Clay: Njord Bathing

 Even at the beach, one must play with clay:
Mask: Njord
soldate clay, oribe glazing (?).

Herring from a Friend

Delicious.

Wyrd Oft Nereth: Two Views

Profile Pics

Eye, Aye: A Medley

The Journey

Sculpture mix, unfired.

I am yearning for kelp.

Njord Rising

Njord: stoneware; floating blue and transparent brown glazing.

Sea-Charms

A Boat-Load Of Charm

In progress.

Nicolson's "Sea Room" -- Gaelic and Norse

Adam Nicolson's Sea Room is a memoir concerning the Shiant Islands in the Hebrides.  Nicolson inherited the islands from his father, and he pays tribute to the islands, their life and history, his own life and history as intertwined with his father's gift.  Here is a longish passage in which Nicolson reflects on the Gaelic/Norse heritage, and though I don't always (or quite) agree with his interpretation of the intrinsic relationships or the causal links between borrowings, I will say Nicolson's delivery takes me into this mixed-lineage, mixed-linguistic world.

(Freyja is Nicolson's trusty boat.)

Freyja does at least belong to that world.  I hold her tiller and she is my link to a chain that stretches over five hundred miles and a thousand years to the coast of Norway.  Because there is no timber on the Outer Hebrides, the commercial connection with the Baltic has remained alive.  Until no more than a generation ago, Baltic traders brought Finnish tar, timber and pitch directly to Stornoway and Tarbert in Harris.  Although Freyja's own timber comes from the mainland of Scotland, her waterproofing below the water-line is known as 'Stockholm tar': a wood tar, distilled from pine and imported from the Baltic at least since the Middle Ages.  Until well into the nineteenth century, kit boats in marked parts came imported fro Norway to the Hebrides, travelling in the hold of merchant ships, and assembled by boat builders in any notch or loch along the Harris or Lewis coast.  In 1828, Lord Teignmouth, the ex-Governor-General of India, friend of Wilberforce, came out to the Shiants in the company of Alexander Stewart, the farmer at Valamus on Pairc, who had tenancy of the islands.  They launched forth in this gentleman's boat, a small skiff or yawl built in Norway, long, narrow, peaked at both ends, extremely light, floating like a feather upon the water, and when properly managed, with the buoyancy and almost the security of a sea-bird on its native wave.

The British Imperialist, the liberal evangelical, member of the Clapham Sect, travels in a Viking boat on a Viking sea.  I nearly called Freyja 'Fulmar' because of that phrase of Teignmouth's.  No bird is more different on the wing than on the nest and in flight the fulmar is the most effortless of all sea birds.  It was that untroubled buoyancy in wind and water that I was after.  But Freyja's  fatness was what settled it.

Almost everything in her and the world now around her, if described in modern Gaelic, would be understood by a Viking.  The words used here for boats and sea all come from Old Norse and the same descriptions have been on people's lips for a millennium.  If I say, in Gaelic, 'windward of the sunken rock', 'the seaweed in the narrow creek', 'fasten the buoy', 'steer with the helm towards the shingle beach', 'prop the boat on an even keel', 'put the cod, the ling, the saithe and the coaley in the wicker basket', 'use the oar as a roller to launch the boat', 'put a wedge in the joint between the planking in the stern', 'set the sea chest on the frames amidships', 'the tide is running around the skerry', 'the cormorant and the gannet are above the surf', 'haul in the sheet', 'tighten the back stay', 'use the oar as a steerboard', or say of a man, 'that man is a hero, a stout man, the man who belongs at the stem of a boat', every single one of those terms has been transmitted directly from the language which the Norse spoke into modern Gaelic.  It is a kind of linguistic DNA, persistent across thirty or forty generations.

Sometimes the words have survived unchanged.  Oatmeal mixed with cold water, ocean food, is stappa in NOrse, stapag in Gaelic, although stapag is now made with sugar and cream.  With many, there has been a little rubbing down of the forms in the millennium that they have been used.  A tear in a sail is riab in Gaelic, rifa in Old Norse.  The smock worn by fisherman is sguird in Gaelic, skirta in Old Norse.  Sgaireag is the Gaelic for 'seaman', skari the Norse word.  And occasionally, there is a strange and suggestive transformation.  The Gaelic for a hen roost is the Norse word for hammock.  Norse for 'strong' becomes Gaelic for 'fat'.  The Norse word for rough ground becomes peat moss in Gaelic.  A hook or a barb turns into an antler.  To creep -- that mobile, subtle movement -- translates into Gaelic as 'to crouch': more still, more rooted to the place.  A water meadow in Norway, fit, becomes fidean: grass covered at high tide.  'To drip' becomes 'to melt'.  A Norse framework, whether of a house, a boat or a basket, becomes a Gaelic creel.

But it is the human qualities for which Gaelic borrowed the Viking words that are most intriguingly and intimately suggestive of the life lived around these seas a thousand years ago.  There is a cluster of borrowings around the ideas of oddity and suspicion.  Gaelic itself, if it had not taken from the invaders, would have no word for a quirk (for which it borrowed the Old Norse word meaning 'a trap'), nor for 'strife', nor 'a faint resemblance' -- the word it took was svip, the Norse for 'glimpse'.  The  Gaelic from 'lullaby' is taladh, from the Norse tal, meaning 'allurement', 'seduction'.

The vocabulary for contempt and wariness suddenly vivifies that ancient moment.  Gaelic borrowed Norse revulsion wholesale.  Noisy boasting, to blether, a coward, cowardice, surliness, an insult, mockery, a servant, disgust, anything shrivelled or shrunken (sgrogag from the Old Norse skrukka, an old shrimp,) a bald head, a slouch, a good-for-nothing, a dandy, a fop, a short, fat, stumpy woman (staga from stakka, the stump of a tree), a sneak (stig/stygg), a wanderer -- all this was something new, and had arrived with the longships.  Fear and ridicule, the uncomfortable presence of the distrusted other, the ugly cross-currents of two worlds, the broken and disturbing sea where those tides met: all this could only be expressed in the odd new language the strangers brought with them.

--Adam Nicolson

Adam Nicolson,
Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides,
North Point Press: New York,
2001

I've quoted from pages 30-33.

A Steady Wind

Clay: sculpture-mix.
Unglazed at present.
Oxide with clear glaze?
Oxide without any other glazing?

Thomas Gray's "The Fatal Sisters"

THE FATAL SISTERS

Now the storm begins to lower,
(Haste, the loom of Hell prepares!)
Iron-sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darkened air. 

Glittering lances are the loom,
Where the dusky warp we strain,
Weaving many a soldier's doom,
Orkney's woe and Randver's bane. 

See the grisly texture grow,
('Tis of human entrails made!)
And the weights that play below,
Each a gasping warrior's head. 

Shafts for shuttles, dipped in gore,
Shoot the trembling cords along.
Sword, that once a monarch bore,
Keep the tissue close and strong. 

Mista, black, terrific maid,
Sangrida, and Hilda, see,
Join the wayward work to aid;
'Tis the woof of victory. 

Ere the ruddy sun be set,
Pikes must shiver, javelins sing,
Blade with clattering buckler meet,
Hauberk crash, and helmet ring. 

(Weave the crimson web of war!)
Let us go, and let us fly
Where our friends the conflict share,
Where they triumph, where they die. 

As the paths of fate we tread,
Wading through the ensanguined field,
Gondula and Geira, spread
O'er the youthful king your shield. 

We the reins to slaughter give;
Ours to kill, and ours to spare;
Spite the dangers he shall live.
(Weave the crimson web of war!) 

They whom once the desert beach
Pent within its bleak domain,
Soon their ample sway shall stretch
O'er the plenty of the plain. 

Low the dauntless earl is laid,
Gored with many a gaping wound;
Fate demands a nobler head;
Soon a king shall bite the ground. 

Long his loss shall Eirin weep
Ne'er again his likeness see;
Long her strains in sorrow steep,
Strains of immortality! 

Horror covers all the heath;
Clouds of carnage blot the sun.
Sisters, weave the web of death;
Sisters, cease, the work is done. 

Hail the task, and hail the hands!
Songs of joy and triumph sing!
Joy to the victorious bands
Triumph to the younger king. 

Mortal, thou that hear'st the tale,
Learn the tenor of our song.
Scotland, through each winding vale
Far and wide the notes prolong. 

Sisters, hence with spurs of speed;
Each her thundering falchion wield;
Each bestride her sable steed.
Hurry, hurry to the field! 

--Thomas Gray

Heaney's "Bone Dreams"

 BONE DREAMS

I

White bone found
on the grazing: 
the rough, porous 
language of touch

and its yellowing, ribbed 
impression in the grass —
¬a small ship-burial. 
As dead as stone,
flint-find, nugget
of chalk, 
I touch it again, 
I wind it in

the sling of mind
to pitch it at England
and follow its drop
to strange fields.

II

Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue's 
old dungeons.

I push back
through dictions, 
Elizabethan canopies, 
Norman devices,

the erotic mayflowers 
of Provence 
and the ivied Latins
of churchmen

to the scop's 
twang, the iron 
flash of consonants 
cleaving the line.

In the coffered 
riches of grammar 
and declensions 
I found bān-hūs, 

its fire, benches, 
wattle and rafters, 
where the soul 
fluttered a while

in the roofspace.
There was a small crock 
for the brain, 
and a cauldron

of generation
swung at the centre: 
love-den, blood-holt, 
dream-bower.

IV

Come back past 
philology and kennings, 
re-enter memory 
where the bone's lair

is a love-nest
in the grass.
I hold my lady's head
like a crystal

and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes 
on her escarpments, 
a chalk giant

carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken 
fosse of her spine, 
move towards the passes.

V

And we end up 
cradling each other 
between the lips 
of an earthwork.


As I estimate 
for pleasure 
her knuckles' paving,
the turning stiles

of the elbows,
the vallum of her brow
and the long wicket
of collar-bone,

I have begun to pace
the Hadrian's Wall
of her shoulder, 
dreaming of Maiden Castle.

VI

One morning in Devon
I found a dead mole
with the dew still beading it. 
I had thought the mole

a big-boned coulter
but there it was, 
small and cold
as the thick of a chisel.

I was told, ‘Blow,
blow back the fur on his head.
Those little points 
were the eyes.

And feel the shoulders.’
touched small distant: Pennines, 
a pelt of grass and grain
running south. 

--Seamus Heaney

Poem from Seamus Heaney's North, Faber & Faber, London & Boston: 1975.

The clay pieces: Works in progress.  Viking Coin ornament and Ship & Hammer: sculpture mix; green glaze, unfired.  (We shall see how these pieces look after their firing.)

The King of the Isles

King Holmberg: Sculpture mix; transparent brown and denim glazes, layered.