by Gavin Scott
Clark finished his glass and stood up. “Thank you, old chap,” he said. “I had to tell somebody; I was going out of my bloody head.”
Forrester stood up too. A bell began to toll. “Shall we go down?”
Clark hitched his gown around him. “Why not?” he said. “I’ve worked up quite an appetite.”
2
RAGNARÖK
In the event, inevitably, the Master kept them hanging about in the Fellows’ Chamber before they could go through to High Table. A giant with a face like a Viking axe was standing in the centre of the room as they entered, his sherry glass like a thimble in his massive fingers, the timbre of his thickly accented Norwegian voice so deep Forrester could swear his glass was ringing as he spoke.
“In the year of Our Lord, 998,” the Norwegian was booming, “Sigrid the Strong-Minded was wooed by both Prince Weswolf and Harald Skull-Splitter, neither of whom pleased her. She took them to a beer hall, got them drunk and as they lay sleeping, set fire to the place, burning them both to death. After this only the boldest suitors approached her, which is what I think she intended.”
There was a murmur of appreciative laughter, led by Professor Michael Winters. The Master of Barnard College was a plump man with a fringe of white hair around his egg-shaped cranium and a face which looked slightly too small for the size of his head, like a child’s sketch painted on a balloon. He turned to Clark and Forrester, gesturing at the Norwegian. “This is Professor Arne Haraldson, from the University of Oslo,” he said. “My star turn at the reading tonight. I trust you’re coming?”
Forrester sighed inwardly. Winters’ evenings of readings from the Icelandic epics were, for those unenthused by Dark Ages poetry, famously painful. But he liked the Master too much to let him down. “Of course, Master,” he said. Clark had managed to edge away before he had to respond; Forrester knew that in Gordon’s present state of mind an evening listening to tales of Vikings hacking one another to pieces was more than he could bear.
“What are your views on the links between Norse mythology and Nazism, Professor Haraldson?” Forrester turned and saw that the speaker was David Lyall. The question was typical of the man: designed largely to draw attention to the questioner.
Forrester saw a curious expression on Haraldson’s face as he turned to Lyall – a flash of surprise that morphed swiftly into fury, as though someone he trusted was reneging, quite shamelessly, on a deal. For a moment Forrester expected the big man to reach out and grasp Lyall by the throat but instead, after a beat, he drew in a deep breath and smiled.
“There are no true links between Nazi fantasy and Norse mythology,” he said at last, “whatever Hitler might have imagined.”
“Adolf was pretty much convinced otherwise, though, wasn’t he?” Lyall persisted. “He had that mystic experience in a wood during the Great War, didn’t he?” Lyall had an athlete’s build, with a fine head and bright blue eyes. Forrester could see why Margaret Clark had been attracted to him.
“What ‘mystic experience’?” said someone. The smile remained on Haraldson’s face, but it was fixed now, his eyes hard.
“The future Führer described the scene very vividly,” Lyall went on, apparently oblivious to Haraldson’s anger. “It was on a hill above his line of trenches: a place he called Wotan’s Glade. Apparently it was very cold, snow everywhere, and he used his bayonet to carve certain runes on a fallen log. He claimed it was there that Odin revealed his destiny to him.”
“The future Führer was deluded,” said Haraldson, “as the events of April last year demonstrated.” It had been in the previous April, of course, that the Führer had shot himself in his Berlin bunker, and the Thousand Year Reich had come to a premature end.
“And those of us who study literature would very much prefer that those delusions should be forgotten,” said Roland Bitteridge. His voice was high-pitched and unattractive, like a triangle being played after a great bell had been struck. “These fantasies have nothing to do with serious study, Dr. Lyall, as you must know.”
“I couldn’t say,” replied Lyall. “It’s not my field.” He was speaking to Bitteridge, but Forrester felt, for some reason, that the remarks were still addressed to Haraldson. The Master intervened swiftly to set the conversation in another direction.
“I have one disappointment for you this evening, I’m afraid.” He paused and cleared his throat apologetically. “Professor Tolkien isn’t coming.” There were polite murmurs of regret from around the room. Tolkien had begun the tradition of readings from the sagas at Oxford, forming with C.S. Lewis a group known as the Coalbiters, after an Icelandic phrase referring to those who sat so close to the blazing hearth on winter evenings that they seemed to be eating the fire.
“He was supposed to be here,” the Master went on, “but he’s moving house and everything seems to have got into a tremendous muddle. Some manuscript he’s mislaid.”
“Another Hobbit?” Tolkien’s children’s book, written in the thirties, had just been republished and Forrester had seen its distinctive green and white dust jacket in Blackwell’s bookshop that afternoon.
“Oh, something much bigger,” said Bitteridge. “He’s been trying to finish it for years – but you know what he’s like. Jack Lewis will pip him at the post if he’s not careful.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Jack’s writing his own fairy stories. Dwarves and nymphs and fauns and that kind of thing. I suspect Tollers thinks it’s pretty meretricious stuff, and it probably is.”
“They’re both looting the sagas, aren’t they?” said Forrester.
“Of course,” said Bitteridge. “But C.S. is writing his stuff on behalf of the Christians, and Tolkien doesn’t approve of that. Can’t say I blame him.”
“At any rate,” said a voice somewhere behind them, “it’s better than writing on behalf of the Devil, isn’t it?” Forrester turned to see who had spoken, but the face was lost in the crowd.
* * *
At last they went through to the Hall, built when Henry VII was on the throne, and were seated at High Table, looking down at the undergraduates watching impatiently as the food approached. The silverware sparkled in the light of the candles and the shadows they cast flickered against the great hammer beams supporting the roof. Forrester hoped the sheer familiarity of the scene gave Gordon Clark the comfort it always gave him.
Bitteridge was placed next to Haraldson, and they were deep in conversation, Forrester noted, with the Norwegian nodding vigorously as he shovelled food into his mouth. He would have looked even more at home, Forrester thought, if he’d been chewing on a leg of wild boar. Bitteridge, by contrast, merely ferried fastidiously tiny forkfuls from the plate to his thin lips.
He looked down the table towards Gordon Clark and cursed under his breath as he saw that the Senior Tutor was sitting opposite David Lyall. But of course as no-one knew about Lyall’s affair with Clark’s wife, no-one had thought to separate them. Forrester forced himself to listen to the languid Foreign Office man seated beside him. His name was Charles Calthrop, he had attended the college in the early thirties, been recruited into the Foreign Office when it was dominated by the appeasers and was now speaking airily of the growing Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. “Oh yes,” he was saying. “Albania declared a People’s Republic two days ago. It’ll be the same in Hungary within the month. And then we should all look out for the Russian army marching towards us with snow on their boots.”
“Is that a serious possibility?” asked Forrester.
“Of course it is,” said Calthrop. “If they can’t get the local communist parties to do it for them. Italy could go red any day. Look at what’s happening in Greece. The fact is, if we want to keep the Russians from taking over, the Americans are our only hope.”
“I don’t see why you’re afraid of Russia,” said the man on the opposite side of the table. “Stalin saved this country during the war.” The remark came from Alan Norton, X-ray crystallographer and deputy bursar
, responsible for repairs to damage done to the college fabric during the late hostilities. “Hitler would be living in Buckingham Palace today if it hadn’t been for the Soviets.”
Calthrop favoured him with a long, amused glance.
“I can’t say anything about hypothetical accommodation arrangements for the Führer,” he said, “but I have to tell you that Stalin is a truly bad man.”
“And you make that statement on what basis?” asked Norton.
“Meeting him,” said Calthrop, mildly. “I was close enough to him at Yalta to be aware of an aura of… how shall I put this? An aura of pure evil.”
Before Norton could rebut this shameless piece of one-upmanship, the balding, sandy-haired German beside him spoke up. “My own view is that the Russians have swallowed as much of Europe as their Slavic stomachs can digest.”
The German’s name was Peter Dorfmann, and it was rumoured that he was being groomed for power when the occupying forces set up the new, democratic Germany. Forrester wasn’t clear exactly how he’d managed to remain a respected academic in the Third Reich without either joining the party or falling foul of it, but apparently he had. “Besides,” said Dorfmann, “I do not believe the Russians have any desire to fight the Americans.”
“The Americans,” said Norton contemptuously, “are the occupying power in Europe these days. They’ve turned us into one big aircraft carrier.”
“You’re not suggesting we could have won the war without them, are you?” remarked Lyall from across the table. “I mean, were you out in the streets on D-Day saying ‘Yanks go home’?”
Forrester saw Clark glance up as Lyall spoke and shot him a look that warned him to stay out of this dispute, but Norton was in full spate. “The Americans were pursuing their own interests when they finally deigned to come into the war, and that’s what they’ll go on doing,” he said. “Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive.”
“Naivety,” said Lyall, as if savouring the word. “It’s a wonderful word for clubbing your opponents over the head, Alan. Much used in Party circles, I believe?”
“I’m not a member of the party,” snapped Norton, “as you very well know.”
“You might give that impression, though, to our guests,” said Lyall, like a picador enraging a bull. There had been plenty of speculation that Norton was a communist fellow traveller.
At which point Gordon Clark could no longer resist. “I’m sure our guests don’t expect to hear fellows quizzing each other about their political affiliations, Lyall,” he said. “After all, this is a bastion of learning, not an inquisitorial chamber.” It was a splendid stroke: Clark had neatly defined Lyall’s baiting of Norton as boorish and crass. For a moment the younger man was at a loss. Then he smiled warmly at Clark.
“I’m so sorry, Gordon,” he said. “I’d forgotten how delicate your sensibilities are.” He looked around the table. “Dr. Clark is Senior Tutor,” he said as if in explanation. “I think dealing with undergraduates takes a great toll on his nervous system.” He looked again at Clark with apparent solicitude. “I promise to keep the conversation innocuous from now on,” he said, and turned back to Dorfmann.
Clark was silent for a moment; Forrester could see that his friend was boiling with fury at Lyall’s revenge, which, true to form, neatly combined truth with slander. Clark was indeed highly strung not because of the demands of being Senior Tutor but due to the toll his war work had taken on him. It was impossible to establish the distinction, but Forrester knew Clark was too angry to let the gibe pass.
“It’s not blandness one seeks at High Table, Lyall,” he said. “It’s – how shall I put it? – incisiveness. Something I have to constantly remind my undergraduates: there’s no point in speaking for the sake of being heard, however amusing one finds the sound of one’s own voice.”
The Master intervened before Lyall could hit back. “I’d be very grateful for your opinion of the claret, Roland,” he said to Bitteridge. “We’ve just opened a new bin and I’m wondering if we left it too long.” Winters turned to ensure everyone else was part of this new conversation. “Roland is not just a great English scholar,” he said, “but he also has one of the great noses.”
There was general laughter and Bitteridge looked enormously pleased at the compliment. “Well,” he said, considering the claret judiciously, “I think, Master, you are to be congratulated.”
And the conversation moved onto safer ground. Forrester felt himself start to breathe again. He’d been afraid, for a moment, that his friend would throw himself across the table and knock Lyall backwards out of his chair. God knows, he’d been tempted to do it himself, and it wasn’t his wife that Lyall was making love to.
* * *
By the time those who had agreed to attend the Icelandic reading crunched through the snow across the inner quadrangle to the Master’s Lodge, clouds were scudding across the moon. As well as Haraldson, Calthrop and Dorfmann there was a mix of Barnard Fellows, and wives and dons from other colleges. David Lyall, Forrester noted with relief, had decided to absent himself.
Inside the Lodge, a minstrels’ gallery ran around the upper part of the large drawing room and carved beams like those in the Hall ran across the high ceiling. There were gently worn Turkish rugs on the floor and a crackling fire in the grate. Lady Hilary, the Master’s wife, was supervising two tall young men as they shifted furniture for the new arrivals. Lady Hilary was a tall, slightly awkward woman who Forrester suspected was not quite comfortable in her skin. He liked her, but he was not sure she liked herself.
“I want you to meet Hakon and Oskar,” said Lady Hilary, introducing her two assistants. “The Master specially asked them to join us this evening because they’re from Iceland.”
“And children in Iceland learn the sagas at their mother’s knee,” said the Master genially. “In the absence of Professor Tolkien they will gently correct us if we get our Old Norse pronunciation wrong.”
Hakon and Oskar shook their heads. “No, no, we are engineers,” said Hakon. “It is many years since we read the sagas. But as this is our last night in England, we offer to do our best.” Haraldson said a few words to the boys in Norwegian and they laughed. With Lyall gone, he seemed to have regained his good humour.
“You understand it is because of the ancestors of these young men that the Eddas and the sagas exist,” he said to the rest of the company. “The stories and poems were first created in Norway and other parts of Scandinavia, but they were not written down. When Norwegians went in search of new land—”
“Rather like the settlers in the American west,” said the Master.
“Very much like that,” said Haraldson. “They took the sagas with them to their new home in Iceland. When they became literate, they wrote them down, which is how the sagas survived.”
“In short,” said the Master to the Icelanders, “your ancestors preserved Viking culture when it would otherwise have been lost.” He turned to his wife. “And everything is perfectly arranged, my dear. Thank you.” As the audience settled itself, he addressed the room. “The work we’re going to read tonight, the ‘Völuspá’, is one of the most important poems in the canon. Hakon, Oskar, Professor Haraldson and I will take it in turns to do the reading from the minstrels’ gallery. The acoustics are splendid and when I’ve turned the lights down to help you, imagine you’re listening to genuine Norse bards declaiming from the depths of time.”
Then he ushered the readers through a small door that led to the stairs. Moments later tiny reading lights came on up there and they heard his voice again, speaking from the shadows of the gallery above. As he had promised, the acoustics were perfect, and it sounded to Forrester, as it always did, as if the readers were right beside him.
“In the passage you’re about to hear,” said Winters, “Odin, chief of the gods, bids a certain wise-woman to rise from the grave. She then tells him of the creation of the world, the beginning of years, the origin of the dwarfs. She describes the final destruction of the gods i
n which fire and flood overwhelm heaven and earth, using a phrase ‘ragna rök’, meaning ‘the fate of the gods’, which has become synonymous with the German word ‘Götterdämmerung’.”
“A subject about which we Germans know all too much,” said Dorfmann wryly. Calthrop frowned, and the reading began.
“I saw there wading through rivers wild,” declaimed Haraldson, sounding like a Viking chief booming down a fjord.
Treacherous men and murderers too,
And workers of ill with the wives of men;
There Nithhogg sucked the blood of the slain,
And the wolf tore men; would you know yet more?
“The phrase ‘Would you know yet more?’ is uttered by the wise-woman,” said the Master. “She is asking Odin if he really wants to hear what is about to befall.”
The giantess old in Ironwood sat,
In the east, and bore the brood of Fenrir;
Among these one in monster’s guise
Was soon to steal the sun from the sky.
There was a rustle of pages as Haraldson handed the book on to the next reader.
There feeds he full on the flesh of the dead,
And the home of the gods he reddens with gore;
Dark grows the sun, and in summer soon
Come mighty storms: would you know yet more?
On a hill there sat, and smote on his harp,
Eggther the joyous, the giants’ warder;
Above him the cock in the bird-wood crowed,
Fair and red did Fjalar stand.
Again the reader changed, but by then the audience was scarcely noticing: through the magic of the incantatory words, combined with the darkness and the firelight, they found themselves transported back to a world where gods roamed the earth and dwarves delved in its depths.
Involuntarily, Forrester’s thoughts went back to what Lyall had said about the Nazi obsession with Norse mythology, and the role the sinister, Nordic-obsessed Thule Society had played in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. But he knew all this was a perversion of the ancient beliefs: the product of warped minds, with no connection to reality. Except when you listened to a Viking saga being recited in the darkness.
