A Dip In The O.C.E.A.N

Ocean surface wave. Jon Sullivan.

I read a few ‘how-to write’ books when younger but as I remember, they concentrated mostly on how to lay out your book and how best to approach publishers. Apart from that, they directed you back to good writers with the instruction to pay attention to the way, for instance, dialogue was used to tell the story and reinforce character. These peeled back the Art a little, so you could take a look at the hidden art.

Some things I’ve seen lately differ from this in that they seem to be trying to provide a formula or recipe for writing a story or novel. Write so many words, make chapters so long, put in so much description, add a certain mix of characters…

O.C.E.A.N, for instance. It stands for:—

 Openness — Conscientiousness — Extraversion — Agreeableness — Neuroticism 

It began as a a tool used by psychologists to assess patients but has been co-opted by writers to help them build and understand character. Each of these qualities is a sliding scale and probably no neuro-typical adult is 100% Open or 100% Closed. But the theory proposes that every personality is made up of these five qualities in various degrees. (That's if you even accept that such a thing as 'personality' exists. Psychologists and psychiatrists are punching it out in a secret arena even as I type.)

A high score for Openness supposedly makes you curious, imaginative, accepting of other groups’ moral codes and customs, unconventional.

A low score makes you nasty, bitter and twisted— Sorry, I'll re-phrase. It makes you narrow-minded (not that we’re being judgemental here. We’re being scientific.) It also means that you don’t analyse things, are rather incurious, and tend to find ‘foreign’ attitudes repugnant.

Conscientiousness measures the drive to complete tasks. Those scoring highly would be hard-working, punctual, driven, self-disciplined and always finish the job at hand. On time, of course. They sound like nightmares.

Those scoring low for C are laid-back, unreliable, pleasure-seeking and spontaneous. They sound almost as bad as the high-scorers.

Diagram of the Big 5 Personlity Traits: wikimedia

Extraversion —measures the degree of extraversion (obviously) as opposed to introversion. Extraverts love stimulation and company. They have positive outlooks, are the life and soul, always take charge and I hate them. High-scorers on this quality are, apparently, the best leaders. Really? I wouldn’t follow them. Where are they going to lead you? Into the Valley of Death, I’m telling you, lured by all those stimulating, exciting flash-bangs and shell-screams.

A low score for E makes you an introvert. You find too much noise and chatter exhausting and painful. You hate parties and have a tendency to go to the furthest point of an empty Hebridean beach and read a book. Not too exciting a book, mind. Low Es tend to be pessimistic, dour and aloof. My kind of people.

Agreeableness — People who score high on Agreeableness are weak leaders, apparently. They are tolerant, sensitive, kind, warm— like Bhudda and Jesus, y'know. And nobody wants to follow them, obviously. But assuming that the scientists are correct and no one follows those high As -- well, right there, is what is wrong with the human race.

Those scoring highly on A are also forgiving and helpful, but gullible. I get the feeling that, if I ever take this test, I’m not going to score highly on A.

A low score for A makes you suspicious and antagonistic; quick to assert your own rights, irritable, vindictive, uncooperative and rude. Now there is a thumbnail portrait of me that my nearest and cowed would immediately recognise.

Neuroticism — I’ve never been sure what this means, apart from being a word psychologists and doctors use to insult you. Especially if you’re a woman. Apparently, it means ‘emotional instability.’ A tendency to feel sadness. (You mean, there’s an option not to? Where do I sign up?) A tendency to feel vulnerable and, as result, to be anxious, moody, quick-tempered.

A high-scorer is likely to be a hypochondriac, worrying over every little twinge— or one of those who constantly invents horrifying scenarios which ‘might happen’ and then worries themselves into fits over them.

A low scorer is calm and unemotional, self-reliant and wastes no time worrying, to the point of being complacent.


Psychologists presumably find OCEAN useful, though I’m not sure why. I doubt I’m the only person who would simply supply the answers best guaranteed to have the good doctor eating from my hand. Which is exactly what psychopaths do and it’s why they get worse with treatment, not better. Instead of 'working on themselves' and becoming better people every day, they quickly learn exactly what to say to convince the trick-cyclists that they've reformed and can be safely released immediately. But then, psychopaths and me, we’re low on Agreeableness, which makes us manipulative.

It’s suggested that writers use OCEAN's sliding scales to map out our characters, to help us figure out how they will react in any given situation. Presumably, we draw a graph for each one. Consulting our graphs, we can easily see that, if asked to make tea for everyone, A will smile and rush to the kitchen because A scores high on Agreeableness — whereas B will tell everyone where they can go because B scores low. And C wouldn’t even be at the meeting, because C is an introvert.

You can also, it’s said, use these sliding scales to plot a change in a particular characteristic. A character begins a story as overly driven and conscientious but in the course of the story learns to cheer up and relax, little square by little square, as you mark up your graph.

I have occasionally found this diagrammatic approach helpful with plots— but only after I’ve written three-parts of the book in my usual pantser, make-it-up-as-I-go-along style anyway. But it can help, when stuck for an ending, to lay a transparency of a perfect plot over the mess I’ve created and see if this suggests any stream-lining, or points broadly in the direction of a conclusion.

'Dear Boy, why not try acting?'

But I could never begin with ‘The Plan’ and then stick to it. I would find it stifling. I feel the same way about OCEAN. These tricks and schemes always remind me of the anecdote about Laurence Olivier. He spent a long time listening to Dustin Hoffman explain The Method and then said: ‘Dear boy, why don’t you simply try acting?’

For me, characters emerge, from the story you’re telling. For instance, Sandy in The Drover’s Dogs. The idea for the story came from reading about Highland cattle drovers in the 18th and 19th centuries and how they sent their herd dogs home alone while they stayed on at the lowland farms to earn money by helping with the harvest. I wanted to write about those dogs and their independent trek across Scotland for years.

Books seldom come from one idea. Ideas have to cross-pollinate. The cross-pollination happened when my partner told me about the ‘bonders’ of Scotland— farm labourers who were almost slaves. They were often mistreated but if they ran away, would be returned to their bond-owner by the authorities, just as slaves were.

The Drover's Dogs by Susan Price

I imagined a boy in eastern Scotland, running away from a bond he hated and meeting a couple of herd-dogs on their way west, returning to their home in Mull. I needed a character who, though a child, was capable of taking the decision to run away and capable of surviving alone as he trudged more than a hundred miles over rough country.

He had to be a boy who willing to leave his family— so the circumstances of the story dictate the characters of the rest of the family too. Runaways rarely come from happy homes.

I remembered some Scots friends talking about their country childhoods. Once they could walk, they said, home was somewhere they ate breakfast and slept. They always had string, matches and a penknife in their pockets. When they were hungry, they made a fire, stole potatoes from the edge of a field and set them to roast, caught some ‘troot’ with their string, and enjoyed ‘fish and tatties.’ They knew where to find mushrooms, berries and nuts. They stayed outside until long after dark, even when the weather was below freezing. They knew -- without ever seeing Ray Mears or Bear Grylls -- how to build themselves a shelter.

I drew on this in creating Sandy, a hardy, tough little nut. He’s about ten, but already works whenever he can. His relationship with his family is distant because he’s hardly ever at home. After his mother bonds him to a neighbouring farmer, he feels that he owes his parents little. He can’t bear the thought of spending the next ten years as a bonder and runs. He's far more scared of being caught and possibly hung (for stealing himself) than he is of surviving on his own. He knows he can do that.

He readily and gladly befriends the two dogs he meets but is suspicious and fearful of people because they might inform on him and have him sent back to his bond-owner. There is always another, opposing and almost equally strong side to a character, though. Despite his self-reliance and hardiness, Sandy longs to find a safe home where he can drop his guard, where there are people who love and value him. When he finds such a home, his loyalty to his new family is deep.

I didn’t need to plot his Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. I only had to think about the background and time that had formed him.

The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price

It was the same with my Sterkarm books. The Sterkarms are a reiver family, living in a pele tower on the lawless Scottish borders of the sixteenth century. The young hero, Per Sterkarm, is the son of the tower’s laird, which immediately gives him status. It supplies confidence and a ‘sense of entitlement’ but is also something he has to live up to. He can’t lose face or back down from confrontation.

Despite the title of ‘laird,’ his family are glorified cattle farmers in a poor and embattled part of the country, where life was always hard and often desperate. People had to stick together and help each other -- but also be prepared to defend what they had against outsiders. This means that Per has been raised with the attitude ‘Ourselves Alone.’ Everyone outside his family is the enemy and since family is the only security, loyalty to family is everything.

His formal schooling was negligible, but he trained to ride, to shoot with a bow and to fight with weapons from a young age. Physical confidence can be added to his general bumptiousness.

We end with a young man who can be charming when it suits him to be— and generous because in his world, generosity is how you display your status and keep the all-important friends and allies. Per loves the Elf-woman Andrea (who is really a time-traveller) and he is quick to defend her— but when he has to choose between her and his family, he always -- to her dismay -- chooses his family. It would be impossible for him to do anything else.

Capable as he is of charm, if crossed or cornered, he can be murderous— and cunning and treacherous. He cannot bear to lose face in his family’s eyes and he will win by whatever means he has to undertake. As Per sees it, lying is only wrong if he lies to a Sterkarm; treachery is only treacherous if used against Sterkarms. He acknowledges no authority except that of his family— which confuses the time-travelling executive Windsor, who expects obedience from those he sees as beneath him. (And as Per is much younger and one of the 16th-Century 'natives armed with sticks,' Windsor considers him very much beneath him.)

Again, Per’s character rose from his background, his influences, his upbringing. I don’t think that sitting with a blank sheet of paper or screen and trying to calculate how neurotic, agreeable or conscientious he was would have helped.

 I could, now, give you his readings for all the qualities. Openness? Almost zero. Accepting of the codes and customs of others? No. It's his family’s way or nothing.

A Sterkarm Kiss by Susan Price

Conscientiousness? Middling. Per's world isn't run by the clock, but by the sun and the seasons. If something seemed to him important and necessary, he would do it, or make sure others did it. The buildings had to be repaired before winter, for instance and there had to be enough fuel to last through the worst of the snow. If a raid ran off their cattle, they had to get out there and ride. This wasn't a matter of conscientiousness but of necessity.

On the other hand, when not pressed by necessity, there's plenty that can wait, especially if there's something better to do, like ale, women and song. (I think this reveals that the OCEAN scale was invented for a 21st Century society -- and only a small part of this society -- that orders its life by the clock.)

Extraversion? Per would score pretty high, but how much this is an inborn quality and how much something his upbringing would have engrained, is hard to say. Life in a pele-tower granted very little quiet or privacy. And when you're a big fish in a very small pond, you're pretty sure that the company is going to welcome you. -- In Handshake, when Per is translated to a 21st Century hospital, he becomes rather shy.

Agreeableness. Per would encompass the whole scale of Agreeableness, from 0 to 100%. On the low end of the scale, he's certainly capable of being vindictive. In fact, his whole family pride themselves on how very vindictive they are. Revenge was a duty. Where there is no reliable force of law to act as a deterrent, then the reputation for being willing and able to take revenge for any slight becomes an important protection. You touch not the Sterkarms with impunity.

Per can certainly be very quick to assert his own rights and inventively uncooperative. But he and his family can also be kind and warm, sensitive to others and helpful. Hospitality was as much a duty as revenge.

A Sterkarm Tryst by Susan Price

Neurotic? Well, if being neurotic is the opposite of 'calm and unemotional' then the whole Sterkarm family would probably score high on the Neurotic scale. Their time and place imposed a high degree of day-to-day anxiety. They were at the mercy of the weather and harvests. They never knew when they were going to be attacked. Moodiness, quick temper and raw emotions all round.

But though I've used OCEAN to express this character reading, I didn't arrive at it by using OCEAN. Instead, I studied the time and place the Sterkarms lived in and their way of life. I thought about how it would shape them. I’m tempted to say to those who favour OCEAN, ‘Dear thing, why don’t you simply try writing?’

But perhaps I’m being too harsh. Perhaps I've even misunderstand how OCEAN is meant to be used?

I’d be interested to know how others feel. Is OCEAN something you’d find useful in creating characters? Something you’d consider trying?

Or, if not, how do you get to know your characters?

Susan Price won the Carnegie Medal for The Ghost Drum and the Guardian Fiction Award for The Sterkarm Handshake.

Find out more at her website.

Singalong With The Sterkarms

A Sterkarm Tryst by Susan Price

Tryst: (Old French) an appointed station in hunting. An appointed meeting place, often of lovers. To engage to meet a person or persons. A cattle market, e.g. 'The Falkirk Tryst.'

 

A Sterkarm Tryst: an appointed meeting place of which only one side is aware: an ambush. 

 On January 24th, the third Sterkarm book, A Sterkarm Tryst, will be published.

It's the third in the series. The first two, after being out of print for some years, have been republished by Open Road. They are The Sterkarm Handshake and A Sterkarm Kiss.

The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price

A Sterkarm Kiss by Susan Price

(I've just been messaged on Facebook by a reader, who tells me she can now at last read Kiss, which she's been trying to find for ten years, and has pre-ordered Tryst.  I can only say thank you for your stamina and thank you again.)

The books were inspired by the reivers of the Scottish Borders though Handshake only came to life for me when I thought of sending workers for a 21st Century company through a time machine to the 16th Century Border Country, where they hope to mine the coal, oil and gas. The 16th Century 'natives,' the Sterkarms, suppose them to be Elves. After all, the strange clothes of the 21st Century people give them an eldritch appearance and their carts which move without horses demonstrate their supernatural powers.

The Sterkarms, the local Riding or Raiding* Family, welcome the Elves at first, for their magical wee white pills which take away pain (aspirin). The welcome doesn't last. The Border men were notoriously 'ill to tame,' as a contemporary put it, and the Sterkarms don't relish being told what they can and cannot do, even by Elves.

*The word 'raid' is from the Scandinavian or Scottish form of the Old English 'rade', which meant 'road.' Our word 'road' is from the same Old English word, which also gave us 'ridan' or 'ride'. A road was where  you rode. A track over a moor or through a wood is still called 'a ride.'

     Raiding was often what you were doing when you rode down a road or ride. So a 'Riding Family' and a 'Raiding Family' were the same thing. Ride, road and raid all stem from the same word.

     And 'reivers', as in Scottish Border reivers, comes from the same root as 'bereave,' which survives to the present almost exclusively in the sense of bereavement by death. 'To reave' originally meant to rob, to take, to forcibly deprive.
     I just thought you might like to know that.

Looking back over the books, I realise that the words and music of old ballads run through all of them. (I hear the music, anyway.) The 21st-Century heroine, Andrea, is 'embedded' (in more ways than one) with the 16th-Century Sterkarms and learns many songs from them. She finds that the songs often give her the words to understand the Sterkarms and her own situation.

The higher on the wing it climbs

The sweeter sings the lark,

And the sweeter that a young man speaks

The falser is his heart.

He'll kiss thee and embrace thee

Until he has thee won,

Then he'll turn him round and leave thee

All for some other one.

Then there's the ballad which gives the Sterkarms their rallying cry and boast:

The 'Sterkarm Handshake': their badge

My hob is swift-footed and sure,

My sword hangs down at my knee, 

I never held back from a fight:

Come who dares and meddle with me! 

A 'hob' was the breed of small, strong, intelligent horse which the reivers rode (down roads on raids). This ballad was historically associated with the Elliot family rather than the Armstrongs on whom the Sterkarms are very, very loosely based. ('Sterkarm' means 'strong arm.) 

These old songs fitted themselves naturally into the story as I wrote. I'd known many of them by heart for decades before I had any idea of writing the Sterkarm books. I never had to hunt for a quote. The scene I was working on would set a particular song playing in my head.

I knew the songs because, while still a young teenager, my love of folklore led me to Child's Ballads. I was already familiar with the lyrics before I discovered recordings of them by various folk-groups and singers.

I was a deep-dyed folkie, me. I was having none of your long-haired sensitive types strumming acoustic guitars while they intoned modern protest songs. If it wasn't at least 200 years old, I didn't want to hear it. I wanted elbow-pipes, Shetland fiddles and bodhrans. I wanted people with closed eyes singing unaccompanied with one hand over an ear. "As I walked out one midsummer morning..."

It was the stories, of course, that attracted me. I wanted to hear about the Billy Blind starting up at the bed's foot  and the loathly worm toddling about the tree. And the Broomfield Hill. And Twa Corbies.

I often listen to music while writing and, for me, the music has to be fitted to the book I'm working on. It creates the atmosphere. For the Sterkarms, it had to be traditional folk, especially the Border Ballads. The music and words of the ballads were as much a part of setting the Sterkarm scene as details of their food, clothing, furniture and buildings.

I wasn't too purist, though. In A Sterkarm Handshake, Per Sterkarm is hurrying through the alleys of the tower, on his way to Andrea's 'bower' (which just means 'bedroom' or 'sleeping place.) He thinks he's on a promise.

Oh, pleasant thoughts come to my mind

As I turn back smooth sheets so fine,

And her two white breasts are standing so

Like sweet pink roses that bloom in snow.

The second book, A Sterkarm Kiss ends with the lines:

For there's sweeter rest

On a true-love's breast

Than any other where.

 Neither of these quotes come from the Border ballads, although folk-song is, by its very nature, hard to date or pin down to a specific place. The first verse, as far as I know, comes from 'The Factory Maid.'

I'm a hand-loom weaver by my trade,

But I'm in love with a factory-maid,

And could I but her favour win,

I'd break my looms and weave with steam.

This dates it, roughly, to the late 18th or 19th century and means that this version is

Mayhew's broadside ballad seller

likely to have been a 'broadside ballad.' These were lyrics, printed on the long sheets of paper which gave them their name. Often written about hot topics of the day, such as industrialisation, they were sold in market-places. There was no music but the name of some well-known tune would be given. 'To be sung to the tune of...'

The lines about the true-love's breast come from a song with a beautiful tune, which I know as 'Searching for Lambs.' (This being what 'the loveliest maid that e'er I saw' was doing when her lover walked out one midsummer morning.) It's very hard to guess at a date for the lovely maid and her ewes, but the song doesn't have that robust mix of extreme vengeful violence and the supernatural that typifies the Border ballads, so it's probably later.

The date for my Sterkarms is about 1520 (though there were reivers long before and after this date.) Some of the songs I quote are certainly later and can be roughly dated to the late 1700s, but this doesn't mean that the Sterkarms wouldn't know something close to these lyrics and tunes. I justify my inclusion of them by the way that elements of folk-tales and ballads 'migrate,' from song to song and tale to tale over long periods of time.

The songs and stories were spread by word of mouth. If a singer or story-teller couldn't remember a detail, they invented their own. Or inserted a verse they could remember from another song. They might also take a verse from one song and put it into another simply because they liked it. They might change an ending to make it happier (see Johnny of Briedesley below) or change the relationships within a song, for example, having the hero murdered by his mother instead of his lover.

The same applies to the music. If they couldn't remember a tune, then they set the words to another or made up a variation. Other lyrics and tunes were updated. These tried-and-tested old tales can go on for centuries. Some researchers think some folk-tales go back to the Bronze Age.

Some old songs almost seem to be compilations of verses:

Oh had I wist, when first I kissed

That Love had been so ill to win,

I'd have shut my heart in a silver cage

And pinned it with a silver pin.

The men of the forest, they asked it of me,

How many sweet strawberries grow in the salt sea?

I answered them well, with a tear in my e'e;

'As many fish swim in the forest.'

When cockle-shells turn silver bells

When fishes swim from tree to tree

When ice and snow turn fire to burn

It's then, my love, that I'll love thee.

The writers of broadside ballads certainly drew on these old songs too, re-using verses to save time as they tried to make a living. So because a verse about a factory maid was published in a broadsheet ballad in, say 1810, it doesn't mean that something very like it wouldn't have been known very much earlier.

And just because a gentle love song doesn't mention treachery, incest, fratricide, infanticide or any of the other -cides so popular in the Border ballads, it doesn't mean it wasn't known on the Borders. Even there, they had their quieter moments.

I thought it a pity that my readers couldn't hear the songs that are quoted so frequently throughout the Sterkarm books - and then realised that there was a way for me to share them. If you have a Facebook or Spotify account, here's a link to my playlist for the Sterkarm books.


The songs here are the best versions I could find on Spotify of the ballads I quote, but they aren't definitive. For instance, in the linked Johnny of Breadiesley, sung by Ewan McColl, Johnny kills seven enemies and rides away triumphant. In other versions, he is killed: His good grey hounds are sleeping,/ his good grey hawk has flown,/ a grass green turf is at his head,/ and his hunting all is done. The verse quoted above, from January, [The higher on the wing it climbs...] also has slightly different words in the recording by June Tabor.

If you like songs about murder, revenge killings and executions - plus the occasional love-song - and if you like deep-dyed folk - this is for you.

Word Obsessive

This is certainly a post for writers.
       Editing and rewriting puts you in a different mind-set to plain, straight-ahead writing.

 
       I'm editing and rewriting a lot lately. I've been rewriting the Sterkarm books, for republication this summer, and I've been rewriting a WIP progress with the working title of Bad Girl.

     Rewriting always seems to make me pernickety about words.

     While I'm bashing along on first drafts, thinking only of working out the plot and motivation, I don't bother much about the words. Just slam them down.

      But when I'm rewriting, it all slows down. I become a bit obsessive. I think: would that character use that word?
      Would this word even exist in English at this time?
      Would they use that form of the word? Is it in character: would they use a slangier term, something more official, something politer - or ruder?
      While rewriting, I seem to pick up the dictionary every ten minutes. I'm always worrying about exact meanings, origins, tone, colour...

       A couple of years ago, while in rewriting mode, I crossed the Forth Bridge into the Kingdom of Fife (with my laptop in my luggage.) The Forth Bridge crosses the Firth of Forth; and on the other side of Scotland, there's the Solway Firth. Further north are the Cromarty and Moray Firths. I started idly wondering about this word, 'Firth.' Why, I wondered, does Scotland have firths where England

Aerial view of Forth Bridge, courtesy of Google.

has channels and sounds?

         A firth is a long, narrow inlet of the sea. Which is exactly what a fjord is - hang on!
        Scots English is even more heavily influenced by Scandinavia, and has retained more of the Anglo-Saxon than 'Standard' English, or the English further south. Could there be a connection?

        In 'fjord,' the 'j' is sounded like a 'y' or 'i' while that final 'd' sounds more like 'th.'
        In other words - and say this with a Scots accent -  'F-yuh-rrrrr-th.'
        Firth and fjord, I thought: they're the same word! I think there are few people in the world who could be as excited as me by this. Some very junior lexicographers, perhaps. A few very naive linguists. And maybe some other writers (though, in their case, not necessarily about 'firth' and 'fjord.')
       I grabbed my OED as soon as I could:

                    FIRTH, n. a narrow inlet of the sea. ORIGIN ME (orig. Scots), from ON fjorthr (see FJORD)

          Oh, I was very happy. The identity of 'firth' and 'fjord' is obviously a well-known fact in the dictionary-compiling community, but it had never occurred to me before, and I doubt if I would have made the connection if I hadn't been obsessing about the sounds of words and their origins, in rewrite mode.

         The present bout of rewriting brought on another of these connections. I was reading something by an American, which spoke of mowing the grass in their yard.

        Now, to me, 'yard' has always meant an area of hard paving or concrete, usually quite small. So the area of hard paving just outside my back-door is my 'yard.' Some of my older relatives lived in yards. An alleyway led from the street into a small square surrounded by small houses. At the centre of the square were blocks of shared lavatories and wash-houses. All of the square was paved. It was a 'yard.' These placed were often named 'Something Yard.'
 
          So, for years, when I was younger, I imagined American streets and towns as places quite without flowerbeds or lawns - because they themselves always talked of their yards.

         My mother loved flowers. She had lots of roses, lilies, magnolia and anything else she could persuade to grow. The place where they grew was 'the garden.' The garden was on the other side of the small paved 'yard.' She was happy for us to play 'on the yard.' She was not happy when we gambolled in her garden and broke down favorite plants.
         At my own house, the 'garden' begins immediately on the other side of the 'yard.'

          As I grew older, it slowly dawned on me that when Americans said, 'yard,' they might, just might, be talking about a place where they grew flowers, bushes and trees.
          Because my brain's is rewrite mode, and is scrambling restively about among meanings and nuances of words, a casual reference started it off on: Why do Americans say 'yard' where we say 'garden'? And it suddenly dawned on me that, just like firth and fjord, they're the same word.

       I was rewriting the Sterkarms, which is set among the pele towers of the Scottish Borders during the 16th Century. A pele tower had a great thick wooden door. But wooden doors could be hacked or

A raid on Gilknockie Tower

burned down, so behind it there was a door-sized iron grille, hinged so it could be fastened across the doorway. Even if enemies succeeded in breaking through the door, they would still have to get past the iron grille, which wouldn't give way to axes or fire so easily.
        The technical name, among archaeologists and historians, for one of these grilles is 'a yett.' It's called that because, in the dialect of the Borders, the letter 'g' is often pronounced as 'y', as it often is in Scandinavian languages. 'Yett' is the same word as 'gate,' but with a different pronunciation.
       So, I thought, 'garden' may once have been pronounced as 'yarden.'

       And that 'd' in the middle of both words? Pronounce it as 'th', as in fjorth, and you have 'garth' or 'garthen.' Or even 'yarthen.' I supposed that the 'en' at the end either meant 'small' as in 'kitten' or, possibly, it was 'the'. In Scandinavian languages, the definite article is added to the end of a word. So, in Norwegian, 'book' is 'bok' - 'the book' is 'boken.'

         Then there's the word, 'garth.'

                   garth, n Brit. 1 an open space surrounded by cloisters. 2 a yard or garden.

       In Norse Myth, there is Midgarth(d) and Asgarth(d). Midgarth is often translated as 'earth' - Middle Earth, or here, this place where we all live. It's the open space, yard or garden where mankind lives. It's in the middle, because there are worlds above and beneath it.
       Asgarth is the open space, yard or garden where the Aesir or gods live.

       So 'garden' was once 'yarthen' or 'yarth' - which comes very close to 'earth.'  ('Earth' is derived from the name of the Norse mother goddess Jord or Yorth.)

       One more dive into the dictionary.

          yard, n 1 chiefly British a piece of uncultivated ground adjoining a building, typically enclosed by walls. 2 N. America the garden of a house.   ORIGIN OE geard 'building, home, region' from a Gmc base rel. to GARDEN and ORCHARD.

           There, at the end of 'orchard' is that 'yarth' again. (And 'orchard' proves to be one of those odd, doubled words. The first syllable comes from the Latin hortus, meaning 'garden.'  So orchard means 'garden-garden.' Or, I suppose, 'garden-area.')

           garden, n, chiefly British, a piece of ground adjoining a house used for growing fruit, flowers or vegetables. ORIGIN ME from Old North Fr. gardin, var. of OFr jardin, of Gmc origin, rel to yard.

          Don't let those Old North Fr. fool you - they were Vikings.

          So now I know why Americans say 'yard' while we Brits say 'garden.' As so often, the American are using a somewhat older version of the word or phrase.

          That's a relief. I can stop worrying about it now.

The Hungry Gap and The Sterkarm Tryst

I was having a bit of a discussion with my editor, Matrice, who is working on A Sterkarm Tryst.

She wanted to know what season of the year the book was set in, because my descriptions confused her. Sometimes she thought it sounded early in the year, and sometimes it sounded late.

It's set in late summer, or early autumn, I said. Crops are almost ready for harvest but not quite yet. Some leaves are starting to turn, but there are still late flowers. Some berries are ripe, many still unripe.

This season was always a good time to fit in a bit of swift aggro. The fiercely cold winters of the 16th Century hadn't set in yet, and if you acted quickly, you could clobber your opponents during 'the hungry gap.' And perhaps be a little less hungry yourself.

The Hungry Gap fell around July or August and reminds us how seasonal life was in the past, and how much we've lost touch with that seasonality.

The harvest was gathered in roughly around the end of August and into September. Hay was made and grain was cut, threshed, stored. Fruit, nuts and mushrooms were gathered and stored. Throughout the summer, cows had been milked and the milk turned into butter and cheese for storing. Eggs were preserved.

It was expensive to keep animals alive through the winter - you had to shelter them and feed them. So most unwanted animals were sold earlier in the year, when they were young and, of the rest, only the best were kept alive. The rest were slaughtered around mid-October, and the meat smoked, salted or dried.

All the hard work was celebrated with a party - and most other big parties, such as weddings, were also held at this time of the year, because there was plenty of fresh food. You had a blow-out at Christmas, of course, to help everybody get through that cold, dark part of the year. And then you carefully tended what you had in store to get you through the rest of the year until the next harvest.
    

 God bless the master of this house,

The mistress also.

And all the little childer that round the table goo -

God bless the house, the barn, the byre

The dog outside the door.

God bless what'er you have in store -

And give you ten times more!

The Soul-Cake Carol.

Smailholm Tower, wikipedia - click for credit

Households like the Bedesdale Tower in the Sterkarm books wouldn't have been small. 'Family' at the time was often understood to include servants as well as blood relatives, and the family living at the tower would have included men at arms, many maids, cattle men, kennel men, stable boys and so on. Most of them would have expected to be fed from the tower's stores as part of their wages. That's why the tower's yard is crowded with storehouses, the upper storeys of which serve as dormitories.

Every large farmhouse would have needed to feed a crowd every day, too. Imagine being the women who had to oversee those stores and manage them. That's why, from the Viking Age onwards, the sign of a woman in charge of a household was a large bunch of keys hanging at her waist - to keep those stores locked up!

The stores dwindled day by day with every meal served. That Christmas feast had to be planned. As the year turned into spring, the level of grain in the bins dropped. The cheeses and blocks of butter were eaten up. The barrels of salted meat and fish were emptied. The flitches of bacon were carved up.

By the time July was reached, there were far more empty barrels than full and people were heartily sick of dried, salted and smoked food - but nothing in the fields or hedges or woods was yet ripe.

People ate the first hawthorn leaves, calling them 'bread and cheese.' The harvest of fresh food must have been looked forward to so keenly.

Today, when we can nip out to the supermarket and buy fresh food regardless of the time of year, and keep bags of frozen (and almost fresh) food in our home-freezers, we have forgotten 'the hungry gap.' Imagine standing in a summer field - wheat or oats tall and waving, hedgerows thick with flowers and leaves, little garden brimming with greenery - and nothing ready to eat.

If the weather was poor and held back the harvest, then the wait was longer - and the food in store still went on dwindling, day by day. The gap in those years was wider and hungrier.

If you struck at your enemy at this time of year, burned and trampled the crops standing in their fields - burned or stole what they had left in store - burned their houses - then you ensured that they had a miserable, hungry winter ahead of them. 16th Century winters weren't like ours have been of late. At that time, the Thames was expected to freeze solid every year - and the Sterkarms live much further north, on the Scottish borders.
  
Matrice was not altogether convinced by my talk of the hungry gap - she's a good editor and it's her job to question. She said that her Irish ancestors didn't have a hungry gap because they planted relays of potatoes and other vegetables from early in the year, to take them through summer.

 Yes, but the Sterkarms would never have seen a potato or heard of one. The historical parts of the books are set, roughly, about 1520. This is something like 200 years before potatos became a staple crop in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands.

And although improvements in technology and agriculture were being made, the developments that really changed things came later. The north country reivers didn't go in much for arable farming - they were, as their ancestors had been for centuries, practicers of 'transhumance.'  That is, they were cattle-farmers who moved their animals between sheltered lowland pastures and higher meadows for summer grazing.

They grew oats for grain, because it was the only cereal that grew at all well so far north, and such fruit and vegetables as they had would have been much closer to the wild variety - or actually were the wild variety, gathered from woods, moors and hedgerows.

Some of my Scottish friends have doubted this since, for them, the 'Kingdom of Fife' is 'the UK's bread-basket' with its wide and beautiful fields of wheat. But Fife only became so productive of wheat after the agricultural revolution of the mid to late 1700s, when more intensive and scientific methods of farming were introduced, together with the development of hardier and/or more productive strains of wheat.

wikimedia: wild strawberry - click for credit

For instance, I have strawberries in my garden that ripen early in the

summer, and some that ripen in the autumn - but these are varieties that have been bred by intensive modern agriculture. The Sterkarms' strawberries would have been wild ones. They flower, fruit - and that's your lot until next year. Wild strawberries are doing it for themselves, not for us.

It reminds me of my beautiful dog-rose, which has a brief burst of flowers every year. They last about three weeks and then - no matter how much I dead-head - they're gone. Everything about life in the past must have had the same aching transience - Come and kiss me, Sweet and Twenty, Youth's a thing will not endure!

Their warm, light summers were brief and followed by a long, dark and grindingly cold winter, in dwellings which were hard to keep warm. How they must have longed, even more than us, for spring and summer, and how they must have tried to enjoy every warm day - every snowdrop, every violet, every hedge rose.

Wild rose, wikipedia - click for credit

For the Sterkarms, after the relief and joy of harvest, would have come October, November, December, January, February... with the weather becoming more flesh-nippingly cold all the time.

Then April, May - things are beginning to leaf and flower, but there's still nothing much you can eat. 

Then June, July - it's warmer and lighter, but still nothing's ripe - and your stores are running very, very low. August must have been torture! Everything visibly ripening but still not quite there.

And this was in a good year. In the modern West, we don't know how lucky we are.