Storytelling Starters ~ Other worlds Part 2
First things, my very great thanks to everyone who came along to Waterstone’s in Piccadilly this last Thursday evening to attend my storytelling session, From the Land of the Magic. Old friends were there and readers of this blog were there as well as a good number of people I didn’t know. The atmosphere was really good and I thoroughly enjoyed it all. Thanks to June Peters for presenting the occasion and saying such nice things about me and thanks to everyone for such lovely support.
Last week, I told the tiny tale of the fisherman who lets down his anchor and then is astonished to see a little chap climbing up the anchor rope to inform him angrily that the anchor has gone through his sitting-room ceiling. Another comparable story – in one sense dramatically different – appears in a piece of folk-lore recorded by the extraordinary folk-story collector, Sabine Baring-Gould who lived from 1834 to 1924. Baring-Gould was a parson and much else besides. The piece that follows is transcribed from one of his many books, A Book of Folk-Lore, which was first published in 1914.
An anchor from the sky:
‘On a certain feast-day in Great Britain, when the congregation came pouring out of church, they saw to their surprise an anchor let down from above the clouds, attached to a rope. The anchor caught in a tombstone; and though those above shook the cable repeatedly, they could not disengage it. Then the people heard voices above the clouds discussing apparently the propriety of sending someone down to release the flukes of the anchor, and shortly after they saw a sailor swarming down the cable.
Before he could release the anchor he was laid hold of; he gasped and collapsed, as though drowning in the heavy air about the earth. After waiting about an hour, those in the aerial vessel cut the rope, and it fell down. The anchor was hammered out into the hinges and straps of the church door, where, according to Gervase (of Tilbury) they were to be seen.’
By the way, Wikipedia informs me that Gervase of Tilbury was a lawyer, statesman and writer who lived from about 1150 to 1228.
Another anchor from the sky:
Another disconcertingly similar story, though with a very different and thought-provoking ending, appears in a poem by the great Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. Entitled Lightenings, the poem is part of a sequence in his book, Seeing Things, published in 1991. The episode it describes apparently happened in Clonmacnoise in Ireland:
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rail
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’
The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.
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That’s it for this week where it seemed right to have photos of nothing but clouds. Next week will be the last in my sequence of anchor stories.
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May 28th, 2016 at 9:57 pm
Lovely, Mary. Making these connections between stories feels like making them true. Wish I’d been in Piccadilly for your storytelling. Kind Regards, Meg.
June 8th, 2016 at 4:55 pm
Dear Meg
It’s always so good to hear from you and to know you’re reading my blog all that way over the other side of the world. It feels like another way of making connections.
All the best
Mary