THE OLD ENGLISH STRAIGHT TRACK

by Jim Kimmis

When the Anglo-Saxon peoples transferred their holdings from Denmark and northern Germany to England in the 5th and 6th centuries CE, they brought with them elements of the cultural traditions of their homelands, including much spoken wisdom in the form of verse. In the 8th century, when the settlement had been completed, some unnamed English poet put into writing a traditional epic set in the earlier era; the story concerned a young hero from southern Sweden who visited a Danish king and performed for him the useful service of killing troublesome monsters, later returning to rule in his own land where he finally died in conflict with one dragon too many. The hero and the poem describing his adventures share the name of BEOWULF.

There is a curious passage in the poem, wherein Beowulf and his companions follow a malignant creature known as Grendel’s Mother to her underwater lair in order to kill her. The track that they take is described as though it were a landscape alignment, a ley; this might simply be poetic licence, or it might be a record of something of genuine geomantic interest. In the translation made by Michael Alexander and published as a Penguin paperback, the verse is as follows:

“… The trace of her going
on the woodland paths was plainly to be seen,
stepping onwards; straight across
the fog-bound moor she had fetched away there
the lifeless body of the best man
of all who kept the courts of Hrothgar.
The sons of man then made their way
up steep screes, by scant tracks,
where only one might walk, by wall-faced cliffs,
through haunted fens – uninhabitable country.

Going ahead with a handful of the keener men to reconnoitre,
Beowulf suddenly saw where some ash-trees
hung above a hoary rock …”

Of particular interest here are the phrases “straight across the fog-bound moor” and “by scant tracks where only one might walk”, which taken together might suggest a narrow alignment physically marked on the ground. The initial point of the ley, if such it was, would have been the pool and its associated cave where Grendel’s Mother lived: this was marked above ground by the clump of ash-trees and the grey rock. The terminal point of the alignment would have been the “courts of Hrothgar”, the Danish royal residence called Heorot on the island now called Zealand. The murder and pestilence in the royal courts, attributed to Grendel’s Mother and her offspring, could then be interpreted as the malignant effects due to an imbalance of energies communicated along the alignment. This, at any rate, would accord with the present understanding of geomantic energy-effects.

(Whether imaginative literature of any era does record actual memories of landscape alignments is very difficult to prove. After all, Pilgrim’s Progress traces out a classic ley but there is nothing to suggest that Bunyan was a geomancer: he may have taken a hint from the numerous references in the Old Testament, or he may have shared an archetypal vision which has been granted to others – notably Alfred Watkins. The concept of “the straight and narrow way” is clearly not limited to physical geography.)

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Jim now edits the new “magazine of antiquities, folklore and paraphenomena” titled ESSEX LANDSCAPE MYSTERIES. Subscription is £2.00 p.a. (4 issues), from Address, COLCHESTER, Essex Postcode.
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