 Ieitha wnaeth yw'r cyfrifio ar gyfer y PMC yw'r ysgolion yma yn y seri Gwyrdd Brytyn yn y Llyfrgell yn y Llyfrgell yma i'r ymgyrch yn y realid. Yn ymwyaf, Lloedd De Beyr, mae'r cyrraedd ym Mhwysiwn Brydysg, ac yn ymwysig yw'r ysgolion Jessica Barambyme, mae'n ymdweithio'r cyfrifio'r seri. Mae'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r Prifesha Alex Bovey, Y thysgol ychydig trinatariad yn ystod yw ddod 3 yw ddod i'w ddod. Y ddod y Dean, y dypediadau, y ddod i'w ddod i'r llyfr o'r hirch gweithio'r Llywodraeth Cymru. diffusell y gallwn oedd y gallwn wedi'i cael eu byddio i'ch ddweud â'r dyfodol roedd iawn, ymlaen i'ch gwerthu i gyrdd am gynnig oedd ni'n mewn gwirio. Alex wedi'i gwirio meddwlol ac yn deall, i'ch ein ein ddefnyddio ar bedroomau ac argynno gwarid. Alex i'r meddwl i fynd ychydig honno yw a chael ei wneud yr ysbyd. Mae gwybod o'r gwirio yma i brinidol i'r Lyfr, fe yw'r lechau dros ydi gynydddiad, am ydyn nhw, bydd yna i'n mynd i gwerthu i Llyfr, ..ynghraeg o'r rhaglen a'r Cymru yn ystod yng Nghymru John Loudon. Yn ystod, fel fydd y dywed y starf y mae'r ysgolwyd yn ymddangos y BBC... ..yng Nghymru yng Nghymru, ac mae'n dweud ymddangos ymddi'r ysgolwyd... ..y'n ymddangos y PBS America, oherwydd y gallwn yn ymddangos ymddangos ymddangos... ..y'r rhaglen a'r rhaglen. Yn ymddangos y gallwn ymddangos Alex i Instagram... ..y'r ymddangos ymddangos yw ymdangos yma... Mae'r ddod yw'r cyntaf ar gyffredinol a'r ddod o'r gweithio. Mae'r ddod yr yw'r ddod yn gwneud o'r cyfnod, rwyfwyr ddod ybydd o'r gyfnod o'r ddod, o ffobl y byd, o'r cyfrifio. Yn 2013, mae'r ddod o'r gyfnod o'r clyweddau mewn ymgyrch, ymgyrch cyfnod yw yw ymwynt, a byddwch o'r bwysig i'r hyn sydd i'r cyfeirio gwneud i'r gwneud yn ysgolion a'r gwasanaeth arnyn nhw'n gweithio'r ffasig yn gweithio'r gwasanaeth yn ysgolion gwneud yn ysgolion gwneud yn gweithio'r gwasanaeth beth mae'r ddechrau ymlaen. Ond Jessica ac Iwneb i'r gweithio'r ysgolion o'r ffordd o'r cyfridd yw yma, Alex yw yma yw ychydig. Rwy'n rhefnodd hynny, sy'n rhaid i'r ffordd o'r cyfridd. Mae'r diogel o'r rhywbeth yn ôl yn fath ymddiannod o'r roedd y cwrs, a'r roedd yn roedd y cwrs yn y ddechrau, ac yn ymddir i'r ysgrifennu ei hun i fynd yma o'r Britain sydd o'r hyn ar y tydd. A fyddech chi'n ei rôl o'r llunio arall, o'r trefynau cyfrifiadau ar y cyfrifiadau mythig, o'r mythig o'r llunio a'r mythig ymddirio. O'r Alex, rydyn ni'n ei fawr i'r hyn, ac yn ddweud yn y dyfodol i gael â'r cyfnodd. Yn ystod, Llywydd. Mae'n gwybod a'r cyfnodd ar gyfer yw, ac mae'n gofio'n gwybod i'r ffordd i ddweud y lluniau. Mae'n gweithio'r newid yw i'r maen nhw'n arfer y lluniau. Felly, yna'n gweithio'r cyfrifiad. Yn ymgyrch yn ei wneud, yw'r cyfrifiadau. Yn ddweud, mae'n gweithio'r gyfrifiadau wrth gwrs mewn gwirionedd y Maen nhw. Mae'n gwirionedd, a'r gyfrifiadau o'r cyfrifiadau yn y maen nhw'n gweithio'r cyfrifiadau yn gyfrifiadau sy'n gweithio, i'w ddweud. Rwy'n gweithio i'r gynllun y ffath o'r hystodau neu oedd yn cyfnodd cyfnodd, oherwydd mae'r cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd yn y ddweud ym gael yn y gweithio cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd. Y cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd yn y pethau o'r hunghwyl proses yn y cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd cyfnodd yn y ffath o'r hynodd cyfnodd, os yw'n blaenau o'r 1200 BC, yn yr ystod o'r year 1419 yn y ddod y Rhain o Henry V. The Chronicle is punctuated by three miniatures, and we'll see each of them this evening. Each one showing a conquest of what Jessica last week described as this Atlantic archipelago. The first of these conquests accounts for the peculiar epithet of this text, Yn ymgylchedd yn y Llywodraeth Gweinig, y llwydon yng Nghaerbydd yna, bydd yma'r ysgrifennu cyfweldol am y King cilwyr diaglifion ar gyfer 33 oes. Mae'r ymddirio'r ysgrifennu ar hyn yn ddod Albina. Diaglifion ar gyfer King y Prinsau, Rhyw Llywodraeth, ac yna'r gweithio'n ysgrifennu ar ychydig, ac yna yna'r 33 oes gweithio ar 33 oes. Ond Mae Albina i ni i erioedwyr wedi ei wneud i gael cyfnodol i'r amgeoli arall, yn ei wneud, â'r rhan i'r chyfydig. yna, hynny yw'r amgylcheddau wedi cyfreadau yn ein cael dŷlwyr gan Dioclŷan, yn ar hyd i gael ar y rhanol, aeth ar unig yng Nghymru, ac Dioclŷan gwneud i'r rhaglion yn amlant ac i'r ddod ddod yn y cwrt o profiad â'r 33 ynchydig. Ond yn y peth sydd y rhanol, rydych yn cyfoson at Joffan Ie, Diocletian enthroned with the 33 princes, looking rather dull, I think you might be able to imagine why Albina and her sisters weren't happy with his matrimonial choice for them, and the sisters with their wrists crossed in a show of submission. But it turns out to be simply that, a show of submission. For that night Albina convinced her sisters to slit the throats of their husbands. And when Diocletian discovered what they had done, he was so enraged that he put them out to sea in a ship with no rigging and no provisions where they were cast across the seas for many long months until eventually they landed up on a totally uninhabited, verdent island that was populated only with flora and fauna, on which they feasted. And what you can see in this image is the sisters having come off their rigging free ship, stretching an Albina, the eldest of whom with golden ermine robes and her name. You can see it in the manuscript, not so easily here, that her name is inscribed on her dress. She is, I think, dusting her shoulders off, and she announces to her sisters that as the eldest this land shall be named after herself, Albion. Thus swapping an ancient name attributed to this island that had been derived from the Latin albus for the white cliffs of Dover for something that turns out to be rather sexier. For what happens to the sisters is that they dine on the plants and animals that they find on the island and they get what the text describes as wonder fat. This in turn made them desire men's company more than any other solace or mirth if you catch the text, not so subtle meaning. Sensing an opportunity, the devil materializes and visits in human form all 33 sisters, impregnating them one by one, and they then give birth to a race of demonic giants who then overrun the island. The text names them as Gog, Magog, Locary and others that are unnamed and you can see at the top of the miniature a kind of foreshadowing the sleeping giants like hills in the landscape awaiting their wicked mothers. As we shall see this remarkable tale which originated probably in London in the 1330s is written really as a prequel for an older foundation myth for the British nation which is where we'll land up at the end of this lecture. The Albina story provides an account not just for the first humans to inhabit these islands, but the first monsters as well. It also offers an account of human history that's entangled with supernatural agents and as a toponymic story, a naming tale, it offers a rather sexier origin for Albion than the one that we learn about from ancient texts and Julius Caesar. Alluding to the chocolates of the south coast, and we'll circle back to this story and this manuscript as we consider the symbolic relationship between myth and art in medieval Britain. It sounds a bit tinny doesn't it? I'm going to put it slightly further away. How is it? Tinny? No? I'll just carry on, but it does seem a little tinny to me. Should we carry on? We'll forge ahead. Tinny though it is. So it is a very great pleasure to have been invited to speak on the theme of myth this evening. It's a blank slide. It's all by design. Part of my cunning plan. It's a blank slide. Don't worry. I'll panic more than then if there are no slides. I can't speak even at the breakfast table with our illustrations. So it was really a very great pleasure to have been invited by Lloyd and Jessica to speak in this series exploring Britain's place in the medieval world through art history. But as I've prepared, I found myself reflecting a little on the nature of myth and on the relationship between art history and this genre, which is really fundamentally a type of narrative, not a category of visual art. In medieval England, myth and image are very often intertwined, especially in illuminated manuscripts, which are one of the richest sources for medieval art history. I think pretty much all of my examples this evening, if I'm not mistaken, are illuminated manuscripts one way or the other. So I thought I might just spend a moment defining myth, what this term means and what it meant in the medieval period. And generally it's understood by narratologists and anthropologists as a type of story with three main characteristics. It involves supernatural forces, magic, prophecies, supernatural beings of one kind or another. Myth explains the origins of something, a society, a ritual, a landscape. And it has been told over and over again and in the retellings through numerous variations myth accumulates a rich set of meanings and resonances. In popular idiom, the myth also has a sense, a kind of a pejorative sense of being something that is untrue, a misconception. You'll get cramps if you swim after eating. I don't think that's really true, it's never happened to me and I've never observed that. You'll get warts if you touch a toad, also something that's never happened to me. Although if it has to anyone else, I'm open-minded about the possibility. Tonight, though, we'll encounter mythic beings that aren't real, at least in any kind of strict zoological sense. Giants begotten by the devil and 33 evil Syrian queens. Exploding chickens are coming up. It will be seeing goat-like, virgin-loving unicorns and many other examples as well. Inevitably, describing a narrative as myth implies that it is not literally true. Perhaps one reason why I think we tend to shy away from describing, say, biblical narrative as myth, even though much of it satisfies the three same mythic criteria. The supernatural forces explains the origins of something and it's been told over and over again. I think it's telling that in middle English, the word myth wasn't really used as a noun at all, but rather as a transitive verb, myth in meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. So in this spirit, let's consider what medieval mythic tales reveal and how they might weave together story and history, nature and the supernatural. As Lloyd has said, what I'm going to do this evening to explore the relationship between myth and image in medieval Britain is consider three case studies, interlocking, kind of messily woven together. The first focusing on mythic people, the second on mythic animals, and the third will return to the mythic history that I started with. So let's turn to mythic peoples, although actually you can see perfectly well this isn't a person, this is an exploding chicken, but it's in a manuscript that contains many examples of monstrous races as we'll see in a second. The first of these case studies then is a text known as The Wonders of the East, which survives in three illuminated pre-conquest copies. The earliest of them is this one, an old English text made around about the year 1000, in a manuscript that is celebrated mainly because it's the sole surviving witness to the old English masterpiece, a Beowulf. Most, if not all, of the texts in this manuscript are occupied with monsters one way or the other, which is something that's been greatly commented on by scholars beginning really with J.R.R. Tolkien and in almost all of the commentaries on it since, trying to understand how it's a kind of monster can compendium this manuscript. As you can see from the scorched edges, it survived really just by the skin of its teeth. It was caught up in a terrible fire at Ash Burnham House in 1731 that destroyed or damaged a great proportion of Sir Robert Cotton's celebrated library. So we're very lucky indeed to have this manuscript and it's slightly kind of, I don't know, a vertiginous feeling thinking of how narrowly we missed out on the poem Beowulf. Fortunately though, this text survives in a couple of other copies. So The Wonders of the East is a kind of illustrated catalogue of marvelous peoples and animals that inhabited distant lands, Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, India. It has 32 entries in this catalogue and it offers succinct rather clipped factual descriptions of each of its topics, giving the reader the essential facts about each wonder. I'm going to begin, as you will have seen, with one of my favourites, the Exploding Chicken. I think it's one of my favourites really because chickens are so unbelievably ordinary and it's really only by reading the text that you discover that this one, which inhabits a place called Lintabelsenia near the Red Sea, that it is a really truly terrifying chicken. It looks very much like ordinary English chickens, red in colour, but if anyone tries to grab one or touch it, they immediately burn up their body. They'll kill you. They'll incinerate you immediately. And the text says this is extraordinary magic. Immediately below is a combustible beast, a kind of theme on this page that lives in the same vicinity. Then the text says, when these beasts hear a human voice, they run quickly. The beasts have eight feet and valkyrie eyes and two heads. And if anyone tries to touch them, they set their bodies aflame. These two are extraordinary beasts. I've got a detail of these self-combusting animals. The text takes us on a kind of tour of places that exist yet also don't exist in the land around and beyond the Red Sea. Its principal focus is on a category of wondrous peoples, known as the monstrous races, which can be traced back through Pliny the Elder and into Greco-Roman traditions even more ancient than Pliny. One of my top favourites of the monstrous races described in the text is a character called Donestra, who lives on an island in the Red Sea. The text says, have grown like soothsayers from head to the navel with a human part as well as an animal. They know all human speech, absolutely extraordinary polyglot that can speak to anyone that encounters them. When they see someone from a foreign country, they name him and his kinsmen with the names of acquaintances and with lying words. They beguile him and capture him. After that, eat him all up except for the head. Then they sit and weep over the head, incredibly lonely creatures. Imagine knowing all languages and you want to make a friend for some reason, you don't seem to have any. You chat away to them and then before you know it, there you are, decapitated head in your lap, no one to talk to again. You can see the look of consternation or alarm on the face of his companion who might already be missing a foot. I don't know if that leg has already been detached. It also describes a character called Pinotius who lives even further east, who's a giant 15 feet tall and 10 feet wide. They're rather squarish monsters. We'll see another in another of these manuscripts. They have large heads and ears like fans. They spread one beneath them at night to use as a kind of camping mattress, one ear as a mattress, and then they wrap themselves up in the other like a duvet. The text says, their ears are very light and their bodies white as milk and if they see or perceive anyone in those lands, they take their ears in their hands and go far and flee using them like a hang gliding sort of thing. They hang glide away rapidly with their ears so swiftly that one might think that they flew. The reader of this manuscript would be able to have a kind of digest of these kind of wondrous creatures of the far east and then turn to Beowulf, which is very much set in the North Sea. It includes kind of wonders of the east as well as wonders of the west. Another splendid copy of the wonder's text was made maybe in Canterbury or Winchester, probably 25 or so years later than Beowulf and it too was caught up in the cotton fire though not nearly as badly as the Beowulf manuscript. It presents this text in Latin and Old English. You might say kind of three of the languages that obtained in England at this time, images Old English and Latin. It has many of the same creatures as in the Beowulf manuscript and I'm going to show you slightly different ones just to give a kind of broader coverage of the monstrous races that this text is concerned with. This page includes a wild animal called a lertesis which has donkey's ears and sheep's wool and bird's feet. His companion is a very celebrated creature that winds up tracking all through the Middle Ages and into Shakespeare and beyond called a blema. He gets a very short write-up which describes him as living on an island south of a place called Bricsontes, totally undiscoverable on any known map where there are men who have no heads but have faces in their chests and they're eight feet tall and it says eight feet wide. This chap seems to be rather unhappy about being trapped in the space of the miniature gazing out at us as if he wants to escape which is precisely what he does in the coming centuries as we'll see in a little while. Some of the entries in this wonder's text explain the origins of precious materials, of spices, of jewels and of gold. On the origin of gold, for example, we learn that it is harvested by giant ants in a country called Gorgonias. Ants, it says, are born as biggest dogs which have feet like grasshoppers and are red and black in colour. The ants dig up gold from the ground from before the night to the fifth hour of the day. People who are bold enough to take the gold bring with them male camels and females with their young. They tie up the young before and cross the river. They load the gold onto the females and mount them themselves and leave the males there. Then the ants detect the females and click over to the camel picture. They're very unhappy looking camel. I think the male camel is looking rather nervous and you'll find out why in a second. The ants detect the males and while the ants are occupied with the males nibbling them as you can see the men cross over the river with the females and the gold. They are so swift that one would think that they are flying. Kind of rather remarkable origin story, kind of satisfying I think if not the supernatural, well possibly this is supernatural, then the drive that so much myth has to explain the source of something. This manuscript's 11th century readers, probably located somewhere in the south of England may well have marveled at its accounts of unimaginably distant lands. Some place names familiar from other sources, especially the Bible, but many mysterious and indeed very difficult to pinpoint on any map past or present. Did these readers believe that these places, people and marvels were real? It's impossible to be certain. Such tales had been in circulation from antiquity and so had a kind of patina of authority. In the fourth century, Saint Augustine of Hippo had actually reflected quite carefully on the veracity of the legends that he'd inherited. Writing in the city of God, he asks whether we're to believe that certain monstrous races of men spoken of in secular history really existed and if so whether they were descended from Noah. Augustine in his account mentions a great many of the monstrous races that can be found in Pliny's natural history and then are refracted through these wonder texts. He talks about Cyclops, Hermaphrodites, Pygmies, Sceopods, and dog-headed men known as Sinocephaly who are similar but less carnivorous than the Donestra. Augustine reasons that it ought not to seem absurd to us that as in individual races there are monstrous births so in the whole race there are monstrous races. Wherefore to conclude this question cautiously and guardedly either these things which have been told of some races have no existence at all or if they do exist they are not human races. But his most interesting inference is that if they do exist and if they are human they are descended from Adam with a clear implication that his readers should evangelise to them that they had souls and could be saved. So there's a kind of moral imperative for Augustine as he places them at least possibly within the frame of divine creation. The makers and probably also the readers of this manuscript would certainly have been highly educated at least capable of reading Latin probably old English as well. You don't need to read both I suppose you just need to read one but also bringing to the text a comprehensive understanding of the Bible and associated texts. And they would also have had access to hugely impressive libraries. The largest library in England at this time was at Canterbury Cathedral at Christchurch and that library included copies of Augustine City of God and also Isidore of Seville's etymologies which is a kind of encyclopedic work in describing all of these monstrous races and very much more as well. So they would have been able to read this text against the other works in their reference library. And this learning is refracted in the Tiberius manuscript in a number of ways perhaps most impressive of which is an utterly remarkable world map which you may be encountering again a little later in this series but it's so interesting I think it's worth coming at it from a number of different angles. This is one of the earliest surviving maps of its kind in Europe and certainly the earliest in England ultimately derived from a now lost Roman exemplar. And since we're considering Britain's place in the world in this series I think it's worth taking a closer look at this source and its organization of the world. We're used to a very particular view of the world I mean even if you didn't happen to grow up here I grew up on the Pacific Northwest coast the map in my classroom probably just like yours had the prime meridian running straight through Greenwich so the world is set on an axis that has London at the centre and if you're familiar with this map then a map like this I think seems very strange indeed orientated towards the east with land masses that seem incredibly unfamiliar but as your eye resolves you can I think start to see the very impressive amount of knowledge that is puzzled into it and I've put some of the kind of key land masses on the European maps at this time conceived of a world with three continents the largest of which was Asia and most but not all maps are orientated towards the east with Europe and Africa below If you play I think quite a fun little game with this map which is to crib a view from Google Earth and to spin it around you start to see that the geography in this map is actually not so ignorant at all with some very familiar shapes Europe, Africa and Asia all start to resolve in quite familiar ways with major bodies of water the Caspian Sea, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea very literally the sea in the middle of the land dividing Europe, Africa and Asia and then we have the British Isles not right at the axis of the world but at its very edge in the bottom left hand corner so that I think is something that should give us I think some sense of how British people place themselves in the world not at the centre but at the edge and I think also that the enterprise of a map like this is rather different than in some respects than the kind of school map that I showed a little while ago it's not just a map of geopolitics it's a map of ideas one that gives very special priority to a world centred on Jerusalem and which is also encoded with all different types of information placename certainly but also I've pulled out a few things that we will return to biblical history so it includes the spot at which Noah's Ark alighted as the waters receded after the flood it shows us where lions are although truthfully I'm not really sure that that's true lions are located just there to the east of the Caspian Sea although happy to be corrected about that and it also shows where monstrous beings Gog and Magog will return to them in a little while Gryffins and dog-headed people are located so it's a really kind of remarkable succinct piece of knowledge with all kinds of information historical, geographical, mythical I mentioned that a lot of the forms of knowledge in these manuscripts escapes out of the wondrous texts and out of the kind of map of Mundi that I was just looking at in the Tiberius altar and into other sources in the later Middle Ages and I've got two examples of this from the 13th century the first is from a really remarkable Psalter in the British Library a Psalter is a kind of manuscript that has a central body of text so the 150 Psalms of the Old Testament they include other things as well and often images this one includes a completely mind-blowing array of wonders and monsters including Blemai who's escaped from the wonders of the east got himself a pink miniskirt and a crossbow and is proudly kind of gazing out from underneath one of the Psalms and you'll see as you look at later medieval manuscripts all kinds of monstrous races reconfigured in different ways Pinotius, Sceopods which are described in Pliny and in the wonders of the east which are creatures who have one giant foot they hop along the Sub-Saharan sands of Africa until the sand gets too hot when they roll over onto their backs to use their giant foot as an umbrella to shield themselves from the burning midday sun they wind up hopping all over Psalters and Books of Hours and other texts as well so there's a kind of rather profound afterlife where they become decoupled from the text that explains them and whether that means that an ordinary viewer of a book like this in the 13th century would have known about the Blemai and would have been able to understand it in relation to the Plinyan story or if there is a kind of provocation by the artist who is indifferent to whether you understand or not I think is a kind of open and interesting question another second example of the afterlife of these creatures is in another Psalter this one really small smaller than your iPad but larger than your iPhone I think it's about this big which begins with a kind of wonderful tiny map of the world much more typical of the medieval maps of the world that you'll probably be seeing in the maps lecture later on in this series and it places the world in a much more Christian setting kind of obviously from the image that you have on the screen than the Tiberius map which includes biblical information but lacks the kind of Christ figure that you hear sits atop the world and if you didn't get the message is also holding the world in his hand like a cricket ball with the three continents Asia, the larger and Europe and Africa inscribed in a fine white line and this tiny map includes a huge amount of information Jerusalem is right at the navel of the world Eden is at the top it contains many many place names from Europe, Asia and Africa with a stronger tilt maybe than we found in the Tiberius map towards biblical knowledge this is a sort of map that you might find quite handy if you're trying to work out where things took place in the Book of Kings or similar it also though has arrayed along the southern edge of the world in tiny little figures and this is really small imagine you're holding in your hand a single piece of basmati rice that is approximately how big these tiny little figures are and it contains all kinds of wonders of the east arrayed along the northern edge of Africa including a Blemai who's again hopped out of the wonders of the east text out of Pliny and into this map of the world with its kind of puzzling and fascinating combination of verifiable geographical information and myth and biblical context so we're going to now flip to think about animals as the second case study in my talk this evening which has many similarities to the wonders of the east text that I started with a kind of catalogue of wonders known as the bestiary this is a genre that like the wonders of the east emerges from classical sources and then very much like the wonders gets recast in a kind of Christian model of the world the sources are an ancient Greek text known as the physiologus Aristotle who wrote so much about the nature of animals Pliny the Elder and then these texts are kind of gathered together by Isidore of Seville in his etymologies and then developed further in a class of manuscript that was very popular in the Middle Ages especially in England from the 13th century and we have some really remarkable surviving examples ranging from rather workaday examples and I do have one of those to show you as well as super deluxe copies and we're very lucky that most of the main bestiary manuscripts that I'm going to be talking about have been digitised by the Bodleian and the British Library so if you want to see more you'll be able to jot down the shelf marks in my captions you'll be able to track down the manuscripts and leaf through them at leisure I'm going to start with a couple of images from a manuscript known as the Aberdeen Bestiary because it's in Aberdeen University Library which has also been very brilliantly digitised with a full transcription and translation of all the texts so if you want to see more of this manuscript you'll be able to as well and it begins with an account of the creation of the world by God as in the book of Genesis and here one of a series of images we see God creating a number of animals elephants a rabbit a squirrel eating a nut and a cat as well as some cattle I can't work out what all of them are because of the terrible smudge and a goat so we see God creating fairly ordinary animals animals that I think we wouldn't want to describe as mythical in any way and the bestiary catalogs manuscripts are rather catalogs animals that fall into a number of categories from the ordinary like the squirrel on this page to the exotic like the elephant all the way through to animals that might not exist at all like the unicorn or the griffin and they treat them all more or less the same with the same degree of seriousness and this implication that they exist and are real and need to be interpreted as part of a book of nature written by God for humans to interpret and the bestiary gives us information factual information about each beast appearance, behavior, particular characteristics and frequently takes a kind of moral approach explaining how their behaviors exemplify good or wicked behavior and quite often citing biblical and patristic sources to underpin their interpretations I've got one example from the Aberdeen bestiary which is a creature called the bonacon very kind of bull like creature as it says and in fact the text describes it thus it has the head of a bull and thereafter its whole body is the size of a bull with the main neck of a horse its horns are convoluted curling back on themselves in such a way that if anyone comes up against it he's not harmed but the protection which its forehead denies the monster is furnished by its bowels for when it turns to flee it discharges fumes from the excrement of its belly over a distance of three acres the heat of which sets fire to anything that it touches shades I think of the exploding chickens and the strange wolf-like creature from the Red Sea in this way it drives off its pursuers with its harmful excrement so entertaining and informative I think in equal measure and also unbelievably luxurious with this shimmering gold leaf background and very kind of richly painted miniature not all bestiaries, in fact most bestiaries aren't quite this glamorous but the next one I'm going to show you is Bodley 764 also fully digitised on the Bodleian's website we're going to look at a few examples from this manuscript including the unicorn which has a very extended write-up and interpretation in this manuscript which is accompanied as you can see by a rather distressing image, a virgin who's the only person who can capture a unicorn incredibly ferocious and very very fast about the size of a goat and if you want to catch one you need to find a virgin no easy task sadly but once you've got your virgin the unicorn will come and put its head in her lap and then the hunters can come and kill it and the text describes the unicorn as a little beast not unlike a young goat an extraordinarily swift with a horn in the middle of its brow that no hunter can catch without the assistance of the virgin as I say and then it segways into interpretation of the unicorn that likens it to our Lord Jesus Christ the spiritual unicorn of whom it is said my beloved is like the son of their unicorns quoting the song of songs and so the analogy that develops is that the virgin who catches the unicorn is the virgin Mary who catches Christ in her womb who's then killed like Christ on the cross and so these hunters are likened by analogy to the persecutors of Christ and maybe with the spears would recall to the mind of the viewer Longinus piercing the side of Christ at the crucifixion so it's not a real creature and yet it is used to expose a kind of deeper reality in which the convinced medieval Christian would most sincerely have believed Other creatures in this manuscript have a kind of similar if not identical kind of patterns of thought associated with them so we've got the siren which comes to the middle ages I mean really ultimately probably from Homer's account of Odysseus who is warned by Cersei on his way back to Ithaca to stop up his ears lest he be tempted by the song of the sirens Homer doesn't explain what the sirens are whether they're birds or fish in fact in Homer's text they sound more like birds than fish and medieval artists if you look up siren online there's a wonderful website bestiary.ca where you'll get a kind of wonderful catalogue of medieval beasts you'll see that many medieval artists hedge their bets providing a fish's tail and also wings for these creatures and sometimes two tails as on the Starbucks logo and what we have in this manuscript is a warning that sailors will fall asleep to the beautiful song of the sirens who will then attack them and rip them to pieces completely unlike the story of Ariel which is I think a terrible desecration of the true kind of dangerous story of the siren I made sure to equip my daughters with the real story of the siren so that they could torment their friends on the playground with the... I mean these sirens would never have given up their voices for a boyfriend put it that way they would have I think eaten the boyfriend and that is what they're doing here and the interpretation that the text offers is that the men are succumbing to a kind of spiritual slumber leaving them prey to the rapacious sexual appetite so women who want to tempt them away from their monastic orders and their clerical vows and so forth so beware sexy songstress fish says the text my final example from this manuscript is probably a little self-indulgent because it involves one of my most favourite animals I'm a great advocate of the barnacle not that many people have barnacles as favourite animals I think so I'm a kind of underdog champion with a deep love of barnacles and part of this comes from the tale of the bestiary which recounts how there are in Ireland a species of bird known as barnacles which nature produces in a way which contradicts her own laws they first appear it says as growths on pine logs floating on the water they hang from seaweed on the log their bodies protected by a shell so that they may grow more freely and then they hold on with their beaks and it's this stage in their development that we see in this image in due course they grow a covering of strong feathers and either fall from the water or change to free flight in the air and interestingly this is a sort of unusual intrusion of an authorial voice into this text it says I have seen them myself with my own eyes many times thousands of these small bird-like bodies hanging from just one log on the seashore in their shells and already formed and it then goes on to describe how because their flesh that comes from neither land nor sea monks can eat them on Fridays or when they're fasting a rather wonderful delicacy as you may have surmised the stocked barnacle or the goose barnacle which the bestiary interprets following on from Isidore and Gerald of Wales and other writers who consider that the barnacle goose is the adult form of the goose barnacle and so far as I'm aware no one has been able to verify whether or not this is the case but the bestiary certainly gives it as a solemn fact the last of the bestiary examples that I'm going to look at comes from the Westminster bestiary which very unfortunately hasn't been digitised at all but I do have this rather magnificent example of a passage from this manuscript that relates to the monstrous races it kind of recasts Isidore of Seville's text and illustrates it with a giant a three-faced giant, a tiny pygmy a Skiapod whom I mentioned earlier and for monstrous races known as Bragg-Maniae and just to demonstrate that not all medieval bestiaries are super deluxe and glamorous and filled with gold here's a rather scruffier one which is another example of a third so-called third family bestiary that includes this text these manuscripts reflect more than a thousand years of lore about animals and the people of the world and established their authority in a variety of ways they cite the Bible, ancient authorities of witness accounts ordinary familiar creatures goats, ants, crows give credibility to the exotic but not unknown lions, elephants and also to the fabulous griffins, unicorns, basilisks the images add a further layer of credibility illustrations underpin the text showing as well as telling but their ultimate purpose is not to provide a truthful zoology or anthropology rather than to fill the reader and viewer with wonder and to offer them a way of thinking about nature and a set of moral examples to follow so with these examples in mind we'll turn to my third and final kind of case study of mythic art in medieval England and this takes many of the mythic modes that we've been considering and deploys them as history in the 1130s the cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth set himself the task of writing a history of the kings of England he explains at the start of his text that he intended his work to be a prequel to the works of Gildus the Wise and the venerable Bede who'd written nothing, Geoffrey complains of the kings who lived here before Christ's incarnation strategically vague about his sources Geoffrey claimed that his history was a translation of a very old book in the British tongue given to him by a certain Walter Archdeacon of Oxford notionally beginning around 1200 BC Geoffrey's history opens with a conquest of Britain by a band of Trojan refugees and continues through the era of King Arthur up to the 7th century AD inventing King Lear along the way elaborating on earlier sources including the 9th century history of Brutonum attributed to Neneus Geoffrey relates how Aeneus and other survivors of the Trojan war fled to Italy and founded a kingdom there Aeneus' son Ascantius founded and ruled Albus which passed to his son Silveus the father of Brutus fulfilling a prophecy Brutus kills his father in a hunting accident and is exiled to Greece and there he discovers the descendants of King Priam enslaved to the Greek King Pandrasus promising to liberate them Brutus became the leader of those who survived the fall of Troy and together they escaped and Geoffrey seems quite aware of the kind of Trojan legends and very able to kind of remix and graft a new story onto them he explains how the goddess Diana offered Brutus prophetic advice about where the displaced Trojans should go advising them to go to the west to the kingdoms beyond Gaul where there lies in an island of the ocean surrounded by the sea a place where giants once lived but which is now deserted and waiting for your people Brutus and his group battled their way westward Geoffrey gives us lots of detail about their adventures eventually loaded with treasure plundered from the Gauls they sailed to the island of Albion making landfall in the region of Totnes and here's one of the very many examples of Geoffrey's text with his claim that there are no inhabitants on the island but for a few giants Diana it turns out was mistaken in that one not in significant fact and here we have a map from the end of the 14th century called the Goff map which also has a kind of easterly orientation it gives, it makes the island look rather sock like I think I think you can tell that the people who made this map didn't know that much about Scotland but had a fairly secure understanding of Wales and England and it's a little hard to read now without assistance but inside the red box is a rich set of details of place names and also a little inscription that explains where Brutus landed with the Trojans rather in the area around Totnes so they alighted at Totnes Brutus names the island Brutain after himself is people Britons and they discover Diana's error the island is completely overrun with giants and they exterminate them all but for the last of the giants called Gog Magog and Geoffrey describes how Brutus preserves Gog Magog so that his best friend Coroneas who's an inveterate wrestler of giants can have a battle with the monster which he describes in kind of a resting detail and we'll move to the second image returning to the peculiar Brut that we started with to its second image of conquest which is the kind of climax of the wrestling match between Coroneas, future Duke of Cornwall and the monster and Geoffrey describes how they come to the top of a cliff into wrestle the giant has the upper hand at first and cracks three of Coroneas' ribs and this so enrages the Trojan that he heaves the giant up onto his shoulders and runs to the cliff throws him over the edge and then the giants body is broken on the rocks below staining forever the rocky shore with its blood and this returning to the gives us I think a really fascinating interpretation of this text you might notice that the ships are very different than the ones that the one that Albina and her sisters arrived on fully rigged with furled sails and a crowd of armed Trojans Coroneas I spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out and I feel rather foolish about this trying to figure out what the heraldry was on his tunic and always explained when I happened to notice the arms of Cornwall on some duchy originals Oatcakes so he's very very on message I'm surprised in fact that the Prince of Wales hasn't used this image to sell his delicious baked goods and so we have this account of the monster as well that will return to shortly after the giants are finally exterminated gog me gog the last of this indigenous species the Brutus then makes his way to a spot in the Thames Estuary and founds a city known as the new Troy later known as London which is close to where we are now we're outside the walls of London this is a fantastic manuscript somewhat less neatly painted than the Lord manuscript that we've been looking at which narrates this story in the upper portion with the arrival of the Trojans and the very well-dressed giants in wonderful hats and mini-dresses they exterminate them and then we have Brutus and his stone masons beginning to construct the glittering city of London and as you will have picked up I think the different images that we've been looking at Geoffrey's story was an absolutely extraordinary success circulating in Latin, French and English versions and translated very quickly after its composition into Anglo-Norman French and I'm showing you here a diagram that we won't discuss in any detail simply to kind of indicate the many different versions of this story that circulated all deep into the age of print it was first printed by Caxton in 1480 and there are all kinds of fascinating crossings over between Latin, French and English and between manuscript and print the Brut text that I've been discussing in relation to the Lord manuscript with its Albina legend is one of the most popular Middle English texts that survives of all in more than 150 manuscript witnesses so it's a runaway success this text and a sign of its success is that it gets the episode of the foundation of Britain gets extracted from Geoffrey's historical narrative and inserted into other peoples for example Matthew Parris's Chronica Maiora which was composed and illustrated by this wonderful kind of artist Montchronicler at St Albins includes he and his predecessor Richard of Wendover insert the Brutus legend into a recounting of the book of judges kind of giving this story the same billing as a biblical narrative and what we have here is Brutus and his men sacrificing to the goddess Diana who has the most wonderful kind of winged and the kind of sacrificed animal at her feet so it gets stitched into other historical narratives as well Matthew also includes Brutus as the first in his gallery of kings of Britain and here he also gives us a wonderful detail at the feet of Brutus the kind of gherning monstrous giants at his feet defeated by the first king the the story of the defeat of the giant sometimes too gets incorporated in other kinds of historical chronicle this is the very beginning of a long genealogical role of the kings of England normally these genealogical roles begin with the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy but this one rather unusually starts with the Trojans on horseback defeating the gherning helmeted giants right at the start so it's a kind of establisher for the entirety of British history and here we are back at Lod 733 with Diocletian and Albina at the start of this story so Geoffrey's Brutus legend was really cast as the inciting incident full of British history yet it left readers wondering where had the giants come from and by the 14th century this story of Albina that we've already discussed and her sisters had emerged also by the mid 15th century Albina's conquest prefigured Brutus' in many versions of the Brut Chronicle in which Geoffrey's mythic history is intertwined with a rather more conventional historical narrative thus the third final conquest pictured in the Lod manuscript is the Norman conquest of 1066 this Galfriedan legend has been dovetailed very neatly jointed on to a narrative history that is rather more verifiable Geoffrey himself wasn't interested in recent history and the conquest does not feature at all in his narrative yet it was certainly an important part of Norman's context in which he was writing his preoccupation with the ancient origins and longevity of Britain perhaps underscores to his readers whose parents and grandparents would have included Norman's settlers the deeper history to which they were connected and it perhaps helps to explain the incredible popularity and durability of Geoffrey's Brutus myth and if this gives us some insights into the context in which Geoffrey was writing I think we should finish up by focusing on how Geoffrey availed himself of the mythic sources that were all around him to populate the Brutus story by tying Britain's history to Troy he gave the nation a foundation co-evil with Rome's in fact maybe even slightly earlier and established a powerful myth of London as the new Troy which is a recurrent myth coming back for example after the great fire of London and most recently to my knowledge after the worst night of the Blitz when newspaper headlines described London raised to the ground as once again the new Troy to rise again from the ashes so it's a very persistent conception of London by populating Albion with a race of indigenous giants Geoffrey made conquerors of the Trojans rather than comparatively less heroic settlers that they would have been had they not had to defeat the giants and by populating Albion with giants Geoffrey associated the Trojan conquest with a tradition that identified giants with the primeval in Genesis before the flood giants populated the earth and although seemingly exterminated in the flood giants reappear here and there throughout the Old Testament Alg of Bishan in the Book of Numbers David's Philistine opponent in the Book of Kings for example naming the giant Gog Magog was also a knowing move fusing together the apocalyptic bogeyman mentioned in Ezekiel and Revelation and evoking to the well-known legend that Alexander the Great had imprisoned Gog and Magog behind a mighty wall medieval cartographers like the ones that we've the one that we've encountered already located Gog and Magog on an island in Asia near the Urals and we've seen here that they live very nearby the Griffins as well in this monstrous landscape to the east of the Caspian another wonderful sadly lost map of Mundi known as the Ebstorf map destroyed in 1943 absolutely enormous the largest known map of Mundi also includes a wonderful detail of Gog Magog intramuralled near the Caspian cannibal like devouring the limbs of struggling victims nearby it's kind of useful to note that in the V&A's gallery medieval gallery they've included a very large reproduction of this map so if you want to see it that's probably the best chance of seeing it I think probably about two thirds of the size that it originally was but here we have anyway Gog and Magog again and they get refracted too in the legends of Alexander which were very popular all around Europe and beyond in the Middle Ages and so here we have a rather scruffy but wonderful example of Thomas of Kent's romance of Alexander from the mid 13th century which gives us Gog and Magog like wild men hairy and consuming chomping on body parts in a way that might remind you of Donestra waving his victims leg around in the Beowulf manuscript and again in the hairy form of Gog and Magog might recall the wild man character of Corinaeus's enemy in the Lord manuscript and the Lord artist I think interestingly does seem aware of this tradition and to want to remix it a little himself with the wild man or with the giants hairy coat in marked contrast to Corinaeus's heraldic tunic that I've already mentioned the tales and images that I've shared this evening all fit I think with the definition of myth that I offered at the start supernatural forces explanatory motivation frequent retelling and I think they also show how in the Middle Ages myth could be a transitive verb to show, to reveal, to demonstrate if not a literal truth then perhaps a deeper one something like Picasso's quip that art is a lie that makes us realise the truth I'm going to end by observing that myth can in the end become real after a fashion over the centuries Geoffrey's giants have taken on a life of their own Gog, Magog and Corinaeus became by the 15th century emblems of the city of London made into pageant figures and welcome monarchs and honour mares on their inauguration days and in fact many of the post medieval legends about giants that circulated in early modern and modern England were myths concocted to explain the curiosity of the pageant figures that had been set up in the guild hall to the bemusment of many generations of Londoners and even now every year Geoffrey's giants walk the streets of London here shown with their makers and also national treasure Giles Brandrith to the bemusment and consternation I think of many generations of Londoners so in considering these myths we are I think inevitably participating in them in some quite interesting ways from noun to transitive verb walking with Geoffrey through the streets of London and I'm going to end there with an extremely long clip of the cash from the BBC in 2016 so thank you thank you that was absolutely wonderful that was really brilliant and it's still going on I'm sorry am I upstaging a national treasure should I we just need to go back to the still of Giles with the basket weavers I mean just to emphasize what a brilliant piece of work Alex has done this is such a vast hinterland of complex overwhelming and critical material so to be able to synthesize and bring out these really central important themes in that way this is just amazingly impressive so thank you so much so I'm going to be moderating questions and I'm also going to ask the first question so I ponder questions we were taking questions from here and also from people at home but I just wanted to start I suppose by asking in a sense a question about one of what's I just took to be a central kind of theme or backbone of your talk so one of the points that you sort of highlighted throughout is the way in which certain kind of images from these narratives of myths I mean I love the way you talk about escape and the way you show that visually but also become decoupled and you find them in the pageant figures you find them in other stories in all kinds of places and you particularly talked about the giants and the way in which the giants do that and I guess I wondered in a sense what brought you to the giants and why that image seemed to take on such a life of its own what is the appeal of the idea and the image of a country that was populated by giants That's a complicated question So what brought me to it was my students in fact I used to teach a special subject called the monster in medieval art and I tried to jack it up with the most exciting monsters that I could think of I excluded exploding chickens chickens aren't interesting giants were fairly boring I mean all the giants are is very large people and at one year at kind of midterm I think I sent around a questionnaire to the students saying what would you draw up and what would you add what should we have an extra seminar on and there was huge support there was a groundswell of support for giants and I started teaching a seminar on the brute legends and I think from there the ordinariness of that form of monstrosity gave wage I think an understanding of just how ubiquitous and therefore interesting giants are and why are these giants why have they become such a kind of lasting symbol of nationhood I think there's no simple answer to that I think part of it is that Geoffrey's conception of them tapping into biblical legend and then also bouncing off the Alexander legends meant that they were highly remixable and familiar yet unfamiliar in ways that made them very elastic over time but I think the other thing about them though is they have a kind of feeling of a folktale that something that is a kind of like a springs up from the groundwater of a kind of population but every example that we have of the giants pulls in the other direction towards an elite Geoffrey was an extraordinarily learned Latin cleric and he's writing for an erudite clerical audience and even now as they walk through the streets of London now it's the Lord Mayor and the livery companies of the city of London that encourage it so it's really fascinating because it's sort of like an academic idea of a folktale and also what you're saying about how at first you thought of giants well they're just like people but bigger they blame me I but of course that makes them a bit uncanny because they're sort of like people not exactly like people and representing them in such a way that they seem strange is kind of a challenge to an artist oh wonderful anyway I think I've monopolized the questions long enough okay so should we start with one from the room maybe and then we can take one from from home question in the room we could also go to one at home if there's one from home as well I've got a lot of questions coming in from home actually it's quite hard to choose from between them but one question from Tim No which is our first question Alex was did anyone publicly question the more far fetched mythical stories at the time would they have been accused of heresy if they've done so so medieval skepticism is a really fascinating topic and there are lots of examples of people questioning the inherited wisdom that they received there are famous examples of people questioning whether well even holy relics were authentic and certainly I think people wondered as Saint Augustine of Hippo did whether the monstrous races were real I don't know that heresy I think questioning the dogmas of the church I think would have been heretical but wondering whether a griffin was a real animal probably not so much it is I think telling though that cathedral treasuries included unicorn horns and griffin claws so I think there probably was a kind of reasonably secure appreciation that they might have existed or probably existed and probably also a sense that one might have I don't know about Santa Claus taking pleasure in the potential truth or untruth of a received legend but there are after the middle ages and as people work their way through the foundation myths of Britain there are lots of examples of early modern historians really trying to demonstrate their historical mouse by distinguishing the verifiable from the not verifiable and you'll be shocked to discover that many early modern historians thought that Geoffrey of Monmouth had made it up I wonder where they got that idea but of course he'd actually discovered it all from an ancient book in a British language that only he could read given him Thank you Alex. I was going to just pick up on that because I remember I think in our time on Gerald of Wales where Melvin Bragg was absolutely committed to trying to say that Gerald was somehow an idiot for buying into it like he was stupid Gerald Wales as I know he was a writer in the 13th century he wanted to be Archbishop of Canterbury but he became Archbishop of St David's Benio he was a very learned man he made these important journeys to Wales, to England obviously but also to Ireland and my question kind of comes round to the point of the senses in both relation to image and reality so you talked about how I think in one of the texts it talks about I've seen them myself with my very own eyes and Gerald does that too where he'll be describing something completely ridiculous to us and then he says but I've seen this with my very own eyes so the relationship between sight physical sight and then the representation of an image and our perception of it through sight to the reality behind the image and the act itself and it not being in a state of stupidity I think you were just talking about these things both interacting at the same time pleasurably in a way well I think someone like Gerald of Wales who I didn't really talk about this evening except for in relation to the barnacles in fact I think the passage in that bestiary either it's quoting Gerald or Gerald is quoting the bestiary in his claim to have seen things with his own eyes although he he has a kind of almost kind of ethnographic sensibility as he describes I don't know fish with golden teeth and surprisingly attractive bearded women who were very good with textiles as he kind of goes around describing the kind of marvels of the west he's very much in that genre I think historians and I'm quite content to describe Jeffrey and Gerald and other writers of this kind as historians of the middle ages I think often present modern historiographers with a real challenge because it was a world in which the miraculous was completely accepted you know where a historically verifiable account of a bishop saint say you know might have dates in which he was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury but then also explain how he would throw demons out of wolverines using a prayer or stay a falling beam with a mark of the cross there's a world in which extraordinary things I think were accepted and I suppose what I would say about that too is that extraordinary things do happen I mean the world is full of marvels and if one chooses to disregard that or treat everything like you know in a sort of jaded way as a common place then I think it's a world denuded of some of its wonder and mystery and we are the losers I suppose so I don't know but I do think that playfulness also accounts for things I think someone like Gerald is playing with his reader and you know tempting them to think of familiar places or nearby places is just as wonderful as the eastern world described by Pliny and his successors you know? How rude of Melvin though No I've got two more I've got two related questions coming from him from an anonymous attendee who's asked why do you think giants or the feet of giants is such a recurring element in myths especially myths that we need to define groups for instance nations and religions and the second question which you can almost answer is it's been asked by Joseph Rosenblum who asks does the conquest of giants signify victory of civilisation over demonic nature Well I think the answer to this second question is yes I think that is the function that they perform in these stories I think why do giants have this significance is a much more profound and unanswerable question of the kind that I don't know Claude Levy Strauss or Joseph Conrad might grapple with I think a kind of simple answer if an incomplete one is that a lot of medieval mythographers take their cues from the book of Genesis and the idea that there's an anti-Diluvian world that is populated with sinful creatures the giants of Genesis another set of texts known as the book of Enoch are meant to be the offspring of men and angels who are completely sinful and one of the inciting incidents for the divine flood described in the book of Genesis but that only goes so far that only takes you to the clearly very pervasive all around the world in the midst of many nations that there was a giant time before and maybe kind of looping back to what I was saying in answer to Lloyd's question to me it's fascinating and I have nothing more than a kind of observation about this it's fascinating to me that in fact there was a time it's just simply the case that there was a time of giant flora and fauna before the huge meteorites wiped out the dinosaurs there was a time with and in fact many megafaunal animals survived well into the modern era I mean the last auroch the kind of great mighty almost mythical bull lived there's one actually there's a skull of an auroch on display right now in the wonderful Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum became extinct in the 17th century you know there are such wonders could in fact did exist one I think plausible explanation for many of the myths about a time of giants is that people found bones they found the bones of dinosaurs and other kind of megafaunal remains I mean today all the time the giant Irish elk I mean you know absolutely titanic creatures and so I think I think if you find something like that or you know you have a cathedral treasury that has enormous unexplicably large femurs in it and we know that they did you might observe well these giant creatures don't exist anymore but they clearly once did and therefore think that literal truth to some of the inherited myths and legends and Genesis stories but I can't really go much further than that but to observe that you know there were one I mean well the largest creature ever to live is still alive I suppose in the form of the blue whale but you know all the other ones are gone I mean what do you make of the I'm just thinking in terms of the the first kind of discussion that you began with about Albinia and the Balian manuscript so what do you make of the fact that both the trojans and the giants to some extent come from elsewhere that they're two waves actually so the giants don't spring up from the soil or in a sense in some ways they do but they're the fact that their mothers are also from away what role does that play I mean not I'm not even thinking in general I'm thinking in that manuscript just the miniature that you began with so I think I think well it's very difficult to just isolate that one manuscript from the entire narrative tradition because it is innovative in many ways and in many things in that manuscript that is I think a little striking is it is quite interested as you observe in mothers I mean it puts amongst the trojans females who are distinctly absent in Jeffrey's text you'd think that there was some kind of Parthenogenesis happening once the Britons had settled down where would they get girlfriends and then the devil would have to rematerialize all over again so I think some of the thinking I think is just common sense in understanding that and have migrated it's interesting though I think that one of the problems that you identify bead also touches on in his history of the English people everyone including us I think is slightly puzzled about the great age of migration in the fourth fifth century AD where you know and even earlier thinking about another British wonderful British Museum exhibition from a few years ago now about the Celts where I think people did find it mysterious where people had come from and they observed similarities in language and culture in decorative motifs from the Rhine Valley and England and so forth so I think that part of the explanatory power of the story is trying to explain things that people were puzzled by and that even as I say bead was puzzled by where had everybody come from in this kind of great age of migration but I think it's also the kind of time problem probably also I think takes an important cue from back to the book of Genesis which begins at the very beginning with the creation of all things and the peopling of the world and I think some of this storytelling is intended to I guess answer questions provoked by authoritative texts of those kinds and I think interesting in the context of a lecture series about art is what the function of images is in all of this are these kind of narrative traditions that are primarily to do with spoken and textual language or to images play an important part in reinforcing, explaining provoking trying to show people as well as just tell them actually what you just made me think of is in the migration of ideas from one arena to another so those images that sort of escape those images that escape sorry I was so overwhelmed with the excitement you were talking about allow ideas to migrate from one realm to another sorry there were more questions is there another question in the room before I go to the people at home yes sorry yes hallucogenic influences fairly obvious weekly obvious carriers of wisdom carriers of personal experience must be significant in what we've seen tonight have you any view on that no I don't really I mean I have to I don't know that much about maybe more ancient hallucinations although I'm open to trying them I suppose if anybody's got some I think it's entirely possible to come up with an extraordinary tale stone called sober and in fact you're probably more likely to I think we've all had an experience one time or another where an inebriated or intoxicated person attempts to tell an entertaining story and it's entertaining only to them right you know we've all been there but it may be I think you can make hallucinogens out of grains and alcohol and you know an element of ritual drinking in a lot of the tale telling that underpins these stories I mean I mentioned the bale wolf manuscript it has you know lengthy sections of drunken boasting in the hall and so I think the idea that there's a kind of a context for storytelling that involves drink and merriment and conviviality and people coming together is certainly the case that you need hallucinogens to come up with stories like this I mean maybe do you I mean does anyone else think so I mean why not people are always trying to intoxicate themselves one way or the other I suppose shortly that will be the case for many of us but so yeah I don't want to rule it out but I don't necessarily know that it's like a necessary precondition for a wondrous tale put it that way Do we have time for one more from home or one we have time for one more It's a nice short sharp question maybe from Rosemary Clarke she asks how is it that Gogmogog is one person sometimes and two is others Well that's a short question but a long answer I wonder if Rosemary is noticing that in the pageant giants that the basket makers constructed in 2006 or whenever it was the identities of the giants and slipped apart I mean the shortest possible answer is that in the 15th century people started to put up two giants on the gates of London normally on the southern side of London Bridge for royal entries and then sometimes also for royal exits at Temple Bar and there's always two almost always seems to be two of them so who were they from quite an early date from the reign of Mary the first they're identified as Gogmogog and Coronas and it's interesting to me that somehow these arch enemies one of whom murdered the other get revived and turned into companions and articulate companions who instead of being enemies of one another and of the people of Britain become spokes giants for the corporation of the city of London but then they get after the pageants take place the figures get set up in Guildhall and that I think is where confusion starts to arise people constantly forget who the giants were and think that they're Hercules and Samson they think that they're you know Goliath sometimes I mean there's lots of kind of forgetting of this story and then in remembering it the story gets retold so someone will say no no no no it's actually these things it's not Hercules it's Gogmogog and Coronas and then they kind of pull back together again but it's really fascinating to me that when the basket makers company went to this extraordinary effort of weaving these wicker giants they too like so many of their their predecessors had slipped back into a biblical understanding rather than a Galfried in one and I think one of my theories about this is that in the narrative tradition forgetting is just as important as remembering and quite often the things that survive or the provocation for a new tale or a new twist on a tale and it's like that kind of swerve away from an authoritative text and that's part of the kind of richness I think of myth generally is retelling different versions, little twists elaborations, solving problems that are left but I'm quite happy I think it's quite interesting and yeah kind of endearing that they they made these in fact because there had been this terrible kind of huge balloon that was the two giants but they were like conjoined twins that were dragged through the streets of London and the basket makers I think just really disapproved them being a latex balloon and so yeah All right well so we've turned to this image actually perfect so the only thing left is for me to thank Alex so much really thank you so much oh thank you Jessica thank you everyone thank you everybody thank you