Alfred K. Siewers

Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac's Mound and Grendel's Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building

“Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building.” Scholars have long noted differences in treatments of nature between Anglo-Saxon and ot...

Desert Islands: Europe’s Atlantic Archipelago as Ascetic Landscape

In James Fenimore Cooper’s nineteenth-century American novel The Deerslayer, the hero Natty Bumppo and a friend approach the lake at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, a huge watershed at the heart of what used to be the great Eastern Woodlands of America: The motion of the canoe had been attended with little or no noise, the frontier-men from habit getting accustomed to caution in most of their movements, and it now lay on the glassy water, appearing to float in air, partaking of the breathing stillness that seemed to pervade the entire scene.1

Paradise in the Sea: An Early Geography of Desire

The ninth-century Periphyseon (De Diusione Naturae) by the Hiberno-Latin philosopher John Scottus Eriugena culminates early Irish Sea writings on nature from the standpoint of intellectual history, although the book was banned for centuries by the Western church and, despite renewed interest in recent years, remains little read (there is no easily accessible English-language translation, for example) and less understood given its early medieval experiential approach to philosophy.1 The work’s symbolism of nature—its sea of divinity and clouds of theophany, its cosmic tree uniting Paradise and earth, and its fourfold textualiconography of a cosmic landscape—remains indispensable, however, for understanding larger cultural contexts of the naturally miraculous Otherworld trope, which move it even beyond the Heideggerian sense of region explored in the last chapter into a more elemental realm. The cosmic-landscape symbolism of the Periphyseon more than its philosophy forms the focus of this chapter, which examines how, in effect, Eriugena’s cosmic iconography extends a place-region analogous in qualities to the Irish Sea Otherworld onto a Creation-wide scale. In other words, the text illustrates views of nature implicit in the Otherworld trope, in ways relevant to current environmental philosophy. Written around the same time as the formation of core literary narratives of Tochmarc Etaine, Tain Bu Cuailnge, and key Irish sources for the Welsh Mabinogi, by an Irish author in Francia with an educational background in the archipelagic milieux of those other texts, the Periphyseon challenges modern assumptions that the distinctive early Irish exegetical concern with miracles as natural “was not tied to a wider theoretical outlook,” but does so with its own iconography.

A Cosmic Imaginarium

The environmental sense of text as image evoked by the color-term glas requires further examining of the Otherworld trope in relation to early medieval visual theory. The “problem” of landscape in Tain Bo Cuailnge and its context in the Ulster cycle provides a place to start. The Celticist Francesco Benozzo notes that Tain Bo Cuailnge offers “mere allusions to landscapes, sometimes so vague that they seem to belong to a stylised convention.” But the Tain’s allusive landscape also has been highlighted by an able translator, Thomas Kinsella (among many others), for showcasing topography, “a continuing preoccupation of early and medieval Irish literature.” While the Tain in successive versions does not feature modern-style landscape, it is grounded and focused on places, spaces, and terrain on Ireland, mythically contextualized around the time of Christ. To read the Tain as a literary landscape that in a modern sense is “not there” but nonetheless integrates tradition with physical topography is necessarily to consider its context in the Ulster Cycle and related stories in the Mythological Cycle, all featuring landscape in which otherworldly and human realms interweave with natural topography. The role of such landscape echoes textually Ernst Gombrich’s view of the function of colors in visual art as Benozzo restates it, metonymic in at once being part of reality and representing it,3 but with words in topography taking the place of colors in images. The landscape of the Tain as textual image related to environment subverts Augustine’s paralleling and hierarchizing of reading over viewing, so influential in the West.4

Archipelago and Empire

Many cultures describe their “story-shaped world”1 spatially in terms of a household, hall, or home. Delaware Indian traditions did this in tales of a cosmic longhouse. Early Irish texts sometimes described the three households of heaven, hell, and earth.3 Paul’s cosmic use of the term economia,4 and the modern neologism ecology, both harken back etymologically and semantically to a view of the earth or cosmos as a household. In early vernacular narrative landscapes of Europe’s Atlantic archipelago, the preeminent formative Insular motifs of the “cosmic longhouse” arguably were the otherworldly mound-portals or side of early Irish stories, together with that of the lord’s mead hall of Anglo-Saxon literature.5 These could be extended into larger landscapes, as well. As we saw in chapter three, the Irish mirrored the chthonic Otherworld in the sea. But in Anglo-Saxon hagiography, the eighth-century locale of St. Guthlac’s mound mirrored the mead hall in Beowulf as transformative citadel-tomb opposed to surrounding fenlands, even as the sea figured alienation in Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Reading the Otherworld Environmentally

In the early Irish story Tochmarc Etaine (“The Wooing of Etain”), the Otherworld ruler Midir and his former wife Etain are reunited, a millennium after magic had broken up their marriage, near the royal mounds at Temair (Tara) where she lived with her husband, the high king of Ireland. Midir reminds Etain, who has been reborn in cycles of new life, of his Otherworld realm in the landscape of Ireland and her old name in it, Be Find, or “fair lady.”

Archipelago and Otherworld

In the early Irish story Immram Brain, whose origins probably trace back at least to the lost eighth-century Book of Druimm Snechtai,1 the legendary Irish ruler Bran mac Febail is near home when he hears music behind him. Although he keeps looking back for the source of it, the music always stays elusively behind. He falls asleep finally in its sweetness. When he wakes, he is lying next to a silver branch whose white blossoms are hard to distinguish from the stem. When he takes the branch into the stronghold where his warriors are gathered, suddenly they see a strangely dressed woman, who sings a song of the otherworldly realm Emain and tells of how she has brought from there a silver branch of an apple tree. So sweetly she sings of her distant otherworldly island that Bran and a party of men sail off to find it, only to discover in their many adventures that the sea itself is an Otherworld, and that their home cojoins this multidimensional archipelago of elements and beings that ultimately makes it an Otherworld as well. While on his adventure, Bran meets Manannan mac Lir, a sea god who shows him that the ocean is teeming with hidden life. Addressing Bran, Manannan says: Caine amrae lasin mBran ina churchan tar muir nglan; os me im charput do chein, is mag scothach imma-reid.

Colors of the Winds, Landscapes of Creation

After rereading the Otherworld trope and Eriugena’s philosophy in terms of connections between environment and text in early Irish Sea cultures, examining the Irish color term glas in two other literary tropes can highlight environment as text in archipelagic ascetic practices. The colors of the winds and colors of martyrdom in early Irish tradition illustrate how color can textually and iconographically express the fluidity of the boundary between body and idea, human and nonhuman, physical and spiritual. In them, color becomes a metonymic expression of landscape, linking the visual and the textual. The primary overlap between the two tropes is found in environmental and cultural associations of the term glas, best translated as “the color of sky in water.” Glas is the color of a southwest wind, from the quadrant of Ireland oriented by tradition toward the Otherworld and by geography toward the ocean. Glas is also the color of a nonviolent ascetic “martyrdom” involving strict self-discipline, glasmartre. The latter encompasses specific bodily and environmental practices, and in them its color evokes biblical aerial waters and clouds associated both with Eriugena’s cosmology and hesychastic-style exercises linking the body and physical world with the uncreated light of divine energies. These motifs of the winds and martyrdom, in the relation of shared colors, evoke the physical context of the Irish Sea archipelago itself.