Amy Jeffs on ancient stories and new understandings
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Amy Jeffs on ancient stories and new understandings
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How can we return to a richer, more complex understanding of national identity and personal ethics - one that can only come from folklore? Amy Jeffs is the perfect person to ask. An art historian and printmaker, she creates immersive retellings of ancient stories, beautifully illustrated with her own woodcuts and etchings. In this week’s episode of How We Live Now, we discuss the function and appeal of folklore, and roam around the wind-blasted landscapes of Medieval Britain.
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Listen to the Episode
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Katherine May:
Amy, welcome to How We Live Now. I'm so thrilled to have you on. When I was planning this season, with the question: 'How can we re-enchant this world?', I immediately thought of you because your work, I think, has reignited a readership that, that maybe we didn't know exist, who are really interested in British folklore.
Katherine May:
Did you know they were out there?
Amy Jeffs:
Well, I don't claim to have any particular expertise on folklore. I came at it from such an academic point of view initially, I think maybe, maybe not initially, initially. When I was 17 or so, I bought Katherine Briggs' Book of British Folklore and would read the stories in that, and I think that's always stayed in the back of my mind.
Amy Jeffs:
And then I came back to stories through studying medieval art history and especially became interested in illustrated later-medieval manuscripts containing the origin myths of Britain, which have definite folkloric elements and probably are rooted to some extent in folklore. So you've got this idea of Britain having initially been called Albion and been [inaudible] for a race of giants and these giants are wiped out by Trojans, led by a guy called Brutus, who ultimately gives his name to Britain and founds a new Troy that becomes London. And in these texts, they're mostly derived from a 12th-century text by a man called Geoffrey of Monmouth. He wrote a history of the Kings of Britain that you do get some names of characters he presents as legendary mortal kings and queens that seem to echo certain names that we know were given to pre-Christian Celtic gods and goddesses.
Amy Jeffs:
So there's something in these, although when I came, when I'm studying them, you know, and these 14th Century manuscripts, they are quite highly crafted political myth-making objects. They're not around the fireside so much, they're more politically engaged than that, or kind of applied. Yeah, there is, there is that dimension to it.
Amy Jeffs:
So I, I just found them interesting because when I started illustrating them, which I did for fun, I found myself looking at a series of illustrations of giants being thrown off cliffs, goddesses giving prophecies, old ladies getting their boobs out on the battlefield. You know, just [inaudible]
Katherine May:
Normal stuff, everyday stuff.
Amy Jeffs:
I was like, oh, these are really, these are genuinely everyday things. Good stories that I can imagine coming across as a child and loving and actually still loving as an adult. And it was a revelation because I'd been looking at them in such a dry academic way. And then it was my supervisor, Alixe Bovey, she's now deputy head of the Courtauld, but she's a great storyteller and it was hearing her talk about the giants of Albion as well that made me think, gosh, this is proper stuff. I didn't come at this consciously with an idea of, of finding a readership interested in folklore.
Amy Jeffs:
I just assumed that everybody loves stories. And that these were really good stories that I didn't think that many people knew.
Katherine May:
Yeah. I mean, it really strikes me as I read your work, how little most of us know about these stories. You know, we've got this kind of vague understanding of Arthurian legend, maybe, perhaps without really knowing many details about it. And I don't know, I don't know how much we really know about these mythologies in the way that maybe other nations would. Do you get that sense or is it just me that's not really come across them in my life much?
Amy Jeffs:
I remember when we, we did a course as part of my BA on the display of art, I was doing art history, and on museums and especially kind of the national museums, and I became interested to discover that England has no national museum. Wales does, Ireland does and Scotland does. England has the British Museum and claims the lot.
Katherine May:
Which is often about other cultures.
Amy Jeffs:
And sort of presents it...I feel as though, in England particularly, and I'm conscious of my, although a lot of the stories that I've enlisted in Storyland or for writing Storyland come from British or Welsh cultures originally, they were appropriated by the English in the Middle Ages, and I write as somebody who was born in England, is English, and has studied predominantly medieval English culture.
Amy Jeffs:
And so I think this issue isn't quite as pronounced perhaps in other countries within the United Kingdom
Katherine May:
I think that's right. Yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
I think that the English, especially just assume that their role isn't to dig down into their own identities, but it's to kinda pick other ones.
Katherine May:
It's so interesting. There's a kind of English embarrassment about having a culture almost. And I think that comes on one hand from us thinking that we are more advanced than everyone else and more rational and so we don't need it. And then there's that kind of fear from the Left maybe that, you know, an over-interest in national culture tips over into sort of supremacy and racism quite easily. And between the two, we've become very shifty when it comes to addressing our own culture.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah, I think it's interesting. And, and a 12th-century text by Gerald of Wales, he's one of my favorite authors of all time.
Katherine May:
That's a great name.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. He talks, he is Welsh, as he probably gathered.
Katherine May:
One would hope.
Amy Jeffs:
And he talks about - at this time the English to him are an oppressed and slightly humiliated, very humiliated, race because they are under the Normans. And so he talks about how the Welsh are confident and hot-headed and say what they think, and this is because they're descended from Trojans, who originated on the hot plains of Troy and the English are this kind of timid, coldblooded, cold-faced sort of...
Katherine May:
Oh dear.
Amy Jeffs:
It's quite, it's really funny to read because at this point they're under Norman rule. And he feels terribly sorry for them. And I think it's nice to to see how cultural stereotypes shift and it's probably self-perception as well.
Katherine May:
Yeah. I mean, I feel like I know much more Welsh and Irish folklore than I do English folklore. And I wonder if there's something in there about that Norman rule and the Roman rule that came before it, and the way that our identity has been disrupted so many different times over the course of history. I mean, maybe we've just had too much eroded during the sort of last two millennia.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. It's interesting so Roman rule really, you feel that the effects of that so strongly in the British as in Welsh-British myth and in things like the Mabinogion where the theme of invasion is so large and there are legendary kings and queens who... they present Roman rule not as an occupation, but as a time when the British [00:07:00] kings were Roman emperors.
Amy Jeffs:
It's not seen so much as... but there is this kind of consciousness of invasion. Obviously the next swathe of invaders become the English, they're coming from Scandinavia.
Katherine May:
Right.
Amy Jeffs:
And I wonder if partly what's happened is some of this... yeah, it's a really odd one, because then the English fall under Norman rule and the Normans appropriate the British myth and present that as what the Saxons then inherited as kings who took over. There was a rupture with maybe the Scandinavian heritage with stories of Woden and Wayland and all of that with Norman rule. I think you're right. But yeah, who knows, it's bloody ages ago.
Katherine May:
Yeah, we don't remember.
Amy Jeffs:
I think there's a lot more fascinating, I mean, when you were telling, just now telling me the kind of broad thrust of this conversation potentially, and you mentioned folklore and myth. I was thinking folklore is such an interesting one because quite often it's hard to pin down when it comes from. There are a couple of very, very folkloric episodes. And by folkloric I suppose, I mean not with great political import, but maybe personal. I often think that folklore has a personal dimension.
Katherine May:
Oh, that's the distinction you make is it, that folklore is more personal and myth is more grand and political?
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. And maybe cosmological. So it has to do with origins and things. Whereas folklore is perhaps more about life lessons, cautionary tales about, you know, Jenny Greenteeth living beneath the duckweed of the, is it the Lincolnshire waterways? Ready to eat you if you fall in. You know, that I think sounds like folklore.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
And there are a couple of moments like that in Gerald of Wales where a little boy, Gerald meets a priest on the road and it is like a memoir, what he writes, he's talking, he's the Katherine May of the 12th century.
Katherine May:
Well, I mean, obviously I have my forebears.
Amy Jeffs:
He does a journey through Wales and he does a sort of topography of Ireland, he calls it. And the journey through Wales, I think it is, he meets a priest called Elidyr who [00:09:00] tells him about this time when he was a little boy and he was hiding from his school teacher and he ran down the side of a riverbank and hid in the kind of overhang.
Katherine May:
Right.
Amy Jeffs:
He fell into a fairy world.
Katherine May:
Oh. And that happens to me all the time.
Amy Jeffs:
And he says, the world, and this world is consistent with other descriptions of fairy worlds in medieval literature - it's twilight, the people there are very small, they have golden hair, they eat only milk pudding coloured with saffron.
Katherine May:
Oh wow.
Amy Jeffs:
Slightly yellow. They've got little horses the size of greyhounds, and he plays with the king's son with a golden ball. And then he takes the golden ball home and he's been sworn to secrecy, when he escapes, when he leaves - and he goes back there a few times - but one day his mother sees the golden ball and he's gone home. And he's been sworn to secrecy, but she presses him and he eventually tells her, and then all of the fairies come marching into his kitchen and take the golden ball away and close the door to the fairy world so he can never go back. And it's one of these really distinctively fairytale-like folkloric stories. So, you know, one of the things that I liked about these medieval texts, is that you could pin down the date, whereas a lot of say Katherine Briggs' collection, this really seminal collection of folklore, they're collected from storytellers from maybe the Seventies and Eighties and these stories have obviously existed within an oral tradition for a long time, but how long, you know?
Katherine May:
Yeah. And it's very, very hard to tell, isn't it? And actually I've come to folklore fairly late and I found at first I had to really get past my own desire, because my training is as a sociologist to exactly situate every single piece of information, like, well, where is this from and what's the evidence? And of course that just doesn't exist.
Amy Jeffs:
I think you end up in this kind of well, I've ended up in this, this tug of war with myself where on the one hand I want to do what you're saying and, and it's probably quite a, I don't know, patriarchal impulse to taxonomize and organise and all that kind of thing. But there's also a wonder in [00:11:00] antiquity, I have to say, the, the trying to, when you have got a story from a 12th-century text about a boy falling into fairyland, you think now that is really old. You know, we're not just making it up, these stories really have very, very ancient roots. And of course there are ones even older from other cultures that maybe wrote things down earlier than we did here.
Amy Jeffs:
But at the same time, you want to accept that stories that you hear while you're walking down the road are just as exciting. I'm thinking of, I mean, when my parents and I moved to a village in Gloucestershire and I got to know an old lady there who wrote a village history, and when she first moved there in 1959, and this isn't a story of magic particularly, it's just a silly story, but she collected various anecdotes and things from the villagers who were there when she first got there and one of them was about a man in the village, a farmer who was so strong he could vault a gate carrying three sheep, one under each arm, the other in his teeth.
Katherine May:
Oh, I love that. I hope he existed.
Amy Jeffs:
And then it brings you right up to the present and you think there are stories being spun the whole time.
Amy Jeffs:
And when I was reading your book Enchantment, I was thinking about that idea of questing, questing through archives, whatever it might be to find these ancient, ancient stories and to marvel at their age, and they actually, I think, tune you in to the same things happening in the corner shop.
Katherine May:
Yeah. The, the act of telling, and in fact, as you're speaking as well, I'm thinking, you know, fairy tales, the figure of the fairy still exists really coherently in our culture now, without having any, you know, without us having an understanding of that lineage. But we definitely know what a fairy is and where a fairy lives and what a fairy might do.
Amy Jeffs:
Yes.
Katherine May:
And even despite the Disneyfication of fairies, I think we still have an understanding that there's maybe another kind as well. And therefore actually probably that folklore persists much more than we sometimes think it does.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. I'm spending a lot of time with a two year old at the moment and I think the instincts that she has to apply concepts she's learned in the every day to things she's seeing when we go on walks, you can see how they very easily welcome ideas like the fairy. So, you know, she, she knows from The Gruffalo's Child that the fox lives in an underground house and so when we go to the woods and she sees a hole under a tree, she says, “this is the fox's underground house”. And then the idea that other things might have houses, that the woodlice need a house. Yes. And then tiny houses are suddenly an idea. And then, you know, what about tiny people? All then that, that imaginative journey needs is, is a story or something to suggest tiny people and suddenly the whole world of the fairy opens up to her.
Katherine May:
Well, when you're a child, the notion of tiny people makes a whole load of things make sense. I mean, I remember sincerely believing that tiny people lived in the TV and in the tape-cassette player, you know, I was convinced there were little people with little instruments playing the music.
Amy Jeffs:
Yes.
Katherine May:
And I remember being utterly convinced by the Cottingley Fairies when I first read about that in, you know, one of those books about esoterica that children read. And it was utterly convincing to me, like, why not? Why wouldn't there be tiny people living somewhere else, somewhere that isn't quite with us?
Amy Jeffs:
Here's a thought. Well, I have a question. When I was a child and I first read Harry Potter, I was a contemporary of Harry's age when the stories began
Katherine May:
So young.
Amy Jeffs:
And I remember lying on my bed just being convinced I had made my lampshade move with my eyes and then being like, I've made that happen. I am, I'm witch. You know, and I'm sure that that's happening the world over every day with these books.
Katherine May:
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
I think in reading medieval myths about, which myth is such a silly word to use, I suppose, about these medieval stories, because at this time, at the time they were being written, they were being presented as deep history but it was just a kind of history that operated differently from how we construct history. It was a history that admitted prophets and giants and magicians and so this is, you know, in these stories about the deep history of Britain that I was reading, there is a sense in which, because you are presenting this to an audience that already think they're really great.
Amy Jeffs:
You know, so you, you are writing about, if you're giving your history of, of Britain to a Norman readership that has effectively claimed that history, presenting that history as having come from, derived ultimately from Troy and the heartlands of the great classical works or classic works of literature in the classical period is completely propping up what they already, you know, it's what everyone wants, what they want to hear.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
And so there's this already very willing and unskeptical audience receiving these histories. And so, sure, you know, they might not see giants in their every day now, but there are giants in the Bible and you know, why not, and there’s this kind of consent to believe that's very easily
Katherine May:
It becomes a kind of conspiracy of belief almost between the invader and the invaded, like, here's a story we make together that makes sense of both of our lives.
Amy Jeffs:
Mm-hmm. And so then I just wonder, and like with children, you want to believe that you are a witch and you want to believe there are fairies. And so all someone has to say is, here's a doctored Victorian photograph of girls playing with fairies and you're like, alright, cool. You know?
Katherine May:
Yeah. Alright then that's fine. I'll take that. That's great. In fact, I'm gonna go and look for some at the bottom of my garden.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. I think also as a child in the back of your mind somewhere, does it mean that we are somehow, that we are kind of, we've grown up, we've moved on that we, we don't, we no longer have that instinct to believe adults? I remember a man with a prosthetic leg once, he didn't tell me he had a prosthetic leg, why would he? And I was sitting next to him in the pub and he said, "have I shown you what I can do?" And this is, I was an adult now. And I said, "no". And he picked up his foot by the ankle, turned his leg upside down, hinged at the knee, put his pint on the sole of his foot and drank out of his pint glass from the sole of his foot.
Amy Jeffs:
And the first thing I thought was, magic is real. It was like this great, like, like, oh, I knew it moment. Um, and then, and then realized actually there was a mechanical explanation, but maybe it's all within us somewhere
Katherine May:
Yeah. I think it is, we want to believe, and I think it also points to this idea that we now see in social media, which is that we all want to be part of the center of the action, like nobody wants to feel peripheral to everything that's going on. And so if I'm going to see pictures of cutout fairies taken by Victorian schoolgirls and believe in them, I'm gonna do that because I want that to be happening close to me, too. I want that to be part of my life.
Amy Jeffs: Yes.
Katherine May:
And I want to believe that magic can come close.
Amy Jeffs:
This is very interesting. I mean, right now I'm, I'm thinking a lot about sanctity and medieval ideas around saints. Back in 2015, I was working in the British Museum, digitizing their collection of pilgrim souvenirs, which are little lead alloy tokens that medieval people who weren't necessarily that well off because these were very affordable, would've bought when they went to visit a sacred shrine and then they'd sort of come out of the shrine and, and presumably on market stands in the cathedral close, there would be these stalls heaped high with, and lead alloy, this particular type of lead alloy, a eutectic lead-tin alloy, casts very thin and very shiny and so it's super cheap and it's also very glitzy. And so, you know, these stalls would've really dazzled the eye when you came out into the sunlight from the shrine. And you could have bought five for a penny or, or something. They would show maybe the reliquary bust of the saint you had just venerated inside the cathedral. That would be a miniature version of that. And you could wear it on your hat or on your bag as you made your journey home.
Katherine May:
Oh, so you, you bought it home rather than leaving it as an offering.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. You would leave offerings, the things that people left tended to be if you were poor or were not wanting to spend too much money for whatever reason, you might leave a wax model of, say you'd gone with a bad leg or, or you had, and if you had prayed, you'd had a bad leg back home, you'd prayed to that saint, received healing, you would then make a journey of thanks to the shrine and leave a wax leg as an offering.
Katherine May:
I see, yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
But then you would come out and you would, you'd take something for your journey home. And these badges also they were called signs, you know, they were also a sign that you were patronized by that saint and it would be a reminder for you to pray to them next time you, there's difficulty.
Katherine May:
Like an attachment to them.
Amy Jeffs:
But, one image that I find quite moving is that of the vernicle, the holy face, which is associated with Saint Veronica. She's a completely legendary saint.
Katherine May:
Does that mean there's no kind of historical evidence?
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. That she, yeah, there's not, and she's not even scriptural. But she's extremely established, in medieval Christianity and in contemporary, modern Catholicism, you know, she's depicted in the stations of the cross, which are these scenes of Christ’s passion that are put up around churches. And supposedly she met Christ on, on the road to the crucifixion as he's carrying the cross and wiped his face with her veil and his face was imprinted onto the veil. Another version of the story that I particularly prefer, to be honest, which is in Caxton's Book of Saints is that she was a painter trying to, she'd go to Christ's talks when he was not about to be crucified, but when he was more in full swing and she would, she'd go home and try to do his portraits and she could never capture his likeness, but she just really wanted his portrait at home.
Amy Jeffs: And then one day he comes up to her and says, why do you keep running off from all my lectures? And she says, "oh, I just really want a picture of your face and I can't get it". And so he takes her handkerchief and presses his face into it and imprints his face in her handkerchief. And in both versions of the legend, you end up with this direct transfer image of Christ's face on the cloth.
Katherine May: Wow.
Amy Jeffs: Cloth became known as the Sudarium. I think there were at least three in existence, but that were said to, to have been real. Each one said it was the real one you know. And they were all venerated in medieval Christendom. And to this day, in fact, any image made based on that Sudarium had the kind, had the authority, you know, making an image of God, the son of God, was a very potentially risky thing to do. But if you had an image with such authority as a direct imprint, then you could copy that image and you were kind of referring back to that, that authoritative original. And so this little lead alloy token of a vernicle as they were known, Veronica is derived from the Latin vera icon, meaning 'true image'.
Katherine May: Ah, OK.
Amy Jeffs: So this, this little lead-alloy vernicle that I digitized when I was working in the British Museum was one of many, many thousands that people would've bought and worn. But it shows Christ's face fully, a full frontal portrait of his face. A bit like he's just poked his head through a hole in a white wall.
Amy Jeffs:
You know, he’s got no neck, no shoulders. But his beard has come through and, but he's looking directly at you. And even on this little primitive lead-alloyed token, that gaze is making eye contact with you, but it's got a kind of direct line of transmission in the medieval belief system to the very gaze of Christ.
Katherine May:
Which is an extraordinary idea. And, and it, you know, the power of it is so much greater then than now when we are so used to photographs and you know, film images. Exactly. I mean, we're, we are enured to that now, really. But it would've been so powerful then.
Amy Jeffs: So powerful. And this idea that you were talking about, of being part of something bigger.
Amy Jeffs:
So even though you might, might be someone who could just afford to buy this image, in lead, you know, in the cheapest material you could get it in.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
To take that home and to own it and to look into that gaze and to imagine that line of transmission made you, you were making eye contact in a sense.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
It’s probably heretical what I'm saying now, but there's, you know, there's, there's this idea of being part of something eternal and something huge and something full of supernatural potential.
Katherine May:
And you are, you're part of this direct lineage to the origin of that image. Which leads me to make a sort of slightly clumsy segue to the images in your book, because unusually you illustrate and write at the same time, which must be an extraordinary thing to be able to do. And I just, I wondered about for you what that means to create your, I think, Storyland is linocuts and Wild is wooden engraving. Is that right?
Amy Jeffs: Yes. It's actually a great segue, isn't it? Because, Christ, he imprints his face and so to go from print to print.
Katherine May: Exactly. Yeah.
Amy Jeffs: Really deft.
Katherine May: I was, I was going for that. [00:24:00]
Amy Jeffs:
What Storyland began, it was very funny, really. I felt like, oh, what, what way round was it? I felt very nervous about writing when I wrote Storyland. I had written a PhD, but it's such a different genre from writing for a general audience.
Katherine May: It's very different.
Amy Jeffs:
I was finishing it as I started Storyland and, you know, you are allowed to use the passive voice with complete abandon. No one's gonna chastise you for lack of style. You know? It is the, it is the, um, yeah. You don't have...
Katherine May: It's actively encouraged, in fact.
Amy Jeffs: Yeah. You assume that your audience knows more than you, which is quite often, you know, you are told when you were writing for general audience…
Katherine May: Assume they know nothing.
Amy Jeffs: You obviously writing for a general audience. You as, as you general, you, you largely assume an intelligent reader, but you don't assume, they have the same expertise as you.
Amy Jeffs:
So you know, whereas writing a PhD, you are aiming it directly at people who might share your expertise, if not, know considerably more. So I was going into a completely different world of writing in writing Storyland. On the other hand, pictures - I had been making pictures since I was a child and I've always loved it and it's always been a source of great relaxation.
Amy Jeffs:
I'd finally found a medium - lino cut or printmaking, relief printmaking - in which I felt really free, and I was very confident in this medium's ability to capture the magic of the particular stories I wanted to illustrate.
Katherine May: Right.
Amy Jeffs:
But it was like a little bit like your question then, I kept thinking people are gonna call me up on the writing.
Amy Jeffs:
People are, you are gonna say, are gonna ask me questions about that. But everyone seemed to assume that I could write unless I, the writing was the thing that I'd found easy and that the pictures were the scary bit. Which was a funny surprise.
Katherine May:
That probably shows you the kind of biases of the publishing world. You know, we're all like, expect everyone to be able to turn out a good sentence, but drawing is very impressive to us.
Amy Jeffs:
So that was, that was a funny one. But, um, I found that lino, this particular medium and this relief printmaking with black ink, I've never, I gone into colour.
Amy Jeffs: So in my case, I've got synesthesia. So my version of synesthesia is that all numbers and letters have colours.
Katherine May: Oh, wow.
Amy Jeffs:
It’s very, very crowded. And so every, I remember when I was learning to read, going past road signs and things, and them kind of flying into my brain in these, in these bright colours.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
And I remember my mum talking to me and seeing the words running past, like behind my forehead in different colours and, and telling her and my mum, who's wonderful , just being like, "haha, funny", you know?
Katherine May: Children say the funniest things.
Amy Jeffs:
And I, I thought, I'm making it up. I've just imagined it. And so for the rest of my childhood, genuinely for, you know, years after that, I would try and catch myself out, making it up.
Katherine May: Wow.
Amy Jeffs:
I would jump into my own thoughts and be like, you just pictured that word, but you were thinking about picturing that word with all its different colours, you know? And it wasn't until I was 15, 16 that I was talking about it with a friend on the bus, and then all the other kids were like, that's so that's not a thing, Amy.
Katherine May: Yeah. It's unusual.
Amy Jeffs:
But basically what the upshot is that I really am very happy in black and white with notebooks, with stationary, everything black and white. And very happy going out on Exmoor where there are absolutely no words. Anywhere. I don't even have to think.
Katherine May:
So then, gosh, that's so interesting. So, sorry, this is completely off topic, but that made me think, what are films with subtitles like for you?
Amy Jeffs:
Well, they're already, it's already happening, generally films have, if the subtitles are going, words are happening. So it's, it's OK.
Katherine May: So it's, yeah. So it doesn't make any difference if they're written down.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah, if there's dialogue anyway. If there's subtitles in another language, that's pretty nuts. Yeah. So that's one of the, you know, this, this black and white medium.
Katherine May: Yeah. So you stuck with your kind of monochromatic palette to keep things gentle for you.
Amy Jeffs:
I guess it just grows out of the black of the text. I really enjoyed it and I realized the manuscripts that I'd been studying, they were often illustrated in pen and wash. Often the same ink being used for the pen drawings as had been used for writing the text in the book.
Katherine May: Wow, okay.
Amy Jeffs:
And that there's a really lovely narrative synthesis going on there between text and image that I wanted to play with. The other thing about the particular way that I was approaching linocut was inspired by an artist called Chris Pig, who I met in Somerset where I live. And he does these quite large-scale linocuts with very detailed areas. He's very technically accomplished, but he also leaves large areas of black. And with these medieval stories where there was so much mystery surrounding them, or kind so much negative space that had so much aesthetic impact.
Katherine May: Yeah, makes sense.
Amy Jeffs: I wanted to incorporate this negative space. And so in nearly every illustration there are areas of black.
Katherine May:
Yeah. OK. So at, at the time when, so I hadn't really realized the continuity of illustration that there would've been illustrations with the original texts as well as with your text. To me, I thought that was an innovation. So that's, that's how much I know. But I was, I was wondering if at the time most people would've seen those illustrations or would they have received those stories outside of a written format more and so is there a different way that we are receiving that information now?
Amy Jeffs:
Yes. So specifically the origin myths that I was interested in the so-called Brute Chronicle because it was about Brutus and Britain , the Trojan Brutus - in manuscript form, they're very rarely illustrated. And even though we only have a fraction of the surviving manuscripts that were made in the Middle Ages, it doesn't seem like it was a common practice.
Amy Jeffs: The text itself survives in many hundreds of manuscripts, in illustrated form it’s a handful.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
It's possible that cycles of illustrations existed in wall paintings and things that have been lost. And I'm sure that is the case, but it still doesn't seem to have been common. But, at the same time, I think that there's, in doing my PhD project, I got really excited about this world of, you know, you talk, in your book about meditative, finding meditative space as a mother, in Enchantment your most recent book, and one of the things I found quite inspiring is this idea that private reading is a monastic idea and not the norm in the Middle Ages. The consumption of stories in the Middle Ages was largely, you know, they were recited. So if you, if you lived in a, somewhere like Goodrich Castle where there was, you know, so let's say we're wealthy enough to be living in Goodrich Castle and we are in the domestic area, and there's a nice big chamber. And, in the evening you've got probably quite a few children around because a place like that would've had foster children as well as the family's, children
Amy Jeffs:
You've got quite a few women. The husbands might well be at war and the uncles and things. You might have some old folk whose eyesight isn't that good, necessarily. Everyone's clustered together in this room and there might be a cleric who is reading a story or they might be reading directly from a manuscript, or they might be reciting from memory. And that enables the kids to be getting on with whatever they're getting on with, or the women to be doing embroidery or, you know, they're doing their craftwork or just picking up toddlers. Who knows?
Katherine May: Yeah. Chasing children around.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. You are listening to a story. I mean, I do put on audio books sometimes when you know, my daughter's playing and she's doesn't really need me, but I, I can keep half an eye on her, but also listen to a story, I think it's the same thing, but equally around these rooms, there's a good amount of evidence that in bedrooms and in domestic spaces, there were tapestries and wall paintings showing the Siege of Antioch or more grand [stories].
Amy Jeffs: Poor Edward II was raised in, his bedroom was, surrounded by scenes of the fall of Old Testament Tyrant.
Katherine May: Oh God.
Amy Jeffs: His dad was like, be warned, then he gets deposed and killed.
Katherine May: There we go, I mean, obviously, you know, stories are very effective.
Amy Jeffs:
I think that stories in the Middle Ages were everywhere. And text was not the dominant form, I mean text in the sense of, there were authoritative versions of stories, but in written form that they were just mnemonics.
Amy Jeffs:
I think Mary Carruthers, a scholar who's really brilliant, describes medieval books as mnemonics. They're just somewhere that you can learn by rote from.
Katherine May: Oh, wow. OK. Yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
If you've got a nice illustrated, the versions that I looked at, which had these pan and wash illustrations, I think they're very well suited to small group reading in a domestic space where you are looking over each other's shoulders or you maybe all looking over the shoulder of the person who's got it on their lap
Katherine May: So that you can have sight of those pictures without necessarily reading them yourself.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. And that kind of, the text and image have a different relationship. An image has much more supremacy perhaps than it does, maybe I'm talking rubbish, I mean, we have TV.
Katherine May:
Well, it would've been been more noticeable. It would've been more unique. There wouldn't have been the glut of images that we have right now, I guess.
Amy Jeffs:
And the idea of painting onto your children's bedroom walls, scenes without words of those stories that our culture celebrates and then being able to use them as cues for storytelling as they, you know, as you're sitting with them at night rather than having a pile of books, which is great too. But, you know, that I found really exciting. Yeah, it's a wonderful idea. And trying to come back to your question that started all of this, just that, although this wasn't commonly illustrated, I think people thought about these stories in a very pictorial way.
Katherine May:
And it's made me think that storytelling was a much more social experience or the reception of stories. I mean, obviously storytelling we understand to be social, but the very notion of a story itself would've been a much more communal idea, whereas I think now we read, and we read in privacy, and we tend to think that, you know, we are all following slightly different interests or having a different encounter with the text, you know? A lot of contemporary scholarship is about that unique personal relationship that we have with a written text as, as a reader, and the kind of interchange between the reader and the writer. But storytelling would've been a social idea at that point.
Amy Jeffs:
I don't know if you find this when you are touring with your new book, but people will say, "Oh, I've, I've just listened to the audio book, I'm sorry."
Katherine May: Yes, yeah.
Amy Jeffs: At which point I'll always say, "No, no, no, no. That's great!"
Katherine May: Definitely listen to the audiobook.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. It's, you know, it's going back to a, a form of consumption of literature that is actually much more practical for people that can't make that solitary ideal space in their days to consume literature privately
Katherine May:
Well, we have this weird idea that listening to the audiobook is cheating somehow. And that there's this, you know, glory in physically reading the words with your eyes, because that is what school told us was a really good thing for us to do. And of course, you encounter the same story and, and there's loads of people for whom reading the audiobook means they can just simply take the information in, in a much more clear way.
Katherine May: I don't know why we got this idea that reading with our eyes is better than reading with our ears.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. It's a different, you know, it's a different craft and a different, a slightly different experience, but I don't think it should be given a hierarchy. You know, I think if you can listen to an interesting story while your child is playing for 20 minutes on their own, my child would turn around to me and say one of the words that she's just heard.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
And you think that would've been happening, you know, you could just imagine some child going "Antioch!"
Katherine May:
"What does Antioch mean?". But also, I mean there's, you know, we've got this really clear separation now of stories for adults and stories for children, and our adult stories have got things happening in them that we don't want children to know about, and they have language that we don't want children to repeat. Whereas actually the notion of separate literature for children is actually a very, very recent one, historically, I think.
Amy Jeffs:
Yes. [00:36:00] That was something I was really interested in when I was more of an active academic - how do you differentiate between manuscripts designed for a young readership and not?
Amy Jeffs:
One of the manuscripts I was particularly interested in, was a Life of Edward Confessor, or a History of Edward The Confessor written in, made in Westminster in the 13th century, is now in Cambridge. It's a really good story. It's all about Edward the Confessor coming to the throne after the Danish kings. He becomes, he is very holy and he can form all of these miracles. And then there's the baddies in the court, which is Earl Godwin, whose son Harold Godwinson ends up being king after Edward.
Katherine May: Is one of the contenders of the king.
Amy Jeffs:
And then he gets the arrow in his eye at Hastings. And this is illustrated in the book, the Battle of Hastings, with the arrow kind of going into Harold's eye, but it's got a real poetry to it because at the beginning of the text, Harold's father, Earl Godwin has blinded or kind of caused to be blinded, Edward the Confessor's older brother, who is a claimant for the throne.
Katherine May: Oh.
Amy Jeffs:
And so there's a real obvious symmetry, kind of literary symmetry to this idea that Harold pays for the sin of his father at Hastings. And this arrow...
Katherine May:
So it could have just been a narrative callback, you're saying all of this, you know, wondering whether Harold was actually shot through the eye, it could just be a literary device.
Amy Jeffs:
I really believe that, and that's argued by a guy called Bernstein as well, who, who sort of makes that point initially that there's, it's so common with chronicle writers if there's a - well, actually what Bernstein suggests is that when you illustrate something, you have to include more detail often then when you write it.
Amy Jeffs:
So you can, if you write something, you can say, Harold died at Hastings. If you illustrate the battle scene, you have to kinda say how he died. You can't, you can't just sort of die. You know, you need some information in there. So, whether or not the arrow in the battle, on the Bayeux Tapestry is original, and obviously there's all kinds of arguments over whether it was added later or not.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Amy Jeffs:
In the early Chronicles, you do start seeing this idea of an arrow that has fallen [00:38:00] out of the sky. It's not shot by anyone in particular with a particular aim of getting Harold. It's a confusion and there are arrows going everywhere, and this one happens to land in Harold's eye. As such, it seems a kind of divinely directed arrow.
Katherine May: Guided arrow.
Amy Jeffs:
God has decided it's gonna go that way. And this perhaps begins appearing in the written versions of the battle because initially it's illustrated. And that illustration had a kind of poetic justice. That choice had a poetic justice to it based on what Earl Godwin had done, blinding Edward the Confessor's brother.
Katherine May:
I had to do medieval history for my history, A Level. We were like only two schools in the country that did it. And it was this sort of, there were no textbooks for us or anything because it wasn't really commercial to do that. And I spent such a long time, you know, studying how Harold died. And I've never come across the idea that it was narrative justice and that now makes me so happy.
Amy Jeffs:
[00:39:00] So this story, this history of Edward the Confessor, it functions on many levels. In the manuscript. You've got these big, almost cartoon strip, comic strip-like illustrations of the story. And they run the full, almost the top half of every double-page spread is just pictures. And they're really good pictures too. And they're good by our standards. They're not kind of these Monty Python, medieval pictures. They are dynamic and they flow into each other in a left to right pattern. So they go, you know, they follow the kind of narrative thrust of the text. And, you've got all of this, all of this action going on. And then underneath that, you've got little captions to the pictures, which just say in very simple French verse and often, you know, our children's books are often written in verse as well, to make them more memorable... what's going on. So you've got this little vignette in text. Then underneath that you've got a few columns of French verse again. So French being the mother tongue giving us a more extended version of the story, and that's got things like metaphor in it, you know, so that's a literary thing.
Amy Jeffs:
But I really believe, and, and this is part of a group of manuscripts where some of them have little inscriptions or one of them has an inscription in the beginning saying, you know, Eleanor the Duchess of Arundel lent this to Claire - I don't know, think of a Duchy somewhere
Katherine May: Cornwall
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah, Cornwall. So they, these noble women are lending them to each other, these books. And you just think this would work so well for reading with young children because you've got your more complex story underneath, but they can read it through the pictures. They can also, as they get better at reading their mother tongue, they can start seeing, reading the captions.
Amy Jeffs:
And then as they improve, they can move on to what you've been reading all along. You know, there's a kind of denser text. I think that we produce books specifically for children and that maybe was prohibitively costly in the Middle Ages when books were already a luxury item. But here you've got these kind of multilayered texts.
Katherine May:
Like having a parallel translation almost or something like that for children or the adults. Yeah. It's so interesting, the whole of this conversation has really been about how similar the devices are then and now we actually understand mythology, folklore storytelling in more similar ways than I'd realised.
Katherine May:
And I just want to close really by asking whether you think we have lost anything between now and then in terms of our thinking, like whether there's a's been a shift in mindset and whether we could make more use of mythological thinking in this current age, whether it, it would still have utility to us now.
Amy Jeffs:
I don't know. It's difficult because I enjoy it and so I think it's great. You know, I think that seeing the world with these alternative histories and when I was studying, you know, I was studying at Girton College, Cambridge and there would be punting tours, where people would take people up and down the Cam and give them the history of the buildings and that kind of thing.
Amy Jeffs:
Once I ended up somehow punting some people, I think they, I can't even remember who they were, but they weren't from Cambridge.
Katherine May: Complete strangers.
Amy Jeffs:
Yeah. And, and I can't punt very well, but I had very little to tell them in terms of actual history of Cambridge, but I had loads of things that may or may not have happened or had been made up about this place or this, one being there's a bridge by Trinity Hall Cambridge, known as Orgasm Bridge. It's not...
Katherine May: What! Nobody ever told me about that. Only heard about the mathematical bridge.
Amy Jeffs:
I don't know what its real name is, but it's quite a steep bridge. And so, when you cycle up it, by the time you get to the top, you're kind of panting furiously. And so that was always what it was called while I was there. So I was like, this isn't called Orgasm Bridge. And this isn't called, you know, this is thing that didn't happen here. And so I think I've always been drawn to what are the things that we tell about a place. That might not have happened or definitely didn't happen, or we would like to believe happened. And I think wherever we live, those stories exist and it's a really fun way of viewing your immediate surroundings.
Amy Jeffs:
So I suppose, in terms of putting mythological goggles on as a historian, that's not something that's accessible to everyone necessarily. But putting mythological goggles on as a citizen of wherever you are and listening in to those anecdotes and things that probably aren't true, but give your home its colour and humour, that's something lots of people could enjoy and benefit from if they're interested in mythmaking.
Katherine May:
Absolutely. Amy, thank you so much. That was such a wonderful account. Thank you. And if people like to find you, where should they go looking for you?
Amy Jeffs:
In the middle of Exmoor as far from any words as possible? But also on Twitter as, @amy_historia, the Latin for history, that is, and then on Instagram as @historia_prints and prints as in printed image, not as in the son of a king or the queen.
Katherine May: It's very important to point that out with your work. Thank you so much.
Amy Jeffs: Yeah, it was really, really good fun. I enjoyed that.
Show Notes
How can we return to a richer, more complex understanding of national identity and personal ethics - one that can only come from folklore?
Amy Jeffs is the perfect person to ask. An art historian and printmaker, she creates immersive retellings of ancient stories, beautifully illustrated with her own woodcuts and etchings. In this week’s episode of How We Live Now, we discuss the function and appeal of folklore, and roam around the wind-blasted landscapes of Medieval Britain. We get a glimpse of the British Isles through ancient eyes - a haunted place stranded on the far edge of Europe, isolated and vulnerable, but full of courageous, hardy folk. What can these tales tell us about who we are now? And how can we restore this agile way of understanding the world?
Links from the episode:
Amy’s Instagram
Amy’s Twitter
Amy's book, Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain
Amy’s book, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain
Other episodes you might enjoy:
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New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
