by Melvyn Bragg
CAROLYNE LARRINGTON: [The] Laxdæla saga is very interested in love, both love of two foster brothers for one another and the kind of complicated love between one particular woman and the men that she marries. The word ‘love’ begins to be mentioned quite a lot. So there’s a sense in Laxdæla saga that something has changed in saga-writing at that point.
The Bible influenced the sagas, too. Salvation was important to Icelanders, as it was to other medieval Christians. In Scandinavia, which had a long pagan history, the arrival of Christianity was often seen as a historical dividing line between something akin to an Old Testament period and then a Christian era. Sometimes Icelandic authors would portray their ancestors as virtuous pagans, as they did not like the idea of them burning in hell before they had had the chance to become good Christians. Besides those influences, Elizabeth Rowe continued, there were specific allusions to events in the Bible as well. There is a smaller feud saga of a man called Hrafnkel, which begins with a scene reminiscent of Genesis, where God says to Adam and Eve, ‘Of this tree thou shalt not eat.’ In this saga, a pagan Icelandic chieftain had devoted his livestock, particularly his favourite stallion, to the fertility god, Freyr, and made a vow that nobody should ride this stallion, punishing anyone who broke that vow with death.
This fourteenth-century copy of the Flateyjarbók contains a collection of manuscripts of the Icelandic sagas.
ELIZABETH ROWE: He hires a shepherd to guard his sheep and he says: ‘You can ride any of my horses except this one. If you ride this one horse, you will die.’ And so, of course, events transpired that the sheep stray off, the shepherd has to find a horse, the only horse that will stand still for him is this one stallion, he rides it and, of course, the chieftain kills him.
For a further flavour of a saga, Carolyne Larrington returned to the central story of Laxdæla, which is about betrayal. In this saga, Kjartan is about to go on a rite-of-passage trip to Norway and, before that, has become involved with a very spirited young woman called Guðrún. She wants to go to Norway with Kjartan and his foster brother Bolli, but she is left behind as an unmarried woman was not allowed to travel alone in this way. In Norway, Kjartan befriends the king and converts to Christianity, and Bolli, feeling left out, returns to Iceland. He takes no greeting from Kjartan to Guðrún and she, rather hurt, agrees to marry Bolli, something that breaks Kjartan’s heart on his return as both the woman he loves and the foster brother he loves have betrayed him.
CAROLYNE LARRINGTON: It’s only a matter of time before either Kjartan kills Bolli or Bolli kills Kjartan. And, in the end, it’s Bolli who kills Kjartan, who more or less offers himself to Bolli and says, ‘If anyone kills me, I’d rather it was you.’ But, of course, once Kjartan is dead, things don’t rest there, because Kjartan’s brothers will then kill Bolli. And, when Bolli is killed, Guðrún is pregnant. And, as one of the slayers wipes her husband’s blood on her apron, she laughs, and the killers ask each other why this is the case, and the one who wiped the blood on the apron says, ‘I think my killer is under that apron, still in the womb.’
Sure enough, eighteen years or so later, Bolli Bollason, the baby that was in the womb, kills the killer and a couple of the others.
CAROLYNE LARRINGTON: Guðrún, who’s really at the heart of the saga, marries four times and we hear about four different husbands, some of whom she loved and some of whom she didn’t particularly. And, at the end, Bolli, her son, asks her whom she loved most and she says, very famously, ‘The one I loved most was the one to whom I was worst.’ And that’s all she said, and the assumption, of course, is it’s not any of her husbands but it was Kjartan.
Almost all the places named in the sagas can be visited today. At the spot where Kjartan was said to have been slain, Emily Lethbridge told us, there is a large stone not far from the road, which is mentioned in the saga as the one against which Kjartan set his back as he defended himself from Bolli.
This saga, Elizabeth Rowe added, was a good example of the religious prefiguration outlined earlier. Kjartan, when in Norway, found himself in a swimming contest with a man who turned out to be quite strong and succeeded in ducking him in the water several times. Back on the shore, the man came over and offered Kjartan a cloak as a gift for being such a strong swimmer, and he turned out to be King Olaf Tryggvason, the first missionary king of Norway.
ELIZABETH ROWE: That contest in the water, and the ducking under, is interpreted as a kind of foreshadowing of the baptism that Kjartan will soon choose, and the gift of the cloak prefigures the baptismal robes that he will receive.
There is also a Celtic influence in the Laxdæla saga, as Kjartan’s grandmother was an Irish slave called Melkorka who never spoke to anybody but her son and taught him Irish. It turned out, Carolyne Larrington added, that she was the daughter of the Irish king, which gave Kjartan an even higher opinion of himself.
Among the most popular of the family sagas were those of the outlaws, telling their stories, the events leading up to their outlawry, and how they survived on the run in Iceland. One of the best known featured Grettir, who lived in the very inhospitable central wastes. Grettir dies in a bloody final battle on a bastion fortress island off the north of Iceland, after a combination of witchcraft, curses, sorcery and the carelessness of a slave. Once the outlaws are killed, Emily Lethbridge told us, these deaths are followed up by vengeance chapters in which their family members carry out further killings in order to avenge their deaths.
Over time, the sagas played a significant part in weaving the society of Iceland together, with a very important role as entertainment. Up until the twentieth century, they were read aloud in the communal gatherings of winter evenings.
EMILY LETHBRIDGE: They were central to the construction of Icelandic identity, one of the key motivations that presumably drove people to write these stories down in the first place. And, right up until the nineteenth century, for example, the sagas – and the Njáls saga in particular – these sagas were used as political propaganda, almost part of the fight for Icelandic independence from Denmark.
Wherever you go in Iceland, we heard, people will come up and tell you about the sagas that took place in the spot where you are standing and retell you the stories that are still living in the landscape.
One of the first things the Icelanders did when they became an independent republic in 1944 was to call for the return of their sagas from Copenhagen, where they were taken by their Danish rulers. This call was answered in 1971.
CAROLYNE LARRINGTON: Finally, two absolutely vital manuscript collections, the Poetic Edda, which contains mythological and heroic poetry, and Flateyjarbók, which is a big collection of various texts, including a lot of sagas, came back to Iceland on an Icelandic destroyer, and were welcomed by vast crowds who came down to the docks to see them.
THE FIGHTING TEMERAIRE
The Fighting Temeraire from 1839 is one of Turner’s greatest works, the one he called his darling. It shows a famous ship of the age, a hero of the Battle of Trafalgar, on its final journey, being towed up the Thames to the breaker’s yard. Most of the canvas is sky, an extraordinary, largely orange sunset reflected in still water. Near the bottom, left of centre, is a small black fiery tugboat from the new age of steam, paddles churning. The Temeraire, full masted from the age of sail, ethereal and white, glides behind to its fate. When Turner first displayed this masterpiece, the Victorian public was deep in celebrations of the Temeraire era, with work on Nelson’s Column underway in the new Trafalgar Square, and Thackeray described the painting as a ‘national ode’.
With Melvyn to discuss The Fighting Temeraire were: Susan Foister, curator of early Netherlandish, German and British painting at the National Gallery; David Blayney Brown, senior creator of nineteenth-century British art and Manton curator at Tate Britain; and James Davey, lecturer in naval and maritime history at the University of Exeter.
In 1839, Susan Foister told us, Turner was in his early sixties and at the height of his powers. He had achieved succe
ss early on, and was appointed a full member of the Royal Academy in 1802 when he was twenty-six. He was commercially successful, had his own gallery and continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy, and this is where he displayed Temeraire with three other paintings in 1839.
SUSAN FOISTER: He had, by that stage, complete command of the powers of painting and he had transformed the genres of paintings. Landscape painting, seascapes, really became something else through Turner, something much more poetic and historic and meaningful. And he was able to use light and colour, and the ways in which he painted, to really transform people’s experience of looking at those kinds of scenes.
Turner had a sense of the great sweep of history and his place in it, and he had already made his will in which he would leave his paintings to the nation and, to that bequest, he would add The Fighting Temeraire.
Melvyn mentioned that Turner’s father was a barber in Covent Garden, that his mother had been forced to live at Bedlam Hospital for a while, and that the young Turner had been farmed out to relatives for his upbringing. He was, we heard, particularly successful as a watercolour artist, painting subjects like Eton or Oxford or great abbeys, which could be sold as engravings with great commercial success. He was never far from the Thames, moving to Isleworth and then Twickenham, and would sometimes go out in his boat.
SUSAN FOISTER: The Thames continued to play a really important part in his career and in his paintings, and he was very responsive to the dramas of the Thames. For example, when the Houses of Parliament caught fire, that was an opportunity for a painting of the Thames with this fire blazing around it and reflected in it. Rain, Steam and Speed, which he painted after the Temeraire, showed the railway bridge over the River Thames at Maidenhead.
The Temeraire was still one of the most famous naval ships in Britain by the time Turner was inspired to paint it. It had been launched in 1798, James Davey said, and really was a wonderful example of British shipbuilding expertise. It was very large – 180ft long, made of oak and armed with ninety-eight guns, a really fearsome armament.
JAMES DAVEY: It was a large ship, it was a fearsome ship and it took a very active role in the French Revolutionary Wars and then the Napoleonic Wars that followed. On a range of duties around Europe, it was a key part of the Channel fleet that blockaded the French navy in port; it was involved in operations around the Iberian Peninsula, particularly the defence of Cádiz in 1810 and various other operations in the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea. But, of course, the Temeraire is most famously associated with the Battle of Trafalgar.
Trafalgar was the famous battle in 1805 when a British fleet, commanded by Horatio Nelson, defeated a much larger fleet of French and Spanish ships. Nelson led by example so, as they approached the enemy, he made sure that his ship, the Victory, was going to be right at the front of one of the lines approaching the enemy, facing a terrible bombardment. The Temeraire was right behind. The Victory was locked in a ferocious combat with the French ship the Redoutable and it looked for a few moments as though the Victory was going to be boarded and taken.
JAMES DAVEY: Just in the nick of time, the Temeraire comes alongside the French ship, launches a number of broadsides into it and then boards and takes it. It then repeats the trick. Later in the battle, another French vessel, the Fougueux, attacks the Temeraire, but again the Temeraire fires a number of broadsides into it, comes alongside, boards and captures the vessel. At the end of the Battle of Trafalgar, Britain has won a great victory, but the Temeraire has played a crucial part, capturing two enemy ships but also coming to the rescue of the fleet’s flagship.
When Cuthbert Collingwood, the second in command, sent his dispatches back to the admiralty, he singled out only one ship for mention and that was the Temeraire. From that point, the ship had a lasting reputation for audaciousness in battle. After it retired from fighting in 1812, it became a prison hulk, then a receiving ship for new recruits, a store ship and, finally, a guard ship at the entrance of the Medway River.
The time came in the autumn of 1838 for the Temeraire to be towed up the river to be broken up in Rotherhithe and, according to David Blayney Brown, it is unlikely that Turner was there to see it or that the journey was publicised at all. It may have been embarrassing to announce the death throes of these once-great ships, or it may have been commonplace as so many were coming to the end of their useful lives at the same time. Once moored, though, she became a great tourist attraction and it could have been then that Turner thought this would be an interesting subject for a painting.
DAVID BLAYNEY BROWN: He began to realise that he could make that subject a kind of elegy for the Nelson era and for the age of sail and for the heroic age of fighting ships. And he could also introduce the idea of, on the one hand, the ending of an era and then perhaps the movement into a new one, because, after all, the Temeraire was towed upriver by steam tugs, so you have the age of sail on the one hand and the new age of steam on the other.
In this scene, there was the transition from the old to the new, the chance to celebrate a great past and create an image of mortality, because the ship in the picture has an almost human quality, as if that one ship represented the navy and all the sailors, crew and marines who had fought in such ships.
DAVID BLAYNEY BROWN: Turner, by the 1830s, had taken upon himself the mantle of a national painter who aspired to paint national themes that could speak to the country as a whole. And I think that’s what he wanted to do in The Fighting Temeraire. He called the picture The Fighting Temeraire, which evokes her heroic battle past, her role at Trafalgar and afterwards, and he made her representative of that great age of fighting ships – the wooden walls, the hearts of oak – that in many ways represented Britain.
For listeners, Susan Foister picked out some of the most striking aspects of the painting. Turner created a fantastic contrast between the great hulk, the bulky, fighting Temeraire, which was represented as a ghost, painted in a very pale colour, with some masts and the front broken down.
SUSAN FOISTER: In contrast with that, and overlapping it, is this black tugboat, and the tugboat is pulling it towards you, the viewer. And, of course, because it’s a tug, it’s a steam ship, and out of the funnel is coming this burst of fiery smoke. You don’t quite know whether this is partly flame coming from its boiler or whether the smoke is partly being coloured by this terrific sunset on the other side of the painting. And that’s what, I think, really draws you in.
Turner, she said, was wonderful at creating the sense of immense skies that disappear over your head and draw your eye to the horizon. There is a very faint sense of the shoreline on either side, just a few buildings, and the sunset is painted in such an immensely powerful and colourful way as to draw your eye down to the horizon and down to the distance. Then, in contrast to the sun on the right-hand side, at the top left of the painting is a white crescent moon.
SUSAN FOISTER: You get these terrific reflections, the sunset reflected in the water and this golden light. You get the reflections from the boats, although the steamer is churning up the water a little bit. There are these beautiful reflections, it looks very still and calm, and then the moon is also casting this rather beautiful silvery reflection on the water.
That is Turner’s scene, and it might be tempting to treat it as a faithful representation of what happened. The reality would have been very different. The Thames would have been very busy, with tens if not hundreds of ships passing up and down that stretch each day.
JAMES DAVEY: [There were] ships of all sizes, from great East Indiamen off to the Far East down to small colliermen bringing coal from the north-east into the capital, or even watermen going about their daily business, back and forth across the river, taking passengers back and forth. All of that would have been going on and you don’t really get much of a sense of that in Turner’s painting, just the sheer density of traffic that would have been on the river.
Besides, the painting shows the Temeraire fully masted and with some furled sails, all of which w
ould have been taken off before it was towed upriver. By the time Turner saw it, he would have been one of many tourists at Beatson’s Yard in Rotherhithe buying prints of the ship or collecting mementos. The breakers had paid £5,000 for the Temeraire, and it was like an oak mine. The story goes that a lot of houses on both banks of the Thames were built using timber from the Temeraire, and just the breaking-up of this ship would have taken years.
JAMES DAVEY: There’s all sorts of things around the country that are made from the wood of the Temeraire. I’m afraid there are more things made from the wood of the Temeraire than could possibly have originally constructed a 98-gun ship of the line.
David Blayney Brown told us it took the Temeraire two days, working with the tides and moving very, very slowly, to negotiate its way, towed by two tugs rather than one, while Turner makes the passage seem smooth, serene, calm and easy. The setting sun conveys the idea of time, of an ending, of the passing of a day and, through the passing of the day, perhaps the passing of an era.
DAVID BLAYNEY BROWN: And also, of course, the red tint of the sunset perhaps also suggests blood. Turner later on painted an extremely bloodshot sky over a painting of Napoleon in exile on St Helena. In this painting, perhaps the ruddy glow is there as a beautiful thing but, also, perhaps it evokes the appalling bloodshed that would have taken place on board the Temeraire when she was actually in battle. Her decks would have been awash with blood, which would have to be washed off, hosed down and removed. She would have been an absolute bloodbath.
Turner loved his sunsets, and David Blayney Brown has Turner’s sketchbooks at the Tate, entirely devoted to small watercolour studies, following the progress of sunsets or sky effects, so Turner would have had a reserve of imagery in his studio to draw upon to create a sky like this.
