DEORFRITH
No. 26
Tim Russell | Buckfastleigh, United Kingdom
Art with camera obscura by Tim Russell
You probably imagine that English is bereft of terms in any way equivalent in meaning to the Lakota term Mitakuye Oyasin, that speaks of our relatedness to all things. Think again.
The term deorfrith, comprised of two words deor and frith, is usually translated as game sanctuary or deer peace. It was first found recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles around 1100 and was used to designate the forested land appropriated by William 1st, places like the New Forest or Dartmoor; A consideration of the older etymologies of the terms suggests a much broader notion.
Deor is the root of the word deer, but more accurately refers to all game and what it lives on and might then be taken to refer to the whole natural world. The word frith is often translated as peace, but again more accurately refers to the conditions of kinship that give rise to a state of peace.
The term frith, also related to the words ‘friend’ and ‘free’, is “the state of things which exists between friends. And it means, first and foremost, reciprocal inviolability.” Grönbech writing in Culture of the Teutons, adds that the foundation of ancient culture was neither conflict nor mastery, but conciliation and friendship that extended out into the natural world, making peace with animal, tree, and the great powers.
Deeper still, the old way was to “make them kin of his kin, till he is unable to draw a fast line between his own life and that of the surrounding nature.” The root of frith is also shared with Freyja, queen of the gods, and is speculatively traced back to the proto Indo-European *pri -love. These suggest that it is only “where love prevails” that the conditions for peace, friendship and safety flourish for Freyja is herself the personification of love.
It might then be a delightful irony to find in the name given by the coloniser, the original meaning buried inside it, the name for the bond that had been broken long before, between humans, the wild, the great mother herself.
To be claimed by deorfrith, or to claim it is to subvert the colonised mind of our history and dare to imagine that we share in the life and fate of all things of the world as our true family. It is a summons from the dark underworld of our ignorance and forgetfulness.
The world wants to be loved by us. It is a love so vast and heart-breaking. It is not ours at all, but the love the world has for us and all things, that we being asked to share in. It is heart-breaking because it is not ours to control; we cannot contain it, so it breaks us open again and again, enlarging us and diminishing us at the same time. It diminishes us only if we cling to the illusion that we are its source.
*
A White Stag Drunk on Apples
To be caught in this fierce embrace
with the world;
a wild god who lives in you
Lord of the three kingdoms
will lay himself down
at the feet of Anima Mundi.
He knows that to live is to die
and in dying
Live.
ii.
Leap into the mead-bowl of the forest;
bare your neck,
submit to the axe.
Have tears wept on your seed head, sown
in the leaf mould,
as your feet dance madly among the stars.
Drink deep from the liquor of sensation
as your skin stretches over the world.
Feel the caress of the chorus of birdsong.
And the chimes of the bell
on the hill.
Make frith with the world
of leaf and fur
the death dark earth
and the wind,
the deep well of the dreaming land.
The waters will run clear again.
The old images restored.
And emerge in the wake of an ass
on the plain of the stony cross.
iii.
It was a single word uttered by the gutters.
The streams, blood red, flowing in the forest.
The blood still flowing in the land, dripped from the veins of William Rufus
as his ever-bleaching corpse was carried over the green-grassy mead
to a cold grave in Winchester.
But not just the water;
by the oaks, the holly, by the thickets of blackthorn, by the boggy ground that sucked my feet
into cloying mud that seemed to pull at me, hold me fast unwilling to let me go.
Deorfrith, deorfrith, deorfrith…
The king of the world must die
The king of the wood must live
I heard the rolling voice of Robin Goodfellow, Puck, singing. Thought I could even see him, now there, now gone, leading me god knows where through the stinking bog.
Where the fuck are you taking me? Can I really trust you? You’re a tricky bastard. You haven’t exactly got an untarnished reputation have you? But as likely to help as harm, they say. What do you want with me anyway?
What the fuck
What the fuck
Really?
You’re following him ?
Pucks Hill
Down
Piece
And Pits
This elusive sprite I’m following along the deer trails, the paths that have no destination,
yet always lead somewhere, is indeed leading me a merry dance and he’s singing some mad song as he goes. I want to stop and ask where we’re going, but he’s just not the answering questions sort of fellow.
The king of the world must die
The king of the wood must live
Ho ho ho!
The king of the world must die
The king of the wood must live
Ho ho ho!
Long live the king!
That interminable song lilting nauseatingly in my ears. And the one word
Deorfrith, deorfrith, deorfrith
Not from his lips, but from the wintered trees themselves. No. Not true… The trees and the forest itself are the word. They are the word itself…
And realising that, in a flash, a moment of such excoriating brightness, it struck me blind. Deprived of all sight I saw her. All the swirling dance of turquoise and pink and the honeysuckle scentedness of her.
Ytene.
Ytene.
Ytene.
Lady of the forest, Bright appearance of the world. Queen of heaven, Queen of earth.
Turned
In her sea drift sleep
dreaming of the sun
on her flank
the sea milk rolled wetly off
She is old, she is old
she is old,
old as the hills, they say.
Far older.
She lived beneath the waters
Age after age
She swam in the great currents of the sea,
And when she walked out of the ocean
She saw that it was good
And carried on walking
She walked and walked
She saw many wonderful things
She walked as she saw the sun rise in the sky
The day was hot
She saw a river of cool sweet water
She lowered herself to her knees
But couldn’t reach the stream
She lay herself down
Breasts, belly, thighs pressed to the ground
Touched lips to the water
And drank
She drank for so long, a forest grew on her back
And she is drinking still
Dreaming of the ocean
From whence she came.
She is nut brown with age
And shines with a light from within
Of the One who Made All Things.
The deer and the fox,
The crows too, remind me,
All know her secret names.
They know the spirit roads
Of her dreaming
And her becoming,
Her eyes looking back on the world.
There are no kings, she says,
they’ve all fled. Curled up and whimpering in their caves. Asleep, all asleep. We’ve rung the bell, again and again and still you sleep. What’s it going to take to wake you? You’re all so pathetic. Enough! For Sovereignty’s sake wake up!
You are kings and queens, yet you live like beggars and thieves.
Stray dogs squabbling over scraps from the tyrants table. You all bore me. You bore me.
I want to object, not hear the truth of it. Say, not me!
But I do know the truth of it; the rabble has been assembling at the gates too long, their clamour ever louder, each one a voice of longing and desire that I carry here in my breast, if I could only call out the leader and convert him to my cause perhaps all would be well.
But I am their leader and I can’t even convince myself. The world is changing and a new king is awaiting his crown. It is my head must roll. But I can no longer speak.
My mouth hanging wetly open,
up to my knees in mud, but now
only unable to see anything else;
feeling myself less than I was, or imagined I was, or ever had been.
My legs now four.
Hooved, horned and hairy. An infernal shape.
Actaeon of England.
I raised my head and bellowed,
broke out of the clay, and ran, and ran, and ran.
Tears from my unseeing eyes wet on my muzzle.
A white stag drunk, as if on apples of the sun itself.
I hear the hounds, close as my own gasping steam breath
snapping at my entrails.
They’re not following me, they’re inside me.
Already desire is making a feast of me.
For her, I want her..
Christ I want her …more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life before.
And the infernal antlers on my head tangled in the thicket.
I hear the horses, hooves pounding, pounding.
Or is it my own beating heart?
I hear the metallic jangle of bridle bits.
I hear the hunting horn.
I am no hunter here.
I am the prey.
And still I run, blind and drunk on disobedient, unfamiliar legs,
hooves too small for the feet I once walked upon.
My legs sprawling terror-wise in flight.
Out across Canterton Glen,
Out across Fritham Plain.
At the temple of the Old Gods everything falls silent.
I see the Old King, red faced and puffed from the gallop.
He dismounts his belligerent and prideful mount,
but I can smell the pain in his pride.
I can smell the king too;
the reek of nightmare is heavy with the stench of fear-piss that stains his breeches.
He doesn’t know it, but he knows what’s coming.
I can feel it in the horn on my head.
I stand at bay, too tired now to run,
lower my head, and we hold each other’s gaze.
Later, another tale entirely is told,
of an arrow intended for me that struck the king,
but what I saw, was the old Sow Queen herself, unseen move across the open sward.
Tall and terrible, on two legs, bristles down her back.
And would you believe it, she winked at me ?
With one casual up-thrust of her moon bleached ivory, she gutted the red king.
And though I felt my entrails, his entrails, spill around my knees
as he staggered forwards waving his puny pathetic blade to finish Me,
he fell, tangled and tripped by his own spilled guts.
The king of the world must die
The king of the wood must live
The king of the world must die
The king of the wood must live
Ho ho ho..
That infernal song again and the whispered word
Deorfrith deorfrith deorfrith
I watched her slowly, nonchalantly bend her head,
drop onto her four short stubby legs,
stick her ravenous snout into the kings eviscerated guts and begin to eat.
Chomp. Chomp. Chomp.
How do you love me now, lover boy?
I watched the sow-queen chew the body down,
down into the vast cauldron of her distended belly,
heavy the teats that hung from her,
before the Normans came, the Saxons, Jutes and Danes came,
the Romans came, the Britons came.
She ate my father, she ate my mother, she ate my uncles, aunts and grandparents.
She ate my brothers,
she tore, ripped and swallowed.
She ate huge swathes of forest,
she ate houses, homesteads, churches and farms.
She ate factories, villages, and towns.
She ate it all down, ate it all down, until all that remained was her.
A forest growing out of her back and a white stag
following the deer trails winding around the hill of her skull;
A white stag drunk as if on apples of the sun itself,
A man with an ache in his thigh
And an entirely human woman
Loves life tender in their frame,
tender to all things of the world.
And the two of them,
Trying to figure out how to keep the world alive.
The following bright morning; “Your problem,” she said “is that you long for the day you no longer have to rebuild the world every morning. Fool!”
her voice rang louder and took on a singing clarity as the sentence ended, that is on the word, fool. I was tired and wanted to sleep which only set her off again, and I remembered her scathing admonishment the last time we met;
“Asleep, all asleep. We’ve rung the bell, again and again and still you sleep. What’s it going to take to wake you? You’re all so pathetic. Enough! For Sovereignty’s sake wake up!
You are kings and queens, yet you live like beggars and thieves.
Stray dogs squabbling over scraps at the tyrants table.”
Some drink coffee to stay awake, some put stones in their shoes, some invite worry to keep them company through the night. Most of us need a thorn bush of some sort to sit in to resist the sleepy breeze. I wanted to take her up on this, but it wasn’t easy; she’s as fleeting as the dawn and as implacable as a mountain. I keep arguing with her, but never really know what I’m talking about; I say, ‘we’re only human’, she says that’s no excuse, our notion of what it is to be human is so woeful and serves no part of the creation at all except ourselves, and even then rarely. And I’m tired, I’m so fucking tired, my tiredness has a gravitational pull all its own. And she reminds me that as ever, I’ve got it backwards. Gravity is the pull into the inertia of sleep. She doesn’t say it, but I know the rest, that we’re not so subject to gravity as we prefer to believe. We’re just scared shitless by the knowledge that the power of creation resides within us. So rather than harness the power of Imagination we try to cut it down to size by turning everything we create into stone, so that we CAN go back to sleep. Then it’ll all last forever. “It’ll all last forever” seems to be the chorus line of the song we sing. Then there is no future. There’s only a carapace of memory that we call the present that’s a fundamental denial that there is any such thing as the future at all.
Every morning I go out to greet her, this Firebird thing that’s ever becoming; never fixed in form. She is light; light shattering the edifice of memory, making it fluid, revealing the world anew. And I know I’m in dispute with her, because she wants so much more from me, and you too. Not for herself, not for me, but for the world itself in all its manifest being.
Your dreams are my dreaming
Your imagining is my Imagination
She says..
You are thieves and rascals if you believe they’re yours.
If only you could just bear witness to MY dreaming
If only you could just bear witness to my dreaming
If only you could just bear witness to my dreaming…..
Trust me……you are mine and you always have been.