Guides Through the Marsh

[steepholm]

I’m always interested in locals-versus-incomers moments, and reading The Eagle of the Ninth with lady_schrapnell threw up one that seemed very familiar. I’m thinking of the passage where our heroes are guided through otherwise-impassable marshland by the hunter Guern, who has the requisite local knowledge. Haven’t I come across that same scene several times elsewhere? There’s Gollum in the Dead Marshes, for example. And Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles, if memory serves, was such another (not sure about that...). My son tells me that the same thing happens in Outlaw of Redwall too. And – well, there are lots more. Lots. Aren’t there?

How do the locals find out about these routes? Is it trial and error? How many "volunteers" does the average marsh tribe lose in plotting out the correct way through their marsh? (Luckily there always is a route – and always exactly one, irrespective of rain or drought. Nor does it ever seem to change, despite the unsettled condition of the land.) I can see the survey team now: “I hope you’re making a note of all this---glub!”

The marsh sits in the interection of two sets of narrative devices: the labyrinth (Ariadne was the original "local guide") and the seemingly-impassable hero barrier, where it belongs with clashing rocks, unscalable mountains, and guardian beasts. I’ve never written an epic journey myself - well, not since I was 18, and the less said about that the better - but it must be very difficult to find new variations on these themes. And yet, where would we be without them? “Well, we have made good time to Mordor!”

Comments

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

Pre-historically, most marshes are covered by trackways which are actually constructed by people.

I wonder if the "route through the marsh" actually involves knowing where these trackways start and end, and that's why there's always "one route" but you have to know how to find it (and if you don't you get lost in the mire).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting thought. Of course, there's the Sweet Track not far from here, as an example. (How Hansel and Gretel that sounds!)

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I do know a guide slightly - my mother knows him better, as she lives in Grange - Cedric Robinson, the Sand Pilot of Morecambe Bay. The sands are very treacherous because of tides, currents and quicksands - you'll remember what happened to the Chinese cockle pickers. I've done the walk across the bay once; Cedric leads you across the safe parts of the sands and then at one point you have to ford the river. The big complication is that the river moves around within the bay; my mother says there have been times when she's done the walk and it's been less interesting because they have to hug the shore more closely to keep on safe ground. So Cedric (pronounced Ceedric, for some reason) has to keep constant watch on the moving channels and the practical routes.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Very interesting - thanks!

[sheenaghpugh]

There's a bog on Yell in the Shetland Islands with what is in effect a marked path of posts through it, and this way has been there in one form or another since the land was inhabited, ie since Pictish times. It would be bloody odd if the locals did not hand down that sort of knowledge, and also learn how to make allowances for changes in weather, etc. For one thing, marshes that you know your way through, but strangers don't, are very defensible. IIRC, the reason the city of Cork was more or less built on islands in a marsh was that though it may have been inconvenient for the locals in some ways, it was far more inconvenient to marauding Vikings.

In an interesting variant on this, I once spent some time in the village of Wust in Sachsen-Anhalt with a scholar called Maria von Katte who was a descendant of the aristo family who at one time had more or less owned the neighbourhood. She was driving us through a forest and I mentioned that all along the road, each side, were two long lines of silver birch trees. "Oh," she said, "great-grandfather planted those, to guide travellers at night".

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

There's an even more impressive one in Madeline Polland's To Kill a King, where they go through the Fens. Goes on for quite a while. Like a few days. Of course the monks on Ely had good reason to learn their way around the marshes (and taught some like-minded types, obviously).

I was kind of wondering if Guern - who's never Guern, but always Guern the Hunter - wasn't meant to be a bit mythic, especially there. He evokes the waters of Lethe, which he can't cross, but he does guide them through the labyrinth...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

So he'd be a kind of bog-based Charon? It fits in a way, and the Lethe reference is suggestive, although I don't think Sutcliff writes him in a way that invites a mythic reading generally. For all that he's 'the Hunter', he's given a specific and very human history, family, set of fears and frailties, etc. On the other hand, Sutcliff is quite capable of 'turning the volume up' on a person or place's symbolic identity when she wants to.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I guess, in default of cat's eyes, silver birches would make pretty good reflectors!

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Well, he's already got two very distinct identities - we could read him as a three-aspected character this way. Though I'm not sure I'd try very hard to argue for it. Just that scene where they cross the bog is so otherworldly - with GtH telling them not to pause 'even for a heartbeat', and the 'mist-wreathes' and the moon and the 'small, evil, sucking noises from the bog', and Guern the Hunter walking on and on until finally they stop under a clump of ancient thorn-trees...

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Lewis's Puddleglum? Always a favourite of mine.