Introducton to Issue 2

ISSN 2996-6353

New Series Issue 2, Spring, 2024

 INTRODUCTION

This is going to be an unusually long issue. The reason is simple: I have discoveries to share. 

The biggest discovery was a small magazine called Wiðowinde, published by “Ða Engliscan Gesiðas” (The English Companions), a society devoted to everything Old English. In the mid-1970s, Dr. O.D. (Duncan) Macrae-Gibson, an Old English scholar, joined the Gesiðas. He studied at Oxford when Tolkien was there, spent most of his professional career at the University of Aberdeen, and later, as his family remembers it, advised Christopher Tolkien and the Tolkien Estate about some of J.R.R. Tolkien’s professional papers. He also developed an Old English correspondence course that the Gesiðas helped to promote. But Dr. Macrae-Gibson also helped educate the society’s membership about alliterative verse. He published a six-article series in Wiðowinde, “The Natural Poetry of English”, which seems to have functioned both as a manifesto for a modern alliterative revival and a crash course in Old English poetics (focusing on the esthetic effects of rhythmic variation). It had quite an impact. One of the members, Pat Masson (about whom more below) was moved to compose the following wittily ironic response (Wiðowinde 68, p. 6):

Doubling of dactyls is doomed to oblivion;
Linking of letters is launched with a bang:
All future odes will use only the form in which
Cædmon and Cynewulf cunningly sang.

Before Macrae-Gibson’s article series had finished running, the Gesiðas announced the Cædmon Prize – a competition for the best poetry in the Old English style, with separate award categories for Old English and modern English submissions. The first prize was awarded in 1984. The Cædmon Prize competition ran every two years from 1984-1994, and then resumed in 2011 after a sixteen-year hiatus.

In the summer issue, I will publish a retrospective on the Cædmon Prize and other alliterative verse published in Wiðowinde. To set the stage, in this issue I reprint O.D. Macrae-Gibson’s “The Natural Poetry of English” and showcase the work of Pat Masson.

Pat Masson, who was active both in the Gesiðas and the Tolkien Society, may be one of the hidden gems of the modern alliterative revival. At the very least, she was one of Dr. Macrae-Gibson’s most attentive readers! But I will say no more, and let my readers judge her merits for themselves. 

You can read three of her poems in this issue: A Lay of St. Boniface, Hymn to Earendil, and The Last Valkyrie. Her other poems can be accessed from her author page on Forgotten Ground Regained. This issue highlights themes Pat Masson would have enjoyed, reflecting, a deep interest in J.R.R. Tolkien, fantasy literature, and England’s medieval past. 