Words of a Fiddler’s Daughter: Rúnian

Anyone who has spent time on Lindisfarne Island off Britain’s Northumbrian coast in the wintertime knows just how exposed it is. Rewind to the eighth century, and one can only imagine the sense of insecurity among the early monks of Lindisfarne Priory when the first Viking raiders arrived. This is the setting of the first narrative poems by Jessie Summerhayes of the epic foundational stories of these isles.

She is the daughter of fiddler Adam Summerhayes, one half of the duo The Ciderhouse Rebellion with accordionist Murray Grainger, and they offer improvisatory musical backing to the poetry. The effect is mesmerising and hypnotic, giving the words flight, so that these tales begin to coalesce with the epics of Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic legend. Thematically, this poem cycle meditates on the violence from which the modern British state was born – particularly that which afflicted Anglo-Saxon Britons (rúnian is Anglo­Saxon for ‘whisper’). It moves from the early terrorism of Viking raids to the systematic oppression of Norman domination, such as in the ten-minute ‘The Harrying of the North’, a poem that seems ominously to strike a chord down history to the politics of modern Britain’s North-South divide.