Forgotten Ground Regained

ISSN 2996-6353

New Series Issue 10, Spring, 2026

The New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf: Pat Masson
Dennis W. Wise
Originally published in three parts in Wiðowinde 213-215, journal of Ða Engliscan Gesithas (The English Companions).
A few issues back, when introducing Charles R. Sleeth (i.e., Wiðowinde 213), I observed just how often the Modern Revival has had poets, strong ones, who rarely published in “official” literary venues. With just the one poem to his name, Sleeth obviously qualifies. As I also mentioned at the time, though, two other hidden gems were the remarkable Ron Snow (1946–1997), master of skaldic stanzas, and the equally remarkable Pat Masson (1940-1994), Wiðowinde’s own Cædmon Prize-winner for 1988.
Naturally, given Masson’s long affiliation with Ða Engliscan Gesithas, we’ll focus on her today, but she and Snow share a surprisingly lot in common. Both are exact contemporaries. Each died shockingly young; Snow from heart attack, Masson from cancer. Nor did either person publish much. In fact, Snow published absolutely nothing at all. I only discovered him because a contact in the Society for Creative Anachronism introduced me to his widow, who had kept his poems with her in manuscript form. Thus Snow’s first byline in poetry came in 2024 – an astonishing 27 years after his passing.
Photograph of Pat Masson published in the funeral booklet in which her poems and short stories were preserved. Reproduced with the permission of her family.
Masson published slightly more, but only barely – a few poems in Wiðowinde, another for a Tolkien fan journal called Mallorn. Luckily, Paul Douglas Deane discovered the English Companions soon after my anthology came out, found Masson, and quickly reached out to her family. In return, they sent him a booklet of Masson’s work compiled by her mother for her funeral. Since several poems had never before seen print, Paul took the opportunity, thankfully, to remedy that situation. They appeared in the Spring, 2024 issue of Forgotten Ground Regained.
So all together we’ve two highly skilled poets, Snow and Masson, each tragically short-lived, whose greatest alliterative verse went unheralded until three decades after their deaths. So far as happy endings go, we can hardly do better …. but better it gets. Word came down recently that Masson’s poem “The Last Valkyrie,” a 40-line skaldic text, has been selected by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association as a finalist for their 2025 Rhysling Awards. Winners should be announced sometime around when this issue of Wiðowinde goes to print, so keep your eyes peeled. [Note: After this article was published in Wiðowinde, it was announced that “The Last Valkyrie” received an honorable mention in the short poem category for the Rhysling Awards.]
Because Pat Masson, you see, is someone whom the Companions can claim uniquely as your own. Besides being a long-time member, she drew deep and direct poetic inspiration from Ða Engliscan Gesiðas. Back in the early 1980s, O. D. McCrae-Gibson, the late great medievalist, published a six-part article for Wiðowinde called “The Natural Poetry of English” (issues 59/60–66). Although Masson had discovered Old English meter earlier – her first alliterative poem, “Riddle,” came out some time before in 1978 – she certainly saw McCrae-Gibson’s article as an opportunity. Soon after the final segment appeared, as Paul Deane has shown, Masson penned the following enthusiastic response:
  • 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.
  • (Wiðowinde 68, p. 6)
To my mind, this stanza is basically a poetic “high five,” a fist pump of alliterative munificence that says: Yes, finally! It also means Wiðowinde hasn’t simply been one venue, among many, for alliterative poets. It has been a clarion call – and a training ground – as well.
So in honor of Masson’s outstanding posthumous nomination, let’s go beyond biography and focus on her work itself. More so than any other revivalist, the Inklings not excepted, Masson has excelled at using Old English meter for achieving an astonishingly powerful set of descriptions. To show how so, I’ll begin with “Dragon-Fighter,” the poem which won the Cædmon Prize, before pivoting to “The Last Valkyrie.” My final extended section will close with Masson’s masterpiece, A Lay of St. Boniface, a text almost unparalleled within the Modern Alliterative Revival.

Dragon-Fighter (Wiðowinde 83, 1988, p. 8).

When it comes to dating verse, especially for poets who never published much, guesswork is the rule. For Masson, we only know that she published a handful of texts from between 1978 and 1988 – a point that, under this calculus, makes her Cædmon Prize-winner a “late” poem. Color me skeptical, but I cannot help suspecting, though, that “Dragon-fighter” came well before either “The Last Valkyrie” or A Lay of St. Boniface. Call it a hunch – scholar’s intuition, if you will – but, for me, this 1988 poem seems more valuable for its poetic potential, not for any fully realized poetic accomplishment.
Looking at the text, you quickly see its obvious debt to Beowulf: a hero from foreign lands goes mano a mano with a dragon. Not just any dragon, though. Masson’s fire-breather is a were-dragon. By night he’s a normal, four-footed, scaly huffer-and-puffer terrorizing the peasants and chomping up the cows. By day, however, this monster transforms into an evil human tyrant ruling over a human kingdom. Cruelly, of course.
Drawing by Pat Masson. Originally published with "Dragon-Fighter" in Wiðowinde.
Naturally enough, that’s a situation no red-blooded Germanic warrior’s ever gonna let stand. As such, our unnamed hero arrives determined to set things aright. Then, as you might expect, he issues a Very Strong Worded Challenge™ to his draconic foe. And then….
Well, that’s kinda it.
No big brawl. No boastful bouts of flyting. Nada. Instead, the poem ends with our brawny hero tapping his foot and checking his watch, wondering when King Were-dragon will arrive. At the time, Cædmon Prize submissions were limited to fifty lines, so if Masson ever did write a conclusion, I suspect she chopped it off for the contest; “Dragon-fighter” clocks at 46 lines, just under the maximum.
Still, we kinda already how things are going to go, right? Even money says the winner’s got to be Beowulf Junior, even if he maybe doesn’t survive. For anyone even remotely familiar with the Modern Revival, you know revivalist poets tend to have strong allegiances toward their medieval source material. So that’s helpful when predicting the outcomes of Man vs. Dragon fights, but it also means certain tropes get overused, drastically, and particularly by poets who, given the obscurity of most other alliterative verse before my anthology, have no way of realizing how cliched their chosen tropes have become. Sad to say, then, “Dragon-fighter” covers excessively well-trod territory within the Modern Alliterative Revival.
That limitation aside, Masson’s prize-winner does show one especially notable flash of brilliance – the same brilliance that’ll make A Lay of St. Boniface, extended at length, the masterpiece it is.
Let’s examine how Masson’s evil dragon-king returns to draconic form once the sun sets. Here’s her passage:
  • and bloody broadsword · brandished in anger
  • to deal death-blows · drop in a moment
  • clattering in his clutches. – claws cannot grip them –
  • then his byrnie bursts · as his body grows vast
  • and like scabs on his skin · scales are seen forming ….
First off, may I say how badly I feel for the dragon here? Obviously, yes, murdering peasants and ravaging their countryside is terrible, but if King Dragon’s curse means that he’s breaking an expensive suit of armor every single night … well, c’mon. That sort of thing gets expensive. No wonder he’s going out and oppressing kingdoms; he probably needs those taxes to keep well stocked in byrnies.
But if you’re less sympathetic to Dragon Econ 101, it’s still worth pausing to visualize the vivid imagery used by Masson here.
On one hand, her comment about “bloody broadswords” is standard alliterative boilerplate. It’s an obvious – and thus over-used – adjective/noun combo. Likewise, her triple alliteration on cluttering, clutches, and claws is merely competent. But then, when the monster’s byrnie bursts, we see –
  • Scales forming like scabs on skin.
Picture that. Visualize it slowly: the boiling of one’s epidermis, its thickening, its darkening, its leprous encrusting. Within this image lurks an unexpected element of body horror, an oozing of the gross and the abhorrent. For just the briefest of instants, we recoil viscerally away from Masson’s dragon-king, its scabrous monstrosity. As anyone knows who has studied the Fourteenth-century Alliterative Revival, when the meter’s operating on full cylinders, it enjoys a powerful descriptive vividness, a special grace. And Masson captures that, here, for just an instant.
From this seed in “Dragon-Fighter,” in my view the poem’s lone highlight, arises the extended virtuosity that’ll eventually mark A Lay of St. Boniface.

The Last Valkyrie (Forgotten Ground Regained, Spring, 2024, p. 7).

Now for the poem nominated posthumously for a Rhysling Award: “The Last Valkyrie.” For poets who lean toward the Old English side of things, their excursions into Old Norse dróttkvætt usually have an experimental status. Yet some experiments succeed better than others, and “The Last Valkyrie” ranks among the best.
If you’re curious about the title, Masson focuses on a Valkyrie who, incongruently, it seems, participates in the Battle of Hastings – a conflict famously between two Christian kings. We may glean Masson’s inspiration from her epigraphs. The second hails from C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces; it notes the mythic multiplicity of old gods flowing “in and out of one another like eddies on a river.” The first epigraph, however, derives from Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, the famous 11th-century homily by Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023).
For the record, since having a cool nickname is a major factor in earning historical prominence (just ask Richard the Lion-hearted, who was otherwise “meh”), I’ve always wondered why “The Wolf,” as Archbishop Wulfstan liked to style himself, hasn’t earned more love from popular culture. There’s certainly dramatic potential. For thirty years, the blood-thirsty Vikings had been rampaging unchecked among the hapless English folk, and for the Wolf, who’s quite exasperated by all the mayhem and murder, he’s trying – one well-honed rhetorical device at a time – to insert a little backbone into his flock.
The sermon additionally addresses an important theological point. Namely, if we have an omnipotent deity on our side, why do they – the pagans – seem to keep… er, winning?
Luckily, the Archbishop finds the perfect answer, the classic response of any Biblical prophet who’s ever been confronted by a similar conundrum. Basically, Wulfstan tells the English, it’s your own damn fault.
You see, he says, for the last thirty years, within your midst, you’ve been tolerating manslayers and murderers of your kinsmen; and tolerating the murderers of priests; and tolerating the people corrupted by incest and other “various fornications.” (Always delicate, Wulfstan leaves those specific fornications up to his audience’s imagination.) Moreover, the English have tolerated robbers, plunderers, pilferers, and thieves, not to mention the odd pledge-breaker or two.
“Really now,” says Wulfstan, “you guys are just terrible people. No wonder God keeps inflicting Vikings on you.”
Be that as it may, Masson’s only really interested in two specific items from Wulfstan’s long litany of English-tolerated evils: wiccan and wælcyrian, i.e., witches and Valkyries. Now, granted, England had been Christian for a long time by that point in the early 11th century. One might think that period rather late for an Englishman to still believe in something so obviously pagan as Valkyries, but so it was … and that’s Masson’s gateway for wedging a Valkyrie into the Battle of Hastings.
In “The Last Valkyrie,” our speaker, the wælcyrie, is a firm supporter of King Harold Godwinson, whom she evidently considers – despite his unfortunate religious affiliation – the cat’s meow. According to the text, the year is 1066. Godwinson has just emerged victorious from Stamford Bridge, defeating Harald Sigurdsson of Norway. He’s now high-tailing it down to England’s southern coast, where our titular wælcyrie herself awaits the despicable Duke William of Normandy. Her goal? To weave spells ensuring King Harold continues his winning streak.
But alas … a sudden vision (Masson uses the beautifully archaic term, sweven) stops her mid-spell. The wælcyrie has had a vision, you see; a vision of defeat.
Notably, King Harold has always had a special connection to Waltham Abbey Church in Essex, his eventual site of burial. According to the Waltham Chronicle, just before Hastings, the king visited the abbey. Obviously hoping for some Jesus luck, he prostrates himself before the abbey’s rood of black marble, and he beseeches the Lord that, should God grant him victory against the Normans on the morrow, he’ll faithfully “serve God in the future like a purchased slave.”
To me, that seems like a pretty solid promise. Sadly, not so much. According to what we’re assured by the Waltham Chronicle’s author are extremely reliable reports, the statue of Christ, immediately upon hearing the king’s prayer, bows its head “as if in sorrow.”
In the omen business, that’s what we call a “bad sign.” Yet that famous legend, this “tale well-known,” is what Masson’s wælcyrie refers to when she remarks,
  • Harold felled she beholds:
  • hoar apple-tree – nay, more –
  • in a shrine her folk shun
  • is shown a tale well-known:
  • a god given to be dead
  • greets the king at meeting,
  • welcomes him to Wælheall,
  • worthily slain on earth.
What’s especially interesting is that, although our wælcyrie clearly acknowledges the Christian aspect of Waltham Abbey Church, Masson’s battle-maiden interprets this incident in terms familiar to Norse paganism. In other words, the wælcyrie doesn’t interpret the omen as Heaven welcoming her beloved King Harold through its pearly Christian gates. Rather, what she envisions is the hanged god, Wōden, the “god given to be dead,” welcoming England’s warrior-king into Wælheall: the Old English word for Valhalla.
At this point, with both victory and magical aid now forbidden, the wælcyrie choses the last option remaining to her. As we know from The Battle of Malden and other Old English texts, loyal retainers must always die alongside their lords in battle … and our wælcyrie is as loyal as they come.
In narrative terms, Masson handles her material well. Still, for my taste, “The Last Valkyrie” brushes against the same issue that bedevils “Dragon-Fighter.” There’s something intrinsically seductive about the “last” of anything – the last samurai, the last starfighter, the last Valkyrie – and for revivalists unable to see how common certain narrative tropes have become, there’s little check on over-using those tropes even further. So when it comes to the comitatus of ancient Germanic cultures, it takes a rare touch for any modern author to inject freshness into that esteemed Old English ethic. Our two best examples both obviously hail from Tolkien: the nephews of Thorin Oakenshield, Fili and Kili, dying alongside the King Under the Mountain in The Hobbit; and Éowyn and Merry’s defense of King Théoden in The Lord of the Rings. Otherwise, most revivalists have had trouble seeing how ubiquitous their specific treatments have become. In that respect, “The Last Valkyrie” doesn’t quite pack the proper punch.
What most engages me from a critical perspective, then, is Masson’s ingenuity for inserting a Norse entity into the Battle of Hastings, and how, subsequently, this wælcyrie reinterprets Harold Godwinson’s famous last visit to Waltham Abbey Church.
In purely poetic terms, however, this is what most engages me about “The Last Valkyrie”: the brilliant smoothness with which Masson handles her dróttkvætt meter.
In a footnote, Masson claims “inadequate knowledge” of the skaldic form, but that’s sheer modesty. Robert Frost once called writing free verse like playing tennis without a net. If that’s true, then writing dróttkvætt is like playing tennis with a bowling ball. The form is hard. Each line must have six syllables. Every even-numbered line must bear two alliterating syllables, and odd-numbered lines must bear one (and always the first). As if that weren’t enough, even-numbered lines must contain full internal rhymes, such as shown/known or worth/earth from Masson’s excerpt. Odd-numbered lines, though, get off comparatively easy. They merely need a strong internal half-rhyme. Masson’s best example is wel-/Wæl-, although I like shrine/shun as well.
In “The Last Valkyrie,” Masson approximates all these strictures pretty well. Yet true poetry resides in more than just mechanically obeying rules. The language must sing. In that regard I’ve encountered few skaldic texts by modern poets, including Tolkien, as smooth-sounding as Masson’s five stanzas. Their language comes naturally, with no jarring distortions of grammar, and the meaning emerges plainly from sentence to sentence. Not even the historical Norse skalds managed half so well, usually. So for anyone looking to compose dróttkvætt in Modern English, you could easily do worse than follow “The Last Valkyrie” as your model.
Editor's Note: For the full rules of dróttkvætt, see Rahul Gupta’s Not Unless Bound with a Chain: An Introduction to Drottkvaett, in the Fall, 2025 issue of Forgotten Ground Regained, and in the same issue Math Jone’s alliterative verse translation of Snorri Sturlusson’s description of dróttkvætt from the Prose Edda. Note that Masson, like many other modern revivalists, does not quite follow the Old Norse form, since she ignores the rule that all lines must end on a trochee. This is, of course, a constraint that is much easier to respect in Old Norse than in modern English. For an example of dróttkvætt that follows the Old Norse rules fully over multiple stanzas, see Rahul Gupta’s Gleipnir: To bind the Wolf. If you want to dig deeper, Michael Helsem’s blog post, “The Impossible Meter” discusses pretty much every serious attempt to write English dróttkvætt up to 2024.

A Lay of St. Boniface (Forgotten Ground Regained, Spring, 2024, pp. 4-6).

Now the moment we’ve all been waiting for: “A Lay of St. Boniface”. Never let it be said that yours truly buries the lead – in this text, Masson has produced one of the best long poems of the Modern Alliterative Revival: an atmospheric, moving work that ranks highly alongside Mothers’ Song (Math Jones), The Nameless Isle (C. S. Lewis), and The Westfarer (James Dorr).
(If you’re wondering where Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur fits in, I’m less bullish than some; he practices an extreme compression of syllables per line, which works better, in my estimation, for his shorter works.)
Yet Masson not only handles her Old English meter beautifully. One traditional strength of the meter has always been narrative, its ability to tell stories at length, and for Masson’s narrative subject she selects a figure as fresh, as dynamic, as any yet chosen by a contemporary revivalist: the late Saint Boniface of blessed memory (as the medieval kids would say), who lived c. 680 through 754 AD.
In A Lay of St. Boniface, moreover, Masson chooses to dramatize the single most legendary deed performed by that singular saint during his remarkable life: the felling of Donar’s Oak near Fritzlar, in northern Hesse, Germany, in 723 AD.
Boniface is someone particularly suited for a long alliterative lay. For those needing a refresher, well before Germany ever made Boniface their patron saint, he was born “Winfrith” in the Old English kingdom of Wessex; i.e., modern-day Devon. In a previous issue of Withowinde (iss. 193, p. 38), Ian Holt has called eighth-century Wessex the “wild west” of the Anglo-Saxon world, and I rather like that. Winfrith’s family seem to have been advance settlers into territory just recently conquered from the Britons, and although the West Saxons themselves adopted Christianity about a century prior (634 AD to be exact), the Roman and British Churches still held themselves at arms’ length. So there remained some religious tensions in Wessex besides the obvious ethnic ones.
Notably, such tensions might have sparked Boniface’s intense drive to unite all Christian peoples, especially in Germany, beneath the Apostolic See. Yet, as a wee lad, young Winfrith enjoyed all the inevitable harbingers of future sainthood. According to Willibald’s Life of Saint Boniface, the boy pondered long and hard over the spiritual glories of monastic life. His father, however, was a more worldly-pleasures-and-successes type. Accordingly, he employed every stratagem in his arsenal to entice his young son into less-than-holy pursuits. He almost succeeded, too, except that, fortunately, a “sudden and fatal sickness” struck Winfrith’s father down suddenly. So, phew.
Otherwise, nothing much interesting happened to Winfrith during his first 38 years in England. His biographer recounts one successful diplomatic mission to Kent, and one un-successful preaching mission to Frisia on the continent, mostly thanks to Frisia’s King Radbod, who, like Lord Byron, was mad, bad, and dangerous to know. (Plus he was pagan.) Yet for the most part Winfrith spent his time at Nursling monastery, near Winchester, studying Scripture, praying to God, practicing humility, overcoming the passions of the flesh, and overall rendering perfect obedience to his Benedictine superiors.
These activities all earned major respect from Winfrith’s monastic peers, so when their old abbot died in 718, they offered Winfrith the abbatial office. Yet our hero had greater ambitions. That summer, 38 years young, he embarked upon the first of his three famous journeys to Rome.
Thus marks the true beginning of Boniface’s saintly career. When historians and scholars study him, they naturally tend to focus on the 720s, 730s, and 740s; traditionally, they’ve also had to contend with their own national or religious biases. For instance, take Matthias Flacius Illyricus, a 16th-century historian of the Lutheran persuasion. In Historiae Ecclesiasticae, Flacius laments the rapid growth of the Papacy’s power in the early 8th century. Well, in fact, he does more than just “lament” – technically, he calls the Pope the Roman Antichrist. Plus he adds a special word of censure for poor Boniface, whom he believes dragged “all of Germany into the power of the Roman pope.” Matthias Flacius Illyricus, you see, neither forgives nor forgets.
Luckily, more modern views on Boniface are more nuanced, but Winfrith undoubtedly worked hard not only to convert outright pagans but, also, to corral the lapsed Christians in German lands – there were many – back into alignment with Rome.
He worked this re-alignment, too, during politically turbulent times. One major ally for Winfrith and Pope Gregory II was Francia’s Charles Martel, who later earned the nickname “Hammer” (again, where’s the movie?) for defeating the Umayyad Caliphate’s forces at Tours less than fifteen years after Winfrith left his homeland in Wessex for good. Notably, one political irritant to the Franks was King Radbod, the same fella who ruined Winfrith’s earlier mission to Frisia. However, this same Radbod died shortly after Winfrith first arrived at Rome, and the Pope, ever the optimist, took this as a good sign. After ascertaining Winfrith’s deep religious fervor and his sincere devotion to Mother Church, Pope Gregory presumably clapped his hands together in glee, and, according to Willibald’s Life, empowered this middle-aged monk to preach among the “savage peoples of Germany.”
Good things happened during those next three years, roughly 719–722. Winfrith palled around with his colleague, Saint Willibrord, near Utrecht, preaching the faith to the now Radbod-less Frisians, before returning to Rome for a second visit. And since things had been going so well, Pope Gregory II officially consecrated Winfrith as a Regionary Bishop (that is, a bishop without an official see) on November 30th, 723, and bestowed upon Winfrith a snazzy new name: Boniface.
For readers who know where this story goes, I almost want to shout, “Timber!”
Almost immediately after his promotion, the former Winfrith – and the future saint – performs his most famous deed: the felling of the Donnereiche, the Oak of Thunder.
Enter Pat Masson.
She opens A Lay of St. Boniface thus:
  • Winter at its midmost. In his weakness the Sun,
  • a doddering dotard, had dared to creep forth,
  • rising late from his bed, to limp a short space
  • up the hill of heaven. Soon, his heart quailing
  • he must tire, totter down, turn again to his rest.
  • A passion of pity ‧ overpowered me at the sight
  • of the god so disgraced, whose glory in summer
  • had lightened the land, lifted up our spirits
  • with brightness and beauty, the bounty accorded him
  • by the Lord of life, light-bestower,
  • bringer of blessing ...
  • (lines 1-11)
Despite the hardness of my old academic heart, I still cannot help but admire almost everything about this passage. Within the realm of pure poetics, there are no weird circumlocutions of grammar, no unnecessary inversions. The language sounds natural. Moreover, Masson remains consistent – but never distracting – with her alliterative patterning, and she avoids cliches such as bloody broadsword. Plus, every sentence wisely varies in length. Altogether, Masson perfectly pulls off a difficult (and vastly underappreciated) poetic feat: she creates an extended alliterative passage that’s both conversational and metrical.
Nor is Masson’s imagery anything to sneeze at. Good alliterative verse needs more than good meter alone, and Masson’s extended metaphor of a “doddering dotard” works effectively at evoking our pity for the Sun’s plight after a long, and presumably harsh, Germanic winter.
Except …. well, wait a second.
Hm.
For someone like Boniface renowned for rooting out heresy and doctrinal error from backsliding Germanic Christians, it sure seems odd, don’t it, that Saint Boniface – a tried-and-true monotheist – would address the Sun like a personified nature deity? Granted, poets have always used apostrophe, but calling anyone or anything except Jesus “Lord of life, light-bestower” seems rather … suspicious. Especially when the Good Lord’s probably listening.
Of course, you’ve no doubt figured out things more quickly than I initially did. In A Lay of St. Boniface, we’re not being offered the Donnereiche legend from the perspective of any adherent of Saint Boniface, much less THE MAN himself. Instead, we’re viewing A Lay of St. Boniface from the perspective of those people most powerfully impacted by Boniface’s sacrilegious deed: the pagans themselves.
Herein lies the third (and most ingenious) thing to admire about Masson’s text. Specifically, the poem’s speaker is a man from Hesse, and he’s volunteering his life to sustain the Oak of Thunder. As we know, Norse deities like Óðinn and Þórr enjoyed a little human sacrifice now and then. Our speaker knows that, too, and for the good of his fellow Hessians, plus a bountiful spring, he understands that human blood must be shed. His blood.
Now, historically, we have little solid evidence for voluntary self-sacrifice in Norse religion. Masson makes such good use of that idea in A Lay of St. Boniface, however, that we’ll let her slide. Nonetheless, as the speaker and his companions arrive at that “eldest of oaks,” the Donnereiche, they witness a disconcerting sight:
  • As we approached the place, plainly we could see him
  • high on his hill-top, the holy one standing
  • gaunt as a gallows before the gloomy heavens
  • as we climbed ever closer. Then a clamour broke out
  • as terror overtook us ….
According to Willibald, Boniface delivers one superficial cut to this tree before a “mighty blast of wind from above” (psst, that’s God) finishes the job. In addition, we know Boniface would have been surrounded by his supporters in the region. This felling was likely very well advertised. But to highlight the drama to best effect, Masson slightly modifies the core situation. When the Hessians arrive at the hill, the Oak of Thunder is already toppling. It shatters into four parts, leaving the “heavens above the hill … horribly empty.” For the rest of the poem, then, Masson explores the pagans’ complicated reactions to this sacrilegious event.
Yet let’s pause a moment, and concentrate on how well Masson connects meter to subject. Remember earlier how I mentioned that Boniface/Winfrith had been a Wessex man? As a native speaker, he would have been intimately familiar with Old English-style poetry. But that’s not why Masson’s alliterative meter works so well thematically for A Lay of St. Boniface. In northern medieval Europe, all Germanic peoples used one version of the alliterative meter or another. That includes the 9th-century Germanic peoples to whom Boniface preached. In fact, our oldest surviving manuscript in Old High German, a famous heroic lay called Hildebrandslied, was copied about a century after Saint Boniface went toe-to-toe with Donar’s Oak.
Thus, Masson’s poem purports to be a genuine “lay”: a poem composed by the volk themselves in their native measure. (Granted, Old English meter is more highly compact than its Old High German counterpart, but Masson wisely plays to her metrical strengths.)
Yet Masson’s decision to center the Donar’s Oak narrative on a pagan perspective carries one further element of major significance. She offers a strong explanation for why Boniface might have been so successful.
If you look at Willibald’s Life – or, indeed, any other medieval saints’ lives – biographers usually attribute their subject’s success in converting the unfaithful to some combination of personal saintly virtue, God’s greatness, or miracles. (A hearty dose of plot armor never hurts either, at least until the martyrdom.) Of course, nowadays, we’re apt to sniff at alleged miracles. We give even shorter thrift to hearsay about miracles. However, in medieval Europe, centuries before the Enlightenment, when folks didn’t distinguish quite so rigidly between natural and supernatural phenomena, the “gosh wow” factor of miracles enjoyed a stronger persuasive force. At the same time, Masson is writing a contemporary poem for contemporary people. How, then, render Boniface’s success in converting heathens into plausible terms?
For answer, Masson chooses an exacting psychological realism: the personal reaction of our pious Hessian, who’s mentally and emotionally prepared for self-sacrifice.
After Boniface fells the Donnereiche, Masson covers the expected range of onlooker reactions. Some bystanders demand martyrdom for the foreigner. Others suggest the gods avenge their own. Still others – mainly mothers and maidens, we’re told, women “whose menfolk in past years / had been given to the god” – wish to hear out this Winfrith, this holy man, and hear about the power of his strange new God.
The leader of the Hessians, however, cannot decide, and this indecision enrages his fellow Hessians.
Then our poem’s speaker speaks.
He says:
  • For I, who of all men ‧ was most angered at heart,
  • spoke for his sparing. It was to spill my own blood,
  • a life that was laid down ‧ loyally and freely,
  • this company had come there, not in cold despair
  • and mirthless mockery ‧ to mangle the carcass
  • of a faithless foe ‧ beside a fallen tree-trunk.
For our noble Hessian, in other words, he hadn’t considered imminent death a bitter fate. His piety was sincere. But just as Donar’s Oak had shattered into four parts, so did its felling splinter his faith. The weakness shown by the old gods shook him. He was enraged, yes, but in that unexpected uncertainty, his sudden theological staggerment, our sacrificial Hessian has no heart for fulfilling the old logic of violent retaliation. What would point would there be, killing this foreigner? For whom would he be retaliating?
This surprising psychological nuance on Masson’s part conveys a subtle, yet still plausible, native reaction to Boniface’s legendary action. In addition, it stacks up well against another saint’s story with a strong resemblance to the legend of the Donnereiche.
As mentioned previously, before Boniface received his Latin name, he spent three years working alongside Saint Willibrord in Frisia. That saint, apparently, once found himself in a similar bind. This was during the bad old days of King Radbod. According to Alcuin’s Life of Saint Willibrord, the saint held pagan superstition in little regard, so naturally he decided to perform a drastic deed: he slaughtered several sacred cattle and baptized three men in a sacred spring. Which was a strict no-no. Angered, the Frisians appealed to King Radbod … who immediately hatched a scheme sure to make any James Bond villain proud. Instead of having Willibrord killed directly, as one might expect, Radbod instead devised a convoluted drawings-of-lots system.
Thrice daily on three consecutive days, Radbod cast lots to determine who would die. The Lord, however, protects his true servants, and neither Willibrord nor any of his party members came to harm. Well, okay, technically, one fella does. As Alcuin admits, King Radbod did actually put a single person to death, but since that death counted as martyrdom, this guy – so low status Alcuin doesn’t even provide his name – got an easy one-way ticket into Heaven, so all’s gravy in the end, right, and ain’t it glorious how well God protected Saint Willibrord and his closest buddies of high rank?
Anyway, what this story demonstrates is that, even in 8th century Europe, no matter how holy a saint might be, destroying anything sacred to the pagans comes with certain risks. Although God might hate heretics, he still gave them swords. So if Masson wants to avoid the common medieval explanations for saintly success (i.e., miracles, personal virtue, God’s greatness, plot armor), as seems dramatically prudent for a modern audience, she had several options at her disposal. Had she wished, Masson could have emphasized the coercive military power of the nearby Franks, a close political ally for Boniface and the Church, or some other element of theological realpolitik.
Instead, Masson goes with the spiritual. Her climax is a quiet one – a subtle moment of sincere pagan piety shocked into quiescence. At poem’s end, after our Hessian returns to his village, dazed by the second life suddenly allotted to him, a “dead man by right,” his kinsfolk welcoming him back … he observes, in time, how the springtime days are growing longer, or at least not less.
It’s a powerful moment. It’s a powerful poem. Read it.
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