After my deep dive into the Icelandic tales of Sigurd I went thru several of the classic tales such as The Green Knight and Beowulf. Thumbing thru the books at one estate sale the title Marmion took my eye, I picked it up and instantly decided to give it a try; the title alone seems to leap out. It is great, I love it. I subsequently bought a couple of copies including the one pictured printed in 1818; it’s in pretty good shape but should not be toyed with, the 1st one I read was in delicate shape and can’t stand much more use. The 1818 copy printed while Scott was still alive, is for collecting but a third version a 1911 copy published by the American Book Company is great because it footnotes and glossaries all of the odd terms; very helpful.
Scott’s prose are fantastic and it is so easy to imagine reading to friends and family around the fire back before the curse of television. I will admit that prose like this is hard to read. You have to really want it and at the same time be willing to move thru it slowly and deliberately. To get thru it sometimes you simply take the gist of it, that’s easy enough but making sure you are following the story line is harder. I’m afraid that I always use Wikipedia and other such summary to help in understanding anything so foreign as this.
The writing starts like this:
Day set on Norman’s castled steep,
And Tweed’s fair river, broad and deep,
And Cheviot’s mountains lone:
The battled towers, the donjon keep,
The loophole grates, where captives weep,
The flanking walls that round it sweep,
In yellow luster shown.
The warriors on the turrets high,
moving athwart the evening sky,
Seemed forms of giant height:
Their armor, as it caught the rays,
Flashed back again the western blaze,
In lines of dazzling light.
And Tweed’s fair river, broad and deep,
And Cheviot’s mountains lone:
The battled towers, the donjon keep,
The loophole grates, where captives weep,
The flanking walls that round it sweep,
In yellow luster shown.
The warriors on the turrets high,
moving athwart the evening sky,
Seemed forms of giant height:
Their armor, as it caught the rays,
Flashed back again the western blaze,
In lines of dazzling light.
The story is a fictional account of the actual battle of Flodden Field, (September 1513) Scott tells of the battle and intertwines stories of love, deceit, fortunes lost and regained. The outcome of this obscure but ultimately significant battle was another turning point in English history. Again as one might say happened in the American civil war we have an extremely arrogant leadership that enlists the whole of the aristocracy only to have it destroyed. Arrogance is a blinding force in human nature.
I was so taken with the story that I subsequently read a complete 2003 publication: Flodden: A Scottish Tragedy by Peter Reese describing the battle and the actual intrigue surrounding it. This is the period of Henry VIII.
King James (King of the Scotts) was implored by the Queen of France to distract Henry from his war with her. A chivalrous womanizer James assembled the aristocracy as best he could but was horribly demolished by his poor tactics and the latest warfare technology of the English (sound familiar?) The fathers and sons of all of the greatest Scotch families of the day were killed during this ill-fated campaign and so with it crumbled there society.
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