Madoc's Dream

In one of the catalogues issued by W M Voynich, there is listed this marvellous title: 

Sir Thomas Herbert of Tintern: Some Yeares Travels into Divers Parts of Asia and Afrique. Describing especially the two famous Empires, the Persian, and great Mogull: weaved with the History of these later Times. As also, many rich and spatious Kingdomes in the Orientall India, and other parts of Asia; Together with the adjacent Iles. Severally relating the Religion, Language, Qualities, Customes, Habit, Descent, Fashions, and other Observations touching them. With a revivall of the first Discoverer of America. Revised and Enlarged by the Author (London: Jacob Blome and Richard Bishop, 1638).

The last phrase, about the ‘revivall of the first Discoverer of America’ refers to Madoc ap Owen Gwyneth, a 12^th century Welsh prince said to have voyaged far away to avoid family feuds and power struggles. He sailed across the Atlantic and found land. Herbert refers to an ‘Old Copie’ that he used as a source for the Madoc passage in his history, and, if that existed, it is now a lost MS. He has the voyager departing from Abergele in North Wales, but other sources say Rhos-on-Sea.

Geofffrey Ashe in his Land to the West (1962), about the Irish saint Brendan the Voyager and similar legends, gives short shrift to the Madoc myth, seeing it as a Tudor political invention to justify priority in New World colonisation. The Tudors emphasised their Welsh origins, and wanted to establish a claim to American colonies, against those of France and Spain. Similarly, the Tudor courtier and magician John Dee suggested King Arthur had reached America, extrapolating from Geoffrey of Monmouth's tales of his conquest of Ireland: equally a political fiction (thanks to G J Cooling for this reference). 

However, there are signs that this invented history was sourced in part from a genuine earlier tradition of a voyaging Madoc, not necessarily linked to Gwynedd, long pre-dating the Tudor fabrication, and similar in nature to the Arthur romances. Like the latter, this must have derived ultimately from Welsh court or folk tales. Nothing of this survives except the merest hints.

In Gwyn A. Williams’ thorough study Madoc, The Making of a Myth (1979), he argues, based on the fragmentary evidence, that there was a now lost medieval ‘Madoc romance’. The 15^th century poet Maredudd ap Rhys, for example, proclaimed ‘A Madoc am I to my age’, because of his love of the sea, which clearly implies a Madoc tradition known to his audience.  In a 13^th century Flemish version of the popular medieval tale Reynard the Fox, the author, Willem, states that he also wrote one on Madoc (he is sometimes known academically as ‘Willem, the Maker of Madoc’).

Another Flemish author, Jacob van Maerlant, in his own ‘rhymebook’ of c. 1270 explains that he is now writing true history, not romances such as ‘Madoc’s dream’ or the exploits of Reynard or Arthur. He had earlier written on Merlin, and on the Grail. This important reference tells us both that Madoc romances existed and that they were seen as similar to Arthurian ones. The allusion to ‘Madoc’s dream’ may link it to Welsh dream tales such as ‘The Dream of Rhonabwy’ in The Mabinogion.

A supposed fragment of the Willem ‘Madoc’ was discovered in Poitiers in the 17^th century. This has Madoc questing for The Fountain of Youth and discovering a magical island, Ely, and beyond that an isle full of sunlight devoted to love and music. Ely, says Williams, was Lundy, known to the Welsh as the setting for the Fountain and as Ynys Wair. Perhaps, we might speculate, the sunlit isle beyond, if it is not entirely imaginary, was based on one of the Isles of Scilly, such as Tresco, still often seem as a rare and precious place because of its beautiful gardens. Williams links this part of the tale to the Welsh tradition of the Gwerddonau Llion, the fairy meadows in the sea which are sometimes glimpsed. One of the Welsh Triads refers to ‘The voyage of Gavran and his companions in search of the Gwerdonnau Llion (Green Islands of the Ocean); and their disappearance from the island of Britain’.

When we unhitch the earlier Madoc from the fabricated Gwynedd history, he may have his origins anywhere in magical Wales or indeed in what the Welsh called ‘the Old North’, in Cumbria. Southey, in his poem on Madoc, has him visiting Aberffraw, Mathrafal and Dinefewr, the three royal courts of Wales, respectively of Gwynedd in the North, Powys in the centre and Deheubarth in the west.

There are few clues as to where his myths may have begun. One is the seafaring to isles of wonder, which implies the West, so a West-facing coastline such as that of the Welsh kingdom of Dyfed (Pembrokeshire) looks likely. This is also Mabinogion country around the Prescelli hills, Narberth and Newport. The other is that, like the Arthurian romances, the myths found their way to Continental minstrels, which implies a Norman link, suggestive either of the courts of the Welsh Marcher lordships or again of Pembrokeshire. Quite why it should be two Flemish authors who evoked him is not clear, but that may be an accident of historical survival. A Flemish/Pembrokeshire link would be useful evidence: G J Cooling tells me that in 1100 Henry I is credited with settling Flemish refugees in Pembrokeshire, so there may be the link.

We can probably infer that it was always a magical ship that voyaged, as in that wonderful and enigmatic ancient poem ‘The Spoils of Annwn’ , not a literal one. The land that the original Madoc sought, and perhaps discovered, was probably no earthly terrain, but one of the fabled mid-Atlantic lands, such as The Fortunate Isles or Hy Brasil, or even perhaps Avalon. In any case, we can certainly regret the loss of the Madoc romance, and of Madoc's dream. 

(Mark Valentine)

 

Sylvia Townsend Warner's 'Lolly Willowes': A Guest Post by Henry Wessells

  

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel, Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman, was first published a century ago by Chatto & Windus.  It is the chronicle of a daughter’s place in a provincial family whose fortune derived from a grandfather’s successful brewery. Laura Willowes was born in 1874. She had two older brothers.  Her mother “grew continuously more skilled in evading responsibilities” and then died. The Willowes treasured family connections and heirlooms: great-great aunt Emma’s harp, broken strings and all, the locks of her hair embroidered into a mourning picture, the heavy furniture. A doting father indulged Laura’ intellectual curiosity, so that she read Glanvil and Pliny and had a little still where she prepared essences of some of the herbs she collected. He underwrote the printing expenses of Health by the Wayside, published anonymously by the local job printer. Her father made a modest testamentary provision for daughter, but in the immediate aftermath of his death in 1902, “Laura, feeling rather as if she were a piece of family property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of as best they should think.”

And so for nearly twenty years she lived in the household of her brother. One of her nieces called her “Lolly” and the nickname stuck. Lolly was stuck, too, in the routines of her sister-in-law’s household: “she actually had a sensation that she was stitching herself into a piece of embroidery with a good deal of background.” She had a growing a recurring sense of disquiet.

And then one day she walked into a shop, “half florist and half greengrocer”, and while looking at “bottled fruits, the sliced pears in syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages”, Lolly has a vision of the woman who preserved the fruit:

A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches. It grew darker and darker [. . .]

 

As Laura stood waiting she felt a great longing. it weighed upon her like the load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the other customers, her own errand. She forgot the winter air outside, the people going by on the wet pavements. She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the patterns of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves.

Lolly secures a guidebook to the Chilterns and a detailed map, and at the dinner table announces her resolve to move to Great Mop. “It‘s not really great. It’s in the Chilterns.” Her brother tries to put her off, and even informs her that her income is not what it once was. She says, “I have understood quite well so far. You have administered all my money into something that doesn’t pay.” And tells him to re-invest her money “in something quite unspeculative [. . .] I shall still have enough to manage on.”

Lolly’s defiance of family expectations carries her to new lodgings in the small village, where she finds things more congenial, though sometimes puzzling. She walks everywhere, exploring the lanes and hills, and even works for a time for a poultry farmer.  “After a few months she left off speculating about the villagers. She admitted that there was something about them which she could not fathom, but she was content to remain outside the secret.” And then her nephew Titus comes to visit, upsetting her pleasant new life and tainting the place. “Love it as he might, with all the deep Willowes love for country sights and smells, lover he never so intimately and soberly, his love must be a horror to her. It was different in kind from hers. It was comfortable, it was portable, it was a reasonable appreciative appetite, a possessive and masculine love. It almost estranged her from Great Mop [. . .] Since he had come to Great Mop she had not been allowed to love in her own way.”

And so, in an empty field on a cold after she makes her second defiance, the great refusal of old habits and expectations and family obligations: 

“No!” she cried out, wildly clapping her hands together. “No! You shan’t get me. I won’t go back. I won’t. . . . Oh! Is there no help?” [. . .] There was no answer. And yet the silence that had followed it had been so intent, so deliberate, that it was like a pledge. If any listening power inhabited this place; if any grimly favorable power had been evoked by her cry; then surely a compact had been made and the pledge irrevocably given.

The pace of Lolly Willowes is deliberate, leavened everywhere by Warner’s sharp humor. The village clergyman looks “like a blessed goat tethered on hallowed grass” (to cite one example). Notions and phrases often recur with new meanings: seeds planted in early passages ripening to deliver what was promised. Lolly Willowes is a work of modernism not in the sense of formal innovation but in its statement that after the first world war the old order was no longer tenable. The novel is a rejection of Victorian pieties as subversive as Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918). Warner was simply working at a different scale: a picture first of comfortable, stultifying middle class life and then the dynamics of a rural village. “She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil.” She acquires a familiar, the kitten Vinegar. When she hears again the strange music, she knows what it means. She doesn’t much like the hilltop witches’ sabbath, though she enjoys dancing with Emily. Lolly wanders off, and converses with Satan at the edge of a wood. “She could sleep where she pleased, a hind couched in the Devil’s covert.”

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978), younger than her fictional Lolly, was born about the time Yeats had his vision of country life in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: “While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, / I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” She had no formal education after kindergarten: her father, a master at Harrow School, tutored her, as did other masters. Lolly Willowes was her first novel, and it launched a long literary career. She published dozens of books, including an excellent and sympathetic biography of T.H. White; and her late-style Kingdoms of Elfin stories for William Maxwell at the New Yorker are in a class by themselves. A previously unpublished one, “The Pursuit and the End” has just turned up in the Time Literary Supplement.  

Lolly Willowes is not neglected in the canon of twentieth-century women’s literature, but its connections with the fantastic are sometimes overlooked. The Oxford DNB describes the novel as the story of a disregarded woman who turns to witchcraft as “the only practical way of asserting herself”. It’s a little bit more than that, and it also articulates in fictional form many of the concerns of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). The visionary descriptions of the countryside are very much in the tradition described in Mark Valentine’s recent article “The Other Country: Numinous Landscape in English Supernatural Fiction”. I included the book in the exhibition A Conversation larger than the Universe (2018): I have a signed copy with an autograph quotation capturing Lolly’s despair at the arrival of her nephew the would be writer, who injured his finger: “Laura hated ink . . . page 210”. Elsewhere in the passage, Warner wrote: “She thought of Paradise Lost with a shudder, for it required even more constancy to write some one else’s book. Highly as she rated the sufferings of Milton’s daughters, she rated her own even higher . . .” It was a delight to re-read Lolly Willowes for this essay.

(Henry Wessells)

Illustration: Collection of Henry Wessells.  

. . .

Henry Wessells: The Elfland Prepositions (short stories); 

                           Another Green World (fictions)