Why I am writing a post about that amazingly talented, beautiful and genuinely nice man Jon English? Well, because of all of the above, because he’s one of the few Australian performers ever to successfully combine a career in music, television and stage, and because he unknowingly played a part in my life.
When I was a teenager I auditioned for a musical. Jon English was in charge of the auditions. I was starstruck. My singing voice came out sounding like a strangled squeak. I will always remember how kind he was to me. “We’re looking for a rock singer. You’d be best as a folk singer.” What a gentleman, not to crush my youthful hopes, as he could have done so easily!
I went on to sing in two folk bands.
Jon’s performances in Jesus Christ Superstar were electrifying. It’s a pity there isn’t a better quality video of them available online.
I would like to ask the universe in general two questions:
And why wasn’t his rock musical “Paris” (based on the myth of the Trojan War) given the backing it deserved, to become a professional stage production as big as any hit by Andrew Lloyd Webber?
The album “Paris” was so good that it was nominated for two ARIA Awards, winning Best Original Soundtrack, Cast or Show Album. It was also nominated for Best Adult Contemporary Album.
So come on ARIA, give Jon the recognition he deserves!
SHE by H Rider Haggard (full title “She: A History of Adventure” “is one of the foundational works of fantasy literature, published around the time of The Princess and the Goblin (1858) by George MacDonald, William Morris’ The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World’s End, and the short stories of Lord Dunsany.”*
“Several authors, including JRR Tolkien, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Miller, Graham Greene and Margaret Atwood, have acknowledging its importance to their own and others’ writing. With more than 83 million copies sold, the novel is one of the best-selling fictional works of all time and has been translated into 44 languages.” [Wikipedia]
The Leaves of Gold Press edition of SHE includes an introduction written by me. It is also the first edition to contain illustrations from not one but four acclaimed artists who were contemporaries of JRR Tolkien, and whose works he admired:
Maurice Greiffenhagen
Charles H.M. Kerr
E. K. Johnson, and
G. C. Wilmshurst.
“She” was first published in book form in 1887. The story is an enduring classic, more than a century old. It’s a fantasy adventure packed with action, mystery, wonder, supernatural marvels and beauty, along with violence and darkness. While it bears some of the now-discredited hallmarks of the era in which it was written, it remains an enthralling page-turner. Critics consider it one of the most influential novels in modern literature.
Refreshingly, considering 19th century social attitudes, the story features a strong woman with a complex personality as the central character. Haggard’s representation of womanhood has received both praise and criticism.
SHE is one of those powerful stories whose popularity endures for centuries. The story has been made into movies and radio dramas.
Tolkien and SHE
In common with every writer, Professor JRR Tolkien was influenced by many books. When he was growing up, he greatly enjoyed reading all the works of H. Rider Haggard. He stated in a 1966 interview, “I suppose as a boy SHE interested me as much as anything. . .” Many interesting parallels can be drawn between “The Lord of the Rings” and SHE. Readers will find echoes of Galadriel and her mirror here, and arguably, even the literary progenitors of Frodo and The One Ring.
Tanith Lee and SHE
Tanith Lee’s superb science fantasy novel THE BIRTHGRAVE, first published in 1975, is also the first novel in The Birthgrave Trilogy. The story follows a nameless protagonist who awakens with amnesia. She travels across a fantastic, epic landscape on a quest to discover her past and her identity. The novel was nominated for the 1975 Nebula Award for best novel.
I was captivated by THE BIRTHGRAVE the moment I began to read it, and it remains one of the favourites on my bookshelves. On re-reading SHE, I began to see Haggard’s influence on Lee’s enchanting fantasy work. A volcano. An exotic, wild landscape. Ancient, ruined cities. Lost civilizations. A powerful, beautiful woman who is close to immortal. . .
Dart-Thornton and SHE
In turn, THE BIRTHGRAVE influenced my own writing. The beauty of Lee’s prose was a revelation to me, but more than that, I found the concept of someone who awakens with no memories, no past, no identity, deeply intriguing. That became the seed of THE BITTERBYNDE TRILOGY.
[Ref: Cornwell, Neil (1990). The Literary Fantastic: from Gothic to Postmodernism. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN 978-0-7450-0804-2. Also Clute, John (2002). Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St Martin’s.]
Warning: do not read any further unless you are interested in deeply geeky stuff.
Words. I’ve always been fascinated by them. It’s not just the meanings they convey, but the sound of words, and the way they look written down.
Certain languages have an added appeal for me because they sound amazing when spoken, they look mysterious and exciting when written down, and they are bafflingly unlike my own mother tongue – the language you, the reader, presumably knows also, if you’re able to decipher this post.
Such a language is Welsh. It’s “a Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup that is native to the Welsh people,” says Wikipedia. “Welsh evolved from Common Brittonic, the Celtic language spoken by the ancient Celtic Britons.”
Up till now, the only languages I’ve been familiar with (aside from Pig Latin, Elvish and Klingon) are English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and a smattering of Russian.
Language families
Google says there are 48 language families, and they are are at the root of all human languages.
Those I’ve mentioned above all descend from the ancient and widespread Indo-European language family.
The Indo-European family is divided into several branches, of which there are eight with languages still alive today and another nine that are now extinct.
English and German are descended from the Germanic branch, Russian from the Balto-Slavic, French, Italian and Spanish are from the Italic (they have another sub-group, called “Romance“) and Welsh from the Celtic.
The Celtic branch is very distinct. It’s divided into two sub-groups: the Goidelic (or Gaelic) languages and the Brythonic (or Brittonic) languages. I’m intrigued by both of these sub-groups but decided to focus on Welsh due to time constraints. (Oh and Wales has dragons, too, which is a bonus.)
J R R Tolkien and the Welsh language
It was listening to a Welsh song that inspired me to start learning the language. That, and the fact that my literary hero J R R Tolkien was also inspired by Welsh. As a boy, he used to see Welsh place-names painted on coal trucks from South Wales that clattered along on a railway line adjoining his childhood garden in King’s Heath, Birmingham.
I should have said Welsh has always attracted me. By its style and sound more than any other, ever though I first only saw it on coal trucks, I always wanted to know what it was about.
~ J R R Tolkien
The mystery and beauty of the Welsh written language inspired him to create his own languages. He, too, was spellbound by it. On an early train journey into Wales, he spotted the name “Ebbw” and ‘just couldn’t get over it. Not long after I started inventing my own languages.’”
The spell cast by the song
Back to that song, “Yma O Hyd” (translating as “Still Here”). It’s a nationalist song, filled with passion, opening with the drumming of an acoustic guitar and the molten silver notes of a harp. Then in comes the mellow voice of the song’s composer, Dafydd Iwan. I make it a rule to avoid commenting on politics, and it was not the meaning of the song that entranced me (I had no idea what it meant) but the beauty of the language and the melody. As far as I was concerned, the song could have been about anything or nothing. To me it was magical.
For a start, right there in the third line is the word “flynyddoedd”. Gob-smacking. What a word! Completely unpronounceable, obviously, though Dafydd was somehow managing to sing it with no problems. I was tempted never to translate this beauty into English, in case it lost its magic by meaning something mundane like “beige” or “carpet-slippers”, but eventually I did. To its credit, it means “years”. This is a concept that’s majestic enough to suit such a word.
Anyway, what’s with all the “d”s and “y”s in “flynyddoedd”? Not to mention all the “w”s that inundate the rest of the Welsh language? I wonder if it’s something to do with ancient writing systems, and rune-derived characters we’ve lost over the last few thousand flynyddoedd?
“dd” for example is just a pale replacement for “eth”. Eth (uppercase: Ð, lowercase: ð) was a letter used in Old English. The sound is the “th” sound in “those”, “these” and “they”. If we brought eth back we could write “flynyddoedd” as “flynyðoeð”. That would make it look even more Elvish and magical.
Barred U
The “Barred U” ʉ isn’t a missing rune, but it’s a symbol used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to indicate the sound “oo” as in “goose”. This would be very useful in writing Welsh, because currently the letter “w” is used to represent that sound.
On the other hand, using “w” for “oo” does increase the mystery and allure of the language. Take, for example, a word like “cwrw”. Written down, it looks impenetrable, esoteric, marvellous. It also sounds glorious, “cooroo”… the sound of the wind blowing through the boughs of pine trees at the edge of the ocean . . . cʉrʉ . . .
In fact the word simply means “beer”, which is nice, but a bit prosaic.
I vote we bring back the Old English runes wynn, Ƿ ƿ, thorn þ (the softer “th” sound in “thorn”) and eth ð.
Welsh vowels – some of the other mysteries
Youtuber Gwyneth Angharad teaches us about Welsh vowels. As well as pronouncing “w” as “oo”, you pronounce “u” as “i”. “Y” is mostly pronounced like schwa, the a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol ⟨ə⟩. Gwyneth describes this as “the lazy sound you have at the beginning of ‘alive’ or ‘about’.” Depending on where it is in a word, “y” can also sound like “i”. . .
It’s not easy learning Welsh!
Some of my favourite Welsh words
If Tolkien wasn’t inspired by the Welsh word for “The Netherlands” I’d be very surprised. It sounds as if it comes straight from Middle-Earth: “yr Iseldiroedd” (or Iseldiroeð if you use “eth”). So much more attractive than the English version!
Another magnificently Tolkienesque Welsh word is “hiraeth”. This is one of those special words whose meaning actually matches the haunting melodiousness of its sound.
“Hiraeth,” says Wikipedia, “is a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. The University of Wales, Lampeter, likens it to a homesickness tinged with grief and sadness over the lost or departed, especially in the context of Wales and Welsh culture. It is a mixture of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past.”
Just now I asked an AI chatbot if it could “write in the style of Cecilia Dart-Thornton.”
It replied:
Certainly, I can try my best to write in the style of Cecilia Dart-Thornton. Here is a sample passage:
Amidst the misty vale, where the ancient trees swayed to a rhythm known only to the winds, there stood a solitary figure. Her raven-black hair cascaded down her back like a waterfall, and her eyes shone like emeralds in the pale light of dawn. She wore a gown of shimmering white, its fabric as soft as a swan’s down, and carried in her hand a staff of polished ash. She was the Lady of the Forest, a guardian of the wild, and her presence filled the air with a sense of wonder and magic.
As she walked, the leaves rustled under her feet, and the birds chirped a sweet melody. She paused by a pool of crystal-clear water and looked into its depths. There, she saw the reflection of a young girl with a heart full of hope and a spirit unbroken by the world’s harshness. It was a sight that brought a smile to her lips, for she knew that the girl would one day be a warrior of light, a beacon of hope in a world filled with darkness. And with that thought, she lifted her staff and continued on her journey, her heart filled with a sense of purpose and a deep love for all that was wild and free.
Oh, my.
Is that how robots think I write? Of course AI is only in its infancy. . . it’s done its best. . . and to be fair I think it’s captured the general theme and ambience of my fantasy stories.
I blush at the idea the bot thinks my prose is THAT purple, however. 🙂 There are way too many adjectives, even for my liking. And there’s no way I’d every write “amidst the misty vale” because that doesn’t really make sense to me.
The bot rightly included references to emeralds and swans. . . and long hair . . . and love of nature . . . and pools in forests. . . and female protagonists. . . and journeys . . . it’s got a lot right, but this piece has a flavour that isn’t mine. (Obviously, because it isn’t mine). To me, it sounds rather immature and saccharine. But hey, it’s pretty good, regardless!
And of course, this is a bot-in-training. Doubtless given another year or two, it’ll improve out of sight, and I’ll be out of a job.
That’s the scary part!
The delightful part is that such amazing technology exists. I hope people use it for Good, and bring a beacon of hope to a world filled with darkness. . . .
“Katharine Briggs (8 November 1898 – 15 October 1980) was a British folklorist and writer, who wrote The Anatomy of Puck, the four-volume A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language, and various other books on fairies and folklore. From 1969 to 1972, she was president of the Folklore Society, which established an award in her name to commemorate her life and work.” [Wikipedia]
Her book “A Dictionary of Fairies” has been a favourite of mine since childhood. I’ve read it again and again. I’ve loved it so much it started to fall apart and I had it re-bound. The book has since been published under the title, “An Encyclopedia of Fairies“.
Briggs was a passionate, accurate and thorough researcher. She had a PhD with a thesis on Folklore in seventeenth-century literature. She wrote many other books on fairies and folklore, as well as a number of children’s books. “A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language: Part A: Folk Narratives (1970)” was re-published in three volumes in 2011 as Folk Tales of Britain, and is described by Philip Pullman in its introduction as the fullest and the most authoritative collection of British folktales that exists.
In 1969 Briggs was awarded the Doctorate in Literature, and made President of the Folklore Society, a post she held until 1972, and which named an award in her honour.
Briggs collected folk tales and fairy tales from people who had learned them, orally, from their forefathers. She found common threads, “types and motifs” within these tales, such as “Mortals as captives in Fairyland”, or “Tree spirits” or “Fairies steal”, or “Mortal not to thank fairy for gifts”. I use many of these motifs in my own work, which is inspired by British and Celtic folklore. One of them is “Golden hair”.
From Katharine Briggs’s “An Encyclopedia of Fairies”: “GOLDEN HAIR. Some of the FAIRIES were golden-haired, as presumably were the TYLWYTH TEG, or Fair Family, many of the FAIRIES OF MEDIEVAL ROMANCES and the Irish fairies of the TIR NAN OG, but many of them were black-haired and brown-skinned.
“Fair or dark, however, they all set great store by golden hair in mortals. A golden-haired child was in far more danger of being stolen than a dark one. It was often a golden-haired girl who was allured away to be a FAIRY BRIDE, as EILIAN OF GARTH DORWEN was; sometimes, too, the fairies adopted girls of especial beauty, and above all golden-haired, as their special charges; and when they could not protect them they avenged their wrongs.
That said, there appear to be some disadvantages to having golden hair in the Real World!
“Blonde stereotypes are stereotypes of blonde-haired people. Sub-types of this stereotype include the “blonde bombshell” and the “dumb blonde”. Blondes are stereotyped as more desirable, but less intelligent than brunettes. There are many blonde jokes made on these premises. Although chiefly aimed at women, jokes of this style have also been aimed at similar stereotypes associated with men, such as the “dumb jock”, the “surfer dude” and “himbo”.
Wikipedia “Blonde stereotype”
Beautiful golden hair such as that which belongs to the young girl in Gustavo Lacerda’s photo may be the result of albinism, an inherited condition that leads to animals or people (of any race) having very light skin, hair, and eyes. People with albinism are often considered to have a unique beauty. Their hair may be white, auburn or golden.
Kelly Allison in her article “How Interruptions Destroy Creative Work” writes, “. . . if you’re constantly allowing yourself to be interrupted, then you lose your ability to concentrate. And without concentration, there is no creativity, quality, or productivity.”
Research suggests that after a creative flow of thoughts has been interrupted, it can take people between 15 and 30 minutes to properly resume that flow. That’s up to half an hour of wasted time. And time is precious!
Interruptions can also increase your stress levels, lower your mood and reduce your productivity.
Interruptions are especially counterproductive
“. . . if you’re working on one task and you’re interrupted on a completely different topic. People have to shift their cognitive resources, or attentional resources, to a completely different topic. You have to completely shift your thinking, it takes you a while to get into it and it takes you a while to get back and remember where you were.”
Worker, Interrupted: The Cost of Task Switching. By Kermit Pattison 07-28-08
When I was writing The Bitterbynde Trilogy, I would often write at nights, when the human members of the household were abed, and only the brownies were pottering about downstairs, quietly doing the housework (I wish).
A strategy I used during the day was pasting a sign on my door, on which I’d written words to the effect of “Please do not come in unless it’s an emergency”. There seemed to be a lot of daily emergencies, however, so this wasn’t entirely successful.
If you’re trying to write, and need some distraction-free time and space, it really helps to be surrounded by people who understand.
Some people think that putting their head around the door with a five-second inquiry about where you put the clean socks should not be a problem for you. Try to make them understand that they’ve just violently ripped you out of a completely different world, thrown you, dazed, into their world, hammered your brain with an alien thought that’s twisted your mind as you’ve tried to comprehend it, let alone answer the question, and then when you’ve managed to overcome your shock enough to gasp out some kind of reply, they’ve blithely gone away with the impression they’ve done no harm.
Meanwhile you’re left desperately grasping at virtual threads, trying to untangle the complicated weave you were in the midst of, and whose fading ends floated off into the amnesiacal spaces of stillborn inspiration at the moment that door opened.
Some people get interrupted by digital distractions. If that’s you, turn off all “notifications” on all your devices. Turn off your phone.
That’s all for now… sain thee, and may your work be blessed with few interruptions.
This tip has stood me in good stead many times. Wonderful ideas can strike when you’re driving (pull over before you start writing), shopping, waiting in a queue, daydreaming, or on the boundaries between sleeping and waking – anytime, anywhere. Even swimming, bathing or showering, Catch those ideas while they’re fresh!
You can, of course, also use other means to record your ideas. When a pen and paper aren’t at hand I’ve often used a notepad or voice-recording app on my smartphone.
As a last resort, you can always try recording your ideas in your memory . . but unless you have a pretty accurate and durable memory, I don’t recommend this.
The thing about creativity is, it’s most likely to strike when you’re not thinking of anything much at all. It bubbles from your subconscious at times when your mind is freely drifting. You can’t force it to happen by sitting down in front of a keyboard or notebook and saying to yourself, “Right! Now I am going to write a story.” (At least, that’s not the way it works for me. )
Which is why carrying recording material of some sort wherever you go, is a great tip for writers. I always recommend pen and paper because when ideas flow from your brain down your arm to your moving, pen-holding hand (so to speak) they are just better. That’s my opinion (and I’ve discussed it in another earlier post Copy by Hand!).
Some writers carry ornate notebooks around with them, and that’s okay too. For myself, I tend to accumulate fragments and scraps of paper with sentences and half-sentences and apparently random words scrawled on them at every angle. We do whatever we need to do, to achieve our aims.
For me, the shapes of letters of the alphabet have deeper meanings than merely the sounds they symbolise. Is this perhaps a characteristic of synaesthesia?
In particular, for me, initial letters seem to carry associations.
The capital letters A and V for example, with their chevron shapes, remind me of arrowheads or lanceolate leaves, or the streamlined wings of a raptor. They are associated with strength and vigour.
M is motherly, reliable, nurturing. Z is “out there”, alien and wild, exciting and almost certainly dangerous.
The letter I, both upper case and lower case, is light, golden, elfin. How much have I been influenced by Tolkien’s perfect creation of names? I did read The Lord of the Rings at an early age, so perhaps marvellous “I” and “L” studded elvish names/words such as Galadriel, Laurelindorenan, Glorfindel and Simbelmynë sank into my childish imagination and gave rise to those associations.
The sixth century monks who created illuminated manuscripts must also have felt that initial letters were important. Those specific initials in an illuminated manuscript, were known as initiums. Those monks lavished their art, their paints, their costly gold leaf upon those initiums.
Hundreds of years later, William Morris included some of the most glorious initiums in his books, printed by the Kelmscott Press. He had 40 custom-designed initial letters specially block-cut for use in his books.
The letter A featured in this post is from the Goudy Initialen font. American Frederic W. Goudy designed these floriated initials in the early 1900’s, and they are among my favourites.
Do the shapes of letters hold other meanings for you too?
I don’t know about other writers, but I find that inspiration can strike me at the most unexpected times. These times are not entirely unpredictable – they’re usually periods when my mind is drifting; when I’m not thinking of anything in particular. That’s when inspiring, amazing, intriguing ideas will often bubble to the surface. If I sat down to “deliberately think”, this burst of creativity would probably not occur. It has to be spontaneous. And when inspiration hits, it feels like such a rush! And that is when, if at all possible, it’s best to put pen to paper. When you do, pay no heed to spelling, grammar or punctuation – just write!
Walt Whitman, the great American poet, wrote:
The secret of it all is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment—to put things down without deliberation—without worrying about their style—without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote—wrote, wrote. … By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.
Inspiration and Discipline
Write by hand
That said, it would be impossible (for me) to write a whole book if I only wrote when inspired. The inspired writing provides the basic “clay” from which the “sculpture” can be formed. It’s disciplined writing that finesses that basic clay. Disciplined writing takes place when that bright glow of inspiration has faded and you need to make sense of it all, insert “bridges” between scenes, get rid of any cliches that may have crept in, add some description, fix the spelling, grammar and punctuation, and so on.
There’s an interesting article that touches on this topic at The Write Practice, here. It’s called “Writing Inspiration: Do You Really Need It to Write?” by Joe Bunting.
In English folklore the asrai are a species of aquatic faery that dwell in freshwater rivers and lakes. (Other aquatic fairies (or “wights”) include sea-dwelling mermaids and nixies, the human-like shapeshifting water spirits of Germanic folklore.) The asrai are usually depicted as female. They tend to be timid and shy, and may be either quite small, 2–4 ft (0.61–1.22 m) tall, or tall and slender. Being faeries/spirits/wights, they are generally immortal, although they can perish if mistreated.
“Tales from Cheshire and Shropshire (UK) tell of a fisherman who captured an asrai and put it in his boat. It seemed to plead for its freedom in an unknown language, and when the fisherman bound it the touch of its cold wet hands burned his skin like fire, leaving a permanent mark. He covered the asrai with wet weeds, and it continued to protest, its voice getting fainter and fainter. By the time the fisherman reached the shore the asrai had melted away leaving nothing but a puddle of water in the boat, for it will perish if directly exposed too long to the sun. Their inability to survive daylight is similar to that of trolls from Scandinavian folklore.
“Other tales describe the asrai as having green hair and a fishtail instead of legs or may instead have webbed feet. They live for hundreds of years and will come up to the surface of the water once each century to bathe in the moonlight which they use to help them grow. If the asrai ( sees a man she will attempt to lure him with promises of gold and jewels into the deepest part of the lake to drown or simply to trick him. However, she cannot tolerate human coarseness and vulgarity, and this will be enough to frighten her away.” [“Asrai” – Wikipedia]
Their oldest known appearance in print was the poem “The Asrai” by Robert Williams Buchanan, first published in April 1872, and followed by a sequel, “A Changeling: A Legend of the Moonlight.”
“Before man grew of the four elements The Asrai grew of three—fire, water, air— Not earth,—they were not earthly. That was ere The opening of the golden eye of day: The world was silvern,—moonlight mystical Flooded her silent continents and seas,— And in green places the pale Asrai walked To deep and melancholy melody, Musing, and cast no shades.
“These could not die As men die: Death came later; pale yet fair, Pensive yet happy, in the lonely light The Asrai wander’d, choosing for their homes All gentle places—valleys mossy deep, Star-haunted waters, yellow strips of sand Kissing the sad edge of the shimmering sea, And porphyry caverns in the gaunt hill-sides, Frosted with gems and dripping diamond dews In mossy basins where the water black Bubbled with wondrous breath. The world was pale, And these were things of pallor; flowers and scents, All shining things, came later; later still, Ambition, with thin hand upon his heart, Crept out of night and hung the heights of heaven With lights miraculous; later still, man dug Out of the caves the thick and golden glue That knits together the stone ribs of earth.
Nor flowers, nor scents, the pallid Asrai knew, Nor burning aspiration heavenward, Nor blind dejection downward under earth After the things that glitter. Their desires Shone stationary—gentle love they felt For one another—in their sunless world Silent they walked and mused, knowing no guile, With lives that flow’d within as quietly As rain-drops dripping with bright measured beat From mossy cavern-eaves.”
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Go With the Flow.
