi cheese with which she drank Diet Cola.