Richard Dawkins’s followers will no doubt be quick to claim this is another example of the heinous effect of ‘the God delusion’. But they would be wrong. Under charity law, the Church of England has to diligently pursue all of its debtors, and, coupled with the laws on ‘chancel repair liability’ which date back to Valor Ecclesiasticus in 1535, they have no choice.

At the same time, there can’t be anyone in the entire world who believes it’s right for Andrew and Gail Wallbank to be forced to sell their house to pay for repairs to a public building. And they are not the only ones. There is a long list of people who have been stung this way over the years, and the list is going to get longer by 2013.

For more information, see Chancel.Org.UK, which explains how a change in the law will mean that the Church of England has until 2013 to register its interest in properties with Chancel liability. To see the campaign site of the Wallbanks, look here. The official line is available here.

What lunatic changed the law in that way?

(You know the answer to this one, but, in case you don’t, the legislation is the Land Registration Act 2002.)

Since the Church of England is powerless to extricate itself from a situation which bankrupts ordinary people and brings the church, and thus the entire Christian faith, into disrepute, the government ought to have intervened to simply cancel chancel liability. This would free the Church of England to pursue grants and even Lottery money. This is in fact what the Law Commission and the Church of England Synod recommended in the 1980s.

Parliament long ago abolished tithing laws. Blasphemy laws have largely been set aside. But the Chancel Repair Act itself was updated as recently as 1932.

In 2008, the Prime Minister responded to a petition against it as follows:
“Chancel Repair Liability has existed for several centuries and the Government has no plans to abolish it or to introduce a scheme for its redemption. The Government has, however, acted to make the existence of the liability much simpler to discover. From October 2013, chancel repair liability will only bind buyers of registered land if it is referred to on the land register. By that time, virtually all freehold land in England and Wales will be registered. The Government believes that this approach strikes a fair balance between the landowners subject to the liability and its owners who are, in England, generally Parochial Church Councils and, in Wales, the Representative Body of the Church in Wales.
“The Government acknowledges that the existence of a liability for chancel repair will, like any other legal obligation, affect the value of the property in question, but in many cases this effect can be mitigated by relatively inexpensive insurance. It is for the parties involved in a transaction to decide whether or not to take out insurance.”

As far as the Wallbanks are concerned, whatever action is taken is now almost certainly too late.

Parliamentary Questions should have been asked. But it seems that they were not.

We are therefore left with the entirely unsatisfactory statement made by Mr David Lammy, Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, in 2002: “The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs (Mr. David Lammy): On 14 September 2003 a Transitional Provisions Order relating to the status of chancel repair liability was made under the Land Registration Act 2002. The making of the order follows the reversal by the House of Lords in June 2003 of the Court of Appeal’s decision in Wallbank v Parochial Church Council of the Parish of Aston Cantlow and Wilmcote with Billesley, Warwickshire. The order provides that, for a period of 10 years from the coming into force of the Act on 13 October 2003, chancel repair liability will remain an interest that binds successive owners of land even though it is not protected by an entry in a register kept by the Land Registry. As no land registration fee is payable for applications to protect similar ancient property rights, such as payments in lieu of tithe, Crown rents and manorial rights, the Land Registry intends to waive the fee for applications to protect chancel repair liability for the 10 year period.”

This is pure madness. The government ought to have abolished chancel repair liability outright and filled the short-fall from the public purse — remember, that, at the time, the public purse was overflowing, long before we bailed out the banks and put the nation into debt.

The government can still act. In its dying days, it can set aside a historic injustice: rather like the rhetoric Gordon Brown used in his speech today to drum up a faint pulse among the faithful. While it is certain that Labour can move no major new legislation between now and its forthcoming electoral defeat, it should be able to sort out this mess. Nobody will oppose it, nobody will try to talk it out in committee.

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Martin Turner at his home in Marlcliff, Warwickshire.

I’m still chairman of Warwickshire County Fencing Union, and West Midlands Fencing Captain, but, sadly, I’ve had to miss the start of the fencing competition series in the run up to the General Election, which will mean that my ranking will plummet as the year goes by. For those who are interested, my best ever ranking was UK 39th in Men’s Foil, and I held on to a spot in the top fifty for a full competition season in that year.

Politically, I will be fighting for the Stratford on Avon seat at the General Election, God willing, which is expected to be May or the very beginning of June. Liberal Democrats have come a long way over the last two years: we won the biggest swing against the Tories anywhere in the UK in May 2008, and the second biggest in the County Council elections in June this year, also coming 34th out of all districts for the Liberal Democrats in the European elections which were held on the same day.

We’ve started attending Bidford on Avon Baptist Church which, if you live in the area, meets in the Crawford Memorial Hall on Sundays at 10.30 am. It’s a warm, welcoming group of people, and a good place to visit if you are wondering about God.

We are also straight into the thick of things, as Tory councillors on Warwickshire County Council have decided to axe our local Fire Station, along with several others in the constituency. Quite simply, they must be stopped.

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1 Christian parties do not stay Christian for long
We don’t have a history of Christian parties in Britain, but they have lots of them in mainland Europe. The problem is, that it’s fairly hard to identify what the ‘Christian’ component of the Christian Democrats is. This is a problem which has particularly taxed the Dutch, whose own struggles with ‘Christian’ parties that were no longer Christian enough, resulted in a baffling 23 distinct Christian parties during the last hundred or so years. A fascinating timeline of their mergers, splits and acquisitions is presented in this Wikipedia article. Christianity grew up as a counter-culture within the Roman state, and flourished despite intense persecution for around 300 years. It was Constantine, the only emperor to be proclaimed in Britain, who proclaimed toleration for Christians in 313 AD, followed later by the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the empire. We can argue backwards and forwards about the real impact of this, but, certainly, by the fall of the Roman empire, a great many practices, symbols and philosophies from the pagan world had been adopted into Christianity, and the track record of supposedly Christian emperors was, to say the least, patchy, when it came to implementing the teaching of Jesus Christ.

Clearly, in the modern world, no Christian party is going to advocate persecution of non-Christian minorities, or crusades to recover lost ‘Christian’ lands, but the history of a too-close union between Christianity and political power is that the, quite soon, Christian regimes and Christian parties lose the Christian distinctive, and become just like other regimes and other parties. For Christians — such as myself — this creates huge problems. Get into any argument with atheists about the existence of God, and they are certain to bring up the Crusades and the Inquisition as examples of the malign impact of religion on the world. The solution to this problem is to challenge them to identify exactly how the philosophy and practices of the Crusades and the Inquisition were derived from the teachings of Jesus. In fact, they derived almost exclusively from the philosophy and practices of the Roman empire. But, at this point, we, as Christians, need to step away, and accept that applying the label ‘Christian’ to really any brand of politics creates enormous risks for the faith itself.

Over the last years, we have seen the spectacle of American presidential candidates scrabbling to present how ‘Christian’ they are. But, with the exception of Jimmy Carter (and, we hope, Obama), their actions once inside the White House have shown no particular Christian influence. If the only purpose of having ‘Christian’ parties is to bring out a captive vote, which can then be treated in a cavalier fashion, just as Tony Blair was able to treat the left-wing vote, then we would be better off without such parties.

2 Christians are called to be involved in mainstream society
Jesus called his followers to be salt and light in society. Through the pages of the New Testament, we see the early Christians engaged in all manner of ordinary, secular jobs. One of them was a city administrator. At no point do any of the New Testament writers suggest that Christians should distance themselves from secular politics. Going a little further back, the book of Daniel presents a clear picture of godly action by a civil servant and later prime minister in a thoroughly pagan regime.
The moment that we create Christian parties, we put a dilemma before Christian voters: should we vote for the best candidate, or should we vote for the Christian party. In some cases we may even be faced with the challenge of voting for the best candidate who is a Christian in a mainstream party, or the Christian party candidate.
Great Christian politicians such as Gladstone and Wilberforce were Christians active in ordinary mainstream parties. Their influence was much greater because they were involved in regular politics.
At the European elections, which traditionally favour minor parties, less than a quarter of a million people voted for the Christian parties, and their average vote was just 1.64%. But even if all regular church-goers had voted for them, they would not have attracted more than 10% of the vote. Of course, with a low turn-out, as we saw for the last election, 10% of the total electorate, if every church-goer voted, would be 20% of the actual vote — enough to put a Christian MEP into every region, but nowhere near enough to make those MEPs any more than an irritation, in the way of UKIP or the BNP.
For Christian politicians to have an impact on the society in which they live, they need to work with non-Christians. Which, of course, is exactly the way of things in business, the public sector, and most of the voluntary sector. And that means being in parties made up of many kinds of people.

3 Protest votes of any kind do not work
And that brings me to my third point. Everyone likes to make a protest, and the protest vote has a long tradition in British democracy. But not a very healthy tradition. Labour voters protested in their droves at the Euro election by simply not bothering to vote. The result? Two BNP MEPs were elected. And, rather worse for Christians, these BNP MEPs actually claim to speak for Christians. As I have pointed out in a previous article, they have no credentials for doing so, and they have no track record which would support it. However, the result of all the protest voting that took place is that the BNP got seats, whereas the Christian parties got none. I struggle to believe that all the people who voted for non-mainstream parties were happy to see the BNP elected. Nonetheless, the English Democrats, the Christian parties, and Socialist Labour were each worth an average of around one and a half percent, with the others all together probably worth another couple of percent between them. Even if these votes had been evenly distributed across the three mainstream parties, it would have been enough to keep the BNP out.

I am, personally, a committed Christian, and I joined a mainstream political party because I believe that faith does matter in politics. I certainly wouldn’t agree with anyone who suggests that you should keep religion out of politics. This is a frankly baffling and illogical perspective: why should we arbitrarily reject one part of our society from having a role in our common life. We might as well suggest that scientists should keep out of politics, or musicians, or dog-owners, or people who drive particular kinds of motor-cars, or people who do not drive at all. But, just as I would advise against a ‘Science party’, or a ‘Musicians’ party’, or any other kind of single-issue or special-interest party, I would advise Christians who want to have an impact through the democratic process against Christian parties. No party can possibly have a monopoly on Christians, nor can any party guarantee its future to the extent that it can be sure it will always behave in a scrupulously Christian way. History — and mainland European politics — is littered with too many examples of people who believed passionately in what they were doing, but were also entirely wrong.

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But the ruling itself is, in a philosophical sense, a slap in the face for the advertisers. The ASA has effectively ruled that the claim is unfalsifiable, and therefore empirically meaningless. Such a ruling wouldn’t bother Christians too much, since they (that is, we) argue that empiricism is an insufficient tool for exploring the existence of God. But for the likes of Richard Dawkins, who have built their public personas on arguing that empirical evidence (remember that Doctor Who? episode?) is the measuring rod, the bus is travelling in the wrong direction.

I did urge that Christians should not contact the ASA to complain. But I knew that Stephen Green of Christian Voice would. I suspect the Dawkins-ites were rather counting on it, and were counting on the ASA ruling against the complaint.

Of more interest is Ron Heather’s decision to refuse to drive a bus with the advertisement on it. This has prompted a storm of bloggers and commentators arguing that he should have no right to refuse, and that advertisers should be allowed to put anything they like on buses, with no come back. Actually, this indicates a lamentable lack of understanding of how bus advertising works. CBS Outdoor, who sell the majority of the UK’s bus advertising, will send you quite a long list of things you can’t put on your advertisements. This includes lingerie, and any writing that looks like graffiti (I suspect because bus companies are worried it might prompt vandalism).

But Ron Heather’s decision to risk his job for the sake of a principle has gained grudging respect from most people. Whether or not you agree with his point of principle, you have to accept that for a man to put his job on the line for his beliefs is a welcome return to courage and conviction in the public arena. Of course, many people have instantly leapt in to accuse him of hypocrisy (the standard charge against Christians, whenever you can’t really think of something more substantial), but the explanations of just why this constitutes hypocrisy are sufficiently far-fetched to rebound more on the heads of the accusers than of the accused.

Considering the campaign again, I think it will eventually backfire heavily for its sponsors. It is achingly asking for the riposte “but why take the risk?”, bringing about echoes of Pascal’s Wager, a famous (although, in fact, insufficient) argument against atheism that seems to annoy atheists more than any other.

Imagine that you saw any of the following advertisements:
“The speed camera probably isn’t loaded”
“You probably won’t die in a car crash”
“You probably did turn off the gas”
Telling someone that something probably won’t happen doesn’t stop them worrying about it. Quite the contrary. And, if the millions of lottery ticket buyers are anything to go by, telling someone that something they very much hope for is unlikely to happen does nothing to stop them hoping.
If “there’s probably no God” is the strongest statement that, on reflection, atheists dare to make in public, then they have moved a long way from the certainties implied in their name.
To paraphrase a quote from the Psalms: “The fool says in his heart ‘there’s probably no God’”. Ouch.

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Actually, I’m fairly certain even the message they’ve chosen would breach the normal guidelines applying to products, though, I, for one, will not be complaining.

How’s that, you ask? Essentially, if it were a product, the advertisers would have to prove their claim that ‘God probably doesn’t exist’. But in order to prove this, they would have to find some way of quantifying ‘the probability that God doesn’t exist’. Being as there is no ISO standard on the probability of the existence of a deity, this would be tough to prove. Atheist leaders may be hoping that they get the same dispensation as the phrase ‘probably the best lager in the world’, but that was clearly a joke, and this clearly isn’t.

In reality, they are probably (and I mean a measurable probability) quite safe, because the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) doesn’t intervene on issues of a political nature, and takes a nuanced position on religious offence. More importantly, they aren’t selling a product.

I suspect, though, that half of the aim of this campaign is to spur hordes of Christians (and others) to complain vociferously. If you are a person of faith, let me urge you not to give Richard Dawkins and his crew the satisfaction. In advertising terms, it’s not very probable that this ad will achieve anything other than prompting complaints. For a start, it’s too long: the eye takes in typically 18 letters in one go, which is why bus adverts, bill-boards and newspaper headlines are usually no longer than that. Most advertisers work to the old adage ‘AIDA’, standing for ‘attention, information, decision, action’. A good ad is generally considered to have an attention getter, some informative content, something that makes you decide to buy the product or service, and a call to action. The good folks at the ASA did some research a few years ago, where they discovered that messages which work in the UK are first of all informative, then clever, and, finally, enter popular culture. In my own experience, the three other things which make or break an ad are clarity (do I get the message?), credibility (does it sound believable?), and relevance (do I care?).

The British Humanist Association may be very good at representing its members, but (my personal view) probably not going to be getting calls from other voluntary organisations asking for advice on campaigns. This is an ad which will only appeal to people who already agree with it, and (again my view) quite a few of those will be embarrassed by it. Of course, they won’t be admitting that, and certainly not to me. Well, probably not, any way.

If you’re a Christian, and have been embarrassed in the past at well-meant but unappealing church adverts, take some consolation from the fact that the other side are now facing the same thing.

PS: If you’re interested in actual debate on the existence of God, you can catch the video they shot of me (and others) at the Cambridge Union autumn 2007, on the motion (which was defeated) This House Believes that God is Dead.

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Here are some answers.

Is there Christianisation of a pagan story in Beowulf?
The answer is no, and yes. There are no specifically Christian elements in Beowulf. However, the bard at Heorot tells the story of creation from a Biblical — or more exactly, Old Testament — perspective. The question used to be asked about what a Christian bard was doing at a pagan court, but the real question should be what is a pre-Christian bard doing at a pagan court?
There is no real evidence to suggest that the Beowulf story existed in the sophisticated form it does in the poem before the Anglo-Saxon Christian era. We can certainly assume that the story itself was not new, just as we know that various of the digressions were not new. Equally, we know that Roman script, which was the only way of writing down long streams of text, was introduced with Christianity. We have very scant pagan attestation in Old English. One example is the tantalising glimpse in the runic poem which begins ‘Ing was aerest…’ (Ing was first… the stanza then going on to describe what appears to be a pagan sun god), and another example is the charm on a field, beginning ‘Erce, erce, erce…’. We also have some runic inscriptions. However, all the evidence is that sophistication grew with writing.
Any attempt to answer the basic question is pure speculation. However, for what it’s worth, this is my view. The Anglo-Saxon Christians were aware of heroes and heroic deeds before Christianisation. This is clear in the Chronicle and also in Bede. However, they did not have a modern anthropological view of paganism. Once pagan practice and belief was no longer active in living memory, they will increasingly have reconstructed it from what they knew about paganism from Christian writings, most particularly from the Bible. They will therefore have held the view that paganism was essentially an idolatry by peoples which previously had knowledge of at least the early chapters of Genesis, but diverged more and more from true worship as they gave themselves over to idolatry. This historic knowledge might be more or less forgotten, but they would not (unless they had been introduced to Christianity) have knowledge of the New Testament. We may see this as a naïve view, which it is, but it is the view exactly represented in the story when the bard recounts ‘the story from creation so far, as known by pagans’.
It is nonsense to suggest that Beowulf was a pagan poem which had been quickly Christianised by interpolating monks. If that had been the case, there would certainly have been a Christian introduction and doubtless some kind of blessing at the end. The pre-Christian bard is part of the overall setting of the poem — as perceived by whoever it was wrote down the final version which we have today.

How critical of Beowulf the character is the author?
This is another old exam question which really represents an earlier era of Beowulf criticism. Essentially, the author presents a fairly uncritical view of Beowulf the character right to the end. However, at the end, Beowulf is described as ‘leodum lithost ond lofgeornost’ — most beloved by his people and most eager for ‘lof’, which is praise or glory. Is this a criticism? In the Battle of Maldon, the Anglo-Saxons give too much ground to the attacking Danes through ‘ofermod’, which could be described as a surfeit of courage, or perhaps overconfidence. From this, it has been suggested that ‘mod’, courage or heart, also a characteristic of Beowulf, is not necessarily always a positive quality. Really, none of these arguments hold water. A comparison with modern agglutinating Germanic languages, and particularly with Old English’s near relations Dutch and Frisian, makes it clear that the addition of a prefix fundamentally changes the meaning. In modern Dutch, ‘gevoelig’ means ‘sensitive’, or perhaps ‘sympathetic’, but ‘overgevoelig’ means ‘touchy’, or perhaps ‘oversensitive’. There are no implicit negative connotations to ‘gevoelig’, but ‘overgevoelig’ is always negative. Many other Dutch and indeed Frisian words function in the same way. Therefore, to say that because ‘ofermod’ is clearly a fatal flaw in the Battle of Maldon, then therefore ‘mod’ is an ambiguous quality, is linguistic nonsense. As far as ‘lofgeornost’ is concerned, we are reading back a modern British cultural sensitivity about becoming modesty into Anglo-Saxon society. As we see from the boasting section early in the poem, the Anglo-Saxons did not have an issue with boasting as such, but rather false boasting — that is, boasting of what was not actually true.
In looking for criticism of the hero, we are also reading something back into the poem which is culturally inappropriate — the notion that there are no real heroes, and that the purpose of heroic stories is really to show the hero ‘warts and all’. The writer of Beowulf shows no interest at any point in presenting Beowulf as a flawed character. To try to exposite this out of the last few lines, and to use dubious linguistics to do it, says more about the critic than about the poem.

Does Beowulf show us the Anglo-Saxon belief that human life is shaped by fate?
Beowulf is not a fatalistic poem in the sense that Norse sagas and Eddic poetry are. This is to some extent because Beowulf always triumphs — we misread the poem if we see Beowulf’s eventual death as defeat, since it would be defeat indeed if such a great hero died in any other context than battle. The poem is, however, written with an enormous amount of hindsight, so the poet knows, for example, that Heorot is to be destroyed by fire. We do not have anything like the fatalism of the Wanderer, who states ‘Wyrd bið ful aræd’ (fate is fully decided), although the actual outworkings of this are not made clear in the that poem. A much weaker version is present in Beowulf in lines 572-3:
“Wyrd often saves
an undoomed hero as long as his courage is good”
This is quite a different perspective from the better known and understood Norse view of fate, where even the gods are subject to the spinning of the Norns, and where, in the central human epic the Volsung saga, the curse of the dwarf Andvarri on the owner of his ring hunts down all those who possess it, to the final destruction of the sons of Guðrun in Hamðismàl.
If you are looking for a life shaped by fate in Beowulf, you are probably over-reading it. Rather, if it presents anything, Beowulf presents fate shaped by life.

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So, what is Beowulf, what’s it about, and why is it important?

What it is
Beowulf (pronounce it ‘Bay-O-Wulf’, not ‘Beer-wulf’ if you want to be taken seriously) is an Old English (formerly known as Anglo-Saxon) poem written between 700 and 1000 about events of the heroic age around the time of the Anglian, Saxon and Jutish migrations to Britain in the 5th century. Like most Old English poetry, we don’t know who wrote it. More exactly, we don’t know who wrote it down, or whether it was written down in one go from an oral tradition, or composed outright by an author, or edited together from previous written sources. There are examples of all three kinds of composition in the parallel Old Norse world, although we tend to believe that works composed outright tend to be later, and works written down after a period of oral retelling tend to be earliest. But nobody actually knows. The poem is 3183 lines long, and the manuscript, which survived a fire late in its life, dates from around 1010 AD.
It’s written in alliterative verse, which means that the first half of the line is linked to the second half by a common initial sound. If the link sound is a consonant, the match will be exact. However, all vowels seem to alliterate with each other. It’s also written in poetic style that uses ‘kennings’, which are short descriptive phrases which represent a noun. So the sea is referred to as ‘the swan road’, though this is actually a double-kenning, because swans do not travel on the sea, but swan-shaped ships do.

What it’s about
Beowulf has two key components — the plot, and the digressions. The digressions are as interesting as the main story-line, and account for a lot of the text. Sometimes they are told or referred to by the characters, and sometimes they are introduced directly by the author. The poem begins with a digression — the story of Scyld Scefing, and his son Beowulf, who is a different Beowulf from the main character.
The main plot is as follows: Heorot, a famous hall, is beset by a monster called Grendel who comes in the night and devours the retainers of the king Hrothgar. This is disaster for a Germanic hall. Beowulf, a young Geat warrior, determines to travel to Heorot to defeat the monster. He spends the night in the hall, and when Grendel, scenting that there are once more men in the hall, comes, he seizes him by the arm. Beowulf has the strength of thirty men in his arms, and wrenches the arm of Grendel from his body. Grendel goes back to the fens to die, but the next night Grendel’s mother appears, killing Hrothgar’s favourite warrior. The next day, Beowulf sets off with Hrothgar’s men to find Grendel’s mother. To do this, he dives into a black lake, where he engages in a Titanic battle with Grendel’s mother, first in the water and then in her cave. Eventually he seizes a sword from among the trophies of Grendel’s earlier predations, and kills the monster. Finding Grendel’s corpse, he beheads it and returns with the head to the surface, and thence to Heorot, where he is richly rewarded.
Beowulf returns to his home, eventually becoming king, where he rules in peace until a slave steals a golden cup from a dragon’s lair, which incites the dragon to devastate the land. Beowulf and his men set out to fight the dragon, but only Beowulf and a young man named Wiglaf, are brave enough to fight. Beowulf kills the dragon, but dies from the wounds he received.

Why it’s important
There are a number of reasons why this poem is important.
First, for the inglorious reason that it is our only specimen of Old English heroic epic. Were there other Old English epics? We might assume there were, as there are long supernatural-heroic stories from Scandinavia which describe the same period of history. However, we don’t have any references to them. As a piece to satisfy the curiosity of linguists, Beowulf has a lot to be said for it. We do have a number of shorter Anglo-Saxon heroic poems, including Widsith and the Battle of Maldon.

Second, because of the glimpses of other stories through the digressions. Sometimes — as in the case of the digression around Finn, king of the Frisians, and Hengist, leader of the Jutes, these connect with history, as described by Bede, or with other stories, such as the Finnsburh fragment (which describes the same events in more detail). Because we have the Finnsburh fragment and Bede’s account of Hengist, we can speculate that the other digressions in Beowulf relate to equally famous Old English heroic stories which we no longer have.

Third, because the poem connects the Anglo-Saxons to all of the supernatural-heroic Old Norse literature. More on that in a moment.

Fourth — and this is probably the reason they made it into a dodgy film — it has one of the most complete archetypally heroic narratives of any pre-modern story. Beowulf engages in three fundamental types of heroic behaviour: he waits patiently to receive the attack of a never-defeated foe, and defeats him, he searches out an even more powerful enemy in their own domain, and defeats them, and he sets out to face certain death, and defeats his final enemy as he sustains his death wounds.

This acceleration of increasing danger and dread, and the stiffening resolve of the hero as he faces it, is crucial to many heroic accounts. It’s also a pattern which is found in modern films, graphic novels, and in almost every video game. By limiting it to just three encounters, the anonymous author(s) force each episode to fulfil a number of functions, and preserve an overriding artistic unity, in spite of all the digressions.

Beowulf and the Germanic traditions
In Scandinavia, and especially Iceland, the pagan saga and mythological tradition survived well into the age of writing. In Anglo-Saxon England, Christianisation took place before widespread literacy. Beowulf is clearly a Christian-era poem, but it looks back to a pagan past.

There are essentially three kinds of Icelandic and other Norse myths and sagas. There are mythological stories, concerning the gods, such as Thor and Odin, and their enemies the giants. There are supernatural-heroic stories, such as the Burgundian cycle, where the gods may play a part as instigators, but where heroes are generally contending with supernaturally endowed but non-divine enemies. And there are naturalistic sagas, which are told as if they really happened, and where fate is the sole means of supernatural interaction. These include stories such as Hrafenkel’s saga and Burnt Njall’s saga. We have some echoes of a naturalistic saga in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, in the Cynewulf and Cyneheard account. We have no Anglo-Saxon mythological stories, although the Runic Poem hints at them, and Anglo-Saxon was cut-off as a literary language by the Norman invasion before the development of naturalistic saga-writing.

Beowulf connects with the world of Norse supernatural-heroic stories — the Goths (Geats) are principal protagonists in the Burgundian cycle, and Hrothgar is a key figure in a number of sagas and cycles.

In conclusion…
The makers of the Beowulf cartoon movie try to portray him as a character with a fatal flaw. If you are coming to Old English from a background in Shakespeare or perhaps Greek tragedy, then the concept of a fatal flaw will be one you are well aware of. But this is really not what Germanic heroic poetry is about at all. We can read the Volsungasaga as a story of ‘all the world being against Sigurd the Volsung’, which connects with a certain kind of (mawkish) modern literature, but the thrust of Beowulf is neither that he had a fatal flaw (and certainly not the one attributed to him in the film), nor that fate conspired to get him in the end anyway. Rather — and here the film-makers did understand something — he is a hero whose heroic character is revealed through his response to danger. Beowulf is a super-hero. No real person has the strength of thirty men in his arms, or can arm wrestle a giant and tear his arm out at the shoulder. But this is not what Beowulf as a story is about. His great strength is only an issue in his first encounter. In the second encounter, he is saved first by his impregnable magic armour, and then by his skill and cunning in seizing a magical sword. In his final encounter, it is his courage alone which sustains him.

Who were the Geats?
The Geats are, simply, Goths — West Germanic peoples who were important on the North Sea and Baltic coasts, and who, in various forms, infiltrated or conquered the Roman Empire. The Goths — Goten, in their own language, Gothic — come into many Scandinavian tales. Pinning down exactly what kind of Goths the Geats were is slightly more difficult, because both Icelandic and Old English have different words for Goth and Geat. Probably the best guess is that the Geats were a branch of the Goths — sometimes identified as the Ostrogoths — rather than saying that Geats=Goths.

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This article should help, at least a little.

I’m a professional writer. That is to say, for the last 20 years, my core professional skill which I have been selling to my employers is the skill of writing. I can say, fairly objectively, that I’m a good writer – people who publish me once usually do so again, in fact, they ring me up or email me and ask me for material. My employers come to me (and have done for many years) when they want excellent writing. And when people hire me for contract jobs, it’s usually for writing. Not everything I write is brilliant. But I generally know what’s wrong when it isn’t. Sometimes this is because of deadlines, sometimes it’s because of a process mistake, such as submitting something before it was finalised. Sometimes it’s because the concept behind it was a thoroughly bad idea. Generally, these days, I try to tell people this rather than somehow create something worthwhile out of something that isn’t.

That’s professional, business, marketing, journalistic and PR writing, though.

Creative writing is a very different matter. It’s often hard to know whether what you are writing is the most amazing thing since Yeats, or, in fact, utter tripe.

What I’m going to suggest is that it is absolutely, definitely possible to know whether or not your writing is good (that is, as long as you can distinguish the good from the bad in other people’s writing) but it is not possible to know by reading whether or not your writing is ‘great’. I’ll explain why in a minute.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, after many years of thinking about it, I’ve concluded that the artistic process can be summarised with the acronym ART, standing for Alternatives, Realisation, and Transformation.

Alternatives is about originality and appropriateness. An artist considers (perhaps unconsciously) alternative approaches to what they are going to do. If you simply adopt the ‘bulldozer’ approach, of the most obvious (to you) approach, you will not create art, though people who have a radically different approach to life from yours might well imagine that what you are doing is highly original. Finding an alternative approach which is uniquely appropriate to what you want to do means your work will be original — even if others have used a similar approach for their own purposes at other times.

Realisation is about the quality of the way you turn your original idea or concept in reality. Some failures of realisation can be sorted out later on. Bad spelling is irritating, and unforgivable in a published script, but there is no reason why it can’t be fixed by someone else who can spell after you’ve finished it. Injudicious writing can also be sorted out, though there is a point at which the editor becomes co-artist, not merely an adjunct. TS Eliot famously dedicated The Wasteland to Ezra Pound, whom he described as ‘Il miglior fabri’ – the better craftsman, because he rescued what was otherwise an inferior poem. Most problems of realisation, though, can only be sorted out by the author as they write, or as they revise.

The final component is Transformation – it’s a change in the audience as they experience the work of art. One of the paradoxes of art is that the artist can never experience the art in the way that the audience does. It’s one of the peculiar joys of music and other collaborative artforms that the performer can experience a part of that, because the whole is greater than their part. However, for a solitary artist such as a writer, that particular pleasure is denied to you.

Great art — at least to my mind — is art which has a consistently great impact on its audience, and comes to be regarded by them as transforming in some way. For all its flaws, the Lord of the Rings is a great book. For all their formal perfections, virtually all of the reviews which decried it when it first came out were not.

By this token, it follows that you can’t know if your writing is great. And this is something which is borne out by experience. Many critics who were able to judge the qualities of other people’s writing have imagined they have created a great work. Gauguin, for example, stated that he saw his “Where do we come from…?” as a work comparable to the Gospels in scope. Gauguin’s painting has certainly stood the test of time, but (as far as I am aware) not even the most enthusiastic of critics has ever suggested that its importance was on that scale. The Beatles once described themselves as ‘bigger than Jesus’. However, 40 years later (but 1970 years later than Jesus), Jesus is now a more searched for term on the intranet than the Beatles.

But back to creative writing.

You can’t know if your writing is great. But you can know if it is originally appropriate, and if it is well written in a way that best brings out that original appropriateness.

Let’s explore this for a moment.

Good writing begins with wanting to say something. The all-too-familiar ‘blank-page-syndrome’ comes from the desire to write without actually having anything to say. You don’t necessarily need to be inspired (you might just be cross), but you do need to want to say something. This is one reason why many fine writers of lyric poems and short stories struggle with long poems and novels — if what they want to say is ideally suited to the short form, then they will be spreading it thin in the long form. But great writing, or even good writing, is not a matter of simply stating what you want to say. There are many ways to tell a story (and a story is itself one of many ways to say something), and the ‘alternatives’ part of the artistic process begins with considering how best to tell it.

The opening scenes of the film “The Two Towers” depict Gandalf fighting with the Balrog in the depths of the mines of Moria. But in Tolkien’s original book, this fight is never depicted — it is recounted by Gandalf several chapters into the book. To my mind, Tolkien’s way of telling the story is infinitely better.

In Macbeth, the murder of Duncan takes place off-set, so that it is described, twice, by Macbeth himself. We assume one of the descriptions to be the true one. In Roman Polanski’s film Macbeth, not only the murder of Duncan, but also many other things hidden in Shakespeare’s play, are presented straight on the screen. It’s generally believed that Shakespeare relinquished the attraction of having a murder on stage early in the play in order to maintain sympathy with the Macbeth character until later. I have to say I really didn’t enjoy Roman Polanski’s film, but I have seen a number of recreations of Macbeth wich stuck more closely to the original which I felt were very satisfying.

Consideration of alternatives does not only apply to long works such as novels, films and plays. Keats’s To Autumn (which seems to be one of the main attractions of this website, alongside the Pathetic Fallacy) is, in my view, one of the finest lyric poems in English, particularly given the unpromising subject matter (for the record, most great poems are about God, Sex (or love) or death, or a mixture of all three). One could imagine that Keats has adopted the obvious approach with his “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…” But in the second stanza, he shifts the treatment, and personifies autumn as a woman. And in the third stanza he changes the treatment again. Keats had the lyrical ability to carry on with more epithets about Autumn for three stanzas, rather in the same way that he goes on and on in ‘On leaving some friends at an early hour’. The change of treatment, however, lifts To Autumn from a Romantic nature idyll to something much more.

The consideration of alternatives at the genesis of a work of art is something which happens often silently and without conscious thought. But if you find yourself setting out to imitate what someone else has done, or to repeat yourself, or to take the most direct route to getting your thoughts onto paper, then chances are high that what you produce will not be the best you are capable of.

Originality in itself is insufficient. In fact, complete originality is impossible, or, at least, dysfunctional. If you make up your own literary form, in your own language, using your own script and distribute it by an entirely new means (for example, by arranging apple peelings in a park), then it is unlikely that anyone else will ever appreciate what you have done. Rather than striving for something which is different from anything which has ever been done before, consider rather the appropriateness to what you are saying. Perhaps these words suggest a more mechanical process than really exists. Often we talk about “Who, what, when, where, how, why”, but writing generally begins with “Why?” (intention) through “What?” (the subject matter), and then on to the how, when and where. But all this is before you begin writing. In the settling of each of these, choices must be made. Appropriate choices lead to good writing. Inappropriate choices lead to bad writing.

I mentioned before my own particular failures in commercial, marketing, PR and journalistic writing. Aside from the things which i just didn’t finish properly, the most common reason for failure was trying to write something in an entirely inappropriate way. A pompous treatment of a light subject always fails (though a mock-pomposity can be very effective). A trivial treatment of a serious subject also fails. Again, most of this was a result of failure to consider what other ways there might have been of tackling the subject.

On to realisation. Assuming that you have something to say, and a way to say it which is appropriate and original, the simple task of writing is to put that into written words on page (or whatever you use). There are lots of great books about how to do this. Speaking personally, I’ve never found any of them to be of any use whatsoever. Even Ursula K LeGuin’s marvellous Steering the Craft I found inspiring rather than actually useful. As far as I’m concerned, the only way to learn to write is to start writing, and then read and revise what you have written. Write, read, revise. That’s all there is.

Ultimately, the length of what you write has to be determined by how fast you can write, read and revise something at a quality and depth which suits your purpose. Lyric poetry requires every word to be absolutely perfect — not something which can be done quickly or easily at great length. Keats, for all his genius at short lyric poetry, signally failed to write the great long poem he was hoping to create. Read his Lamia and Hyperion if you want to get a sense of how a great lyric poet could be bogged down in his own writing.

Quality and depth are two different things. A lot of Shakespeare’s words are not very deep, although, for soliloquies, he is able to write some of the most profound words in the language. However, it’s very hard (if not impossible) to find ‘wrong’ words in Shakespeare. It is said that he wrote straight off, without ever blotting a line. If this is really true, it explains why he was able to write so much, but also to control character and plot so well — one of the greatest problems of writing is that the actual writing of words slows the author down, so that the characters and the plot get lost. The individual words may be fine, but the quality of the work as a whole suffers.

Aside from the advice of write, read, and revise, I don’t have a great deal to offer you. But this article is not about how to write well, but about how to know whether or not your writing is good. This is a much simpler matter:

Good writing — at the realisation stage — is about saying the thing you really wanted to say memorably. To be memorable, there must be no distractions which lead the reader away. Bad spelling and grammar are distractors, but these are easily fixed. Poor choice of words distracts: words which jar, or are wrong for the sentences they are in. Clumsy rhythm and awkward sentences distract. Too many words or sentences, which slow down the reader and cause them to lose the thread — these too distract. Missing explanations or confusions distract at a more profound level. Most of all, characters who suddenly speak or behave out of character concentrate the readers’ minds on the inconsistencies — leading them away, therefore, from what you are saying.

Therefore, the main question which you should ask yourself as you determine whether or not you are writing well, is ‘does it distract from what I am saying’. Sentences which do should go. Beyond that, does the piece as a whole say what I am saying? And is it memorable? If you want to know whether it is memorable or not, ask yourself, do I remember it? If the page was lost, would I tell the same story, recount the same incidents, include the same sentences, use the same words? It does not have to be memorable at the word level — one of the greatest problems of writers is concentrating on the words at the expense of the story — but it has to be memorable at some level. As a reader moves on through the story, they must have some memory of what went before. If they have no memory of a section, and this is important, then they get lost later on. If they have no memory of a section, and this makes no difference, then the section was redundant, and merely a distraction to the main story. Of course, a passage may be memorable and yet not be required later in the book. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Three Men in a Boat, one of the most perfectly funny works of comedy ever written, is full of charming, memorable scenes (and many memorable lines which are quoted by people who have never read the book), but here isn’t really much of a plot, and there is no real need for one. The frame narrative of rowing up the Thames is merely a way of stringing together a series of delightfully observed vignettes of the human experience.

To summarise. If your writing is memorable, free of distractions, and says what you want to say, it is good writing. If the choices you have made about how to say this is the right choice, then you are writing well. And if (in addition to these things) what you want to say is interesting and apposite, then what you produce is actually good.

How good?

If this is what you are discerning, then it will be as good as (but no better than) your discernment. If you can’t tell the difference between Enid Blyton and John Masefield, or between TS Eliot and WH Auden, then one of the things you need to do if you want to be a really good writer is to learn how to distinguish better between the good, bad, and indifferent. If your critical faculties are sharp, and you can answer yes to the questions above, then your writing will be very good indeed.

Will it be great? Only time — and your readers — can tell.

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Ultimately, children’s literature, if it exists at all, is literature which is written to make sense to, and appeal to children — though possibly with a wary eye to the adults who may be vetting it. Analytically, the most obvious point of reference for adult authors writing is to write about children themselves. This is something certainly borne out by a survey of the market (or the corpus, if we want to be academic). A very high proportion of children’s books being published today are about children, and even greater proportion of the most successful books are: Harry Potter, Lemony Snickett, Tracy Beaker, and so on.

Looking back at what we might call the ‘canon’, we see, going from the present to the past, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tom’s Midnight Garden, the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, the Narnia books, the Box of Delights, Le Petit Prince, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Five Children and It, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — landmark books where children are the main characters. Set against that, we have Watership Down, The Hobbit, The Wind in the Willows and Pinocchio, but Pinocchio is a doll that wishes to become a child, the rabbits in Watership Down are ingenues in a wider world, and Bilbo Baggins is physically always the smallest and least experienced person. I do not wish to push this point too hard, since it could be argued that even 007 in ‘You only live twice’, is the ingenue in a strange land, by which one could make ones way to the entertaining, but entirely unproductive claim, that all literature is about representations of children.

I am not offering this list as a definitive, in the tradition of FR Leavis: it is merely a list of books which spring into my mind, supplemented by someone else’s list from Wikipedia, which will no doubt have changed by the time anyone reads this. However, I should perhaps explain why neither Winnie the Pooh nor the Tale of Peter Rabbit are included. Children’s literature, I feel, should be about the books that children choose to read, rather than the books which are read to them. Perhaps I am being unfair to Peter Rabbit. It is also, I think, primarily about ‘books’, as defined by the point in children’s lives when they see the books they read as being essentially the same kind of thing that they see adults reading. This might be a difficult point to prove, but, thankfully, public libraries and publishers have made their own arbitrary judgements about these things, and both print and display books in such a way as to make it clear that these are picture books, but those are reading books.

I digress. For the time being, suffice it for me to make the claim that books about children are one of the fundamental categories of children’s literature.

With that in mind, there is immediately a fundamental problem to that fundamental category. One of the most basic requirements of any kind of fiction is that interesting things happen which are plausible within the context of the world in which they are set. This is naturally a relatively easy problem to solve in an entirely made up world. From the moment that we hear “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit…” we know that we are in entirely different world, where all kinds of interesting things may happen. Sadly, there is a dreary back catalogue of authors who thought they could write tours-de-force of imagination like Tolkien or Kenneth Grahame, but produced something rather less significant than Noddy in Toyland: worlds which are neither interesting, nor believable.

For a story about children, the immediate problem is: what about the parents? Children are of course allowed to play, but children’s novels are not about children playing at interesting things happening, but about them actually happening. So one is left with the question: what kind of parents would allow a child to travel in danger right across Europe (The Lost Prince), tackle criminal gangs (any Famous Five story), fight pirates (Treasure Island), coast down the river on a raft (Huckleberry Finn), or take up with any random collection of strangers which happens to come along (Moonfleet)? Note that these examples are from books set firmly in the ‘natural’ world, without any hint of supernatural activity. Real parents would put a stop to such things straight away, and, if they didn’t, social services would be round in an instant to do what the parents wouldn’t.

The first problem, then, for the children’s author who chooses to write about children, is to get the parents out of the way, or otherwise neutralise them. Key approaches with a long pedigree include:?

What about author’s who choose not to use any of these solutions — who, in fact, choose not to solve the problem at all? Stan Barstow’s Joby, Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, and others represent a school of British naturalistic children’s fiction which is hugely popular with school teachers, but rather less so with children. As it happens, A Kestrel for a Knave does include the absent father, but it is not used to solve the problem of children’s literature, but to underline it. It could be argued that the parent-problem is only an issue when literature is escapist, but this is to fall into the trap (which also seems to have made a major come back in schools) of imagining that imaginative literature is somehow less valid than naturalistic literature, despite all the evidence to the contrary. This is to suggest that there is a ‘purpose’ to literature, either in the mould of Leavis (serving the purposes of life, whatever they are) or of Ruskin, in his criticism of the so-called ‘pathetic fallacy’. But imputing a purpose to literature is effectively saying that everyone writes with the same purpose, while, intuitively, authors know that they do not even write with the same purpose on different days of the week.
I think if put to it, I would argue that the greatest children’s literature of the 20th century was a quadrivium of fantasy books: The Box of Delights, The Hobbit, the first six Narnia books, and A Wizard of Earthsea. Some people would put Tom’s Midnight Garden at the head of the pack, and probably many would want to make a case for the Wind in the Willows. People who really dislike CS Lewis (you know who you are) would almost certainly want to change the time frame a little and include Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, though if we were to do that, it would be very hard not to include the Harry Potter books. All of these books are escapist fantasy: talking animals, wizards, travel through time, travel from world to world.
The same is true of the foundations of English children’s literature, written in the 19th century or at the very beginning of the 20th by authors who were part of that era: Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island and the E Nesbit books: naturalism has no place in these books, although the authors were careful to create the illusion of naturalism whenever it suited them, as a means of underlining what they were really doing.

When I read the comments of people who favour naturalistic British children’s literature, I’m always left with the sense that they feel there is something intrinsically immoral in doing away with the parents for the sake of a successful story. I also have the impression that they feel that 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies (although its solution to the parent problem is one of the most complete), The Pearl, The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird are good for children, because children can correctly learn that life is wretched, and will then be free to carry on growing up in the existential courage that was so popular round about 1922. But if this is the purpose of children’s literature, it is clearly not one shared by the better children’s authors (better, in the sense of more exactly being able to sell large numbers of books, which, in a wretched world, would surely by the only measure worth having), nor by the book-buying, book-borrowing and even book-stealing child-public.

Again, I digress.

The view I am putting forward, about the fundamental need of authors to solve the parent-paradox, may (by this point hopefully does) seem an obvious one, but it is not necessarily the general consensus. For example, the prevalence of orphans in children’s literature has attracted the attention of Philip Nel, of Kansas State University, who explains it rather differently: “The literary orphan dramatizes the difficulty of being a child. That is, to be a child is to be subject to the forces of people more powerful than you are. Well, being an orphan makes the powerlessness of childhood that much more visible. At the same time, many literary orphans are resilient characters who, despite their relative lack of power, find the emotional resources to beat the odds and make their way in the world.” (Quoted in USA Today, 7/2/2003)

Perhaps. The plight of the Baudelaires is clearly directly linked to their status as orphans, and it is clearly their powerlessness that Count Olaf exploits in his bid to obtain their inheritance. On the other hand, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim has complete freedom to live the way he wishes because he is an orphan. Tom Sawyer is incompletely free because he still has an Aunt Polly, whereas Huckleberry Finn is able to function with complete freedom. Peter Pan is either a lost child, an abandoned child, or an orphan, subject to which of the many of JM Barrie’s versions of the book and the play one considers. But, again, his unparented status is the source of his freedom, not his vulnerability.

Philip Nel is particularly thinking of Harry Potter when he talks about orphans, but Potter is a special case, as he (to begin with) has the worst of both worlds: no parental love, but guardians who prevent him from having any fun whatsoever. Even so, Potter discovers himself later to have been protected and guided by forces more powerful than his parents, and certainly than the Dursleys. It is precisely his lack of emotional resources to cope with the absence of his parents that provide the counterpoint to what would otherwise be a tediously easy access to the delights of magical power.

Nonetheless, orphans do outweigh other plausible solutions to the parents paradox in English children’s literature. Though their function in solving the problem of plausible scenario has been, I think, now soundly demonstrated, they clearly have a resonance which goes beyond their function. In fact, orphans have the strongest, or at least the oldest, pedigree in English literature: at the very beginning of our earliest epic, Beowulf, we hear that the very first character, Scyld Scefing, “ærest wearð feasceaft funden” — was first found an orphan. King Arthur is brought up as an orphan. Our other literary heritage — Latin — begins with the myth of Romulus and Remus, also foundlings, although they are not technically orphans, but the offspring of the God Mars.

It is beyond the scope of this essay — and perhaps of any essay — to realistically unpick the resonances of orphans in world literature and folk-tales. Which came first, the notion of orphans as the offspring of gods, or the resonance of orphans as figures in stories? How could anyone possibly find out? — although, naturally, as with most unproveables, it is an excuse to spill a lot of ink.

It is one of the great temptations of literary criticism to identify a common feature in diverse works and thereby assume that it explains everything. Orphans are not the hidden meaning of literature: if this essay has demonstrated anything, it is that there are a range of solutions available to the children’s author. What I believe I have demonstrated is that, within the confines of making a story work, the author must either choose not to write about children at all, or must find some means of suppressing parental interference, or is restricted to (possibly, but not necessarily quite grim) naturalistic writing.

Perhaps the ultimate escapism that children look for in children’s books is a plausible escape from their parents. But only so long as they are in the book.

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