Robin Hood’s Bay Cardigan: Week 11 – 6 July

The Herring Mart and fishermen’s huts

There’s an Old English poem, Deor, each stanza of which ends with the phrase Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg. (“Þ” is the Old English letter thorn, used for a “th” sound that doesn’t use the vocal chords, as in the word thorn. It was used alongside the letter eth, or “ð”, which has a voiced “th” sound as in the word either. Try saying thorn and either aloud and you’ll see what I mean.) The line means roughly, “That has been overcome, this also may”. It had a particular significance for JRR Tolkien, who translated it as, “Time has passed since then, this too can pass”.

Foxglove

The poem’s been in my mind recently as Scotland prepares to come out of lockdown. Every day brings a new sign of a return to normality. Shops are reopening, or being made ready. The boats in the marina, rocking idly in their moorings these many weeks, are now hives of activity, as bald men in overalls freshen the paintwork, batten down mainbraces and splice scuppers, or whatever it is nautical people do. The town’s seagulls have a particularly rapacious look, like gangsters planning a heist, as they wait for the tourists to come flocking back; in Wick, “gullible” takes on a whole new meaning. Already the anxious days of April seem like another lifetime. But, unlikely as it seemed back then, everything does indeed pass; time marches on, and while physicists may have proved that time is an illusion, as a wise man once observed that doesn’t make them late for meals.

Even knitting a gansey doesn’t last forever, although sometimes it feels like it might. The Robin Hood’s Bay cardigan is almost there: the knitting at least is over, it’s been washed and blocked and s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d to its proper dimensions. Now all that remains is the surgery to make it into a cardigan. When I look at it I feel it’s something of a high point in my knitting career; that maybe now I should, like Prospero, break my needles, and bury them certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my sorrows kittens books.

More Creels

Incidentally, speaking of Old English poems, there’s no getting around the fact that they are, on the whole, on the gloomy side. Even if an Anglo-Saxon scribe had tried to write a limerick it would probably have ended up something like this: “There once was young man from York/ Who died in the wastelands eaten by wolves/ Such was his wyrd/ So pass all the world’s joys/ Into eternal darkness and despair”. Who’s had it worse: us or the Anglo-Saxons? They had plague and Vikings to contend with; we’ve had the Brexit referendum, [insert the names of a US president and a British prime minister of your choice here] and New Zealand losing the cricket World Cup final; now we have a pandemic. It’s a close call. But I guess the message isn’t their bleak worldview, but rather their grudging light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-ish-ness, which we can at least take inspiration from: Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg. Or, if you set it to music, Let the good times roll…