A Vision of the 16th Century

Af : Anne Born

Helle Stangerup´s first historical novel Christine was the bestselling Danish novel in the 80s. Her latest novel Sankt Markus nat (St Mark´s Night) has so far - in three months - sold more than 25.000 copies and was the bestselling Danish novel in 1992. The English historian and translator, Anne Born, has read Sankt Markus nat for Danish Literary Magazine.


Helle Stangerup has studied and thought her way into 16th century Danish history in its context of Europe and the emerging new world until she is as familiar with it as our own time.
    The author´s love and knowledge of her own land shine with the clarity of a strong sense of place. The rural landscape is background for the "herregårde" - lordly manor houses - the homes of leading characters, where so much of Denmarks culture and history has been enacted. There are more of these to the square km than in most larger countries, a priceless heritage. Helle Stangerup not only vividly describes the buildings in their variety, of style and date, from fortified manor houses with thick walls and moats like Vallø, to vast Renaissance castles like the huge, glowing red brick, step-gabled Gisselfeld; she presents us with furnishings, ornaments, all the accoutrements and utensils of everyday life, dress in changing fashions, armour and weaponry. Then she introduces the households, their many servants and officials both indoors and out, and the living conditions of all these and of their animals. There are realistic childbirth scenes, attended not only by midwives but also relatives from miles around, and moving deathbeds.

Times and seasons

This book presents an especially fine impression of life lived in accord with the natural cycle of the seasons and thus the passage of time marked by the repetition of this cycle. Helle Stangerup achieves this partly by involving the reader in the domestic activities, work and duties ruled by the seasons - of which the basement kitchens and offices are the hub-brewing, baking, conserving, weaving and sewing, dealing with the supplies of earth´s fruits: grain, meats, game, fruit, vegetables, hops and so on - over all of which the lady of the manor rules and for which her daughters are trained, at home and in the house of their future parents-in-law. But this writer does not keep us indoors. She rides out into the landscape with her characters and allows us to share in what they see and feel, for this is a satisfyingly tactile and visual book. We see the sweep of landscape, hear the sea or the wind in the trees, touch and smell flowers and leaves, and more than this, name them, appreciate their beauty and healing properties. The descriptions resemble the illuminated manuscripts of this late medieval period. The contrast between the wide view and the minuscule plant proxides a valuable view of human perception of the natural world. Not an idyllic world by any means. Smells as well as perfumes, decay as well as burgeoning, plague and war as well as wellbeing, all the contradictory pleasures and pains of life.
    In this book Helle Stangerup places emphasis on the female characters, and men are mostly seen through women´s eyes. Reviewers have noted the mother-daughter relationship between Ide Munk, who marries Oluf Rosencrantz, and her daughter Mette, born on St Mark´s Night, the 26th April, 1533.

Starting with a bang

Mette is unlike other people from the very moment of her birth. Her world begins rather than ends, with a bang. Ide has been obsessed with a desire to manufacture gold since meeting an old monk who sold her a small phial of dragon´s blood; She believes this to be an essential ingredient of gold. She has an alembic and furnace in the cellar at Vallø, the Rosenkrantz mansion south of Køge, where she experiments. At the moment of Mette´s delivery there is a great explosion. Ide´s attendants flee in terror. Her latest experiment has failed, as do future attempts.
    The daughter, Mette, refuses to speak for some years; but she possesses the gifts of the seer. Although she soon realises it is better to conceal her powers, she can see into women´s wombs and tell the sex of their child, and she can sense when a death occurs far away. People find her a strange child, and she is something of a rebel, happiest when riding with her father, protected from the cold wind at her back in the shelter of his arms, listening to his wonderful tales of the far distant lands of the New World. Latin lessons by the house tutor bore her. But she starts to write in runes, to everyone´s amazement. She prefers to listen to the domestics gossiping in the kitchens, to hear their primitive "pagan" lore or learn flower-names, and to join in prayers in the secret "right" chapel at the top of the house where the Golden Madonna lives, Our Lady who comforts and hears the prayers of women, after the family has attended the obligatory service in the "wrong" church, the parish church where the new incumbent preaches long sermons in the bare church stripped of all its saints. The sense of loss and confusion brought about by the change in religious practice comes across strongly in this book.
    Although she is untidy and rebellious, reluctant to be strapped into the new form of corset and to adopt the sidesaddle mode of riding, Mette is beautiful, and in her teens she is affianced to handsome Steen Rosensparre.
    But before Steen, while no more than a child, Mette met someone else: Peder Oxe, a nobleman thirteen years her senior. His gaze had fined her with a strange emotion, one she never forgets. Oxe is a brilliant statesman, but his passion for acquiring property by any means necessitates a prudent absence from Denmark for a number of years.
    Mette senses Steen´s death in Halland, Sweden, on the battlefield at Axtorna and grieves when his body is brought home for burial. Long ago she measured his length and breadth, trying to understand his goodness, always haunted by the thought of another man she hardly knew.
    One day Mette hears of a gypsy living in the woods. Something draws her to this person. She rides to see who it is, and discovers a very old, shabby monk. He seems to recognize her, says it was long ago, and it was a different name: "But she had the power. It blazed from her body...The power to create that which humanity never achieves". He is the monk from whom Ide bought the "dragon´s blood" long ago.
    Mette picks up the phial he indicates, his third and last, and asks him what to do. He says she must use heat and the liquid. She pours the contents of the phial into a pan and puts it on the fire. The monk intones faintly: "Pax tibi, Marce, Evangelista meus". It is the night of St Mark, the night of the Sword. The liquid turns into gold, and Father Dominigo dies. The miracle he was sent to seek in order to redeem his sins has come to pass and he is blessed, not cursed. As Mette sets off for home with the gold, she turns and sees that the woven twigs of the tent have budded and put out leaves. She gives the gold to the poor of the two family mansions, Skarholt and Vallø. "The gold did not belong to her. Nor did the wonderful and incomprehensible."

Mirror and reality

After such an experience, Mette expects to see a change in herself. But when she looks in her mirror she seems the same. Not long after this, with her son Oluf she visits Peder Oxe at his most magnificent castle, Gisselfeld, designed and built for himself. Mette feels strange, happy but without realising why. And then she sees:
    "She looked around her, slightly confused. There were so many shades of green. The red brickwork gave off blue and grey tints. She no longer saw the mirror´s image of reality. She saw the reality it had reflected."
    Peder Oxe invites her to come and eat carp. She knows she will never become a seafarer. Never reach the place with cliffs and waves and mussel shells. The place with the name whose sound the child she once was could not imagine. But today she would taste the fish that came from the Land of Silk.

Magic

It is refreshing - and, I must own, a relief - to read an author who is not afraid of engaging with the miraculous, the extra-ordinary, and who creates, or rather re-creates, a character whose life is spent in the efforts to apprehend those supernatural elements we normally suppress. But is this not self-indulgent, naïve, sentimental, everything a respectable modern writer must eschew in favour of the straitjacket of negativity and cynicism? No. Helle Stangerup succeeds because she presents a character who is not self-indulgent, naïve and sentimental. Mette´s feet are on the ground of this earth, she accepts everything, even what´s tedious and difficult. But she never forgets the truths given her in childhood by the Golden Madonna, the gypsy in the forest, and the older lore of nature learned from the country people, and never ceases to listen to her own individual inner voice.
    The style of this book has developed a deeper richness from that of Christine (In the Courts of Power): Description and dialogue fit together admirably. The dialogue is ageless and natural. Helle Stangerup is able to describe details of life in the 16th century so convincingly that the reader enters that age and can live with the characters without any sense of time-warp. The book´s underlying patterning forms a satisfying structure. In addition to the rhythmic seasonal cycles, the story begins with Mette´s birth on St Mark´s night to the sound of an explosion. It ends on another St Mark´s, this time in the early hours of his day. Mette succeeds in forging gold and facilitates the happy translation of Father Dominigo´s soul. Looking in her mirror at Skarholt, Mette hears a crash. But this is nothing to do with alchemy, merely melting masses of snow sliding to the ground from the roof. A natural melting, as the gold had materialised in nature as a part of nature, without any premeditation or urgent desire in Mette herself. Daughter reaches further than mother.
    "Slowly she felt coolness spreading through her. Making her lighter, as if her weight had changed. But what had happened could not be seen in a mirror. Or by the human eye." The material quality of gold does not lie in its value, the riches it brings its owner. This imagery recalls George Eliot´s use of gold as metaphor in Silas Marner, in which the miser´s turn from lonely hoarding and subsequent loss is activated by a lost child with golden hair whom he adopts and so gives of himself. And this final image of gold comes in St Mark´s Night shortly before Mette again meets Peder Oxe and their long-delayed feeling for each other seems to approach fulfilment, as Mette emerges on the other side of the mirror into reality.

Denne artikel blev første gang bragt i Danish Literary Magazine nr 4, 1993