While some scholars have begun meeting at Oxford to discuss the
cause of his eventual sainthood, G. K. Chesterton is remembered
largely today by the reading public as the creator of the Father
Brown detective stories, in which a humble Catholic priest solves
crimes largely because his experiences in the confessional makes
him exceptionally informed about the real nature of good and
evil.
But beyond Father Brown, Chesterton was an enormously versatile
writer of poetry, history, novels, biographies and devotional
works as well as literally countless articles (they have never
been definitively collected). What is perhaps his greatest
imaginative book, The Ballad of the White Horse, is
available
from Ignatius Press in San Francisco.
In its style, though not in its ultimate concerns, The Ballad
of the White Horse is a rather different work from the
adventures of Father Brown. It is not perfect as poetry but it is
one of those works — there are not very many — that can
actually change the reader’s life and is a perennial source of
inspiration and hope.
Some say Chesterton wrote it in inspired haste over a few days,
though the introduction to the present edition says it took ten
years. It was published in 1911, and is a vast (173-page),
sweeping, heroic account in ballad form of King Alfred the
Great’s hopeless war, crushing defeat and final “eucastrophic”
victory over the Great Army of the marauding Danes in “the
Thornland of Ethandune” about a thousand years ago, a victory
which saved English-speaking civilization from being murdered in
its cradle, and saved us, as Chesterton put it earlier, “from
being savages forever.” A book-length poem is not the most likely
of publishing propositions, but for those in the know about it,
The Ballad of the White Horse has enjoyed sales for
nearly a hundred years. The present edition is embellished with
wood-cut illustrations and notes, though the latter seem hardly
necessary: the poem speaks for itself.
It is a poem that can be read by anyone in need of inspiration
and encouragement in dark times. It begins with the king,
defeated and hiding in the marshes of Athelney. The Christianized
kingdom of Wessex (whose symbol was a golden dragon) has been
shattered by Viking attacks, both open invasion and the
treacherous betrayal of Chippenham:
There was not English armour left
Nor any English thing
When Alfred came to Athelney
To be an English king …
And the God of the Golden Dragon
Was dumb upon his throne,
And the lord of the golden Dragon
Ran in the woods alone …
Slowly the king, at first wandering alone, recruits a guerrilla
army. The first leader he approaches, Eldred, an old
battle-scarred Saxon Lord, tells Alfred over his drink they have
lost too often and resistance is hopeless:
Come not to me, King Alfred,
Save always for the ale;
Why should me harmless hinds be slain,
Because the chiefs cry once again
As in all fights, that we shall gain,
And in all fights we fail?
Your skalds still thunder and prophesy
That crown that never comes;
Friend, I shall watch the certain things,
Swine, and slow moons like silver rings,
And the ripening of the plums.”
Alfred replies that this time he offers no hope or promise of
success. However, there is no alternative but to fight. Otherwise
nothing will survive:
“I bring you naught for your comfort,
Naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet,
And the sea rises higher.”
Then silence sank. And slowly
Arose the sea-land lord.
Like some vast beast for mystery,
He filled the room and porch and sky,
And from a cobwebbed nail on high
Unhooked his heavy sword.
With the same council he gathers a Christianized Roman magnate,
Mark, and a Celtic chief, Colan — as in so many epics, up to
The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, the forces
called to resist evil are an ill-assorted lot.
As well as being a military-political story the ballad evokes, as
only poetry can, what seems like the authentically strange,
haunted atmosphere of that time when, beset by deadly attacks on
every side, a new civilization had slowly and partly arisen from
the shadow the Dark Ages and the cataclysmic fall of Rome:
And the man was come like a shadow
From the shadow of Druid trees
Where Usk with might murmurings,
Past Caerleon of the fallen kings
Goes out to ghostly seas.
Last of a race in ruins
He spoke the speech of the Gaels;
His kin were in Holy Ireland,
Or up in the crags of Wales …
His harp was carved and cunning
As the Celtic craftsman makes,
Graven all over with twisting shapes,
Like many headless snakes …
Having arranged for the chiefs to meet him as soon as they can
gather their forces, Alfred wanders on alone in thought over the
“shrill sea-downs”, through the ruined landscape towards the
meeting-place, playing his harp in the dusk (“The rook croaked
homeward heavily, the West was clear and wan …”). He is captured
by a party of relatively good-humored, drunken Danes, who,
admiring his harp-playing, bring him before their chief, Guthrum
of the Northern Sea, the Emperor of the Great Army, and three of
his principal Earls. Each, after listening to Alfred’s playing,
takes the harp and makes a song on it, and Alfred learns that
despite their power and terror they are actually despairing and
terrified of death.
The young Earl Harald consoles himself with the excitement of
battle and plunder. He tells Alfred:
“Doubtless your sires were sword-swingers,
When they waded fresh from foam,
Before they were turned to women
By the God of the nails from Rome;
“But since you bent to the shaven men,
Who neither lust nor smite,
Thunder of Thor! We hunt you,
A hare on the mountain height!”
Elf, the Viking minstrel, consoles himself with music and
artistic tragedy:
As he sang of Balder beautiful,
Whom the heavens could not save,
Till the world was like a sea of tears
And every soul a wave …
The dreadful Earl Ogier’s consolation in the face of death is
destruction (“The barest branch is beautiful, one moment, as it
breaks”), but beyond them is Guthrum, who has passed even through
that and is staring into a universe of despair too absolute even
for Nihilism:
“When a man shall read what is written
So plain in clouds and clods;
When he shall hunger without hope
Even for evil gods …”
The nameless, shabby “rhymester without a home” who is Alfred
replies to this Pagan hopelessness:
“Our God hath blessed creation,
Calling it good. I know
The spirit with which you blindly band
Hath blessed destruction with his hand;
Yet by God’s death the stars still stand
And the small apples grow …”
Next day the armies meet. Alfred’s makeshift Army, having had
their courage raised in the night by Alfred’s inspired speech,
despair at the sight of the overwhelming forces against them, and
see the “high folly” of what they are attempting. The Vikings
march out in savage magnificence:
The Earls of the Great Army
Lay in a long half-moon,
Ten poles before their palisades,
With wide-winged helms and runic blades,
Red giants of the age of raids,
In the thornland of Ethandune.
Still Alfred’s forces attack. Harald, Eldred, Elf, and Mark are
all slain, and the Danes, inspired by Ogier, come charging on:
“Down from the dome of the world we come,
Rivers on rivers down!
Under us swirl the sects and hoardes,
And the high dooms we drown …
“It is not Alfred’s dwarfish sword
Nor Egbert’s pigmy crown,
Shall stay us now that descend in thunder
Rending the realms and the realms thereunder,
Down through the world and down!”
Alfred’s forces fight desperately but are swept away:
Vainly the sword of Colan,
And the axe of Alfred plied —
The Danes poured in like a brainless plague,
And knew not when they died.
Prince Colan slew a score of them,
And was stricken to his knee;
King Alfred slew a score and seven,
And was borne back on a tree …
Hopelessly beaten, Alfred points out to the fleeing remnant of
his army that all the future has for them is slavery and
starvation. It is better to die fighting on the right side. They
launch a last hopeless counter-attack and sweep everything before
them. Ogier dies under Alfred’s axe, the great Viking banner of
the Raven of Odin falls, “And the eyes of Guthrum altered, for
the first time since dawn.”
In the final part, describing the years of peace that follow, the
king warns the fight will go on: barbarians will come in the
future armed not only with warships and burning torches but also
with books, with “the sign of the dying fire,” and: “By this sign
shall you know them: that they ruin and make dark.”
C. S. Lewis has said that The Ballad of the White Horse
is “permanent and dateless…does not the central theme of the
ballad…embody the feeling, and the only possible feeling, with
which in any age almost defeated men take up such arms as are
left them and win?”
It is good to read The Ballad of the White Horse, and
also to reflect that it is basically true. There really was a
climatic battle at Ethandune (possibly modern Edington, where a
white horse is carved on the chalk hillside, possibly originally
in memory of the battle), and where, against all odds, the
nascent Anglic civilization and its noble and undaunted king,
after years of defeats and betrayals, really won the day, and
where the barbarians really were not only defeated but
Christianized: Guthrum, with Alfred as his Godfather, took the
Baptismal name Athelstan and kept the peace for the rest of his
life. In England learning, culture, and civilization were revived
under Alfred’s rule, and we really were saved from being savages
forever. Thank you, G. K. Chesterton.
