The Adventures of the Billy Goats Gruff

Setting: The Cheviot Hills

The Cheviot Hills proper are quite a small range of hills in northern England, lying to the south of Gatburgh. The Cheviot is the region's highest summit (you really cannot call it a peak!). The Cheviot is an enduring lump of granite, and the hills around are of various igneous rocks (mostly andesite) and sandstones into which they are intruded.

In a wider sense the term can be said to include a much greater stretch of hills along the border between England and Scotland as the term "North Pennines" does not seem to fit the mass of hills that lie out this way.

The hills are first visited in Chapter 2 when we find a character called Ceredig the Tall living in a valley under the shadow of the Cheviot. This is "Happy Valley", the dale of Harthope Burn. For me it is a place that I love to visit, but for Ceredig it is a bitter place of exile. He feels that his place is at Gatburgh, yet he is not welcome there. At the end of the same chapter we hear that the brothers are driven out into the hills and this is where their lives as goats begin.

Yet there is no real detail about the hills at this time, for the goats were not just driven into the Cheviots, they were driven into Faerie, or Elfland as I call it in the book. It was not a time that the brothers relished, for Elfland is not a good place for mortals. Only much later do any of them cast their minds back to recall some fragments of memory.

However the hills cannot be avoided and time and again the brothers find themselves wandering across them in the pursuit of their quest. Fleeing from Jed's valley (of which more later) the brothers climb into the western Cheviots by way of an old Roman road - the road to Dere. They find refuge in the old fort at Chew Green and then get lost on Gamelspath, before finding their way into Redesdale.

After Redesdale, the trail once more leads into the hills and if the brothers thought they had troubles before, they find that they have other challenges to face than angry troll fathers, challenges which alternately unite and divide the brothers as they journey westward.

Finally we have a view of distant hills which bring back memories of home for Frith as he contemplates the possible end of his adventures, for they recall to his mind the more dramatic hills of the Cheviots south of  Gatburgh, especially Yeavering Bell, the hill that dominated the skyline above the brothers' home.

The Cheviots that the brothers knew differed in many respects from the hills we know today. There was more extensive natural forest, but not in the respect of towering trees. The forests that would have grown there would have been stunted and sparse, only rising to significant heights and densities in sheltered valleys. Already parts of the landscape were dominated by heather, bilberry and moorland grasses as they are today and there were some deep accumulations of peat where the right conditions existed. Only one piece of the moorland that we know today would have been missing, the rotational burning of mature stands of heather which is essential to raising grouse but is also beneficial for sheep farming. This practice would be the final death knell for the dwarf forests as heather responds more quickly to this way of managing the land than birch trees do.

Setting: Jedburgh and Jeddart

Although the majority of the book is set in Northumberland, three chapters are set in the Borders Region of Scotland

At the time the story is set, there was neither a Scotland nor an England and the Cheviots were not considered to be the border with anything (except Trolldom of course!). When you read the story of St Cuthbert, for example, there is little surprise that he should move freely from the Lammermuirs, to Melrose, to Ripon and then to Lindisfarne.

Jedburgh is in many ways key to the development of the story. In the dim and distant past we used to go regularly on holiday in the Highlands of Scotland. Once we had moved to Newcastle that meant a journey with its ritual stop-overs and sights which became a familiar part of my life. As you come down the valley towards Jedburgh there are tall cliffs of red sandstone on either side and if you look carefully you can see some small caves. They really don't amount to much, but my eldest brother used to tell us that there were trolls living in these tiny caves in the sandstone cliffs and to keep an eye out for them. This became a highlight of journeys into Scotland even after my brother stopped coming on holiday with us.

The valley is therefore my setting for the traditional tale of the billy goats Gruff, which falls in chapter three. The troll does not live in a cave in the cliff, but does seem to have some sort of home in the riverbank (we never find out because the brothers do not investigate it).

However the involvement with Jeddart does not end there, for further up the valley they find a family of trolls with a daughter; just what they were looking for. In the aftermath of this meeting and with the news coming in of the death of the bridge-keeper, the brothers have to flee.

The third chapter sees the brothers fleeing southwards and eastwards in fear of pursuit. The countryside they pass through is largely woodland, but they are unable to appreciate its beauty, for they have the twin worries of pursuit by trolls and the growing goatishness of their eldest brother. Their spirits and fortunes seem to rise when they find the old Roman road known as Dere Street. This makes their route and their speed more certain and they continue to climb the hills southwards until they leave for modern-day England at the old Roman camp of Chew Green, the name of which I refer to obliquely through a pun. I will not say a bad pun, because all puns are bad, which is why I love them.

It is the last we see of Scotland (as we know it) in the tale, but by the time we follow the brothers into England almost all of the major elements of the book are in place and even the most shadowy figure of all has been introduced, even if we only witness his passing feet.

Setting: Redesdale and Kielder

Technically speaking, the Grufflings' first foray into what we know of as England was short-lived as they were swiftly transported into Elfland and their first encounter with one of its inhabitants, the elf who calls himself Gamol.

However, the terrain that they were crossing mirrored the real world, where Dere Street seems to disappear and becomes the winding Gamelspath. From the source of the River Coquet the path climbs over a ridge and into the headwaters of the River Rede. The two rivers flow away from each other, the Coquet finding the easy path eastwards to the sea, while the Rede flows south before finding its waters merged with the River Tyne.

The name Coquet is one of the more enigmatic river names in Northumberland. It is first recorded in a form something like Cocwudu which suggests a wood associated with male birds. I have never been happy with this and I feel that it is more likely that there is an otherwise unrecorded Brythonic or even pre-Indo-European name here. For the Cock Wood explanation to be valid it would have to have been a forest stretching across a large area to give its name to a river as significant as the Coquet and an island at its mouth.

The River Rede is a lesser stream although it may have been somewhat more impressive before the Catcleugh dam stole some of its waters for the ever thirsty Tyneside connurbation. I passed it recently and remarked to my wife "perhaps the three goats could have swum across anyway" but then of course they would not have had another chance to cross a troll bridge.

The brothers emerged from Elfland quite far down-stream. I gave the next troll the name Rofi with the thought of linking him with Rochester in Redesdale, just as I had linked Jodi with Jedburgh. Rochester however was too far from the point where Dere Street crossed the river, so I had to move the family several miles away. Perhaps at a later date he became associated with the old Roman fort in the same way that Jodi became associated with the entire Jeddart area.

Having got across yet another bridge, the brothers took to the wilds rather than follow Dere Street southwards. To the west of the River Rede is a wide expanse of low hills, today covered by Kielder Forest: mile after mile of conifers with patches of naturalised woodland here and there and some patches of open moorland.

Moorland is problematic for me in that I know that at the time of which I was writing, the moorland that we know today did not exist. Moorland as an ecological habitat is a product of an alliance of sheep farming and grouse rearing. The latter in particular requires both mature stands of heather and areas where fresh new shoots can be found. Without that management, a few hardy trees would make an appearance and the heather would grow much thicker and higher, becoming a barrier to progress.

Similarly the modern coniferous forest would not have existed at the time, being entirely plantation. However, Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) may have been found amongst the hardy trees that would be found in an ancient moorland landscape.

Because of the uncertainty about the exact nature of the landscape at the time, I have tended to describe it more like the landscape that I know from walking the hills of Northumberland without talking too much about the issue of trees.

Setting: Tynedale

Journey's end for the brothers is not actually a great distance from Redesdale, where they had met Frenkle and then Rori. They had taken a long round about way to get there, travelling through a land that is now lost under the waters held in place by the Kielder dam. It is difficult to describe such a valley now, even with the help of maps from before the dam was built, but I can say that it twisted and turned quite a lot and it was relatively narrow.

The brothers found no shortage of trolls here but Frith was aware of the fact that he had the last chance to save them and so he became very choosy. Not one to rush in when he could take a measured view, he let several of the trolls he saw go by and then decided to have a rest from the decision making. He headed back into the hills and found the valley of the Tarset Barn. Here he gathered his thoughts and perhaps his courage before heading back into the busy valley of the Tyne. The Tarset Burn guided him back and led him almost straight to Siglotta and Snabot.

So we have the third bridge. The number three is important in this story not only because there are three brothers Gruff and three chances to break the spell but because there are three brothers guarding three bridges and three maidens to kiss. Snabot, like his older brothers, lends his name to a place-name, this time Snabdaugh (Snabot's Haugh) downstream from the bridge. Siglotta and the other girls have no impact on the place-names, unfortunately, but whether this is because of the trolls or the incoming English speakers who kept the names alive, cannot be known for certain.

Nearby there was one landmark that I simply could not let go by without a reference, even if it is perhaps one of the oddest passages in the book. Just as Frith is contemplating the way forward, up pops a wee friend to offer him help, on his own terms. He is more than just an obscure plot device, he is a genius loci suggested by the name of the hill that Frith watches from: Boggle Hill. Boggle (also Bogle) is a northern English and Scots term for a supernatural creature or goblin but I have used it here for a lesser elf.

There is one final place that the brothers all visit and that is Trollhame itself, the court of Fendri the Fierce. That this lies in Tynedale, the heart of Trolldom, should be no surprise but the exact location is unknown and it seems likely that it lies somewhere under the dark waters of Kielder.

The names of the kingdoms

Very early on in the process of writing the book I got it into my head to deconstruct the names of the various kingdoms, sub-kingdoms, regions, etc. that the characters know and move through. With hindsight I was a little uneven in my approach, but I think I got the level about right.

The first name was Dere. This is better known as Deira, but this is a Latin name derived (probably) from a Brythonic original (perhaps Deur). However the road that runs from Edinburgh to York is known as Dere Street so I opted to use this name for the land around York.

Having dropped one Latin name, the next in line was Bernicia. The Brythonic original was something like Bryneich, which is not very easy on the tongue, so I went for Bernice as a similar name to Dere.

Then there was the land that the story began in. It is often lumped in with Bernice in general histories but I prefer to think of it as a separate kingdom that was later merged. We only have the Welsh name Din Guaire to apply to the region, which seems to have had its political centre at either Bamburgh, Yeavering, or both. My solution was to assume that the "gu" in Guaire was pronounced as a "w" and so Dinware was coined as an easy way to give a name to the land within which Frith and Bertred were born.

Further abroad there lies The Mark, which represents the midland realm of Mercia. In West Saxon sources this is often written as Mierce, which by i-mutation would suggest an earlier northern spelling something like  Mearc. It is The Mark because there were no other marks (border areas, marches) in existence.

Welsh names, paradoxically, are left pretty much as they are. Gwynedd was for some time going to be "Gwunneth" or something similar, but I abandoned this idea in favour of the modern spelling because it lacked the simple elegance of Dere and Bernice.

Similarly the Brythonic kingdoms of Rheged and Gododdin are mentioned several times and no attempt was made to alter those names.

Finally there is the name Gatburgh. A single place-name can change from one form to another in a remarkably short period of time. Bede gives the name as "ad gefrin," but on the whole such Brythonic names did not survive elsewhere in Northumberland, so it seems plausible that at some time there was an attempt to change the name to a more English-friendly form. We know (also from Bede) that nearby Bamburgh was named by the Idings after a princess called Bebba, replacing its earlier name of Dinguararoy.

Gat is, of course, Old English for goat, and burgh is a fortified place. Although Gatburgh is technically not fortified it does have the illusion of strength to help it along, and the ancient hillfort on the summit of the Bell may have influenced the name further. The reversion to the Brythonic name is thus thanks to Ceredig, who uses that name when talking to others about the place. The name Gatburgh falls out of use after the death of Eadwine.

The Historical Setting: 7th century Northumbria

I'm still not exactly sure why I wanted to set The Adventures of the Billy Goats Gruff in the Early Middle Ages, but I know that I was drawn to stories of the period. I started writing the story in about 1994, before I  started my MA, so the interest was sparked by history books for the general market and I had not at that stage picked up a copy of Bede's Ecclesiatical History to begin to read the primary sources - indeed at that time I knew more about the later Historia Britonnum and Annales Cambriae than I did about the Anglo-Saxon sources.

What I was aware of was the prominent position of Northumbria at that time. I have since learned to develop a layer of scholarly cynicism, to see Bede and other contemporary writers as people with agendas and bias, not as pure, disinterested chroniclers of events. Nonetheless, there was definitely something dynamic and vital about the kingdom in the 7th century, a fact that is attested in the monumental sculpture, the incredible illuminated manuscripts and the fact that no other kingdom at the time produced so many writers who could present their stories of saints and kings and be preserved after Northumbria had ceased to be independent and became a relatively minor earldom and ultimately remembered only through the county name of Northumberland.

It is often said that history is written by the victors, but that is only partly true. History is written by the literate, and where the other side is illiterate or does not foster literacy, that side's voice is not heard, whether they were the victors or not.

It is difficult to define when the concept of Northumbria came into being and whether it was meant to represent a unified political force or to be descriptive of a group of peoples who came to be united. The inverse term of South Humbrians was certainly used (by Bede, of course) to refer to all the other English kingdoms, but that label did not stick, largely because the South Humbrians included both Mercia and the West Saxons, who were to become the main rivals in later centuries for the dominance of England.

There were two principal dynasties involved in the formation of Northumbria, the Idings in the north and the Soemilings in the south. The Idings ruled a land given the Latin name of Bernicia, which I have called Bernice (not pronounced Ber-nees like the girls' name, but Ber-nee-che). The Soemilings ruled in a land in modern Yorkshire called Deira, which I have given the alternative name of Dere in the book after the name of the Roman road which runs from York to Edinburgh.

Ida was a king of Bernicia and is said to have joined Bernicia and Dinguaire (Dinware in the book). As the older name given in Welsh sources for Bamburgh is Dingauiraroy (or something similar), this account seems to tell of a more southerly kingdom, probably centred on the River Tyne, absorbing a more northerly one. Ida seems to have had a lot of sons, the greatest of whom was Æthelric. They were under repeated attack, particularly by Urien of Rheged and Morcant, who may have had a claim to Dinguaire. The Idings survived it all in part because the Welsh were divided and Urien was killed by an assassin. Æthelric's son, Æthelfrith, was the first king of both Bernicia and Deira. He also seems to have expanded his territories westwards at the cost of kingdoms like Rheged and its forgotten southern neighbours.

Soemil is named in the ancestry of the kings of Deira, but may not have been an actual person. For the purposes of the book, I have assumed that he was, and that the Grufflings are descended from him, thus giving them royal blood. The first king of Deira named in history was Ælle, for his name is said to have been known to slave traders in Rome, as recounted in the Life of St Gregory. It was Ælle that was defeated by Æthelfrith when he became ruler of both kingdoms. Ælle's son Eadwine (Edwin) was forced into exile until the time was ripe for his return. Eadwine defeated Æthelfrith and in turn ruled over both Deira and Bernicia, the only Soemiling to do so. The importance of the line continued after his death, however, as we shall see in time.

Into this situation I have placed our family of Grufflings. The two older boys were born in Deira and stayed there as fosterlings when their mother died. Their father was sent north into Bernicia, to the place that Bede tells us was called Ad Gefrin and is now called Yeavering, in Northumberland. Here he remarried, a political match to a princess from the fallen royal family of Rheged. They had two sons and a daughter, born in the north and of mixed ancestry - they differ from their elder brothers in being biligual, learning Welsh from their mother even though English was their main language. When Edgar and his elder brother Athelred join the family, they are almost full grown men, and Athelred is taken by his father as his assistant. The younger boys learn to get along with their older brothers, but the differences between them can cause arguments to flare up - as with brothers anywhere.

In AD 633 two significant events seem to have occurred. The first was that Cearl of Mercia (or the Mark) was deposed by a kinsman called Penda. The second was that Cadwallon (or Cadwalla), who was the king of Gwynedd, rebelled against Eadwine. Together with this same Penda, he marched out against Eadwine, who fell at Hatfield Chase. Cadwallon stormed northwards, harrying the land and seeking out any English settlers, putting them to the sword. Bede states that his intention was to destroy the English race. This is the situation facing the family at the beginning of the book. The events at Yeavering are not part of history, although the excavation there by Brian Hope-Taylor identified two attempts to burn the place to the ground, neither of which was particularly successful. I have taken the first attempt as being in AD 633 and have based my account around that fact.

In a future post I will discuss the aftermath of Eadwine's death further, as it has an impact on one minor character and will affect the world to which the Grufflings return.

The role of magic

I have had some misgivings over the role of magic in the book, given that it is also a book with a real historical background. As soon as the plot line had been realised, the magic was a necessity for the simple reason that young men cannot pretend to be goats and everyone who sees them treat them as goats if they are just imagining it all. They have to become goats and that needs magic.

For there to be magic it follows that there should be a practitioner of magic, so I had to give the family Gruff an enemy; Cerdic or Caradoc. He is not particularly effective as an enemy until the time of the battle, spending his time in miserable conditions in Harthope Valley eating broth made from squirrels or hedgehogs and longing for a bit of decent goat's flesh. His putative enemies don't even think of him as an enemy - they simply are not aware that the man exists to be a threat to them.

He however knows them and he holds them and their king to be responsible for his squalid living conditions. So we learn a little about the history of the little land I call Dinware and how Ida joined it to his own realm of Bernice with the promise to its inhabitants to protect them from Christianity.

King Eadwine however accepted Christianity and even brought his foreign priest to Gatburgh, a place sacred to the old ways. His father, then the priest of the place, had carried on regardless in his pagan practices, but had died the following year, leaving Gatburgh without a pagan priest. When Cerdic turned up to claim what he considered to be his place as high priest, he was turned away.

So he has a grudge and among the damage that he inflicts upon the family is to turn the youngest three sons into goats. Only later does he perform more difficult magic to make the change permanent, a thing which, as all good tales insist, must have a get-out clause, the charm that will undo the spell.

I thought about this for a while, trying to think about all of the spells that are overcome in traditional tales - such as the Frog Prince, the Beast, the Seven Swans; all of these seemed to know what would break the spell and hang around waiting for the right person to come along. Rather than have my young billies blundering along blindly, I made sure that they knew what their fate would be. They also appear to be unable to reveal the method of their disenchantment to others.

After these spells cast at the beginning of the book, the magic sort of dries up. It has not entirely gone, but there are no more wizards chucking spells about. Obviously there is magic of a background nature whenever the brothers stray through into Elfland, but magic there has an altogether different quality. The trolls do not seem to use magic, although they have their Gifts and they seem comfortable with things which are magical, perhaps they even make some things which are magical.

Finally there is the problem of protection. I mention in the book that Cerdic looks at a pagan king and sees upon him charms that will turn aside his magic. Why then can Cerdic use magic against the brothers, who are Christian?

My only answer is that the brothers had been baptised, but aside from hearing some stories that they liked they know little about it, and therefore talk about it amongst themselves. They never truly understand what it is they have become part of. This time is discussed by Bede as being a time when kingdoms became Christian and then returned to their old ways, for the understanding of a religion with only a single god was not established. They could understand a jealous god wanting his brothers (and sons, cousins, lovers, sisters ...) ignored and all of the glory being given to him, but not that the gods had gone away, were no longer capable of offering luck to whoever would treat with them.

This ambiguity can best be seen when Frith asks his brothers what elves are (a question that does not get a precise answer - more of a guess really!). In the dramatis personae the elves are listed as Osen, which is my own word based on the name element Os as in Oswald, Oswy, Oswine, etc. which is usually interpreted as God in lists of name meanings. Os is an older element referring to the pagan gods and is directly linked to the Aesir of Norse mythology. I have tried to avoid obvious links with Norse mythology, because although that mythos can shed a light on Anglo-Saxon religion, it is a dim light and not at all helpful. There is no evidence, for example, for a god equivalent to Loki in Anglo-Saxon religion. The trickster role is therefore taken by Woden, which explains why the chief of the Anglo-Saxon pantheon is identified with Hermes/Mercury rather than with Zeus/Jupiter in comparisons between cultures.

Another symptom of their incomplete conversion to Christianity is the name that all of the characters use for Christ, namely "The Healer" This is a very wide play on words. One of the names of Christ in the Old English period is se halend which can literally be translated as "the one who makes things whole" and is therefore equivalent to conventional epithets such as the Saviour or the Redeemer. However, by calling him "The Healer" I have hoped to add a level of ambiguity. By itself it is not a bad title to give Jesus - he was a healer. To the minds of children and young men it resonates with magic - the stories of miracles would have been of great interest to pagans who accept the everyday reality of magic in their lives. In addition it illuminates the lack of understanding that the characters have for Christianity in that they misinterpret the meaning of one of their titles for Christ.