Issue 58, Fall 2013 Reading Maeshowe By CHARLOTTE FAIRLIE [1] Cuween, a small Neolithic cairn, perches on top of a hill on the Orkney Mainland. A flashlight waits in a bucket by the door, and visitors crawl on hands and knees, one by one, into the pitch-black interior. After savoring a degree of darkness rare in modern life, they direct beams of light up the tapering walls to marvel at the skill of the stonemasons. It is impossible to resist the impulse to clamber into the chambers and crouch where the bones once lay. Green and smooth, Maeshowe, another Orkney cairn, rises enigmatically from the field where it has stood since around 2700 BC. The designation of this monument and the surrounding Neolithic structures as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) in 1999 significantly increased tourism to the area (Card et al. 429), so while visitors may still enter Cuween unsupervised, access to the much larger Maeshowe now requires a timed ticket, bought in advance. Throughout the year, thousands of visitors, bending uncomfortably low, shuffle through the tunnel-like passage entry, making the physical journey from light to dark and a more psychological journey from present to past. Exploring any of the Neolithic sites in Orkney is to bridge time, to feel kinship with those who built them. [2] Without doubt, a major reason Maeshowe attracts so many people is its symbiotic relationship with its environment. Most famously, at sundown during the December solstice, the winter sun lines up with the door of the tomb, shines down the passage, and focuses its rays on the stone wall within. Interest in this phenomenon, the moment when the light stabs the darkness, is so high that Historic Scotland provides web-cam coverage, but Maeshowe fascinates others besides tourists and solstice celebrants. Whether they are vacation visitors, archaeologists, anthropologists, or poets, explorers experience the sites differently, applying their own intellectual tools and imagining Neolithic lives from their respective points of view. Leslie Riddoch has written that these are “Stone Age marvels which inspire and astonish,” and Simon W. Hall expresses the experiences of many when he refers to “the profound impact of entering a tomb” (160). They imply that to enter a cairn is to become one with it, to undergo a transformation. Maeshowe, which can now be experienced only under the regimented conditions required by the Historic Scotland guides, clearly retains extraordinary power to inspire. Indeed, this ancient mound has attracted a great deal of literary attention from both noted and obscure writers. Considering these cumulative interpretations, rather than relying solely on the work of archaeologists, opens up a more comprehensive, textured, and, indeed, gendered understanding of ancient history and our commonality with Neolithic peoples. [3] George Mackay Brown, Kathleen Jamie, Myra Schneider, and Dilys Rose are four of the more prominent authors for whom Maeshowe has proven inspirational. They have experienced the tomb through a doubly imaginative process: first by reading it as they would read a poem and then by expressing that interpretation in writing. While Brown was an Orcadian, living most of his life alongside the Neolithic sites, Jamie, Schneider, and Rose, all of whom have Scottish roots, experience Maeshowe as tourists, drawn across the Pentland Firth to enter the passage and travel into the darkness. Significantly, all three of these more contemporary writers are women. Hall, in his valuable survey, The History of Orkney Literature, contrasts the use of the prehistoric by female Scottish writers with that of their male counterparts, stating that it is less political, that women authors take “the opportunity to reestablish the place—and, significantly, the inner lives of women in the prehistoric or early historical northern landscape” (162-163). I would argue, however, that their work also engages the public world to a greater extent and is more ideological than this statement implies. Jamie’s, Schneider’s, and Rose’s experiences in Maeshowe lead to readings of the monument that build on the archaeological interpretations, allowing us to consider the possibility of ancient gender power struggles and raising our awareness of the deep roots of masculine dominance. [4] Archaeologist Colin Richards, who has written extensively about The Heart of Neolithic Orkney WHS, describes how visiting cairns must also have affected prehistoric visitors: “the journey will be one of consequence.” Moving from the light of day to the dark mysteries of a tomb’s interior “is a passage from the profane to the sacred.” As such, “it will involve transformation” (“Doorways” 70-71). However, the nature of the transformation is mysterious. Referring to single-chambered structures divided into stalls, he continues, “If the Orkney-Cromarty ‘chambered’ tombs are principally conceived as a series of doorways, the question arises: where are they leading? To what goal?” (71). In discussing the relationship between buildings and the people who used them thousands of years ago, Richards considers the figurative significance of doors. In doing so, he treats the tombs as if they were literary texts with debatable meaning, having previously pointed out that “the architecture of a chambered tomb relied on analogy and metaphor for its understanding and interpretation” (“Doorways” 67). Rather than merely being repositories for bones, the tombs, Richards asserts, were “built to be experienced visually, physically and imaginatively,” an experience which may well result in some kind of “revelation” (“Doorways.” 69, 70, 76). Since he argues that buildings carry metaphoric meaning, open to imaginative interpretation, it is entirely appropriate that, when explaining this, Richards also changes to the historical present tense. His grammatical shift emphasizes that like Beowulf, Hamlet, or Moby Dick, tombs such as Maeshowe transcend time and are open to new readings, whether by trained archaeologists, pilgrims, casual visitors, or writers. [5] Robert Crawford draws more explicit parallels between Maeshowe itself and literature in his essay, “Maes Howe Sappho.” Noting the continuing appeal of the tomb, how today “people still treasure” the moment that the sun lines up with the passage, he compares the ancient monument to poetry: However different we and our family groups, our tribes, have become, we can and do still savor that sense of alignment and attunement and have our own ways of articulating some sort of consonance between ourselves, our intimate groupings, and the universe that surrounds us. Though such patternings may be deconstructed, they seem to emerge from a deep need that recurs across generations, like a persistent internal rhyme, and poetry, this most nuanced way of making with words, is a way in which that need for attunement is repeatedly articulated through language. If prehistoric sites often appear to relate people to the stars and planets, then poems continue that impulse. (61) Ancient tombs, then, prompt us to ponder our place in the universe, our identity as humans, and in that also they resemble literature. According to Kenneth Brophy, Neolithic monuments “were and are locations that embodied the biography of the builders, users, spectators, and excavators” (10). It follows that if we think of Maeshowe as a text, Brophy’s assertion that the monument absorbs the “biography” of all who have used it or visited it, positions it as an example of intertextuality. Maeshowe has many constantly changing stories to tell to its different readers, and readers will respond differently to its figurative meanings. [6] In a 1977 column for The Orcadian newspaper, George Mackay Brown describes how witnessing the midwinter solstice at Maeshowe affects him: “Winter after winter I never cease to wonder at the way primitive man arranged, in hewn stone, such powerful symbolism” (“Maeshowe at Midwinter” 88). Like Richards, Brown is emphasizing the figurative qualities of the structure, which he has further explored in poetry. However, the first of his 1999 “Two Maeshowe Poems” (often printed as a stand-alone) opens not at the tomb, but with an image of the neighboring stone circle, Brodgar. Perhaps surprising to most readers, this would resonate with archaeologists since current scholarship emphasizes that the sites comprising The Heart of Neolithic Orkney are not self-contained but exist and function in relation to one another and to the surrounding landscape (See “Heart of Neolithic Orkney WHS: Setting Project” 5). As such, they should not be interpreted as discrete entities. It is fitting, then, that Brown’s poem moves seamlessly through a series of images that integrate Brodgar’s “light and darkness” with Maeshowe’s “flowers [and] stone” (a reference to the runic graffiti carved by Vikings inside the tomb) and “skulls” (Lines 1, 9, 11). The first word of the poem, “Circle,” is semantically echoed in the initial word of each ensuing stanza, “Ring,” “Wheel,” and “Round,” subtly shifting from the geometrically circular Brodgar to the tumescent mound of Maeshowe and emphasizing the cycle of “life and death” (7). For this is a poem about regeneration, how “Out of those skulls / Breaks the first green shoot, the full ear, then the bread” (11-12). Throughout, juxtaposed images look for the positive to outweigh the negative: “We move in shadows,” but “Brodgar has burned on the moor a dance of sun”; “Ring of quern and plough” (a quern is a stone for grinding grain) are charged to “contain / Our tumults of blood”; “The stars’ chaos is caught in a strict rein”; the word “stone” is enveloped by “flowers,” and “beauty and love”; similarly, “snow” is flanked by “sun” and “seed.” So darkness becomes light, destructive violence is subservient to the raising and grinding of grain for bread, order makes sense of the universe, the beautiful and the warm temper the hard and the cold, and new life will follow death. [7] Brown’s interpretation of these monuments, his use of the architectural circularity and roundness of the Ring of Brodgar and Maeshowe as metaphors for the lifecycle and the possibility of renewal, is shared by archaeologists, who despite its being a burial site, have also associated Maeshowe and its rituals with the agricultural year. Neolithic people were not nomadic but had gradually become settled farmers, living by the routines and rhythms of the seasons, which, according to Richards, constituted “an analogy with the human life cycle and past generations” (“Doorways” 65). Time’s passage was the organizational framework for survival as well as mortality, and the tombs, he writes, were “a metaphorical extension of daily life” (“Doorways” 76). Trevor Garnham, an architect, develops that idea further: “Burying bones in the earth was perhaps to seek some metaphoric relationship with the planting of seeds. In its maturity and death, the seed containing the essence of its own renewal served as the inspiration for the hope of life’s rebirth in some other form” (87). In pairing skeletal remains with seeds as an expression of hope for the future, Garnham’s analogy is comparable to the positive final image of Brown’s poem, the “skulls” engendering the “green shoots” and the “bread” of life. [8] Brown had written earlier of Maeshowe in his 1996 poem, “Maeshowe: Midwinter,” choosing then to focus on the solstice. However, the imagery here is not rooted in the agricultural cycle, the earthly world of querns, ploughs, and bread; instead, he connects the pre-Christian tomb to the Christian calendar. The opening phrase, “Equinox to Hallowmass,” immediately integrates the astronomical with the sacred, giving the season of “darkness” both physical and spiritual dimensions (1). The religious imagery continues in the second stanza as it evokes “St Lucy,” whose feast day falls on the shortest day of the year (6). She is portrayed as a weaver whose “shuttle” creates “a dark web” that “fills the loom” (7-9), placing at the centre of the poem a world in which light is completely absent: “The blackness is solid as a / stone that locks a tomb. / No star shines there” (10-12). To be in such a void, with no guiding star, would seem like a moment of psychological despair, yet just as the days begin to lengthen immediately after the solstice, the poem also brightens. The moment when the sun enters the passage is the “true ceremony,” suggesting that perhaps the pagan reverence for nature carries particular authenticity. Then “the last fleeting solstice flame” is “caught up,” leading to an optimistic note as the children—the future—sing with “voices like leaves of light” (19). Again, the poem ends with an image of rebirth, but its tone is less biological and more cosmological. [9] While Brown’s poems use these dual frames of reference in order to explore the themes of regeneration that Maeshowe expresses, the biological and cosmological are not at odds. Garnham defines the cosmos as “an all-encompassing world of things and phenomena [. . . .] The essential character of this early form of cosmos bound every aspect of a people’s life into reciprocal relationships with the forces that give shape to their world” (9). The central argument of his book places Neolithic Orkney in this context. Similarly, reading Brown’s two Maeshowe poems together reveals that the “green shoot” which produces the “bread” corresponds to the youthful “voices like leaves of light.” In fact, his insertion of “leaves,” with its agrarian connotations, into that final line establishes the connection, recognizes that the complex architectural system of domestic houses, burial chambers, and stone circles symbolizes the idea that the activities for which they were designed—working, eating, loving, sleeping, worshipping, dying, and the possibility of rebirth—are the web of human existence. The physical bread and the metaphysical song are one. [10] In their respective responses to Maeshowe, Kathleen Jamie, Myra Schneider, and Dilys Rose also address the theme of the cycle of life and death. Jamie’s essay, “Darkness and Light,” describes a quest: she seeks a good, positive darkness because, in the 21st century, it has become impossible “to see the real dark for the metaphorical dark . . .the death-dark.” Enjoyment of the “natural, courteous dark,” she has come to believe, has been squeezed out by the Christian belief in a metaphorical darkness that stands for the opposite of salvation (9-10). However, as she is planning this trip, a friend points out that “Maes Howe is a metaphor,” perhaps exposing a flaw in Jamie’s thinking: possibly the natural and metaphorical darknesses are inseparable (10 emphasis added). Although her visit to Maeshowe takes place a couple of days before the solstice, the artificial lights of a surveyor’s crew assault her eyes, so she rediscovers no “courteous darkness” and witnesses “no resurrecting beam of sunlight” (19). Nevertheless, through Maeshowe, she becomes reconciled to the conventional negative concept of darkness. In terms of “wonder” similar to Brown’s in The Orcadian, she asks, “Were they the first people . . . to articulate this metaphor of light and dark, of life and death?” and reflects upon its significance: For five thousand years we have used darkness as the metaphor of our mortality. We were at the mercy of merciless death, which is darkness. When we died, they sent a beam of midwinter light in among our bones. What a tender, potent gesture. In the Christian era, we were laid in our graves to face the rising sun. We’re still mortal, still don’t want to die, don’t want our loved ones to die. (19-20) Her rejection of a metaphor that she has considered “[worn] out” and “redundant” (4, 9) turns out to have been less literary and more personally psychological, for Jamie’s visit to the tomb leads to her acceptance of mortality. Whereas previously she has blamed Christianity, she now appreciates that the Christian concept of darkness is part of a continuum of dread traceable back to Neolithic times and forward to our own. The “tender, potent gesture” of the light penetrating the dark of the tomb, therefore, offers consolation, ameliorating our most profound fears (20). [11] In her poem, “Maeshowe,” Myra Schneider also describes a guided tour of the cairn, during which the speaker uses the second person singular to address a hypothetical visitor, initially giving the sense that to enter the burial place feels like death as the “chill seeps into your body” (14). However, this ominous impression is immediately dismissed because “a stillness that’s other than death inhabits / this place where the undead gather to greet the dead” (15-17). The journey through the passage will take “you” to a place that is not oblivion but, instead, is where the living may consort with their ancestors. Again, the boundary between life and death, which can seem so irrevocable, becomes less absolute and, therefore, less threatening. After the visit is over, its impact will remain, and the speaker imagines her visitor’s memories: In midwinter you’ll visualize the sun piercing the dark that swaddles seeds, see it falling on the aligned entrance, its white shine splitting to burnish the passage wall, flood the ground with gold. (22-26) These images recall Garnham’s theory: that the burial of bones is connected metaphorically to the planting of seeds. In the speaker’s memory, the dark cradles seeds, the germ of life, rather than bones. Once sunlight enters the tomb, a radiant moment occurs in which the “ground” will turn “gold,” like a field of ripe grain. Schneider’s poem, like Brown’s, affirms the archaeological reading of Maeshowe as a place of renewal, but in this case that renewal goes beyond the promise of the agricultural cycle. An individual will be able to experience, perhaps during times of psychological or spiritual gloom, the moment of glory when the sun is “piercing / the dark.” There is a Romantic quality to these lines: Maeshowe will stay with Schneider’s speaker as those daffodils stay with Wordsworth, “to flash upon the inward eye / That is the bliss of solitude,” to stimulate the imagination (24). Having herself benefited from the tomb’s restorative qualities, the speaker is inspired to spread the word, to share her revelation with “you,” the reader. [12] Besides the drama of the solstice, another inspirational feature of Maeshowe is the Viking runes carved on the interior walls. Referring to these inscriptions as “The first island poems,” Brown quotes them emphatically in the second of the paired poems: “INGIBIORG IS THE LOVELIEST GIRL / HERMUND WITH A HARD AXE CARVED RUNES” (“Two” 13, 18-19). Many have been struck by the simple humanity of these statements, as well as the paradox inherent in this lusty youthful scrawling being hidden in a tomb. Dilys Rose, in “Maeshowe Nipple,” for instance, lists the prosaic concerns of the Vikings, portraying them as “intrepid” but also homesick, missing “sweethearts and family” (4, 9). At the ends of their respective poems, both Brown and Rose emphasize that Maeshowe was merely a temporary shelter for the Vikings: the “young seamen climbed out of Maeshowe, / Their nostrils wide to the salt wind”; “the dragon boats moved on” (Brown “Two” 23-24; Rose 11). Crawling out of the subterranean tomb and heading for further maritime adventures, the men re-enter the world, extending the overall theme of regeneration. Brown, as we have seen, has already linked the tomb with the life-giving promise of “the first green shoot, the full ear, then the bread” in the first of these paired poems. Rose, in similar terms, also connects the Viking runes with the reassuring knowledge that there will be a crop next year: over the centuries, “their tongue / took root and sprouted from invaded soil / green words for Father, Daughter, Bread” (11-13). Here, in the final lines, the Viking vocabulary is fresh and verdant, a harbinger of new human life and the grain that nourishes it. Since runic characters are “straight-branched” (Rose 4), they resemble rows of rudimentary skeletal stick figures which have been buried in the tomb. The bony runes, therefore, have become metaphorical seeds, and Rose’s speaker, like Garnham, sees hope in the bone/seed analogy. [13] It is clear, to summarize briefly, that these four creative writers read Maeshowe much as archaeologists and historians of architecture have done, as an expression of hope for the future, particularly in relation to the coming of spring, but also at a more personal level. The texts suggest that to visit these tombs is, as Richards also emphasizes, transformative. Like their ancestors, contemporary visitors are changed, in some manner revitalized, especially if they witness the sun’s midwinter alignment, which Brown describes as a “pledge of renewal, a cry of resurrection” (“Maeshowe in Midwinter” 88). However, in the work of Jamie, Schneider, and Rose, a further, more political restoration is at work, for all three use images equating Maeshowe with the female body. [14] Kathleen Jamie states early in her essay, “We are conceived and carried in the darkness,” emphasizing the positive, life-giving qualities of the dark, and inviting the reader to see Maeshowe as a uterus (4). The womb/tomb imagery is developed further when she eroticizes the winter solstice as “a complicit kiss,” during which “the beam of the setting sun shines along the passage, and onto the tomb’s back wall” (12). When she goes inside the tomb, she expects “not utter darkness, but perhaps a wombish red”; however, this is denied her because of the lights of the surveyors, one of whom is “folded, foetus-like, into the little cell in the back wall”: a foetus implanted in the very place where the sunbeam strikes (12,13). When Jamie leaves, she describes taking “the smallest and most challenging of journeys, squeezing down a passageway and out into the world of sound and moving air” (17). The tunnel that admits the beam has become a birth canal, so Jamie’s transformation is not only her intellectual reassessment of the metaphorical value of darkness; she visualizes her own rebirth in more literal terms too, with Maeshowe cast as the mother. [15] Myra Schneider’s “Maeshowe” also hints that to visit the tomb is to return to the womb when the speaker remarks that although “you” are part of a tour group, you will realize that you are “alone” and have “never travelled so far back / so far in” (8-10). This analogy is made more explicit later in the poem when the sun enters the passage: “In that deep chamber / you’ll be bathed in red, not the red spilt in hatred—/the red that’s birth, the heart looming with the blood” (24-28). In the vision that the speaker evokes for the visitor’s memory, therefore, the “dark that swaddles seeds” not only nurtures and protects the grain that will ripen into crops, but also the fertilized ovum (23). With no dazzling and intrusive surveyors’ lights, Schneider suggests that it is possible for us to experience the “wombish red” that was denied Jamie, blood that is the force of life rather than the mark of violence. [16] Dilys Rose’s poem, “Maeshowe Nipple,” on the other hand, in addressing the Viking use of the tomb, acknowledges that violence has taken place. The title, of course, immediately signals that Maeshowe is female, and the opening lines graphically describe the tomb’s external anatomy: a “breast,” with an “aureola / sandy-rimmed, the nipple leaking a pale trail / to hidden chambers” (1-3). Within, Maeshowe’s chambers have been “invaded” by men who “inscribed their conquests” and “totted up the loot” (12, 4, 6). Even though the poem has initially compared the cairn to a breast rather than a womb, this seems like a rape or an assault by men exercising their power and keeping track of their plunder. As human and homesick as the poem presents the young men, it does not forget that their presence in Maeshowe is as uninvited intruders who leave their runic seeds carved into the chamber walls. [17] To make sense of this pattern of imagery, it is helpful to turn to an earlier female author, similarly inspired by her visit to a Neolithic site. Naomi Mitchison wrote Early in Orcadia after a friend took her to another of Orkney’s chambered tombs, Isbister, which has no passage entry, because “she knew it would waken something in me” (8). Set in Neolithic times, the novel follows a family and its descendants as they settle on Orkney, establish homes and villages, and erect the monuments in which they practice their religious rituals. Mitchison depicts the cairns predating the stone circles (both Isbister and Maeshowe are, in fact, thought to have been built before Brodgar) and imaginatively describes the changing beliefs prompting these architectural developments. Tradition holds that pregnant women must visit the tomb in order that the ancestral spirit will be passed to their children (132). One woman, Ba, making this journey, reflects that a “few moons” have passed since she became pregnant and stopped menstruating. She also knows that a powerful goddess, “the big bad Moon Woman had once had an honouring place,” had watched over the dead (119). However, the Moon Woman has been supplanted by the sun. The burial place was “pulled apart and scattered by the Sun Man and the bulls. After that came the beginning of their own honouring place where the bones lay and where you must go down on your knees before you could get in” (119). The later passage cairn, then, is a creation of the masculine sun, the same sun that shines down the passageway at midwinter. Accompanied by bulls, also male, the Sun Man has ravaged the Moon Woman’s tomb and designed a new one to suit his own needs. Even so, the burial place is still associated with female fertility. Nervously, Ba enters “on her hands and knees . . . under and between great stones.” Once inside, though, she thinks of the moments before she conceived her child: “She was waiting, almost as she had waited in the soft sand behind that rock in the sun-warmed geo a few moons back” (130). For Ba, the tomb is not frightening. She recalls not a violent rape, but a loving encounter, and the darkness feels as warm as the “geo” (an Orcadian word referring to a deep, narrow fissure in a cliff) where she met her lover. Following her memory of the moment of conception, she is “push[ed] . . . back, back to the way out, back to the square of light, to the way out into the real world on hands and knees as one must” (130). Like Jamie, Ba is compelled to crawl, to battle her way through the passage to be reborn. [18] By the end of Early in Orcadia, the stone circle, with its emphasis on light rather than dark, is becoming the ultimate manifestation of the transfer of power from the Moon Woman to the Sun Man. Its significance is explained by the “Great Man,” who is “painted with sun circles,” to Moon Woman after he has summoned her to his presence: “The great tall stones . . . were so raised to show the way of the sun, who is our master and our maker” (169). Moon Woman, however, is aware of the injustice of this arrangement: “They said that the moon was the servant of the sun, to do what he wanted, but that, Moon Woman knew, was not right. In her own mind she unsaid it” (170). At first she is jealous and afraid, but the final vision of the novel is hers, and it is, to an extent, a reconciliation of powers: If I were to say a few small and easy words to the Great Man, if I were to move myself in a certain way, then we would be sun and moon. Then I would put my fingers onto the colour, onto that knife, onto his eyes, . . . eyes, onto that round, shining sun that hangs over his heart, fingering it so that my fingers would meet his, me going . . . onto all parts of him. He would be mine as the sun is the moon’s. (176) She is picturing an intertwining of sun and moon, of masculine and feminine—a consummation. The partnership is not one of complete equality, though, for she also envisions not that the sun will be the master and the moon the servant, but that he will be hers, that the moon will possess the sun, that her status will be restored. [19] Mitchison’s fictional representation of light/sun/man emerging as the object of worship and awe, assuming the rank previously held by dark/moon/woman, is an idea rooted across cultures: “A fundamental polarity in many creation myths,” according to Trevor Garnham, “contrasts the dark, fecund, harbouring earth with the up-drawing sun.” (145). He points out, for example, that “by the time of the Celtic occupation of Britain, there were well-established beliefs and practices focused on the sun” and that in Norse mythology, “a male hierarchy supplanted older, matriarchal law” (161, 109). Analyzing the archaeological sites within this paradigm, Garnham argues, supports the theory that religious practice fundamentally changed along with the architecture, that “ritual activity associated with burial cairns became transferred to stone circles” (152). [20] Maeshowe, however, suggests a mid-point in this ritualistic shift because although, like earlier stalled cairns, it is dark and womb-like, its annual climactic moment is when the sun lights up the passage. Garnham sees the Neolithic architecture of Orkney as a progression. The first structures, the houses, were purely domestic; they had a “nurturing role” (66). The houses at the coastal village site, Scara Brae, therefore, “seem to be fundamentally powerful symbols of protection and gathering, echoing that of the pot and the basket” (70). Since the manufacture of both pots and baskets was the work of women, Garnham is reading the houses as essentially feminine. They were vessels, their stone walls embanked by earth. Both Garnham and Richards point out that the houses were models for the tombs: the passage graves are structurally similar to the houses at Scara Brae, and both were covered with turf (Garnham 48; Challands, Muir & Richards 242, 245). Cairns of the Maeshow type, with passage entries, however, were the later forms. The earlier stalled structures, such as Midhowe, on the island of Rousay, did not feature the tunnel entrance. [21] Archaeologists do not agree on the social significance of passage cairns and sun circles, the extent to which their development reveals a move to a more hierarchical society. Challands, Muir, and Richards state, “In many ways, everything about the architecture of Maeshowe enforces a notion of separation, division, and restriction” (247). Elsewhere, Richards and another co-writer are more guarded. They point out that the tomb resembles House 2 at the nearby Barnhouse settlement, a larger house than any at Scara Brae that was probably “highly restricted on the basis of an individual’s status, probably additionally defined in terms of age and gender.” However, they also warn that there is insufficient archaeological evidence to “leap to conclusions about a patriarchal group of ‘elders’ who used knowledge as a commodity to maintain their power over women and younger men” (Muir & Richards 204). Although cautious, they do acknowledge that “power and authority,” probably based on “cosmological beliefs,” would have been necessary to build the monuments (199). Leaning not only on physical but also anthropological evidence, Garnham’s view, on the other hand, is that the more formal structure does support the idea of hierarchy and that the estimated 100,000 man/hours that would have been necessary to build it point to a more complex social structure that had to extend beyond the local community (128). Furthermore, he writes, the layout of individual chambers “can be read as a metaphor of primogeniture” (74). Like Richards, Garnham interprets the passage as a symbol of privilege because it was hard to get inside. However, citing Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion, he also emphasizes that there is “a close connection between solar theology and the elite” (163). In this context it seems that “allowing access to the sun . . . was more important that [sic] allowing access to members of the tribe” (131-132). [22] Maeshowe can be seen, then, as expressing a point of tension between earth and sun in which the dark tomb is literally infiltrated by solar rays on one day only. The subsequent building of the Circle of Brodgar elevates the stature of the sun. Fully above ground, the center of its astronomical and religious year occurs not in December, but in June, at the midsummer solstice. Garnham points out that while a smaller circle, the Stones of Stenness, is open to the sun at its “point of maximum power,” Maeshowe allows the sun inside only when it is “at its lowest ebb.” Except at midwinter, “the tomb is dark, cold, and filled with white bones, echoing the whiteness of the moon” (207). Although Stenness actually predates Maeshowe by perhaps 400 years, throwing off the neat chronology of Early in Orcadia, Garnham’s interpretation of Maeshowe and the stone circles parallels Mitchison’s literary response to the Isbister tomb: compared to earlier cairns, Maeshowe is a more patriarchal development, the passageway allowing the masculine sun to displace the feminine “whiteness of the moon,” and yet the bones, the metaphorical seeds, still lie dormant; the presence of Moon Woman endures. [23] Although Early in Orcadia ends with Moon Woman’s vision of a mingling of sun and moon, of masculine and feminine, there is a note of uncertainty as she asks herself, “Should I, then?” (176). She does not ask “Can I?” but “Should I?” Her question is not whether she is personally capable, but whether it would be wise to challenge the elite power structure in the name of justice. Readers are left without an answer, but since women are still fighting for equality in the institutions of politics and religion, it is reasonable to assume that if Moon Woman did attempt it, she met with a great deal of resistance. It is with this in mind, then, that we can return to the Maeshowe experiences of Jamie, Schneider and Rose. Their visits to the cairn suggest that to see it merely as a symbol of agricultural regeneration or even more broadly of hope, is incomplete. Something more needs to be resurrected, and their use of the female imagery effectively acknowledges and reclaims a feminine narrative for Maeshowe. In Rose’s poem, 12th century Vikings may take up residence inside, but 900 years later, the reader is instructed to “See,” to bear witness to “a green breast in a green field,” the most nurturing part of a woman’s body surrounded by the new growth of spring (1). When Schneider refers to the “red that’s birth” rather than the “red spilt in hatred,” and describes how the sun will “burnish the passage wall, / flood the ground with gold” and, similarly, when Jamie refers to the “complicit kiss,” it is as if Moon Woman’s consummation has finally taken place and justice restored. [24] Richards asks where the doors of tombs lead, to what “revelation.” Indeed, the creative writing of Jamie, Schneider, and Rose transports readers through Maeshowe’s entryway towards “revelation.” Their collective responses help us to recognize the humanity of Neolithic peoples, to appreciate how common experiences connect us to the past. They ask us to consider the roots of sexual discrimination, the possible marginalization of women 5000 years ago. More universally, they honor the memory of displaced matriarchal societies and, thus, prompt us to reflect on the status of women today. While, as Hall points out, male authors of the mid-twentieth-century Scottish Literary Renaissance had a nationalist political agenda, “looking for Scotland in Scotland’s prehistory” (160), these female writers look to the past for a feminist renewal, both personal and political. As such, their interpretations complement and illuminate those of archaeologists. Naomi Mitchison, acknowledging that she may be “treading on the toes of archaeologists,” points out that their physical “evidence may not always offer a clear interpretation, in fact it very seldom does” (113). For despite their painstaking sifting (both literal and figurative) of physical evidence, archaeologists must, finally, apply their own imaginations. [25] Archaeologists themselves recognize the uncertainty inherent in drawing conclusions about ancient societies from the surviving fragments of their lives. In reference to the recent discovery of a complex of temples at the Ness of Brodgar, Richards has said, “This was a ceremonial centre, and a vast one at that. But the religious beliefs of its builders remain a mystery" (qtd. in McKie). In fact, the excavation of this temple complex is prompting a reassessment of the entire Heart of Neolithic Orkney. Tom Muir, of the Orkney Museum, goes so far as to assert that "the whole text book of British archaeology for this period will have to be torn up and rewritten from scratch thanks to this place" (qtd. in McKie). Even as archaeologists, using sophisticated technology, scrape away the dust of time from this long-buried site, it remains true that “Insights can only come from interpretation” (Jones and Richards 195). It is in this interpretative arena that science must join forces with the arts and humanities in the search for knowledge, for a fuller understanding. [26] George Mackay Brown has written, “People in 2000 AD are essentially the same as the stone-breakers [. . .] of 3000 BC” (“Brodgar Poems” lines 10-12). Knowing where we have come from, fleshing out our understanding of the prehistoric world and, therefore, ourselves, takes the skills and multiple perspectives not only of scientists, archaeologists, architects, and anthropologists, but also essayists, poets, and more. The interdisciplinary synergy involved in comparing archaeological, anthropological, and literary interpretations of Maeshowe sheds light on the shadows of the past, raises questions about the more elusive shadows of Neolithic women, and provides historical context for our understanding of gender relations across time. Like crawling through the passage into the dark and out to the light, the empirical and literary journeys into the mysteries of Maeshowe are indeed transformative, exhuming the bones of the past that we may better nurture the seeds of the future. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. Thanks are due to Edward Gale Agran, Stephen Potthoff, and the anonymous reviewers for their time and valued advice. WORKS CITED Bevan, Archie, and Brian Murray. Eds. The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown. London: John Murray, 2005. Print. Brown, George Mackay. “Brodgar Poems (1992).” In Bevan and Murray.308-312. Print. ---. “Maeshowe: Midwinter.”1996. In Bevan and Murray. 320. Print. ---. “Maeshowe at Midwinter.” 1977. Under Binkie’s Brae. Edinburgh: Gordon Wright Publishing, 1979. 87-88. Print. ---. “Two Maeshowe Poems.” 1999. In Bevan and Murray. 420-421. Print. Card, Nick, et al. “Bringing a Landscape to Life? Researching and Managing ‘The Heart of Neolithic Orkney’ World Heritage Site.” World Archaeology 39.3 (2007): 417-435. EBSCO Academic Search Complete. Web. 29 Jun. 2011. Challands, Adrian, Tom Muir, and Colin Richards. “The Great Passage Grave of Maeshowe.” Dwelling Among the Monuments: The Neolithic Village of Barnhouse, Maeshowe Passage Grave and Surrounding Monuments at Stenness, Orkney. Ed. Colin Richards. Cambridge: McDonald Inst. For Archaeological Research, 2005. 229-248. Print. Crawford, Robert. “Maes Howe Sappho.” Yale Review: 95.1 (2007): 60-65. OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center. Web. 29 Jun. 2011. Garnham, Trevor. Lines on the Landscape, Circles from the Sky: Monuments of Neolithic Orkney. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2004. Print. Hall, Simon W. The History of Orkney Literature. Edinburgh: John Donald/Birlinn Ltd., 2010. Print. “Heart of Neolithic Orkney WHS: Setting Project” Historic Scotland. 2008. EBSCO Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Jun. 2011. Jamie, Kathleen. “Darkness and Light.” Findings: Esssays on the Natural and Unnatural World. Ed. Jamie. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2005. 3-22. Print. McKie, Robin. “Neolithic Discovery: Why Orkney is the Centre of Ancient Britain. The Guardian / The Observer. 6 Oct. 2012. Web. 16 Mar. 2013. Mitchison, Naomi. Early in Orcadia. Glasgow: Richard Drew, 1987. Print. Jones, Siân, and Colin Richards. “The Villagers of Barnhouse.” Dwelling Among the Monuments: The Neolithic Village of Barnhouse, Maeshowe Passage Grave and Surrounding Monuments at Stenness, Orkney. Ed. Colin Richards. Cambridge: McDonald Inst. For Archaeological Research, 2005. 195-204. Print. Richards, Colin. “Doorways into Another World: The Orkney-Cromarty Chambered Tombs.” Vessels for Ancestors: Essays on the Neolithic of Britain and Ireland in Honour of Audrey Henshall. Ed. Niall Sharples and Alison Sheridan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1992. 62-76. Print. Riddoch, Lesley. “Stone Age Marvels Which Inspire and Astonish: Wonders of Scotland.” The Scotsman. 13 Feb. 2006. Web. 30 Jun. 2011. Rose, Dilys. “Maes Howe Nipple.” Bodywork. Edinburgh. Luath Press, 2007. Print. Schneider, Myra. “Maeshowe.” Circling the Core. London: Enitharmon Press, 2008. 23-24. Print. Wordsworth, William. “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eighth Ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and M.H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 2006. 305-306. Print. Contributor's Note CHARLOTTE FAIRLIE teaches English at Wilmington College, in Wilmington, Ohio. Her published work focuses on Scottish literature and rural life in literature. She is currently co-editing an anthology of poetry relating to scythes and mowing. |
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Genders Journal 226 UCB University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309 http://www.Genders.org |
