Tatwine
c. July 30th, 670
Dates are funny things. I don’t mean those things that grow on trees, even though they don’t, they grow on palms, which aren’t trees, I mean dates as in years, months, that sort of thing.
We like to roll out history like a great carpet with us at one end and all the little kings and queens and actors and bishops all tramping off into the past in a nice little line, each one with a happy number next to their name so we know where they fit in. Which is cool, but we put those numbers there, not necessarily them. They might look at the date ‘July 30th, 670’, for example, and decide they have no idea what you’re talking about. For them, this might be an utterly meaningless number. If you’re a turnip farmer in the English kingdom of Mercia in the 7th Century, then who really cares what the date is? The local clergy will tell you when you have to turn up to church for this-and-that feast day or to give them money so that God can save you from doing all the things He’ll do to you unless you give them money. And when you owe the local Lord three sheaves of whatever, he’ll send someone around to hold you upside down and shake you until everything you own falls out of your pockets. You don’t need to know what the date is. You don’t matter.
Our dating system is one we apply to the past. Back in those days, it might not have been the year 120, say, at all. The year might not even have had a number. In Roman times, the dating system normally followed one of two conventions. The least common was the practice of dating years ab urbe condita, expressing a number of years from the supposed founding of Rome in 753BC. More normally, years would be described according to the names of the two consuls who took office for that year. Originally the Roman year began in March, which is why September is the 7th month and so forth, but it was switched to begin on the same day the two consuls took office, January 1st, in about 153BC. What we call ‘1AD’ was, to the Romans, ‘C. Caesar et L. Aemilius Paullus consulibus’ ([with] Gaius Caesar and Lucius Aemilius Paullus [being] the consuls). At least until July of that year when Marcus Herennius Picens takes over from Lucius. ‘1 AD’ does save a bit of time, admittedly.
Add to that the changes in the Gregorian calendar, after October 1582, and everything becomes a bit less distinct and you have to start putting little asterixis everywhere or noting everything ‘OS” for ‘Old Style’. So, we don’t bother because nobody’s got time for all that, right?
Therefore, when we say that the tenth Archbishop of Canterbury, Tatwine, died on July 30th, 734, that’s the date that we are giving it. Consequently, when we then say he was born on July 30th, 670, it’s what we like to call an educated guess, but in reality, it just means we made it up. Because we don’t know how old he was when he died, just that he was quite old when he became Archbishop and 670 sounds about right. And as we don’t know his birthday, he can have July 30th for that, as well.
This practice sounds a bit shady, with good reason, but elsewhere you can work out how old people were and in which year they were born by other means than just birth dates. We have no idea when the famous historian Tacitus was born, where he was born, or even what his full name was. But he tells us that he took public office ‘at the first opportunity’ in either 81 or 82 under Titus. The earliest age he would have been allowed to take public office was 25 years old, meaning that he was born in either 56 or 57.
Why am I telling you all this? Because otherwise everything we know about Tatwine could fit on the back of a matchbox and I’d have nothing to write about. Apart, that is, from some of the things he wrote. Because Tatwine was fond of a riddle.
He was a Mercian, from the great Anglo-Saxon kingdom that covers most of what is now central England. He was a monk and later abbot of the monastery at Breedon-on-the-hill in the modern county of Leicestershire. Under the patronage of King Æthelbald of Mercia, he became Archbishop of Canterbury on June 10th, 731, one of a number of Mercians elevated to that position for political reasons during the 730s and 740s. Aside from appointing a few bishops here and there and generally bumbling around doing Archbishopy things, his reign was short and uneventful and he died in office on July 30th, 734. There’s an epitaph for him in Canterbury Cathedral although his burial place is unknown. He later became a saint, venerated in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches and his feast day is, of course, July 30th, because why not?
The Venerable Bede, the great chronicler of the early medieval period, called Tatwine vir religione et Prudentia insignis, sacris quoque literis nobiliter instructus (a man notable for his prudence, devotion and learning) and his learned nature is evident in what remains of his writings, particularly in the two surviving manuscripts containing his riddles and four of his Ars Gramattica Tatuini.
The Ars is one of only two surviving 8th Century Latin grammars from England. Essentially it is a text book on Latin grammar designed for the more advanced reader. It is inspired by Donatus’ Ars Minor, with elements from other Latin scholars. He finished it before becoming Archbishop and it was used widely across Europe.
By the 8th Century, Latin is predominantly the preserve of the Church. It’s tempting to think of the Roman period in Britain as being one in which everyone spoke Latin, but the reality is that Latin was used probably only by the elite of society, for official documentation and perhaps among the legions. Whilst the Romanization of Britain had been widespread, it was far from complete and the vast majority of the population, as much as 92%, were rural and lived their lives pretty much as they had before conquest and as they would after the Roman period. The languages they spoke, mostly Brythonic, are unrecorded because they either didn’t come from a tradition on which things were written down, or things were written down but haven’t survived.
In the period following the Romans, when kingdoms such as Mercia were formed, the people who could speak Latin either left or had been thrown out. However, the new warlords who would later go on to become Kings, that flooded into the power vacuum left behind by the Romans knew that in order to maintain the outward illusion of power, they too would have to use Latin. The problem was that Latin is a very complicated language to learn, and still is. And with nobody around to twist their ear until they get it right, like in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, the standard of Latin used in Britain becomes dreadful until, eventually, the new-fangled English replaces it everywhere except that one place that refused to hand over any sort of power - the Catholic Church. By hanging on to Latin, the Church hung on to control of religion.
There was a culture in early medieval England of riddle writing, made famous by the West-Saxon scholar, Aldhelm, who wrote Epistola ad Acircium in the late 7th Century and it was probably from him that Tatwine got the inspiration for his own riddles.
His riddles deal with all sorts of subjects, from philosophy, to the arts, to monsters, faith and even everyday objects like anvils and pens. There are 40 in total, although the surviving manuscripts also include another 60 written by an unknown person calling themself Eusebius.
The first riddle is on philosophy. It reads:
Incipiunt enigmata Tautunii
Stamine metrorum exstructor conserta retexit
Sub deno quater haec diverse enigmata torquens.
Septena alarum me circumstantia cingit,
Vecta per alma poli quis nunc volitare solesco,
Abdita, nunc terrae penetrans atque ima profundi.
Sum Salomone sagacior et velocior Euro,
Clarior et Phoebi radiis, pretiosior auro,
Suavior omnigena certe modulaminis arte,
Dulcior et favo gustantum in faucibus aeso.
Nulla manus poterit nec me contingere visus
Cum, presens dubio sine, me quaerentibus adsto.
Mordentem amplector, parcentem me viduabo.
Est felix mea qui poterit cognoscere iura:
Quemque meo natum esse meum sub nominee rebor.
”Here begin the riddles of Tatwine
The author recounts these riddles, connected by a thread of
Verses, weaving forty in different directions.
A sevenfold circle of wings surrounds me,
On which it is my custom to fly, concealed, carried now through the sweet heavens,
Now penetrating the profound depths of the earth.
I am wiser than Solomon and faster than Eurus,
And brighter than the rays of Phoebus, more precious than gold,
Certainly more pleasing than every art of music-making,
And sweeter than honeycomb in the mouth of the tasters.
No hand nor sight is able to touch me
When I, definitely present, stand near those who seek me.
I embrace that which bites me, deprive that which avoids me.
Happy is he who can know my laws:
I will judge him born under my name.”
Riddle 1 is a great example of a scribe not paying attention because as you can see from the first few lines:
”Here begin the riddles of Tatwine
The author recounts these riddles, connected by a thread of
Verses, weaving forty in different directions. “
These aren’t part of the riddle at all, they’re the introduction to the whole riddle set. A lazy scribe has simply bundled them all together without paying attention. The reason this is important is subtle, so subtle that those scribes didn’t even notice it. Tatwine’s list of riddles is itself a riddle, the solution to which is an acrostic. An acrostic is a hidden text in the first or last letters of each line and this is what the introduction is trying to give us a clue to. The riddles go something like this:
Riddle 1 Septena alarum me circumstantia cingiT
Riddle 2 Una tres natae sumus olim ex matre sagacI
Riddle 3 Bis binas statuit sua nos vigiles dominatriX
Riddle 4 Dulcifero pia nos genitrix ditavit honorE
Riddle 5 Efferus exuviis populator me spoliaviT
Riddle 6 Nativa penitus ratione, heu, fraudor ab hostE
Riddle 7 Olim dictabar proprio sub nominee “CaesaR”
I won’t do them all, but you can see the hidden text running down the list on the left and then, when it reaches number 40, and then running back up the right side in reverse. It reads:
Sub deno quater haec diverse enigmata torquens / Stamine metrorum exstructor conserta retexit
Which translates, of course, as:
”The author recounts these riddles, connected by a thread of Verses, weaving forty in different directions”
Somebody has written this down, to point out the acrostic to the copyists, who have then simply included it in riddle 1 by mistake.
Here’s another of his riddles, Number 18:
Discernens totum iuris, natura locavit
Nos pariter, geminos, una de matre creatos,
Divisi haud magno parvi discrimen collis,
Ut numquam vidi illum, nec me viderat ipse,
Sed cernit sine me nihil, illo nec sine cerno.
”Separating us completely by her laws, nature placed
Us, twins, created equally from one mother,
Divided by the not-at-all big division of a little hill,
So that I have never seen that one, nor has that one seen me,
But he sees nothing without me, nor do I see without him.”
And how about Number 17:
Celsicolae nascor foecunda matris in alvo,
Quae superas penitus sedes habitare solescit.
Sum petulans agilisque fera, insons, corporis astu.
Ardua, ceu pennis, convecta cacumina scando,
Veloci vitans passu discrimina Martis.
”I am born from the fecund womb of a mother who dwells on high,
Who tends to live inside the upper settlements.
I am an insolent and agile creature, innocent of bodily guile.
I climb, as if on wings, the lofty vaulted peaks,
Avoiding by speed in step the dangers of Mars.”
Why not try those out for a bit until you get bored and Google the answer? A glittering prize, beyond the measure of human imagination if you can guess what the answer to both are. *
(* there is no prize but glory, fellow traveller through the past)
Oh, and if you’re wondering, it’s Tat-ween.