Towards the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero makes his way to the appointed tryst at the Green Chapel, and can find no such place:
‘but a little way off on the level there was a kind of low,
A smooth barrow on a bank sloping down to the brook . . .
It had a hole at the end and one to either side,
And grass grew over it all in great clumps;
Inside it was hollow and only an old cave’.
The use of words derived from beorh and hlaew has disposed commentators to see this site as a tumulus – presumably some kind of chamber tomb with side passages. But barrow and low are simply synonyms for ‘hill’ – indeed the site is ‘that hyghe hil’ a few lines later. The Green Chapel may be pure imagination, but local historians have found a cave-pitted knoll called Thurshole or Fiend’s House, near Wetton, that fits the bill very well.
Here again, there’s that sense of uncertainty as to whether the words ‘barrow’ and ‘low’ can really be taken as evidence that the place in question is a burial mound. It’s coming up time and time again, and I know I need to capitalise on the way it piques my curiosity. Also I find myself excited by the names given to the ‘cave-pitted knoll’ (which I take to be a natural hill) – Thurshole or Fiend’s House. Well, given my primary aim of exploring the extent to which Germanic and Scandinavian sensibilities might be caught and anchored in such places, it’s really not surprising. Thurshole can be nothing other than the cave of Thor (or Thunor, in Anglo-Saxon) and naturally enough it would attract the name Fiend’s House by the early Christians who would be doing their utmost to badmouth the deities of the Old Religion.
I’m drawing to the end of Hollow Hills now – just one more blog entry will do it, I think – which means that the time of reckoning is also approaching. Attempting to deconstruct a piece of writing as closely focused as this one is has, I know, been really useful in helping to get my ideas together. But I’m not underestimating how difficult it might be to translate the specific reasons that I feel drawn to create a project called Howe, into a body of work that will be truly engaging. Given that the Arts Council have given me some money to develop this work, I can’t gloss over this aspect of the project. Nonetheless, maybe the most authentic approach to my work is just to do it, without any thought of a future audience? That’s probably how I worked during the Festial year, come to think of it. And I know that it was a really worthwhile thing to do, even though it hasn’t directly done much for my progression in the art world (whatever that means).
