The Context
This spell is based on a short episode in Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum, at the end of Book 4, Chapter 27. The main narrative at this point of the History tells of the sack of Forum Iulii (now Cividale del Friuli, at the foot of the Alps in north-eastern Italy) by the Avars (sometime in the early 600s, either 602, or 611, or somewhere in between, depending on which historian you read). It is a key moment in the main narrative of Langbard history because the future King Grimoald performs his first acts of heroism. Paul the Deacon’s own ancestor, Lopichis, was made prisoner during the sack and taken to the Avars’ lands in Pannonia, the old Roman Province corresponding, more or less, to Hungary today. Sometime later he managed to flee his captors and return to Italy, with supernatural aid. Paul inserts Lopichis’ story into the main narrative almost apologetically, and these two short pages are particularly dense in those little clues – such as the supernatural aid mentioned above – that show us (in my view) Paul is really abridging these stories, and removing or downplaying non-Christian elements that could jeopardize his conscience as a Benedictine Monk. How these can be interpreted is anybody’s guess – in this spell I have had my personal shot at it (notes on my specific interpretations below), but I do not presume to really know what such details meant to Paul or his family members. To my mind it was essential to ‘fill out’ these elements in order to create a complete and cohesive oral tale: the goal of this whole project.
The framing narrative – Arichis at Charlemagne’s Court
I could not assume the identity of Paul the Deacon as storyteller in my project, because he would have the same limitations in an oral setting as he has in a written context: not wanting to fully represent the pagan elements in his stories. But Paul had a brother, Arichis, whom he dearly loved (‘Arichis’ appears to be the Langbard equivalent of our ‘Henry’, and survived into medieval Italian as ‘Arrigo’ – now it has been replaced with ‘Enrico’). During Paul’s own lifetime, the Langbard kingdom was invaded by Charlemagne and his Franks in 774. Arichis took part in a rebellion against their new overlords, led by Rotgaud, the duke of Forum Iulii, which culminated in defeat at the Battle of Brenta in 776[1], when Arichis was taken prisoner and removed in bondage to the Frankish lands.
Thus, in a way suggested to me by the story of Marco Polo telling the story of his travels in prison in Genoa, Arichis is singing and speaking the spells of his people to listeners at the halls of Charlemagne where he is held in bondage. I imagine him held there in honour as a noble prisoner, and not relegated to some dungeon, and his listeners are curious courtiers, visitors, court functionaries, and so forth. The Frankish king and first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, is called Karol in the spell itself, which is what he probably called himself, and at this time (approximately 783 CE) he had not yet received the epithet ‘the Great’ and had not yet been crowned emperor.
Some years later, Paul the Deacon became one of the foremost scholars at Charlemagne’s court in Aquisgrana (now Aachen), and found time among his court duties to plead for his brother’s release in a moving poem composed in Latin. For the purposes of my narration, I have supposed that Paul also composed a variant of the poem as a song in the Frankish tongue, or at least, a Germanic dialect intelligible to them, in order to spread the sentiment of pity for his detained brother as widely as possible. You can find Paul’s poem in the original Latin below. My translation is a rather compressed form, as the latter part of the poem seemed to me to be partly redundant to the needs of a storyteller. Regarding the music: the starting point for the melody was the opening phrase of Vaughan Williams’ I have trod the upward and the downward slope, from his Songs of Travel song cycle on poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. I later developed the melody in a manner reminiscent of plainsong-inspired secular song. Why? Well, Paul the Deacon himself, as a monk, would have been most familiar with the genre that we call today ‘Gregorian Chant’, and I imagine this would have influenced his tastes as a composer of songs, too. Also, the song’s subject is sober and plaintive, with a suitable appeal to divine providence at the close, which also makes me think he would craft the music to be at least a little ‘holy’ sounding.
How did the Langbards and Franks (and Saxons and Bavarians, for that matter) speak to each other?
Of course, that two brothers from Friuli, in Italy, at one end of Charlemagne’s empire could make themselves understood at Aachen, at the other end of that empire, is far from obvious to us today. If you grow up in Cividale del Friuli, as Paul and Arichis’ home is now known, you may learn German, but you are just as likely to only speak Italian, and have no way of speaking with people in Aachen. You may have studied the common lingua franca – English – and be able to use that instead. What about 1,300 years ago?
Paul gives us a hint in the final chapter of Book I of his Historia:
But the name of Alboin was spread far and wide, so illustrious, that even up to this time his noble bearing and glory, the good fortune of his wars and his courage are celebrated, not only among the Bavarians and Saxons, but also among other men of the same tongue in their songs.[2]
In other words, both at the time of Alboin (this passage describes the 560s) and at the time of Paul’s writing (800 circa) the Langbards, Bavarians and Saxons, and others still, considered themselves to speak a single tongue, and shared a corpus of heroic songs. I’m no linguist, of course, but it seems Paul is saying that, to some degree at least, the divergence of many regional Germanic languages had not yet progressed so far as to make them mutually unintelligible.
Lopichis’ forebear Leupchis: a flashback to the invasion of Italy
Paul the Deacon justly begins his family tale with a flashback to the first of his ancestors to settle in the family home in the Duchy of Forum Iulii, a certain Leupchis. He refers to Leupchis and his family being among those fara (large kinship group? clan?) that settled Friuli with its first Langbard duke, Gisulf, at the time of Alboin’s invasion of Italy (568 CE). For this reason, I have fleshed out this flashback with an episode from earlier in Paul’s Historia, in Book II Chapter IX, describing how Alboin entrusted Friuli to Gisulf, his nephew and most trusted man, and Gisulf accepted on condition he could hand-pick the men who would remain with him. Thus, it is as though Paul is telling us that his ancestor Leupchis was a particularly worthy man.
Langbard Paganism?
Many of the Langbard Spells will be dealing with pagan elements and, in the earliest ones in chronological order, outright Germanic paganism. Unfortunately, I have very little to go by in trying to evoke a fleshed-out version of these pagan elements in my Spells. And yet, I believe it is necessary to do so in order to recreate at least the mood and overall effect of Langbard oral history, as it might have been. We really only have one overtly pagan story (Gambara’s Spell) and a large number of veiled hints in Paul the Deacon’s book. I have attempted to fuse these hints with Lombard, and Italian folklore in general, and with scholars’ ideas (still more confused than the original sources) of what early Germanic paganism might have been like, often based on archaeology and/or the Scandinavian sources like the Eddas. I make no pretence at reconstructing the real myths and beliefs of the early Langbards: that would be impossible, and futile. Nor am I interested in reconstructed Germanic Paganism as a religion. What I am attempting to do is recreate a belief framework that is at least plausible, rather than leave a gaping hole in the stories where superstitions, beliefs, myths, legends and religious ideas would once have been. I am not recreating an ancient belief system: for storytelling purposes I am creating a false one, based on faint hints left over by a real one.[3]
Lopichis’ birth: Norns, White Ladies, and Goldhorn
At the birth of Lopichis I have described a sort of ritual in which ‘soul-water’ is used to bathe the newborn baby’s feet, and in this moment a Norn spirit visits him, called Wulderada. What I mean by soul-water is later explained clearly in Gambara’s Spell. The Norns are minor female deities, best known from later Norse literature as the equivalent of the Three Fates of Greek mythology, although there are many more than three attested. What I am really referring to in my story, is an earlier manifestation of minor female deities in Germanic culture, the Matres and matrones (mothers and matrons), known by this Latin expression because they are only attested in archaeological remains. I am following the idea put forward by some scholars that the Norns are a later, literary manifestation of the same tradition. The concept is that a female spirit visits newborn babies, casting their fate from birth. I have imagined a Norn spirit called Wulderada, the hypothetical sister of the surely attested Wuldered, the Bowman. He is my version of Ullr, (rendered as Wuldor in English), whose name means ‘glory’, and who seems over time to have become a sort of winter deity in Scandinavia, wearing skis, for example. Interestingly, in the Poetic Edda he is reported living in a yew grove (appropriate for a bowman) in a way also reminiscent of the Greenman traditions. Later in Paul’s history, and in my Langbard Spells, we will meet a Bavarian queen called Walderada (also Valdrada), daughter of a Langbard king and the mother of the much more famous Theodolinda. I have supposed that her name is the Langbard form of Wuldered’s hypothetical sister. Wulderada in my spell is called the ‘mother of all help’ because Paul the Deacon says that Lopichis chose to escape captivity at the inspiration of the ‘Author of Mercy’ – clearly a reference to the Christian god or perhaps the Virgin Mary, but it made me think of the hypothetical Norn called Eir, and I chose to run her together with Wulderada in my story.
Regarding minor female deities like the Norns, a similar concept is found in folklore from the Alps above Paul’s home of Cividale del Friuli. Here, among the same mountains the Langbards passed through in order to reach Italy, we find the wonderful Slavic tale of Goldhorn[4], a pure white chamois buck with golden horns who guards a flock of pure white chamois does, which may only be milked by the White Ladies, beautiful white-haired and pagan mountain maids who help women birth babies and foretell the newborn’s future. Arichis speculates that the White Ladies are akin to the Norns (as speculated by modern scholars including Monika Kropej). In one variant of the story of Goldhorn, a young hunter whose fate is to try and win the hand of his love by hunting the magical chamois was visited by a White Lady at birth. In Lopichis’ Spell I have made the old Slavic woman referred to by Paul the Deacon, who nurses Lopichis back to health in the mountains, a White Lady. I am dealing with the story of Goldhorn in a fuller way in my children’s novel Quis, also published on this blog.
A love story, and an escape aided by two pagan deities
Paul does not tell us what Lopichis did in his life of bondage in Avar Pannonia. I have imagined that Lopichis is sold into bondage with a family of boatmen, whose work is to ferry people across a long lake, that they don’t wish to walk around. I know that the portion of Hungary/Croatia settled first by the Langbards and then by the Avars is a land of water, crossed by many rivers and punctuated by many lakes. I have not really chosen any particular lake for this story, the lake it refers to may even be a simple broadening out of a river that has since disappeared. Why did I imagine boatmen on a lake? Let’s see if I can map out the mental connection.
In Paul’s story of Lopichis, our young hero carries a bow and a quiver of arrows after escaping bondage in Pannonia. As you will see, this plays a particularly important role at the end of the tale. My thought was: how did he come to have this bow if he was an escaped prisoner? Knowing that the arrow was a symbol of freedom among the Langbards (more on this in Gambara’s Spell), I decided that he had not stolen, but won the bow and arrow as a token of freedom for some deed done. Thus Wulderada, the Norn who visits Lopichis at birth, foresees such trouble in his future that she calls upon her brother, Wuldered the Bowman to bless him, too. With his help, Lopichis will escape bondage in Pannonia. I was intrigued by the theory that Ullr/Wulder is a possible mythological character blended with the (historical?) figure of William Tell, that charismatic superhero of medieval folklore[5]. In the best-known version of the story, William Tell escapes bondage by being the only boatman capable of piloting his captor across a lake in a storm. Being a romantic at heart, I turned this into a love story reminiscent of Hero and Leander of Greek legend. Lopichis’ reward for taking his master across the lake in a storm is an arrow to symbolise his freedom and… a bow to go with it.
Why should the arrow symbolise his freedom? Well, as Paul the Deacon himself tells us at the beginning of Chapter 13 of Book 1:
In order that they might increase the number of their warriors, confer liberty upon many whom they deliver from the yoke of bondage, a that the freedom of these may be regarded as established, they confirm it in their accustomed way by an arrow, uttering certain words of their country in confirmation of the fact.
This custom is also attested in the Edict of Rothari, of which later spells will speak. In short, it was the first formal writing-down of Langbard customs, ordered by King Rothari, with the help of the Eldermen of his people. It is explained that this ritual took place at a crossroads.
224 – On manumission
…The lord shall first hand the servant over to the hand of another freeman and confirm it by formal action. And the second man shall hand the servant over to a third in the same manner, ad the third shall hand him over to a fourth. And this fourth man shall lead him to a place where four roads meet and give him an arrow and whip, and say: “from these four roads you are free to choose where you wish to go”.[6]
Ah, if only lawmakers today were as poetic as Rothari’s Eldermen gathered in Pavia in the year 643! I like to imagine that the exact words uttered were in fact a short alliterative spell, and I will try to find an excuse to insert it into a future spell.
A half-remembered family song
A completely new element I have added to the story is the ‘Avar Boatman’s Song’, with made-up nonsense words. It comes out of the reflection that real families, like mine and yours, dear reader, do have these family legends passed down from generation to generation, and not only: we even have family songs. These may be little variants on well-known songs, variants arising, for example, from a child not being able to pronounce some of the words properly, or muddling up the meaning of a verse. In the case of my own family, we have a little song that probably comes from a Vaudeville show my great- (or great-great-?) grandmother saw, and remembered, and sang it to her children, and it has come down to us.
Tea now, for me now, me like-ee cup of tea!
Johnny Bully drink-ee beer,
Frenchie drink-ee wine so dear,
Chinaman no, he will ne’er do so,
Chinaman drink lots of lovely tea!
I wanted to enrich the sense of tradition in Paul and Arichis’ family with a half-remembered song Lopichis brought back from his time among the Avars, and settled on this melody, which I originally wrote years ago for theorbo while studying at the Conservatorium of Milan. I think it has a sea-chanty-esque feel…
The wolf and Tiuz, the Wolf-bitten
Easily the most-discussed element in Lopichis’ story as written by Paul the Deacon is the wolf that comes to his aid as he crosses the Alps in search of his home in Italy. It is a sublime moment of storytelling that unexpectedly rises into the near-mythical register. The reason why this is discussed a great deal is a little complicated, so I’ll try to break it down. The ancestral name of the Langbards upon leaving their homeland at the beginning of their migration-age saga was ‘Winniles’ (more on this in Gambara’s Spell). Some scholars have explained this name as meaning ‘war-dogs’, or ‘wild-dogs’ or ‘fighting-dogs’ or ‘glorious-dogs’. I’m no linguist, and I frankly wouldn’t know. What is clear to me is that the earliest tales of the Langbards feature a few episodes that quite rightly lead to speculation that the dog was in some way the totemic animal of the early Winniles. I will write more about this in the notes to Gambara’s Spell, which deals with the most important and most widely discussed episode among these. For now, suffice to say that I have supposed that the warrior-culture of the Langbards was, in its origins, associated with the god Tiuz (Tiwaz, Tiw, etc), later replaced as primary focus of worship by Odin (Wotan, Woden, and for the Langbards ‘Godan’). I have adopted the (much later attested) association of Tiuz with the wolf and the image of him as one-handed, with one of his hands bitten off by a wolf. Am I explicitly equating dog and wolf in Langbard mythology? Not quite. Perhaps there is some distinction, for example, wolf in war and dog in peace… but more on this in the notes to Gambara’s Spell, where the most telling episodes occur.[7]
The rose-bush, the Ash Tree, and Godan’s wisdom
There is no doubt in my mind that trees, and plants in general, played an important part in the belief system of the Langbards. Unfortunately, Paul himself, as usual, only drops obscure hints in this regard, and the most explicit of all references he makes to ‘tree magic’ is right here, in this tale about his family origins. When Lopichis finally returns to his family home in Forum Iulii, he finds it has become overgrown with brambles, and an ash tree has grown up through the roof. Anyone who has ever had any interest in Germanic mythology will immediately perk up their ears at the species of tree: Yggdrasill, the world tree… the wood used to make spears, the primary weapon of warriors and associated with Woden/Godan… Irminsul, the revered tree of the Saxons destroyed by Charlemagne… There can be no doubting its symbolism. It is, I think, no coincidence that this is the second moment in the family-history tale in which Paul’s narration rises to the mythic register, and it is exquisite.
After some days he entered Italy and came to the house in which he had been born, which was so deserted that not only did it have no roof but it was full of brambles and thorns. And when he had cut them down he found within the walls a large ash-tree, and hung his quiver upon it. He was afterwards provided with gifts by his relatives and friends, and rebuilt his house and took a wife.
I don’t know about you, but that makes shivers run up my spine. “…and hung his quiver upon it.” In a single gesture, the adventure in the wild, with the bow and the wolf, is brought to a most significant ending, the weapon of his survival hung upon the most sacred tree in the world. Wow. And coming as it does after cutting through brambles and thorns… in the best tradition of Sleeping Beauty (is this the oldest Germanic version of the motif?)
I have elaborated a meaning for this extraordinary tale, that is suitable to our narrators, Paul and his brother Arichis: the wolf adventure elevated them to the rank of Hariman (warrior, chosen by Tiuz/Tiwaz), and the ash-tree marked them as Eldermen (keepers of the oral tradition, ‘long beards’ chosen by Godan/Woden). That is my interpretation, and I think it’s a damned good one.
For the curious, I wish to add two references to the plants above you may not be familiar with, being exceedingly obscure. I’m particularly proud of discovering the first, linked with tree-magic. In the 1570s, the great Carlo Borromeo, cardinal and later saint, partially in an effort to spare Milan the rigours of the Inquisition, clamped down on pagan rituals (so that the Inquisition would not have to do it for him, and in much less pleasant ways), including the planting of trees at crossroads at the calends of May.[8] To be sure, which kind of trees are not specified, but the place they are planted is, and it is the same significant place where the manumission of slaves and prisoners took place, the crossroads. To my mind, this place represented ‘the wide world’, and embraced all possibilities, in the Langbard imagination. Thus, the tree planted there may well have been, at least originally, an ash tree, the world-tree.
What about the rose bush? Paul the Deacon refers to brambles and thorns, which is not so specific. I have made it a rose bush on the strength of a very obscure text dealing with Langbard history, known as the Codex Gothanus, a 9th-century text written at Fulda, in modern day East Germany.[9] In it, the seeress Gambara (see Gambara’s Spell) proclaims that thorns will become roses, and with this vision in mind leads her people out of their ancient homeland of Scandan. Since Paul mentions thorns, I have decided they are roses, which completes the tie-in with Sleeping Beauty quite nicely (though I am aware that the rose-bush may be a late addition to the Sleeping Beauty story).
VERSUS PAULI AD REGEM PRECANDO.[10]
Verba tui famuli, rex summe, adtende serenus,
Respice et ad fletum cum pietate meum.
Sum miser, ut mereor, quantum vix ullus in orbe est;
Semper inest luctus tristis et hora mihi.
Septimus annus adest, ex quo nova causa dolores
Multiplices generat et mea corda quatit.
Captivus vestris extunc germanus in oris
Est meus, afflicto pectore, nudus, egens.
Illius in patria coniunx miseranda per omnes
Mendicat plateas ore tremente cibos.
Quattuor hac turpi natos sustentat ab arte,
Quos vix pannuciis praevalet illa tegi.
Est mihi, quae primis Christo sacrata sub annis
Excubat, egregia simplicitate soror:
Haec sub sorte pari luctum sine fine retentans
Privata est oculis iam prope flendo suis.
Quantulacumque fuit, direpta est nostra supellex,
Nec est, heu, miseris qui ferat ullus opem.
Coniunx est fratris rebus exclusa paternis,
Iamque sumus servis rusticitate pares.
Nobilitas periit miseris, accessit aegestas:
Debuimus, fateor, asperiora pati.
Sed miserere, potens rector, miserere, precamur,
Et tandem finem his pie pone malis.
Captivum patriae redde et civilibus arvis,
Cum modicis rebus culmina redde simul;
Mens nostra ut Christo laudes in secla frequentet,
Reddere qui solus praemia digna potest.
[1] Paolo Diacono, Profilo bio-bibliografico, Appunti delle lezioni del corso di Letteratura Latina Medievale (Modulo 2), Università degli Studi di Palermo – Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Corso di Laurea Triennale in Beni Culturali, Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Scienze dell’Antichità, Anno accademico 2012-2013, (prof. Armando Bisanti)
[2] Alboin vero ita praeclarum longe lateque nomen percrebuit, ut hactenus etiam tam apud Baioariorum gentem quamque et Saxonum, sed et alios eiusdem linguae homines eius liberalitas et gloria bellorumque felicitas et virtus in eorum carminibus celebretur.
Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum, Book I, Chapter XXVII. English translation by William Dudley Foulke (Ed. Edward Peters, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003
[3] For an interesting and exhaustive discussion of Langbard belief systems and the difficulties in reconstructing them, see Gasparri, Stefano, La cultura tradizionale dei longobardi. Struttura tribale e resistenze pagane, Fondazione CISAM, Spoleto 1983.
KROPEJ, Monika. The Goldenhorn in Slovenian folk belief tradition. Cosmos, ISSN 0269-8773, 2011, 27, str. 31-60.
[5] Rochus von Liliencron, Historische Volkslieder der Deutschen, vol. 2 (1866), no. 147, cited by Rochholz (1877), p. 187; c.f. Bergier, p. 70–71.
[6] Translated by Katherine Fischer Drew, The Lombard Laws, The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973.
[7] The best articles to read concerning the nexus Langbards/Winniles/wolf/dog are: Kemp Malone, “Agelmund and Lamicho” In his Studies in Heroic Legend and in Current Speech. Ed. by Stefán Einarsson and Norman Eliason. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger. pp. 86-107. Orig. publ. 1926.; and Joseph Harris, “Myth and Literary History, two Germanic examples” in Oral Tradition, 19/1 (2004): 3-19. The former is the original conceptual work on the subject, dense and difficult, the second gives an easier to read summary of the conclusions of the former. Malone himself builds on Rudolf Much, “Der Germanische Osten in der Heldensage.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 57 (1920), 145-176.
[8] Stefano d’Amico, Spanish Milan: A City within the Empire, 1535-1706, 2012, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. See Chapter 4, The Second Rome.
[9] I have used the translation in appendix in William Dudley Foulke, History of the Lombards, (Ed. Edward Peters, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003
[10] Archivio della Latinità Italiana del Medioevo, Carmina, resource/3472
Yarnspinning and Storyweaving 