A Secret England: On Penda’s Fen and the Malvern Borderlands
“If on the hills you ever hear the sound of an old man’s whistling in the air, don’t be afraid. It’ll only be me.”
Ye olde England
England is an old country. This is true in historical terms: since Athelstan in 927, England has been a (mostly) unified state. But this obfuscates just how old England is. The Anglo-Saxons themselves were latecomers to this land and so if we mark 927 as “the beginning,” we miss a millennia-old human story where waves of humans crossed the Doggerland bridge between the British peninsula and the continent.
This is to say nothing of the rocks. What looks manicured and new today — “green and pleasant” — is just the eons’ long weathering down of a geology that once situated Britain in the southern hemisphere. You see this at Beacon Hill in Charnwood, Leicestershire, where a gentle bimble from the wonderfully named village of Woodhouse Eaves takes you to a pile of rocks from the Precambrian age. The fossils here — Charnia – are some of the earliest known examples of multicellular organisms in the world.
Professor England himself, JRR Tolkien, knew all of this. For Tolkien, England’s history in Middle Earth was ancient even before the first modern men arrived. In his Book of Lost Tales, the elves of Luthany (Britain) cut the channel separating it from the Great Lands before they began their long exodus to the Undying Lands further west. An Anglo-Saxon man, Ælfwine (“elf-friend,” cognate with Albion), learns of this story, which becomes the first version of the Tolkien legendarium
In all of this, the Malvern Hills, my home, mark a border. From Malvern, I can see Worcestershire unfold to the east. Beyond the Lickey Hills there is Birmingham, where Tolkien grew up. Before Lickey, there is Bag End farm in Dormston, where he spent his childhood summers. Looking due east there is Bredon (Bree) Hill, on whose slopes his brother had an orchard. This is the Shire, civilisation, gentle.
But look west across the Marches to Wales and the landscape changes. There are fewer lights and only narrow roads. There is a border here, England to the east and an older Britain to the west, a land of elves and the first men. From the top of Table Hill, one of Alfred Watkins’s ley lines connects a collapsed barrow to the standing stone at Pen-y-beacon in the Black Mountains. If you kept drawing the line into the Atlantic, you would end up in the Azores, as good a Tol Eressëa as there is. Stand here and one becomes Ælfwine, looking out along the final route of the elves.
One day I mean to sleep in the barrow. I can’t think of a better (or worse) place to try out the folktale attached to many British hills, that a night spent on the summit turns you into a prophet or a mad man. It seems to have worked for William Langland, whose nap on the Malverns led him to the vision recorded in Piers Plowman. Seems risky though!
Penda’s Fen
All of this came to mind while watching the quite remarkable 1973 film, Penda’s Fen. Set in the Worcestershire village of Pinvin, the story uses a very Tolkienesque bit of etymological play, in which “Pinvin” hides its original name of “Pende-fen” or “Penda’s Fen.” Fen refers to a wetland and Penda to the last pagan king of England. Like Malvern, Pinvin/Penda’s Fen is the borderland between Englands, one old and one new.
In the film, a schoolboy named Stephen learns that some of the symbols of England — Elgar, Anglicanism, grammar schools, Toryism, militarism, and Englishness itself, to name a few — are not what they seem. In a series of dream and occult encounters, Stephen meets a sinister Mother and Father of England, angels, demons, the dying Jesus, and the ghost of Elgar. In the final scene atop the Malverns, he meets King Penda himself, who blesses him:
“Our land and mine goes down into a darkness now. And I, and all the other guardians of her flame are driven from our home, up and out into the wolf’s jaw. But the flame still flickers in the fen. You are marked down to cherish that. Cherish the flame, till we can safely wake again. The flame is in your hands; we trust it you . . . . Cherish the flame; we shall rest easy. Stephen, be secret. Child, be strange. Dark, true, impure and dissonant. Cherish our flame. Our dawn shall come.”
If this were just a “paganism good/Christianity bad” message it would mostly be uninteresting. But Jesus has a role in the film as a “buried” truth, as Stephen’s vicar father puts it. The problem, according to Duncan Barford, is the “monolithic,” for it was not the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth that threw Penda into the “wolf’s jaw,” but the creedal, church-y monolith of Christianity that has often (always?) allied itself with a narrow, nationalistic, capitalistic, imperial “England.” Or to borrow from Blake: England built dark satanic mills and flew its flag from the chimneys.
Stephen — we “English” — are called to cherish Penda’s flame, the way out, the chariot of fire. Penda’s Fen does not really tell us what that is, just what it is not. That’s at least a place to start.
I can’t recommend the film enough. It’s hard to find but archive.org has a streaming copy.
Very cool! I've got the film bookmarked!