In the name of self-care I’ve been attempting early nights. So, at 7pm prompt (my North star, the thing that I aim for, is Small’s bedtime) I make myself a drink and/or a snack, and head to my bedroom. I make sure that the lamp is on, the bed is tidied, various discarded pieces of underwear are launched into the laundry basket. These are routines long in the making, and they are part of what brings me comfort.
It struck me last night as I sat on top of the covers, scattering biscuit crumbs and watching a movie on my laptop, that what I’m doing is almost akin to medieval living (sans laptop, obvs); the hunkering down in one room. Once Small is asleep I move through the house like a shadow, shuttering off the other areas before heading to my bedroom, with its warm lamp glow and the sound of wood pigeons in the trees outside my window, a small sanctuary against the storm.
Books are another safe haven. I buy books in the best of times as a way of safeguarding myself against the worst of times. So right now I am finishing Elizabeth Boyle’s Fierce Appetites, and am a few chapters into This Mortal Coil by Andrew Doig. On my windowsill I have Lafcadio Hearne’s Of Ghosts & Goblins, a birthday gift, with its beautiful poison-green cover and an opening story which made me gasp with pleasure.
Whilst reading Fierce Appetites (utterly amazing and highly recommended), I’ve learned for the first time about Virgilius Maro Grammaticus. Ol’ Virgil had an ambiguous heritage, though recently academics have thought that he might’ve been Judeo-Irish. What we do know is that, according to Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, Virgilius had a rather interesting way of dealing with sources: often dispensing with the examples provided by various esteemed grammarians of the period, and simply inventing his own.
Besides citing Cicero, Quintilian, and Varro (from works of theirs otherwise unknown), and a host of superficially authentic authors, he also knows a Donatus of Troy (reputed to have lived 1,000 years), three Virgils and three Vulcans, a Carthaginian sibyl, and others who rejoice under the names of Blastus, Galbungus, and Gurgilius. Also included are Gregorius, an Egyptian who wrote 3,000 books on Greek history, and his own teacher, Virgil of Asia, who was the author of a ‘noble book’ (liber nobilis) on the subject of twelve latinities. Two of these pedants argued virulently for fourteen days and nights about whether the word ego (‘I’) had a vocative case. Two others engage in a two-week-long dispute about an obscure form of a verb.
Virgilius Maro Grammaticus by Dáibhí Ó Cróinín
Virgil, then, sounds like someone we’d call “a bit of a boy” in the Valleys. Something of a laugh, an obvious piss taker – but Virgil definitely knew his stuff. Indeed, Cróinín explains that Virgil was engaging in metalinguistics centuries before it was being considered in modern times, and was “remarkably prescient of modern-day…concepts”. Virgil believed that people “often have a ‘feel’ about words not unlike the sense of taste (sapor) in the body” [Boyle, 2022] As a person who wasn’t taught grammar but has been a voracious reader since childhood, I understand this: sometimes, a word or a sentence feels wrong, but I don’t know why from a grammatical point of view. It’s fascinating to me to think that when I’m reading, the structure of the language might speak to a sense of linguistic taste I’ve developed over the years, rather than any formal learning.
Something else that Virgil espoused, and which Boyle discusses in Fierce Appetites, is the concept of the innate spirituality of a letter form. Now this really speaks to me, as it chimes with some of my own research into digitisation and medieval manuscripts. I’m going to spend some time quoting my own work now, because that’s just who I am these days, you know?
So, in my chapter From the Divine to the Digital: Digitisation as Resurrection & Reconstruction, I talked about how medieval scribes believed that the objects which they used to create a physical manuscript, in which they would reconstruct the word of God, were filled with God’s grace because they came from nature. The processes by which a manuscript is created, so eloquently described by Doyle and Lovett in their blog for the British Library, are a devotional experience, using objects which have had a living relationship with the divine; the skin of the animal, ink made from the oak tree, through to the use of gold in illuminated manuscripts (which Endres tells us was meant to emulate the divine light believed necessary to illuminate the more difficult passages of the Bible).
It makes complete sense to me, then, that the letter forms themselves also contain a spirituality which further connects us to God. As Boyle puts it:
The actual physical shape of a letter as you write it down, or the shape of the sound that you pronounce in your mouth is, according to Virgilius, analogous to the physical body of a person, our outer body. But we all have a soul, he says, and that soul is like the inner meaning of a letter or word or statement. When you dig beneath the surface of the letter on the page, or the sounds emanating from your mouth, and get to the heart of what something really means, there is its soul.
Elizabeth Boyle, Fierce Appetites [2022]
It is not just the physical which connects us to God, according to Virgil – it’s the shape of a sound, which has as much its own soul as the parchment or the gold ink. God’s grace can be found in the smallest of moments, ones which seemingly contain only a passing relationship with the physical. I like this, a lot. We give so much power, rightly, to materiality but there is just as much holiness to be found in the non-corporeal – the sing-song sound of a loved ones name, or that feeling when you hear the opening chords to your favourite song. That’s divinity, right?
By the half-light of the lamplight in this sanctuary room, I am writing down word shapes that may (or may not) bring me closer to something hallowed. That feels like a lot to expect from a WordPress blog post on a rainy night in a seaside town but maybe, as the song says, it’s an echo across the cruel sea – because after all, what is faith, without a little hope?
Dr Keri Thomas 