Bernard Cornwell, "Bookclub", Radio 4 on Sunday 1 February

Bernard Cornwell's novel The Last Kingdom, set in ninth-century Britain against the background of the wars between Alfred the Great and the Danes, is the subject of February's Bookclub on BBC Radio 4.

The programme will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday 1 February at 1600 GMT, and repeated on Thursday 5 February at 1600 GMT. If you're outside the UK you can listen to the programme live on the BBC website, or on the Listen Again page or the BBC iPlayer (look under 'B' for Bookclub in the alphebtical listings) for 7 days after broadcast.

More information on the Bookclub web page.

Bookclub is a monthly half-hour programme presented by James Naughtie. Each month a well-known book is selected for reading and the author is invited along to answer questions from the presenter and members of the audience.

The Poetry of History: Battle of Maldon

"Thought must be the harder, heart be the keener,
mind must be the greater, while our strength grows less.
Here lies our prince all hewn,
a good man in the dust. He will always mourn
who from this war-play thinks now to turn.
My life is old. I will not fly;
but I myself beside my lord,
so loved a man, think to lie."

So speaks the old warrior Byrhtwold, resolving to fight and die beside his dead lord Byrhtnoth, at the Battle of Maldon in 991. The battle was a crushing defeat for the men of Essex and their ealdorman Byrhtnoth, at the hands of a Viking raiding party on the marshes of the Essex coast. But the commemorative poem manages to turn the defeat into a heroic last stand. The values of the warrior ethic - courage in battle, loyalty to a lord and one's companions, contempt for those who flee - echo those in Wiglaf's angry speech to the cowards who abandon Beowulf in his last fight with the dragon (in the poem at least; I can't speak for the recent film).

The Battle of Maldon was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 programme, The Poetry of History, broadcast on Sunday 25 November. A historian and a professor of English discuss the poem and its context, with splendid readings from a modern translation and from the Old English original. You can listen to it here for seven days after broadcast (so up to Sunday 2 December).

The Tinner's Corpse: A Crowner John Mystery

Radio 4’s Saturday Play yesterday (6 January 2007) was an adaptation of a historical mystery novel, The Tinner’s Corpse by Bernard Knight. It’s available on Listen Again for a week, so you can still listen to it provided you do it before Saturday 13 January.

Set in Devon in 1195, it’s a little later than that doyen of the medieval mystery, the Brother Cadfael series. Instead of an ecclesiastic, the detective is a bluff no-nonsense knight, Sir John de Wolfe, coroner of Devon, the ‘Crowner John’ of the series title, aided by his trusty sidekick, the naive young clerk Thomas. Sir John shares his crusading background with Cadfael. Thomas wants to be a priest, but was thrown out of his training when the bishop caught him stealing a chaste – so Thomas insists – kiss from a girl.

The Tinner’s Corpse is set against the background of tin mining on Dartmoor, and as well as solving the murder mystery Crowner John and Thomas have their own personal problems to sort out. Here’s the blurb from the novel:

Crowner John is summoned to the bleak Devonshire moors to investigate the murder of the overman of a tin mining gang working for Walter Knapman, one of Devon's most powerful tin merchants. The case is puzzling, but things get even more confusing when Walter disappears. A decapitated body, a missing tinner, a disgruntled band of miners and a mad Saxon. How on earth can Crowner John sort all this out when his wife and mistress hate him, and his clerk is in the grip of a suicidal depression?

The personal lives of Crowner John and Thomas are given at least as much attention as the mystery. Sir John is married, though his wife never made an appearance in the play, and engaged in a longstanding extramarital affair with beautiful red-headed Welsh tavern-keeper Nesta. (You guessed right, she has the fiery character to go with the red hair) He also has an irascible relationship with his brother-in-law, who is the Sheriff of Devon and a slimy political type with his fingers in the till. Thomas seems to be adolescent (I didn’t catch his exact age, but got the impression he was about sixteen), eager but inept, who takes everything terribly seriously. In a modern school he’d be the geeky kid with glasses who’s no good at games. I rather liked Thomas, though I could also see how his ineptitude might try Sir John’s less-than-limitless patience. All this gave the play a charming human touch, and it also seemed very well researched – I noticed no anachronistic names or events, and nothing that made me mutter, "Oh, please!".

By contrast, the mystery itself seemed quite slight. There’s a line in one of Dorothy L Sayers’ novels where the respected mystery writer Harriet Vane admits to Lord Peter Wimsey that she once devised a crime so fiendishly complicated that she could think of no way for her detective to solve it and had to fall back on the murderer’s confession. Well, The Tinner’s Corpse fell back on the murderer’s confession not once but twice. Call me old-fashioned, but I like the detective to have to do more detecting than that to solve a mystery, historical or otherwise. As the author, Bernard Knight, is a retired forensic pathologist, I was expecting the case to turn on some forensic detail, like the time of death or the type of murder weapon. Maybe such details were present in the original novel but deemed impractical on radio, or considered too gruesome for a Saturday afternoon audience? Or maybe The Tinner’s Corpse isn’t typical of the Crowner John mysteries. At any rate, the radio adaptation was pleasant company for an hour and half while doing the ironing and mending.

Did anyone else hear it? What did you think? Or if you’ve read the novels, what do you think of them?

Sisters of Aphrodite: Radio 3 Sunday Feature

The Christmas Eve Sunday Feature on Radio 3 (available on Listen Again) was an interesting 45-minute documentary on female deities and their worshippers in prehistory. I found the overtly feminist tone rather irritating, and in places I got confused over dates, but there were plenty of noteworthy nuggets of information and ideas embedded in the narrative.

The presenter, historian Bettany Hughes, started with the prehistoric female figurines such as the ‘Venus’ of Willendorf. These figurines turn up over a wide area of Europe and Asia from France to Siberia and are dated at anything up to 25,000 years ago. I didn’t get a clear date for when they went out of use, but had the impression from the programme that the date range might run up to about 4,000 BC. The figurines are conventionally interpreted as representing a Mother Earth Goddess, hence the title ‘Venus’ applied to many of them by the excavators who discovered them. Their wide distribution has been interpreted to mean that the Goddess cult was universal, or at least very widespread. The programme suggested that the figurines might represent real women, rather than a universal goddess. Which is an interesting hypothesis, although I’m not sure how one would go about testing it – how could we tell whether an artefact represents a real woman, an idealised woman, an earthly incarnation or representative of a deity (e.g. a priestess) or a goddess, or indeed a combination of all of them? (This is touched on in an interesting web article, which is well worth reading - though I wonder if his contention that Stone Age women resembled Raquel Welch in the film One Million Years BC may contain an element of wishful thinking).

One suggestion made in the programme was that the preponderance of female figurines (apparently something like 95% of Stone Age figurines for which the sex can be identified are female and only 5% male) indicates that women held high social status. One contributor suggested that this might be connected with the development of farming and a settled lifestyle. The argument suggested that home-based activities such as raising crops in a garden, tending livestock in a yard, making pottery, weaving textiles, etc can be readily done by women, and that when people became sedentary and such activities became at least as important as hunting, women’s power and social status increased. There’s some logic to this, and I think I remember some anthropology survey that claimed that women have higher status in agrarian societies (e.g. peasant farmers where the staple crop is rice) than in hunting communities (e.g. the Inuit). (But I can’t find the reference, so don’t quote me on that, I may have mis-remembered it). Unfortunately, I don’t see how that hypothesis squares with the age of the ‘Venus’ of Willendorf, which is dated to around 24,000 years ago. As farming is supposed to have started around 10,000 BC in the Near East and taken several thousand years to spread across Europe, this would suggest to me that the ‘Venus’of Willendorf was carved in a hunter-gatherer society, in which case the postulated connection with the development of farming rather falls apart.

Another suggestion was that some of the female figurines represent a sort of childbirth manual. This suggestion was, I think, based on statuettes found on Cyprus near the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Paphos. The contributor argued that there are no temples associated with Goddess worship at the right date, and the figurines bear no insignia suggesting they represent a deity. But his excavations showed a high level of infant mortality and a number of women buried with neonates who had presumably died in or shortly after childbirth, which he interpreted as indicating that infant mortality was a problem of great importance to the society at the time. The figurines are shown seated with their knees apart, a recommended position for childbirth, which may indicate they were used to demonstrate a way to bear a child that might maximise the survival chances of both mother and baby. Though I don’t know how one could tell the difference between this and a good-luck charm or an invocation to a goddess who was thought to protect women in labour?

The programme then went on to look at female figures in art and artefact from the Bronze Age up to the Classical period in Greece, arguing that at least some of them represent women worshippers rather than goddesses – e.g. the lady carrying a tray of cakes. (Did you know that cake-baking moulds turn up in temple deposits from classical Greece? Now that gives a whole new meaning to How to be a Domestic Goddess, doesn’t it?) One of the titles quoted for a goddess of this approximate period (I got lost in the dates here, so I don’t know if it’s Bronze Age or Classical or both) was ‘Queen of Heaven’, a title that could be readily applied to numerous goddesses from numerous religions (ox-eyed Hera comes to mind, as does Frigg from Norse mythology). The parallel with the Virgin Mary was drawn, and there is a Christian church dedicated to Mary built on the site of the sanctuary of Aphrodite, suggesting that whoever built the church either saw a connection between two powerful female figures or thought it was worthwhile trying to make one. Apparently Mary’s title in some remote Cypriot villages is ‘The Most Blessed Aphrodite’, making the connection explicit. And a monastery high in the Troodos mountains owns an embroidered girdle which is reputed to have belonged to the Virgin Mary and is reputed to have the power to help infertile couples conceive – as evidenced by the many women who come to the monastery to wear the girdle and pray, and then write grateful letters to the monks when they later become new parents. Homer tells a story of Aphrodite lending her embroidered magic girdle to Hera. In that case the girdle had the power to make men and gods fall hopelessly in love with the wearer, which is not quite the same as aiding conception (though obviously connected) – perhaps Aphrodite’s girdle was a little risque for the Virgin Mary and was adapted to a new role, or perhaps it always had several attributes and different aspects dominated in different circumstances.

It doesn’t seem to me very surprising that religions/mythologies/cults (call them what you will) should pick up ideas and rituals from their environment, building on and adapting what has gone before. Pope Gregory the Great advised Abbott Mellitus to do just that when trying to convert the pagan English to Christianity, to make the transition to a new religion more acceptable by doing it in small steps (the letter is in Bede, Book I, Chapter XXX). Perhaps the practice has a long history. What do you think?

The Albatross of Mixed Metaphor......

...is alive and well and roaming the hallowed halls of the BBC. A trailer for a Radio 4 documentary on global warming warned, “....we are on the precipice of a runaway train.”

Most listeners no doubt just laughed or said “Whisky Tango Foxtrot?!” or “What do they pay the editors for?”. Mitch Benn of the satirical sketch team on The Now Show turned it into a comic song. Here’s an extract:

I’m caught between the Devil and a hard place
Between the fire and the deep blue sea
Between a rock and the frying pan
What a terrible place to be

I kicked two birds with one bucket
Bit more bullets than I could chew
I burnt my bridges at both ends
That’s a pretty dumb thing to do

And now I’ve got a snowball’s chance in a handcart
I hope you’ll let me explain
I’m standing on the precipice
Of a runaway train

Now I’m hoist by my own line and sinker
Since I opened up a whole bag of cats
I put my nose out of joint on the grindstone
I don’t know why I did that

I took a bull by the china shop
I won’t do that again
Now I’m standing on the precipice
Of a runaway train

You can hear the whole thing on Listen Again, either by listening directly or by downloading the MP3 file to play on your iPod. The song starts 24 minutes into the 8 December edition. (The rest of the show is also good for a laugh, if you like satire on British/world news and politics). It’ll be available until Friday 15 December, when it will be replaced by the next edition.

By the way, the discussion on historical fantasy in the post below is still running. I just thought I’d better post this now so you all had a chance to go and listen before the programme expires!