The Anathemata
Angle-land (continued)
Past where the ancra-mana, deeping his holy rule
in the fiendish marsh
at the Geisterstundeb
on Calanagaeaf night2
heard the bogle-baragouinage.c
Crowland-diawliaidd3
Waelisc-man lingo speaking?
or Britto-Romani gone diaboli
or Romanity gone Waelisc?4
Is Marianus wild Meirion?5
is Sylvánus
Urbigéna’s son?
has toga’d Rhufon6
(gone Actaeon)
come away to the Waked
in the bittern’s low aery?e
along with his towny
[p. 113]Patricius gone the wilde Jäger?
David Jones notes
2 Calangaeaf, Winter Calands, November 1, cal-lan-gei-av, accent on ei pronounced as in height.
3 diawliaidd, devils, deeowl-yithe, accent on first syllable. The Mercian saint, Guthlac, when an anchorite on Crowland island in the Fens, hearing the speech of surviving Britons thought it the language of devils.
4 Pronounce wye-lish.
5 The Roman name Marianus gave Meirion in Welsh; hence ‘Merioneth’.
6 Rhufon, rhiv-von, Romanus. Urbigena; cf. Urbgen in Nennius, Urien in the Romances. The late Gilbert Sheldon wrote: ‘The Latin name Urbiqena, city-born, is disguised as Urien’. Pronounce as urr-bee-gain-ah, accent on gain.
additional notes
d DJ to Hague: ‘Wake is used in the sense of Hereward “the Wake” but not of Hereward but of mixed fore-types of Bret-Wealas and others who as civic life caved in sought out a life in forest or fens ... not of Hereward or his men who gave those damned Normans a lot of trouble by their alertness in the Fen country, by the armed “wake” or vigil, or watchfulness that only the skill and determination of the Conqueror’s panzer-gangs could overcome. Which reminds me of another passage where you mention my use of the Jerry word Panzer. Do you suppose Adolf and Co. deliberaately used the word Panzer Division for tank or armoured corps to revive the use of Panzer which meant mailcoat in the Nordic tales ?’ (Hague, p. 139).
Much of this section also reminds me of Finnegans Wake.
e aery: variant of eyrie, the nest of any bird of prey, usually built in a high place; but the bittern is a bird of reed beds in marshy low-lying country.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
a ancra: anchorite, hermit.
b Geisterstunde: the witching hour, midnight (German).
c bogle-baragouinage: goblin-gibberish (French).
comments
We are with St. Guthlac feeling his way up the river Welland with his sounding pole to found the monastery of Crowland in 716 CE. His polyglot devils (‘diaboli’ DJ note 3) simply add to the confusion caused by the ‘going native’ Romanised town-dwellers (personifed as Urbigena) becoming men of the woods (Sylvanus) and the the well-dressed civilised (toga’d Rhofon) becoming the hunters and the hunted (Actaeon). A patrician was a rich landowner with political influence.