James-A-Day: A Warning to the Curious

By -
Isn't this a great drawing?

Oh boy, I think this is a great story!  It must be one of the most famous MRJ tales. 

Two scholarly gentlemen are taking a seaside holiday at Seaburgh (a lightly disguised Aldeburgh, in Suffolk), and meet another, younger man who is strangely anxious and relieved to have a bit of company.  This fellow is named Paxton and he has a weird tale to tell; he heard a local legend about ancient crowns buried on the coast to protect England from invasion.  Two are lost, but he managed to figure out where the third crown would be and actually discovered it.  Now he is haunted by the crown's guardian, and he must put the crown back.  Even so, he knows he has committed an unforgivable crime and he'll have to pay.

I just love ancient legends like this, so I hunted around a little for information about the crowns.  Did James make it up or does it have roots in reality?  I'm having a hard time finding solid information, actually; I might need to go on a proper librarian quest.  But several minutes of poking around on the Internet shows that indeed three crowns are the traditional insignia of East Anglia (gold on blue, as shown in the flag below).  There are a few mentions of three crowns that guard East Anglia--one in Norfolk, one in Suffolk and one in Essex--but most of them seem to feature this story as the evidence.  My book's notes claim that there is a legend not of crowns, but of "magical coins buried on the coast in Anglo-Saxon times" to prevent invasion, but I really can't find anything about that. 

A more convincing history for the three crowns insignia is given in saints' legends.  St. Edmund was King of the Angles in the 10th century and was tormented and killed by Viking invaders.  Eventually he became the patron saint of East Anglia.  His symbol is three crowns, for his kingship, his martyrdom and his virginity.  He is invoked against plague, and his feast day is coming up on November 20 so maybe do something fun for that.

Fictitious flag of East Anglia--designed 1900


I really like not only the legend of the crowns, but the idea of the guardianship being passed from father to son for so many years.  (I always enjoy stories like that.)  The last guardian died, but he's still keeping watch over his stewardship.

So what did you think of this one?







Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more