MAP89: British Myths & Legends with Amy Jeffs

seduced by demons and gave birth to a race of giants. Her second book, titled Wild Takes You on a Journey from Desolation to Hope, through seven chapters of insightful reflection. She retells stories from medieval texts with vivid description and unique perspectives. Now, one of the standout elements of both books are the illustrations which Amy created in the episode. You'll find out how she created them and how the creation process helped her through the lockdown quarantine period we

all dealt with. If you have any questions or comments or want to suggest a topic for the show, send those over to podcast at Medieval Archives XCOM. You can also leave us a message on the voicemail line. 7207221066. You can find all the links to Story Land in Wild and Amy's social media and the show notes at medieval archives dot com slash 89. So let's get to the talk with Amy Jeffs and the origins of Britain. They were joined by a medievalist and art historian,

Dr. Amy Jeffs, who's the author of two books on Medieval Britain. Thanks for being on the show, Amy.

entranced. And then the Cambridge Open day happened quite soon after that and a Ph.D. student read me. I went into the Department of Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic, which is a subject, a very niche undergraduate course. They offer

that. So here in the UK, we we specialize very early on. We don't kind of continue with a broad range of subjects and we start university, we go straight in and, and there's a particularly specialist course in Cambridge called Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic, which is a little bit like classics for Northwestern Europe. And I went into that department and sat down with a Ph.D. student who read me a passage of Old Norse. And again, I was just my imagination was just completely

ignited by this moment. And she was really cool. And I was like, Oh, this is amazing. So anyway, I applied and got in and just spent the most joyful two years studying old English language and literature, Old Norse language and literature, medieval Latin and a touch of medieval Welsh. Also. That was they offered a wonderful course called Code Ecology and Paleo Graffiti, which looked at the history of manuscript construction and book history as well as the history of scripts.

And because it was in the Middle Ages, there was a very strict hierarchy of scripts and what you could or couldn't use for

writing scripture and so on. And as that progressed, I became more and more interested in manuscript illustration and medieval art, and I started sitting in on lectures I didn't actually have to go to in the art history department on early medieval art and gone into inlaid jewellery and carved Wales bone caskets and just loved it so much that I jumped ship in my third year into art history, carried across much of many things that I'd learned about language and literature

and medieval languages. I'd borrowed papers in old French and middle English. It just it just kind of all came with me into art history. And then I carried that on through to my master's and my PhD, which moved up from the kind of early medieval period into the 14th century, focusing on English

illuminated manuscripts. And in the at the same time, I did an internship at the British Library on a digitisation project for manuscripts dating 700 to 1100 or 1200, I think all from England and France, and also digitizing pilgrims souvenirs and medieval badges at the British Museum. So the British Museum project really took me up to the Reformation.

So over the course of my studies, I, I was had the great joy of covering literature, history, language, arts, as well as going from the kind of fifth century, from late antiquity all the way up to the Reformation. And that was that was just the most wonderful adventure and has informed everything I've done since. Even the washing up.

write a book about?

it had illustrations on still has still exists. It has illustrations on every double page spread which and they were really kind of my supervisor at the time said looked like it'd been illustrated in ketchup and mustard because it was a very scurrilous kind of scurrilous, swift dynamic, slightly messy illustrations. But they are that kind of movement to them and a

great deal of pace because there's so many of them. And so I became interested in how the origins of Britain, these this origin myth that was based on a 12th century text by Geoffrey of Monmouth, of a big Latin prose text about where Britain had

come from, Britain for Norman readers. I was interested in how that had been translated, abbreviated, illustrated in order as I argued to educate a young the young chivalric classes so people that were going to be going off and fighting or marrying people who were going to be going off and fighting. How these these stories kind of fired them up about being English or being Christian and how text and image did that. And so as I was writing up my thesis, I moved

out of Cambridge. I went to a town in Somerset where there were a lot of artists, and I became interested in printmaking, and I started producing a series of illustrations of this text by Geoffrey of Monmouth of the Brute legend, as it's called, and it's called The Great Legend, because it begins with this character, Brutus, who's a refugee descended from refugee

Trajan's, who founded Rome. And he he's exiled, accidentally killing his father, and he ends up receiving a prophecy from the goddess Diana, journeying where he tells him he's going to found a new Troy and a race of kings in an island in the western Ocean way on the edge of the world. So it's called the breach. After Brutus,

he then names this island, Britain after himself. And and so I started illustrating it. And in the process of illustrating it, I became convinced of or received some helpful advice, telling me that these really were exciting stories in and of themselves. That Brutus is prophecy from the goddess Diana, his encounter with the giants that are indigenous and the island of Britain, formerly known as

Albion here. The events that happen afterwards concerning the subsequent legendary kings like King Lear and his daughter Cordelia, like Arthur and his his counsellor Merlin will see the king before him is the Pendragon and his brother Aurelius. All of these stories were really fascinating because of how they mapped on to modern day Britain and just because they're great stories. So that's what the illustrations came from,

which was really the nucleus for the book. And actually I should also say just for anyone just to introduce the book itself, how those illustrations worked then was that they would they each illustrate a fictional retelling of the medieval origin myth. So I've then I've cherry picked myths about where Britain came from, from a variety of sources, including Chronicles, but also

saints lives and romances. And I've retold them as fiction in chronological order, starting from before Noah's Flood and running all the way up to the conquest, the Norman Conquest of England, which has implications for the whole of Britain, and each fictional retelling story is followed by a non-fiction commentary explaining how these myths were understood at the

time. So this is in the kind of in the high Middle Ages, as we call it, and how that came to shape real political decision making, real life wars, especially things like the conflicts between England and Scotland, and how that therefore came to shape the Britain that we know today. So it is an argument against myths and the legend being Wimsey, it's saying that these stories, whether or not they're perceived as history, are very, very powerful and have political ramifications.

over what was or wasn't truth. But either way, those histories were seen as a set of moral exemplar to guide contemporary kings and barons and how to rule, but also they were just inspiring. So you know the story of Arthur as it develops over time. This this idea of the round table of the of the knights who when they sit at that table, realize they love each other so much, they will die for each other. That bond, that bond between Arthur's barons was such a powerful idea

that it shaped politics. You say Edward the first. He has a round table made for his his Tonys and kind of pageantry. And that's a kind of battle of playing an end of that that does the same, imitating Arthur and his celebrations with his knights. And that's kind of playing at the Arthurian ideal. But then it becomes even more solid when he finds the Order of the Garter in

the 1340s. And this is directly modelled on the Knights of the Round Table in an order of barons and really the reigns Before Edward the third had been characterised by baronial disunity and especially the reign of his father. And so he basically takes from literature this idea of the order of knights and makes it happen with huge success.

conquered France. He go all the way to Rome. He had 30 crowns under his feet. And so that is then presenting his contemporary political ambition and his objectives as just a completion of an old campaign that was cut short.

spark the same inspiration for you?

beginning of how the Britons where they came from. So that having come from Brutus and Troy, the Scots, they had a story that was a sort of reworking of much older Irish myths that the Scots had had their roots in Ireland anyway, and so they kind of reworked the story of how they had come from Egypt with a an Egyptian princess called Soter, who was the daughter of Rameses, the second who is famous for having

altercations with Moses. The stories of Brutus and Skater came into play in a big way when during the wars of Scottish independence and the reign of Edward, the first when he was trying to claim Overlordship of Scotland, and if if listeners want to find out the sort of nuts and bolts of that, then I'll direct into the early chapters of story land so that as a historian, I'm really fond of those stories that are really, really interesting and really impactful politically. One of my

favorite stories is about the How Albion got its name. So Albion is the name that Britain has before Brutus arrives, and

there's a 13th century or a 13th century sources that give a kind of prequel to the Brutus legend and say he arrives this island called Albion. He renamed it Brutus. How did Albion come to bear his name? And it gives the story of a great king in Syria to Assyrian King, who had a huge empire. And he also had 30 daughters. And the eldest of the daughters is called Albina, and they're all married to his barons and hoping it becomes jealous of the barons power over them and of her father's power.

And she convinces her sisters to agree to kill their husbands so that they can seize the throne ultimately and rule Syria as them as Queens. But the youngest of the sisters betrays the rest of them and tells her husband and they're dragged before their father, who punishes them by casting them adrift in a rudderless boat and they end up getting swept up in a storm and wrecking on the coast of an unknown uninhabited island. And Albania jumps out of the boat, grabs a handful of sand and and

says, I'm claiming this. And later she gives it the name that she she names herself queen with the agreement of her sisters of this uninhabited island. And they they learn to live off the land, which it takes. It's a poem, The medieval poem which describes this, really emphasizes that their kind of bushcraft as they are learning to set traps and catch deer and

fish and all of that. Ultimately, they get really good at it and they are able to feed themselves very well and they've got the run of the island and they're really fat and happy, but they realize that they are lacking anyone to have sex with. And so that and their collective desire kind of is felt. It sort of sends vibrations down into the earth and and the devil detects it. And he and his demons are like, rise up and have a night of passion with Albania and her sisters, which gives rise to the

birth of the race of giants, which is present in Albi. And when Brutus arrives, this story is a really problematic story to retell. Now it draws on a lot of stereotypes for representing non-Christian women, let's say medieval kind of tropes of medieval Christian tropes of doing this, which say a lot more about medieval Christians than they do about anyone on that

sphere. But but I also just instinctively, despite her murderous tendencies, kind of identified with Albina and her ambition, not that I would go quite as far as she did, but I think that it's just such a great story. And I also, as a as a child, would read a lot of survival books. So I just liked the idea of these 30 women making rope and setting nuns and fashioning spears and generally kind of imposing it.

modern day perspectives. So that's always it's always tough to kind of balance those to you establish the origin of Britain. And then your next book, Wild Tales Tales of Medieval Britain. Yes. Are those also myths? Are those real tales that you found from medieval Britain?

societies. I want you to reflect on an old idea of the wilderness through primarily focusing on a group of poems known as the old English adages, but just to going to take a step back. The book has seven chapters entitled Earth, Ocean, Forest, Beast and Catastrophe Paradise, and each chapter, as in story Land, has a story and a commentary in Wild. The stories are not retellings.

They are short stories that I've made up, but they are inspired by fragments of poetry and art, other forms of literature that use the wilderness in really interesting ways, or use an idea of the wilderness in really interesting ways. So for instance, the first chapter mostly inspired by an old English elegiac poem that we now call the wife's lament, is found in a late 10th century manuscript known as the Exeter Book, which is a one of only a very few surviving big

compendium of old English poetry. And it was given to the Bishop of Exeter, and he then left its text to Cathedral in 1072 when he died. And it's been there ever since, which I think is just wonderful. And it's got animal lore, it's got 95 old English riddles, some of them really rude, it's got saints lives, but it's also got a collection of poems known now as the Elegies, which are distributed among the riddles,

but don't seem to quite be riddles. So in the case of the wife's lament, the narrator seems to be a woman trapped under an oak tree in what she calls an earth hole. And she is watching the kind of the slow summer sun creeping by in this northern landscape where the days are endlessly long and summer. And she is bemoaning the fact that her Lord has left her there and hasn't come back. And it's really oppressive. The atmosphere and the themes are very much of isolation and

longing and yearning. And in contrast to that, there's another poem which I use in the chapter on Ocean called The Seafarer, where the narrator is out on a frozen ocean all alone. So this is happening in the wilderness, his feet shackled by frost. They're dreaming of former joys and trying to find solace in the idea of eternal life as the only tree and

lasting joy. And they seem to me to use extreme portrayals of the wilderness to express quite subtle psychological situation and to just to talk about emotion, really, which is really, when we think about the Middle Ages, I think we can often see it as quite an emotionally stunted age.

I've sort of spun a ghost story out of it. And in the commentary I then reflect on the idea of how the Earth was understood as a place of burial, of that the Earth itself was kind of seen as like a gigantic version of the human body. I became interested in an article by a scholar called Sarah Semple, who argues that the narrator of the wife's lament might be, Actually, I want to say it without giving you any spoilers, but she

explains it. She explores the idea of prehistoric burial mounds and how they how when the Germanic migrants who would become the English landed in Britain, they found a landscape, as they would have on the continent, covered in in prehistoric monuments and burial mounds. And they added to those themselves in that within that prior to that conversion. And but in the in the later period when they have converted, these places become steeped in superstition because of their

association with pagan burials. They were often the sites of pagan shrines that were then on the boundaries of territories, of civilized territories. And so they start becoming increasingly in the later Anglo-Saxon period somewhere that they bury criminals. And this might be to do with a belief that these monuments were inhabited by demons, elves and goblins and that sort of thing, and that the souls of the executed dead might

be trapped there. Yeah, that's an example of how sort of starting with the elegy and the book then moves broadens out into an exploration of that, that kind of element in general. But it also brings in the Franks casket to the British Museum, the first chapter, which is what beautiful Wales Bones is a lot beautiful. It's kind of clunky, but it's what it is is amazing. Is it made of Wales bones? Probably eighth century Northumbrian caskets, about the size of a shoebox for a small

person for a child. Yeah and it's got each of the panels is has been carved with scenes from stories and those stories are derived from classical sources from the Bible. It's got Romulus and Remus, for instance, circling the sea. Well, it's got the three Kings visiting the Virgin and Child. It's got a theme from a Germanic known Germanic story about Weyland, the goldsmith dragging a woman caught by all the hills so that he can impregnate her and wreak

vengeance on her father. It's got an unidentified scene of somebody standing, a woman standing over a burial mound or a funeral pyre. It's not quite clear with a cup. And it says that Hoss wept for air tie and the sorrow mound and ruins around the outside, which as it's an uncontested, otherwise uncontested story, we don't know what that means. So I've brought that into the short story as well. So it's just that's how

the book kind of rolls out. And I'm hoping the trajectory of the each chapter, beginning with the Earth, ocean forest, fun beast, catastrophe, paradise as there is broadly upward trajectory from kind of the earth to the to the heavens and likewise has a kind of ultimately very hopeful message, but in the process reflects on early medieval ideas around mortality and the apocalypse and such lovely themes as that.

illustrations for both of the books.

Britain during the pandemic. And that was a the radio and the news and things were were reminding me of the old English elegies because they were talking about exile and isolation and loss and they were talking about transience of all human experiences. It all became quite poetic in some ways, as

well as being very horrifying. And yet here in the UK we had the most beautiful spring and it was like there were no planes in the sky and the roads were silent and it was this glorious weather and birds were singing and there was a real disjunct between what you could see out the window and what you knew was happening in the world and what humanity was experiencing. It's like the opposite of the old English elegies, not so much the Welsh Elegies that that video and even which are similar, but

they employ contrast very effectively. But the wife's lament is and in The Seafarer, in reasons I've described, they mirror the emotions of the narrator. With the weather, it's a real it's just through and through pathetic policy. And and so I sat outside one day and carved a block of maple with an illustration of the of the figure from the wife's lament, standing under an oak tree in this kind of dark cave and felt as though it was, I don't know. It was just a kind of what to do

with all of these weekends. And maybe reflecting on on what I was hearing in the news, and that became a wood engraving. So this is a technique is different from woodcut, which is often quite is on a larger scale and done on a piece of wood, cut on the plank, wood engravings done on the end, grain of a piece of timber like boxwood or maple wood, very close grained, and they're often very small. So the illustrations in wild a 7.5 by

ten centimetres and they're reproduced to scale. So it'll feel like a letterpress book you inside your drawing, your image of stain the block with black ink, first of all. And then I draw on it in pencil so that if you tilt the block in the light, you can see your drawing very clearly. And and then I use a sharp tool called appearance to incised little lines, which will show up white in the final print. And this was a good medium to use in lockdown because I couldn't get to the studio, so I

didn't have a press at home. And so with these small engravings, I could just use a boon burnish or the burnish so I could place ink up the block, put paper on top, and then use a piece of antler or the back of a wooden spoon to rub the paper on, to press it really hard onto the block by rubbing under and transfer the ink that way. And then I spent a couple of days just auditioning this print of the woman under the oak tree.

And then I did a series inspired by the Elegies. And then when the publishers came to me after story lines and said, Have you got an idea for another book? I thought, Well, I've got the collection of illustrations just ready to have words put around them. And so that was how World came to be.

decided, I'm assuming you decided that the illustrations were going to be replaced by music, folk songs. Did you make those songs and how did you decide to do that?

aloud of a book. And when it comes to medieval, using the Middle Ages as a key for storytelling, you can't get away from the fact that stories were everywhere, in every medium in medieval culture that are painted onto the walls of both chambers and woven into tapestries and in song or spoken over instruments, and they're on caskets and all kinds of things. I'd also I've been producing songs anyway, because I'm not I'm not a highly trained musician or anything like that.

I used to sit down at the piano when I was struggling to find the emotional crux of a story, because when you're retelling medieval stories, you've got to find, I think, the thing in it that matters to you emotionally so that you can try and engage a modern readership and enjoy the process yourself. So I would sit down and try and find a chord sequence that kind of sounded like the story or what I cared about in the story and maybe put

some words to it. And I did the same with Wild, and I thought, and it's such an immersive world anyway, the Elegies are so immersive. It just seemed right to try that out. And it was. It's great because it's not it's not authentic at all in the sense of it's not on the liar or using any medieval instruments apart from the Voice. But I hope it is authentic in the sense that though it's all

in the service of the story. So the first the story for the song, for the Wife's Lament chapter, the Earth chapter, is a kind of scandi noir, metal, seething sort of song. But then the one for the Heaven chapter, the Paradise chapter, is poorer and a lot more kind of traditional in that sense, and perhaps more

euphoric and hopefully beautiful. And so I hoped that it would like, as the illustrations do, just kind of give a give an extra emotional nudge to the reader to kind of feel what that chapter has to offer, as well as kind of immersing themselves in the non-fiction, the facts and the quotes from Bede and what sort of things that are in there to.

literature that way. So I listen to a lot of audiobooks when I'm making pictures, but it also is a shame if the if the audiobook is is, as you say, like lacking something that the physical book has. So I hoped that by offering music it was a different product and that would be, yeah. And you could feel as though you were getting the audiobook and something that more right.

like. So it's so close to being announced.

it's and it's contingent on that on their worlds. And so for me, it's so exciting because it's really building up a secondary fantasy worldview, actually, because in both of these books and in this next one, you're kind of putting medieval goggles on. There's magical realism. One does can happen, Giants can walk the earth, miracles can occur, Wales can pose as islands and

drag you to the abyss. But the great thing about this current project for me is seeing all of those connections yet again and and seeing them kind of get more complicated and bigger as as this world emerges. So I'm hoping that for readers of Story Land and Wild, this next one will keep on reinforcing what the other two have put in place and add to it as well. In this delicious world of the medieval imagination, there is such a thing.

which is the Latin for history, and it will be great to see you on there and I will keep posting about forthcoming projects. Thank you guys so much for having me. It's been lovely.

Mythology of Britain and Wild Tales from early medieval Britain in the show Notes and Medieval Archives dot com slash 89. There's also links to her Instagram and Twitter accounts. You should follow one or both of those to stay up to date about her upcoming book. It sounds like another great read. If you're enjoying podcast. Easiest way to support us is to tell your friends and shared on social media. If you're listening on your smartphone, you can send them a link right

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