Beowulf, Dragons & the Wilderness

Last month I went to see Beowulf, a rather odd film with slightly cartoonish modified characters that seemed facially wooden compared with straight acting but also with some dramatic special effects and a wonderful dragon. The film is based on the Anglo-Saxon poem of the same name that dates from sometime in the last centuries of the first millennium. The poem is set in Sweden and Denmark in the sixth century and tells the story of the hero Beowulf and his battles with the monster Grendel and his mother (described in the poem as a “swamp-thing from hell” but played in the movie by Angeline Jolie as a seductress”) and finally the “old harrower of the dark”, the dragon. The poem is a powerful tale of heroic warriors and evil monsters, the original of all “sword and sorcery” stories. Beowulf wasn’t taken seriously as a literary poem until 1936 when J.R.R.Tolkien, then a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, wrote an important academic work called Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics. The influence of the poem can be clearly seen in Tolkien’s own stories. In The Hobbit, as in Beowulf, a dragon is roused to violence when an intruder steals a gold-plated cup from its horde of treasure. In The Lord of the Rings there are even direct quotes from Beowulf in the descriptions of the land of Rohan and its people. The Golden Hall of the King of Rohan, Meduseld, sounds like the hall of Hrothgar in Beowulf, described as "radiant with gold". Meduseld is convincingly portrayed in Peter Jackson's film of The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, I think that Jackson's Rohan is more like the world of Beowulf than that portrayed in the Beowulf film.

Although Anglo-Saxon or Old English gave rise to modern English Beowulf can only be read in the original with difficulty. However there are several translations into modern English. Of the few I’ve read I like Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, which is powerful and compelling. All the quotations in this blog come from this version.

Much of Beowulf takes place in the outdoors, in wild country that is threatening and strange with “dismal woods” and “windswept crags and treacherous keshes, where cold streams pour down the mountain and disappear under mist and moorland”. The poem contains one of the first known uses of the word “wildeor” which means “wild animal or deer” and from which the word “wilderness” derives. Beowulf itself probably means “bee wolf”, that is a creature that eats honey, a bear. In my book Crossing Arizona I link Beowulf to Winnie-the-Pooh (who lives in a wilderness – a wood on a hill) and Beowulf’s quests to long distance walking. For those who love the literature of wilderness as well as the wild itself Beowulf is the place to start.

The photo shows a carved dragon in Weem Woods in the Tay Valley in the Scottish Highlands. Photo info: Canon EOS 300D, Canon 18-55mm lens at 18mm, f3.5@1/60, ISO 200, flash, raw file converted to JPEG in Capture One Pro.

Yellowstone in TGO

The February issue of TGO magazine, out now, has a feature on my Yellowstone ski tour with Igloo Ed last winter – see blog posts for February and March 15 2007 – on which I lived in igloos built with the IceBox tool. This winter I am undertaking another ski tour in Yellowstone, again with Igloo Ed along with some others. I’ll report on how it went in a couple of months.

The photo shows Ed outside the igloo in Little Firehole Meadows during an evening snowstorm. Photo info: Ricoh GR-D, f2.4@1/30, flash on, ISO 400, raw file converted to JPEG and processed in DxO Optics Pro.

Strathspey in the Snow: Welcome to the New Year

Yesterday I ventured out into the local fields and woods for the first walk of the year, a week later than normal due to a nasty cold or virus ailment that has been slow to shift. A fresh overnight snowfall covered the ground, shimmering in the low sun. To the south the Cairngorms rose, white and distant above a monochrome landscape of dark woods and pale fields. There was no wind and little sound, just the steady crunch of snow under my boots and the occasional crack of ice as I stood on a hidden frozen puddle. Tracks showed that wildlife had been active, seeking essential food in this cold hostile world. From an overgrown spruce and larch plantation straight lines of rabbit prints led through holes in the fence to scatter at low banks and clumps of rushes where the snow was thin and could be scraped away. Fox tracks worked a way through the maze of rabbit prints. I followed the fox for a while but could see no sign it had caught anything. Pheasant tracks wandered randomly around. These pen bred birds are not fully wild. How many will manage to survive the cold? By the edge of a birch wood roe deer prints dotted the ground, never coming far from the security of the trees. Little moved as I passed by, just the occasional pheasant scurrying along a fence line in search of an opening, a coal tit foraging in pine foliage, the dipping flight of a silhouetted wagtail and once a raven, its harsh call causing me to look up, flying south straight at the mountains. On the very tip of a tall, thin, ancient larch a buzzard perched, catching the rays of the sun, its upright shape looking like an extension of the tree. Out to the west a thick bank of cloud surged against the hills. The air was sharp with frost and pale with weak cloud-filtered sunlight. As the greyness of dusk slowly replaced the faint pink of the sunset I tramped back across the fields, thinking of the warmth of the fire and a hot drink. I had only wandered a few miles on this quiet, gentle walk but I felt I had made a first contact with nature for 2008 and it was enough.

The photo shows Strathspey at dusk on January 7. Photo info: Canon EOS 350D, Canon 18-55mm IS lens at 53 mm, f5.6@1/80, ISO 200, raw file converted to JPEG in Capture One Pro.

A Glorious Winter Camp

A week ago I took advantage of the wonderful pre-Christmas winter weather to spend a few days in the Coulin hills between Glen Carron and Glen Torridon. I camped on a high col with spacious views and a sense of wildness and remoteness, a magnificent camp site. Many days of hard frost had left the ground hard and icy, though I was able to find a trickle of running water to fill my bottles. Dry weather meant I was able to leave the door of my shelter wide open and fall asleep lying in the entrance gazing at the stars and the almost-full moon. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a glorious and spectacular camp in December before. From my camp I had an exciting day on the hills, the going quite tricky due to ice covering paths, rocks and grass. Before the freeze the weather was very wet and the hills sodden, with a thaw of an earlier snowfall adding to the rain. The sudden coming of the frost had meant huge bubbles of ice rippling across the grass and running down crags where streams had burst their banks. Elsewhere a thin veneer of ice made rocks treacherous while long sections of paths were frozen into skating rinks. Only on the gravel and stone summits where there was no water to freeze was the walking easy. The sky was cloudless and the sun bright, though with little heat and always low down, making for dramatic side lighting even at midday. The air was sharp and cold and as clear as I can ever remember, with more detail in distant hills than I believed possible in our usually hazy air. The glens and straths were full of cloud however, a white canopy hiding roads and houses. Below my camp Coire Lair was full of cloud, which poured very slowly over the lip of the corrie and down into Glen Carron, like a waterfall in slow motion. From Sgorr Ruadh I watched the sun set and a dark red line spread out across the western horizon with the jagged silhouette of the Cuillin Hills on the Isle of Skye breaking into it. The next day I walked back down the icy corrie as the wind picked up and clouds spread across the sky, reaching the road just as the first raindrops fell.

The photo of my camp was taken late in the evening in a temperature of -5ºC. Photo info: Canon EOS 350D, Tamron 11-18mm lens at 11mm, f4.5@8 seconds, ISO 1600, tripod, raw file converted to JPEG and processed in DxO Optics Pro.

Outdoors Station Podcast on New Gear & GPS

A few days ago I did a podcast with Bob Cartwright, for The All New Podzine for 10/12/2007 on The Outdoors Station, talking about some interesting new outdoor gear and telling a story about a problem I had with a GPS unit earlier in the year. The same podcast also has Andy Howell talking about some outdoor books, including The Wild Places, which I reviewed in my last blog (6/12/07). You can find the Podzine here.

The photo shows the wide open spaces of the Ben Avon plateau in the Cairngorms on the morning when I couldn't get a GPS signal, as described in the podcast. Photo info: Canon EOS 350D, 18-55mm lens at 27mm, f8@1/160, ISO 100, raw file processed in Capture One Pro.

The Wild Places- Book Review

My wilderness journeys and my love of nature and wild places are inextricably linked with my love of literature. The two intertwine and inspire each other. This goes back to my childhood when I was enthralled by the stories of Arthur Ransome and even Richmal Crompton’s “William” books, which often have woods and fields as their settings (I still find William’s adventures hilarious). As an adult it has been writers like Henry David Thoreau, Colin Fletcher, Edward Abbey, John Muir and W.H.Murray who I have read and reread, always finding something new and thought-provoking in their work. A few months ago I wrote a piece on these writers called Visionaries of the Wild for the January 2008 issue of TGO magazine (out now in early December and full of suggestions for Xmas gifts, despite the cover date – one of the strange quirks of magazine publishing). I finished that piece with a reference to a recent book, Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, in which the author seeks the wild in the British countryside, ranging from the Northern Highlands to Devon and East Anglia, in a series of short journeys, most involving a night or two under the stars. Macfarlane links these places with natural forces – the weather, geology, wild life – and the people who have inhabited the landscapes. He collects talismans – stones, feathers, shells, wood – that connect up the places in his memory and finds that these connections present a different map of Britain, a web of nature, to the road map most people are familiar with, a rigid structure that ignores nature. Macfarlane also discovers that wild places are not only remote and vast but can be found everywhere, that the natural state of the world is wildness and that to this it will return. Macfarlane’s discovery of wildness in little woods and lowland farmland brought me back to my childhood in the flat countryside of Lancashire where I discovered nature and freedom in such places. The book, a wonderful celebration of the wild, brought back other memories too and stimulated me to think anew about the meaning of wild places. It’s not a polemic in defence of wild places but the joy the author expresses in wildness shows the importance of these places and therefore the need to protect them (the author supports the Scottish Wild Land Group and does say “the contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe”). The writing is compelling and enthralling, pulling the reader into the wild landscapes and the experiences of the author. Optimistic and life-affirming the book is a great antidote to the sense of despair and loss that can come with the experience of the destruction of wild places. As an old hippy-farmer friend of mine was found of saying many decades ago “nature will out”. That is the message of The Wild Places.