A long avenue of black pine-woods September 20, 2009
Posted by Jenny in literature.Tags: Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton, The Strange Crime of John Boulnois, Walter Scott
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The story that got me hooked on G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown detective works is called “The Strange Crime of John Boulnois.” Here are some of the reasons I like this story: the hero is a professional philosopher; it features a murder committed with a rapier with big red jewels in the hilt; and it has a seductive sense of landscape.
The picture at left is from a book referred to in the Chesterton story, The Bride of Lammermoor. One of the characters in the Scott book is Edgar, Master of Ravenswood. I mention this only because it gives a tiny bit of background to aid in reading the following passage. The scene takes place in the evening at the estate of Pendragon Park just as the murder is about to occur. A character named Calhoun Kidd is walking into the estate.
And turning the corner by the the open lodge-gates, he set off, stumping up the long avenue of black pine-woods that pointed in abrupt perspective towards the inner gardens of Pendragon Park. The trees were as black and orderly as plumes upon a hearse; there were still a few stars. He was a man with more literary than direct natural associations; the word “Ravenswood” came into his head repeatedly. It was partly the raven colour of the pine-woods; but partly also an indescribable atmosphere almost described in Scott’s great tragedy: the smell of something that died in the eighteenth century; the smell of dank gardens and broken urns, of wrongs that will never now be righted; of something that is none the less incurably sad because it is strangely unreal.
Aw, I love this stuff.
Moss-trooping in South Africa February 4, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Boer War, history, literature, military history.Tags: Boer War, Border wars, Deneys Reitz, Lay of the Minstrel, Walter Scott
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Not far from where Smuts' men met the 17th Lancers, eastern Cape
Moss-trooper. n. One of a class of marauders who infested the ‘mosses’ of the Scottish Border, in the middle of the seventeenth century; a border freebooter.
Moss. n. A bog, swamp, or morass; a peat-bog. (Chiefly Sc. and northern dialect.)
It is September, 1901, in the Cape Colony of South Africa. A Boer commando led by Jan Smuts has just made a successful assault on the British 17th Lancers regiment. The Boers, who had been starving and dressed in rags, are able to refurbish themselves from the regiment’s captured supplies. Deneys Reitz, a 19-year-old Boer, describes the activities of the commando, as they go from from one village to another in the British colony, as “moss-trooping.”
His grandfather had been educated in Britain, where he had actually met Sir Walter Scott. His father loved to recite the long narrative ballads of Scott to his family gathered in the parlor. Deneys had grown up reading the novels of Scott, and at one abandoned farmhouse during the war, he and a friend are delighted to discover “almost a complete set of the works of Scott,” which they promptly seize and bring along on their horses along with their canteens and their Mauser rifles.
Mosses and mists in Scotland (Glencoe)
Deneys would have heard the phrase “moss-trooping” in Scott’s “The Lay of the Minstrel”: “A stark moss-trooping Scot was he…”
They are in a dry country of open veld and sharp kopje, thorn-bush and antelope. It could hardly have been more different from the misty moors of Scotland, but the vastly outnumbered Boers took their inspiration where they could find it. The imagination does what it needs to.
Place: Exmoor. Time: 17th century. January 29, 2009
Posted by Jenny in literature, nature, travel.Tags: English footpaths, Exmoor, Lorna Doone, Monmouth Rebellion, R.D. Blackmore, Walter Scott
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If your knowledge of literature is good, you will immediately suspect from the words above that I have been reading the novel Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore. Yes, it is true. I have been living on the wild, windswept heath of Exmoor, loitering by the fireplace in the cottage of the Ridd family, galloping on my faithful steed along roads frequented by highwaymen, and venturing up the roaring cascades of a hidden stream to visit the forbidden lair of the Doone clan.
The book was more of a favorite of my grandmother than my mother. Grandma Johnstone had one of the old-fashioned three-volume editions. She was not in a hurry to finish a book. She loved the leisurely setting of a scene in Sir Walter Scott, the tale that begins with a small figure making his way across a highland glen, or over a pass between precipitous crags, or through whatever mist-swirling, moss-festooned place Scott might have invented. Blackmore was a bit later than Scott, writing Lorna in 1869. But they were cut from the same cloth. Their books were meant to be lived in for a while, as one sat in the parlor in the evening turning the pages, admiring the illustrations, lost in the romance and intrigue.
I would like to visit Exmoor someday. It takes its name from the River Exe, and many other streams and rivers flow through it. Most of it is now a national park. Exmoor has the advantage of not being on the way to anywhere else, unless perhaps you are going from South Wales to Cornwall. The area has only small villages. Herds of red deer and wild ponies wander the moors. The coastline is embroidered with waterfalls and ravines. There is said to be a “Beast of Exmoor,” southwest England’s answer to Sasquatch, that makes mysterious nocturnal attacks on livestock. Exmoor boasts many species of heather, some obscure lichens and mosses, a high-elevation beech forest, and something called a whitebeam tree. It is possible to walk many miles along the system of public footpaths that are such a wonderful feature of England.
Blackmore was writing about a time 200 years earlier than his own, the period of the Monmouth Rebellion, also known as the “Pitchfork Rebellion,” against the rule of the papist James II. It was a harsh time. The bodies of criminals were hung from gibbets as a warning along the highways. Lives were short and often curtailed by violence. Some of the passages in Lorna are written in a dialect as impenetrable to me as Uncle Remus would be to a reader in England. But part of the enjoyment for me is to learn about those lives, the schools that were attended, the food and beverages that were served (the venison and the ale), the conversation that was had in a tavern, the gathering of the villagers, both men and women, to do the work of the harvest. The plot of Lorna is pure rhinestones and moonbeams, but the setting is very real. Probably not much had changed in Exmoor between 1685 and 1869.
It’s fun just to read the captions to the illustrations. (You can find an illustrated version of Lorna if you go to the Project Gutenberg website.) “I was grieved to see a disdainful smile spread upon his sallow countenance.” “For, lo! I stood at the foot of a long pale slide of water.” “As snug a little house blinked on me, as ever I saw or wished to see.” “We happened upon a great coach and six horses labouring very heavily.” Ah, wonderful!
