#half horn for the craic

[cillianmurphysdimples]

Are men aware of how sexy they are when they speak immediately after waking up? Like, do they know the power they have with that sleep-clogged voice and huskiness and the lidded eyes and the half-horn and the bed hair, and all that jazz?

Because if they don't, someone needs to tell them because I'm sick of men clearing their throats and being all sheepish over their sleepy voices or when their voices waver.

It creates the moisture, boys. Don't banish it!

[thematrixofreadership]

I both Cannot Sleep and am Having Feelings so hi Tumblr how’ve you been GUESS WHAT I READ

I read a brilliant book last week, is what. It’s this:

Right, so. Here’s the craic: It’s Robin Hood, with all the Sexy Paganism of the likes of the old Robin of Sherwood TV show, BUT...this time, Robin Hood is gay.

There’s still a Marian, except she’s called Marion, and she’s Robin’s sister. Their relationship is exactly as beautiful and loving as it should be, it’s just minus the romance.

The romance comes from Gamelyn de Boundis, youngest son of the local Norman lord, who Rob and Marion have known since childhood when his horse got too close to a randy stag and dumped Gamleyn on his head in the ensuing scuffle. Marion and Rob’s father Adam is the head forrester of the Shirewode (pronounced Sherwood, but you knew that) and their mother Eluned is a healer, essentially functioning as a district GP, so Rob takes Gamelyn to get patched up by his mam and then took home by his dad.

But Adam and Eluned are also local religious leaders, something like avatars of aspects of the Horned God and the Mother Goddess. They were the Hunter and Maiden in their youth, but those positions will go to Rob and Marion, with Eluned becoming the Mother and Adam presumably taking over the position of the Horned One, currently held by some druidic old herbert named Cernun who hangs around the place doing the cryptic Obi-Wan bollocks.

Gamelyn is fated to be Rob’s rival, both of them seeing visions and hearing the voice of the Horned God, with Gamelyn supposed to be the Oak, the King of Summer and Rob the Holly, the King of Winter, locked in eternal emnity to represent the myffic balance of nature an' that, with Marion as the Ivy, a fixed constant.

Only problem with that is that Rob and Gamelyn are in love, and it’s interesting to see how both of them have to fight against religious opposition to their love, Rob because he literally has the voice of his God in his head telling him This Is Not How Things Are Done and Gamelyn because...well, medieval Christianity, you know how they get.

There’s also the political aspect, where they both in a way represent an occupying people and an occupied one, which itself is not without its challenges. Not having been raised within the strictures of a homophobic Church, Rob literally can’t comprehend the idea of love being ‘forbidden’ just because involved parties are the same gender. The people of Loxley and its surrounding area who belong to the old religion have a very open, freewheeling attitude to love and sex, which is a far cry from everything Gamelyn knows.

When it comes to the occupiers, Gamelyn is One Of The Good Ones, for sure, but he still gets sat down at various points of the story so that various characters can explain to him the precise nature of How This Shit Is Fucked (where ‘This Shit’ = the political situation of 12th century England and, at one point, Roman Catholicism’s rejection and perversion of the actual teachings of Christ).

But even that occupier/occupied dynamic has precedent within the story; Rob and Marion are themselves the result of such a union, being as they are the children of an Anglo-Saxon man and a Celtic woman. Their mother, Eluned, is Welsh, and for a book set in what is now the East Midlands of England, clear across the other side of the island, there’s a surprising amount of Welsh dialogue in the book.

Some of it comes out in Rob and Marion’s everyday speech and certain things like Rob’s naming his horse Arawn, the name in Celtic mythology of the ruler of the Otherworld. But a lot, probably the majority, of the Welsh used in the book is used because it occupies the niche that Latin and Greek do in a lot of other stories and real life, as Welsh is both the language of religious liturgy for the Old Religion and also the catalyst for the performance of magic.

A repeated motif is the use of the word tynged, the Welsh for Fate or Destiny, and the way it’s used in the story is similiar to the concept of wyrd in Norse, tynged is the broad flow of causality as well as the specific destinies of individuals; people are spoken of as having tynged, and there are various instances of characters ‘seeing’ tynged visibly manifesting as literal connections between people.

The majority of the dialogue that isn’t in Welsh is written in an actually-pretty-good rendering of the kind of accent you’d hear around Nottingham, but if you’re not familiar with it, it could take a while for it to click with you.

(I will say that was a hell of a trip opening a book and seeing The Obligatory Fantasy Map but then seeing place-names like ‘Doncaster’ and ‘Huddersfield’)

So, is Magic Half-Welsh Gay Robin Hood now My Favourite Robin Hood? That’s a ridiculously redundant question and you’ve embarrassed everyone by even asking it, mostly yourself tbh, BUT I will say that I wasn’t even halfway through Greenwode before I ordered the next book:

Make of that what you will.