Brilliante blogs award

Gabriele at The Lost Fort kindly nominated me for this sparkly blog award. Thank you, Gabriele. I'm not quite clear what the sparkly object actually is: Jonathan Jarrett, who was also on Gabriele's list (and was also kind enough to include me in his own list), calls it a tinfoil hat. I think it looks like a diamond on some sort of stand, not unlike the diamond that was the target of that Pink-Panther-style attempted raid on the Millenium Dome. Any other ideas, anyone?

The usual caveats and disclaimers apply: all the blogs and websites listed in the sidebar, plus a good few that I visit but haven't got around to adding yet, are worthy recipients, but it would be a long post to list all of them. So here, in no particular order, are ten to check out, if you aren't already familiar with them:

• The Lost Fort (Gabriele Campbell). History, snippets of her historical fiction, and amazing photographs of castles.


• A Corner of Tenth-century Europe (Jonathan Jarrett). Academic history blog covering aspects of medieval and early medieval Europe, particularly Catalonia.


• Senchus. Academic history, covering early medieval North Britain including the Picts, Dal Riada, Gododdin and Rheged. This appears to be a fairly new blog, as the archives only go back a few months. One to watch.


• Edward II (Alianore). Everything you ever wanted to know about Edward II, his life, times, friends and enemies. (Not for fans of the film Braveheart).


• Lady Despenser's Scribery. Everything you ever wanted to know about Hugh Despenser the Younger.


• Sarah's Bookarama (Sarah Cuthbertson). Book reviews, photographs of rural England and more.


• Medieval-novels.com. Not a blog, but a website run by Nan Hawthorne and Brandy Purdy listing novels set in the medieval period (broadly defined as 500 - 1600 AD).


• Living the History (Elizabeth Chadwick). History and historical fiction in the Middle Ages, including re-enactment events.


• Ancient Musings (Meghan Sullivan). History and historical fiction in classical Greece.


• Language Log.Witty and erudite commentary on contemporary English usage.

Feel free to play along!

John Barleycorn

The Murder of John Barleycorn

As I went through the North Country,
I heard a merry meeting,
A pleasant toy, and full of joy,
two Noble-men were greeting.

And as they walked forth to sport,
upon a Summers day,
They met another Noble-man,
with whom they had a fray.

His name was Sir John Barley-Corn,
he dwelt down in a Vale,
And had a Kinsman dwelt with him,
they called him Thomas good-Ale.

The one named Sir Richard Beer,
was ready at that time,
And likewise came a busie Peer,
call'd Sir William White-Wine.

Some of them fought in a black-Jack,
some of them in a Can.
But yet the chiefist in a black pot,
fought like a Noble-man.

Sir John Barley-Corn fought in a Bowl,
who won the Victory,
Which made them all to chafe and swear,
that Barley-Corn must dye.

Some said kill him, some said him drown,
some wished to hang him high,
For those that followed Barley-Corn,
they said would beggars dye.

Then with a Plow and they Plow'd him up,
and thus they did devise
To bury him within the Earth,
and swore he would not rise.

With harrows strong they came to him,
and burst Clods on his head,
A joyful Banquet then was made,
when Barley-Corn was dead.

He rested still upon the earth,
till rain from Sky did fall,
Then he grew up on branches green,
which sore amaz'd them all.

Increasing thus till Midsummer,
he made them all afraid,
For he sprang up on high,
and had a goodly Beard

When ripening at St. James tide,
his countenance waxed wan,
Yet now full grown in part of strength,
and thus became a man.

Wherefore with Hooks and Sickles keen,
unto the fields they hy'd,
They cut his Legs off by the Knees,
and Limb from Limb divide.

Then bloodily they cut him down,
from place where he did stand,
And like a Thief for Treachery,
they bound him in a band.

So then they took him up again,
according to his kind,
And plac'd him up in several stacks,
to wither with the wind.

Then with a pitchfork sharp and long,
they rent him to the heart,
And Traytor like for Treason did,
they bound him in a Cart.

And tending him with weapons strong,
unto the Town they hie,
Whereas they Mow'd him in a Mow,
and so they let him lie.

They left him groaning by the walls,
till all his Bones were sore,
And having took him up again,
they cast him on the floor.

And hired two with Holly Clubs,
to beat at him at once,
Who thwackt so hard on Barley-Corn,
the Flesh fell from his Bones, [sic]

Then fast they knit him in a sack,
which griev'd heim very sore,
And soundly steept him in a fat, [vat
for three days space and more.

From whence again they took him out,
and laid him forth to dry,
Then cast him on the Chamber Floor,
and swore that he should dye.

They rub'd and stir'd him up and down,
and oft did toyl and ture,
The Mault-man likewise with vows his death,
his body should be sure.

They pul'd and hal'd him in a spight,
and threw him on a Kill, [kiln
Yea dry'd him o're a fire hot,
the more to work their will.

Then to the Mill they forst him straight,
whereas they bruis'd his bones,
The Miller swore to murther him,
betwixt a pair of Stones.

The last time when they took him up,
they serv'd him worse than that,
For with hot scalding Liquor store
they washt him in a fat. [vat

But not content with this Bod wot, [God
they wrought him so much harm,
With cruel threat they promise next,
to beat him into Barm.

And lying in this danger deep,
for fear the he should quarrel,
They heap'd him straight out of the fat,
and turned him into Barrell, [sic]

They roar'd and broach'd it with a Tap,
so thus his death begun,
And drew out every drop of Blood,
while any drop would run.

Some brought in Jacks upon their backs,
some brought in Bowls and Pail,
Yea, every man some weapon had,
poor Barley-Corn to kill.

When Sir John Good-Ale heard of this, [Thomas Good-Ale
he came with mickle might,
And took by strength their Tongues away,
their Legs, and their sight.

Sir John at last in this respect,
so paid them all their hire,
That some lay bleeding by the walls,
some tumbling in the mire.

Some lay groaning by the walls,
some fell i'th street down right,
The wisest of them scarcely knew
what he had done o'er night.

All you good wives that brew good ale,
God keep you all from teen,
But if you put too much water in,
the Devil put out your Eyne.

--Dated to 1620–1630, full text of this and many more songs available here

The ballad of the death and resurrection of John Barleycorn has been a popular one in England and Scotland for at least four centuries. The earliest known version is the Scots ballad Allan-a-Mault, found in the 16th-century Ballantyne manuscript (for the lyrics, see the link above). Alternative versions abound. Robert Burns wrote a version in 1782, and numerous folk groups have recorded variants and adaptations (see Wikipedia for a list). Curiously, John Barleycorn’s laying low of his tormentors in the last verses is often omitted, which I think is rather a shame as it neatly brings the poem full circle.

It’s appealing to see the ballad of John Barleycorn as a distant memory of a sacrificial king or a dying god whose death rendered the earth fertile, along the lines suggested in Frazer’s immensely popular book The Golden Bough. (However over-enthusiastic Frazer’s conclusions, if his book helped to inspire Mary Renault’s Theseus novels I can forgive him anything).

Kathleen Herbert suggests that the name ‘Beow’ (Old English for ‘barley’), which appears among the legendary figures connecting Alfred the Great’s pedigree back to Noah’s Ark, is another representation of John Barleycorn (Herbert 1994).

It’s also very appealing to connect John Barleycorn with another legend involving a miraculous drink derived from the blood of a murder victim, the Norse legend of the origin of the mead of poetry. Kevin Crossley-Holland’s is the best modern retelling I’ve come across. It’s well worth seeking out his book, but here’s a short summary for anyone who isn’t familiar with the legend:

When they agreed their truce, the Norse gods created Kvasir, wisest of all men. Kvasir was murdered by two jealous dwarfs, who drained his blood and mixed it with honey to brew a sublime mead. Whoever drank a draught of that mead became a poet or a wise man. The mead was stolen by a giant, and recovered by Odin using his characteristic mixture of force, deceit and sexual seduction. After that, the gods guarded the mead of poetry well, and it was never stolen again. But from time to time, Odin would permit a man to drink of it; he gave the gift of poetry.

Could John Barleycorn and wise Kvasir be connected, or derived from the same ancient tradition handed down from the dawn of time? Well, possibly, though I cannot see how you’d go about testing the hypothesis. Heady stuff, this, speculating about long-lost religions.

Perhaps the ballad of John Barleycorn began life as an extended Old English riddle? It wouldn’t take much to recast the song in the familiar say-what-I-am-called format. Indeed, John Barleycorn has been suggested as a possible solution to Riddle 26 in the Exeter Book:

Part of the earth grows lovely and grim
With the hardest and fiercest of bitter-sharp
Treasures--felled, cut, carved,
Bleached, scrubbed, softened, shaped,
Twisted, rubbed, dried, adorned,
Bound, and borne off to the doorways of men--
This creature brings in hall-joy, sweet
Music clings to its curves, live song
Lingers in a body where before bloom-wood
Said nothing. After death it sings
A clarion joy. Wise listeners
Will know what this creature is called

--Riddle 26, translation and original text available here

I can see the connection, though I personally prefer ‘lyre’ as a solution to this riddle because of the reference to music.

Rhyme, riddle or remnant of a vanished religion, raise a glass to John Barleycorn next time you go for a beer.


References
Herbert, Kathleen. Looking for the Lost Gods of England. Anglo-Saxon Books, 1994. ISBN 1-898281-04-1.
Crossley-Holland, Kevin. The Norse Myths. Penguin, 1980, ISBN 0-14-006056-1.

High summer

Young swallows in chattering groups on the telephone wires. The barley field cut and golden, gleaned by the rooks that give the farm its name. Dragonflies like gleaming biplanes skimming the pools in the rutted track. Fat brown velvet bulrushes in the shallows at the pond margin. The common tern chicks are nearly as big as their parents - though they still beg for wriggling silver fish - and have exchanged their speckled down for mottled brown-grey feathers and rakish charcoal caps above white foreheads. Blackberries swelling in the hedgerows.

Summer reaches its zenith and turns towards autumn.







A field of ripe barley. You can tell it's barley and not wheat (the other big cereal crop in East Anglia) because it has long whiskers. John Barleycorn had a beard, remember. This will probably be destined to be turned into malt and thence into beer.










Close-up of barley showing the whiskers.

"....fireweed seeding into fluffy ashes...."

--JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.















Otherwise known as rosebay willowherb. Here's what it looks like before the seeds form. It's quick to colonise waste ground, hence the name "fireweed" because it's among the first plants to spring up after a fire.





















Bulrush. The flower has this smooth velvet appearance when it first forms. During the autumn it will fall apart like a motheaten cushion to release thousands and thousands of fluffy seeds. Trivia note of the week: apparently this plant used to be called reedmace, and became known as 'bulrush' because of an erroneously named but popular painting.

The Brendan Voyage, by Tim Severin. Book review

Edition reviewed: Arrow, 1978. ISBN: 0-09-919460-0

On St Brendan’s Day in May 1976, Tim Severin and four companions embarked on an attempt to sail across the North Atlantic from Ireland to North America in a leather boat, recreating the (legendary?) voyage of St Brendan the Navigator. St Brendan lived during the sixth century, and is one of the most important Irish saints. The medieval text Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (The Voyage of St Brendan the Abbot) tells how St Brendan and a crew of 17 Irish monks built themselves a leather curragh and set sail west over the ocean in search of the Promised Land. After many colourful adventures and hardships, during which they encountered many strange lands and strange creatures, they arrived at their destination and then returned safely home. Tim Severin set out to test the hypothesis that this apparently fantastical journey could have been an account of a real voyage, or voyages, from Ireland to North America. Was such a journey possible with sixth-century technology? To find out, he decided to build a leather curragh using as nearly as possible the materials, designs and techniques available in St Brendan’s time, and to try the journey for himself. This book is an account of the project, from idea to completion.

Curraghs are small, narrow, keel-less boats, still in use on the west coast of Ireland (or they were at the time of the Brendan project). Now made of canvas rather than leather and called ‘canoes’, they are used for inshore fishing and to ferry cows out to offshore islands for summer grazing. Reconstructing a sixth-century ocean-going curragh required designing the boat itself, based on expertise in naval architecture and a single illustration in a medieval manuscript, then identifying and then sourcing the right kind of leather, the right kind of grease for preserving and waterproofing it, the right kind of flax thread for ropes and stitching, and the right kind of wood for the strong but flexible frame. Not to mention finding craftsmen who knew how to make and work such materials. The saga of designing and building the boat is almost as complex and fascinating as the saga of the journey itself. Very often Tim Severin found himself contacting the last firm or person still in business with the traditional skills he needed – a generation later and the knowledge might have been lost and the project not possible at all.

The ship, named Brendan (what else?) was eventually completed and set sail from Brandon Creek (Brandon is the modern Irish spelling of Brendan) in May 1976. Learning to sail a keel-less boat in the vagaries of the Atlantic weather was the first challenge – Tim Severin describes Brendan as “skidding across the waves like a tea tray”. The planned sailing route was to take them north along the west coast of Ireland, then north-west and north to thread through the Hebridean islands, north again to the Faroes, then west to Iceland, west again to Greenland, then south-west along the coast and the edge of the Arctic pack ice to Labrador and Newfoundland. This apparently roundabout route is known as the Stepping Stone Route, and has the benefit that it allows the journey to be broken up into a series of comparatively short ‘hops’ from one island to the next. As the prevailing winds in the Atlantic are west-to-east, this allows a sailing ship to wait in harbour for the occasional east-to-west weather systems that blow the right way for the journey. Several centuries after St Brendan’s time, the Norsemen used the same route in their voyages across the North Atlantic.

This is an epic journey by any standards, even more so when undertaken in a small open boat, and Tim Severin’s clear and straightforward prose style is ideally suited to telling the story. There is adventure aplenty, whether it be the thrilling and dangerous ride through the rock-strewn Mykines Sound in the Faroes in the grip of gale and tide-race, or the heart-stopping anxiety of trying to repair Brendan in the harsh Greenland Sea after the hull was holed by ice. There are also moments of serene beauty in encounters with the whales who frequently came to investigate Brendan, perhaps wondering if the leather boat was some strange relative of theirs, and in the starkly stunning volcanic landscape of Iceland, the towering sea cliffs of the Faroes, and the deadly loveliness of the pack ice.

The author’s fellow sailors are deftly characterised, from the cheerfully irrepressible Edan, nicknamed “Gannet” because he would eat anything (except, as it turned out, dried whale blubber), to the easy-going Arthur Magan and the calm, cool-headed George. Perhaps the most memorable is the Faroese fisherman Trondur, who could catch fulmars at sea as a welcome addition to the crew’s diet, harpoon a whale bigger than the boat, and fish for cod in 300 feet of water. (Who says the Norse legend of Thor fishing for the World Serpent was a myth?)

Brendan’s voyage showed that a leather curragh built with materials and technology available to St Brendan was capable of crossing the North Atlantic. Indeed, some of the early medieval technology turned out to be superior to the modern alternatives available in the 1970s. A diet of cheese, salt pork, smoked sausage, oatmeal and hazelnuts – supplemented of course by Trondur’s seabirds and cod – proved more palatable, more nutritious and better able to survive the conditions in an open boat than modern packaged and dehydrated foods. Woollen clothing kept the crew warmer than synthetic materials, with the exception of modern waterproof immersion suits (without which survival in the cold Greenland Sea would have been measured in minutes). Wood, leather and flax proved more versatile and durable than many modern materials, and could be readily modified or repaired in an emergency. Tim Severin sums up by saying, “…the modern equipment worked better until it broke, but then the traditional gear, clumsy and inefficient though it was, managed to survive the adverse conditions – and this is what mattered.”

As well as testing out the technology, the voyage also provided possible explanations for some of the apparently fantastic incidents in the Navigatio. The Island of Smiths, where one of St Brendan’s monks was killed by fiery demons, could be a description of the eruption of a submarine volcano and the volcanoes on the south coast of Iceland. The Island of Sheep is recognisable as the Faroes – the modern name is derived from the Norse Faer-Eyjaer, or “Sheep Islands” – and the pillar of floating crystal could be a stray iceberg. Even the giant fish the monks tried to land on, thinking it was an island, could be a (somewhat embellished) description of a close encounter with a whale, since whales were apparently attracted to a leather boat.

The Brendan voyage doesn’t prove that St Brendan and/or other Irish seafarers did sail to North America in the sixth century. That would require finding an inscription on the North American seaboard saying “St Brendan was here”, or words to that effect, capable of being securely dated on radiocarbon or stylistic grounds to the right period. The chances of such a discovery must be vanishingly small. But what it clearly shows is that they could have done it – and that if they did, it would have been a marvellous adventure, well worth remembering and retelling for 1500 years.

Exciting adventure, remarkable travelogue and a fascinating study of early medieval seafaring technology, all rolled into one.

Has anyone else read it?

Woolpit Steam Rally

Every summer the little Suffolk village of Woolpit holds a rally for steam-powered machinery of all kinds - traction engines, steam rollers, steam-powered lorries, you name it (More information and photo galleries on the official website). This year I actually remembered it was on and we cycled out to have a look.




Possibly the smallest and prettiest self-service cheese shop in the country, at Rodwell Farm near Needham Market. Their cheese is very good, too.








Chocolate-box thatched cottage passed on the way.










Steam-powered carousel. If you look closely you can see the steam engine that would originally have powered it in the middle of the carousel, though at the show they were running it off a diesel generator. Also, if you look closely, you can see that some of the rides on the inner row are in fact giant chickens rather than horses. Don't ask me why.






Steam-powered road roller. I expect Bedfordshire County Council has got a replacement by now. Though, pressures on local authority budgets being what they are, you never know.

Litha (July) and Trilithi: the early English calendar

Before they converted to Christianity and adopted the Roman calendar, the early English (‘Anglo-Saxons’) reckoned time using a system of lunar months. Each cycle of the moon, probably from full moon to full moon, was a month. The year began at the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. There were two seasons, summer, when the days were longer than the nights, and winter, when the nights were longer than the days (See my earlier post for a summary of the early English calendar.)

The sixth and seventh months of the year, corresponding approximately to the Roman and modern months of June and July, were called Litha. Like its counterpart in the winter, Giuli (from which we get the word Yule), Litha was a double-length month, or two months of the same name, placed either side of the midsummer solstice. See my June post for the possible meaning of Litha.

Bosworth and Toller’s Old English Dictionary says that the first Litha month (corresponding roughly to modern June) was called “se aerra Litha” and the second one was called “se aeftera Litha”. Kathleen Herbert says that the information in Bosworth and Toller comes from Bede’s treatise On the Reckoning of Time, and from later English scholars who commented on it such as Aelfric and Bryhtferth (Herbert 1994). The distinguishing terms ‘aerra’ and ‘aeftera’ aren’t in Bede’s account, so I presume they come from one of the later commentaries, but I haven’t verified the source. As I understand it, the meaning is closer to “the earlier Litha” and “the later Litha”, rather than “the month before Litha” and “the month after Litha”, so “Litha” refers to the name of the months and not to a date that occurred at the junction between them.

Trilithi

Bede, writing in 725, tells us:

When an embolismic year occurred (that is, one of 13 lunar months), they assigned the extra month to summer, so that three months together bore the name “Litha”, hence they called the year “Trilithi”.

--Bede, On the Reckoning of Time, Chapter 15. Translated by Faith Wallis.

This neatly demonstrates both the problem with a lunar-solar calendar and the early English solution to it. A solar year refers to one complete cycle of the sun from one midwinter solstice (or any point of your choice) to the next. This is a natural way to reckon time in an agricultural society living at temperate latitudes, where day length would be an important determinant of agricultural activities. But it is rather long to be the only unit used to measure time.

The lunar month, covering a complete cycle of the moon from one full moon (or any other point of your choice) to the next, is a shorter unit of time, conveniently intermediate between the long unit of the solar year and the short unit of the solar day. Thus a lunar-solar calendar gives you three units of time each of a different order of magnitude, so you don’t have to express time periods either in tiny fractions of a year or in very large numbers of days. Great.

Unfortunately, the problem is that none of these natural units of time are exact multiples of each other. A lunar month is 29.53 days. A solar year is 365.24 days. There are 12.37 lunar months to a solar year. So the lunar months won’t line up neatly with the solar year. Suppose you start your lunar-solar calendar at a time when the full moon also falls on the midwinter solstice, so both the year and the first month of the year start on the same date. The second month of the year starts at the next full moon, the third month starts at the full moon after that, and so on through the year. But 12 lunar months only take 29.53*12 = 354.37 days to complete. So by the time the next midwinter solstice comes round, at 365.24 days, the moon is already 10.87 days past the full. What do you do? Do you start the new year when the moon was full? In which case the year won’t match the solstice. Or do you start the first month of the new year at the solstice? In which case the months won’t match the phase of the moon.

I can imagine priests, druids and learned folk tearing their hair out over this infuriating astronomical feature. Some cultures settle on a purely solar calendar and let the months go out of phase with the moon (our modern Western calendar does this), others settle on a purely lunar calendar and let the year go out of phase with the sun (the Islamic lunar calendar does this). Others adopt a hybrid system, adding an extra month when necessary to bring the lunar months back into line with the solar year – a sort of “leap month”, if you like, in the same way as the modern Western calendar adds a day (almost) every four years to keep the calendar synchronised with the solar year. This extra month is called an intercalary month.

Clearly the early English applied this hybrid approach, adding an extra month to Litha to keep the lunar months in line with the solar years. This would happen every two or three years (every 2.72 years to be precise), so a “Trilithi” year would be pretty common. It could have been decided by calculation, by observation, or a mixture of both. If you kept a count of the observed full moons starting at the midwinter solstice each year and the second Litha full moon happened before the midsummer solstice, you would know it was a Trilithi year. If you also kept a count of the days and alternated between 29 and 30 days for a lunar month, you could calculate the date of the full moon even if the weather was too cloudy for a direct observation.


References
Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Translated by Faith Wallis. Liverpool University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-85323-693-3.
Herbert, Kathleen. Looking for the Lost Gods of England. Anglo-Saxon Books, 1994. ISBN 1-898281-04-1.

The Chronicle of Zenobia: The Rebel Queen, by Judith Weingarten. Book review

Edition reviewed: Vanguard Press 2006, ISBN 1-84386-219-0

In the 3rd century AD, Zenobia, the Queen of Palmyra (in modern Syria) led a rebellion against the Roman Empire. The Rebel Queen covers the start of the events that were eventually to lead up to the rebellion. From my limited knowledge of 3rd century Syria, I recognise Zenobia, her husband Odenathus and their children as historical figures, and perhaps also the dashing young general Zabdi. The author’s introductory note refers to “…the manuscript left to us by Simon, son of Barabas, a Palmyran citizen who lived through the events he describes,” which it says survives only as a single copy in a monastery in the Egyptian western desert. This Simon is the central character in the novel.

Simon is the highly intelligent son of a wealthy Jewish trading family, living in the great Syrian caravan city of Palmyra, also known as Tadmor. His cleverness, skill at oratory and knowledge of law draw him into the circle of Odenathus, the city’s able and charismatic warrior king. As storm clouds gather over the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, Simon embarks on a legal and diplomatic career that will see him rise to the rank of senator, and becomes the close friend and confidant of Odenathus’ beautiful and intelligent wife Zenobia.

The first thing to say about The Rebel Queen is that you get a lot of book for your money. I estimate the word count at something around 350,000 words (about three times the length of a ‘standard’ novel), printed in small typeface on large pages. The narrative is highly complex with a great many different threads, and this means the book requires long periods of sustained concentration to keep track of the narrative. I found that if I had to stop reading for any length of time I would have to backtrack many chapters to pick up the narrative again. As lengthy interruptions are far from infrequent it has taken me well over a year to read the whole book. It’s a novel that benefits from having long spells of uninterrupted reading time available.

The author is an archaeologist who has worked extensively in the Near East, and this expertise no doubt underlies the immense historical and archaeological detail in the book. The Rebel Queen provides a detailed portrayal of the complex and colourful world of 3rd century Syria and its surrounding territories. Religions, superstitions, philosophy, social structures and norms, family and household organisation, food, customs, towns, temples and buildings are all lovingly described, and poetry and proverbs are liberally quoted throughout. One interesting episode covers the disastrous effects of the debasement of the Roman silver coinage on the trading economy of the region, and shows how financial instability could feed into political and military events.

Much of the novel covers the military turbulence on Rome’s eastern frontier as a newly confident Persian empire flexes its military muscles, and the political turbulence in Rome as short-lived Emperors come and go. Inept military campaigns, arrogant governors and ineffectual emperors mean that Tadmor/Palmyra is increasingly forced to look to its own defences. The modern image of Rome tends to be one of a terrifyingly efficient, if brutal, military machine. So it’s useful to be reminded that (like many large institutions), the Roman Empire operated quite a lot of the time on the Dilbert principle: incompetence is no barrier to world domination provided all your competitors are just as shambolic as you are. The exasperation of the competent leaders of Tadmor at having to deal with a succession of arrogant nincompoops and pick up the pieces after their failures is very clear. I can see where the seeds of the later rebellion were sown.

The novel covers a huge canvas, from high politics and warfare to the social and domestic lives of Simon and his friends and relatives. This variety has the benefit of showing many aspects of the society, but it also makes for a sprawling narrative. An episode of high politics or military campaign will be followed by a detailed incident in Simon’s complicated love life, or a family row, or the love life of one of Simon’s friends, and by the time the narrative returned to the high politics or the military campaign I often found I had lost the thread and had to turn back several chapters to remind myself what was going on.

Despite the title, Zenobia does not appear in earnest until page 162, halfway through the book, and the novel is very much Simon’s story. He narrates most of the novel in first person, with some episodes told in third person and a few narrated by Zenobia in first person. Third-century Syria as depicted in the novel was evidently a man’s world. Simon and Odenathus expect unquestioning obedience from their wives and consider it their right to take out their bad temper on their women (although it is worth noting that a sharp-tongued and intransigent old lady can still make her son’s life a misery, so it isn’t entirely one-way). What would now be called domestic abuse is rife throughout the book. I’m not an expert on the social norms of third-century Syria so I take the author’s word for it that this is how it was. Full marks to the author for not imposing modern values on a past society, but be prepared for some unsympathetic leading characters and some stomach-churning scenes of rape and violence. Similarly, be prepared for frequent explicit sex scenes, of considerable variety, and the regular use of modern expletives.

The stormy marriage between Odenathus and Zenobia is played out against this backdrop of a male-dominated society, and displays Zenobia’s remarkable strength of will in trying to stand up to her husband. By the end of the novel Zenobia is narrating some episodes in first person, which may suggest that she will move more towards centre stage in the planned sequel. The Rebel Queen comes to a halt at the birth of Zenobia’s second son, and it is evident that this is only a pause and there is much more story still to be told in the sequel.

Detailed reconstruction of life in the complex multicultural word of third-century Roman Syria.