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Vikings

What Writers Can Teach Museum Curators

10/03/2014 by J D Davies

‘Nothing!’ cries an enraged legion of museum curators, their spectacles quivering with righteous fury. ‘Nothing at all, you idle coffee-addicted scribblers of words that nobody wants to read! Adverbs, in particular.’

But hear me out.

In a way, we’re both in the same business. We’re both story tellers. We’re both trying to get ‘ordinary people’ (sic) interested in the lives and experiences of others, or in a particular culture or moment in time, or in a lost way of doing things, or in the history of a special place, or in a combination of all of those. If I’m right about this, then surely it means there should be a certain crossover in the way that we go about our business: in a nutshell, a good book and a good museum should have a great deal in common. But that’s plainly not always the case, and it certainly isn’t the case with the new Vikings exhibition at the British Museum, which we visited last Friday (its second day of public opening).

Vikings.

That single word tells us the British Museum should be onto a sure-fire winner, with an absolutely knockout story to tell. But it blows the opportunity spectacularly, principally because it ignores the basic rules that should underpin the telling of any story; basics which every writer worth his or her salt will, or should, take for granted in their own work, but which, for some reason, some museum curators seem to ignore entirely in theirs.

Politically incorrect
Politically incorrect

1/ Start with a bang. Or, to put it another way, ‘impact, impact, impact’. Every writer reading this blog will know the importance of a strong opening – a powerful first sentence, first paragraph, first page, first chapter – either because it’s something your creative writing tutor /agent/ editor/ publisher has drummed into you, or because it was an instinctive part of your writing to begin with. Grip your audience. Convince them from the very start that this is a fascinating story which they really want to follow. Note to the British Museum: Having the very first display case containing precisely one brooch is not ‘starting with a bang’. Recorded voices speaking in old Norse on a continuous loop do not constitute ‘impact’.

2/ Keep your audience’s attention and sympathy. Absolutely vital for all writers. You want your readers to find the story gripping, the characters sympathetic (or interesting, at the very least). You want them to decide that this is a journey they want to lap up every part of; that they want to keep going to the very end. Note to the British Museum: You do not get your audience’s sympathy by immediately funnelling everybody into a narrow, dark, dog-leg gallery, with effectively only one bank of exhibits. As a result, people’s first impressions of the exhibition are of a vast logjam, with a huge queue shuffling slowly forward, and with very little to look at for ages – partly because there’s relatively little in the first few display cases, partly because most of them contain beads. Nice beads, admittedly, but still beads. OK, yes, we know you’re on a mission to convince people that the Vikings were cuddly bunnies who liked trade and were skilled craftsmen, and not blood-crazed maniacs in horned helmets, but would it really have hurt to have just one sword near the beginning…just one helmet (even without horns)…just one atrocity story? And just a bit more space, perhaps, with a more flexible layout, so that everybody wouldn’t effectively need to stay in one stationary line, several deep?  As a result, several people in our hearing were asking the staff on duty about how they could complain formally when they were barely 10 feet into the exhibition space. Many others were bypassing the first half of the exhibition entirely, once word got out that there was more space – not to mention swords and helmets – later on.

Wrong
Wrong

3/ Drive the story forward. Keep the narrative moving. Build up to dramatic climaxes that leave the readers wanting to turn over to the next page, or move on to the next chapter. Note to the British Museum: Driving the story forward means you have a story to begin with. I know it’s very cutting-edge to reject narrative and go for a thematic approach instead; there’s nothing innately wrong with that, and, indeed, I’ve often done it myself in my non-fiction work. But leaving all of what I suspect most people will consider to be the best bits to the very end (see below) is neither cutting-edge nor clever – especially when that pesky queue still isn’t moving, people are still complaining, and absolutely nothing at all, least of all the audience, is being driven forward in any shape or form. 

4/ Raise your audience’s expectations, and then fulfil them. Your audience comes to your work with certain expectations. They know the genre. They have an idea of what to expect, perhaps from the cover blurb, perhaps from reading your previous work, perhaps because they want to discover something fresh and different. It’s vital that you fulfil your audience’s expectations, rather than creating something self-indulgent and overly introspective. Note to the British Museum: Swords. Helmets. Atrocities. OK, you might want to disprove that myth – but surely the best way of doing so is to confront the myth head on, at the beginning of the exhibition, and not ignore it entirely, relying instead on the smug assumption that you know much better than your audience? Of course, I’m just one lone voice, and can thus be easily disregarded. But I’ve spent the last 30+ years dispelling myths about 17th century naval history, so I think I’ve developed a reasonable idea of how to tackle that sort of mission effectively…and as for being a lone voice, I see that both The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph are taking pretty much the same line as me. (‘Like watching The Killing in Stansted Airport’ – genius, Mark Hudson of the Telegraph, sheer genius.) And let’s face it, if those two are on the same side, things really must be pretty serious.  

No. Just no. (Horned helmets? Myth, not to mention a health and safety issue.)
No. Just no.
(Horned helmets? Myth, not to mention a health and safety issue.)

5/ Move from the general to the specific. This is one of the guiding principles of writing non-fiction, although it doesn’t necessarily hold true in every single case. Even so, the principle of setting the scene, giving the audience a clear sense of the context, and then moving into detail – say, into such themes as religion, warfare and home life (yes, even beads) – is a sound one, especially as it also applies in the profession that provided my ‘day job’ for thirty years, namely teaching. And if you don’t buy my comparison between writing and museum curating, I hope you’ll at least accept that the latter has a great deal in common with teaching, especially as museums are often major teaching resources in their own right. Note to the British Museum:  Starting with a few domestic items and some Old Norse voices certainly doesn’t constitute moving from the general to the specific. Yes, you have some pieces of explanatory text around, but these are ridiculously brief – and, worse, they tend to be either very high up on the walls or very low down, and thus often completely inaccessible because of the crush. This isn’t trendy minimalism; ignoring such a basic requirement as providing straightforward lines of sight to important information is simply crass, and something that the greenest student on his or her first teaching practice would be able to sort out much more competently. (Or are you assuming that everyone will have one of those neat little interactive handsets your staff are so keen to give out? The same handsets that contribute further to the logjam by ensuring that the people with them all stop dead in exactly the same places to listen to the commentary? Those handsets?)

Now that's what I call a Viking ship! (Up Helly Aa, Lerwick, Shetland, January 2013)
Now that’s what I call a Viking ship!
(Up Helly Aa, Lerwick, Shetland, January 2013)

6/ End with a bang. Self-explanatory, really, and the one and only point on which the Vikings exhibition scores. Finally, you emerge from the logjammed dog-leg into a huge hall containing swords and helmets galore, not to mention stunning religious artefacts and a few examples of some of my favourite artefacts of any sort, the delightful Lewis Chessmen. The centrepiece, though, is the enormous steel skeleton containing the surviving timbers of ‘Roskilde 6’, the biggest Viking ship ever discovered. Even this is not quite as impressive as the curators probably hoped, though: at the end of the day, there’s much more steel frame than there is timber. Dare one suggest that bringing in a rather smaller hull, but a more complete one, would actually have had a greater impact?

All in all, then, a missed opportunity by the British Museum, and arguably the latest in a series of seriously misconceived decisions at that institution (witness its cavalier treatment for a decade or more of what should be one of its greatest assets and attractions, the Round Reading Room). If its curatorial team want an example of how to stage an exhibition that at once challenges audience preconceptions, presents radical new revisionist interpretations of supposedly familiar subject matter, and yet succeeds triumphantly in fulfilling all six of the basics I’ve set out above, then perhaps they should catch one of the fast boats down to Greenwich and take a look at the new Nelson, Navy and Nation gallery at the National Maritime Museum. But somehow, I doubt if they will.

Filed Under: Heritage preservation, Uncategorized Tagged With: British Museum, Vikings

The Comfort Zone

21/05/2012 by J D Davies

One of the challenges and delights of working on my new non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales, is that it’s taking me into all sorts of uncharted territory and, in some cases, territory I’m revisiting after many years. The book is meant to cover the entire time period from the Romans (AD 60, to be exact, and Suetonius’ attack on Anglesey) to the present day, so large areas are well outside what I’d regard as my comfort zone. I suppose that said zone would extend from the sixteenth century through to about 1815, with the core being my principal specialisation from about 1640 to about 1700. But as I’ve said before in this blog and elsewhere, I originally started out with an interest in twentieth-century warships, so the period from roughly 1939 onwards is also an area I’m very comfortable with. Over the years I’ve also done various bits and pieces of work on aspects of the Victorian period and World War I, so getting up to speed there isn’t a problem at all.

All of which still leaves huge swathes of history that are relatively new to me, and very exciting. The American civil war has always fascinated me – I remember collecting picture card series about it when I was a boy, I recently read Amanda Foreman’s vast and very impressive study of Britain’s relationship with the conflict, and, yes, I own the DVDs of both Gettysburg and Gods and Generals – but I had no real idea of just how many Welshmen served, or of the part that Welsh waters played in the fitting out of some of the Confederate raiders. There were Welshmen aboard the Monitor, the Virginia (aka Merrimac) and the Alabama, and from my point of view, the recent reconstruction of the face of one of the Welsh crewmen on the Monitor has been really timely. I’ve also had to find out more about the various wars between the South American states in the 19th century – Welshmen and other Britons served in pretty well all of their navies and all of their wars, and one of the early heroes of the Chilean navy was an ‘Admiral Bynon’, originally a Beynon from the Gower.

But the really big leap outside the comfort zone has come with what could be termed ‘the early stuff’. My knowledge of the Romans is probably pretty similar to that of most people, i.e. nice walks on Hadrian’s Wall and occasional visits to the likes of Caerleon, watching Gladiator and episodes of Time Team, and Monty Python’s rant about ‘what have the Romans ever done for us?’. I suppose my opinions were jaundiced by my experience of school Latin, which was taught by a formidable gentleman who possessed a truly Roman nose, was inevitably nicknamed ‘Caesar’, and seemed old enough to have actually known his namesake at first-hand. (A corrective – he later became the Headmaster pro tem, very much in ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ fashion, and I got to both know him very well and to respect him greatly.) Despite Caesar’s best efforts I never became much good at Latin (nor any languages, come to that), although I loved the historical aspects, so getting up to speed on the Saxon shore forts, the Classis Britannica and last year’s exciting archaeological discoveries at Caerleon has been hugely enjoyable.

The same is true of that period which it was still politically correct to term ‘the Dark Ages’ when I first studied it at Oxford. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed the period from 410 (when, according to the university’s Modern History Faculty, ‘modern history’ began) to 1066 and beyond – I was taught the Venerable Bede by a bouncy ex-nun and the really Dark Ages by James Campbell, a wonderful, inspiring Oxford don of the old school whose rooms were a battleground for domination between books and cats. It always intrigued me how historians of the period could disagree so violently over a tiny number of sources – at the time the great controversy was over James Morris’s Age of Arthur, which built an enormously complex and ambitious interpretation of the period by making some remarkably imaginative assumptions (some of his critics preferred ‘ludicrous guesses’) based on minute fragments of evidence. In getting myself up to speed on such topics as the ‘Strathclyde Welsh’,  King Edgar’s famous rowing ceremony on the Dee in 973, and whether the Vikings were really the horn-helmeted pillagers of my recollection ((but said recollection might be over-dependent on the Kirk Douglas / Tony Curtis film, The Vikings…) or else the nice peaceful cuddly-bunny traders that modern orthodoxy seems to favour, I see that little seems to have changed – historians still seem to be arguing over exactly the same phrases in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, etc, that were causing them so much angst over thirty years ago! And then again, something strange seems to have happened to Norse names; the king I’ve always called Harold Hardrada now seems to be known as Haraldr harðráði, so do I have to adopt the latter? Of course, the added complication with Welsh history is the astonishing proliferation of petty kingdoms and kings with pretty similar names. So remind me again – which was which out of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, Gruffydd ap Cynan and Gruffydd ap Rhydderch, not to mention Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, when did Deheubarth replace Dyfed, and can I attribute any naval history of any sort to the kingdom of Rhwng Gwy a Hafren? But seriously, getting outside the comfort zone is good. It’s refreshing. It’s exhilarating. Historians and authors everywhere should try it!

Below: the estuary of the River Tywi, site of the naval battle of Abertywi in 1044 between the Dublin-Norse fleet recruited by Hywel ap Edwin, King of Deheubarth, and the native fleet of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwynedd, the only native Welsh ruler in the era of independent kingdoms to establish his own powerful naval force; Gruffydd won a decisive victory and Hywel was killed. On the right-hand headland stands Llansteffan Castle, built in the 12th century to guard both the navigable river leading to Carmarthen, then the largest town in Wales and the seat of royal government in the south, and the important ferry across the Tywi estuary (part of the major pilgrimage route to St David’s cathedral). Behind the left-hand, or southern, headland is the estuary of the Taf, leading to Laugharne of Dylan Thomas fame.  

Filed Under: Historical research, Historical sources, Naval history, Welsh history Tagged With: American civil war, books by J D Davies, Britannia's Dragon, Naval history, Royal Navy history, Vikings, Wales, Welsh history

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