An unofficial transcript of the podcast episode by Alexis Kennedy and Lottie Bevan.

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LB: Hello and welcome to Skeleton Songs.

AK: Skeleton Songs…

LB: We’ve been away for a bit, um, because we moved house, um, and we were busy contemplating the infinite, reading more gothic stuff…

AK: Taking things out of boxes after we put all the things in boxes…

LB: Very spooky boxes.

AK: Spooky boxes for the spooky books… we’re talking about madness and blood, aren’t we?

LB: We are, and I have a feeling this is going to be an episode where you, um, pick out lots of interesting anecdotes, ‘cause I believe it’s quite specifically to do with the gothic’s fear of women and madness and blood.

AK:  I mean, we’re, we’re gonna be honest here, the fear of, that men feel towards women in, in the gothic context.  And beyond, there’s a little mythology here, but when I started looking into madness and blood, I found that that, that there’s a particular kind of blood that comes up very often, especially because a lot of, erm, mythology has been written by, by men.  And, as you…

LB: And literature!

AK: As you’ll be aware if you don’t—

LB: Almost all gothic literature…

AK: Has to do with menstruation?

LB: No, it’s been written by men, ugh.

AK: Oh yeah.

LB: You see, it begins already…

AK: (chuckles)

LB: The baiting!

AK: I’m sorry I erased you.  Now, I’m just gonna start, er, I—I’m gonna start by mentioning in passing, the Red Grail, the Cultist Simulator Hour…

LB: And again, to be clear, for listeners who are not aware of this, the Red Grail is one of the many, er, are they gods or are they…

AK: Secret gods, ish…

LB: Secret gods in our, our video game Cultist Simulator, and the Red Grail is by far and away, probably, the most… disgusting.

AK: I mean I don’t think that’s the case.  I think you’re basing this on one…

LB: Yes. 

AK: …particular scene.  I…

LB: You know the one.

AK: I do know the one.  And so…

LB: There’s a particular scene in the depths of the Wood, at a certain time of the month, and I’ll just leave that there.

AK:  So, so the— it’s the Well, in the Wood…

LB: Oh we’re, we’re not leaving it there…

AK: Which is (inaudible)

LB: …ladies and gentlemen, we are describing it in detail.

AK: We’re not describing it in detail, ‘cause I described it in detail to you at the time, and I, I wrote the description…

LB: Mhm…

AK: …and I came to you and I said…

LB: You did.

AK: As a woman who menstruates…

LB: It’s always a good start to a, to a date night, isn’t it?

AK: When you read this description, does it make you think about menstruation, and you say it did, so I think I did my job there.

LB: Mm.  Menstrua— I can say as a woman…

AK: (laughs)

LB: …that menstruation remains really gross.

AK: Well, funny you should mention that, because here is…

LB: Oh god…

AK: …Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, talking about menstruation.

LB: I’d love to hear what Pliny the Elder has to say about menstruation.

AK: (intoning) “But nothing could easily be found that is more remarkable than the monthly flux of women.  Contact with it turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seeds and gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees falls off, the bright surface of mirrors in which it is merely reflected is dimmed, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust.  And a horrible smell fills the air.  To taste it drives dogs mad!”

LB: I’m sorry.

AK: “And infects their bites with incurable poison.”

LB: So, okay, just to, the mental image that we all have here is, Pliny the Elder smearing…

AK: BLOOD!

LB: Smearing menstrual blood over everything in a sort of pseudo-scientific spirit of investigation, and finding that it smells bad, it makes everything less nice than before he smeared the menstrual blood on things, and dogs aren’t a fan of it, is that, is that what we’ve learned from this extract?

AK: I think, basically the way it works is a guy told Pliny…

LB: (laughs)

AK: A guy who met a woman.

LB: I’m not sure any women were involved in this at all, actually, but, but sure.

AK: But, but the thi— I mean…

LB: Ah, he should stick to volcanoes, is all I’m saying.

AK: (laughs) So— I, I think, seriously, menstruation is a pretty good shorthand for one of the ways in which men, men are frightened of women, I mean, one of the ways, one of the other ways in which men are frightened of women is, is that…

LB: Just to be clear: according to literature.

AK: According to literature.

LB: This isn’t, like, some sort of David Icke reveal…

AK: Yes, yes. (Laughs). So, the trope is…

LB: (laughs) Thank you.

AK: …that men spend a lot of time wanting to have sex with women.

LB: They do…

AK: Erm…

LB: They do!

AK: And, er, and that’s all great, but sometimes women turn around and want to have sex with them, and that could be a little bit alarming…

LB: (laughs)

AK: And that’s basically where, I think, where a lot of vampire stories come from, because women who are actually out looking for sex, which, you know, if you’re a, especially a slightly, sort of, um, introverted writer, you don’t necessarily know how to, uh, to deal with…

LB: You see, I think that’s a very sympathetic reading of, of, of that.

AK: Well…

LB: Because it’s— it’s—

AK: Funnily enough, I’ve chosen to be sympathetic…

LB: —basically nonsense, isn’t it?  I mean the—the, what, what you were just talking about goes back to a literary trope, um, that I was talking to you about earlier, the, the Madonna-whore complex.

AK: Hmm.

LB: And this actually has its origins in Freudian psychoanalysis, which we can safely deposit in the wastepaper bin for being total nonsense, um, particularly…

AK: You’re just going to write off all of Freud?

LB: I am, actually, I am.  I think he is a fascinating individual, who had a lot of fun ideas…

AK: And cocaine.

LB: …and he makes… did he have cocaine?

AK: He was big into cocaine.

LB: That explains so much…

AK: He, he, he went through this phase where he thought it was really great, and he used to, like, put bowls of it on the sideboard at parties.  I mean, to be fair, er…

LB: It was that or all the menstrual blood.

AK: …pharmacology was in its infancy, and people didn’t realise…

LB: The parties were better when he swapped it out!

AK: And eventually, he, he got addicted and I think he, he actually suffered health problems in his face because of it, so (inaudible)…

LB: Well look, I’m very sorry that he, he, he drugged himself into an early grave, but…

AK: …he recanted, but…

LB: …he, he had some issues with, with ladies, I’ll put it like that, and I do like him because, um, he… psychoanalytic literary theory is really fun.  It’s a really enjoyable activity to partake in.  So the classic example of this, um, if you haven’t ever read a book with psychoanalytic theory in mind, is, um, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, which I’m not gonna go into, it’s a slightly different topic, we’ll probably discuss it in detail on a later podcast, but a lot of, um, the analysis of that story is about whether or not the, ah, unnamed narrator, who is a woman, has repressed sexual desire, which results in her doing a number of things, of whether she’s actually mad, or whether she is totally innocent and telling you exactly what happened, and it, and it’s just that, sort of, circumstance conspires against her.  So, so for that, I doff my hat to Freud.  But the rest of him is nonsense.  And going back to the Madonna/whore complex, for which he is partly responsible, it is this fundamental idea, fundamentally male idea that there are basically two categories of women.  One of which is this idealised, um, saintly figure, usually associated with both religion and your own mother, um, and the idea is that you respect these women, but you have no sexual attraction to them, because they’re too busy being good and, and, and holy.  Um, and of course men do have sexual attraction to women, a lot of them, um, and that means that, that there must be another type of woman for, for men to, um, direct their sexual attraction to, and those women cannot be respected, because sex, I think, is fundamentally not respected in some way?  And those women therefore become, in some way, this trope of, of the whore.  So the idea is that, in a lot of literature, and, I have to say, Dickens is a big… guilty party in this, there’s basically the good women and the bad women.

AK: I think, yeah, I mean, yeah.  Also, sorry.  Ah…

LB: Also, to be clear, based in literary tropes, not actual, any reality or misogynistic theories of our own.

AK: Ah, it’s, it’s, it’s projection, right?  Because if you’re a man, you know, and you have feelings, and sometimes these feelings, I mean, obviously women have feelings too, but, uh…

LB: It’s not apparent!

AK: I’m told.  But, but if you– if…

LB: We just faint a lot, and we put our blood on knives and they rust.

AK: If a woman doesn’t have sex with you…

LB: Yeah.

AK: Then that’s bad.  But if a woman does have sex with you…

LB: That’s also bad.

AK: Well, that’s also bad.

LB: Yeah.

AK: So that’s a problem.

LB: That is a problem.

AK: But— and, and that’s one— one of the nastiest, um, Kafka traps, if, if you’re a woman living in a, um, especially pre-modern, but even in a modern society, is that if you’ve put out, er, then that proves you’re not virtuous, er, so if you— but if you haven’t, then that proves, you know, you’re offended or, or, or whatever.  Because men obviously sometimes have sex, and then feel complicated about it afterward.

LB: Mm.

AK: So it’s great that it can be somebody else’s problem.

LB: That’s why I’ve, I’ve always really hated particularly the, um, neoclassical chivalrous trope of ‘Have pity on me, madam’.  There are so many knights who go around and fall madly in love with, you know, this particular lady in a tower, or this lady they meet on a Tuesday in the forest, and, um, they actually get ill with love, it’s this actual idea, which was not, you know, a joke at the time, that, that the, the lovely young knight— who’s nice in every way, we don’t dislike him as, as the reader, um— is, is genuinely sickened for love of this woman, who obviously denies him because she’s a virtuous attractive woman.  So then you get these constant, kind of, begging conversations, where the knight basically says “You have to have sex with me or I will literally die, and then you’ll be a murderer, and all the guilt will be on your head!”, um, and then this woman is in this impossible position, of either maintaining her virtuous situation of life— she just met this guy, just appeared at her house and been like “You must have sex immediately”, and she was like “Wait, buddy, let’s have dinner first”, or she, he does have sex with him, and saves him, but then she, she loses her, her virginity probably, and her sense of, of, of purity.  And it’s this— it’s not… really evaluated, which is why it’s so fascinating, when you get to renaissance literature, and I think we’ve, we’ve talked on a previous podcast about, um, The Faerie Queene, which is a big favourite of mine, Edmund Spenser… um, it’s really fascinating to see how real men in the real world, who aren’t as silly as some of the tropes of gothic literature about women would imply, um, are desperately trying to figure about how they feel about Queen Elizabeth.  Because she was a big stick in the mud.  Um, she was Queen, and obviously people— kings and queens were respected, because they were in charge, and it was, that was just what we did, and of course there were also ideas that there was some sort of divine intervention and she was Queen because of her bloodline and because God had chosen and because she was special, but at the same time there was this basic sense that women were rubbish.  So, so people really bent over backwards to, to try and reconcile these two things— England was great, but England was ruled by somebody who wasn’t great, which meant England wasn’t great, but England was great, but women are rubbish but she’s Queen.  So all these, all these, ah, contradictory ideas, and, and literature: this basically results in this sort of turn to neoclassicist ideals.  And in the chivalrous mode, this means that women can both be idealised and also, um, demeaned, because on the one hand, women don’t do anything, in traditional chivalrous romances, they just get rescued, or are witches, basically, um, but also they’re this sort of idealised grail-figure, um, which are quested after.  And this allowed a lot of literature at the time, including things like The Faerie Queene, to basically position Elizabeth as somebody who was great and admirable and fantastic— I’m so pleased, I’m definitely pleased that she’s on the throne!— but also allowed men to maintain control in the new world order.

AK: That— that makes a lot of sense, and I was, erm, I was surprised though to hear you being so cross with knights, I know how much you love The Faerie Queene, and that— what you’ve just said makes sense of, of that.  I was thinking, um, a, a few years ago, when I was doing some contract work for a, ah, certain large triple-A studio, um, I read up a lot on the intelligence, ah, networks of the Elizabethan era.  And some of the listeners I’m sure will know, or have this general sort of idea.  Um, about, you know, Walsingham and the School of Night and, um, ah, how Marlowe was, was probably involved, ah, because he probably wasn’t paid a very large sum of money just to be somebody’s tutor…

LB: (laughs)

AK: Off in the Low Countries.

LB: Oh, he’s so great.

AK: And, um, what I hadn’t realised until I read it is that Elizabeth’s, um, ah, courtiers and, um, counsellors were actually quite effective, ah, and ruthless, um, in their intelligence, er, and counterintelligence operations.  Because England was very isolated at that point, and it’s astonishing, and it’s a testament to Elizabeth, among others, that she stayed on the throne for decades.

LB: Mm— really impressive.

AK: Because: unmarried woman, virgin queen, and in a context where the whole idea of a woman ruling a country seemed sort of unnatural.

LB: (chuckles)

AK: And she was a Protestant— her father, remember it was that recent, had literally just, um, er, banished the Catholic Church from Britain and decided that he was the head of, of, of the church.

LB: Yeah.

AK: Ah, and, and she was the heir of that tradition, so Europe is full of very cross Catholics monarchs.

LB: And she was, and she was the heir of that tradition through a mother who’d been beheaded for treason.

AK: Yes!

LB: So, her claim was even less sturdy.

AK: But, but she’s, she’s against nature.  And I think that’s—

LB: (bursts out laughing) And that’s the end of the podcast.

AK: (laughs) But I think that, that’s one of the things about, er, our old friend menstruation, again…

LB: Oh, [yeah, alright, yeah?].

AK: Is that it is both against nature, but actually, nature as far as…

LB: Um, so, what do you mean by ‘it’s against nature’?!  That’s a very, that’s a quite masculine view!

AK: Well, ah, ah, I was gonna say, as far as men are concerned.  Because…

LB: Ah, okay, you missed out that quite important…

AK: Well…

LB: …add-on.

AK: You know, I— I was gonna get to the end of the sentence, but…

LB: Agh.

AK: Anyway.  Ah, so the point is, obviously it’s not against nature, that’s, that’s an insane thing to say…

LB: I think it should be— I have several issues I would like to take up with nature about…

AK: (laughs)

LB: …the whole system.

AK: But— I, I, when you first come to the whole subject of menstruation as a man, you know, especially if you grew up in the era before…

LB: God.

AK:  …it was properly discussed in schools.  You know, there’s just something going on, and it happens at sort of irregular intervals, we won’t talk about it that much, it’s sort of [yerky?] and women when they talk about it are generally not big fans of it, and, and it’s all tied to all that stuff that goes on in there, that’s complicated and, and, you know, you don’t really— And, if, if, I have to say, um, being present at the birth of a child, ah, does, does help with, prev— a, a certain amount of this, um, visceral confusion.  Ah, but visceral is this word, really— ah, the, Alex Comfort, who wrote The Joy of Sex, in a, a more innocent age, says something, ah, very resonant, I think, about, um, the, the when women— men and women are thinking about sex: he said that for men, sex occurs in a sort of separate part of themselves, like the state of Florida.

LB: You told me this!

AK: And for women it’s an, an internal thing, and I think it, it ties back into, into that.  And the, the thing about the Red Grail is, it is, okay, to be clear, I’m talking now about the Red Grail, which is based on a gothic exaggeration of some attitudes men have towards women— I’m not talking about women: but the Red Grail is both monstrous and natural…

LB: Mm.

AK: So it, it’s the—

LB: And it’s not just about menstruation, to be clear—

AK: No, it’s not, it’s, it’s about birth, and it’s about blood, and it’s about consumption, and it’s about the, the, the Dionysian impulses…

LB: Yeah.

AK: In explicit opposition to the Apollonian impulses, of the Lantern and the Watchman…

LB: Yeah.  Yeah.

AK: And this is why the Grail is down in the Wood, and the, erm, all the Lantern powers tend to congregate at the top of the Mansus, so you get this explicit, um, contrast between the cerebral and the visceral.  And if you—

LB: And is that, fundamentally, how you typify the, the difference between the Dionysian and the Apollionian?

AK: Yes.

LB: Apollonian!  (Inaudible)

AK: Yes— so, and I, I, as far as I can tell the, the…

LB: Apollonian.

AK: The way in which we talk about Apollonian/Dionysian these days came out of Nietzsche of all people— but obviously initially it came out of…

LB: Much-maligned!  Not a Nazi.

AK: (chuckles) Obviously, initially it came out of, erm, ah, traditions that emerged in, ah, Greek culture and mythology.

LB: Yeah.

AK: And I think— it, it’s always made intuitive sense to me, ah, that, that you… one side of human impulses is towards, um, abstractness, and, um, ah, thought, and the other is towards concreteness and feeling, and I think if you go, you know, too far down the abstractness and thought route you end up with this, this perfect burning nothing, and if you go too far down the, um, the, the solidity route, you end up sort of drowning in a well of blood.

LB: I think that’s a, I think the perfect burning nothingness is the, is the best description of Apollo, that I’ve, ever heard, because we’ve talked before— we’re big fans of, of the Greek pantheon, as I’m sure many, kind of, literary nerds are, um, and I have never felt that Apollo is interesting, even though he officially stands for lots of things that I admire and love, and, and, you know, there’s lots of beautiful things that he’s responsible for, and you have the Aeolian harp, and, and obviously he’s wisdom and, and music and poetry, and, and joy and everything good, and the sun, I suppose that’s acceptable.  Um, but it— but because he is kind of the purest, because he has the sense of, of the kind of intellectual element, I find it very difficult to identify with him.

AK: Mmm.

LB: As a, as an entity, and that’s the whole reason that the Greek pantheon and any kind of, ah, polytheistic religion, I think, really, really has that, that attraction, because it, it fragments a lot of different human experience into realistic individuals that you can identify with, and then they have interesting stories, whereas when you get to that level of perfection, um, it’s hard to make them do anything interesting.  I mean, the classic in, in literary, ah, so, in literature, example of this would be, um, Paradise Lost by Milton, who’s infamously, was set out to sort of praise God?  And, and, and how great Christianity was, but of course what it really achieved was making Satan really interesting and sympathetic.  And that really wasn’t his intent, you know, he did deliberately write, er, an interesting bit of, ah, text, because he was a brilliant writer, but, but, he, he really wasn’t trying to make Satan the, kind of, the star, but everyone was much more interested in what he was doing than God, ‘cause God just kind of was there in the background being perfect, and that’s really boring, from a dramatic point of view, um, whatever your religious leanings.  Anyway.  Um.

AK: I think, I think you— I haven’t thought of that before, and it occurs to me, to step back from the visceral fear of women by men in literature…

LB: Oh yeah, don’t worry, we’ll get back there, listeners.

AK: Ah…

LB: You’ve not escaped yet.

AK: There’s, there, there’s another, ah, trope, which sidesteps, er, Madonna-whore, and the crone, and that’s someone like Athena, or Brigid, who are feminine, uh, but who are types of ingenuity and artifice and thought and competence.

LB: Mm.

AK: And Athena is, I think…

LB: (inaudible)

AK: Ah, yeah— is much more appealing, intuitively, somehow, than Apollo, she’s, she’s quite austere.

LB: And I’m not sure I hate on Apollo, I love Apollo…

AK: No, I know.

LB: I’m just saying, from a human point of view.

AK: But she’s, she’s more approachable, somehow.  And Brigid, who of— Brigid of course, the, the, erm, ah, Celtic figure associated with inspiration and poetry and also smithing, is, um…

LB: Interesting.

AK: one of the two big roots of the Forge of Days, another Hour, and is, is probably the reason, I can’t really remember…

LB: I love the Forge of Days…

AK: …why she’s explicitly female.

LB: Yes.

AK: Partly because of Brigid, who I’ve always liked as a, a, as a mythological character.  Can I tell a fun Viking story about menstruation?

LB: I mean, gee, you never need to ask—

AK: I need your permission as a lady.

LB: Do you?  Stop saying “As a lady!”

AK: I think, I think it’s just, it’s just, you know, in contrast to the, to, to, to Pliny, this is the, sort of, perfect…

LB: Pliny.

AK: …Norse…

LB: He’s off the Christmas card list, I’m afraid.

AK: …intersection between, um, misogyny and slapstick…

LB: (laughs)

AK: And, and, and what it is, I think you know this one, ah, Thor is off to have, get drunk with some giant.

LB: Classic Thor.

AK: And, and on his way, he’s trying to cross a river.  Ah, and he, um, he finds the river is flooding, ah, and he’s struggling to get across it, and in danger of being swept away, so he looks upstream…

LB: Mhm…

AK: And he sees one of the giants’ daughters…

LB: Mhm…

AK: A lady named Gjálp…

LB: Mhm…

AK: Who’s also a giantess, obviously…

LB: Mm.

AK: Genetics being what it is— is standing over the river with one leg on one bank and one leg on another bank, and she is lending her force to the stream.  So Thor is trying to—

LB: I’m sorry, she’s what?

AK: She’s lending her force to the stream.

LB: Ah, ladies and gentlemen, you’re hearing a man talk about something he knows nothing about.

AK: Well, what you’re hearing is, is a man talk about a translation…

LB: “Lending her force to the stream…”

AK: …of a man, because it’s Snorri Sturlurson, obviously I don’t speak Old Norse— being translated by, I think Crossley-Holland, or somebody.  Erm, and it’s all phrased quite coyly.

LB: Mhm!

AK: So, you know, could be…

LB: I can tell you, in the original, it would not have been coy.

AK: So in, um, ah, it goes on to be [good?], because Thor is obviously, you know, powerless against this, this female force.

LB: Yeah!

AK: And is being driven back to the (inaudible)

LB: Fire and, fire and water…

AK: So he picks up a big rock…

LB: I know, I know what this— this is horrible.

AK: And he, he, ah, I’ve got the precise quote from the translation.

LB: Oh god!

AK: “He snatched up a great stone out of the river and cast it at her, saying these words: ‘At its source should a river be stemmed!’  Nor did he miss that at which he threw.”

LB: Mmh.

AK: And then he crosses the river safely.

LB: Just, just to be clear: um, he, he blocks a lady’s natural flow with a boulder.

AK: Yeah.

LB: So he can get on his way to the pub.

AK: (snorts) Well, uh—

LB: Is that specifically the story there?

AK: He then, he then goes to, to, to her father’s house— inexplicably, she and her sister try to murder him…

LB: “Inexplicably”?!

AK: If I remember correctly, they get under… they do it in an inexplicable way, they get under the chair that he’s sitting in and they sort of try to smash the chair against the roof of the house?  And then he…

LB: Ok, that is badly thought through.  

AK: Yeah.

LB:  But, but I respect their desires.

AK: But the other, the other Viking thing, when it comes to blood and madness, um, this—

LB: You see, I had such a nicer way that this podcast could go, and you…

AK: Well, this is about poetry, this bit.

LB: Okay. 

AK: And spit.  So, as you…

LB: (laughs) 

AK: Ah, the, the reason I’m talking about this is that it went out of a bit of an etymological rabbit hole, which, which regular listeners will know I, I tend to do.

LB: Mhm…

AK: Ah, so Kvasir was a, um, figure in Norse mythology, who was born out of spit, and the reason he was born out of spit is that the Aesir and the Vanir, the two, two flavours of, of Norse goddery, um, finished their big war, and they wanted to have a, a peace that lasted.  So they all came and spat in a pot.  A big vat.

LB: (laughs)

AK: Ah, to seal it.   Um, and then they got all of the spit out, and they moulded it into a person.

LB: Right.

AK: Who was Kvasir, who because he’d been made of all the gods’ spittle, uh, was, was really wise?

LB: Yeah.

AK: And that was great, and he went around being wiser [than?] everybody, and then two dwarves got jealous of his wisdom

LB: (laughs)

AK: So they murdered him.

LB: (laughs on)

AK: And they, um…

LB: It’s Baldr all over again!

AK: …mixed his, ah, his, his spit-composed body…

LB: Uh-huh…

AK: Er, with honey.

LB: Right.  

AK:  And blood.

LB: Right…

AK: And that’s where mead came from. 

LB: You have— I can’t— I’m so angry right now.  I love mead…

AK: The Mead of Poetry.  So every time you drink, you know, you, every time you get the gift of poetry it’s because you’ve tasted this blood, spit and honey.  And the gods wanted to know where Kvasir had gone, and the dwarves said ‘Oh, he was so… big-headed and brainy that he just suffocated to death under the size of his own head’, and the, the gods were all, like, ‘Oh, yeah, you know, brainy people, that’s, that’s what happens’, and, um, later on, Odin found out about the, um,  the Mead of Poetry, that they were keeping, they had kept in a mountain and some giants had took it off, and the giantess was keeping it in a mountain.  Now, I want you to see, Lottie, if you can distinguish the Freudian subtext in what happens next.

LB: Mhm…

AK: So there’s this giantess in the mountain guarding the mead.

LB: Yeah. 

AK: And…

LB: So, so, just to be clear, um, abstraction here: we’ve got female presence between man and his desire.

AK: Yeah.

LB: OK…

AK: And the desirable is blood and honey.

LB: Okay.

AK: And spit.

LB: Bloody desire, and spit.

AK: And poetry.  And…

LB: Probably more like the alcohol, really.

AK: So, Odin goes to a couple of dwarf brothers, and he gets them to make him a big drill.

LB: Oh god!

AK: A really big drill.

LB: Really? 

AK: A really big drill, and then he— there’s some sort of trickery involved I don’t, don’t remember the details of, and he gets— and he’s under an assumed name, because Odin, but he gets his big drill, he starts to drill into the mountain, drill all the way into the mountain, all the way, it takes him ages.

LB: Uh huh…

AK: And the dwarf who’s with him says, ‘Oh, you drilled all the way into the mountain’, and Odin blows into the, um, hole…

LB: Uh huh…

AK: …and the, the chips come out, so he realises…

LB: Uh huh…

AK: …it’s not all the way, and he’s trying to be tricked, but he keeps drilling, um, and then, erm, he drills all the way through…

LB: Mhm.

AK:  …and he blows in, the chips go in, so he knows he’s done it.

LB: Mhm.

AK: So he turns himself into something that can get through the hole and into the mountain.

LB: Mhm.

AK: Ah…

LB: Is it a worm?

AK: It’s a snake, a big snake.

LB: Mm.

AK: So he turns into a big snake…

LB: Yeah.

AK: And he goes through the drill-hole into the mountain, the dwarf tries to stab him with the drill as he goes in, but he misses, and he goes in…

LB: Mhm.

AK: And he drinks the mead— but, first, and you’ll never see this one coming, he has sex with the giantess.

LB: As a worm?

AK: Um, pfft… As Odin.  And, er, so, three successive nights, they, they enjoy delights of the connubial bed, and then he gets a sip of mead.

LB: Is that the end of the story?

AK: That’s the, that’s basically the end of the story.

LB: Wow.  (Long silence). I was wondering what to think about that, I wanted that, wanted that, wanted to let the silence sink in.  See, what’s— I was gonna say something so much more wholesome than, than you did.

AK: Go on.

LB: You were talking about how Brigid was, was to do with, you know, poetry and also…

AK: Spit.

LB: Smithing.

AK: Yeah.

LB: I thought it was fascinating, again, from this period of time.  Because I’m an Old English nerd rather than Old Norse, I don’t speak Old Norse, um, and, one of the, ah, characteristics of Old English poetry is this idea of entrelacement, which is also, ah, seen in their smithing.  So when you, when you think of Anglo-Saxon designs, all of it’s very intricately circular, and, and it has repeating patterns and everything flows into everything else.  Which, you know, partly a reflection of how skilled they were, and they were showing off and all, partly a reflection of how they thought about the world, that their mythology was that everything flowed into everything else, and, um, and there was, kind of impermanence, and you just kind of went along with the, with the warp and weft of, of, of what happened.  Um, and their traditional poetic, ah, arrangement follows this too, so, so you tend to get, um, four beats in a poetic line, two of which, um, the first two of which have, um, assonance and consonance, so they begin with the same letter or sound, um, so, so when you hear them spoken, because of course most of their poetry was spoken, you— you would hear connection, and that will be carried across a gap in the poetic line, into another couple of connected words, so overall you get this kind of interlinking sense every line, and of course then that’ll be, um… continued through the whole poem.

AK: Mhm.

LB: And how interesting that poetry and, and smithing is something that, that has actually…

AK: Yes, it is.

LB: That you can actually see it.  And I, and I think there is actually a famous phrase in Beowulf, where, where a poet is described as something like a, like a word-smith, um, which doesn’t sound particularly exciting, ‘cause, ‘cause of course we now all call, if we want to be hifalutin, people wordsmiths.  But— see, that was how I was gonna take this podcast.  But you went with…

AK: The worm.

LB: The bloody snake sex party.

AK: Well, let me make amends by saying, er, genuinely, until I got to know you, and you talked at length and fluently about Anglo–

LB: (laughs)

AK: No, this is going in a good place.  

LB:  Okay.

AK: About Anglo-Saxon poetry.

LB: Uh huh…

AK: Obviously I knew that there was a rich tradition of Anglo-Saxon poetry, I knew that Beowulf, you know, is where D&D came from, so it’s…

LB: Oh my god. 

AK: And— but, but I hadn’t, I’d sort of thought about the, erm, Anglo-Saxon culture as basically people drinking mead in, um, draughty buildings and shouting at each other and hitting each other.  And I genuinely hadn’t realised how sophisticated and interlaced it was…

LB: It’s really sophisticated! 

AK: Yeah.

LB: You know, from a technical point of view, when you actually analyse it, from a linguistic point of view, it’s beautiful, and they’ve thought about it, and it’s clever— and of course it’s all complicated because the version that we have is written down by Christian monks and so they’ve kind of put on their own stuff and it’s all fantastically interesting anyway from a historical perspective.  And then, thematically, you also get, you know, the, the point of Beowulf is not, as people might thing, that there’s a big— lots of fights, there are literally three fights in Beowulf: there’s Beowulf fighting Grendel, there’s Beowulf fighting Grendel’s sexy mum, and then there’s Grendel— sorry, Beowulf fighting a dragon, right, those are the three big, sort of, moments in Beowulf.  But, but, beyond that, and that, you know, that is part of it, you’re meant to be excited by listening to these epic fights— but beyond that, it’s basically, er, a musing, upon… what happens when a king dies.  And there’s a struggle for inheritance.

AK: Mm.

LB: You know, the whole, the whole thing is a sort of idea of this encroaching wild outside on this pocket of fragile civilisation, um, and, and, you know, the, the— it’s just, it’s very, it’s brilliant and complicated and great.  So, ‘origin of D&D’, whatever.  But then of course you get, um, they were well into their limericks, people don’t know this about Anglo-Saxons either.

AK: I didn’t know that about them, no.

LB: I have a book of old English limericks, and they are dirty.  And really, really silly.  So one of them is like, oh, ‘What am I?  I am long and stern, I am often held in maids’ aprons… what am I?  Ooh, and I’ve a bulge at the end, mm, what am I?’

AK: (chuckles)

LB: ‘I’m an onion!’  And everyone goes ‘Aaaagh’.  And that, they loved that.

AK: (continues to chuckle)

LB: So… they’ve got the whole human experience, wrapped up in some old puns.

AK: You, you reminded me, I was gonna talk briefly about the etymology of Kvasir.  (Clears throat)  And I was reading up on, so I— I did some prep for this, and I reminded myself of the whole Kvasir thing, and I realised two things, they’re both quite recent things.  One, I’ve been reading about, um, a bunch of Eastern European culture and Russian culture, um, for, er, specifically Lithuanian Russian (sic), um, culture, er, for Exile, which is the DLC we’re, we’re putting out, um, next month, and one of the things that is in common across Russia, Lithuania, and some other countries in the region, is kvass, which I hadn’t really heard of, but I’m sure a lot of people from that part of the world will, will know, which is a very very very very slightly alcoholic drink, that is made sort of like the Egyptians used to make beer, as far as I can tell?  You put bread in water and you leave it for a while, then you strain the gunk out, and you flavour it with berries or something, er, and then, apparently, you drink it.  But kvass is from the same root as Kvasir, obviously, and it seems to be this porto-Germanic or, um, PIE, er, or something root, which, ah, means something like ‘squeeze’ or ‘crush’, so you’ve got this idea of crushing berries…

LB: Mm.

AK: Or crushing people to get the, the blood out.  But also, you remember, Lottie, we were talking about Yiddish the other day, and how great a lot of Yiddish words are…

LB: We do love Yiddish.

AK: And we like ‘kvetch’.

LB: We do.

AK: To mean, you know, ‘to complain’, or— but what, uh, ‘kvetch’ comes from the same root.

LB: Aaaaah!

AK: And again we squeeze or crush, so apparently you can, like, kvetch out the last drops in a bottle of ketchup as well.

LB: That’s so good.

AK: And, you know, if you’re kvetching, you’re kind of squeezing out this, this…

LB: ‘Nyaah, and another thing…’

AK: So kvetch, Kvasir, kvass, all the same under the skin.

LB: That’s great, and it’s interesting that you thought of ketchup as your condiment of choice, bearing in mind the theme of…

AK: Kvetchup!

LB: …this podcast.  Do you have anything else horrible you wanna say…

AK: Yeah!  Well, I was, I’d, I had—

LB: …about madness, women, blood…

AK: I, I was, er, about maenads, but we’re almost out of time.

LB: I think maenads are cool enough to deserve an entire podcast of their own.

AK: I think, yeah…

LB: But I have to say that a lot of this stuff, I mean, okay, on the one hand, (huffs) it is, from a feminist point of view, it is frustrating that so much of literature is making these mad statements about women.  And, and what’s unnatural and what’s not.  But, but I don’t want to be, you know, nasty to these people, I think it’s very important, when you read old stuff, even if it’s old only by fifty years, that you recognise that there is different ideas of what’s going on, and there are different modes, so just because somebody said something a hundred years ago that we now think would probably not really [be?] on if you heard it at a party, does not mean that that certainly is devoid of, of artistic or, or, or whatever else merit, I think, I think we can be annoyed at something and still admire it for many different reasons.  So I hope nobody takes this podcast as, you know, we shouldn’t ever listen to any silly men, and Freud, even though he’s annoying, did have a massive impact on lots of things, so, so, just to be clear on that point.  But I have to say, I think so much of this could be avoided if one man had just spoken to one woman?!  Like I’m reading, um, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, at the minute, which I’m very much enjoying, which is set in the reign of Henry, as he’s married to Anne Boleyn and it all goes complicated.  Um, and there is a rather unattractive nobleman called the Earl of Norfolk in there, and literally he says to, to Thomas Cromwell, the hero, at one point, um, “You couldn’t have a conversation with a woman.  I mean, what would you talk about?”  And it’s a genuine question.

AK: I mean, they don’t want to talk about horses, they don’t want to talk about how great other women are, they don’t want to talk about drinking beer, I mean, what, what, what, what else have you got?

LB: But I think that’s the point, I think that there is this fu— there— I think that for centuries it didn’t really occur to anybody, for, for a bunch of complicated reasons, that maybe you could ask a lady what menstruation is like.

AK: That means you have to talk to a lady about menstruation!

LB: (laughs)

AK: What are you, insane?!

LB: (keeps laughing)

AK: The next thing you know, she’ll be spewing menstrual blood all over your mirrors and your ivory, it’ll be cracking and dulling and the dogs will be drinking it going mad and biting people…

LB: Which happens once a month in this household, I mean, it’s embarrassing.

AK: That’s why we don’t have a dog.

LB and AK: (snort-chuckle)

LB: Wow.   Okay, so…

AK: I’m going to tell my favourite story about Freud, just before we close, which has nothing to do with anything that we discussed, apart from the fact that it’s Freud.

LB: Okay…

AK: It’s just that, when, er, Freud was in Vienna, er, at the time of the Anschluss, when, er, Germany annexed Austria, um, the Gestapo…

LB: The good old days.

AK: …came around and questioned him, because as you could imagine, a, a Jewish intellectual who talks about sex…

LB: (laughs)

AK: Was not top of the Gestapo’s Christmas card list, but he was top of some of their other lists.  So they came round and I think sort of searched his house and, and questioned him…

LB: And found bowls of cocaine.

AK: And then at the end they, they said, “We’d like you to sign this letter saying that, that, you know, this whole thing was in your own free will, we didn’t, um, ah, coerce you and you let us in and, and, um, and so Freud sat down, read the letter through, and he wrote at the end of it, um, something along the lines of “I very much enjoyed the Gestapo, I would like to recommend the Gestapo to all my friends”.  And then he signed it, and he gave it to them.

LB: (laughing)  I think baiting the Gestapo is probably a very fun and very, very brave thing to do.  Right, well, I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to our pretty horrendous podcast, really.

AK: Next time will be wholesome, we’ll talk about kittens.

LB: (inaudible), you’ll find some horrible story about kittens.

AK: And maenads.

LB: Kittens and maenads, together at last.  Um, well yeah, that’s it from us!  Thank you for listening, er, play Cultist Simulator if you haven’t, experience the true horror of the Red Grail and its Well in the centre of the Wood…

AK: And the Forge of Days.

LB: And the Forge of Days, which isn’t quite as horrible.  Um, and we’ll see you next time.

AK: After your spooky day.