2022-01-11 13:53:03 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

thornandbriar:

> thornandbriar:

> > considering the role of the archivist as an oral and not a written one in the pre-industrial revolution era.

> > a statement pared down to its marrow-bone essentials is a recording of a certain supernatural event. what the eye consumes is (1) a snippet of history that (2) can be borne witness to and distributed, even if not by or to more than the eye itself and the archivist. it is a true event, but it is also a story, in that it is told and it is subjective to the perspective of the teller.

> > so: several folk ballads follow a similar format. some of my favourites are the well below the valley (also known as the maid & the palmer), and isabel and the elven knight. both detail individual threatening experiences with the supernatural. the well below the valley is itself about strange, impossible personal knowledge.

> > the recountings of epics such as beowulf and the völsunga saga also remind me of statements in the loose sense. of their being a preservation of a story through oral repetition. these are fictional events, but the idea of communicating history through song and story is an old, old one. (the marriage of story and event comes, for example, in icelandic sagas which simultaneously legend and record, story-told descriptions of some people who genuinely existed and whose descendants can be traced today. obviously by far not the only example of this.)

> > and so i’ve been thinking of the archivist not as a paper-ink-scholar, but as a bard, a poet. the liminality of that role. sometimes, the inherent magical associations of it.

> > imagine:

> > it is midwinter, and the winter howls with a dead mouth, and rakes snowy fingers across your lintels until your hall is near buried. the candles are lit. wide and dark and full of wine as it is, the fire makes the hall of your liege-lord almost unbearably hot, enough that when you doze you dream of cool ice and snow against your cheek. the shadows slick the gaps in the wooden walls like mould, make strangers of your known ones in the half-light.

> > there is a knock at the door.

> > you open it to a man.

> > he tells you: i am a bard, i have come a long way, i need shelter.

> > you do not refuse him, even with his strange, reflective eyes, the stare he gives you like he is attempting to hollow you out and examine what is left of you, because it is midwinter and you do not leave wanderers in the snow. and the hall gets (is already) close, and hot, and suffocating, and a bard might lift some of that tension.

> > so you step back, and you allow him in, and he carries no instrument. and you give him a space by the fire. and a cup of mead. and time, to decide what to perform.

> > the first song he sings is sigurd, or a fragment of him. and oh, don’t you know this one, nursery-favourite, familiar-worn-cloth-of-story, well loved and prettily done, worth applause and another drink. a few more fragments. a heroic deed. another.

> > another ballad. not one you’ve quite heard of. not quite unfamiliar either. a good story, a story full of night-running wolves and moonlit shelter. but the bard weaves such intricate loops of the man’s terror, his desperate weeping, the pounding of his heart as he ran, enough that you wonder if this is based on a personal experience. too real. too visceral, for you to be entirely comfortable. the fire flickers, and the shadows lean closer, like they don’t want to miss a word.

> > the applause still comes. and the congratulations. but different. some softer voiced. some blustering and loud. the bard continues.

> > this song is a pretty one, two summertime lovers - or it would be, if one had not murdered the other in hopes of marrying higher. it ends with two bodies bones in the river, hair drifting in the current, and what gives you pause is this: the bard sings the town name. and though you’re unsure, you think it might be not this town. not the next one over. but the one beyond that. and you think you do remember your (sister, cousin, friend) saying something about a disappearance, perhaps an elopement, but they never found bodies, did they?

> > the bard does not name the lovers, but they are never found either.

> > you are all watching him, now. in the reflection of his eyes is your whole company, town, run upside down and strange in the convex window of his cornea.

> > his voice is low and sweet as he sings to you of a horror that preyed for a year on the town closest to yours. it is a story you already know. they are events that you, shivering, hoping that it would never come to your town, heard of as they happened. he tells it from the perspective of a man hunted by the beast. when he names the beast guthmundr, the hunter with flat grey eyes and strong hands, the man who appeared dead last spring with a knife in his back and teeth just slightly overlong, yellowed, foaming - you are not surprised.

> > and then he turns to you. the canines of his eyes hook you. unspool you. the threads of your heart wound around this man’s voice.

> > here is what you have done, he says, in a whisper like a promise. and he sings to you of the spiders that sit waiting in your bones, of the creature that you met once in a cave, that sang just as sweetly and tangled you inexorably into its web from that day forth, of how she consumed your friend as you watched, terrified, and could not save him. of your dreams of cobweb and dark corner, and your growing hunger.

> > no one speaks, when he finishes. his eyes are so very hollow. hungry. the man next to you draws his sword.

> > outside, the storm rages on.

> the crux of well below the valley is the idea of a stranger looking at you and knowing the worst thing that has ever happened to you. that you have ever had to do. that to me seems archival.

and what is possession but something making an instrument of you in much the same way that your voice shivers through you as you sing.