If you've dropped by this blog before, you might have seen some of my previous posts about my new novel Silent Saturday, the first in a trilogy set in Belgium. The book is being published in the UK at the beginning of April 2013.
As I've mentioned before, the idea for the trilogy started with a tradition which I heard about at my Dutch class whilst I was living in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). "Stille Zaterdag" ("Silent Saturday") is the day after Good Friday and on that day the church bells are not rung. Flemish children are told that the bells have flown away to Rome to collect Easter eggs from the Pope. I was both enchanted and intrigued by this tradition and immediately thought that if I were a Flemish child, I would want to climb the church belfry on Silent Saturday and see for myself whether the bells had really gone or not! This is what happens in the opening scene of the book - only the children who climb the tower look out and see something truly horrific happening below them in the village.
It wasn't until very recently that I started to wonder when Silent Saturday would fall in 2013. I knew the book was coming out in early April and wondered whether its publication might dovetail with the real Silent Saturday. In fact they are very close together, as Silent Saturday falls on 30th March 2013.
I am therefore delighted to say that after some careful enquiries about logistics I am going to be in Brussels on 30th March to do some interviews and book signings. I will post exact times and locations once they are finalised, along with details of UK-based launch events. If you are one of my Belgium-based readers, I'd love it if you would come along on Silent Saturday, to get your signed copy of the book, or just to chat and perhaps ask questions if you have any. You may recognise many of the locations, such as Tervuren park(!) and some other features of life in Belgium, such as the 44 tram, frangipane and bessenjenever. The symbiosis of local Belgian and expat lives also plays a major role in the plot. Also importantly, there are some gruesome deaths! It is a thriller, after all...
Monday, December 10, 2012
Sunday, December 9, 2012
A party and a museum!
This week I am sorry to say I wrote 0 words of my current work-in-progress. I haven't been idle though. I've been reading through the suggested revisions to my short stories for my forthcoming collection The Sea Change and having a few amicable wrangles with editor Brian J. Showers about semi-colons and other unruly bits of punctuation.
I also went to the Random House Children's Books Christmas party, which was great fun; being an author is lonely work since you spend most days closeted alone with your laptop, so it is very nice to see some flesh-and-blood colleagues for once. However, the party was in London and I live in Perthshire, so getting there was a bit of a challenge. I couldn't afford to spend a fortune on travel and I couldn't be away overnight without my long-suffering husband taking two days off work to be with the kids, so I opted for flying up and down on the same day with a budget airline. This meant getting up at 3.30 a.m. to drive to Edinburgh airport, and getting home at 10.30 p.m.(!) I knew I would be exhausted afterwards and that I wouldn't get anything done the following day (Friday) at all, and I was right. All the same, my 4 a.m. drive through the dark, deserted and snowy Perthshire countryside was rather enjoyable. I saw a pair of eyes gleaming at me from the undergrowth (probably a fox), saw a large white bird (probably an owl) swoop across the road, and on one lonely stretch of road a whole herd of deer were crossing.
Once I actually got to London I had a bit of time to kill so I decided to do a lightning raid on the Victoria and Albert Museum. I mainly went to pay my respects to the Steinfeld glass in room 64 again. Since I take such a personal interest in the glass (whose history inspired my book The Glass Demon), I am always a bit surprised to see the panels on display sitting there in a corner of the room with no-one taking any particular notice of them. I am mortally tempted to grab passers-by and tell them all about it, but I suspect I would come across as some kind of crazy female Ancient Mariner.
Anyway, I went to look at the glass, and after that I popped into the Japanese section. My daughter is a big fan of manga and anime so I thought I would have a look and see if there was anything I could photograph for her - some Japanese paintings, perhaps. In fact, there was something better, and it was pretty clearly signposted by the group of teenage girls sitting on the floor in the middle of the gallery, admiring the exhibits: a whole series of Japanese "Lolita" costumes, which looked as though they had come straight from the pages of a manga.
I thought I'd post some of the pics here because I think the costumes are amazing. I especially like the male one - I'm not really into frills myself...
I'm not going to spend ages describing the party because a party is a party! I was amazed however by a conversation I had with another female author, who had been asked at an interview what clothes, handbag, etc. she had on (hard to imagine a male author being asked this). If this ever happens to me, I shall be in big trouble as I do not think I own a single designer item! Also, my handbag is from the Shelter shop in Crieff. (You heard it here first...)
After such a long day, Friday was a write-off, as expected. I couldn't seem to concentrate on anything: my brain felt like an albatross that cannot take off because its wings are waterlogged. I imagined all the characters in my current WIP, The Demons of Ghent, falling into a slumber like the Sleeping Beauty! Hopefully all of us will be well rested in time for Monday morning; as I'm onto the last few chapters of the book we have a busy week ahead of us, and not everyone is going to make it to Friday alive...
Monday, November 19, 2012
Enticingly horrid!
I have a piece of news which I have been keeping to myself with great difficulty, until today! I am delighted to say that Swan River Press in Dublin is publishing a collection of my strange stories, entitled The Sea Change & other stories. This is an entirely separate project from my novel writing and one that has largely come about through the energy of editor Brian J. Showers, who previously published my chapbook The Red House at Münstereifel as part of Swan River's Haunted History series.
I have been writing short supernatural fiction for some years; the earliest of the stories included in this collection appeared in 2005 in All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story Society. I'm a massive fan of ghost stories - my bookshelves are lined with everything from crumbling old Fontana anthologies to Koji Suzuki's Ring. I sometimes run workshops on ghost story writing too, which I usually introduce by explaining my pet theory that writing them is a fabulous training ground for writing in general: it is easy to write a story that is simply gross or disgusting, but it requires skill to make the flesh creep. I very much hope that the readers of The Sea Change & other stories will find their flesh creeping pleasantly!
These seven tales are set in locations as diverse as the French Pyrenees, rural Slovakia, the German Eifel and the seabed, ten fathoms down off the south coast of England. I am particularly pleased to say that the collection includes my ending to M.R.James's unfinished story The Game of Bear; this appeared in print in the M.R.James Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter in 2009 but has never been available to a wider audience until now. It is now republished with the kind permission of N.R.J.James and Rosemary Pardoe.
For more details, and to pre-order the book, see: Swan River Press - The Sea Change
The cover art above is by Jason Zerrillo.
"Enticingly horrid" is the reaction of one of my Twitter friends!
I have been writing short supernatural fiction for some years; the earliest of the stories included in this collection appeared in 2005 in All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story Society. I'm a massive fan of ghost stories - my bookshelves are lined with everything from crumbling old Fontana anthologies to Koji Suzuki's Ring. I sometimes run workshops on ghost story writing too, which I usually introduce by explaining my pet theory that writing them is a fabulous training ground for writing in general: it is easy to write a story that is simply gross or disgusting, but it requires skill to make the flesh creep. I very much hope that the readers of The Sea Change & other stories will find their flesh creeping pleasantly!
These seven tales are set in locations as diverse as the French Pyrenees, rural Slovakia, the German Eifel and the seabed, ten fathoms down off the south coast of England. I am particularly pleased to say that the collection includes my ending to M.R.James's unfinished story The Game of Bear; this appeared in print in the M.R.James Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter in 2009 but has never been available to a wider audience until now. It is now republished with the kind permission of N.R.J.James and Rosemary Pardoe.
For more details, and to pre-order the book, see: Swan River Press - The Sea Change
The cover art above is by Jason Zerrillo.
"Enticingly horrid" is the reaction of one of my Twitter friends!
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Lingering memories of the treasure
As those who have read the acknowledgements at the back of The Glass Demon may know, the real-life history of the Steinfeld Abbey stained glass windows was a source of inspiration for the book.
On an autumn day in 1908, a thirty-three
year old Roman Catholic priest named Nikola Reinartz stepped out of the bright
sunshine of an Indian summer and into the vaulted interior of Ashridge Park
chapel, the private chapel of Earl Brownlow in Hertfordshire. His heart
thumping, he gazed in awe at the stained glass which filled the chapel’s eleven
gothic windows. As he was to relate many years later, “With a stroke of magic I
felt myself transported home to the Rheinland!” Gazing at the glass, “fabulous
work in beautiful subtle colours”, he was able to pick out the name of
Steinfeld abbey in the Eifel, the abbey itself in the background of one of the scenes,
and the familiar figures of white-robed Premonstratensian brothers. There could
be no doubt about it: Steinfeld’s greatest treasure, its magnificent stained
glass, had been rediscovered after a hundred years of obscurity. The road to
this discovery was paved with strange coincidences, and at the heart of the
story lay a remarkable correspondence between Father Reinartz and M.R.James, then
the Provost of King’s College, Cambridge. This is the story of that
correspondence.
Above: Steinfeld Abbey (photo: William Bond)
In brief: the Abbey had a set of fabulous 16th century stained glass windows which vanished in 1802 and were presumed lost or destroyed until 1904, when the English ghost story writer M.R.James was asked to catalogue the windows in the chapel of Ashridge House in Hertfordshire and realised that most of them came from Steinfeld. He was inspired by the windows to write a story entitled The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, which is partly set at Steinfeld Abbey, although he himself never visited it. The windows were auctioned at Sotheby's in the 1920s and now reside in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where a small selection of them can currently be seen in room 64.
In 2004 I wrote an article about Steinfeld Abbey for the M.R.James Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter, comparing the Abbey as it is described in M.R.James' story with the real location. At the time I was living in Bad Münstereifel, which is only about 20km from Steinfeld, so I visited the Abbey on a number of occasions. You can read that article online here: The Treasure of Steinfeld Abbey
At the end of the article I mentioned an small exhibition in the cloister at Steinfeld Abbey, which mentioned M.R.James' role in the rediscovery of the glass, and also referred to Father Nikola Reinartz, a local Catholic priest who corresponded with M.R.J. and eventually viewed the glass at Ashridge. The Steinfeld Abbey website included details of several articles written by Father Reinartz himself about the Steinfeld glass and published in the Eifel Club Newsletter, and since these sounded rather intriguing I subsequently visited the offices of the Eifel Club in Düren and read them.
This was a distinct labour of love because they were (obviously) written in rather old-fashioned German but also printed in the difficult-to-read Gothic type used in Germany in the early 1900s! However, the story they related is fascinating. For a while I became somewhat obsessed with the Steinfeld glass and Father Reinartz's connection with it. I visited his former parish of Kreuzweingarten and obtained a booklet from the church that included some anecdotes about him, and visited his grave (photo above) by the parish church of the Holy Cross (photo above).
I subsequently wrote an article which was published by the M.R.James Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter in 2008. That issue of the Newsletter is now out of print and there are no plans to publish its contents online, so I am posting it here with the kind agreement of editor Rosemary Pardoe. At the end of the article I have added some photographs of the Abbey and the glass itself.
“Lingering memories of the
treasure”
- How the lost stained glass
of Steinfeld was discovered
By
Helen Grant
The Steinfeld glass adorned the cloister[i]
of the abbey and is thought to have been installed between 1522 and 1557; Abbot
Johann VI von Ahrweiler initiated the work but did not live to see its completion,
which was achieved under his successors Abbot Simon Diepenbach von Hasselt and
Abbot Jakob II von Panhausen[ii]. The
content of the windows is now known from two handwritten catalogues, the first,
created by Prior Johann Latz, dating to 1632[iii],
and the second, by Canon Heinrich Hochkirchen, created in 1719. These
catalogues were sad necessities – owing to the repeated threat of war the
stained glass had to be removed from the windows and hidden no less than five
times, and a guide was required to ensure that they were correctly re-installed.
The catalogues detail an ambitious cycle of magnificent pictures guaranteed to
make any mediaevalist’s mouth water: a Biblia
pauperum starting with the Fall of the Angels and the Fall of Man, covering
both Old and New Testament stories and culminating in the Last Judgement, with
a glimpse into God’s kingdom in Heaven and Lucifer’s kingdom in Hell. There
were additional pictures of local significance including representations of the
clerics and patron saints of parishes affiliated to Steinfeld, the most famous
being St. Norbert, founder of the Premonstratensian order. The damage which
inevitably occurred during the removal and re-installation of the glass – no
matter how carefully it was done - is appalling to contemplate. In 1785 the
glass was removed for the last time[iv] and at the
beginning of the nineteenth century when the abbey itself was closed[v]
it vanished completely from Steinfeld, making its way across the Channel to
England through the agency of John Christopher Hampp, a German dealer living in
Norwich. For all those connected with Steinfeld, the fate of the glass passed
into a deep obscurity that would last for over a century.
In 1904, M.R.James went to Ashridge Park to
inventory the stained glass in the chapel there for Lord Brownlow. Noticing the
inscription “Abbas Steinfeldensis” on one of the panes, he deduced that its
origin was the abbey church at Steinfeld.[vi]
The glass proved to be the inspiration for a story written to complete his Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, published
later that same year. In March 1907 a Dr. Förster noted in a column entitled Literarisches und Verwandtes[vii]
in the Eifelvereinsblatt (Newsletter
of the Eifel Club): “The Englishman M.R.James from Cambridge tells a ghost
story from Steinfeld in his agreeably-written book ‘Ghost Stories of an
Antiquary’, London 1904, Arnold, 270 pages, pages 229-270 (“The Treasure of
Abbot Thomas”).” Förster remarked that MRJ had correctly attributed Steinfeld
to the Eifel, whereas others had misplaced it to the Ardennes; however he gave
no further description of the story before passing on to other topics. This
very brief notice piqued the interest of Nikola Reinartz, a young priest with a
strong interest in local history, but it was not until the following year that
he was able to satisfy his curiosity, when church business took him to England.
Nikola Reinartz himself was an intriguing
character. He was born on 6th December 1874[viii]
to Adam Heinrich Reinartz of Kall-Heistert and his wife Gertrud, née Pünder. His
mother died when he was only three years old, and his older brothers not long
afterwards; his father never remarried, devoting himself instead to bringing up
his young son. Something of a prodigy, young Nikola is said to have been able
to read the newspaper before he started school and later to have shone at Gymnasium (grammar school). After
studying at Cologne he became a priest in 1899, an event his father did not
live to see. The first two decades of his ecclesiastical career were spent as
curate and rector at various locations in the Rhineland; it was during this
period that he visited Ashridge Park. In 1920 he became the Pfarrer (parish priest) of
Kreuzweingarten near Euskirchen, in the Eifel, and remained there until 1949,
in which year he celebrated the golden anniversary of his ordination. He died
in 1954, a few months short of his eightieth birthday.
The majority of published photographs of
Nikola Reinartz date from the last decade of his life, and show a
kindly-looking, composed, bespectacled elderly man faintly reminiscent of
Donald Pleasence. A photograph from the district picture archive, thought to
date from 1932, shows Father Reinartz in middle age, standing next to the
remains of the Roman canal in Kreuzweingarten, clad in bowler hat, a rather
natty coat and boots, and carrying a walking stick. His expression is
good-humoured but unsmiling; unusually, he is looking straight at the camera.[ix]
The location is significant: Father Reinartz was renowned for his passion for
local history and culture.
Reminiscences of Father Reinartz in the Chronik und Kirchenführer[x]
of the parish church at Kreuzweingarten describe him as an upright and
god-fearing man. Twelve years younger than M.R.James, he lived to see the
horrors of the Second World War, and was a fearless and outspoken opponent of
Nazism. In an autobiographical essay provocatively entitled Mein Kampf he described his personal
struggle against Nazism, which led him into confrontations with local party
members and the Gestapo[xi]. “How often
proceedings were taken against me, I do not know myself,” he wrote. On one
occasion he was said to have been warned by the verger that two strangers,
probably party spies, were amongst his Sunday congregation, but, undeterred, he
proceeded to denounce Nazism in no uncertain terms. The result of his efforts
was that the state contribution to parish funds was slashed, but Father
Reinartz was undaunted, especially since rampant inflation of the tax paid to
the church took the sting out of the gesture. He considered the especially good
harvest that year to be a sign of the Almighty’s support.
Following his visit to Ashridge Park in
1908, Nikola Reinartz wrote several articles about the Steinfeld stained glass.
The first appeared in the Eifelvereinsblatt
number 10, in 1909. A little under
3,000 words in length, it was written when the visit to England was still fresh
in his mind, and contains the fullest description of his correspondence with
M.R.James. This document is, sadly, very difficult to come by nowadays.[xii]
After the sale of the Ashridge glass in 1928[xiii],
Father Reinartz wrote a further, but shorter account of his visit to England,
prompted no doubt by the renewed interest in the fate of the glass. This
article appeared in the Eifel Kalendar
of 1930. From these two articles, written in rather archaic German and printed
in the crabbed Gothic script of the period, it is possible to follow Father
Reinartz’ journey from the point at which he read Dr. Förster’s brief notice
about The Treasure of Abbot Thomas to
the moment he stepped into Ashridge Park chapel and feasted his eyes upon the
Steinfeld stained glass. As we shall discover, none of this would happened at
all, if it were not for the tale of hidden treasure which M.R.James hastily
added to his collection of stories in 1904. Let us take up the story in Father
Reinartz’ own words, from the point at which he read Dr. Förster’s notice.
“In the year 1906, a book was published –
already in its third edition – by Edward Arnold, ‘Ghost Stories of an
Antiquary’, of which Dr. James, the provost of King’s College, Cambridge, was
the author. Amongst these ‘Ghost Stories of an Antiquary’ was one tale
entitled, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas of Steinfeld” (sic). The book, which
was mentioned in the Eifel Club newsletter without any further details about
the content, caught my attention.” Nikola Reinartz was instantly intrigued.
“What did this Englishman know of a treasure of Abbot Thomas? How on earth had
he come across Steinfeld, which nowadays lies forgotten by the world, away from
the main tourist routes and the railway, on its lonely Eifel heights? The
thought had continually dogged me.”
In 1908 he went to London for a number of
weeks in order to attend the Eucharistic Conference, and thought that he would
take the opportunity to travel up to Norwich and see the stained glass of
Mariawald at St. Stephen’s. For this he required a travel guide, and
accordingly visited the bookstalls in Charing Cross, which were, he remarked,
“No modern antiquarian bookshops with well-ordered stock and catalogues, but
where the books lie in jumbled heaps and the booklover simply steps up, to look
for and purchase what he pleases.” He began to search for a Bädeker guide to
Great Britain. “At the same time, however”, he writes, “I had another book
written in English in mind, which I had once made a note of years before:
‘Ghost Stories of an Antiquary’, in which there was supposed to be a tale, ‘The
treasure of Abbot Thomas of Steinfeld.’….and so I wondered, after I had sought
in vain for a Bädeker, whether this book was perhaps known or available. The
bookseller shrugged his shoulders: he didn’t know himself. So I decide to take
my leave; then, as I lift my hand from the pile of books by which I had been
standing, my gaze falls upon the book which my hand had happened to rest upon,
and – in large black type on a coarse white clothbound volume there starts out
at me: ‘Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.’” Father Reinartz was not the only one
to be astounded by this coincidence: “The bookseller himself is flabbergasted,
and is happy to let me have the desired volume for a few shillings. It would set
me on the trail of much more significant remnants of Rhenish glass painting
than the ones which are in Norwich.” Eagerly devouring the story, Father
Reinartz was sufficiently convinced by M.R.James’ scholarly style that he at
first assumed that the “Sertum Steinfeldense Norbertinum” quoted at the
beginning was a real book. “My first thought,” he relates, “when I read of this
historical source, previously unknown to me, was that I should perhaps track
down the remains of the old Steinfeld library.” But where to start? “Since I did not personally know the
author, Dr.M.R.James of Cambridge University, I approached him in writing with
a request for information about the material which his story mentioned. I
received the following reply: ‘The story of Abbot Thomas including the Sertum
Steinfeldense, which you have asked me about, is, as I must unfortunately
confess, completely and utterly my own invention…however there really are some
stained glass windows from Steinfeld in the castle[xiv]
chapel of Earl Brownlow in Ashridge Park near Berkhamstead, although they, too,
in no way ressemble those described by me.’” Echoing the words of the narrator
of The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, MRJ
added, “I must also confess, that I have never been to Steinfeld, and therefore
also do not know what of the splendour of the old abbey of St. Potentinus is to
be found there.”[xv]
In Father Reinartz’ later article of 1930,
he somewhat romantically conjectures that MRJ was “so drawn under the magic
influence of the windows…that he created this ghost story out of them”, in
spite of never having been at Steinfeld itself. This is not the only reference made by Father Reinartz to
some special spiritual influence exerted by the glass. In the same article he
refers extensively to the catalogue of the windows created by Prior Johann
Latz. Coincidentally, this document was discovered in the Trier library by Dr.
H.Oidtman and published almost contemporaneously with Father Reinartz’ visit to
Ashridge. Father Reinartz writes of Prior Latz, that he was the son of the
abbey’s lay helper, Peter Latz of Heistert, one of Reinartz’ own forefathers.
“This personal association is so very extraordinary,” he writes, “that I had to
mention it here. Was it the ghost of the good Prior who, at the same time as
his little book was resurrected from the dust of the library and summoned up
the image of former Steinfeld glories, himself set his descendant upon the
trail of their remains?”
At any rate, Nikola Reinartz was galvanised
by the letter from M.R.James. “I knew enough,” he declared resolutely. A glance
at the map quickly located Ashridge Park for him, but he almost immediately ran
into an obstacle. “My request to view the Earl’s private chapel was at first
roundly turned down by the estate management, who guarded their treasure
jealously from others.”[xvi] Nikola
Reinartz was not, however, one to be easily discouraged, as his later life
showed. He obtained a letter of reference from M.R.James, and thus armed
presented himself at the gates of Ashridge Park. “On production of my papers
the gates were opened to me with no further difficulties,” he relates. “Barely
glancing at the other exquisite works of art, I had myself directed straight to
the chapel.” Stepping inside, he felt that “stroke of magic” which transported
him back to the Rhineland, “as though I were standing in the great cathedral in
Cologne engrossed in gazing at the dazzling splendour of the mediaeval art in
the windows of the north aisle; only the impression is now more self-contained,
clearer.” With the help of an index supplied by M.R.James, he quickly
orientated himself, picking out figures and inscriptions from his Rhenish
homeland. Awe was quickly succeeded by melancholy and even the first stirrings
of anger.
“Admittedly my joy was not unclouded. It
was more and more mixed with sadness, sadness not only over the injustice, that
had stolen these magnificent treasures of my homeland, but above all at the
absolute crime against art, perpetrated when they were thrown together and
jammed in as fillers for their current places with total ignorance. At least I
must describe it thus today, since I have obtained a picture of their whole
former magnificence from the the notes of the old Steinfeld prior[xvii].
From this colossal artistic creation, the great cycle of pictures in the
cloister at Steinfeld, now only a glittering ruin remains. There are fragments
from nearly all the windows described, but they are just fragments – in total
there is probably only about a third remaining.” Years later, when Father
Reinartz penned his article of 1930, the injustice still rankled. “So London
has its stained glass from Steinfeld’s former glory, just as Paris has the
shrine of holy Potentinus,” he remarked with bitter regret. “The archive and
library, once widely famed, are strewn to the four winds. Also vanished from
the wide halls are the white-clad monks, who nurtured all that wonderful human
knowledge and expertise. The best of them still live on in the thoughts of the
local population,” he mused, concluding: “Their life and striving, also
Christian virtue and perfection, in the favourite saints of the people of the
Eifel, the holy Hermann Joseph[xviii], whose
bones, the most precious treasure of Steinfeld, still lie up there in their
sarcophagus of Eifel marble, “grande decus patriae” – an expression which could
equally apply to Hermann Joseph as to Steinfeld itself: the Eifel’s illustrious
ornament.”
Nikola Reinartz died on 4th
August 1954, outliving M.R.James by eighteen years. Several streets are named
after him: Pfarrer Reinartz Straße in Kall-Heistert, where his parents’ house
(bombed flat in World War II) once stood, and Nikola Reinartz Straße in
Kreuzweingarten, where he served as parish priest so many years. His name is
inextricably entwined with that of Steinfeld in local remembrance. At Steinfeld
abbey, taken over by the Salvatorian order in 1923, his name has a place of
honour in the literature and small exhibition about the Steinfeld glass, as
does the name of M.R.James. His mortal remains lie close by the south wall of
the parish church, the church of the Holy Cross, in Kreuzweingarten. A very
simple gravestone bears the words:
Nikola
Reinartz
6.12.1874
† 4.8.1954
Pfarrer
in Kreuzweingarten
1920-1950
RIP
It is a curious sensation to stand by this
grave, and contemplate the connection between this Roman Catholic Father from
the Rhineland and the English ghost-story writer who sleeps under a similarly
modest memorial in the cemetery at Eton. Curious, too, to think that in spite
of the great body of academic work produced by M.R.James, it was his fictitious
Abbot Thomas who at last pointed the
way to Steinfeld’s lost treasure.
[i] The north wing was completed around 1517 and glazing began shortly
afterwards.
[ii] Abbot Johann VI von Ahrweiler 1517-1538 was succeeded by Abbot
Simon Diepenbach von Hasselt 1538-1540 and Abbot Jakob II von Panhausen
1540-1582.
[iii] Sad to relate, this document in the Trier town archive was
destroyed in World War II; however a copy resides in the Victoria and Albert
Museum.
[iv] It is thought that this was not done due to the threat of war but
to allow the damp cloister to dry out more efficiently, since the sunshine
would then fall through clear glass.
[v] The abbey was dissolved in 1802 under secularisation.
[vi] In an article entitled The
Mariawald-Ashridge Glass in The Burlington Magazine (November 1944) Bernard
Rackham says that MRJ mistakenly assumed that all the stained glass at Ashridge
was from Steinfeld, whereas in fact some of the glass was from Mariawald. David
King’s article The Steinfeld cloister
glazing in GESTA (1998) says that Lord Brownlow acquired thirty eight
panels of the Steinfeld glass, which were installed at Ashridge. Father
Reinartz raises the question of whether all the Ashridge glass came from
Steinfeld in his 1909 article, but leaves it open to debate.
[viii] St. Nicholas’ Day in the Roman Catholic calendar; Nikola is short
for Nikolaus.
[ix] In an undated
studio portrait apparently also from his middle age, his eyes seem to gaze at
something to the photographer’s left, as though he is deep in thought.
[x] Chronicle and church guide; the full title is 200 Jahre Pfarrei Hl. Kreuz “Kreuz”-Weingarten 1804-2004 Chronik
und Kirchenführer (ed.
Hermann Josef Kesternich).
[xi] Father Reinartz remarks in Mein
Kampf that the Gestapo even visited him on the day of his 40th Jubilee!
[xii] I obtained a copy from the Eifel club’s headquarters in Düren. There
is apparently another copy in the Eifelbibliothek in Mayen, near Koblenz. The
other local libraries and archives in the area do not appear to have copies.
Since researching this article, I have presented copies of this and the 1930
article to the district archive in Euskirchen and to the Nikola Reinartz
website.
[xiii] By auction at Sotheby’s.
[xiv] Ashridge Park, built in the Gothic style, does indeed present the
aspect of a castle rather than a manor house.
[xv] This is a translation back into English of MRJ’s letter, which was
rendered in German in Father Reinartz’ article; the substance is therefore
correct but the wording may not be exactly as per the original.
[xvi] In his article of 1909 Reinartz says that he was turned down, but
in the later article he says (perhaps for tact’s sake) that his letter went
unanswered.
[xvii] i.e. The catalogue of Prior Latz, from 1632.
[xviii] St. Hermann-Josef (born and died between 1150 and 1250) was a choir
master at Steinfeld. A fine Baroque tomb with effigy of the saint created in
1702 and located in the central aisle of the abbey church houses the shrine
containing his bones.
Above: the cloister (photo: William Bond)
Above: the Abbey church, interior
Above: detail, the Fall of the Rebel Angels
Above: Abbot Johann von Ahrweiler and Saint Norbert
Above: Peter Blanckenheim and his patron St. George
Thursday, November 15, 2012
My Next Big Things speak out...!
Last week I blogged as part of the current "Next Big Thing" meme going round on authors' blogs. I nominated Jenna Burtenshaw and Susy McPhee as my two writers to watch.
I'm pleased to say that Jenna's blog post is now up; you can read it here:
Jenna's Next Big Thing
Susy will be posting soon, and I'll post a link to her blog too in due course.
Meanwhile I'm beetling away at the sequel to Silent Saturday, whose title is The Demons of Ghent (no prizes for guessing where that one is set!). I'll also be blogging soon with some interesting news about a separate project I am working on - one with a ghostly theme! - and once I get an hour or two to sort through the relevant photos I shall be posting the long-promised article about the Steinfeld glass.
Busy, busy, busy! :-)
I'm pleased to say that Jenna's blog post is now up; you can read it here:
Jenna's Next Big Thing
Susy will be posting soon, and I'll post a link to her blog too in due course.
Meanwhile I'm beetling away at the sequel to Silent Saturday, whose title is The Demons of Ghent (no prizes for guessing where that one is set!). I'll also be blogging soon with some interesting news about a separate project I am working on - one with a ghostly theme! - and once I get an hour or two to sort through the relevant photos I shall be posting the long-promised article about the Steinfeld glass.
Busy, busy, busy! :-)
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
The Next Big Thing!
Last week fellow writer Lari Don kindly invited me to
take part in a theme currently going around on authors’ blogs: The Next Big
Thing. Each featured author answers a set of questions about their next book,
and then invites five other authors (whose work they like, and who they think
might be The Next Big Thing) to answer the same ones the following week.
This project has already spread like wildfire, so I am
afraid I have not managed to find five new authors (I’ve found two, blush)
because nearly everyone I asked is already taking part! I’ve nominated my two
at the end of this post. Anyway, here goes!
What is the title of your next book?
Silent Saturday – it’s the first book in a trilogy with the theme Forbidden Spaces.
Well, the book is set in
Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) where I lived from 2008 to 2011.
Throughout my three years there I took Flemish classes; as well as teaching the
actual language, the teacher used to tell us a bit about Flemish culture and
traditions. One particular tradition really stuck in my mind, and that was the
acorn that grew into the mighty oak of a trilogy! In Britain, Easter eggs are
supposedly brought by the Easter Bunny; in Flanders, children are told that the
church bells fly away to Rome on the Saturday before Easter, and come back full
of eggs. No church bells are rung that day (which is why it is known as “Silent
Saturday”). When I heard this story, I immediately thought, well, if I were a
Flemish child I would be dying to get into the belfry to see whether the bells
had really flown away or not! And that is how Silent Saturday begins. The heroine, Veerle, and her childhood
friend Kris, climb the bell-tower of their village church to see whether the
bells have flown away. They are disappointed and a bit disgusted to find that
the bells are where they usually are! So they decide to look out of the belfry
window – and that is when they see something terrible taking place in the
village. That is the beginning of the book.
Eek! I don’t really think of
myself as writing to a particular genre. I would call Silent Saturday a thriller but it is at the literary end of the
spectrum. Also, because of the Flemish setting I think it fits into the
“European Crime” stable. Having said that, I don’t do “crime” in the sense of
police procedures, except insofar as those have
to be mentioned, because if there is a serial killer on the loose obviously the
police are going to be involved. I’m not really interested in that (procedure),
though. I’m interested in how my characters feel about what is going on!
Argh! Another tricky question!
I haven’t ever really asked myself that, because Veerle, at least her outward
appearance, was inspired by someone I saw in passing in Flanders, and I can’t
think of an actress who looks exactly like her. I think however that in my
ideal film version the Flemish characters (there are Walloon – French-speaking
Belgian – characters too) would be played by Flemish/Dutch actors. The book is
essentially Flemish – much of the plot depends on the location and the type of
population you have in Belgium. You couldn’t relocate it to the US or the UK
without ripping the heart out of it.
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
Dark doings in expat houses!
Will your book be self-published or represented by an
agency?
Silent Saturday will be published in the UK in April 2013 by Bodley
Head, an imprint of Random House. I am represented by the Darley Anderson Literary
Agency.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the
manuscript?
It took me roughly one year.
This is about normal for me!
What other books would you compare this story to within
your genre?
I find it quite hard to
compare it to anyone else’s work – apart from anything else, that sounds quite
presumptuous! But the team at Bodley Head have described it as “Jo Nesbo meets
Marcus Sedgwick” on the back of the proof copies. Penguin, who published my
first three novels, once compared me to Stieg Larsson, who is dead(!).
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I really wanted to write a
book about Flanders. My first three books were all set in Germany, and were
very much inspired by the little German town of Bad Münstereifel, where we
lived from 2011 to 2008. At the end of the third book, Wish me dead, I felt I had said what I wanted to say about Germany.
Also, by the time that book came out we had moved to Belgium and I wanted to
move on with my work too. It was a strange experience living in Belgium; in Bad
Münstereifel there were very few English-speaking expats and we basically tried
to blend into German culture as much as we could, but in Brussels there is a
really high proportion of expats amongst the population. Also the affluence
amongst some of them is astounding. That was definitely a factor in the development
of the plot of Silent Saturday: the
thought of all these incredibly luxurious villas inhabited by expats. What
might be going on in those villas when the owners have all gone back to their
home countries for the holidays?!
What else about your book might pique the reader’s
interest?
I hope that readers will enjoy exploring the
setting (Brussels and Flanders) because I think it is quite unusual. There’s
also a mystery at the heart of the trilogy – I won’t say what, but it’s to do
with the terrible event Veerle and Kris see from the top of the bell-tower –
and I hope that that will keep them guessing! The other thing which may strike
a chord in these difficult economic times is the opulence of the houses that
Veerle and Kris visit. They are so much more luxurious than anything either of
them has ever experienced that they don’t take breaking into them as seriously
as they might normally have done – the houses don’t seem real, because the
lifestyle they represent is so unimaginable to them. I think there is a certain
appeal in imagining what one would do if one had access to a lifestyle like
that, even for a while. Also it’s understandable that Veerle can’t really see
the owners of those houses as real people – their lives are so removed from
hers.
Those were my Next Big Thing questions! Here are
my two “Next Big Things”:
Jenna burst onto the scene in 2010 with her
first fantasy novel, Wintercraft,
since followed by Wintercraft: Blackwatch
and Wintercraft: Legacy. Her work has been described as “Huge
fun, and deliciously shivery” (Amanda Craig, The Times).
The irrepressible Susy McPhee is the author of Husbands and Lies and The Runaway Wife. Susy’s books are full
of lively wit but she is not afraid to tackle the darkest of subjects,
including terminal illness and the death of a loved one.
As I said at the beginning, I was really
supposed to recommend five authors, so I should like to mention Che Golden and Gillian Philip who were unfortunately snaffled by other participants in The
Next Big Thing before I asked them, and also Inbali Iserles and Leila Rasheed
who are both smashing authors but aren’t currently blogging. Do check them out!
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Demons prefer blondes. Apparently.
As anyone who reads this blog regularly will know, I have been spending quite a lot of time recently at Innerpeffray Library, the oldest lending library in Scotland, where I have been transcribing excerpts (especially the bits about lechery and bawdiness) from various arcane antiquarian books for the edification of my readers.
I am sorry to say that 31st October, Hallowe'en, is also the last day before Innerpeffray Library closes for the winter (sob!). I have a busy schedule today because as well as working on The Demons of Ghent, the second book in my upcoming trilogy, I am also visiting Strathallan School this afternoon to tell them some seasonal spooky stories! All the same I couldn't bear to let pass this last opportunity to nip over to Innerpeffray before the books go into hibernation until March, and copy out a few more gems for the delectation of those who, like me, love anything old, sinister and frankly bizarre.
So, especially for Hallowe'en, here are some sections from my great favourite, the Treatise of Specters, and from that other rollicking tome, The Discovery of Witchcraft.
Let us start with the Treatise, which offers us some delightful tales of leprosy inflicted by witchcraft.
These two passages are from the part entitled An History of Strange Apparitions, and cunning delusions of Devils.
The first one brings whole new meaning to that thing my mother used to say to me when I was a child, about not making a nasty face in case the wind changed and it stuck that way. Here, a sudden wind brings disfiguring disease:
NB Brisacum is probably the French town of Neuf-Brisach, close to the German border. The other name was not clearly legible but is evidently another town close by.
The second story, below, mentions the "black wood", presumably the Black Forest on the other side of the border. Here, a witch engages in the traditional occupation of cursing her tormenter:
So, especially for Hallowe'en, here are some sections from my great favourite, the Treatise of Specters, and from that other rollicking tome, The Discovery of Witchcraft.
Let us start with the Treatise, which offers us some delightful tales of leprosy inflicted by witchcraft.
These two passages are from the part entitled An History of Strange Apparitions, and cunning delusions of Devils.
324. In the Constantiensian
Diocess, betwixt the Towns of Brisacum
and Fitourgum (Ertourgum?), a leprous woman told to many
auditors, that she falling out with another woman, and many railing words
passing betwixt them; as soon as she came home, a sudden wind blowed upon her
which came from the house wherein the woman dwelled (opposite to her) with whom
she had contention, with which she conceived she was so struck, that she was
thereby infected with a Leprosie, whereof she could never be cured.
325. In the same Diocess and Territories of the black wood,
a hang-man lifting up a Witch from the ground by a pole of wood, she turning
her self toward him, saith, I will give thee thy wages; and together with these
words blowing on the face of the hangman, she infected it with an ugly
Leprosie, whereof he dyed within a few dayes after.
And to conclude, here is a piece from the Discovery of Witchcraft, without which no Hallowe'en blog post would be complete. This is from Book IV (the one with all the lechery etc.). In this chapter we hear about the activities of Incubus, an evil spirit that comes to women in the night, and not just to read them a bed-time story.
CHAP. V.
Of Bishop Sylvanus his
Lechery opened and covered again. How Maids having yellow hair are most
combered with Incubus. How marryed
men are bewitched to use other mens wives, and to refuse their own.
[1]You shall read in the Legend, how in the night-time Incubus
came to a Ladies bed-side, and made hot love unto her: whereat she being
offended, cryed out so loud, that company came and found him under her bed in
the likeness of the holy Bishop Sylvanus,
which holy man was much defamed thereby, until at the length this infamy was
purged by the confession of a Devil made at S. Jeroms tombe. [2]O
excellent piece of Witchcraft wrought by Sylvanus!
Item, S. Christine would needs take unto her another maids Incubus, and lie in her room: and the
story saith, that she was shrewdly accloyed. But she was a shrew indeed, that
would need change beds with her fellow, that was troubled every night with Incubus, and deal with him her self. But
here the Inquisitors note may not be forgotten, to wit, that Maids having
yellow hair[3],
are most molested with this Spirit. Also, it is written in the Legend, of S. Bernard, that a pretty Wench that had had the use of Incubus his body by the space of six or
seven years in Aquitania (being
belike weary of him, for that he waxed old) would needs go to S. Bernard another while: but Incubus told her, that if she would so
forsake him, being so long her true lover, he would be revenged upon her, &
c. But, befal what would, she went to S. Bernard,
who took her his staffe, and bad her lay it in the bed beside her. And indeed
the Devil fearing the bed-staffe, or that S. Bernard lay there himself, durst not approach into her chamber that
night: what he did afterwards, I am uncertain. Marry you may find other
circumstances hereof, and many other like bawdy lies in the golden Legend. But here again, we may
not forget the Inquisitors note, to wit; that many are so Bewitched, that they
cannot use their own wives, but any other bodies they may well enough away withal.
Which Witchcraft is practised among many bad husbands, for whom it were a good
excuse to say they were Bewitched.
[1] In via Hieronym.
[2] Saints as
holy and chast as horses and mares.
[3] Maids having
yellow hair. Mal.malef.par.2.qu.2.cap.2
This is rather a muddled chapter, mixing up various different tales, but it amused me all the same, especially with its claim that the libidinous Incubus prefers "maids having yellow hair"! The Golden Legend referred to as a source work for this chapter was a popular mediaeval work collecting stories about saints including supernatural ones. I also like the tale of the pretty girl who tired of her demon lover because he was getting too old!
When Innerpeffray Library opens again in March I shall post some more excerpts. In the meantime I hope those who have read the ones I have already posted have enjoyed them, and I wish everyone a Happy Hallowe'en!
Above: a demon, from Fairford church (photo by William Bond). I don't think this
one is an incubus though!
When Innerpeffray Library opens again in March I shall post some more excerpts. In the meantime I hope those who have read the ones I have already posted have enjoyed them, and I wish everyone a Happy Hallowe'en!
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