Saxon Tales Quotes

When rumours fly, when false tales are being told, be the storyteller.

I liked those tales. They were better than my stepmother’s stories of Cuthbert’s miracles. Christians, it seemed to me, were forever weeping and I did not think Woden’s worshippers cried much.

I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, and this is the tale of a blood feud. It is a tale of how I will take from my enemy what the law says is mine. And it is the tale of a woman and of her father, a king. He was my king and all that I have I owe to him. The food that I eat, the hall where I live, and the swords of my men, all came from Alfred, my king, who hated me.

Thoughts are like raindrops,’ he persisted, introducing yet another of his interminable images. ‘They fall, make a splash and then dry up. But the world of wyrd is like the mighty oceans from which raindrops arise and to which they return in rivers and streams.

us to comprehend, for we are ourselves part of wyrd and cannot stand back to observe it as if it were a separate force.

You are labelling pieces of the world with words, then confusing your word-hoard for the totality of life.

The revenues of the ancient Saxon kings of England are said to have been paid, not in money, but in kind, that is, in victuals and provisions of all sorts. William the Conqueror introduced the custom of paying them in money. This money, however, was for a long time, received at the exchequer, by weight, and not by tale. The inconveniency and difficulty of weighing those metals with exactness, gave occasion to the institution of coins, of which the stamp, covering entirely both sides of the piece, and sometimes the edges too, was supposed to ascertain not only the fineness, but the weight of the metal. Such coins, therefore, were received by tale, as at present, without the trouble of weighing.

Nothing may happen without wyrd, for it is present in everything, but wyrd does not make things happen. Wyrd is created at every instant and so wyrd is the happening.

know the flow of the grain. The pattern of wyrd represented by this tree is visible in the grain and you must work within it.

Everything that has happened took place because you arrived. If you had not come here, the warrior might still be alive and the horse might not have been sick. A man has been killed, and a horse healed, for your benefit.

Words can be potent magic indeed, but they can also enslave us. We grasp from wyrd tiny puffs of wind and store them in our lungs as words. But we have not thereby captured a piece of reality, to be pored over and examined as if it were a glimpse of

Each sorcerer has his own connections with the forces of wyrd. In the execution of the shapes subtleties, allusions and personal secrets are revealed. Once you have mastered the copying skill, you will develop your own style and in time your knife will

But the threads of wyrd are a dimension of ourselves that we cannot grasp with words. We spin webs of words, yet wyrd slips through like the wind. The secrets of wyrd do not lie in our word-hoards, but are locked in the soul. We can only discern the shadows

You are strangling your life-force with words. Do not live your life searching around for answers in your word-hoard. You will find only words to rationalize your experience. Allow yourself to open up to wyrd and it will cleanse, renew, change and develop your

The monks had murdered Danes and Ragnar had punished them, though these days the story is always told that the monks were innocently at prayer and died as spotless martyrs. In truth they were malevolent killers of women and children, but what chance does truth have when priests tell tales?

Language is now my trade, boy, because I have become a skald.’ ‘A skald?’ ‘A scop, you would call me. A poet, a weaver of dreams, a man who makes glory from nothing and dazzles you with its making. And my job now is to tell this day’s tale in such a way that men will never forget our great deeds.

Hic Jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus Arthur is gone…Tristram in Careol Sleeps, with a broken sword - and Yseult sleeps Beside him, where the Westering waters roll Over drowned Lyonesse to the outer deeps. Lancelot is fallen . . . The ardent helms that shone So knightly and the splintered lances rust In the anonymous mould of Avalon: Gawain and Gareth and Galahad - all are dust. Where do the vanes and towers of Camelot And tall Tintagel crumble? Where do those tragic Lovers and their bright eyed ladies rot? We cannot tell, for lost is Merlin's magic. And Guinevere - Call her not back again Lest she betray the loveliness time lent A name that blends the rapture and the pain Linked in the lonely nightingale's lament. Nor pry too deeply, lest you should discover The bower of Astolat a smokey hut Of mud and wattle - find the knightliest lover A braggart, and his lilymaid a slut. And all that coloured tale a tapestry Woven by poets. As the spider's skeins Are spun of its own substance, so have they Embroidered empty legend - What remains? This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak That age had sapped and cankered at the root, Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke The miracle of one unwithering shoot. Which was the spirit of Britain - that certain men Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood Loved freedom better than their lives; and when The tempest crashed around them, rose and stood And charged into the storm's black heart, with sword Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed With a strange majesty that the heathen horde Remembered when all were overwhelmed; And made of them a legend, to their chief, Arthur, Ambrosius - no man knows his name - Granting a gallantry beyond belief, And to his knights imperishable fame. They were so few . . . We know not in what manner Or where they fell - whether they went Riding into the dark under Christ's banner Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent. But this we know; that when the Saxon rout Swept over them, the sun no longer shone On Britain, and the last lights flickered out; And men in darkness muttered: Arthur is gone…

He was pale skinned,with eyes like honey and hair that held the promise of fire.Had Rycca been a man,she would have looked just like him. Happy,happy day that she was not. "What brings you to Hawkforte,friend?" Dragon asked as he took the seat opposite his new aquaintance. "I seek work of my sister,the Lady Rycca of Wolscroft.I have had troubling word of her in Normandy and wish to be assured of her safety." Trouble involving Rycca? How astonishing. Dragon hid a grin and said, "You would be called-?" "Thurlow.And you are-?" This time,Dragon's smile would not be denied. "Ah,well,as to that,therein hangs a tale.

Each rune is a complete representation of wyrd. Just as one drop of water reflects a perfect image of all that is around it, so each rune reflects the totality of wyrd. The rhythm of wyrd may be observed at all levels, whether it be the movement of the stars across the sky or the cutting of shapes into a patch of earth.

What is it?” Dragon asked. “There is a man, lord, just off a ship from Normandy. He’s in the tavern over there and he’s asking for the Lady Rycca.” “Is he? What manner of man?” “Tall, slender, actually he looks rather like her ladyship. He says she is his sister and he seeks word of her.” “Does Rycca have yet another brother?” Wolf asked. He was close to Dragon and had overheard the exchange. The news had him fingering the hilt of his sword. “Yes, she does, but I gather he’s an altogether different sort. Do you mind finishing up here?” “Not at all. Go ahead.” Scant minutes later, Dragon set a horn of ale in front of the visitor from Normandy. The young man looked up, startled. He was pale skinned, with eyes like honey and hair that held the promise of fire. Had Rycca been a man, she would have looked just like him. Happy, happy day that she was not. “What brings you to Hawkforte, friend?” Dragon asked as he took the seat opposite his new acquaintance. “I seek word of my sister, the Lady Rycca of Wolscroft. I have had troubling word of her in Normandy and wish to be assured of her safety.” Trouble involving Rycca? How astonishing. Dragon hid a grin and said, “You would be called—” “Thurlow. And you are—?” This time, Dragon’s smile would not be denied. “Ah, well, as to that, therein hangs a tale.

No longer kneeling at the foot of the bed, knees on the hard wood of the gym floor, Aunt Elizabeth standing by the double doors, arms folded, cattle prod hung on her belt, while Aunt Lydia strides along the rows of kneeling nightgowned women, hitting our backs or feet or bums or arms lightly, just a flick, a tap, with her wooden pointer if we slouch or slacken. She wanted our heads bowed just right, our toes together and pointed, our elbows at the proper angle. Part of her interest in this was aesthetic: she liked the look of the thing. She wanted us to look like something Anglo-Saxon, carved on a tomb; or Christmas card angels, regimented in our robes of purity. But she knew too the spiritual value of bodily rigidity, of muscle strain: a little pain cleans out the mind, she’d say.

Don't you think Rycca would like to hear about Hadding, the warrior Odin rescued from his enemies? Indeed, so would I for as I recall, the last time I asked about him, you told the story in great haste without the scantiest details." There was a gleam in her eyes that Rycca had come to understand meant she was up to something, but she had no idea what might lurk behind so seemingly innocent a suggestion. Dragon grinned and looked at his brother, who leaned back in his chair and laughed. When Rycca appeared puzzled, Cymbra said, "I confess, when I noticed how attentive you are to Dragon's stories I was reminded of myself. At Wolf's and my wedding feast, I persuaded Dragon to tell a great many tales. He was the soul of patience." "He was?" Wolf interjected. "I was the one with the patience. My dear brother knew perfectly well I was sitting there contemplating various possibilities for doing away with him and he enjoyed every moment of it." "Now how could I have known that, brother?" Dragon challenged. "Just because the wine goblet you were holding was twisted into a very odd shape?" "It was that or your neck, brother," Wolf replied pleasantly. He looked at Rycca reassuringly. "Don't worry, if I hadn't already forgiven him, that sword he gave me would force me to." "It is a magnificent blade," Dragon agreed. "They both are. Every smithy in Christendom is trying to work out what the Moors are doing but..." "It's got something to do with the temperature of the steel," Wolf said. "And with the folding. They fold more than we do, possibly hundreds of times." "Hundreds,really? Then the temperature has to be very high or they couldn't pound that thin. I wonder how much carbon they're adding-" Cymbra sighed. To Rycca, she said, "We might as well retire.They can talk about this for hours." Wolf heard her and laughed. He draped an arm over her chair, pulling her closer. Into her ear, he said something that made the redoubtable Cymbra blush. She cleared her throat. "Oh, well, in that case, you might as well retire, too." Standing up quickly, she took her husband's rugged hand in her much smaller and fairer one. "Good night, Rycca, good night, Dragon. Sleep well." This last was said over her shoulder as she tugged Wolf from the hall. Her obvious intent startled Rycca, who even now could not think herself as being so bold, but it made both the Hakonson brothers laugh. "As you may gather," Dragon said in the aftermath of the couple's departure, "my brother and his wife are happily wed.

Get talking, then,' the girl urged, and Ksenia clucked her tongue. 'Raina, don't be rude,' she scolded. 'Aleks, won't you please tell me the tale of your intrepid adventures?' Raina asked with exaggerated sweetness.

How many’s that?” I asked the shepherd. “Jiggit and mumph, lord,” he said. “Is that enough?” “It’s enough, lord.” “Kill the rest then,” I said. “Jiggit and mumph?” Willibald asked, still shivering. “Twenty and five,” I said. “Yain, tain, tether, mether, mumph. It’s how shepherds count. I don’t know why. The world is full of mystery.

The One who ruled from the Beginning had twelve names: first Allfather, second Lord of Hosts, third Lord of the Spear, fourth Smiter, then All-Knowing, Fulfiller of Wishes, Farspoken, Shaker, Burner, Destroyer, Protector and Gelding. I know the significance of each of those names and each one takes a lifetime to tell. You shall learn them all.

But the tale, tall as it is, demonstrates how wretched the memory of Æthelred had become by Malmesbury’s day.

to.” “And only have one wife?” “Only one wife. They’re strict about that.” He thought about it. “I still think I should do it,” he said, “because Eadred’s god does have power. Look at that dead man! It’s a miracle that he hasn’t rotted away!” The Danes were fascinated by Eadred’s relics. Most did not understand why a group of monks would carry a corpse,

scenes from the Legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table many lovely pictures have been painted, showing much diversity of figures and surroundings, some being definitely sixth-century British or Saxon, as in Blair Leighton’s fine painting of the dead Elaine; others—for example, Watts’ Sir Galahad—show knight and charger in fifteenth-century armour; while the warriors of Burne Jones wear strangely impracticable armour of some mystic period. Each of these painters was free to follow his own conception, putting the figures into whatever period most appealed to his imagination; for he was not illustrating the actual tales written by Sir Thomas Malory, otherwise he would have found himself face to face with a difficulty. King Arthur and his knights fought, endured, and toiled in the sixth century, when the Saxons were overrunning Britain; but their achievements were not chronicled by Sir Thomas Malory until late in the fifteenth century. Sir Thomas, as Froissart has done before him, described the habits of life, the dresses, weapons, and armour that his own eyes looked upon in the every-day scenes about him, regardless of the fact that almost every detail mentioned was something like a thousand years too late. Had Malory undertaken an account of the landing of Julius Caesar he would, as a matter of course, have protected the Roman legions with bascinet or salade, breastplate, pauldron and palette, coudiére, taces and the rest, and have armed them with lance and shield, jewel-hilted sword and slim misericorde; while the Emperor himself might have been given the very suit of armour stripped from the Duke of Clarence before his fateful encounter with the butt of malmsey. Did not even Shakespeare calmly give cannon to the Romans and suppose every continental city to lie majestically beside the sea? By the old writers, accuracy in these matters was disregarded, and anachronisms were not so much tolerated as unperceived. In illustrating this edition of “The Legends of King Arthur and his Knights,” it has seemed best, and indeed unavoidable if the text and the pictures are to tally, to draw what Malory describes, to place the fashion

They’re mean bastards, those monks,” I said. I was supposed to deliver a weekly cartload of firewood to Saint Rumwold’s, but that was a duty I ignored. The monks could cut their own timber. “Who was Rumwold?” I asked Willibald. I knew the answer, but wanted to drag Willibald through the thorns. “He was a very pious child, lord,” he said. “A child?” “A baby,” he said, sighing as he saw where the conversation was leading, “a mere three days old when he died.” “A three-day-old baby is a saint?” Willibald flapped his hands. “Miracles happen, lord,” he said, “they really do. They say little Rumwold sang God’s praises whenever he suckled.” “I feel much the same when I get hold of a tit,” I said, “so does that make me a saint?” Willibald shuddered, then sensibly changed the subject.

Wyrd bi ful aræd.

I have done everything that you have asked, Brother Saxon,’ he told Eadulf. ‘Brother Madagan has regained consciousness but is weak. Abbot Ségdae has also recovered and is trying to organise the brethren to face our enemies with more discipline.’ He glanced rather shamefaced at Fidelma. ‘We did not acquit ourselves well at the gate when the warrior came, Sister. For that I must apologise.’ Fidelma was forgiving. ‘You are Brothers of the Faith and not warriors. There is no blame on you.’ She was still peering anxiously southward where she had detected the movement of a body of horsemen. Brother

BERNARD CORNWELL is the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Agincourt; the bestselling Saxon Tales, which include The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, Lords of the North, and Sword Song; and the Richard Sharpe novels, among many others. He lives with his wife on Cape Cod. WWW.BERNARDCORNWELL.NET

Plants carry life-force as potent as any person. To take the life of a plant, whether for food or sorcery, is to act with the gods.

I have known other men like him, men who could work themselves into a welter of fury over the smallest insult to the one thing they hold most dear.

Love has power over power itself.

At sea, sometimes, if you take a ship too far from land and the wind rises and the tide sucks with a venomous force and the waves splinter white above the shield-pegs, you have no choice but to go where the gods will. The sail must be furled before it rips and the long oars would pull to no effect and so you lash the blades and bail the ship and say your prayers and watch the darkening sky and listen to the wind howl and suffer the rain’s sting, and you hope that the tide and waves and wind will not drive you onto rocks.

The word 'troll' is of Nordic origin, and in the fairy-tales of Northern Europe it is supposed to have been a human-like, mischievous and hairy dwarf who swaps troll children for human children in the middle of the night. For good measure, trolls are sometimes depicted as equally mischievous and hairy giants, some of whom lived under bridges or in caves. Which would be all well and good but for the singular observation that the word 'troll' is entirely absent from the original Anglo-Saxon text of Beowulf

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Carl Sagan

In this I follow the early English writers who suffered from the Danes, and who rarely used the word Viking, which, anyway, describes an activity rather than a people or a tribe. To go viking meant to go raiding, and the Danes who fought against England in the ninth century, though undoubtedly raiders, were preeminently invaders and occupiers

The same is true of the horned helmet for which there is not a scrap of contemporary evidence. Viking warriors were much too sensible to place a pair of protuberances on their helmets so ideally positioned as to enable an enemy to knock the helmet off. It is a pity to abandon the iconic horned helmets, but alas, they did not exist.

The three spinners sit at the foot of the tree of life and they make our lives and we are their playthings, and though we think we make our own choices, all our fates are in the spinners’ threads. Destiny is everything,

Although these were easily the darkest days in Alfred’s life, they also were to become the most famous. The stories of his persevering against the Vikings transformed King Alfred into Alfred the Great. The story falls into a category that the modern ear can easily recognize and appreciate. From the legends of Robin Hood hiding out with his band of merry men in Sherwood Forest to the tales of men fighting in the underground French resistance during World War II, the modern listener has been well trained to be moved by the courageous nobility of continuing a campaign of resistance long after being driven into hiding. The seeming despair of a life of defiant resistance, while being hunted in one’s homeland, captures the imagination and takes on a romantic hue. But this was not a category of story that the Anglo-Saxon ear was accustomed to hearing. To his contemporaries, Alfred’s plight was an unqualified tragedy, utterly devoid of romanticism

Harold may or may not have been hit in the eye: the story first appears one hundred years later, and the arrow shaft on the famous Bayeux Tapestry may have been only added in the eighteenth century by bored nuns. It’s possible also that the eye story was Norman propaganda, since blinding was the biblical punishment for oath-breakers; but either way he was dead. One story has William leading this death squad but it is extremely unlikely he’d have done something so risky; likewise with a later tale that Gyrth unhorsed William before the duke killed him, which is most likely borrowed from The Iliad. By the end of the day the Normans had lost 2,500 men, the English 4,000, including most of the country’s nobility. After the battle William didn’t bother to bury the defeated, and it was left to Harold’s mistress, Edith Swan-Neck, to identify him by a part ‘known only to her’, as his face had been so badly mutilated. However the indignity continued; William wouldn’t give up the body, even after Harold’s mother offered him her son’s weight in gold if she’d return him, and to this day no one knows where England’s last English king lies.

From the plotting of strangers and iniquitous Monks, as the water flows from the fountain, Sad and heavy will be the day of Cadwallon. The lines come from the Red Book of Hergest, a collection of Welsh poems written in the late-fourteenth century but containing material that is much older. This brings us, neatly, to J. R. R. Tolkien. For according to a learned authorial conceit, the source of his tales of Middle-earth was the Red Book of Westmarch. Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University and one of his aims was to create a mythology for England, as the Red Book of Hergest, which contains the Mabinogion and other material, could be said to preserve the mythology of the Britons. Many if not all the writers and scholars involved in Anglo-Saxon studies first came to the field through reading the professor’s stories – and I am one of them, so it is no accident that this story is called Oswald: Return of the King, in tribute and homage. Tolkien writes of Oswald in his seminal essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and the parallels between him and Aragorn – rightful king in exile returning to claim the throne – are obvious.

Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination. Love is a voyage too, a voyage with no destination except death, but a voyage of bliss.