#marmion

~ "Marmion" by Sir Walter Scot, Canto 6

Last Monday, in need of a change of scenery, I blew my daily budget on a train ticket to the Borders. The afternoon was spent pottering around Melrose, squinting at the abbey and National Trust gardens, and wandering up and down the banks of the Tweed. Every so often I flopped down on the ground and read snatches of "Marmion", which turned out to be an ideal companion.

I think that R.F. Cholmeley, the courteous Victorian (Edwardian?) who wrote the introduction to my pocket-sized copy, was onto something when he said:

"Certainly, Marmion is a poem to be recited walking- one might almost say riding or running but for the practical difficulties of such a performance; it goes with motion."

As this was my first (successful) encounter with Sir Walter Scott's "Tale of Flodden Field", naturally I couldn't recite it from memory and I've not yet mastered the art of reading while walking without injury. Nevertheless I marked the poem's metre in my stride as I went and I almost believe that the battered little brown book enjoyed being taken for a walk in the shadow of the Eildon Hills, if not a canter. At the very least it felt like having a friend in my pocket as I ambled alongside the Tweed.

It's no surprise that the popularity of Scott's poems has fallen off in recent decades, and I can't say that "Marmion" spoke to my soul on any particularly deep level, though I enjoyed it well enough. But it's worth reiterating just how popular this work was in the first century or so after its publication. I habitually think of "Marmion" as one of the works I would assign if I were creating a "Bertie Wooster Reading Challenge"; i.e., a collection of books so well-known and well-loved that even someone with the mental capacity of the average member of the Drones Club was capable of quoting them.*

(For those with a more refined literary palate, "Marmion" is also the book which St John Rivers presents to the titular heroine of Jane Eyre as a gift in chapter 32).

So as a reader who likes to get to know Victorian novels and their ancestors on an intimate level (sparing their blushes of course) an afternoon spent reading "Marmion" was long overdue. On the other hand I am, of course, primarily knowledgeable about the history of mediaeval and sixteenth century Scotland, so Walter Scott's legacy is always difficult to cope with. Therefore I do have to give my opinion on the "accuracy" of the work, even though that obviously wasn't my main motivation for reading it.

The verdict (as usual with Scott) is "I've seen worse". He gets a lot more stick for the tartan-tinted view of Scottish history and culture that the popularity of his work helped to make so enduring than I think is really fair, based purely on the content of his novels and poems. "Marmion" does get a few details and dates wrong: for example, Gavin Douglas didn't become bishop of Dunkeld until after Flodden, David Lindsay wouldn't become Lord Lyon until years afterward, and I highly doubt that the 3rd Earl of Bothwell was 12 in 1513.** Marmion's coat of arms seems to be a piece of false heraldry and many of Scott's characters feel like they would be more at home in the faux-twelfth century world of Ivanhoe than in the early sixteenth century. But on the whole it's a good tale and the inaccuracies are not hugely distracting from the story Scott want to tell.

It's the way he tells it that shows his instinctive sympathy with his subject and the emotional world of his characters, both real and fictional. The passage above struck me as particularly interesting because finding a new way to describe the Battle of Flodden is difficult. We all know how this story is going to end and the prospect of coating the narrative in a thick layer of impending doom is as tempting for the academic historian as for novelists and poets. Scott doesn't break with tradition here; throughout the poem we are constantly reminded that James IV and many of his subjects are going to die. But amidst all the references to the Flowers of the Forest and the (sometimes excessive and heavy-handed) laments about James IV's alleged lack of foresight, Scott does manage to introduce the battle from a new perspective.

He puts the reader in the position of the English knight Marmion, who is watching the movements of the Scottish army on top of Flodden Edge, as they in turn watch the Earl of Surrey's force steal a march on them far below. Rather than have Marmion or another character present in the Scottish camp, and therefore privy to the strategic discussion that these English manoeuvres must inevitably have occasioned, Scott preserves an air of mystery around the tragedy. Instead the Scottish host resembles a living animal, perhaps a kestrel hovering skilfully on the wind, keenly tracking the movements of its prey in the undergrowth, but uncertainly, with an instinctive sense that this might be a trap. When it finally descends, it will die.

* Though he personally references Young Lochinvar in "Right-Ho Jeeves" and "Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit" apparently Bertie had an attack of amnesia some time before Jeeves quotes it in "Aunts Aren't Gentlemen". From a Doylist perspective and in light of the late twentieth century eclipse of "Marmion" in the public consciousness, it is interesting to note that P.G. Wodehouse apparently found it perfectly believable that Bertie would be able to recite Young Lochinvar in the 1930s and 1950s, but that by the 1970s it was a reference more suited to a man of Jeeves' age and literary tastes. Needless to say I am not capable of undertaking the "Jeeves" reading challenge.

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