“Britain in the early eighteenth century: an introduction that is both informative and imaginative, reliable and entertaining. To the tradition of travel writing Daniel Defoe brings a lifetime’s experience as a businessman, soldier, economic journalist and spy, and his Tour (1724-6) is an invaluable source of social and economic history. But this book is far more than a beautifully written guide to Britain just before the industrial revolution, for Defoe possessed a wild, inventive streak that endows his work with astonishing energy and tension, and the Tour is his deeply imaginative response to a brave new economic world. By employing his skills as a chronicler, a polemicist and a creative writer keenly sensitive to the depredations of time, Defoe more than achieves his aim of rendering ‘the present state’ of Britain.”
Harshness is transformed into beauty and then terror by this extraordinary film from Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason about a 19th-century Danish pastor sent to establish a new church on Iceland’s remote south-eastern coast. I left the cinema dazed and elated by its artistry; it is breathtaking in its epic scale, magnificent in its comprehension of landscape, piercingly uncomfortable in its human intimacy and severity. There is such superb compositional sense in the still life tableau shots and the almost archaeological sense of time, creating something deeply mysterious and unbearably sad. There are echoes of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Roland Joffé’s The Mission, Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja – and even Howard Hawks’s Red River.
Pálmason announces in the opening credits that the story was inspired by the supposed discovery in Iceland of seven glass-plate photographs of people and places taken there at the end of the 19th century. While the claim is a deadpan fiction, his screen has an almost square 1.33:1 aspect ratio, perhaps in honour of the still photograph motif. This smaller-size, in such contradistinction to the movie’s CinemaScope ambition and spectacle, gives a density to the viewing experience.
Elliott Crosset Hove plays Lucas, a highly-strung young clergyman instructed by his bishop to travel to a pioneer community in Iceland (then a Danish dependency), superintend the church-building and install himself as parish priest. Lucas makes this arduous journey first by sea and then overland with horses, taking among his luggage a huge and burdensome cross, climbing mountains and fording rivers with it. But Lucas has a secular-ethnographic project to go with the imperial Christian mission: he dreams of taking the first pictures there, capturing the people with new technology. His cumbersome tripod goes on his back, its three spiked feet poking up behind his head, a version of the points of a crucifix. The camera is Lucas’s ordeal as he visits his stations of the cross.
Driven to the edge of madness by hardship and physical pain, Lucas has a thwarted friendship – or something more – with his translator (Hilmar Gudjónsson), and finally finds an erotic connection with Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), the daughter of the local parishioner, who takes him in. But his life is dominated by his cantankerous, contemptuous Icelandic guide Ragnar, a tough, weatherbeaten veteran tremendously played by Ingvar Sigurdsson, the cop from Pálmason’s previous film A White, White Day. Palmasón shows that Lucas is humanised and possibly even redeemed by his encounters at journey’s end, particularly his relationship with his quasi-host, the level-headed widower Carl (a shrewdly judged performance from Jacob Lohmann), who is bemused by Lucas’s self-harming decision to come to Iceland in the most difficult way possible, and then suspicious of his potential designs on his eldest daughter. Anna’s younger sister Ida (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir) has an attractively emollient role and her relationship with Lucas is gentle and sweet and brings out the nearest Lucas has to warmth.
The film’s mightiest figure is the implacable Ragnar. Far from helping Lucas across the terrain, Ragnar embodies it; he is the very personification of its hostility. As an Icelander, he hates the high-handed Dane with his book-learning. Lucas comes in turn to hate and fear him. And yet Pálmason shows that Ragnar softens imperceptibly even as he sabotages Lucas; he needs someone to confess his terror of God to while exorcising a lifetime of buried rage. In Godland, these emotions are projected out on to the stunning, daunting landscape to the accompaniment of spine-meltingly beautiful choral music. That austere, boxy screen looks like a window on to a vast, unfathomable world.
In this journey across England’s most forbidding and mysterious terrain, William Atkins takes the reader from south to north, exploring moorland’s uniquely captivating position in our history, literature and psyche. Atkins’ journey is full of encounters, busy with the voices of the moors, past and present. He shows us that, while the fierce terrains we associate with Wuthering Heights and The Hound of the Baskervilles are very human landscapes, the moors remain daunting and defiant, standing steadfast against the passage of time.
“Archaeology is a way of acting and thinking—about what is left of the past, about the temporality of what remains, about material and temporal processes to which people and their goods are subject, about the processes of order and entropy, of making, consuming and discarding at the heart of human experience. These elements, and the practices that archaeologists follow to uncover them, is the essence of the archaeological imagination.”
In his book Shanks offers the following definition: “To recreate the world behind the ruins on the land, to reanimate the people behind the shard of antique pottery, a fragment of the past: this is the work of the archaeological imagination, a creative impulse and faculty at the heart of archaeology, but also embedded in many cultural dispositions, discourses and institutions commonly associated with modernity. The archaeological imagination is rooted in a sensibility, a pervasive set of attitudes toward traces and remains, towards memory, time and temporality, the fabric of history.” pp.25
“The printer and publisher John Nichols described Richard Gough in a long tribute after his death as ‘the Father of British Topography’. More recently scholars have recognised him as the leading antiquary of his day. Gough was one of the first to recognise the importance of old maps in helping to understand the history of particular places and wrote a pioneering account of the development of British maps in the second edition of his British Topography (1780). This is the oldest map of Britain at the Bodleian Library, Oxfordshire (exact date unknown, approx. 14th Century). In addition, the topographical collection bequeathed by Gough to Oxford University in 1809 is one of the most important in the Bodleian Library, outstanding for the visual material received as well as the printed books and manuscripts. Among the maps is the earliest depiction of Britain in recognisable form (now known as the Gough Map) and large portions of the unique Sheldon tapestry map woven in the 1590s.
His Anecdotes of British Topography (1768) was the first comprehensive national bibliography of the subject and a remarkable achievement for one individual. It provided a gazetteer of sources relating to the local history and antiquities of each county, covering not just printed books and manuscripts but also maps and illustrations often with comments about dates, artists and when he acquired items. An enlarged second edition in two volumes was published in 1780 under the title of British Topography. Gough was one of the first to recognise the importance of old maps in helping to understand the history of particular places and wrote a pioneering account of the development of British maps in the second edition of his British Topography (1780).”
1] Richard Gough, British Topography. Or, an Historical Account of what has been done for Illustrating the Topographical Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland, London, J. Nichols and T. Payne, 1780. The completed part of the 3rd edition was destroyed in 1808 by a fire in Nichol’s printing works. However the Bodleian has a copy of the 2nd edition with useful later additions by Gough (Gough Gen.Top. 363–5).
2] Peter Barber, ‘King George III’s topographical collection: a Georgian view of Britain and the world’, in Kim Sloan and Andrew Burnett (eds), Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, London, British Museum, 2003, pp. 158–65.
3] The most useful guide to Gough’s topographical drawings is Maurice Barley, A Guide to British Topographical Collections, [London], Council for British Archaeology, 1974, pp. 95–8.
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