round and round they go

round and round it goes

Is it the influence of my autoimmersion in AngloSaxon studies? Last night it happened. This afternoon it happened again. I’m taken back to october 1949. Unexpectedly. Very tangibly. It almost hurts.

last night

BBC4 TV has a couple of excellent programmes about Vienna, that old capital of the AustroHungarian Empire. We tour the grand style architecture when the Ringstrasse was built. I glimpse the little statue of Johann Strauss and relive the moment in the late summer of 1977 when my mother and I heard the orchestra strike up The Blue Danube. And we danced. There and then in the Ring we danced The Blue Danube Waltz while a Viennese orchestra played on the other side of the greenery. (Been there! Done that! They didnt sell T-shirts in those days!) BBC4 took us on a tour of the Wien of Freud and then to the Klimt of the Secession Pavilion. (I’d seen and luxuriated in the decadence of The Kiss when it was on display at the New York Guggenheim in january 1965.) Last night (New Year’s Eve) I turned on for Schiele’s Death and the Maiden.

and stayed on for The Third Man

Oxford, october 1949. My first evening in Univ. I still hadnt had my study grant confirmed. The National Service bureaucrats seemed reluctant to let me have my due. But I went up just the same and had a handsome room on the first floor, overlooking The High. I had a small quantity of small change in my pocket. I spent a substantial part of it in a visit to a cinema in the Cowley Road. Yes, you’ve guessed it. The film was The Third Man. In black and white. Dark shadowy atmospheric black and white. Ending as it began. In a cemetery. ( .. .. and my grant was delivered in the nest morning’s post.)

this afternoon

I’ve been a fan of Michael Wood since the early 1980s when he went on TV In Search of the Dark Ages. In my mind’s eye there’s still a picture of him, young as he then was, striding along a narrow footway between two hedgerows – an ancient and still existing AngloSaxon boundary – and as he strode he declaimed the AngloSaxon words of the original land charter. Very impressive.

In 1999 his In Search of England was published. I bought it to compare with H V Morton’s 1927 work of the same title (my copy was bought in Wells on 7 september 1957). Just a few minutes ago I was reading Michael’s considerations of Asser’s Life of Alfred the Great. A name leapt out of the page and caught my eye. Humfrey Wanley. Once more I am transported back to October 1949 when I sat in Duke Humphrey’s Library with the incomplete set of partbooks which contain the earliest surviving handwritings of church choir music in English. The Wanley Manuscript.

is there a message for me?

The original users of Old English lived in a continuous present. Their language provided for this and for recalling events of the past. Unlike the Latinists of the ekklesia they had no future tense. I sense though that at least some of them were aware that their continuous present was a continuous weaving of the Web of Wyrd. Each individual continuously created their own future – in conjunction with the Webs of all those with whom they were inexorably linked. What am I weaving now?

swa cwæð snottor on mode

francis atte oxenford
incipit 2008