MABINOGI - MATTHEW FRANCIS

‘Here at the turn of a leaf a

Horseman is riding

Through the space between one world

And another’

I struggle in Welsh and am (I am told) good with English. The two are like different sets of clothes,
my Welsh is like a formal outfit; stiff with unuse, pinching slightly in places that used to be loose, but
something you wear with an inordinate amount of pride. English? That's my day-to-day wear, boots,
a pair of jeans and a brightly patterned imported shirt; good for for just about anything.

No story survives being kept in cotton wool, which is why this version feels vibrant with a spring-like
growth, fresh, new and green. Like all the good tellers of tales, Francis handles his source material
with respect, but not a slavish recapitulation of it. He has reshaped, pruned and coppiced, as the
early bards must have done, regarding their material as alive and seeing the shape of the tree they
want rather than one of a row of identical trees in a dead forest.

I don't read much poetry; A-level Eng Lit and the emphasis on deconstruction put paid to that. The
occasional bit from Poet's Corner in The Times or something through Twitter, that's about my limit.
But being Welsh we all pretend to have the soul of poets and the ability to channel generations of
bards, so a retelling of one of the core ‘The Four Branches of the Mabinogi’, (mabinogi being a word
meaning very roughly ‘youthful exploits’, or the early achievements of a hero) piques your interest.
But rather than those youthful exploits of life, we get dreamlike stories that wouldn’t be misplaced
in teen soap-operas; disguise, forbidden love, abuse, betrayal and characters disappearing and
reappearing, proving that titillation and taboo-breaking are stories with a long history and betrayal.
The life of the small Welsh courts of the Dark Ages is exposed, its mundanity broken by moments of
extreme violence; the lyrical emotional language and (to modern eyes) impenetrable Celtic mythical
themes, such as the glimpses of the enigmatic Rhiannon (‘She rides slower than daydreams’) – a pre-
Roman horse goddess – who cannot be caught by any pursuer, however slowly she seems to be
riding:

Although each of the books can be read as ‘stand-alones’ thay have a lot in common with movie
series, interlinked and moving to a sequenced narrative. But they are also completely compelling in
their own right as stories.

The detail is as bright as a red cloak, the dialogue as sharp as a winter apple, bursting with zest and
flavour
The poems are full of verbal twists that pique and repel. The Prince of Hell in the prose works
becomes the King of Annwfn, the Otherworld, a realm called Unland, a world on the fair side of a
fallen leaf the land of

‘unrock, unwood, of sheepclouds

and their pasture of vagueness,

suzerain of shades.

The second branch is the gruesome story of the King of Britain’s half-brother hamstringing the
horses of the King of the Irieland:

‘He’s running through the town with a knife, from shriek to shriek.

The shrieks make him feel better. Most are not his’.

I won’t go into the description of a child being burned alive.

The sorcerer Gwydion, steps forward in the last story to tell his tale, bringing the cycle full circle with
a direct reference to the beginning, as Gwydion kills the son of the Prince of Dyfed, whom we met
on the first page, so that we are taken back to the opening exchange between world and
Otherworld, land and Unland – ‘the forested border/of what can’t be true’, ‘where stories begin’.
True then, what he says in the Introduction, that ‘poetry has never had much of a problem with
magic. Poets spend their lives transforming things into other things’. A Welsh Metamorphoses then ,
where necromancers' wives disguise themselves as mice, and horses are made of mushrooms are
any everyday occurrence, something you might well come across when walking in as magical and
history-haunted a place as Wales.

I did have the feeling that there were some episodes missed from the prose version; Twrch y Trwyth
seems to ring a bell (and a comb) and the talking head of Bran, but this tightens it to an intense,
disturbing experience. The shadow of Unland is there just under that turned leaf.

In fact, I can do no better than to echo Gillian Clarke in the front cover; ‘I have waited all my life for
this book: our ancient British tales re-told, in English, by a poet, as they were in the original Welsh.
This is more than translation. It picks up its harp and sings’.
- the literature of these islands, the first reference to a pub comes as you might expect, in the Welsh
language, in the collection of medieval prose tales known as the Mabinogion. The Dream Of
Rhonabwy is set in Powys, in the middle of the 12th century.

Three men on some quest, of course (the Middle Ages were permanently on tour), come to a place
with smoke coming out of it.

'.....They could see a floor full of holes and uneven..... and there were branches of holly in plenty on
the floor, after the cows had eaten off their tops. And when they came to the main floor, they could
see a dais of bare, dusty boards and an old woman feeding the fire..... When she felt cold she would
throw a handful of husks on to the fire, so that it was not easy for any man alive to endure that smell
entering his nostrils.

And on the dais they could see a yellow ox-skin. And good luck would it be for one of them whose lot
it was to get in that skin'.

The sort of establishment, in short, which might appear in the Campaign For Real Ale's guide as 'a
rural gem'. Nor have things changed that much: for yellow ox-skin rug read the personal tankard, the
seat with your name on it, or the Grail itself - your own account at the bar.

George Orwell wrote about the perfect pub. It was he said, called The Moon Under Water, and it
was only at the end that he admitted that it did not exist. But the search goes on.

-Mabinogion, a Welsh prince changes place for a year with the Devil, and when he returns to his
court is stunned to find that no-one has noticed the difference.

And suddenly it all made sense. You see, that court was in Narberth.
- the literature of these islands, the first reference to a pub comes as you might expect, in the Welsh
language, in the collection of medieval prose tales known as the Mabinogion. The Dream Of
Rhonabwy is set in Powys, in the middle of the 12th century.

Three men on some quest, of course (the Middle Ages were permanently on tour), come to a place
with smoke coming out of it.

'.....They could see a floor full of holes and uneven..... and there were branches of holly in plenty on
the floor, after the cows had eaten off their tops. And when they came to the main floor, they could
see a dais of bare, dusty boards and an old woman feeding the fire..... When she felt cold she would
throw a handful of husks on to the fire, so that it was not easy for any man alive to endure that smell
entering his nostrils.

And on the dais they could see a yellow ox-skin. And good luck would it be for one of them whose lot
it was to get in that skin'.

The sort of establishment, in short, which might appear in the Campaign For Real Ale's guide as 'a
rural gem'. Nor have things changed that much: for yellow ox-skin rug read the personal tankard, the
seat with your name on it, or the Grail itself - your own account at the bar.

George Orwell wrote about the perfect pub. It was he said, called The Moon Under Water, and it
was only at the end that he admitted that it did not exist. But the search goes on.

AUGUSTINE - ROBIN LANE FOX

-Saint Augustine a clever little provincial, mummy’s boy, almost picture him revelling in his
Carthaginian accent the same way Radio Six presenters parade their Northern vowels

-Despite his theological insight to the mind of God, man, and all of his intelligence all I am left with a
memory of two and named concubines (who probably had no choice in the matter) who are only
referred to as ‘She whom I was accustomed to take to bed’."

OUTLANDISH KNIGHT -MINOO DINESH

His wealth and social status gave him access to people and places ordinary people of his time could
only dream of. The subsequent democratisation of history has not led to an increase storytellers, but
instead appears to have led to a degree of specialisation and niche history that has forgotten about
the narrative

– That link to Prince Albert; by turning down an invitation, you missed out on it.

– Never having gone about rouged, there is a limit to the empathy one can have with the subject.
But then as Constantine did, should I have empathy with him?

– George Blake: neat spirits and garlic; his breath like a dragon.

– Heavy lidded, mischevious eyes, peering out around an Ōgi fan.

– What was the reason for the feud between him and Riley Smith?

– I suspect he was as much of an enigma to himself as he is to posterity.

– Like all members of his class, a frightful snob.

He wealth and social status gave him access to people and places ordinary folk of his time could only
dream of. The subsequent democratisation of history has not led to an increase in storytelling, But
instead appears to have led to a degree of specialisation and niche history that has almost forgotten
about the narrative.

A CABINET OF BYZANTINE CURIOSITIES - ANTHONY KALDELLIS

A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities

Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History's Most Orthodox Empire

Anthony Kaldellis

An entertaining and enlightening guide for students and general readers interested in the late
Roman and Byzantine worlds

Introduces readers to a wide array of ancient texts and factoids, many of which have never before
been translated or collected

Richly illustrated with contemporary artworks

Its attractive layout and organization allows for quick and easy browsing

Anthony Kaldellis, A cabinet of Byzantine curiosities: strange tales and surprising facts from history’s
most orthodox empire, Oxford University Press (2017). Available from: Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk.

Oxford University Press (USA) emailed and asked me to review this little volume. I agreed at once.
We need more easy-to-read collections of anecdotes and wit from antiquity, and something of the
kind for the Byzantine empire can only be a good thing. I believe Dr Kaldellis has written two
preceding volumes on Roman and Greek curiosities, but I have not seen these.

Such a book is aimed at the educated general reader. Possibly I am the ideal reader for such a book.
For I collect books of anecdotes, and humour anyway, so I am familiar with the genre; and, although
I am not a professional scholar, I do love tales of antiquity, and I am even interested in some parts of
Byzantine history. So… what did I make of it?

The volume is a small hardback, with a quite magnificent cover designed by Brady McNamara. In fact
this photograph from OUP’s website does not do it justice!

The standard of book manufacture is high – no surprise from OUP. There are internal photographs
inline, taken from manuscripts, in monochrome. These are not a success, and look very murky. The
idea is very sound; but the images should have been reproduced in colour. As it is, the eye skips over
them.

Dr Kaldellis has assembled some 200 pages of anecdotes, taken from sources mainstream and
otherwise. He gives the source in almost every case, and one can only respect the breadth of reading
that is involved, particularly in hagiographical literature. Translations are his own, and he wisely
advises the reader that he has paraphrased where need be to bring out the point for the general
reader. In a book of this kind, intended for entertainment, this is entirely right and proper.

As is usual in these kinds of collections, the material is organised by topic. A table of contents would
be helpful here. Curiously it starts with marriage and the family; then “unorthodox sex” (!?); animals;
food and dining; eunuchs; medical practice;… and so on. The ordering of this material seemed
unusual to me. Usually such volumes open with military anecdotes, scholarship, and so on,
wandering into more domestic items later. Stuff about the vices of the Byzantines should certainly
have been banished to deeper inside the book.
Failing to follow the traditional (!?) order rather undermined the author’s hope to neutralise the
picture of the Byzantines as a bunch of decadent back-stabbing effeminate cowardly treacherous
superstitious scumbags. In fact the content left me with precisely that impression. For instance the
negative anecdotes about Byzantine saints, although deeply valuable to me, reinforced the
impression of credulous superstition. Other anecdotes made clear how the Byzantines preferred
bribery and treachery to courage, which reinforced the stereotype of weakness and backstabbing. So
here the author fails in his objective.

But this does not weaken the usefulness of the book to me, and probably to others. I don’t object to
the old stereotype in any way. What the book gives me is solid interesting information from primary
sources, that might perhaps not easily be gathered in so compact a form. For instance how many of
us know that St Simeon the Stylite developed an abcess on his foot which dripped stinking pus all
down his pillar? The charlatanry of the monks is well brought out.

And of course such books are rarely read from cover to cover. Maybe doing so is rather a mistake.
Indeed Dr K. wisely suggests that this is the sort of book to read on the toilet. Nor is he wrong. Open
it anywhere, read a bit, learn a bit, smile a bit – that is what such books are for.

One decision will strike the reader at once. The author has decided, unusually, to give nearly all
names as a transcription from Greek. So “Konstantinos” appears all over the place, instead of
Constantine (with the absurd result that on one page we have Constantine I facing Konstantinos V!);
Ioannes rather than John; and even Isaccios Komnenos for Isaac Comnenus. This habit, creeping in
among some academics, is deplorable. It achieves nothing, since all of us know what is meant. It
places a barrier in the way of the general reader. It (again!) vitiates the author’s purpose, to suggest
that the medieval Greeks were the Roman successors, when the names are so utterly odd and un-
Roman. This was a mistake, and OUP should have prevented this. Many ordinary people can
empathise with the brave death of Constantine XI, going out in 1453 to die fighting in the streets as
the Turks breached the walls of Constantinople. Nobody cares a bit about a king called Konstantinos
XI, whoever he might have been. I suspect that Dr. K. is not to blame, but these sorts of games,
which tend to exclude the ordinary folk, are a form of elitism.

I learned a great deal from the book. Again and again I found myself drawn, wanting to put down the
volume and go and look up the original source. (In some cases, of course, I remembered the original,
and I didn’t detect any significant lack of reliability).

This is not a joke book either. But the stories are interesting enough. Anyone interested in Byzantium
will find useful stuff in here, relatively easily absorbed. So I think I can recommend the book,
although I would definitely argue against reading it from the front. Read it on the toilet, read it in
bits here and there. Because of the contents, I cannot recommend it as a gift for the monk in your
life, however; which is a shame, since the Most Orthodox Empire is a subject that would otherwise
appeal to many of them.

Between about 1880 and 1960 British and American publishers occasionally brought out curiosity
books in small print runs by capable people. These books were on delightful but inconsequential
subjects: the eccentricities of Chinese court etiquette; descriptions of giraffes by non-Africans;
mysterious passages in Shakespeare… They were also written in beautiful English by men and
women who would have rather cut off their hands with a paper knife than use words like ‘impact’
(as a verb), ‘socio-economic’, toward (in titles), vocality etc etc Beach’s copies of these treasures
smell vaguely of tea biscuits and pipe smoke. They belonged to a world in which people wishing to
entertain themselves sat down in armchairs and read in daylight in houses where there was no
television and where the radio was restricted to the servants’ quarters: outside red squirrels
gamboled in the garden; and men with shotguns chased poachers. It is not that, post 1960, these
books stopped being published. It is just that it ceased to be fashionable for very intelligent folk to
‘waste’ their time on such trivia and, all too often, the field was ceded to enthusiastic amateurs who
– forgive… – didn’t understand and couldn’t write. Such drolleries, such intellectual facetiousness,
such rollicking acts of sophism had become games from a happier but altogether vanished world of
which perhaps crosswords alone have survived. They now – like Arabian unicornsand New England
mermaids – only very rarely come out to play.

This brings us to the marvelous A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities.

The author of A Cabinet is one Anthony Kaldellis. Beach has decided not to look into Mr or Dr
Kaldellis’ online profiles because he likes to think of him as a survivor from Europe’s fin de siècle (c.
1900 not c. 2000) upper middle classes who had a little too much time on his hands; and who in a
world war would have been drafted into espionage or code breaking. (You know the sort). AK has
brought together a series of, to quote the subtitle, ‘strange tales and surprising facts from history’s
most orthodox empire’ and somehow convinced Oxford University Press to publish them (Beach is
still working that one out). The book is really just a series of Byzantine gobbets broken down into
sections: war (wounds, weapons, spies…), saints (stylites, extremists; holy fools…) etc. The skill in
history by gobbet is: (i) write well (subject, verb, object, preferably in that order); (ii) present well
(give context, but without insulting the reader); and crucially (iii) choose well. AK has got these three
down, but Beach particularly wants to pay tribute to ‘choose well’. Many of the gobbets are, at first
glance, gentle rather than hilarious, but they bring, particularly eaten ten or twelve at a time,
immense satisfaction. Consider this gem. Beach read it once and frowned, then read it twice and
smiled. He is now quoting it to his children.

The Vandal king Geizeric (d. 477) conquered North Africa, sacked Rome in 455, and terrorized the
Mediterranean with his pirate fleet. One time when he was setting sail from Carthage, his pilot asked
him where they were going. Geizeric replied, ‘Clearly against people with whom God is angry.’
(Procopius)

Also did you know that one of the earliest passages of Alan to survive is an obscene joke about a
woman, a priest and sexual intercourse?

There are almost 250 pages of this fabulous nonsense.

Not every civilization invites the gobbet treatment, of course. Try writing 60,000 words in this style
about the Franks or the Anglo-Saxons and you’d quickly run into a wall of boredom. Civilizations
probably need an absurdly high estimation of themselves and enough freedom in the ranks to act
crazily: the Byzantines along with the Vikings and the medieval and early modern Gaels qualify.
Beach fears that ‘the West’ c. 2010 would not make good gobbet material, but that is what you get
from living in a safe space.

Lots of good reading this summer. A Cabinet was not the most educational, the most profound or
the most impressive read, but, God, it was the most enjoyable.

Other good books: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

Weird, decadent, degenerate, racially mixed, superstitious, theocratic, effeminate, and even hyper-
literate, Byzantium has long been regarded by many as one big curiosity. According to Voltaire, it
represented "a worthless collection of miracles, a disgrace for the human mind"; for Hegel, it was "a
disgusting picture of imbecility."

A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities will churn up these old prejudices, while also stimulating a deeper
interest among readers in one of history's most interesting civilizations. Many of the zanier tales and
trivia that are collected here revolve around the political and religious life of Byzantium. Thus,
stories of saints, relics, and their miracles-from the hilarious to the revolting-abound. Byzantine
bureaucracy (whence the adjective "Byzantine"), court scandals, and elaborate penal code are world
famous. And what would Byzantium be without its eunuchs, whose ambiguous gender produced odd
and risible outcomes in different contexts? The book also contains sections on daily life that are
equally eye-opening, including food (from aphrodisiacs to fermented fish sauce), games such as polo
and acrobatics, and obnoxious views of foreigners and others (e.g., Germans, Catholics, Arabs,
dwarves). But lest we overlook Byzantium's more honorable contributions to civilization, also
included are some of the marvels of Byzantine science and technology, from the military
(flamethrowers and hand grenades) to the theatrical ("elevator" thrones, roaring mechanical lions)
and medical (catheters and cures, some bizarre). This vast assortment of historical anomaly and
absurdity sheds vital light on one of history's most obscure and orthodox empires.

Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities-Notes

P113 Dog Head

P114 ‘Touch my resticles’

P121 is the place where Arius died still there?

P121 farting

P123 lists

P124 Synesios

P125 Felix