Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain

by Amy Jeffs

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Synopsis

A TIMES HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR


Soaked in mist and old magic, Storyland is a new illustrated mythology of Britain, set in its wildest landscapes.

It begins between the Creation and Noah's Flood, follows the footsteps of the earliest generation of giants from an age when the children of Cain and the progeny of fallen angels walked the earth, to the founding of Britain, England, Wales and Scotland, the birth of Christ, the wars between Britons, Saxons and Vikings, and closes with the arrival of the Normans.

These are retellings of medieval tales of legend, landscape and the yearning to belong, inhabited with characters now half-remembered: Brutus, Albina, Scota, Arthur and Bladud among them. Told with narrative flair, embellished in stunning artworks and glossed with a rich and erudite commentary. We visit beautiful, sacred places that include prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge and Wayland's Smithy, spanning the length of Britain from the archipelago of Orkney to as far south as Cornwall; mountains and lakes such as Snowdon and Loch Etive and rivers including the Ness, the Soar and the story-silted Thames in a vivid, beautiful tale of our land steeped in myth. It Illuminates a collective memory that still informs the identity and political ambition of these places.

In Storyland, Jeffs reimagines these myths of homeland, exile and migration, kinship, loyalty, betrayal, love and loss in a landscape brimming with wonder.

Release date: September 2, 2021

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 384

Sample

Now giants were upon the earth in those days. For after the sons of God went in to the daughters of men, and they brought forth children, these are the mighty men of old, men of renown.

Genesis 6: 4–5

The giants’ home – the hot, excessive regions of remotest Africa – belonged to the southernmost part of the map, south of the Nile, at the antipodean edge. There the great beings abhorred the night’s lingering heat, not to mention each other, for they had blood like lava and tempers to match. Eons before the Flood, in the dryness of the desert, they cracked the stones from a rock-face unchanged since Yahweh wrought the land. From that rock-face, the giants would take the stones to a place where water would release their mineral virtues and soothe the giants’ seething blood.

The largest of the group drove a wedge into a fissure. She struck once, twice, three times, with her hammer. When the wedge had stuck, she inserted another, striking until, standing back, the stone groaned into her arms. Her skin, which was ember hot, was now the yellow of sand, now blue like the mudstone she cradled.



Without acknowledging her companions, who were driving in their own wedges and adding to the din, she heaved the rock onto her shoulder and walked away. Sweat hissed from her brow and dust desiccated her throat, but she journeyed for the rest of that night, pursuing the trace of a chill on the breeze: a whisper of colder climes. She drank deeply from rivers at daybreak and slept until sunset each day, disguised as a hill or sandbank. She did not disturb the creatures about her: herds of deer with swivelling horns, beings that shaded their faces with one enormous foot, or villages whose inhabitants’ faces were located in their chests. Each night she bore her load onwards. Once or twice she saw a city, smoke rising from its rooftops, laughter and music from its streets. These she hated and avoided, striding on until she reached the sea.

The other giants followed with their heads bowed and their rocks resting on their backs. When they came to the great ocean, they felt the water like a balm. They travelled for weeks, plucking whales skywards for food. As they passed the gates of the Mediterranean, the Sirens saw them and covered their beautiful mouths.

As the giants waded, the heat abated, and soon they reached the part of the ocean where the clouds hung low and cold winds blew on even the warmest days. Then the lead giant saw an island and stepped from seabed to reef to cliff-face and onto the moon-illuminated meadows. Deep greens and blues rippled on their skin as the giants followed, striding over marshes, until scree rose to meet them. The air condensed and they felt the fires in their veins grow cooler. They made for the peak of the tallest mountain.

In later days the Irish called it Killaraus. And even later than that they said it had never existed at all. On its summit was a plateau, pillowed with thyme and veiled with cloud. When the giants assembled, moisture-beaded, they were in harmony. It was conducive to their bodies, this place of moss and mist; the unnatural accord this task allowed would last a little longer. They placed the stones in circles and topped them with flatter stones. Then they dug pits in the midst of the central circle, and watched as the rain that came and went pooled into them, flowing over the rocks.

When the stones were erected and the baths full, the giants encircled their structure in a great ring: a carol, a dance. One by one they dipped their heads below the water. Minerals entered and soothed their veins. All their hurts subsided. That would be enough for now.

The island was full of valleys and hollows perfectly suited to the solitary ways of giants. When they had washed, it was to these they retreated, returning to their dance when they were wounded or sick. Years later, there came a Flood. Many of the giants’ original number were swept away for good, but their healing temple endured. The Irish called it ‘The Giants’ Dance’, perhaps on account of the stately formation of its colossal stones, perhaps because the mist preserved some memory of a unique meeting. The stones stood there for many thousands of years; when at last they were moved, it was by the power of a child.

*

A few years ago I took a cruise ship with a jazz band from Tilbury Docks to the Canary Islands and back again. For the first, and probably last, time in my life, I spent a fortnight floating on the Atlantic, watching a lonely East London sparrow orbiting the ship all the way to the Moroccan coast. In that time, I thought about Europe, Africa and the sea. These three things are connected in the story of the origins of Stonehenge, mentioned in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s c. 1136 History of the Kings of Britain. The character of Merlin speaks of a monument known as the Giants’ Dance, ‘on Mount Killaraus in Ireland’: ‘many years ago the Giants transported them from the remotest confines of Africa and set them up in Ireland . . . they used to pour water over them and to run this water into baths in which their sick were cured.’ The giants made a similar journey to the one being traced by my cruise ship. Travelling to Ireland, they might have tacked through the Atlantic, with Africa to the east. They might have passed the mouth of the Mediterranean. Like me, they might have experienced a gradual transition from a desert to a temperate climate.

It’s a compelling thought, this journey undertaken by stone-bearing giants. But why giants? Why Africa? And why Ireland? Of course, even now we don’t know the whole answer to the real question of how all the monoliths that make up Stonehenge were transported to their current site. And in the Middle Ages, giants were a viable explanation; they even appear in the Bible. According to the Book of Genesis, giants walked the earth after rebel angels lay with human women, engendering the races of mighty men. In the Old Testament Book of Samuel, David fights a giant called Goliath. And in the Old English epic Beowulf, the narrator describes the monstrous semi-human Grendel as ‘Cain’s kin’, and Cain is the murderous brother of Abel, son of Adam and Eve. In the Middle Ages, giants were real. Why not giants? They were the obvious candidates for the transportation of impossibly heavy stones.

However, Geoffrey of Monmouth also has Merlin claim that Stonehenge was carried by these giants from ‘the remotest confines of Africa’. This requires some explanation. Again, looking to early texts reveals Africa’s furthest reaches to be accepted as a likely homeland of giants. For instance, in the somewhat later legend of Guy of Warwick, a Danish army challenges Guy to fight a mercenary African giant. But why? Medieval European thought was steeped in ideas inherited from the Classical age. The far south of Africa was held to be a place of intense heat and, by extension, an incubator of monstrous beings. According to the Classical writers Hippocrates and Galen, the concentrations of the body’s four humours (blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm) could be affected by extreme climatic conditions, leading to changes in physiognomy. Monstrous races found on the lowest edge of the world map included beings like Sciapods, who had one enormous foot apiece, the headless Blemmyes, whose faces were in their chests, near the seat of their appetites, and Cynocephali, who had the heads of dogs. All of these beings appear in drawings on the southern edge of the Hereford Mappa Mundi (a world-map, dated c. 1300).

Yet even with all this in mind, Geoffrey’s backstory to the Stonehenge monoliths is enigmatic. Why did the African giants want to go to Ireland in the first place? I recalled the return leg of my ride on the cruise liner and the transition from the hot dryness of lands level with the Sahara to the chilly mists of the Thames estuary. What if the giants owed their excessive size to the hot, dry home of their birth? What if they craved a cold, wet place of respite? And what if the stones, the healing properties of which were best mediated by water, could enhance that longed-for comfort? And so the giants took their medicinal monoliths to a cold, damp island in the sea, and that is where they remained.

They were daughters of a king so powerful that he was never subject to anybody. So, nor did they want to be subject to anybody, and nor did they want to have masters or be under any constraint. Each wanted to be absolute mistress of her husband and everything he possessed.

Des Grantz Geanz [Of the Great Giants] (c. 1250–1333/4)

In ancient times, God sent a Flood to drown the sinful races. But afterwards the survivors repopulated the world and learned to sin again. Kingdoms were re-established and proud kings ruled over them. In Syria, 3,970 years after Creation, stood such a kingdom, ruled by such a king. He lived in his marble palace with his thirty daughters, the eldest of whom was called Albina. Like their parents, his daughters were wondrously tall, but they held none of their father’s imperial power. This was not at all to their liking. All the while they were trapped in marriage to his barons, they would be no better than slaves; they resolved to murder their husbands in their beds and take over the kingdom. But the youngest among them could not suppress her guilt. She confessed to her husband and he went straight to the King. A brutal punishment ensued. The sisters, all except the youngest, were cast out to sea and left to the mercy of fate.



For weeks they drifted, rudderless, collecting water from the sails to drink, eating nothing, until a storm came upon them. For three whole days and nights the waves crashed on their ship, but the vessel endured. When the first morning came after the passing of the storm, they awoke to the sounds of birds and the slow crunch of waves on sand. They had landed, though they had no idea where. The air was much colder and wetter than it had ever felt in Syria.

Albina landed on the seaweed-strewn beach, beneath the bone-white cliffs. She seized a handful of sand and pebbles and let them fall like beads through her fingers.

Together the women explored. In their hunger they ate acorns and sour crab apples, medlars and chestnuts. They might have found more, but what did they know of foraging? The rivers were full of gleaming trout, but they had never fished.

What was more, no matter how far they wandered, in search of food and shelter, or a town in which they might find lodging, the sisters encountered no one. They realised they were alone, washed up on a strange shore with none but themselves to rely on. ‘This land shall be called Albion,’ said Albina, and they accepted her as their queen.

So, Albina and her sisters were forced to learn how to survive, until they were no longer pampered queens but mistresses of root, stone and antler. First, they learned to gather berries and nuts, curbing their hunger with these. Soon, wanting meat, they devised traps and spears from wood, and rope from sinuous stems. Then, they practised with these tools, till they were cooking deer on open fires and falling asleep with their stomachs full. It was not without hardship that they came to live off the land, but live they did, and well. The sisters, already tall, grew plump as penny-bun mushrooms and strong as wild boar.

But there was still something missing; with their traps and snares and their growing hunger they caught more than meat. It came to pass when they began, whether on languorous summer evenings, around autumn fires or from warm winter caves, to long for sex, for their lust was soon detected.

The devil and his legion ascended to the deepest parts of the forests and caves, thickening the air and visiting the women after nightfall. When they saw the spirits’ eyes in the darkness they knew their own hunger was as nothing to the hunger suffered by these beings. Their eyes were red from an eternity in the dark without touch. Their lips were pale from the chill of ages of neglect. All at once the sisters ached with pity. And in the vessel of the night they enveloped the spirits with their tender touches and the spirits sowed their seed in them. In the consummation of dawn, the devils slid from the women’s arms and back down into hell.



After a few weeks Albina and her sisters suffered violent sickness. Their bellies swelled – as if they were already full term – and by the time they had gestated for nine months, they barely escaped with their lives, as if some magic kept their outsides from splitting like overripe plums. When they finally gave birth, their screams sent eagles flapping from mountain-tops and knocked fish insensible in the depths of the northern lakes. When the pain finally passed, the mothers were intact and weathering the wails of their enormous, hideous sons and daughters. From devils and queens the giants of Albion were born and they suckled milk that was as fat as the land.

Albina and her sisters lived from the land until they were old. With their children they mined the earth and made golden idols to worship: bulls and swans and dragons. When they died, their white bones became part of the chalk downs and their flesh turned the hay gold. After this, their children grew huge, strong and ancient. The giants populated the land by means of one another, though they fought with more passion than they bred. Each giant claimed a territory and guarded it jealously from its neighbour; they worshipped the golden idols and they feared no invasion. For who would disinherit the devil?

*

The legend of the thirty Syrian sisters is a prequel to the story of Brutus and the giants that you will read in the next chapter. It survives in both Latin and Anglo-Norman French versions. The latter is called Des Grantz Geanz, or Of the Great Giants, and dates to between the mid thirteenth century and the second quarter of the fourteenth. It places great emphasis on the sisters’ ingenuity:

But [Albina and her sisters] were clever and inventive, and put their minds to thinking of something; at last, with a lot of ingenuity they made a good number of devices. Using branches, they made nooses to catch animals; they made traps out of wood to catch birds. They made lots of such things, and set them cunningly, to snare game and also to take fowl. When they had got as much as they wanted, they prepared the game and made a fire by striking pebbles together – there were plenty.

Today, Albina and her clan read like heroes, but in the Middle Ages, their characters may have been more ambiguous. This has to do, perhaps, with their Syrian origins and their similarity to the stock character of the female Saracen. In medieval literature, Saracen women, especially princesses, are often portrayed as determined agents of their destinies, which, in the context of many a Crusader narrative, might well manifest itself in infatuation with a Christian knight (often one she hasn’t met yet) and such a powerful desire to be with him that she may betray, injure or even kill members of her own household to satisfy it.

The Syrian Albina and her sisters behave with the quintessential hot-headed murderousness of literary Saracen princesses but without the saving grace of the Christian knight. They may have represented, like the East itself, both an allure and a threat to their original readership, and a lesson against giving women free rein. When the sisters copulate with the devil and his legion, the race of giants they deliver – which interbreed and interfight, guarding the land with insane jealousy – are all threat.

Some versions of Des Grantz Geanz include lines noting how in later years farmers tilling the soil found huge bones, shield-sized shoulder blades and the like. Hilltop fortresses smack of giant-work too, they say. All of this serves as evidence for the erstwhile presence of Albion’s race of giants. Whoever the poet was, they were a storyteller of the highest calibre, with a vivid imagination and a sense of humour to match. We may never work out the true origins of the name ‘Albion’ or why it was believed to have been populated by giants. In the absence of another explanation, why not look to Albina?

The Britons . . . transplanted from the hot and arid regions of the Trojan plain, keep their dark colouring, which reminds one of the earth itself, their natural warmth of personality and their hot tempers, all of which gives them confidence in themselves.

Gerald of Wales, Journey through Wales (c. 1191)

When the very first Britons arrived in Albion, they learned of Albina from one of her descendants. He told the story while tied up on the cliffs, his colossal knees forced to his chest and his fists clamped before his massive, rolling eyes. The giant’s chin was dimpled and his craggy fingernails were like oyster shells, undercut with moss. Despite his great size and strength, he was a prisoner, and the corpses of his kin were scattered along the coast.

The giant’s name was Gogmagog.

Gogmagog proclaimed his right to the land, and to the gold, silver and iron that ran in its veins. He insisted on it with narrowed, restless eyes. The Trojans, led by Brutus, listened to what he told them, but they were not cowed. They did nothing more than laugh. All along the river, Gogmagog could see their settlements, but the puny inhabitants were newcomers, who would never call Albion home.

When Brutus, who was young and searching, had first set out for Albina’s ancient kingdom, he had known that giants awaited him. This did not make him want to turn back. Born to a prophecy, he was the great-grandson of the Trojan Aeneas, the son of the goddess Venus. He had their courage and determination and he was in need of a homeland. Brutus had been exiled from Rome after killing his father in a hunting accident. Roaming the Mediterranean, he had stopped at the court of the Greek King Pandrasus, where he had found more Trojans, men and women, being kept as slaves. Identifying himself as their kin, Brutus led them in revolt, defeated Pandrasus and married his daughter, Ignoge. When they left, their ships weighed down with gold, Brutus watched her weep until she had no more tears. He put his arms around her with the tenderness of Venus until Ignoge seemed to sleep in his arms. He would build her a kingdom, if only he could find a home.

One evening the fleet docked at an island called Logice, where the men found a temple of the goddess Diana. When Brutus saw its marbled beauty, he chose twelve of his most trusted soldiers to perform a ritual sacrifice with him. They chased, killed and slaughtered a mil. . .