Dear Ceinwen,
As a fellow librarian interested in all things mythopoeic, you’ll find this interesting.
This is the month that I’ve got the Several Annies studying a myth in depth, this one being that of The Sleeper Under the Hill. They started off by studying the myth of the king under the mountain or the sleeping hero, as it’s a prominent motif in mythology that is found in many folktales and legends. Arthur of course was believed to be taken away to the Isle of Avalon to sleep until he was needed by the people of Britain. Now, not all sleepers are Good. Loki was bound with cold iron by Odin after he caused the death of Baldr. With the onset of Ragnarök, Loki is to slip free and fight alongside the forces of the jötnar against the gods.
Now all of this was fairly dry and I could see that the dear lasses were not that interested in the subject, even though they loved Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, so I decided to have Jack take them out to a barrow mound several hours distant here on the Estate. So they got their warm clothes on, waxed up the skis, and had the Kitchen staff pack them a hearty lunch. I figured the combination of Jack and outdoor exercise would do them good. Besides, I had a curling match that I didn’t want to miss!
Our barrow mound is a small one, barely thirty feet long, but obviously not a natural feature. No archaeologist has dug into it, nor are we willing to let them do so, so the reality of what it is will not be known. The stories of what it is are all that matters. And given a thousand years of storytellers here, you can well imagine how interesting those stories are.
So Jack had them build a warming fire which they sat around as he told them tales of a long-dead King who defended his people until the enemy struck him down, though his army won the battle, won that long forgotten war, and whose Merlin, not our Merlin, put him to sleep under this barrow mound to sleep with his sword ’til his people need him again. A king who will sleep forever, as his people vanished from history into legend and finally into myth a very long time ago.
Just before they journeyed back, he rosined up his bow, drew a long note on his fiddle, and played ‘A Lament for a Sleeping King’, a mournful tune.
I can’t say that they dove into their studies with any more enthusiasm after their trip out there, so we moved on to another subject, Medieval music, with Catherine, my wife, as their tutor, and that does interest them.
Cheers,
Iain
