In a side conversation on a recent post here, my pseudonymous occasional correspondent known as “Froog” recently undertook some research for me. I’d come across this extremely cool wallpaper (well, I think it’s cool; that’s it at the right, and you can click the image to see a larger version); alas, I knew nothing about it except (and this is all merely alleged at this point):
- The scene is in the Vale of Glamorgan, in Wales.
- These are “restaurated” monuments.
- They are about two meters — roughly six feet — in length.
- The person who’d created the wallpaper could remember only that she’d come across the image on a page linked to from somewhere on Wikipedia.
I myself had been able to learn nothing further about the image or about what seem to be these three six-foot swords buried, tip-down, in the earth. Froog, likewise, came up empty-handed, despite a no doubt valiant effort.
(He did make an interesting suggestion, though: check Google Earth. Great idea; anyone who thinks that Google Earth is just for geology or geography nerds clearly has not laid eyes on the product recently. It’s already led me to Cadw, an organization responsible for managing historic monuments and sites — what they call the “historic environment” — in Wales.)
But he also said, almost by the way, that he’d grown up in a town close to the Vale of Glamorgan, a town named Monmouth.
At which point I started to whimper for The Missus to come pick me up off the floor. (Well, not really.) As I said to him in my reply, “I don’t want or need to know anything about your real name; just reassure me that you’re not a seven- to eight-hundred-year-old man named Geoffrey.”
Cryptic, eh?
The reference was to one Geoffrey of Monmouth, the 12th-century “clergyman and one of the major figures in the development of British history and the popularity of tales of King Arthur” (thanks, Wikipedia).
Which provides me with the barest nubbin of a pretext for sharing with you the barest nubbin of something about the Work In Progress.
One thing which excites me about the WIP is that it feels like the closest thing to a complete, original story that I’ve ever written. As you’ll see, it’s not original original, but it’s also not a knock-off. (Which feels very cool, I wanna tell you, to a guy with confidence in his writing but zip to no confidence in his storytelling ability.)
The bulk of the action takes place in late 20th-century Pennsylvania. There in a newish subdivision cluster the book’s half-dozen protagonists, four of them retired guys, and three of them former officers of a small metalworking company named Castle MetalCo.
Throughout the main plot, in a series of (I think) five chapters, weaves a subordinate plot dating back two centuries before the main one — to the late 18th century, predominantly in Wales.
An ale, first concocted by Welsh brewmaster Emrys ap Rhys, provides the principal element connecting the main to the sub-plot. This brew goes by the daunting name Diwrnach Wyddel (to pronounce it, think — roughly — “door-knock withal”); Emrys ap Rhys selected that name carefully, after much consideration, from the name of a character in an old Welsh tale oft told him by his grandmam. (The character in that tale was Irish, as it happens, but that’s immaterial: the legend, and the ale, are entirely Welsh.)
(Er, and you do get that the ale is fictional, no? Not the tale of Emrys ap Rhys’s grandmam, however.)
The latter-day Diwrnach Wyddel is the favorite brew of 20th-century Al Castle (founder and past chairman of the board of Castle MetalCo), and it’s the one which all the protagonists share at their regular Saturday-night pinochle games around Al’s kitchen table.
And as it happens, Al and his friends, and Castle MetalCo, and Emrys ap Rhys, and Diwrnach Wyddel, the arcs of their pasts and their presents, all of them are about to converge at a single point.
That point? Depending on your perspective, bird’s-eye or microscopic, it lies either in a brand-spanking-new corporate conference center along the Delaware River in New Jersey, or — more specifically — in the light glittering upon the surface of a very interesting flagon…
Now, “Diwrnach Wyddel” isn’t the only carefully selected name in the story. Every one of Al Castle’s friends has a name which is important in some way. There’s Larry Weston, and Pierce de Borron, and Wayne Wayce, and George and Bonnie Malory: every one of those four last names was the last name of a significant contributor (like Geoffrey of Monmouth) to the legends of King Arthur.
But Geoffrey was first. Without Geoffrey, there’d likely have been no Sword in the Stone, no Excalibur, no Once and Future King or The Natural, no Monty Python and the Holy Grail (and hence no killer rabbits, nor knights who say “Ni!”), arguably no Lord of the Rings. And certainly no Grail.
No way, in short, could I have touched — have plundered — his name.
Which is why, when Froog said (in the context of a discussion about swords buried by their tips in the Welsh countryside) that he’d grown up in Monmouth, I had to stop and catch my breath. It felt like Geoffrey himself had reached out across the centuries and touched me, flicked my bemused brow, with a cold fingertip:
Yo, Bub, it felt as if Geoffrey were saying. Forgetting somebody, maybe?
Tara Maya says
So strange are the paths taken by stories….
Julie Weathers says
Whoa, this is a fascinating travel.
froog says
If only I’d chosen to mention instead Hereford, the place of my birth, you would have thought of nothing but cream-faced cattle in classic Westerns. That might also have led to an interesting post, but obviously not one as obsessed as this.
You should check out Monmouth on Google Earth. It is a remarkable little place. Though it has grown into something of a tourist and commuter town in the last couple of decades, it’s still fairly tiny: the town centre is basically a single street, about a mile long, ending in a small humpbacked bridge with a gatehouse over it – very old and very beautiful.
We also used to try to claim the distinction of having the highest number of bars per capita in the UK (always a contentious and unprovable boast). When I was a boy, there were 35+ bars in the town for a population of only about 10,000 (a huge drinker/bar ratio for rural Ireland; but for the UK, astonishingly low). Since then, alas, the number of bars has halved and the number of people doubled.
froog says
By the way, is Wales merely part of your imaginative life, or have you been there?
One of our favourite brews in Monmouth (and much of south Wales) is Felinfoel, always jokingly referred to as “Feeling foul”.
marta says
I thought I’d made up the name Lake Belle, and then one fine day a lady left a comment on my blog that mentioned she grew up in Lake Belle and did any of the “people” on the blog know her uncle.
I walked around in a daze all day.
Strange when our fiction meets up with real life/
John says
Tara: The woman speaks true! I’d love to have been inside some of my favorite authors’ heads, “listening in,” while they were at work.
Julie: It’s great fun tracing through all the routes and sidetrips taken by a story, as the story becomes a story. For fantasy-epic authors, I bet, er, well, I bet someone could write a book. :)
froog: In the last few days there’ve been so many fallings-into-place between Wales and my book that I’m now thinking there might be something to the more-than-coincidence thing after all. I may get into more of this later; don’t want to “write it out of myself” just yet.
At the time I started writing this thing, in the early 1990s, Web research wasn’t of course possible — let alone for something like Welsh brews. I came across Felinfoel at the time, and of course Brains, but the beer and ale people writing back then didn’t seem very impressed with the country’s product. But there is (or was) something called bragawd; according to Wikipedia, Taliesin sang of this brew as a source for “science, inspiration, and immortality.”
Have never been to Wales in this life, no. The Missus assures me, however, that my interest in it is inexplicable by anything but a past life there.
John says
marta: I wondered about Lake Belle (I mean, the town’s name). It sounds almost too real. And I think that a site visitor like that would have thrown me for a loop for sure!
César says
That picture corresponds to the monument “Sverd i fjell” in Stavanger (Norway).