Symbolic Forest

When I first moved down to South-West England, I was intrigued to note that one of the major local commercial property firms, their boards decorating every half-empty high street, was called Alder King. No doubt this is because at some point in the distant past Mr Alder and Mr King got together to form a business (their website is sadly unhelpful on the subject), but in my own private imagination I liked to think that their founder was deliberately trying to invoke a mythical archetype, implying that the cycle of closure, vacancy and opening on the High Street echoed the ancient cycle of death, sacrifice and rebirth, the brief but spiritually charged reign of the sacred king destroyed by the Great Goddess as described by James Frazer and popularised by one of the twentieth century’s best-known English-language poets. No doubt that poet, if he had lived to the 2010s and had seen Alder King’s advertising boards himself, would have thought the same. Rather, he would not just have thought “that’s an amusing coincidence of naming,” as I did: he would have thought it yet more evidence that all of his theories about mythology and prehistory were incontrovertibly, emotionally and poetically true, and that anyone who disagreed with him was probably a contemptible writer-of-prose or Apollonian poetaster with a degree from Cambridge. At least, I assume that’s what he would have thought. I’ve never managed to finish reading his book on the subject, and I’ve threatened to write a blog post about it more than once in the distant past. Today’s Book I Haven’t Read is, as you potentially have already guessed from this introduction, The White Goddess by Robert Graves.

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Keyword noise: Books I Haven't Read, reading, religion, paganism, Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Goodbye To All That, poetry, history, mythology, fake history, fake mythology, Ancient Britain, anthropology, archaeology, Blodeuwedd, Lleu Llaw Gyffes, Gwydion, Mabinogi, Mabinogion, Cad Goddeu, Cymru, Wales.

There are quite a few ideas for blog posts lining up on my pinboard at the moment, and most of them are the sort that require work to write: long, in-depth pieces that need some sort of study or concentration. With the state of things right now, both in the world outside, here at home, and in the office, the space for that level of study and concentration has been a bit hard to come by. However, there’s one thing that has been in my head, on and off, for years, and it’s been sitting in my head for so long that it’s about time I tried to put it into words. It’s about a book which (unlike these) I have read, a much-loved book, one I love myself, in fact, at least at some level. It’s a classic of 1960s YA fiction, particularly in Britain. The Owl Service, by Alan Garner.

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Keyword noise: Alan Garner, The Owl Service, books, literature, mythology, Blodeuwedd, Mabinogi, Math fab Mythonwy, Wales, Cymru, Gwynedd, Llanymawddwy, Vale of Ffestiniog, Dyffryn Maentwrog.

We sat down last night to watch one of the Christmas present DVDs: Arrested Development Season 3. It got me thinking, after yesterday’s post, about pseudo-archaeological documentaries.

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Keyword noise: archaeology, Arrested Development, Atlantis, comedy, conspiracy theory, Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, documentary, fake history, fake mythology, Freemasonry, Graham Hancock, history, Illuminati, Knights Templar, mythology, narration, Nostradamus, occult, Priory of Sion, pseudoarchaeology, Ron Howard, television, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

Getting this website going again, and posting things regularly, I was thinking that maybe I should resurrect Books I Haven’t Read, an ongoing series of posts in which I reviewed books that I hadn’t managed to finish reading, and briefly discussed why. This was on the grounds that reviews of bad books are often more interesting than reviews of good books;^* many book reviewers probably get away without reading the whole thing; and if I’m going to talk about something, I may as well be honest about whether I’ve read it or not. Hence, Books I Haven’t Read, which annoyed at least one author who discovered it and couldn’t resist responding.^**

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Keyword noise: archaeology, Books I Haven't Read, Christopher Hill, Robert Graves, civil war, English Civil War, Greek Myths, history, Levellers, literature, mythology, poetics, The White Goddess, The World Turned Upside Down.

So, Big Dave has left, in a cloud of adulation and office stationery, getting ready to move house over the break. Everything is booked, and everything is ready to go, and when I get back after Christmas I will have someone new to share the office with.

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Keyword noise: Big Dave, books, Celtic mythology, children's books, general knowledge, King Arthur, King William's College, literature, mythology, quiz, Silver On The Tree, Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising, trivia.

The big problem with three-day weekends^* is that you start wishing they were four-day ones.

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Keyword noise: bank holiday, Beltane, Celtic, Edinburgh, long weekend, May Day, mythology, paganism, religion.

(read part one here)

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Keyword noise: archaeology, castles, Iron Age, King Arthur, London, Mabinogion, mythology, raven god, ravens, Tower Of London, Welsh myth.

When I was still a student, as a researcher, I was always a bit rubbish. I’m one of those people who hoovers up random, unconnected pieces of information like anything; but when it comes to use it I can never remember where it came from. Little factoids are no good unless you can judge how true it is likely to be, and you can’t do that if you don’t know their provenance.

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Keyword noise: baking, birthday cake, cake, castles, Celtic, Celtic mythology, cooking, English, history, kitchen, London, mythology, oven, ravens, research, researching, Tower Of London, tradition.

Feeling dark and downtrodden still, and nothing creative has been coming to mind. When I’m home from work, all I want to do is stretch out on the sofa and let my mind idle. When I’m at work, I’m too busy, well, working, rebuilding and reindexing database after database in desperate attempts to shave percentage points off their performance.

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Keyword noise: archetype, darkness, databases, interconnection, mythology, subconsious, yggdrasil.

Bored this afternoon, so I ended up watching Richard & Judy. They were trying to suggest some symbols to represent Englishness—it being St. George’s day and all—and kept going on about King Arthur, suggesting Excalibur as a national motif, and so on. Don’t they realise that the King Arthur myth was all about stopping the English from settling in Britain? It would hardly be appropriate.

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Keyword noise: mythology, Richard and Judy, King Arthur.