In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  MARY ANN LUND: In the sixteenth century, it was very attractive to picture yourself as melancholic and, indeed, [in] portraits at this time, courtiers are painted reclining by a riverside, under a tree, wearing black. Melancholy is definitely a pose that people found attractive. Burton’s sales were certainly helped by the fact that melancholy was so voguish.

  Burton appears to have written The Anatomy to help his own condition, saying, ‘I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy,’ Julie Sanders told us. He wrote and rewrote the book for the rest of his life. He also thought that the act of reading was a distraction, a curative, so that the reader, by exploring melancholy, would be attracted away from the actual experience of it. At various points, he says, ‘Well, if you have this type of melancholy, this bit of the book might not be so good for you,’ or, ‘If you’ve been getting a bit depressed by reading this, this section will be light relief.’

  MELVYN BRAGG: He’s quite playful as well. He said, if you’re of a jealous disposition, the best thing to do is to marry a prostitute because you’ll have no problems, you’ll know that she’s betraying you, so you can get on with it.

  JULIE SANDERS: I think he’s witty. I think there’re lots of literary games going on as well, pushing the possibilities of humour when dealing with a very serious subject.

  The first edition of The Anatomy ran to 900 pages and the final one was over twice as long, at 2,000 pages. It is divided into three main partitions: the first with causes and symptoms of melancholy; the second with cures; and the third looks at love melancholy and religious melancholy. Melvyn asked for an example of these melancholies.

  ERIN SULLIVAN: At one point, he’s suggesting the different ways in which women suffer from melancholy and how they might need to be married and to have a sexual partner and that will help with things. He does back off and say, ‘Oh, I don’t really know why I’m talking about this.’ You can read it as genuine but also as facetious.

  Moving on to nuns, Burton enters into a critique of Catholicism and how living the celibate life is problematic, which was a contemporary political and religious issue, and he handled this in a light and humorous way.

  Mary Ann Lund said this playfulness followed on from Erasmus and The Praise of Folly, a paradoxical book in which Folly herself speaks and says how ridiculous everything is. Burton calls himself Democritus and Democritus Junior, another reference to that work of Erasmus in which Folly alludes to Democritus as the laughing philosopher.

  MARY ANN LUND: The story goes that Hippocrates went to see Democritus because the people of his town of Abdera thought that Democritus had gone mad. Hippocrates says, ‘Well, why do people think you’re mad?’ And [Democritus] laughs at worldly anxieties and says ‘Why worry about these things?’ Hippocrates goes back to the people of Abdera and says, ‘Democritus isn’t mad at all, he’s the wisest man I know.’

  Democritus is also paired with Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, and those two attitudes to life were ones that Burton oscillated between, lamenting for worldly folly as well as laughing at it.

  In the section on love melancholy, Burton turned to authorities that were predominantly literary and poetic, and, for this, he had a large collection of Petrarchan love poetry in his library that he could draw on. These authorities used a set of literary tropes, literary metaphors and clichés that were very standard – ‘burning with love’ or ‘pining away’ – only for Burton to say that, in fact, some people do stop sleeping or lose their appetite, these are commonplace for a reason, there are real physical manifestations.

  Following on from Mary Ann Lund, Erin Sullivan argued that there was a tension between the extents to which some of these tropes were metaphorical or literal.

  ERIN SULLIVAN: If you do take the humoural system seriously, then a burning feeling around your heart could be conceived as the hot humours heating it up or, when you feel very despondent, when melancholy takes hold, you feel cold, you want a blanket around you.

  MARY ANN LUND: It’s also very much based on the individual. Burton says that scarce two of 2,000 concur in the same symptoms. In love melancholy, for instance, some people might have it from not having any sex, from their abstinence. For others, it can be from too much. There’s a story of a man who marries a young wife in a hot summer and tires himself out with ‘chamber work’ and becomes mad as a result.

  What can be the cause of a problem for some can be a cure for others, a matter of Burton having it both ways, as Melvyn put it.

  Turning to the long section on religious melancholy, Julie Sanders told us that Burton had little precedent for treating this kind of melancholy separately. Burton was consciously making it a category in its own right, dividing it into religious melancholy in excess, which was superstition, and, in this, he included Catholicism, Judaism and Islam, and melancholy in defect, which was atheism. The Church of England was placed in the middle of these extremes.

  JULIE SANDERS: At the end of the work, he writes about despair as a cause of melancholy. This is where Burton’s really at his most serious. The cure of despair is what ends this work, and he adds to it massively in the second edition and it becomes a very straightforward consolatory section, where he’s really comforting people who feel that they have been abandoned by God or have been listening to too many strict puritan ministers and reading too many depressing treatises and think that they are destined for hell. And the message is that one shouldn’t give in to despair.

  To Melvyn, Burton seemed particularly anxious about the powerful notion put forward, particularly by Calvinists, of predestination – that, even before you were born, you were either elected for salvation or not, and there was nothing you could do about it. This, Erin Sullivan said, was an official part of Church of England theology in Elizabeth’s reign and into James’s, but it was being called into question increasingly. Burton quotes some who were supportive of the idea, but again has it both ways.

  The melancholic landscapes in Keats’s poetry, such as ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, may have been influenced by Burton.

  ERIN SULLIVAN: He certainly is concerned about the negative effects that this way of thinking can have. People who really adhere to predestination said that it should be a comforting doctrine because, once you know that you’re saved, you really know it. But he says that actually, of course, there are people who are going to think they aren’t.

  Burton was responding to the time, Julie Sanders argued, as his anti-Calvinist feelings were starting to grow, and the 1630s were a time of deep religious conflict in England that would lead to civil war, mirrored across mainland Europe in the Thirty Year’s War. There was a fierce rise of extremist puritanism, and Burton was saying that this zeal was something that would affect your body and carry you into these states of torment, into religious melancholy.

  The work found a ready audience from its first publication, going through so many editions and, as a big folio text, it would have been expensive. Copies from the seventeenth century show lots of underlinings, a mark of how engaged the readers were with the text. Mary Ann Lund told how people in that century reportedly mined The Anatomy for quotations and exotic stories to furnish their own learning, and Milton seems to have had Burton’s work in mind when he wrote Il Penseroso. Erin Sullivan pointed to a rush of plays that came out in 1629, after the third edition, which is the one with a beautiful title page with various versions of melancholy.

  ERIN SULLIVAN: We get plays by Ben Jonson, The New Inn, we get Richard Brome’s The Northern Lass, we get John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy, all in 1629 at the Blackfriars Theatre, all quoting and using chunks of Burton. And, interestingly, those plays are all in his own personal library. So Burton purchases the very plays that are responding to him.

  The book continued to be read avidly during the civil war and afterwards. Royalists appeared to find the idea of Democritus attractive, withdrawing from the world and laughing at it.

  MARY ANN LUND: Particularly after the collapse of the monarchy, th
is sense that one could still observe the world from one remove was attractive. And then, well into the late seventeenth century and, indeed, to Queen Anne’s reign, people are still stealing from it. Laurence Sterne takes a large passage from The Anatomy of Melancholy and passes it off as his own in Tristram Shandy.

  The Anatomy was not published in the eighteenth century but there were still many copies in circulation for Sterne. Johnson said that, when Burton spoke from his own voice, he had a great spirit and a great power to him, and that is what got him up earlier and seems to have been curative for Johnson in some way. Charles Lamb took the book up in the Romantic period, and Keats based his poem Lamia on a story in Burton about an enchantress who convinces a man to marry her, and then it is exposed at the marriage feast by the philosopher Apollonius that she is, in fact, a snake.

  Julie Sanders suggested that the bittersweet compound of pleasure and pain in Keats’s poetry was coming directly from Burton, such as in the melancholic landscapes of poems like ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Byron apparently used Burton as a mine for quotations to impress women in social situations.

  ERIN SULLIVAN: In the Romantic period, the idea of the sublime is that beauty and awe-inspiring creation is at once positive and also dangerous, or [there’s] even a bit of horror about it. You get writers saying things like, ‘I can’t imagine something beautiful without an undercurrent of pain.’ The bittersweet aspect of [melancholy] is really appealing in its complexity.

  The Anatomy of Melancholy is still in print, long after the idea of humours was overtaken by medical science. Julie Sanders thought that there was a reconfiguring of Burton in new theories, post-Freud, through the World Wars, when ideas of depression and trauma and Burton became very relevant.

  JULIE SANDERS: In the past few days, Burton’s been cited in the press in an article about information overload and the internet. That’s a new version of over-much learning, I suppose. And the value of public libraries. And, I like to think, head on his hand, penned in his study, he would have been quite pleased at that.

  ICELANDIC SAGAS

  The late Middle Ages was a period when literature flourished across Europe as never before. Italy produced the masterpieces of Dante and Petrarch; English literature began in style with the works of Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer; and the medieval poets of Wales and France laid the foundations of great national literary traditions. But some of the richest and most original writing of the early Middle Ages was produced on a remote island in the North Atlantic, which even today has a population about the size of Leicester. Iceland was first settled in the ninth century by Vikings and the deeds of these first Icelanders and their families are recorded in the Icelandic sagas. Around forty of these sagas, written down between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, are known to exist. They are dramatic tales that mix the domestic, the historical and the supernatural as they chart the feuds and love affairs of early Icelandic life.

  Illumination from the Icelandic manuscript Flateyjarbók shows King Harald Fairhair cutting the fetters from the giant Dofri.

  With Melvyn to discuss the Icelandic sagas were: Carolyne Larrington, professor of medieval European literature at the University of Oxford and fellow and tutor in medieval English at St John’s College, Oxford; Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, reader in Scandinavian history in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge; and Emily Lethbridge, research lecturer in the Department of Name Studies at the Árni Magnússon Manuscripts Institute for Icelandic Studies, Reykjavík, Iceland.

  According to the Icelanders’ own origin myth and histories, Carolyne Larrington said, the Norwegians migrated to the island because King Harald Fairhair was centralising power in Norway and various members of the aristocracy took against this. Added to this was a mixture of Scandinavians in the British Isles who moved to Iceland, particularly women, bringing a Celtic injection to the population. Around the edges of the island, they found a landscape that was not unlike western Norway.

  CAROLYNE LARRINGTON: We’re told that there was also forest in Iceland when the Norwegians first arrived there, but, if there was, it seems to have been cut down very quickly. But there was certainly, particularly in the south and in the west, some very good land for farming and, of course, the climate was slightly better in those days.

  The migrants brought their own laws with them, but they did not have a king, and they instituted a system of thirty-six chieftaincies, with local assemblies for local legal matters and, once a year, everybody would meet at the Alþingi, the big general assembly. The settlers had not been there for long when Christianity arrived in 999 or 1000.

  CAROLYNE LARRINGTON: That, at least according to the Icelandic historians, resulted in a more or less overnight conversion to Christianity. Everybody at the Alþingi decided on a vote, more or less, that it would be better for the country to have a single religion, and that would be Christianity. It also got the king of Norway off their backs, to some extent, because he was very keen on converting them.

  With Christianity came writings, Latin literature and access to the European culture, which together made the writing of sagas possible, though some texts were being written before then. These sagas, Elizabeth Rowe explained, are now classified according to their subject matter, with groups made up of kings, bishops and saints, other groups with heroes of chivalry, such as King Arthur and Charlemagne, others with heroes of Germanic legend, such as Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, and from the early Viking age, such as Ragnarr Loðbrók, or ‘Shaggy Breeks’ as he is sometimes known in translation. There are sagas about the other North Atlantic settlements, such as the Orkney Islands, the Faroes, Greenland and North America. Of central importance are the sagas about Iceland itself.

  ELIZABETH ROWE: Critical are the ones that take place in the ninth, tenth, eleventh centuries about the Icelanders’ own ancestors. These are often called the family sagas because they’re multigenerational and the original epic, sweeping dramas of emotion and violence, such as the saga of Egil, son of Skalla-Grímr, supposed to have been written by one of the leading chieftains of Iceland.

  Some are satirical, poking fun at the chieftains, as power became more concentrated in the hands of half a dozen families rather than the original thirty-six or thirty-nine chieftains. Often there was a historical core of events, and there can be genealogies in the family sagas, making them a way for Icelanders to preserve their history and identity. Emily Lethbridge noted that most Icelanders today can trace their ancestry back to the first settlers, so genealogy has always been extremely important to Icelanders, combined with a very strong sense of local belonging and identity.

  There are claims to authenticity in some, and hints at sources. Court poetry was treated as a source since it was held by society at the time that, as the poetry was recited in front of people who took part in the events, they would know if the poems were true or not and would have objected if they were not true.

  ELIZABETH ROWE: [In] Icelandic histories that are not in the form of sagas, such as the Book of Icelanders, written by Ari Thorgilsson in the beginning of the twelfth century, he actually talks about his sources and he says, ‘I heard this from my foster father who remembered being baptised at the age of three,’ something like that. Or, in the king sagas, the author of Heimskringla, Snorri Sturluson, talks about his sources as the report of ‘men who we consider wise and truthful and they believe these things to be true’.

  There are about 400 or so manuscripts of sagas from the medieval period, Emily Lethbridge said, of which about sixty are sagas of Icelanders or family sagas and a lot of these are fragmentary. The oldest fragment, a single leaf, dates from 1250. The texts would have been produced by scribes or clerics on parchment in religious houses, though, for the most part, it is hard to say who wrote them, or precisely where or when. The golden age of manuscript production was in the fourteenth century.

  EMILY LETHBRIDGE: From then, a manuscript called Möðruvallabók is one of the most famous manuscripts, a large heavy v
olume, and it contains eleven sagas of Icelanders. Seven of these sagas are organised geographically, most of these sagas are very local in character and they focus on a specific local area. And the sagas in this Möðruvallabók manuscript chart around the country east to west.

  Generally, lawsuits were critical to sagas and, Carolyne Larrington suggested, the earliest oral forms may have arisen as accounts of particular legal cases. Typically, there would be a feud between two groups of people, and, often, these would be minor figures, but then it would escalate to a power battle between two families. There would be a crisis, somebody very important would be killed and the case would come to the Alþingi where there was a very complex law system, but no executive power to put legal findings into force.

  CAROLYNE LARRINGTON: You have all sorts of extraordinary bits of domestic detail in the middle of them. Like one feud, which kicks off at some level, really, because one woman is a bad housekeeper and she sends her slave to steal cheese from somebody else’s pantry. And, when her husband finds out, he slaps her and, a very long way down the line, he pays for that with his life.

  There were traces of other literature in them, with storytellers learning from Latin texts, and there could have been awareness of the Arthurian romances that had travelled from Norway to Iceland of which many are preserved in Icelandic manuscripts. The narrators of the sagas do not have a particularly distinctive voice – they rarely tell what people are thinking and readers have to judge that by their actions and speech. Sometimes the narrator will go further by saying whether others thought that an action was good or bad, but the author does not offer judgements. There can be very dense poetry, perhaps uttered in the middle of a battle, which can give some sense of the violence or the internal turmoil or the joy of battle or the sorrow of the aftermath, but again the author does not express this in his own voice. Generally, the sagas do not talk of emotions or the interior life, but, where there are some with treatments of love, those treatments may have come from the romances.