by Tim Severin
'It's not only the sons of the well-to-do who join us,' Senesach went on. 'In fact we have a tradition of encouraging young men of talent. With their skills they often contribute more to our community than the material gifts which the richer recruits bring.'
'I'm very grateful for your thoughtfulness and to Saer Credine for his kind words,' I replied, seeking to gain a moment's thinking space. 'I have never even imagined such a life. I suppose my first worry is that I am not worthy to devote my life to the service of Christ.'
'Few newcomers to our community are completely certain of their calling when they first arrive, and if they are, that is something of which I personally would be rather wary,' he answered gently. 'Anyhow, humility is a good place to start from. Besides, no one would expect you to become a fully observant monk for years. You would begin as a trainee and under my instruction learn the ways of our brotherhood, as scores have done before you.'
It was a suggestion which no slave could possibly have turned down. I had no one to pay a ransom for me, I was far from the places where I had grown up, and until a moment ago I had no prospects. Suddenly I was being offered an identity, a home and a defined future.
'I've already talked to the abb about your case,' Senesach continued, 'and although he was not very enthusiastic to begin with, he agreed that you should have a chance to prove your worth. He did say, however, that you might find that being a servant of God was more demanding than being slave to a stonecutter.'
It occurred to me that perhaps Odinn had at last observed my plight and arranged this sudden opportunity. 'Of course I shall be happy to join the monastery in whatever capacity you think fit,' I said.
'Excellent. According to Saer Credine your name was Thorgils or Thorgeis, something like that. Much too heathen sounding. You had better have a new name, a Christian one. Any suggestions?'
I thought for a moment before replying, and then — silently acknowledging Odinn the Deceiver — I said, 'I would like to be called Thangbrand, if that is possible. It is the name of the first missionary to bring the White Christ's teachings to Iceland, which is where my people came from.'
'Well, no one else here has got a name like that. So Thangbrand it will be from now on, and we'll try to make it appropriate. Maybe you will be able to go back one day to Iceland to preach there.'
'Yes, sir,' I mumbled.
'Yes, Brother. Not sir. And we don't talk of the White Christ here, it is simply Christ or Jesus Christ, or Our Lord and Saviour,' he answered, with such sincerity that I felt a little ashamed. I hoped he would never discover that Thangbrand had failed completely in his battle against the Old Ways.
As the abb had warned, the physical life of a young novitiate at St Ciaran's monastery was little different from my days working for Saer Credine. I found that my previous chores as a slave were mirrored in my duties as a trainee monk. Instead of sweeping up the stonemason's chippings, I swept out the senior monks' cells and emptied their slops. In place of hammer and chisel, I grasped a hoe and spent hours stooped and hacking away at the rocky soil in the fields which my brethren and I prepared for planting. Even my clothing was much the same: previously I had worn a loose tunic of poor stuff held in at the waist with a bit of string. Now I had a slightly better tunic of unbleached linen with a waist cord, and a grey woollen cloak with a hood to go over it. Only my feet felt different. Previously barefoot, now I wore sandals. The major change was in discipline and for the worse. As a slave I was expected to rise at dawn and work all day, with a break for a midday meal if I was lucky, then curl up for a good night's rest so that I would be fit and strong for the next day's labour. A monk, I found, got far less rest. He had to rise before dawn to say his prayers, work in the fields or at his desk, repeat his prayers at regular intervals, and often went to bed far more exhausted than a slave. Even his diet was little consolation. A slave might be inadequately fed, but the monk ate coarse food that was little better. Worse than that, he often had to fast and go hungry. Wednesdays and Fridays were both fast days at St Ciaran's, and the younger ones among us ate double portions of food on Thursday, if we could.
But none of this mattered. Senesach's benevolence threw open the door of learning, and I walked in and revelled in the experience. As a slave I had been credited with the mind of a slave and offered only the knowledge that was relevant to my work - how best to scour a cooking pot with sand, stack a pile of turf, straighten a warped plough handle by soaking it in hot water. Now as a monk in preparation I was offered schooling in an extraordinary range of skills. It began, of course, with the requirement to learn to read and write the Roman script. Senesach produced a practice book, two wax tablets held in a small wooden folder, and he drew for me the letters, scratching them with a metal stylus. I think that even Senesach was astonished that it took me less than three days to learn the entire alphabet, and that I was writing coherent and reasonably well-spelt sentences within the same week. Perhaps my mind was like a muscle already exercised and well developed when I learned the rune writing and the rune lore — of which I said nothing — and had gone slack from disuse. Now all it needed was sharp stimulus and practice. My fellow students, as well as my teachers, soon came to consider me something of a prodigy when it came to the written or the spoken word. Maybe my combination of Norse and Irish ancestry, both peoples who relish the rhythms of language, also accounted for my fluency. In less than six months I was reading and writing Church Latin and was halfway to a working knowledge of French, which I was learning from a brother who had lived in Gaul for several years. Both the German tongue and the language of the English posed little difficulty, for they were close enough in pronunciation and vocabulary to my own donsk tong for me to understand what was said. By my second year I was also reading Greek.
My talent with words kept me on the right side of Abb Aidan. I had the feeling that he was waiting for me to falter and disgrace myself, but he could only acknowledge that I was among the star pupils of the community when it came to that prime requirement of memory - the learning of the psalter. There were some one hundred and fifty psalms and they were our chief form of prayer, chanted at holy service. Normally it took years for a monk to have the entire psalter word-perfect, and most of my contemporaries knew only the most popular psalms, those that we repeated again and again. But for some reason I found that I could remember almost every word and line more or less at the first hearing, so I found myself singing out the verses, line by line, while most of my colleagues were mumbling or merely joining in the refrain. My memory for the psalms was uncanny, though, as someone remarked, it was closer to the devil's work because, although I could remember the words, my singing of them was discordant and grating and offended the ears.
My new-found mastery of the Roman script meant that I was able to soak up all manner of information from the written page, though at first it was difficult to gain access to the monastic library because Brother Ailbe, the librarian, believed that books were more valuable than the people who read them, and he discouraged readers. In a way he was justified, as I came to appreciate when I was assigned to labour in the scriptorium. The manuscripts in his care were the glory of St Ciaran's and exceedingly valuable, even in the physical sense. The skins of more than a hundred calves were required to make sufficient vellum for a single large volume, and in a land where wealth is counted in cattle this is a prodigious investment. Eventually Brother Ailbe did come to trust me enough to let me browse the shelves where the books were stored and I found most of the volumes were Holy Scripture, mainly copies of the Gospels with their canon tables, breves causae and arguments and paschal texts. But there were also writings from classical authors such as Virgil, Horace and Ovid, and works of Christian poetry by writers such as Prudentius and Ausonius. My favourite was a book of geography written by a Spanish monk named Isidore, and I spent hours dreaming of the exotic lands he described, little knowing that one day I would have the chance to see many of them for myself. I had a magpie's facility to select and carry away bright
scraps of unrelated information in my head, and my erratic robbery from these solemn texts quickly irritated my teachers, the older and more learned monks who were assigned to give the novices their classes in such subjects as history, law and mathematics.
As novices, we were expected not just to acquire knowledge, but also to preserve and transmit its most precious elements, namely the Holy Scripture. That meant copying. We were issued once again with the wax tablets from which we had learned the alphabet, and shown how to form our letter with the help of a metal stylus and ruler. Over and over again, we practised, until we were deemed fit to mark the surface of reused vellum, over-writing the faint and faded lines left by earlier scribes until we had the gist of it. At that stage we were mixing our own ink from lamp black or chimney soot. Only when we could write a perfect diminuendo, starting with a large initial letter and then progressively writing smaller and smaller along the line, until the eye could scarcely distinguish the individual letters, were the most deft of us permitted to work on fresh vellum. It was then I appreciated why the monastery needed a never-ending supply of younger monks for the famed scriptorium just as much as it needed flocks of calves and lambs to produce the vellum skins. Young animals provided unblemished skin, and young monks provided sharper eyes. Our finest copyists were men of early to middle age, deft, clear-eyed and with remarkable artistic imaginations.
Strangely, the materials designed to please the eye remain in my memory according to their smells. The raw calfskins had been steeped in a fetid concoction of animal dung and water to loosen the hairs so they could be scraped off easily, and they gave off a pulpy, fleshy odour while stabilising in a wash of lime. Oak galls had a bitter stink when crushed to provide our best red ink, and as for greens and blues I still smell the sea whenever I see those colours. They were made by squeezing out the juice from certain shellfish found on the rocks. We then left the liquid to fester in the sun, which made the extract alter from green, to blue, to purple, all the while giving off the pungent smell of rotting bladderwrack. It complemented the fishy odour of the fish oil we employed to bind the ink.
The transformation of these reeking originals to such beauty on the page was a miracle in itself. I was never an outstanding copyist or illustrator, but I acquired enough of the techniques to appreciate the skill involved. Observing one of our finest illuminators decorate the initial letter of a Gospel would make me hold my breath in sympathy in case he made a slip. He required a steady hand as well as the finest brush - the hair from the inside of a squirrel's ear was favoured for the most delicate work — and a rare combination of imagination and geometric skill to interweave the lacing patterns that twined and curved like tendrils of some unearthly plant. Curiously, I was reminded of the patterns that I had seen — it seemed so long ago — carved on the curling stem post of King Sigtryggr's royal ship when he sailed from Orkney. How or why the patterns, Christian initial and Viking prow, were so similar I did not know. What was even stranger was that so many of the bookish trellis patterns ended in a snarling figurehead. That I could understand on the high bow of a ship of war, designed to frighten the enemy, but how the motif was found in a book of Holy Scripture was beyond my understanding. Still, it was not a topic on which I dwelt. The extent of my contribution in penmanship was to write the occasional line in black, using the tiny script which Abb Aidan favoured because it meant more words could be squeezed on each expensive square inch of vellum, and I was delegated to fill in the red dots and lozenges which were liberally scattered across the page as decoration. This kept me occupied for hours as they could number in the hundreds on a single page.
It would be wrong if I gave the impression that my life as a novice monk was spent in the fields, the schoolroom or the scriptorium. Religious instruction was severe and unfortunately was the responsibility of Brother Eoghan, who was at the opposite remove from the kindly Brother Senesach. Brother Eoghan's appearance was deceptive. He looked benign. Rotund and jovial-seeming, he had dark hair and very dark eyes that seemed to gleam with a humorous twinkle. He even had a booming, cheerful-sounding voice. But any of his pupils who presumed upon his good nature were quickly disillusioned. Brother Eoghan had a vicious temper and a grinding sense of self-righteousness. He taught not through reason, but strictly by rote. We were required to memorise page after page of the Gospels and the writings of the Church Fathers, and he tested us on our acquisition of the texts. His favoured technique was to pick out an individual in his class, demand a recitation, and when the victim stammered or erred, to suddenly rum to another student and shout at him to continue. Terrified, the second performer was sure to make a mistake, and then Brother Eoghan would swoop. Seizing the two novices, each by his hair, our tutor would complete the quotation himself, grinding out the words through gritted teeth, his face set grimly, and punctuating each phrase by banging together the two heads with a steady thump.
Every novice, and there were about thirty of us, reacted in his own way to the unyielding world in which we found ourselves. Most were meekly acquiescent and followed the rules and routines laid down. Only a handful were genuinely enthusiastic for the monkish life. One young man — his name was Enda and he was a little simple - sought to model himself on the Desert Fathers. Without informing anyone, he climbed to the top of the round tower. This was St Ciaran's most spectacular edifice, a slim spike of stone which had been a lookout in the days of the Viking raids, but now mostly used as a bell tower. Enda clambered to the very top, where, naturally, he was out of sight from the ground, and sat there for four days and four nights while the rest of us searched for him uselessly. It was only when we heard his weak calls for a supply of bread and water and saw the end of a rope he had lowered down - he had misjudged the height and his rope was dangling far too short - that we knew where he was. Brother Senesach organised a rescue party, and we clambered up and retrieved Enda, who by then was too feeble to move. He was taken to the infirmary and left there to recover, but the experience seemed to have left him even weaker in the head. I never knew what finally became of him, but in all likelihood he became a monk.
EIGHTEEN
I MADE ONLY one real friend among my fellow novices in the two years I spent at St Ciaran's. Colman had been sent there by his father, a prosperous farmer. Apparently the farmer had prayed to St Ciaran for relief when a severe cattle murrain had affected his herd. As a remedy he had smeared his sick animals with a paste made from earth scraped from the floor of the saint's oratory. When the cattle all recovered, the farmer was so grateful that he enrolled the lad — the least promising of his six sons — with the monks as a thank offering for the saint's beneficial intervention. Solid and reliable, Colman stood by me when the other novices, jealous that I outshone them in the classroom, ganged up to bully me about my own alien origins. I repaid Coleman's loyalty by helping him with his studies — he was something of a plodder when it came to book learning — and the two of us made an effective team when it came to breaking the bounds of monastic discipline.
Our dormitory huts were situated on the northern side of the monastery grounds, and at night the bolder ones among us would sometimes scramble over the monastery bank to see what the outside world was like. Slinking among the houses that had grown up around St Ciaran's, we watched from the shadows how ordinary people lived, eavesdropped on quarrels and conversations heard through the thin walls of their dwellings, listened to the cries of babies, the drinking songs and the snores. We were discreet because there were townsfolk who would report our presence to the abb if they saw us. When that happened the punishment was harsh. Spending three or four hours flat on your face on the earth floor reciting penances was the least of it. Worse was to be made to stand with your arms outstretched as a living cross until the joints creaked with pain, supervised by one of the more callous senior brothers, while reciting, over and over again, 'I beseech pardon of God,' 'I believe in the Trinity,' 'May I receive mercy.' Little mercy was available. One of the novices, reported for the second time for a nocturn
al excursion, received two hundred lashes with a scourge.
A short walk from the monastery was a small stone-built chapel, sheltering in a wood. No one knew who had built it there or why. The monks at St Ciaran's denied any knowledge of its origins. The place was nothing to do with them, and they never went there. The little chapel was abandoned and falling into disrepair and housed, as we discovered, a hidden attraction. Which novice first found the lewd sculpture, I do not know. It must have been someone with remarkably sharp eyesight, for the carved stone was tucked away among the stones forming the entry to the chapel, and under normal circumstances it would have been invisible. Whoever found the carving mentioned it to his friends and they in turn passed on the knowledge to other students, so that it became a sort of talisman. We called the stone the Sex Hag, and most of us, at some stage, crept down to the chapel to gaze at it. The carving was as grotesque as any of the strange and leering beasts which appeared in our illuminations. It showed a older and naked woman, with three pendulous breasts sagging from a rugged rib-cage. She was seated with her legs apart and knees open, facing the observer. With her hands she was pulling apart the lips of her private entry and on her face was a seraphic smile. The effect was both erotic and demonic.
Of course, there was a good deal of salacious talk inspired by the Sex Hag's revelations, but for the most part it was ignorant speculation as we had few occasions to meet any women. Indeed the frightening posture of the Sex Hag acted as a deterrent. Several of the novices were so disturbed and repelled by the graphic quality of the carving that I doubt they ever touched a woman thereafter.
The same cannot be said for me. I was intensely curious about the opposite sex and spent a good deal of time trying to devise a way of striking up an acquaintance with a female of my own age. This was well-nigh impossible. Our community was all male, and our only regular women visitors were those who came from the nearby settlement to visit the infirmary or to offer prayers at the various oratories. Unfortunately they seldom included anyone who was youthful and nubile. Sometimes a young and unmarried woman was glimpsed among the pilgrims who came to St Ciaran's shrine, and we younger monks would gaze in fascination, telling ourselves there was nothing wrong in our curiosity because the temptation was only momentary as the pilgrims would linger just a few hours, then vanish out of our lives for ever.
