“An Archaeology of the Air:” Marisa Libbon Explores the Thirteenth-Century Poem Havelok the Dane, Medieval Air, and the World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm in a New Essay
Marisa Libbon.
In “An Archaeology of the Air,” recently published in issue three of The European Review of Books, Associate Professor of Literature Marisa Libbon traces the quest of English poet and historiographer Robert Manning, in the 1330s, to find written records of the widely told legend of a Danish king named Havelok, his royal English wife Goldeburgh, and a fisherman named Gryme (Grim) who founded the port town along the North Sea coast in England, now called Grimsby, which today is the site of the world’s largest offshore wind farm. Although Manning found nothing in terms of texts, Havelok’s story was “too diffuse for Manning to capture, but too ubiquitous for him to ignore.”
“For Manning, the air was the archive,” Libbon writes. “Fossils are preserved in layers; bodies and treasure and other time capsules are covered over with earth . . . Yet the air, as Manning saw it, was circulating, transmitting, carrying hearsay and history . . . what if, like Manning, we excavated the atmosphere? What might an archaeology of the air look like?”
Through this “archaeology of the air,” Libbon’s essay examines Havelok the Dane, the oldest surviving manuscript about Havelok and Grim—which was written in rhymed couplets circa 1300 by an unknown author in a North East Midlands dialect of Middle English—and explores the historical evolution of the characters’ and region’s narrative and technological relationship to the wind’s power. “The ground preserves objects as they were in their own time. The air preserves artifacts in transit. Carried from place to place, era to era; always in the process of becoming, of changing,” she writes.
Post Date: 05-02-2023
“For Manning, the air was the archive,” Libbon writes. “Fossils are preserved in layers; bodies and treasure and other time capsules are covered over with earth . . . Yet the air, as Manning saw it, was circulating, transmitting, carrying hearsay and history . . . what if, like Manning, we excavated the atmosphere? What might an archaeology of the air look like?”
Through this “archaeology of the air,” Libbon’s essay examines Havelok the Dane, the oldest surviving manuscript about Havelok and Grim—which was written in rhymed couplets circa 1300 by an unknown author in a North East Midlands dialect of Middle English—and explores the historical evolution of the characters’ and region’s narrative and technological relationship to the wind’s power. “The ground preserves objects as they were in their own time. The air preserves artifacts in transit. Carried from place to place, era to era; always in the process of becoming, of changing,” she writes.
Post Date: 05-02-2023