Undeterred by winter rains, I fought my way to the bustling metropolis for the British Library’s Fantasy exhibition and was handsomely rewarded by an inspirational feast for the imagination. Here are my top 4 exhibition moments, ranked and in reverse order:

4 – Angela Carter’s notes for The Bloody Chamber:

‘insert: first view of the castle ‘…words cannot convey to what extent that scene was wild & lonely & forbidding, nay, unearthly’. There’s something arresting about seeing a story you’ve known for so long in its embryonic form. Thoughts noted, struck through, re-worded – the writer, at that point, did not entirely know where those thoughts would go and what the result would be – but you know! You have the result on your bookshelf. You read the book as an undergrad and you have taught it to your own students. I found myself thinking ‘that’s it, Ange, keep going!’…

3 – C.S. Lewis’s notes for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

Another amazing little bit of scribbling from C.S. Lewis – his original handwritten idea for the first book (to be published) from his Narnia world. Here, the four children have different names: Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter – ‘But it is most about Peter who was the youngest’. ‘They were sent to stay with a kind of relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived all by himself in the country’. I cannot see any mention of the wardrobe here, but the upside down notes below say (as far as I can make out) ‘1. Science & Religion a. miracles b. origins.’ The rest is a mystery to me, but so exciting to see the start of a tale that shaped my imagination from childhood.

2 – Beowulf and Game of Thrones:

Fantasy is not niche. Fantasy is not new. Fantasy is, and has always been, fundamental to our ways of conveying meaning through story. Here is the oldest surviving Fantasy manuscript from the UK – Beowulf, the only manuscript of it that we know of (scribe unknown, poet unknown, date c. 975-1025 CE), with an example of contemporary fantasy writing beside it – George R. R. Martin, a book from his story-cycle A Song of Ice and Fire (Folio Society edition, 1996). A good millennium of Fantasy writing. On the wall, ‘Needle’ – Arya Stark’s sword, with harness – a prop from the popular Game of Thrones TV series based on Martin’s books.

1 – Susanna Clarke’s plan of tides for Piranesi:

If you have read Susanna Clarke’s 2020 novel Piranesi, and love it and wonder/fret about how the main character is getting on just about all of the time, then it’s really hard not to blub uncontrollably in front of the notes lent to this exhibition by Susanna Clarke. These two sheets of paper detail her plan of the tides that swell around The House (Kind and Beautiful). It feels like work that didn’t really need to take place – having read the novel several times now, I have never thought too much about the logistics of the tides, even as Piranesi himself notes them – but it is work that has been done, nonetheless, just in case, just because, and it shows an attention to detail, a care and respect for Things that reverberates through Piranesi himself. There I was, in a wet, dim, windy London (not too far from Batter Sea), looking at a document that read not as a plan of a literary fantasy world but as a guide from a traveller who had inhabited another dimension. note 1. ‘Flooding centred on the 9th Vestibule. This is the tide from the South. The High Tide will rise at 11.30 a:m. The diagram is not right. It This will produce a certain amount of flooding which would in the normal way subside quickly. The problem is the subsequent High Tides’. In an age of sea-level rise, and in a week when the Trent had flooded very badly (a river which is tidal for 50 miles), we are ourselves at the Mercy of the Tides.

My jaw continues to be challenged gravitationally by the exhibition book: Realms of the Imagination: Essays From the Wide Worlds of Fantasy – a weighty tome (what else?) stuffed with short, accessible essays by giants of the Fantasy world in its academic and creative expressions (Neil Gaiman, Cristina Bacchilega, Teri Windling), images of the exhibition artefacts, and details of its astounding bespoke artwork by Sveta Dorosheva https://blogs.bl.uk/living-knowledge/2023/10/interview-with-sveta-dorosheva-artist-for-fantasy-realms-of-imagination.html

“Now Moses don’t know a damn thing about Jamaica – Moses come from Trinidad, which is a thousand miles from Jamaica, but the English people believe that everybody who come from the West Indies come from Jamaica.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

On June 22nd 1948, as George Orwell sat writing 1984 on the remote Scottish isle of Jura, a ship named the SS Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, Essex and 492 West Indian immigrants disembarked, the first travellers of what became known as the ‘Windrush Generation’. In 1950, Sam Selvon and George Lamming (both from Trinidad) came on the same voyage to Britain where they later developed notable careers as writers, publishing novels which were to form the bedrock of Black literary culture in the UK. Their novels gave voice to an emerging Black British community as well as educating an ignorant British readership regarding the harsh economic and social realities these people faced. Sam Selvon’s characters in his seminal novel The Lonely Londoners are placed on one of in these early waves of West Indian immigration to Britain.

West Indians were being encouraged to come to the UK under the ‘Nationality Act’ which had just been passed, partly inspired by Indian independence the year before. The Nationality Act indicated that subjects of the British empire and its former subjects (the Commonwealth) were able to come to Britain to live and work more easily than before in order to fill the shortage of labour after the loss of life and destruction of WWII. Jamaica was still under British rule at this point and remained so until 1962. According to the propaganda spread through British Imperial rule around the globe, Britain was a place of plenty, fairness, power, influence and education. Many colonial subjects, and those of newly independent nations, saw a life in the ‘Motherland’ as a way to a progressive future. The people who came to fill this post-war shortage of workers provided cheap labour (connotations of slavery and exploitation abound) and found themselves locked out of that centre of power and influence even while they lived and worked within it.

On the day after the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush, The Evening Standard’s front-page headline was “WELCOME HOME!” – the implication being that these West Indians had come to their Mother-country. Yet the people who disembarked were not welcomed into a society which had lived for generations under the idea of colonised people as their social inferiors. Signs saying “No blacks” went up at the doors of many boarding houses, only the most menial poorly paid jobs were offered to these immigrants (despite any qualifications they may have had) and problems of integration began. Sam Selvon captures this moment in The Lonely Londoners, which uses a defiantly Caribbean third-person narration throughout and focuses on a set of friends who are all connected through Moses Aloetta, a guide of sorts who attempts to ‘part the waters’ and help settle his people in the ‘promised land’.

“It have people living in London who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“She is standing on the kitchen table, an unmistakable silhouette, cut from the wild” (Hall, 2019, pg.17). Hall’s prize-winning, magical realist short story Mrs Fox (2013) is based on the short novel by David Garnett Lady into Fox (1922), published just seven years after Kafka’s famous story of human-to-animal transformation, Metamorphosis.  Like the texts of a century earlier, Hall’s story is set within the mundane domestic realm and raises many questions about the status of our humanness, our humanity, and our animality.  However, it offers an update insofar as it also raises pertinent questions about our relationship with the natural realm, and our position as animals within a global ecosystem undergoing rapid alteration.  These themes permeate the work of Sarah Hall (b.1974, Cumbria) who has written five novels and two collections of short stories. Mrs Fox is an excellent avenue into Hall’s work as the 36-page story represents not only her skill and writerly tone but also her recurrent themes: nature and our place within it, the wildness within, and the experience of living in a female body (in this case, one which is not even human). Following on from reading Mrs Fox, you might consider reading one of Hall’s short story collections, or one of her novels: in particular, the eco-dystopian The Carhullan Army (2007) or her historical debut novel, Haweswater (2002), are highly recommended. 

Dr. Melanie Ebdon.

Listen! And I will tell you of the best of exhibitions that I saw in London yesterday…

Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War at the British Library. This exhibition will end on February 19^th, so I urge you to go along as soon as you can – its like will never be seen again in your lifetime. Full price tickets are £16, concessions available, booking in advance of your trip is essential.  For bookings, visit: https://www.bl.uk/events/anglo-saxon-kingdoms

Allow around 2 hours to see this exhibition – its scope and breadth are unspeakable. This is the ‘greatest hits’ of the literary life of the British Isles between the withdrawal of Rome (early 400 CE) and the Battle of Hastings (1066). The hefty 424-page exhibition catalogue (pictured here, £40 hardback) has been essential in helping me to digest the experience as it was almost too overwhelming to absorb the detail of its 180 objects.

As you may expect, the bulk of the books assembled here are Latin texts created during Britain’s early ecclesiastical culture; these were copied by scribes on vellum and richly illustrated. Preservation rates are strong in these elements of the collection as these sacred texts were cared for and then often hidden in order that they survived the Reformation. These texts are numerous, but were written for the Church, in the language of the Church. Even if they had been permitted to see one of these books, the average inhabitant of these islands would not have understood them.

For me, the real high points of the exhibition were the displays of texts written in Anglo-Saxon English (or ‘Old English’) of which there are so very few in existence: not many were ever created as Anglo-Saxons were largely illiterate, yet this was the language of the ‘common folk’ of these lands, predominantly consisting of, or descending from, Scandinavian and Germanic people who had variously invaded and settled here. As the subject-matter of these books was often more secular in nature, this tiny portion of literature has not always benefitted from the protection of the Church in the way that their contemporary Latin books have. We owe a great debt of gratitude to figures such as Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631), an antiquarian bibliophile who collected so many texts and documents in his personal library.  The best-laid plans, however, go oft astray – a fire destroyed and degraded many of his books in 1731, at which point his collection was already highly regarded as a national treasure.

One of the texts which was partially destroyed by this fire is known as Beowulf (named retrospectively for its protagonist hero as no title is given). The best estimation is that this text was written down around 1000 CE, but it contains a tale handed down for many generations before that via the oral tradition. This is the first known ‘story’ from the British Isles: it recounts a tale of Danes and Swedes combining forces to do battle with monsters and dragons. This type of story, brought to Britain by an immigrant culture, came to form the modern-day Fantasy genre via the work of Anglo-Saxon scholar, J.R.R. Tolkien in the mid-20th century.

The exhibition sees the return to these shores of some texts which have not been seen in Britain for quite some centuries, such as the Codex Amiatinus – a gigantic illustrated bible which takes several people and a wheelbarrow to shift (Northumbria, created before 716 CE). Also experiencing a homecoming is the Vercelli Book (c. 975 CE) which contains several of the most important and profound poems in Anglo-Saxon and has been housed in Italy since the early 1100’s: the supposition is that a Pilgrim took it from Britain to Rome and never brought it back – to be fair, it does look heavy…

It’s not just religion and secular poetry on display here: the early British understanding of astronomy and medicinal remedies is on offer here too, along with maps, letters, accounts of Far-Eastern exploration and a collection of early music. These scores are accompanied by a set of headphones so that you can hear recordings of the music, which pre-dates the development of the major-minor key systems – chillingly beautiful in its modal inflections.

Fittingly, the through-flow of the exhibition terminates with The Great Domesday Book (c. 1086) which marked the Norman conquest’s full comprehension of the territory they had colonised following the Battle of Hastings. This account of every house, pig and slave in Britain sits beneath a short but helpful video by leading historians who give the circumstances of the book’s creation.

If all this isn’t enough, the exhibition is liberally studded with Anglo-Saxon ‘bling’ which adorns the walls as you move from one set of book display-cases to the next. Precious treasure from the Sutton Hoo ship burial and the Staffordshire Hoard is displayed for context – the Potteries Museum of Stoke-on-Trent is given a thankful acknowledgement as a lender to the exhibition.

The British Library has been planning this exhibition for around 7 years – it has taken this long to carefully coordinate and curate this event which has gathered together precious British books from as far afield as New York and Florence, as well as the prestigious UK collections such as are housed in the University libraries of Oxford and Cambridge – and, of course, the British Library’s own Treasures Collection. The international effort behind this exhibition corresponds with a genuine sense of the pan-European character of early Britain, and serves as a timely reminder of the fruitful nature of cultural exchange and integration – be that though the spread of Christianity from Ireland and Rome, or the multiple immigrant cultures from Northern Europe. The exhibition shows that the deeper we look into Britain’s past, the more it seems to be composed of a fascinating collage of many cultural voices.

If you like books – you really must go. If you don’t like books…. well, you really must go and see a special Doctor about that.

Photos: the front-cover of the exhibition catalogue, and its double-page spread of the richly illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels (Northumbria, c.700 CE).

Melanie Ebdon.

Thursday 9th November 2016 – Careers Week

Today we had talks from three graduates of the English and Creative Writing awards at Staffs Uni

• Danielle Booker, manager of local PR company ‘Lyme Communications’
• Sharon Sant – novelist (Romantic fiction under the pen-name ‘Tilly Tennant’, Young Adult fiction as herself)
• Bram Welch – Entertainment Journalist

The speakers brought a wealth of diverse topics to the panel, which in turn generated many helpful questions from the current undergraduates in attendance.   Having attended the careers talks this week and last, I can see several important linking themes emerging, which I shall summarise here:

1. All speakers stressed the importance of forming good friendship groups at undergraduate level in order to support and encourage you in the key task of getting through your degree!
2. Relatedly, there was further emphasis in every presentation regarding the need for networking after graduating.  This could mean any of the following: keeping in touch with your fellow graduates, attending events relevant to your areas of employment interest, letting family and friends beyond the Uni know about your skills set/career aspirations, creating a LinkedIn profile, creating a Facebook page for professional use only.  Get to know people and get people to know you!  Many of the stories we heard at these talks depended upon happy coincidence, and that coincidence was generated by networking.
3. A degree doesn’t necessarily mean that you get a job – work on YOU.  Become someone that an employer wants to employ: work on your interpersonal skills, your self-confidence, maybe even your manners.  Learn to cultivate a good presentation of self.  Develop your personality by travelling, possibly even by living and working in other countries (Bram talked very enthusiastically about the TEFL scheme), volunteer – even for things that aren’t directly relevant to what you’d like to do eventually.  If you have no particular career path in mind, then pick some work experience and just make yourself do it; if you hate it, you can at least discount that field.  If you love it you could be making valuable links for later on.   Any work experience will give you life-experience and help you with your personal development.
4. Find out about Graduate Schemes – you may not even be interested in the field in which any given scheme is based, however, you can be well-paid and given intensive training in a variety of skills which will stand you in good stead for a range of other careers.   This tip was really just from Kerry Ann last week, but it’s such good advice that I had to include it here.
5. Managing your existing online profile/s: if a potential employer were to Google you, what would they find…?  It’s time to think carefully about what’s out there on the internet and how it will look from a professional context… (Again, this was just from Kerry Ann, but too important to leave out!)
6. Start the wheels in motion NOW!  This was a common and crucial piece of advice we heard from every speaker.  All 6 of these points can be tackled right now, today, yes – even in the 1st semester of your 1st year!

The talks were – obviously – much richer than this list can indicate.  We are very grateful to our alumni for returning to pass on their pearls of wisdom and inspire our current undergraduates with a lot of food for thought.

Melanie Ebdon.