Byzantium to Dunvegan?

It's a good time of year for reading, living as we do in a big cold house where, once you've got the bed warm, there's no incentive at all to get up. So I've been working my way through Tom Holland's latest book, Millennium, which is a dense but very readable account of European strife and dread around the year 1000.

It was a turbulent time, especially for those preaching the eternal verities. Emperor and Pope at each others' throats, pagan groves still flourishing in Eastern Europe, an ailing Islamic state in Spain forced to bring in jihadist Berber warriors to keep the Christians at bay, Italian cities growing rich by abetting Muslim corsairs with their slave trading, Vikings turning Christian for the enhanced access to plundering opportunities, the emergence of a knight class dedicated to war and rapine, churchmen worried about the ugly new trend of depicting the suffering or dead Christ on the cross, the monastery at Cluny as sanctuary and dynamo, and everywhere a call for purity and reform to face the last things - without, of course, upsetting the social order.

Given the poverty of the average early medieval life and its horizons, some of the lives described by Holland are astonishing in their scope. Once upon a time every schoolboy knew Harald Hardrada as the unwitting provider of an invasion window for William the Conqueror in 1066, by a diversionary (and doomed) landing in the North of England that King Harold had to deal with. But his life encompassed service under Prince Yaroslav in Novgorod, the making of a fortune in Byzantium as one of the famous Varangian guard, a marriage with Yaroslav's daughter and accession to the throne of Norway.

After the slaughter at Stamford Bridge, his surviving warriors and ships fled. But I'm reminded that, this summer in Dunvegan Castle in Skye, I saw for the first time in 40 years the Fairy Flag of the Macleods - a banner of extreme age and, it seems, eastern origins. One of the explanations offered of its provenance was that it was Harald's battle standard, come into his possession during the Byzantine days and carried away after his final battle to the outer isles of Scotland (long under Norse influence). To be investigated further!

The files

Interesting to read in the newspaper the other day an account by a Romanian journalist of what she read when she finally got access to her Securitate file. Like other communist regimes, Romania controlled its citizens through surveillance and widespread informing. All kinds of perks, advantages and absolutions could be earned by "whispering" to the spooks, the Securitate. The percentage of the population engaged in informing about incidents of suspicious behaviour, inappropriate opinions or just the wrong jokes on the part of neighbours or even family has been variously estimated between 3% - 10%. The Securitate files fill well over 20km of shelving.

The fall of the Berlin Wall had the Stasi, in what would soon cease to be the German Democratic Republic, burning out the motors of umpteen shredders and finally sending to West Germany for better models, as they liquidated the product of an even greater army of informers. Until recently - and maybe still - a roomful of people was engaged in putting the shredded papers back together again at (necessarily) the pace of a snail. Perhaps computers are being used now, but big fish (big transgressors) have been given plenty of time to die.

These East German and Romanian files, once a secret information resource and social control tool for the repressive state, remain open. The KGB equivalent was open for a brief period during the heady and shambolic days of Yeltsin, long enough for the fate of some well-known figures from the creative world to be clarified. For example the files showed how, in a refinement of interrogator cynicism, Isaac Babel the writer was given as his last authorial assignment the task of defining his crime and confessing to it, while KGB officers added a few editorial tweaks. The power exerted, abetted by the levers of torture and threats to family, is total, irresistible.

The self-belief of totalitarianism is also visible here. The files were bulging, comprehensive - why not, when no-one but the "organs" was ever going to see them, in perpetuity? And paradoxically what the files contained was, among the fabrications, a full record of the mutations of fact that had built into the new "truth"; as if there had to be, among the spidery fictions, a bedrock, a setting-off point, a reality.

Back again

A previous blog, under the pen-name of Crane, went south for the winter - in fact, 3 winters - but now I've touched down again and will try to do what it says on the tin - a sharing of thoughts on what I've been reading or writing, and an account of my travels. Being retired, you might think, gives me plenty of time for all these. We'll see!