At this stage, I realise I’m using this blog in a very different way from how I approached my previous one for Festial. The thing is, it’s helping me to make a start, even though all I’m doing is getting initial thoughts pinned down here rather than in a notebook. This may not make for very entertaining reading, I fear, but I quite like the idea of the project growing in a truly organic fashion this time. For some reason I feel oddly confident that something will emerge, blinking and stretching, if I give it the space to do so.
Yesterday, I started to look closely at Jeremy Harte’s article Hollow Hills, which I quote here more or less verbatim. He stresses that just because a site is referred to as a beorh in an Old English text does not mean that it was a grave mound. We should not even jump to the conclusion that it was the sort of hump or hillock that looks like a gravemound. King Alfred, after all, refers to the Alps as beorgas and he must have had some idea that they were not artificial. The ‘mountains round about Jerusalem’ of Psalm 125 were turned into muntbeorgas in translation. The word comes from Indo-European (IE) *bhergh, ‘height’, and its original sense of ‘high place’ persists in later languages.
Old English (OE) beorh was obsolete in written English by 1500. But the word left four dialect descendants – in the North barf, ‘a low ridge or hill’; in Sussex berry, ‘a hillock’; in Anglo-Cornish burrow, ‘a heap or hillock’ (often of mining waste); and in Wessex barrow, ‘a gravemound’. Ancient tumuli, rather than topography or tin-mining, were a proper object of study for gentlemen; besides, Salisbury Plain was rich in archaeological features that were the subject of fieldwork research by Aubrey; so the Wiltshire word won the day against its competitors.
It might look as if this can’t possibly be leading towards an engaging art project, but I’m liking the sense of shifting meanings and near misses.
