Radio Archaeology: 'Myth or Legend?' edited by Glyn Daniel

In 1953-54 a series of twelve talks was given on BBC Radio under the heading ‘Myth or Legend?’ They were organised by the leading archaeologist Glyn Daniel, and were gathered, pretty much verbatim, in an anthology which he edited under that title (1955), which now seems somewhat uncommon. The contributors included Leonard Woolley, T.C. Lethbridge and Stuart Piggott.

Daniel drew a distinction between myth, which is wholly invented, and legend, which may, though fanciful, have a kernel of historical truth. He claimed these definitions to be well-known in academic circles: I don’t know whether they still are, but in common use I would say they have since become somewhat elided.

Though the idea for the series began with Donald Boyd in the BBC Talks Department, as Daniel acknowledges in his preface, it fitted nicely with Daniel’s drive for public education in his fields of archaeology and ancient history. He was to become a familiar face and voice on the BBC both as a populariser of his fields of study and as a ‘personality’, presenting a series on archaeology, Buried Treasure, and hosting the genteel quiz show ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?’. Indeed, the title of Myth or Legend? has an air of the game show about it: ‘and now, over to our panel, what do you think? Avalon, myth or legend? What about you, Dr Snortleberry? Where do you plump on this one?’

The inquisitorial format also suited his robust sceptical approach. He was later notorious in earth mysteries circles for refusing a paid advertisement for The Ley Hunter in Antiquity, the academic journal he edited: he wasn’t having any truck with the more speculative aspects of amateur antiquarianism.

The twelve subjects of the talks in the book are: Lyonesse and other drowned lands; Troy; Glastonbury and the Holy Grail; The Flood; Theseus and the Minotaur; Tara; Tristan and Isolt; St George and the Dragon; The Isles of the Blessed; The Druids and Stonehenge; Atlantis; and The Golden Bough. This offers a a good mixture of classical and local themes. The most obvious omission from British myths or legends is Robin Hood. I suspect this was because the focus of the talks is archaeological and the medieval outlaw wasn’t considered ancient enough. Each talk is followed by suggestions for further reading, sometimes in obscure monographs or other languages: evidently the interested reader was trusted to be undaunted by these.

The talks are brisk, informal, friendly, inquisitive and provide an excellent primer for their subjects. They are clear in saying what is known, what is probable or possible, and what is unsupported by evidence. I think they provide a useful context for the public interest in myth and legend in the period immediately before publication of The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). I wonder whether this popular wireless series, discussing with enthusiasm magical realms, epic warfare, mystical talismans, fabulous beasts and ancient English and Celtic tales, might have prepared the ground with some readers for a sympathetic response to Tolkien’s work.

The talks have a strong focus on their individual subjects, but there is less attention to comparisons and contrasts between them. They do not discuss very much why certain legends seize the popular imagination and endure, and what further dimensions of thought they might evoke. For example, the idea of an earthly paradise is implicit in several of the themes here: Lyonesse, Tara, Avalon, Atlantis, the Blessed Isles. What does that tell us about human longings and aspirations, or about art and spirituality? This is not really part of their concern in these talks, and so sometimes we may feel that, in exploring the evidence for the existence of a myth or legend, they miss its essence.

In his King Arthur’s Avalon, The Story of Glastonbury (1957), Geoffrey Ashe used as the epigraph for his book a quotation from the historian E.A. Freeman: ‘We need not believe that the Glastonbury legends are records of facts; but the existence of those legends is a very great fact.’ While myths and legends might not directly represent history, they illuminate the imaginative and inspirational world of their weavers and hearers and readers, and they may still have rich and mysterious things to tell us.

(Mark Valentine)

Radio Ghosts of the Mid Twentieth Century

In the period from about 1930 to about 1960 many people in Britain had a radio but few had a TV. The radio was therefore the main form of home entertainment, alongside the gramophone. The BBC was the only radio broadcaster in the country and thus a major sponsor of the arts. But most of the broadcasts in this period are lost: it was too expensive to record them permanently and, once they had been aired, it was rare for them to be archived.

This means that for an entire art form, the radio play, and for experimental features such as sound collages, we do not have many early examples in existence. To get some idea of what they were like, we have to rely on scripts (these do not always exist either), publication in books (not many made it to this form) and reviews (often brief and general).

The same is true of music, where not only the performance but sometimes the composition itself is lost: and particularly in the case of incidental music for plays. Talks and readings are more likely to have survived, as their authors often collected these in book form. The Radio Times and The Listener, the two radio newsstand journals, did provide detailed listings and some commentary week by week, and some BBC paperwork also survives, giving insights into the commissioning and development of pieces. Even so, most radio productions from this period are only known as ghostly echoes.

Using the resources that are available, a dedicated researcher can try to build up a picture of what we have lost and what survives, and that is just what Roger Simpson has done in his study of Arthurian programmes, Radio Camelot: Arthurian Legends on the BBC, 1922-2005 (2007). Inevitably, this can be at times a little dry, reading simply as a catalogue or checklist, but the author works imaginatively with the sources to convey more colour and detail where possible. There are a handful of stalwart Arthurian works which recur throughout his survey, deployed in various forms by the BBC, eg Malory, Tennyson, Wagner, Eliot, and indeed one criticism that could fairly be made is that the broadcaster too often played safe and served up variations on established classics, rather than commissioning new work.

On the other hand, the BBC was occasionally adventurous, for example in sponsoring interpretations of David Jones’ difficult modernist long poems with Arthurian themes, which seemed to have made a real impact on listeners. They also adapted some of T H White’s popular Arthurian fiction such as The Sword in the Stone. They did not, however, use any of Arthur Machen’s Arthurian pieces, whether his Grail fiction or his essays, nor did they do anything with Charles Williams’ Grail thriller War in Heaven, but they did broadcast in 1957 The Summer Stars: A Masque by Robin Milford, a musical tribute to his Arthurian poem In the Region of the Summer Stars. The Robin Milford Trust lists this as his Op. 102 and dates it 1946-57, but there does not seem to be any recording. Work was often taken up through the personal championing of individual BBC employees, as with David Jones’ narrative poems.

As we get into the later 20^th century and early 21^st century, more work is preserved, and the book provides a useful guide to Arthurian history and literature in the air during this period. For example, Simpson mentions a contribution to a 2003 programme by Prof Charles Thomas, the noted Cornish archaeologist, who warmly recommends two novels often overlooked: Castle Dor by Daphne du Maurier, completing a novel by Arthur Quiller-Couch (1962): and Dawn in Lyonesse (1938) by Mary Ellen Chase. This is set at the King Arthur Hotel, Tintagel, and replays the Tristan legends among Cornish fisher folk.

Radio Camelot illustrates what can still be achieved with patience and ingenuity to retrieve at least some knowledge of lost radio productions, and it would be interesting to see a similar survey for fantastic literature more generally, or for some sub-set of it, such as ghost stories.   Early on, of course, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was the obvious choice for any ghostly theme, and there were also folklore and ancient customs talks, but perhaps surprisingly M R James was not then greatly in evidence. Algernon Blackwood, however, became a household name as an established ghost story raconteur on the radio, known familiarly as ‘the Ghost Man’.

I have encountered by chance descriptions of a couple of interesting productions: Horton Giddy’s ghost story Off Finisterre (1936) and the fantastical Candlemas Night by Ernest Randolph Reynolds (1955). I think it is likely that, as with Arthurian productions, there were other high quality and distinctive fantastical or ghost story dramas or audio collages during the 1930-60 period that are awaiting rediscovery, even if we only have faint echoes of what they were.

(Mark Valentine)

The Dons, the Devil and the Playing Card Queens: A Boxing Day Masque of 1955

When I was editing Grotesqueries—A Tribute to the Tales of L A Lewis (Zagava, 2022), I checked for any previously published books called Grotesqueries, and found in the British Library catalogue, Card Queens – A Grotesquerie in One Act by Ernest Randolph Reynolds (Samuel French, 1932). Liking the title, I looked into him further and found he was a Northampton poet, playwright, actor, connoisseur and writer on theatre, opera and antiques.

There is a fascinating post about him by Barry Van Asten at the Ghost Blooms blog, which notes that he is little-known even in his own town. I can vouch for this: though from Northampton myself, and a quester after lost literature, I had never heard of him. He was ‘a British Council Lecturer at Baghdad and Lisbon between 1940 and 1944, before teaching English at Birmingham University’. While in Baghdad he published Scheherazade, A Drama in One Act, From the Arabian Nights (1942) and while in Lisbon he published King Sebastian, A Verse Drama in A Prologue and Three Episodes (1944).

I could not find a copy of Card Queens, but I did discover his Mephistopheles and the Golden Apples: A Fantastic Symphony in Seven Movements (Heffers & Sons, Cambridge, 1943), bylined from Baghdad, 1941, a rollicking Faustian and Arthurian verse drama. In the opening ‘movement’ of the book an Oxford don is beguiled by the Devil’s emissary and then conducted to a cavalcade of fantastical pageants, all extravaganzas of his fevered imagination under the demonic spell.

These each present episodes of myth, legend or history. The seven movements comprise: The Don and the Demon; Scheherazade; The Snow Queen; Merlin’s Pantomime (set at Tintagel); Tristram and Iseult; Pique Dame; and Crosses for the Queen. There are also interludes, including a Festival of Literary Ghosts, featuring pastiches of Swinburne, Baudelaire, Rossetti, Hopkins, Lawrence, Wilde, Whitman, Verlaine, Samain, Lear and Beddoes: quite a feat of imitation.

The Pique Dame movement presents the four Playing Card Queens, and a Knave, as conniving courtiers in a macabre Jacobean tragedy. The Card Queens play I had noticed in the catalogue was presumably an earlier version of this, now incorporated into this larger work, or else a separate piece exploring a similar theme.

Reynolds later created Candlemas Night, A Fantastic Comedy, a radio play about Lucifer’s agent in Oxford, three university dons and the conjuration of the playing card queens. This was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on Boxing Day 1955 (and repeated on 30 December), produced by Frederick Bradnum, featuring Freda Jackson and Ernest Milton with Vivienne Bennett and Gordon Davies, and with music by the Northampton-born composer Malcolm Arnold. It seems slightly odd that it wasn’t kept for Candlemas Night itself, but perhaps it was thought the supernatural theme was suitable for the Christmas season.

The Radio Times description of Candlemas Night was as follows:

‘This play tells of the attempt of Miss Spanheim, Lucifer's minister in Oxford, to seduce three disillusioned Dons from the Arts to ‘the banner of Science and Death and the earth-shattering fires of the hydrogen bomb ...' The Dons willingly co-operate, and are taught how—by a spell of cards-to conjure up and make prisoner the goddess of Wisdom (in the French pack the Queen of Spades is identified with Pallas Athene); but she is too clever for them and, escaping, strikes the Dons dumb. Rather surprisingly, their wives view this situation with alarm, and set about calling back the Queen of Spades to plead with her. Unfortunately, their calling of the cards is not correct, and they raise instead the Knave of Diamonds (Hector of Troy). The ensuing complications do not aid Miss Spanheim . . .’

This sounds rather fun, with elements of M R James and Charles Williams to it, but Candlemas Night doesn’t seem to have been published under this title or in this form. However, Mephistopheles and the Golden Apples does have many similarities, suggesting Reynolds drew on it for this later radio play, and it may therefore give us some of its flavour.

As a verse drama, Reynolds’ book has a bizarre panache, and if ever performed it would certainly give the scenery, costume, lights and special effects crews plenty to do. If it had been recast as a novel, it would be savoured by connoisseurs of the weird: as it is, readers can still relish Reynolds’ over-brimming zest in the published play, and try to imagine the gist of that wintry wireless broadcast.

(Mark Valentine)