A Summer Wind among the Alders (Speaks of Lludd and Llefelys)

JOURNAL ENTRY

3rd July, Thursday

“Walking up the hill.
 The grass crackles and scrunches
 With each step.

If I closed my eyes
 I would have said
 I was walking through deep snow
 If it were not for the hum of bees
 And the wind that wraps me in warmth.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

All day, the clouds have hung angry and heavy, growling and oppressive. A few specks of rain have danced on the wind, but nothing more. Everything feels frontal and unsettled. The wind skims the water’s surface, painting ripples that catch the dull grey of the snarling sky.  

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness of a sultry midsummer night to wherever you are.

I was hoping you’d come. It is so good to see you. Quickly come inside and make yourself comfortable before the brewing storm eventually breaks, if it ever does. It looks like you've made it just in time, large spots of rain are beginning to patter and drum. The kettle is on, the biscuit barrel has been restocked, and is on the side. So, come on in, and welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS

Bedstraw. Meadowsweet. Misty veils of lace and tiny stars that soften and glow along the water's edge. Now is the time for the hedgerows and banksides to foam with floral froth, as if the great rolling wave of midsummer is about to break. In this way, nature surfs the seasons.

Summer grasses, brittle and browning into the honey-coloured tawny browns, snap and rattle in the broiling winds. The earth beneath them cracks, as if open mouthed and pleading for rain. Peaks of heat come and go, but the temperatures remain a little higher than average. Today, it felt stormy. Heavy skies seemed to press down on the gently folding fields – although, in fact, they were still actually quite high – and it felt like rain. The wind truculent and stormy. It was, for the first time in a while that it felt a little like a typical British summer’s day. Warm, but overcast and the trace rain in the wind. But none came. The little rain we’ve had, doesn’t even wet the ground.

Nevertheless, fruit are multiplying on the trees. I have never seen the plum tree so full and after the bumper crop from the young apple tree last year, even though it's little more than an established sapling, I wasn’t expecting much this year, but its branches a weighed low with apples. Sloe are also turning midnight blue, although still bullet hard. There’s a bee’s nest in one of the nearby fields. A constant stream clamber or fly out of their tunnel. Already, they are making short work plums. They're doing well, although I am half expecting to find that it's been dug up by a badger in the night. Complaints about the number of wasps have gone up. I keep quiet about the bees. It’s hard to be a bee in a world when most people think bumble bees are the only type of bee.  

So far, it’s also been a good year here for frogs. I have never seen so many tiny froglets, clambering and scampering through the grass. However, this might be the result of the short grass getting scorched and making them easier to spot than in previous years. It is a lovely sight though, first thing in the morning; a migration from land to water.

And the ducks are regrouping, gathering in larger numbers around the boats. It’s getting harder to distinguish the male from the female. This year’s juvenile drakes have as yet to shed their tawny uniforms, although one or two bottle-green feathers are becoming visible, and a number of males are also in moult and have shed the garish plumage of their natty head feather. This is probably the main reason for them gathering into groups. When they lose the ability to fly, there is safety in numbers.

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

A SUMMER WIND AMONG THE ALDERS (SPEAKS OF LLUDD AND LLEFELYS)

There’s a summer wind playing among the alders.

The evening is growing late, although the sun is still a hand’s breadth above the skyline ribbed with the blue hills of Shropshire and the mountains of far distant Powys. Old hills, old lands. The air is still baked with the heat of today despite a gusty wind blowing in from the west. These times always put me in mind of the line, “There’s a warm wind blowing the stars arounds, I’d really love to see you tonight.” Although, right now there are no stars and I am not sure who I would really love to see tonight. But there IS a warm wind and if there were stars above, and the piling clouds would part for us to see them, I am sure it would be blowing them around.

Listen to the sigh of wind and leaf.

Behind us on our left is a mature ash and to the right are a stand of tall alder. Their thick foliage offered very welcome shade this afternoon. When it’s hot, stay close to trees, is my motto. Although, even with that you need caution. The long dry spell has meant that some trees are having to shed limbs, resulting in a sudden thud to disturb the walker or the boater. At this time of year, it doesn’t take much of a breeze to make the trees talk.

Listen to the ancient music of the wind in the trees….

If we listen to the myths and legends of old, we need to tread cautiously here too. This is old music, untamed, unclaimed, with its claws still undrawn. This music, can be rough music, for humans, at least. But we ignore it at our peril. Listen to the oak and willow whisper, “The man you have made king has donkey’s ears.” “You can fool yourselves as much as you want, but there is no fooling us.” Oh, yes, myth and legend still speak to power even today. 

The other week, a poster on social media who calls themselves ‘Hermit of Everything’ posted these words which, at the time, struck a real chord with me: “We tilt back our head to swallow the sun. Letting radiance seep beneath our skin and sending our fingertips glowing. Then at night we reach up and paint the stars, following the lines that tell a story. We are the storytellers, the makers of myth, remembrance of gods.”

I think what struck home so forcibly in these words was that I had tried to make sort of a similar – or at least related – point in the last episode – or it might have been one of those just before it. Whatever the case, it was a thought that has been continually echoing around inside my head for quite a while. That, and the problem of how do we, as a culture, relate to myth and legend after having become so divorced and disconnected from them? How can we use and listen to them, when we have cultivated a mindset that can only process writings in certain rigid ways. That insists on reading myth in the same way as a scientific textbook and seems to be incapable of accepting the profound wisdom in the semantically and literary nonsensical. When even our imaginations have become stunted by what we view as logic and reason, and our genre of fantasy must come tempered with large fistfuls of realism and magic needs to comply with the laws of Euclid, Darwin, and rationality.

That is not to say that there is no logic or undergirding reasoning to the older, more ancient myths. They too comply with their own sets of laws. There’s a sophistication and a coherency to them that flows on a number of levels. Not linear, the way we expect stories to work today, but circular, helical, a weaving of Moebius strands. The problem is that they have become so far removed from our consciousness that we have become all but culturally illiterate to read them. Myths and legend run along a deeper current, out of sight to us, but, nevertheless, still speaking powerfully to us, if we let them.  

On an evening like this, roiling clouds and summer wind among the alders, what old stories still hang upon the air and mark the songlines to signpost our presents and into futures? Evenings like this are made for sharing stories.

So, let me tell you an old story about an ancient king called Lludd and his brother Llefelys. Well, as stories go, it’s not really that old. We first hear of it in the great collection of Middle Welsh stories and songs, the Mabinogion. Actually, it occurs in a number of places within early English and Welsh literature, like Geoffry of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (written around 1136), and the Welsh Triads, written around a century later. But it is version we can find in the Mabinogion that is thought to preserve the quality of its antecedents most powerfully.

At this point, I feel I need to point out that stories like these – and especially ones much older ones than this – morph and change and maybe even distort – with the telling. These stories belong to the pre-Christian, pre-writing, past, the forms we have them have they've been flattened and straightened by the setsquare and slide rule of Christian teaching and understanding. In fact, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s chief interest in Lludd – now in its Anglicized form of Lud (L.U.D.) was to record importance as the first king to found the city of London (named after him). The account of the story we are about to hear, is almost certainly a later scribal addition. Geoffrey had other fish to fry than recounting old stories. And like other contemporary clerical chroniclers (like Gildas and Nennius) a key objective in his ‘history’ was to establish and embed the story of the Britons into the biblical narrative of the ongoing history of Israel. Their task was Heilsgeschichte (sacred history) drawing the threads of the history of salvation through the scrambled lineage of Britain’s petty kings and chiefdoms. Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nennius also make great play of linking our kings with the heroes of – for them – the much more recent histories of Greek and Roman worlds. The first histories of Britain make uncomfortable and awkward reading to modern patriots. It is somewhat ironic that today, the figures described in the great tales and fables of the past are being used to establish an identity of true Englishness, are the very same figures who earlier were so eagerly viewed as of foreign ancestry and who legitimacy to rule was based on precisely that fact, but for exactly the same reasons – a nation in search of an identity. History and nationalistic myth-making are often closely entwined.

But all this is leading us too, too, far away from the sounds of summer wind among the alders and the rattling call of the magpie. There are new stories to be told and old ones to be heard.

Now, listen. Long, long, ago, perhaps on a day like this – bleached by sun and scolded by wind – when the alders roared and the wilder creatures slunk low in the shadows, a storyteller cleared his throat and began to speak,

Now, listen. Long, long ago, on the eve of Britain there lived here a king, who was young, and fierce, and generous, and he ruled his people with wisdom and grace. And not long after this king took his throne, three great oppressions befell his kingdom. Here begins the tale of King Lludd. Hear it well, for we too have faced conflict and tyrannies and know those times when our hearts fail within us. We too face uncertainty and fires so powerful that they appear unquenchable. That is the nature of the world, and of kingdoms, and of kings.

Lludd had a brother Llefelys, who through marriage, became the king of France. The brotherly bonds that held these two men together was not just fraternal, they loved each other and each respected the other for their strengths and stood by them in the times of their weakness. It was told how each would seek the other’s council in matters of wisdom and statesmanship.

Lludd, the chroniclers say, “was a good warrior, and benevolent and bountiful in giving food and drink to all who sought it.” And so, under such a wise and prudent king the land should have flourished and prospered. However, in time, three oppressions fell upon the island of Britain, each one more terrible than the last, and the like of which had not been known of before.

The first was the arrival of a strange race of people, the Coraniaid. Fairy folk, some story tellers say and their hearing was so great that any word (no matter how softly whispered in the secret places) that was caught on the wind, they could hear. There was no conversation that took place on the island, from Land’s End in the south to the Orkneys in the far northern, that they didn’t know about. Their ears were as sharp and as acute as the willow’s feathered leaves and those of the alder who sigh above us tonight. Because of this, no harm could be done to them. Every plan was foiled. Every attack met with complete resistance. This was an ancient land, paralysed, locked tight in the grip of total and universal surveillance.

The second oppression was even greater than the first. Every year, on the eve of May Day above every hearth in the centre of every family home in the land there occurred such a terrifying and lethal scream. It was so horrific and so loud that it was said that men’s courage turned to water, and every woman who was bearing a child would miscarry. It was also said that the haunting sound of it rang so deadly in the ears of the young, both young men and young women, that it sent them spiralling into madness. Even animals and trees, the earth and water were left barren. Instead of being a day of fertility and festivity, May Days dawned sterile, and desolate. The crops wilted, the fruit blossoms turned brown and dropped, the rivers and pools stank with the smell of rotting fish. No one knew what caused this scream or where it came from, only that year after year, after year, it happened. Sages and wizards, saints and warriors were consulted, but no one knew how to rid the nation of this terrifying persecution. This was genocide, or ethnic cleansing, on a national scale – the wiping out of a people and the destruction of the land to make it uninhabitable; environmental warfare, ecocide. Tyrannised by the Coraniaid who seemed to be able to read even their deepest secrets whispered to only the dark, and haunted by the oppressive shadow of the scream that they knew would be coming.

How do you even begin to fight, to appropriately respond, to the immensity of all that had befallen this island kingdom? But Lludd and Britain’s torments did not end there. There was a further, third oppression that befell the land. One that was equally as puzzling and equally as devastating. And this third affliction went like this.

Any attempt to store surplus from the meagre harvests that had survived the howling roar of the eve of May scream in barns or storehouses, whether that was crops, meat, beer disappeared the night that it was stored. Even when placed under lock and key and guarded by watchmen, when the doors were opened the very next day all would be found would be an empty room smelling of must and stale light.       

King Lludd was a sad and worried man as he watched his frightened people suffer under the three torments that had befallen them. The enormity of it all was paralysing. How could you attack or even challenge something so powerful, so pervasive, so great? Lludd and his court advisors were at a complete loss. Even planning a response, even talking about the catastrophes were fruitless. However, Lludd was a wise man and recognised that as great as the first oppression was, its cause was known – unliked the latter two. This meant that there was a better hope of ending this oppression than the other two.

At his wits end, Lludd and a handful of his closest advisors and warriors silently, without word and with muffled footsteps, slipped out of the court and threaded their wordless way through forest and over downs to the south coast where they found a boat and set off for France to consult Lludd’s brother King Llefelys. As they put out to sea and rowed with strong oars into the channel, in the moonlight, they espied another boat coming towards them. Had the Coraniaid, despite all their painstaking precautions, got wind of their plan and were set to, to thwart them? As the two boats closed in, Lludd’s oarsmen’s arms trembled with fear, unable to even pull the clean stroke. However, Lludd knew his brother and his brother knew Lludd, and Lludd stood bold in the prow of his small currach boat and his face broke into a smile that had not been seen for years and years. “Well met, brother!” he called across the gloaming waters.

The old story tellers tell us that Llefelys already knew about the troubles that had come upon the land and his heart had gone out to his dear brother and his people. For, as the sages say, there are more allies in adversity than we realise and no oppression can keep them apart. Know you enemy is good counsel, but in doing so remember not to forget your friends. There are many who share your heart and have dreamed those same dreams that fire and comfort your darker nights.

The two brothers embraced on the gentle sea swell as gulls cried in the salty winds above their heads. But how could they share counsel without those same salty winds carrying Llefelys’ wisdom and advice back to the twitching ears of the Coraniaid?

Llefelys was a master tactician and had already devised the building of a very long brass horn that glinted in the first light of dawn. One end he held close to his mouth. The other, stretching across the water, Lludd placed close up to his ear. That way, Llefelys’ words could not be picked up by the salty coastal winds and conveyed to the Coraniaid.    

However, when each brother tried to talk to the other, all the other heard was a vicious stream of insult and violent threats and profanity. It was good that each brother loved the other, for it could have quickly ended in war. But, wise of counsel, Llefelys was quick to note what had happened. In the making of the brass horn, a demon had crept inside and was turning words of wisdom and perception into hostility and animosity. And we all know, even today, how easily allies can be split by words of hate and how easily they multiply. How many a good cause has been thwarted not by the tactics of the opposition but by the infighting that erupts seemingly out of nowhere among the allies? These old stories know the modern world very well.

Quickly, Llefelys picked up a pitcher of good wine that he had beside him, and he poured it down the length of the horn; thus, washing away the demon and allowing the conversation to proceed unobstructed.

In this way, Llefelys instructed Lludd how to rid his kingdom of the three great oppressions that had fallen upon his land – and all without a single word reaching the itching ears of the Coraniaid.

For the first oppression, Lludd crushed up some magic insects and mixed them with water. The concoction thus made, Llefelys told him would be poisonous to Coraniaid when sprinkled on them, but harmless to humans. Therefore, when Lludd returned to London he called a conference where all should attend, both those of his own race and the race of the Coraniaid. The purpose of this conference, he announced, was his intention of making peace between his people and this strange fairy race who had oppressed them so severely. In due time, all the peoples gathered for the great conference. Lludd opened the proceedings by sprinkling the magical concoction over all those assembled. Sure enough, as Llefelys had promised, in this way the Coraniaid were driven out of the land. 

Another version of this story was that rather than offering Lludd some magic insects, Llefelys told Lludd about a herb that grew abundantly in the meadows and byways of Britain which would be lethal to Coraniaid. I like this version better, as it goes on to tell how Lludd, on returning to Britain, set all his people to go into the fields and waysides to pick this flower and to combine it with water and bring it to the conference (without, of course, informing them of the real reason). I like the way, the solution rests on the way this powerless, paralysed people come together. After all, more than one historian of ancient history has taught us that the great social paradigm shifts that have occurred in human history rarely derive from the actions and ideas of the political and ruling elites; in most cases they are driven by the people.

The second oppression was dealt in this way.

The screams that have caused such devastation to the land are those of the red dragon lives in a cave far underground and she is being attacked by another dragon, a white one, who has come from overseas. The screams are the sounds of pain from the red dragon’s battle injuries as she fights for the land. Llefelys instructed Lludd to find the exact spot that was the very centre of the land and there dig a large pit and place in it a vast cauldron filled with mead and pasted with honey and then conceal it with cloth of the finest brocade. Lludd found the spot, which is where Oxford now stands, and followed Llefelys’ instructions.

On the eve of May Day, Lludd climbed a hill and saw the writhing figures of two gigantic dragons, one red and one white. They fought and battled, biting and snarling, their bodies whipping like snakes, their vicious claws and armoured scales flashing in the late April sunlight. After a while, exhausted, the two dragons plunged to earth, straight towards the spot where Lludd had concealed the cauldron. Not seeing the trap. Covered in rich brocaded cloth, they fell into the cauldron and there they both gorged on the mead and the honey until not a drop of either was left. The story tellers say that how the dragons, filled with mead and honey, they curled up together and fell asleep like two little kittens. Then, as Lludd watched, spell bound at this transformation, a further transformation happened as both turned into pigs. Ludd leapt down into the cauldron, taking hold of the ends of the brocaded cloth that the dragons had landed upon in their exhaustion, wrapped up the two, now sleeping, pigs and placed them in a waiting wagon. Crossing the great silver ribbon of the River Severn into Wales, across mountains wreathed in heather and cloud, and that sang with waterfalls and eagle calls, Lludd placed them in two stone chests secure in the heart of Snowdonia.

Here the story bisects and follows new routes, as is the nature of stories like these. One picks up on the tale of the red dragon buried in the heart of Wales and it is from these stories that, even today, the red dragon is used as the proud symbol of Wales and the Welsh people.

That leaves the third and final oppression; the mystery of the empty barns and store houses. Once again, Lludd followed precisely the instructions of his far-seeing brother, Llefelys.

One night, after seeing his main store house filled to the brim with surplus grain and flagons of best wine, Lludd ordered his perplexed watchmen to stand down for the night. “Tonight,” he told them, “will be my turn to be watchman.” And so, Lludd, settled down on a small wooden stool beside the one padlocked door. Beside him sat a large barrel filled with water – fresh from the Thames and still smelling of water weed, fin, eel and pike.        

Night fell and darkness deepened. Stars fled before the racing clouds. The thin finger-nail crescent of the moon shone cold and lonely that night. First silence fell, but for the scurry of rats and the mournful whoop of a distant owl. And then, as he sat, strange eerie music began to whisper and unfurl like phantom night mists. It sounded unearthly, haunting, unsettling. And yet, at the same time, Lludd began to feel his eyelids get heavier and heavier. He stood up and plunged his head into the barrel of water. For a while, the music abated, and then it returned. This time as beautiful and beguiling as the first was unsettling. Again, Lludd’s eyelids drooped. He fought the tiredness with the ferocity of a she-lion defending her cubs. His eyes felt as if they were filled with dry dust and grit and no matter how much he rubbed them, they demanded to be closed. Again, Lludd plunged his head and then his feet into the icy Thames water and then shook himself free of drowsiness like a dog. A third time the music came. This time soft and sweet as soporific as a children’s lullaby. Lludd’s head dropped to his chest. His eyes felt as if honey had been poured over them and was gluing his eyelids shut. This time Lludd dragged his exhausted body to the barrel and plunged head first into it. When he climbed out, he shook himself as a polar bear does when climbing onto an icefloe.

And so the night wore on – until, look! In the faint penumbra of veiled starlight, the bulky shape of a giant, schooled in the arts of magic and wizardry, can be seen stealthily climbing the storehouse steps. Wearing full battle armour, the giant carries with him a large wickerwork hamper. Lludd, watched, cunning and ready. His eye’s sharp and wicked as a wolf as the giant placed his hand on the padlock which sprang open to his whispered command and then opened the door. Once inside the store house the giant proceeded to empty its entire contents into his wickerwork hamper. And strange it was to Lludd, stranger than the enchanting music, stranger than the size of the man, stranger even than his ability to command locks to open, the strangest of all was that he could fit the entire contents of a large storehouse into one wickerwork hamper.

At this, Lludd leapt to his feet and, with sword in hand, cried, “Stop! How dare you insult me and despoil the land that is in my care. How dare you cause hunger and grief fall upon my nation.”

The giant enchanter swung round, sword raised, and there was a mighty encounter. Sparks flew from iron on iron and iron on stone. Sword light flashed in the pale moonshine. The battle waged long and hard, but in the end, Lludd wrestled the enchanter to the ground where he begged for mercy and the man sought his protection.

Lludd agreed to spare the giant magician’s life in exchange for his service and the reparation of all he had stolen.

The Mabinogion ends this tale with these words:

[READING]

And so it ends.

Or does it? Until the next time, at least.

GK Chesterton “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

Perhaps that is what these old stories will tell us if we let them speak. Not that the world is hurting and the people in it are often broken and capable of such evil and cruelty. We know that already. What they tell us is that, no matter how bleak things feel, there are paths that can be taken to restore the things that have been broken and amidst all the hurting and wounding, there is a path to bring healing. Perhaps that is what the story of LLudd and Llefelys tells us. Perhaps that is what all the old stories tell us. Perhaps, if we listen carefully, that is what the summer wind among the alders is whispering to us: “The dragons we face, can be overcome.”

SIGNING OFF 

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG