This year-long artistic project, Our Longland Is Dreaming, is going to be about four things. Let us tell you what they are. Then we’ll tell you some of the initial steps we’ve taken in the past month.
The first thing Our Longland Is Dreaming is about … is a style of writing.
A few months ago, Jim came to me (Thomas) with something he’d found.
It was an ancient style of writing called ‘boustrophedon' he’d read about in a book by celebrated typographer Jan Tschichold called ‘An illustrated History of Writing and Lettering' (Zwemmer, 1940).
In boustrophedon alternate lines are written in reverse, in mirrored characters. This means the reader reads from left to right on one line and then turns at the end to read back right to left on the subsequent line … and so on.
The forms and glyphs are graphically beautiful. It was a common way of writing on stone in Ancient Greece. Many ancient scripts, such as Etruscan, Safaitic and Sabaean, were frequently written in Boustrophedon.
It beautifully bridges Latin Script (reading left to right) and Arabic script (reading right to left).
Jim’s initial thinking is to design a typeface that is mirrored so it can read in either direction. Isn’t that a lovely idea?
The name ‘boustrophedon’ comes from Greek. It means ‘like the Ox turns’.
Bous = Ox, Strophe = Turn, Don = in the manner of.
A related discovery (from 'The 26 Letters' by Oscar Ogg, Harrap & Co, 1949) is that the Latin character A - derives from the name of the letter in the Phoenician period meaning ‘ox’ The form is thought to derive from an earlier symbol resembling the head of an ox.
Jim brought all this to me as the beginning of a possible project. The next three aspects of Our Longland Is Dreaming all snorted themselves out from the nostrils of boustrophedon.
Presented with the turn of the ox, I couldn’t help thinking about poetry’s most famous (but not that famous really) worker of the land – Piers Plowman.
Piers Plowman is a medieval alliterative poem which was being written and re-written, almost continuously, between about 1360 and 1400 by an author scholars believe to be called William Langland. There are three main versions of the text, commonly called the A, B and C texts which are *thought* to have been written in that sequence – B being a revision and expansion of A, and C being a revision of B – though nothing is certain.
Taking clues from notes added to manuscripts and potentially biographical details hidden within the poem, it’s thought that William Langland was an English West Mid Lands peasant who moved to London and earned a living by saying prayers for people richer than him. If it wasn’t for his poem, we wouldn’t have known he existed.
The poem begins ‘In a somur sesoun whan softe was the sonne’ – no need to translate that line, but much of the text does need translation. We will talk more about this in later letters.
Nevill Coghill in the introduction to his 1949 translation says ‘if William Blake had known the poem I cannot but think he would have been moved to illustrate it as magnificently as he did the Book of Job or the Divine Comedy.’
Piers Plowman is a series of allegorical visions of the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Heaven. Our hero is a symbol of the good life as it should be lived and the poem often presents as dreams within dreams within dreams.
Boustrophedon pulled us towards Piers Plowman, which in turn cuts a furrow towards the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.
Sometimes also called Wat Tyler's Rebellion or the Great Rising, this was a major uprising across large parts of England in 1381. There were various causes, including the socio-economic and political tensions generated post Black Death pandemic in the 1340s, high taxes resulting from war, and instability within the leadership of London.
A febrile frustration coming from those who worked the land leading to a march on London. It’s one of the most widespread rebellions in English history, and Piers Plowman, the poem, was one of the inspirations.
John Ball, a leader of the revolt, wrote a letter to the peasants of Essex in 1381 telling them to ‘stondeth togidre in Godes name, and biddeth Peres ploughman go to his werk, and chastise wel Hobbe the Robbere’.
As Langland writes in Passus III of Piers Plowman ‘poor men have no power to express their needs even though they are hurting’.
(‘Passus’ means ‘step’ and is used much as we would use ‘chapter’ now.)
So, we have an as-the-ox-turns system of writing, a medieval plowman dreaming of the renewal of England and a rising rebellion demanding a fairer society.
Our final reference point for this project is a land art. Artworks made in fields, from soil, exposed to the elements, under the skies. Statements carved into the earth. Creativity that thrives or fallows with the seasons.
Again, more on this in another letter, but I can say that Jim and I have already spent some time in the Henry Moore Institute’s library in Leeds. This holds the world’s largest dedicated sculpture library, which means great clods of books and ephemera and archival objects on land art.
As ever, all comments or contacts welcome on any of this.
I can say that following our first letter, someone has been in touch regarding a magnificent field in Devon. We’ll be going down to visit this in November.
We’re also having some Ox masks being made for us. Don’t know why, just feels right.
A important saying we had on the Pilgrimage was 'if we knew why, we wouldn't be doing it' - Daisy stole it directly from Bill Drummond's mouth
This is all very lovely stuff. I'm generally not that fascinated by etymology... But word and letter archeology... That's another thing. If I had more time I'd dig deep into Owen Barfield's work.
All I have to offer, inspired by A and the Ox... is the little known theory about the $ motif.... A nice easy one for reversing! There are a few tedious theories about how it came to be. But the one I love is suggested by Marc Shell... It makes total sense to me... $ is a monogram of In Hoc Signo (by His sign... Ie By the sign of Christ).
Look forward to the next passage. Xx
Thank you for sharing this fascinating breakthrough, Thomas. Not only endeavouring to create a type that can be read both this way and that, but to channel 'boustrophedon' as the creative furrow to do so... a word which is trampled into the sod of language by the brutes of the plough themselves!
Your project had me digging out my MA Creative Writing dissertation, Out of Darkness, Cometh the Black Country - a saga of people, place and identity. In this piece, I reference the setting and experiences of the West Midlands, including some of the allegorical themes found in the Plowman narrative. In my saga, I was influenced by epic medieval narratives, Middle English epic alliterative verse and Old Norse saga forms. Although this was ‘penned’ around 150+ years before Piers Plowman, I wanted to share an old bull story with you, hoping it may unearth another creative turn. It’s an Old Norse myth, with oxen at the front and centre…
In Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, the opening of ’Gylfaginning (The Deluding of Gylfi)’ talks of Sweden’s King being tricked by the Goddess Gefjun. Here is an extract from The Prose Edda (Byock, 2005):
King Gylfi ruled over the lands now called Sweden. It is said that he offered a travelling woman, in return for the pleasure of her company, a piece of ploughland in his kingdom as large as four oxen could plough in a day and a night. But this woman, named Gefjun, was of the Aesir. She took four oxen from Jotunheim [Giant Land] in the north. They were her own sons by a giant, and she yoked them to the plough, which dug so hard and so deep that it cut the land loose. The oxen dragged this land westward out to sea, stopping finally at a certain channel. There Gefjun fastened the land and gave it the name Sjaelland. The place where the land was removed has since become a body of water in Sweden now called Logrinn [the Lake], and in this lake there are as many inlets as there are headlands in Sjaelland. So says the poet Bragi the Old:
Gefjun dragged from Gylfi
gladly the land beyond value,
Denmark's increase,
steam rising from the swift-footed bulls.
The oxen bore eight
moons of the forehead and four heads,
hauling as they went in front of
the grassy isle's wide fissure.