Following the circuit, Riddley and the Ardship continue to the next Dead Town, Fork Stoan. Here Riddley recalls his. 'ki
CAMBRY 1 Westgate: How fents gate house Riddley’s group carry their kill back to How fents, where the boar’s head is placed ‘on the poal up on top of the gate house’. As severed heads are believed to hold prophetic powers, Lorna, the fents ‘tel woman’, goes up to the gate platform to get ‘the tel of the head’. When Riddley takes a piece of the boar to Lorna, she invites him into her ‘doss bag’. After they have ‘freshent the Luck’ on top of the gate house, Lorna speaks of that which lives inside them all, ‘looking out thru our eye hoals’. What this might be, and where the self begins, become key questions for Riddley.
9 Abbots Mill Garden (Solly’s Orchard): the Aulders
8 The Friars bridge: the flooding of Inland
The Aulders is the home of the mysterious chard coal berners. Here Riddley seeks out Goodparley’s former master, Granser, an itinerant healer. Riddley has found some ‘yellerboy stoan’, one of the essential ingredients for making gunpowder, which he gives to Granser. Guarding the ‘fissional seakerts’ of the chard coal berners, Granser sends Riddley outside while he mixes a sample. Employing esoteric knowledge, imparted through rhyme and ritual, Granser creates the 1 Littl 1, blowing himself up. The explosion also kills Goodparley. Meanwhile, the Eusa Folk and new Pry Mincer attempt to create a bomb through basic chemistry and a ‘some poasyum’ of ritual chanting and trance.
According to legend, Eusa’s severed head predicts that ‘the body of Inland wil be cut off from the head’. A great wave follows, ‘a wall of water hyer nor a mountain’. The wave ‘come rushing it come roaring it come roaling down’, flooding the Rivver Sour. It ‘cut acrost the lan’, separating the Ram, making Thanet an island again. Following the deluge Eusa’s head is thrown into the sea, where it swims across ‘from Inland to the Ram’. On the island the head continues to speak, giving commandments for the Eusa puppet show, the Ardship sacrifice and the Fools Circel.
Chapter 16
Chapter 14
Chapter 1
9
2 Bath House ruins: Widders Dump Riddley’s group work recovering scrap at the infamous Widders Dump, digging out a vast pit ‘down to the chalk’. Here they unearth a huge lump of ancient machinery which crushes and kills Riddley’s father. Later Riddley uncovers a Punch figure here. This puppet contains the atrophied hand of the showman who operated it; the bodies of several children are found in the area. Riddley senses that the Punch figure holds some special significance. Rather than give it to the overseer Belnot Phist, Riddley throws Phist into the mud, jumps over the fence and runs away. This transgression makes Riddley an outcast.
7 Cathedral: Cambry senter Riddley comes to the ruined cathedral in Cambry: here, at the centre of the ring, the ghost of the old power still shines. The walls of the cathedral are gone, but the crypt, with its pillars and carvings, is visible. This site is another ‘hoal’ for imprisoning the Eusa folk. Riddley has heard legends of the lost cathedral organ: when he discovers ‘stoan trees’ in the crypt, he speculates that the ‘stoan ben cut and carvit’ by the makers of those ‘jynt music pipes’. Riddley has a mystical experience here, receiving a complex ‘tel’ and hallucinations, including the face of the enigmatic green man, ‘Greanvine’.
1 8
Chapter 2; Chapter 11
7
Chapter 15
Visit: https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/owhatweben/ This event is part of the Being Human festival, the UK’s only national festival of the humanities, taking place 17–25 November. For further information please see beinghumanfestival.org Produced by Sonia Overall, Canterbury Christ Church University
Flooding has swollen the Rivver Sour (Stour) and Thanet is an island again, known as The Ram. This is the seat of government, where the hierarchical Mincery (ministry) attempt to keep order through a system of propaganda - delivered through itinerant puppet shows - ritual sacrifice and intimidation. Riddley’s world has reverted to Iron Age technology, but the land is still littered with remnants of lost civilisation. These clues to the past – ruins in the landscape, objects in the ground, stories attached to place – haunt Riddley, Eight major towns on the periphery of the explosion are in various states of ruin, comprising a linked circle of the Dead Towns around Cambry: Horny Boy (Herne Bay), Widders Bel (Whitstable), Fathers Ham (Faversham), Bernt Arse (Ashford), Fork Stoan (Folkestone), Do It Over (Dover), Good Shoar (Deal) and Sams Itch (Sandwich). The towns form a connected circle, and are recalled through the rhyme of ‘Fools Circel 9wys’, a sinister children’s game that enacts imprisonment, attempted escape and capital punishment. Cambry is the site of the Power Ring that signals destruction in Riddley’s world. A nuclear holocaust brought about by ‘the Master Chanjis’ and ‘the 1 Big 1’ (atomic power and a related explosion) has decimated Inland (East Kent). Cambry, the epicentre, is now reduced to rubble and is surrounded by barren wasteland. Riddley Walker is told through ‘Riddleyspeak’, an invented futuristic dialect.
By connecting the text with the urban landscape of Canterbury, we can seek the clues that Riddley uncovers over the course of the novel. We can choose to walk in this place with the shadow of Riddley’s world still to come, inhabiting the calm before the fall: what will survive the 1 Big 1, and what will be lost? We can also walk as Inlanders long after Riddley’s time: the landscape has healed and civilisation is restored. What will we do to prevent the 1 Big 1 from happening again? What would we strive to save? Or we can choose to walk with Riddley, imagining the sites of the novel in the streets of Canterbury, seeing with the eyes of contemporary Inlanders. By mapping the book onto this place, we can walk the riddels where ever they take us: around the Power Ring of Cambry, into its senter, and into the ground below its ruined stannings. The novel begins with Riddley killing the last wild pig on the ‘Bundel Downs’. Riddley belongs to a group of hunter-gatherers living in a small settlement, ‘How fents’, nearby. It is his 12th birthday: he is now considered a man. Killing the boar on his naming day is the first ‘syn’ that marks Riddley out. Foragers are under threat from larger ‘forms’ whose gradual and often violent expansion encloses open land. The death of the last boar thus signals the end of an era for Riddley and his group. As the Mincery’s allegorical ‘Eusa show’ demonstrates, there is no protection for those who refuse progress. who longs to make sense of what he is and what has been.
6 O what we ben!:
6 Buttermarket: sacrifice
Discovering Post-apocalyptic Landscapes in Andreas and Riddley Walker
R I D D L E Y W A LK E R
2
Welcome to post-apocalyptic Kent.
This is the setting for Russell Hoban’s cult novel Riddley Walker, with Cambry (Canterbury) at the heart of its ruined landscape.
5
This is a place of gathering and sacrifice. Supported by the ambitious ‘shadder mincer’ Orfing, the freed Ardship exacts revenge on the ‘Pry Mincer’ Goodparley. In the candlelight Riddley sees the Eusa folk, their ‘faces like bad dreams’, surrounding their victim. Chanting, they pass an axe swiftly from hand to hand, giving Riddley the impression that the weapon is dancing by itself. Riddley attempts to intervene, but Goodparley is tortured and blinded. Although stripped of his office, blindness confers a new mystical status on Goodparley. Riddley helps him from the scene: from here they enter exile together. Chapter 16
3 Canterbury Castle: the Ardship’s hoal Riddley is greeted outside Widders Dump by the leader of the Bernt Arse dog pack. Discovering he is dog frendy, Riddley follows the pack to Bernt Arse, the nearest Dead Town. Below here, amongst the ‘stannings’ and rubble, Riddley finds the blind ‘Ardship of Cambry’, imprisoned in an underground ‘hoal’. The Ardship is one of the deformed, mystical ‘Esua folk’, linked to the apocalyptic fall. The sacrificial victim of the ‘Fools Circel 9wys’ chant, his head is also destined for the end of a pole. Freeing the Ardship from this hoal seals Riddley’s fate as an outsider. Chapter 11
3
4 4 Dane John mound: Fools Circel 9wys and Eusa’s head Circles are places of power: part of the Cambry Power Ring can clearly be seen here. This is the ideal site for the Mincery to display the Ardship’s head and wait for its ‘tel’. As with Riddley’s boar, this practice echoes the legend of Eusa, whose severed head continues to speak after death. Before his rescue, the Ardship begins a final progress through the Dead Towns, echoing Fools Circel 9wys. This ritual circuit is designed to ‘axel rate’ power before the sacrifice. Riddley’s intervention has broken this cycle and thwarted the Mincery’s hopes of regaining lost knowledge through the Ardship’s tel. Chapter 11
5 Bus station tower: Fork Stoan outers Following the circuit, Riddley and the Ardship continue to the next Dead Town, Fork Stoan. Here Riddley recalls his ‘kid crowd’ and imagines his younger selves surrounding him, ‘clyming over old walls stumps and stannings.’ Amongst the town’s ruins are giant machines, broken but still ‘smoov’ and ‘shyning’. The sound of waves beyond is ‘like them machines… breaving and sying in ther sleep’. These symbols of lost power, knowledge and technological achievement strike Riddley with awe, reducing him to tears. As he exclaims, ‘How cud any 1 not want to get that shyning Power back..?’ Chapter 12
MERMEDONIA
9 Abbots Mill Garden (Solly’s Orchard):
8 The Friars bridge: the flood
trees of life
At the climax of the poem, Andrew summons a torrent of water from a pillar in his jail cell, which fills the walls of the city and threatens to drown all of the Mermedonians within: ‘the stone split apart, and a deluge poured forth, flowing over the earth. Roaring currents covered the earth as the sun rose, a great sea-flood rose up…the power of the water grew greater, and the people lamented, the old spear-bearers. Their desire was to escape, to flee the dark waters, and save their lives, desired to flee to mountain caves and hiding places in the earth, but an angel prevented them, overwhelming the town with gleaming fire, a burning hot surge of war. The pounding sea beat within the walls’.
Andrew undergoes three days of brutal torture at the hands of the Mermedonians, during which he is dragged through the city, and his blood, flesh, and hair cling to the stones of its rough and cobbled streets. He complains to God that he had been told he would not be harmed, and is instructed to look back on the path of blood he has left behind him: ‘after God had finished speaking, the beloved champion looked back on the track, and saw groves of trees standing in bloom and adorned with blossoms where he had poured out his blood’. The appearance of these trees portends the metamorphosis that Mermedonia undergoes at the end of the poem, being transformed into a place of community, happiness and celebration.
1 Westgate: the gates of Mermedonia Here Andrew gazes upon the gates of Mermedonia for the first time after a long voyage by sea over perilous waters; ‘the man hardened by battle awoke, and saw the lie of the land before the gates of the city, with steep hills and cliffsides looming around it, and all over the grey stone and the windswept walls, were towers, and shacks with tiled rooves’. Andrew addresses his companions one final time before steeling himself and marching up the stone-paved street beyond the city gates, magically concealed from the sight of the gatekeepers and Mermedonia’s soldiers.
9
2 St Margaret’s Street:
the Mermedonian prison
7 Cathedral: the new temple
1
Upon entering the city, Andrew makes his way to the prison where Matthew and the rest of the Mermedonians’ prisoners are held captive until their captors are ready to slaughter them for food: ‘noble Andrew pressed on, Christ’s champion, until he reached the prison, where he saw the gang of pagans, seven in number, standing together before the bars of the jail. Sudden death took them all, and they fell without glory – the rush of death overcame those bloodsoaked warriors’.
After the waters of the flood subside, a church is built upon the site of the prison, on the spot where some of the Mermedonians killed by the flood were resurrected, and from whence the waters first emerged: ‘then the brave one, the craftsman of God, commanded a church to be built, a temple of God constructed where the youths arose through the baptism of God, where the waters sprang forth’. A bishop named Plato is ordained to continue Andrew’s work, and Mermedonia becomes a prosperous place of community, no longer dependent upon human flesh, but on the body and blood of God.
8
7
Visit: https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/owhatweben/ This event is part of the Being Human festival, the UK’s only national festival of the humanities, taking place 17–25 November. For further information please see beinghumanfestival.org Produced by Michael Bintley, Canterbury Christ Church University
At the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon poem Andreas, Matthew has been blinded and drugged with a monstrous potion, and lies languishing in jail, awaiting his terrible fate. Andrew, summoned to rescue him by God, is at first reluctant to take up this mission, but puts out to sea with his companions in a boat piloted by Jesus, who is in disguise. At the end of the sea voyage Andrew is left sleeping outside the walls of Mermedonia. Upon awakening he marches within, coming to the prison where Matthew and other captives are held, whereupon its guards drop dead and the door opens at the touch of his hand. After leading Matthew and almost three hundred others to safety, Andrew returns to the city and sits down at an assembly place to await discovery. The Mermedonians are distraught when they discover that their prisoners have been freed, and hold a meeting at which they perform diabolic rites to determine their next victim. This turns out to be one of their elders, who offers up his own son in his place. As the Mermedonians prepare to slaughter the boy, divine intervention melts their weapons like wax, saving the young man’s life. Andrew is seized, beaten, and dragged through the city streets, tormented by the Mermedonians and by demons. He complains to God that he has undergone worse tortures than Jesus, and that promises made to protect him from violence have not been fulfilled. God tells him to look back at the trails of blood he has left throughout the city, which have been transformed into blossoming trees, and miraculously heals Andrew’s wounds.
In his subterranean jail cell, Andrew commands one of its pillars to spring apart, releasing a torrent of water that swells up within the walls of the city, threatening to drown all of its inhabitants. Realising their predicament the Mermedonians undergo a hasty conversion, and Andrew allows the waters to subside into a burial mound, dragging fourteen of the most evil Mermedonians down into hell. Andrew offers comfort to the surviving Mermedonians, and resurrects those killed by the flood. The town becomes a place of celebration and prosperity, and a church is constructed on the site of Andrew’s jail. The Mermedonians are baptized, Andrew establishes a bishop to guide them, and stays on a little longer to ensure that these new converts do not return to their former idolatry. In walking this route through a city which once looked much like the city of Mermedonia in Andreas – stone-built, run down, and ripe for rebirth – we are encouraged to think about the way in which those who came before us have searched for meaning in the ruins of the past. Are they, as some Anglo-Saxon poets thought, places in which we discover the fragility of our civilisation, teetering on the precipice of a descent into violence and horror? Are they reminders that every empire must fall? Or are they places in which, to paraphrase the Anglo-Saxon historian Bede wrote (quoting Isaiah), where once dragons had dwelt, the green shoots of recovery might one day grow?
6 O what we ben!:
6 Buttermarket: sacrifice
Discovering Post-apocalyptic Landscapes in Andreas and Riddley Walker
2
Andreas
5
Look here upon the wastes of Mermedonia, scene of
This is the place where Andrew sits beside a pillar of bronze after freeing Matthew and the rest of the Mermedonians’ captives. It is here that the Mermedonians gather together to divine – through diabolical arts – which of their own they will slaughter for food: ‘When all of them had gathered together at that meeting place, they used a divining rod to determine which of them should be first to give up their life as fodder for the rest; they drew lots with hellish arts, and with heathen rites decided between men’. The rod first alights on one of their elders – who delivers up his own son in his place.
Saint Andrew’s heroic expedition to rescue Saint Matthew from the clutches of the city’s devil-worshipping cannibals. Experience the Anglo-Saxon poem Andreas through the landscape of medieval and modern Canterbury.
3 Canterbury Castle:
the works of giants
Here are the stones of the crumbling, rubble-strewn streets across which Andrew is dragged by the Mermedonians during his three days of torture, before he is miraculously healed and restored to wholeness: ‘They commanded him to be drawn over the land, their fearsome enemy, to be hauled across it repeatedly in the most perilous way they could find – those infamous men, those men of hardened hearts, dragged him through scree in the hills, around stone cliffs, and as widely as the roads stretched, the ancient works of giants within the fortifications – streets paved with stone’.
3
5 Bus Station tower: the flood
4
subsides
4 Dane John mound: the mouth of hell At the climax of the poem, Andrew summons a flood, which bursts forth from a pillar in his jail cell. This forces the Mermedonians into a hasty conversion, and they promise that they will give up their worship of devils and consumption of human flesh. This great burial mound splits open, and as the waters are sucked into it, they drag fourteen of the most evil Mermedonians down into hell: ‘then the burial mound opened up, a terrifying fissure in the earth, and the turbulent waves swept into it – the ground swallowed up the churning waters’.
The floodwaters that Andrew summons prompt the Mermedonians to undertake a hasty conversion: ‘the waters encircled, and mountainous streams flowed – the flood was at its height, until the swelling waters were up to their necks’. Andrew ‘commanded the waters to be still, and the storms to come to rest within the stony gates’, and a ‘path was cleared for him through the rushing torrent – that plain of victory became fair, and the ground dried at his every footstep. The hearts of the townspeople were filled with joy, and their spirits were gladdened, now that a remedy had come forth for their injury’.
Manuscript background from Wellcome Library MS 46, used under Creative Commons licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
