England’s Epic

First published in 1948, Hope Muntz’s The Golden Warrior was reprinted three times in its first year and twice more before its reissue in paperback in 1966. Its all-too-brief bestsellerdom was the result of fortunate timing and virtues which G. M. Trevelyan, the doyen of British historians, celebrated in his Foreword:

I regard it as an honour to be asked to introduce to the public this remarkable book. The author . . . has a deep knowledge and love of the island she has twice seen threatened with invasion. This is the story of the successful invasion of England long ago. It is not an ordinary historical novel, for the historical novel usually avoids the great personages and the famous scenes, and fills its canvas with imaginary characters. But this book is a Saga of Harold and William. The other personages, English and European, are historical portraits; they are subordinate to the two protagonists, but each of them stands as a clear-cut figure in the tapestry.

The Golden Warrior is not ‘an ordinary historical novel’ in any sense. These, and even extraordinary historical novels like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, tend to be written by novelists who have done their research. Hope Muntz (1897–1981), however, was a historian, Fellow of both the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Historical Society, and co-editor of a volume in the Oxford Mediaeval Texts. Having lived more than half her imaginative life with Earl Harold Godwinson and Duke William the Bastard, she astonished those expecting a scholarly monograph by producing a magnificent novel. When Trevelyan speaks of the book’s ‘historical portraits’, each standing ‘as a clear-cut figure in the tapestry’, his metaphor is at once accurate, suggestive in its allusion to the Bayeux tapestry, and at the same time misleading. Nothing could be further from the immobility of a portrait or the two-dimensional comic/tragic strip of a mediaeval tapestry than the breathing figures in Muntz’s story. Her narrative has an epic shape, a variant form of the traditional quest, as her protagonists seek and compete for ‘an heirloom fashioned like the Wessex Dragon, a golden arm-ring . . . the royal ring, which all the Kings [of the English Royal House] had borne’. A serpentine coil rather than a simple circlet, this has an envenomed reputation as ‘a thing accursed’. Two of its royal owners have been murdered before Muntz’s narrative begins. When Earl Harold, receiving his father’s inheritance, sees ‘the royal ring, the Golden Dragon of Wessex, lying on blood-red silk’, the omens become audible. He sets aside ambition and sends the ring to Edgar Atheling, heir to Edward the Confessor’s throne. Only after the Atheling’s premature death does Harold agree to wear it. The land symbolized by the Wessex Dragon is the prize for which English Harold and Norman William compete. Both are master strategists on the battlefield and in the political arena at home and abroad. Well-matched in physical strength and raw courage, their differences are significant and skilfully conjured up. Harold, the Golden Warrior, has hair ‘like shining bronze’, while William’s is ‘black as coal’, and their styles of leadership are as different as day and night. Harold’s radiant charisma inspires love and loyalty in both men and women, whereas William’s dark power generates awe and fear. Both find sexual fulfilment outside the ordinances of the Church: Harold is raising a family with a much-loved handfast wife, Edith Swan-neck, until he is obliged to weld the halves of his kingdom together by marriage with a daughter of the northern House of Leofric; William is entering into a marriage banned by the Holy See. Ever the cynical strategist, he subsequently negotiates a pardon and a Papal blessing on his imperial ambitions against England. Women – mothers, wives, daughters – play major roles in The Golden Warrior, which is as much a love story as a war story. Nothing so vividly shows the crucial difference between its two main protagonists as the way in which they take leave of their women before the final battle: William, coldly and with self-deceiving self-justification; Harold, tenderly,

His voice far off and low: ‘Do you remember the mown meadow, Edith, and St. John’s Eve; the dancing round the baalfire and the songs, and then we two alone under the apple-trees? If it were sin, yet surely we loved much.’ She did not answer . . . They were long silent. The King lay with his eyes closed. At last his hand that held hers loosed its hold. Edith sat unmoving. The candles guttered and went out. The fire was ashes. When she looked down, she could not see his face. King Harold rode from Nazeing after Midnight. Edith stood with the boy Harold in her arms and the old nurse beside her. They watched until the torches vanished in the deep forest.

In 1064, Harold had been shipwrecked on the coast of Normandy, imprisoned by the Count of Panthieu, but ransomed by Duke William. For a time they became friends, each recognizing the other’s strengths and, more importantly, the one recognizing the other’s weakness: ‘In mighty matters and in small,’ says William, ‘his heart will sway him.’ The recognition comes to him when he sees Harold risk his life to rescue two common soldiers from a quicksand. ‘William asked him: “Why did you do it?” “I could not bear to hear them yell,” said Harold.’ Harold’s compassion is a manifestation of a humanity reinforced by strong religious belief. Bishop Wulfstan ‘was the Earl’s confessor and his dearest friend’. We hear nothing of the Duke’s confessor. Had he wanted one (which may seem unlikely), that role would no doubt have been taken by his brother, Bishop Odo, a monster of avarice and brutality. Wulfstan, by contrast, is a good shepherd in his Master’s image, a compassionate man of simple tastes and strong faith. When Harold’s life is threatened by a mysterious illness, he asks Wulfstan whether he should visit the shrine in the Bishop’s cathedral and there make prayers and offerings. The Bishop writes back: ‘Look higher than this place, dear son, as God shall teach you.’ With his letter he sends an illuminated manuscript book of old English poems. That night Edith leans over the stricken Earl. ‘She wore a little golden cross, his gift on the first night. It swung between them like a star.’ This star supplies the answer to Wulfstan’s mysterious injunction: Waltham Holy Cross, the forest church, where ‘many poor folk had found healing’. Harold orders his men to take gifts to the humble shrine and offer Masses there for his recovery. Then, opening Wulfstan’s book at the Bishop’s marker, he reads in ‘The Dream of the Rood’:

On me the Son of God suffered for a space; Wherefore now I rise glorious beneath the heavens, And I can heal all who fear me.

His faith rewarded, Harold recovers and, in due course, receives the royal ring from the hand of the dying King Edward. When Duke William contests his claim, the reader already understands the complex interaction of ambition, chance, rights and wrongs in each claimant’s case. Both men are heroes of Shakespearean stature, heroes to their peoples and to each other. Both have flaws; the difference being that Harold’s is a tragic flaw, long recognized by his adversary. He is undone by his most admirable qualities: compassion, sensitivity, self-knowledge. He will not allow himself to take the Holy Cross as the emblem of his Standard, because he had earlier violated an oath sworn, under duress, on holy relics. His courage is heroic but, like Beowulf (hero of a poem he knows), he takes risks appropriate in a warrior, inappropriate in a king; and with the same tragic outcome. He fights his final battles under a Standard, embroidered by his mother, bearing the image of a golden warrior; and when some of his men desert, there is at least an implication that they might have stood firm under the Holy Cross. The battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings are set-pieces as majestic as Stendhal’s Waterloo and Tolstoy’s Borodino. After the King has fallen and the Duke has taken possession of ‘an arm-ring wet with blood’, the last of Harold’s housecarles wield their axes, chanting the words of ‘The Battle of Maldon’:

I am grown grey-hair’d; go hence I will not, But I here abiding with my bread-giver, By so loved a man look to perish.

The interwoven themes of love and war are united after dark, as Edith searches among the stripped bodies for that of her lord. She finds him and he is buried at dawn with her cross in his cold hand. The Golden Warrior has a grand and intricate narrative, coiled like an arm-ring, but that alone would not make it a great novel. As with other great novels, its distinction lies in an ideal marriage of language and structure. ‘Ordinary historical novels’ are all too often as clearly a product of their author’s period as of their subject’s: eighteenth-century props – crinolines and cutlasses – at variance with twentieth-century psychology and turns of phrase. Not so The Golden Warrior. Hope Muntz had studied The Anglo- Saxon Chronicle longer than a London clubman studies The Times, and has given us a composite, brilliantly fleshed-out ‘translation’ of non-existent Anglo-Saxon and Norman chronicles of the years 1051–66. Her chapter titles set the tone: ‘Of Harold’s Heirship-ale’, ‘Of Duke William’s Marriage’, ‘Of the Atheling’. Heirship-ale and Atheling are not ‘explained’ (any more than Landfather or Wayfaring Bread). Context makes the meaning clear. Muntz’s sentences are short, simple and declarative, in the manner of eleventh-century chronicles. They make little use of metaphor or simile, but her speakers have a gift for the apt proverb: ‘Let him slay the bear before he sell the bearskin’; ‘There is little for the rake after the besom’; ‘Small fish are better than no fish’. The master-stroke that makes the masterpiece, however, is Muntz’s avoidance of words with a Greek or Latinate root, particularly in the mouths of Old English speakers. She paints her great canvas from a sombre Anglo-Saxon palette, her rare touches of bright colour frequently symbolic – as in the ‘blood-red silk’ cushioning the royal ring, or the phoenix-like image at the book’s end:

Odo spoke again. His words were given in the English tongue. The warriors shouted anew. The clarions and the trumpets rang. A third time the Bishop spoke, thundering his words: ‘Hail your deliverer, men of England. King William comes to make you free.’ The trumpet-calls and shouts rang out unanswered. Then a man cried aloud in English. The people stirred and murmured, their faces changed. ‘What does he say?’ said the Duke. ‘Sire,’ said Malet, ‘he says their King cannot be slain, that he will come to save them.’ Odo said to Duke William: ‘Have the fellow seized. You will not win this people with fair words.’ ‘Let him go,’ said William. ‘Let them all depart.’ He turned his horse and rode at a foot-pace towards the camp. His Barons and his captains followed. The dawn wind struck cold to their wounds; weariness beyond telling was upon them. William turned his head and looked across the sea. The sun rose up in splendour and the day grew bright. He saw far out the sails of warships, coming from Normandy.

Herbert Read called David Jones’s prose poem, In Parenthesis, ‘as near a great epic of the [Great] War as ever the war generation will reach’. Judged by the same standard, The Golden Warrior is as near to a great epic of the Norman Conquest as we will ever have.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 15 © Jon Stallworthy 2007