A Skull in a Box

It’s been a hard winter. It’s been a long winter. The ground is hard and unyielding. Food is hard to find and the days do not draw out. It should be past the time of needing to sleep huddled with others for warmth. It is cold and it is wet and everyone is weary. Hungry strangers are straying close, looking for food. The world is starved and angry when it should be warming.

Clouds have kept the day dark and Botwulf approaches the apple grove with care. He has been chosen to see the wild woman and ask what might be done. It is hard to see through the gloom. Somehow, the woman gets behind him, and the first he knows is when she says his name. He has been careless. Such blunders can kill a man.

The woman tells him to sit by the fire. He wonders that he did not see its light before. She offers an apple, and it tastes good - even though such things belong to the warm months, not days like these. They sit waiting, until she asks why he is here.

“The hungry months are going too long,” says Botwulf. “Something is wrong.”

They sit still, watching the flames. The fire does not seem to be devouring the wood.

“You need to head east and bring the summer back.”

“How do I do that?”

“Head east. You will know when you get there.”

He stares at the fire, asks “Why me? Surely people who live in the east are closer.”

“Why not you? Someone has to do it, and if other people were to do it, well - it might have been done by now. You must do it.”

Stillness lingers. Botwulf sits with his fear. He is scared of a long winter journey, passing through other people’s lands. They would have no reason to trust him. And then there are the savage creatures that live between the settlements. They would be hungry too, would want to make prey of him.

Time passes, and it becomes obvious that there is nothing more to say. He stands to leave, but the wild woman waves for him to sit down. They sit in silence for some more time.

“Do you want to know your fate?” she asks.

Does he? wonders Botwulf. The day of his death waits for him whether he knows it or not. But a brave man does not close his eyes. “Yes.”

“Your skull be kept in a box. And they will take it out to show people.”

“Who will do this?”

“Children of children of children, hundreds of years in the future.”

His skull unburied. The shame of this makes him sad. But also, it means his skull is kept. He is unforgotten. And this says nothing about his death, about whether it is fair. “Why should I care about my skull’s story?”

“Then don’t. It is good for men to surrender to their fate.”

Botwulf smiles, and the woman glares. He keeps his silence for a time. “You have said that people will be keep my skull as treasure centuries hence?”

“Yes. It will be grasped by strangers.”

“So. We know this winter is not forever, and that the sun comes back. It is good to make a journey knowing you will reach the end.”

Some Background

This story is set in the so-called Dark Ages, and one of the things I tried to do was to ensure that I only used Saxon/Germanic words rather than Norman/French ones. This was an interestesting experiment. I can definitely see the effect, but I wonder if it is as noticeable to readers? I love the idea that the English consciousness is split by how the language mixes Saxon words with Norman ones. The Norman words are typically fancier than the Saxon ones, being derived from the French of King William’s invaders.

Botwulf’s story is probably going to be collected alongside Sally’s stories, in a collection called Imaginary Folk Tales of the South Downs Way. The two quests - Botwulf searching for the sun, Sally for excitement - will be played alongside each other. In Sally’s story, she will encounter a skull in a box, kept as an archaeological specimen.

Recommendations

I love Anglo Saxon literature, even though I rely on translation and footnotes to understand it. With a good guide, I can see how this literature describes a world different to our own. So many of these texts have been lost, and we are trying to understand a world from the remaining fragments.

The Exeter Book Riddles are an example of this. This a compendium which contains a number of riddles, but without the answers. Some of them are obvious, such as the number 25, an extended double-entendre whose correct answer is onion. Some of them are not solved, although scholars have guesses. We’re lucky this books survived, as it’s been used as a cutting board and a coaster.

Hannah Videen’s book, The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English describes the Anglo Saxon world through their language - words that have been handed down to us, and words that have been lost. It’s an interesting ways of looking at the lost world of this period.

Related to all this, my favourite piece of language trivia, which comes via Matt Webb’s blog Interconnected (original source).

Our ancient ancestors were so worried about bears, they didn’t even want to name them because they feared [the bears] might overhear and come after them. So they came up with this word – this is up in Northern Europe – bruin, meaning “the brown one” as a euphemism, and then bruin segued into bear. We know the euphemism, but we don’t know what word it replaced.