Wanderings in Arnold's Balder Dead

Sleipnir depicted on the Tjängvide stone, Gotland

[Image source: Wikipedia .]

  But the blind Hoder left the feasting gods

In Odin's hall, and went through Asgard streets,

And past the haven where the gods have moored

Their ships, and through the gate, beyond the wall;

Though sightless, yet his own mind led the god.

Down to the margin of the roaring sea

He came, and sadly went along the sand,

Between the waves and black o'erhanging cliffs

Where in and out the screaming seafowl fly;

Until he came to where a gully breaks

Through the cliff-wall, and a fresh stream runs down

From the high moors behind, and meets the sea.

There, in the glen, Fensaler stands, the house

Of Frea, honored mother of the gods,

And shows its lighted windows to the main.

There he went up, and passed the open doors;

And in the hall he found those women old,

The prophetesses, who by rite eterne

On Frea's hearth feed high the sacred fire

Both night and day; and by the inner wall

Upon her golden chair the mother sate,

With folded hands, revolving things to come.

(Matthew Arnold's Balder Dead I.72-93)

Complete text of Balder Dead.

Death is somewhere we live in, whether as mourned or mourner; death turns out to be a place. I've lost count of how many times I've read Balder Dead recently, but now it too has the quality of a place for me; a place of wandering, endlessly searching for something lost, whether in the plains of Hela's realm or in Asgard streets. 

Where are we here? In Norse myth, in a classical harbour, on a nineteenth-century English seashore? In all three, as seamlessly as in a dream. 

*

The Prose Edda uses the term "Æsir" to refer to Odin and the other gods. Arnold just calls them "the Gods"; he never uses the word "Æsir". Why not? 

I suppose one answer might be that Arnold's epic verse bans all feminine endings with the semi-exception of a small group of (so to speak) honorary monosyllables: Heaven, prayer, power, fire.... ("Heaven" is of course a very important word in Balder Dead.) This practice is just as in Milton's Paradise Lost or Keats' Hyperion, but Arnold goes even further, by avoiding ending lines with multisyllabic words whose endings are only stressed from a metrical perspective. For instance "His eye surveyed the dark idolatries", "Of thundering Etna, whose combustible" (Milton), "And wandering sounds, slow-breathèd melodies", "He utter'd, while his hands contemplative" (Keats) ... There's none of that in Balder Dead. Every line ends with a syllable that has a firm and definite stress, not just a metrical one. The vast majority of the line-endings are monosyllabic words; the others are mostly words with prefixes, like "forlorn" or "obtained". (About 80% of the lines have some kind of end-stop, too.) 

So you can see that, while Arnold can end a line with "gods", he couldn't end it with "Æsir". Maybe that's also why Arnold has "Lok" instead of "Loki" or "Loke" (the Percy/Mallet version). And why he uses "wail" in the sense of "wailing".

But the simpler answer is that Arnold had never heard of the Æsir. Bishop Percy translates the Icelandic word as "the Gods" and Arnold merely follows him, just as he does with the "Nornies", and with the words "grate" and "limber", both discussed later. 

*

And on the conjuring Lapps he bent his gaze,

Whom antlered reindeer pull over the snow;

And on the Finns, the gentlest of mankind,

Fair men, who live in holes under the ground; ...

(Matthew Arnold's Balder Dead (1855), I.53-56)

You could infer the conjuring Lapps from reading Mallet's/Percy's Northern Antiquities, but not the hole-dwelling Finns. From where, if anywhere, did Arnold take that idea? 

*

But fiercely Odin galloped, moved in heart;

And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came;

And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang

Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets;

And the gods trembled on their golden beds

Hearing the wrathful Father coming home,—

For dread, for like a whirlwind, Odin came.

(I.258-264)

Odin's midnight return follows Hoder's suicide and precedes Nanna's death. The poet doesn't explain Odin's passion. Does he whose "eye surveys the world" already know something of these other events? Is it a father mourning a beloved son, or a chief mourning the latter days of his tribe? Having made his speech forbidding prolonged tears, does he, after a day spent apart on Lidskialf, finally vent his own emotion in this rage?

*

In the Prose Edda the funeral of Balder follows close on his death; Hermod meanwhile has set off on his mission to Hela's realm.

But Arnold delays the funeral for twelve days, i.e. until after Hermod's return. Why? As G.C. Macaulay (1896) remarked: "it is questionable whether according to that system [Norse beliefs] Balder would have been found in Hela's realm until his funeral rites had been accomplished.." Furthermore the change of sequence means that the ring Balder sends to Odin (II.274) cannot be the same one that Odin throws on the pyre (III.173). In the Prose Edda they are one and the same: the ring Draupnir. 

Arnold's change of sequence isn't unobtrusive. In fact the timing of the funeral receives a lot of attention, Odin making no less than four speeches in which he specifies, and sometimes alters, the timing.  

In the first (I.40ff) he commands it for the day after Balder's death (basically, just as in the Prose Edda). That night the gods, who have memorably feasted while Balder's body still lies where it fell (apparently trying to live up to Odin's dry-eyed command), then take up the corpse and move it to Breidablik, Balder's home. Later the ghost of Balder himself, tenderly watching his sleeping wife, assumes that his funeral could be as early as next day (I.295)

But the next morning it appears that Odin's plans have changed (perhaps Frea is his "unseen guide", as she will be for Hermod). He now says:

Go quickly, gods, bring wood to the seashore,

With all which it beseems the dead to have,

And make a funeral-pile on Balder's ship;

On the twelfth day the gods shall burn his corpse.

But, Hermod, thou take Sleipner, and ride down

To Hela's kingdom, to ask Balder back.

(II. 41-46 Like any good politician, Odin makes no acknowledgement of a change of plan.)

The deferrent gods do indeed go quickly to work. And when you have Thor as a woodsman, gathering wood shouldn't take very long (why bother with an axe if you have a hammer to knock down the trees?). They "ranged the wood in stacks by Balder's ship" (II.68), but there they leave it. It looks like it takes them all day. Despite Odin's seemingly clear instructions, no funeral-pile is made on that day.

Twelve days later, when Hermod returns, he finds that the gods have brought Balder's corpse down to the sea-shore. Odin now gives his third command (III.49-56) for the funeral, including "then build a pile / Of the heap'd wood" (III.53-54). 

A prolonged sequence of laments follow, and then comes Odin's fourth command:

  "Ye gods, there well may be too much of wail!
Bring now the gathered wood to Balder's ship;
Heap on the deck the logs, and build the pyre."
⁠   But when the gods and heroes heard, they brought
The wood to Balder's ship, and built a pile,
Full the deck's breadth, and lofty; then the corpse
Of Balder on the highest top they laid, ...

(III.157-163) 

Arnold, as part of his general Homeric colouring, often begins lines with "But", and sometimes when you wouldn't expect it. Since the gods do exactly what Odin has commanded, you might expect "And" here. Maybe the word "But" is saying: But this time (contrary to all the previous speeches) the gods actually do build the funeral pile....

It's a strange situation, this funeral, though it does not seem strange as you read it. Just as the gods have been told of a way by which they might very possibly bring Balder back to life, they put that hope to one side and sincerely immerse themselves in the long and passionate ceremony of his cremation. Evidently Arnold delayed the funeral because it was in some ways the crowning image of his poem. 

...  And the gods stood upon the beach, and gazed.

And while they gazed, the sun went lurid down

Into the smoke-wrapt sea, and night came on.

Then the wind fell, with night, and there was calm;

But through the dark they watched the burning ship

Still carried o'er the distant waters on,

Farther and farther, like an eye of fire.

And long, in the far dark, blazed Balder's pile;

But fainter, as the stars rose high, it flared;

The bodies were consumed, ash choked the pile.

And as, in a decaying winter-fire,

A charred log, falling, makes a shower of sparks,—

So with a shower of sparks the pile fell in,

Reddening the sea around; and all was dark.

(III.193-206)

Yet part of the powerful impact of the scene is the consideration, in the circumstances, that it doesn't actually achieve anything. The sense of meaninglessness, which unlocks a deeper meaning. 

This funeral scene can be accounted Odin's triumph, but the Father of the Gods does not have the most authoritative voice in Balder Dead. Though the Gods show no sign of insubordination, there's something unhealthy in the relationship of this commander to his commanded. Where should we look for a deeper authority in Balder Dead? Balder is wiser than Odin, but only by the end of the poem. Hela is wiser too, but she's also devious. The most authoritative voice is probably Frea's, for instance when she says:

Nor do I judge if it shall win or fail ;

But much must still be tried, which shall but fail.  

(I.129-130)

(Arnold was not afraid of "ten low words", a point sometimes mentioned in critical views of Balder Dead. The poem has been largely ignored, but those who do write about it show a range of opinions from curt dismissal to unbalanced fervour. I'm in the latter camp.)

*

Hermod led Sleipner from Valhalla forth,

And saddled him: before that, Sleipner brooked

No meaner hand than Odin's on his mane,

On his broad back no lesser rider bore;

Yet docile now he stood at Hermod's side,

Arching his neck, and glad to be bestrode,

Knowing the god they went to seek, how dear.

But Hermod mounted him, and sadly fared

In silence up the dark untravelled road ...

(II.71-79)

Another creative use of "But" .... I won't attempt an explanation this time. 

Hermod needs Sleipner, the best of all horses, for his first journey to Hel, in order to leap what Arnold (following Percy) calls the "grate"; most later translations call it the Hel-gate. After he has returned from this journey, normality resumes: Odin rides Sleipner (III.59). When Hermod makes his second journey to Hel, he sets off straight from Thok's iron wood, so he must be riding his own horse, but it doesn't matter, because the grate is still lifted (III.378), just as when he left Hel the first time (II.287). 

Arnold doesn't mention that Sleipner has eight legs (as portrayed above, and as stated in the Prose Edda). On the whole he dispenses with many of the freakish colours of Norse mythology. For instance his account of the launching of the funeral ship makes no mention of the giantess Hyrrokkin nor the dwarf Litr. Nor do we hear about the ring that Odin lays on the pyre, "that every ninth night there dropped from it eight gold rings of equal weight" (this detail is in Percy's translation). In Balder Dead rings are just rings, their magic properties concealed (and perhaps heightened) by the absence of detail. 

*

While on his island in the lake afar,

Made fast to the bored crag, by wile not strength

Subdued, with limber chains lives Fenris bound.

(II.214-216)

Arnold cannot have expected most of his readers to know the Prose Edda, but you can only really appreciate "limber" (flexible, pliant; Arnold adopts Percy's word) if you know the story of the binding of Fenris-wolf with the fetter Gleipnir (Gylfaginning XXXIV). 

*

Nine days he took to go, two to return,

And on the twelfth morn saw the light of heaven.

(II.293-294)

Nine days to go there, but only two to come back...that sounds a bit unlikely, doesn't it? And it isn't in the Prose Edda, which only mentions the nine days that it took Hermod to get to Hel, but says nothing about how long it took him to get back. It was Arnold himself who, fixing the funeral for the twelfth day, decided that Hermod and Sleipnir would do the return journey in such an astonishingly short time. Evidently Arnold's adaptation was not simply about eliminating the fantastic; sometimes he chose to add it himself. 

* 

"Mallet and his version of the Edda is all the poem is based on", Arnold wrote in a letter to his sister. 

One of the appendices of Paul Henri Mallet's 1756 book, as translated by Bishop Percy in 1770 and titled Northern Antiquities, is the Gylfaginning section of the Prose Edda. It is a double or even triple translation. Bishop Percy didn't know Old Norse; he was translating M. Mallet's French. But Mallet didn't know Old Norse either. He did know modern Danish, and he could puzzle out the gist of Snorri's meaning with the help of his Scandinavian friends. But he also made extensive use of Göranson's less-than-perfect translation into Latin. 

Small wonder, then, that the "Edda" read by Arnold differs quite a lot from what Snorri wrote!

Percy's version is here:

http://www.germanicmythology.com/ProseEdda/Mallet1770Edda.html

The story of Balder is the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth fables, equating to Gylfaginning chapter 49. However Arnold draws on the rest, too. For instance the names of Hel's rivers come from the first fable, the "limber" chains that bind Fenris-wolf come from the seventeenth fable. The "golden dice" that Balder says he will find in the new heaven (III.539) are also from Percy (thirty-third fable). 

Percy's translation fails to connect the ring that Odin lays on the funeral pile (Fable 28) with the ring sent to Odin by Balder (Fable 29). And therefore, nor does Arnold. In fact in the Prose Edda they are the very same ring, which is called Draupnir in Brodeur's translation (see below). Percy's translation did not include names of objects like the ring Draupnir and the fetter Gleipnir, so don't blame Arnold for not using them. 

Most significantly, Mallet (and hence Percy) disentangled Gylfaginning 49 into two separate fables (one of Balder's death and funeral, the other of Hermod's journey to hell and its outcome). Arnold could not know that the two fables were originally interleaved, nor how. In Balder Dead he recombined them, but in a slightly different way.  

If you want to read the whole of Mallet's book, it's here:

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Northern_Antiquities.html?id=DvUBAAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y

[However, note that this is the 1847 Bohn edition, for which the new editor I.A. Blackwell translated the Prose Edda afresh. Arnold might have read this edition, but he didn't. He must have been reading one of the earlier editions (1770 or 1809), containing Bishop Percy's translation. (As was demonstrated by Mary W. Schneider, "The Source of Matthew Arnold's 'Balder Dead'", Notes and Queries 14 (1967), pp. 56-61.)]

[And here's a handy translation of the whole of the Prose Edda in Arthur G. Brodeur's 1916 translation:

https://mythopedia.com/library/prose-edda-brodeur-1916

.]

*

On Matthew Arnold's The Scholar-Gipsy:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/02/notes-on-scholar-gipsy.html

On Matthew Arnold's Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/11/strike-leftward.html

conference points

Beech, hornbeam, sycamore. Frome, 10 December 2022.

In March 1862 [the chief constable] issued a broadside of denunciation of the inefficiency of [the Isle of Wight's] police.  ... The [constables on night duty] were rarely visited after midnight, or 1.30 a.m. at the latest and no adequate check had been exercised to prevent constables "from leaving their beats before the hour appointed for them to come off duty or to prevent them from passing their time in public houses when they should have been on patrol, or to prevent them from booking one another at the different conference points without patrolling to them". 

[Ian A. Watt, A History of the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary 1839 - 1966 (1967), p. 20.]

One of the delights of a bookswap is discovering books I would never have supposed I wanted to read. A History of the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary 1839 - 1966 was one. I took it away last week to flick through it, then found myself slowing down, eventually reading longer chunks and finally going right back to the beginning and starting over. Even now I cannot pretend to be absorbing every detail of pay increases or restructuring or commendations for distinguished service. But the book has plenty of things that engaged me, -- church attendance and paying for prayer books, the riots at Winchester (1908) and Andover (1914), the dangers of bikes and horses, barracks and fairgrounds, the treatment of dissenters, gypsies and aliens, armed police, police in war-time, police on strike (1918-19), preparations for D-Day --  but this post focusses on something a bit less dramatic. My eye snagged on the unfamiliar term "conference points" and in the end I've compiled a kind of anthology of conference points which explains the term's changing meaning better than I can. 

A graver matter altogether was mentioned in a General Order of October 1906, which superintendents were charged to see that every constable took a copy of in his own writing. This dealt with the offences of missing conference points and making false entries in journals. The failure to attend strictly to conference points was a most serious offence, in that the whole system existed for the purpose of preventing burglaries and other such crimes. ...

[Ibid., p. 83]

*

I feel, though I have no proof, that "conference" should be pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, to emphasize the idea of conferring together.

These conference points addressed an issue inherent in the concept of a police force. An army, being gathered together, could be controlled by commands, bugles, visible signals and messengers on horseback. But a police force was necessarily dispersed, upholding the rule of law across the wider community. How could information be shared, action coordinated, synergies realised, or performance monitored? How could the police act as a cohesive force and not merely as what preceded them, the individual Dogberries who answered to their Squires and maintained the village lock-up?

It answered to two aspects of early policing. First, that the police derived from the watch; their main duty remained night patrol. The Winchester force, formed in 1832, had seven constables. Only one did day duty, the others all did night duty. (The main motive for creating the Winchester force was suppression of vagrancy.) The other aspect was drunkenness in the force itself. In 1840, Hampshire superintendents "were directed to be very particular in looking after the men on pay days immediately after they had received their money; and any of whom they had the slightest suspicion were to be ordered to be at certain places at fixed hours in order that their superintendents might see if they were perfectly regular and sober" (Watt, p. 10). 

*

The first volume of the Bishop’s Stortford Police Archive to be prepared for digitisation, the Constable’s Journal (daily logbook) of PC 13, Arthur E. Elderton of ‘B’ Division, for the nine months from July 1915 to April 1916, sheds some light on his daily (and nightly) life on duty.  ...

PC Elderton carried out routine duties, without the benefit of modern technology or communications, dealing face-to-face with colleagues, the public and the soldiers based in local billets and at Hockerill Camp.  He pounded the beat, meeting other policemen on duty when he attended Conference Points such as the Corn Exchange, the Bridge Inn, The Causeway, the Cemetery, Northgate End and the Police Station at set times throughout the shift.

[Maggie Dines, on the Herts Past Policing site: https://www.hertspastpolicing.org.uk/content/about-us/conservation/a-policemans-lot .]

*

Confidential

7th November 1915

To all Superintendents

I quite appreciate what has been said by the various Superintendents with reference to their shortage of attendance at night conference points, nor am I unaware of the fact that the amount of work of every description which they are now called upon to perform is greatly in excess of what is the case in normal times.

From what I have seen and learnt in going round the County I also appreciate the fact that many hours of work have been ungrudgingly given by Superintendents (especially) and others in consequence of war conditions. I feel I cannot however let omissions of this nature now under observation pass unnoticed because juniors are liable to take their cue from seniors and a general falling off in the performance of regular duties may consequently occur.

Under no circumstance can I exempt particular Superintendents from visiting conference points but I leave it to Superintendents to do all in their power and within reasonable bounds, to set an example in their divisions to juniors, and see that a strict standard of attention to duty is maintained. I am of the opinion that two night patrols per month after midnight at some distance from Divisional Headquarters should be performed, that 2 or 3 conference points should be visited on each occasion, and that such attendance should be in the nature of surprise visits.

J.A. Unett Capt.,

Chief Constable

[From Essex Police: Night Conference Points 1915. History Notebook Number 17 by John Woodgate.

https://www.essex.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/essex/about-us/museum/research/history-notebooks/17.pdf  .]

In far flung rural districts the effort of carrying out these checks was significant; each Superintendent had only the choice of riding his horse (already exhausted, like himself, from the efforts of the day) or riding his bicycle. The chief constable knew this, and in 1919 the force ordered four Ford motor cars. But in fact another emerging technology would soon relieve the monitoring officer of any need to travel at all.

English Elm, Ash. Frome, 12 December 2022.

*

Communication between the Police Station and Officers on various beats was at first by means of “conference points”, when Sergeants would meet Constables on their beats at appointed times, to ensure all was well.

In 1925 the City was newly-equipped with over a dozen Police boxes (the blue structures, shown left, frequently referred to these days as “Tardis” boxes), and a few triangular–shaped pillars. The idea of these was basically to provide a telephone for the public to contact any of the Emergency Services, and for the Police Station to be able to contact the nearest Police Officer by means of a flashing orange light at the top. (Bear in mind there were few private houses with telephones in 1925).

... The Boxes were large and square, and of wooden construction, with enough space on one side for an Officer to sit inside and make notes, or have his meal break. On the left was a small door that opened for anyone to use the emergency direct telephone line.

[Exeter Memories: Police boxes and pillars. Contributed by three former Exeter City Police Officers–Sydney Rowsell, Peter Hinchliffe and Dick Passmore:

http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_organisations/police-boxes.php .]

*

Constables made what were called conference points. This they did up until the late 1960s. Some will remember seeing the policeman standing by the telephone box for 10 minutes every hour. Here he stood waiting for the sergeant to meet him or, for the station to telephone with a job. Before there were call boxes, many conference points were at large houses. These points accounted for the size of the policeman's stomach, because they got to know and charmed the majority of the cooks and housemaids.

All this John [John Finch, a Brockham policeman of long standing] would recognise as, nothing much changed in over a hundred years. When radios came, there was no need for conference points. However, the new radios were seen by the Chief Constable as a potential opportunity for the constable to skive and not cover his beat. Points ensured that they went to the furthest house. With a radio they could sit with their feet up. Points stayed for a while until the ridiculous nature of the order became apparent, and they were abandoned.

[Bob Bartlett, Policing in Brockham (Surrey): http://www.brockhamhistory.org/brockham-people/police/ .]

*

I was posted to High Wycombe on the 12th August 1963, unfortunately just missing the initial excitement of the Great Train Robbery. My first day is etched on my memory as I still have my faded pencil inscribed pocket book to remind me. The dubious honour of accompanying me on my first patrol fell to P.C. 1 Sheldon Bressington, as I walked self-consciously along the High Street I felt as if I had two heads. On reaching the Public House we went inside, presumably to check that the Landlord was complying with regulations. “Come on Landlord clear this bar”. Demanded P.C. Bressington who was clearly a stickler for the enforcement of such regulations, the bar cleared as if by magic. We then approached the Landlord who was busy pulling three pints of bitter but instead of the formal caution I was expecting, we informally accepted his hospitality. So there I was just twenty minutes into a thirty year career, sitting at a bar supping ale. Not being an experienced drinker the alcohol reached my legs before I reached the door, memories of the next hour or so are rather hazy. Nobody had told us at basic training that drinking on duty was compulsory.

There are many things I remember about the old High Wycombe nick but the two main features for me were the sleek black Mk2 Jaguars of the Divisional Traffic Department and the mortuary in the corner of the back yard. I have happy memories of the occasional duty in a Jag. With the likes of Bernie Twist, Acker Floyd and Joe Fell. Unfortunately the memory of my first visit to the Mortuary hunts me still, when together with another young Probationer I was required to move a rather large gentleman from the refrigerator and place him on the table. He was on the top shelf and there was no mechanical aid for lifting him down. We carefully slid the tray from the shelf but failed to calculate the full effect of gravity, the body slid from the tray and pinned my colleague to the wall. Our first reaction was to try blind panic but that did not seem to work very well at all. We had of course been highly trained in the art of restraining violent prisoners but had never been taught how to deal with less than co-operative corpse, on this occasion the corps won.

The golden age before the introduction of personal radios we made fixed conference points each hour, Wycombe had the luxury of several strategically placed Police Boxes. These structures were later immortalised as Dr. Who’s time machine but the original Police ones provided generations of Bobbies shelter from the eliminates and a place for a quick smoke out of sight of the Inspector. They were about four feet square and were lavishly equipped with a bench, telephone, three thousand dog ends and a blue flashing light on top. I once occupied such a box with tree other large Bobbies and was reliably informed that they could accommodate up to six as long as nobody broke wind or smoked Old Shag.

[Mike Smith, Bucks Constabulary Special Memories: http://www.mkheritage.co.uk/bch/docs/policeofficers%20stories.html .]

In 1967 Mike Smith left High Wycombe and took up a post as village bobby at Lacey Green.

As a village Bobby I would now work on my own with supervision by Sergeant Bert Buggy at Princes Risborough. The Police house had a small office which contained a desk, filing cabinet, telephone, type writer, my own personal world war three early warning system and a large box containing an air raid siren. This was the cold war 1960's and our nearest neighbour was Strike Command HQ, the Soviet Union's number one nuclear target. I did a test run with the siren; it took 45 minutes to drag out into the front garden, read the instructions and assemble it. The estimated time of arrival of a nuclear missile strike was 4 minutes; this left me 41 minutes short of warning the good folk of Lacey Green of a very loud bang.

Other features of the Police House were a notice board outside the gate, a 'County Police' sign over the front door and a very loud bell above the bedroom door to indicate an incoming telephone call. The latter sounded at 2 am on our first night; I was still suffering from the shock when I answered the phone, the caller enquired if her lost cat had been found. On my way back to bed, I made a slight adjustment to the alarm bell and it never bothered us again. Joan still blames that alarm for the almost immediate arrival of our daughter Emma. We were, in every sense, living above the shop. The house itself was a bit basic by modem standards, having no electric points upstairs for example. It was built in the mid 1930's for £350.00 and was situated in Main Road, opposite Stocken Farm. The original Victorian Police cottage was just across the road and still occupied as a private residence.

The village Bobby had been a common feature of rural life for many years, it required a Constable to live in the village and accept 24 hour responsibility for his beat, which in my case included Lacey Green, Speen, Loosley Row and Hampden. A married man was usually given this task, because his wife was expected to answer the phone and see to callers at the office when the Constable was out on patrol. Unfortunately, the public's expectation of my wife's legal knowledge was sometimes a little high, but taking in stray donkeys was all in a days work.

Prior to the 1960's, most Policing was carried out by a solitary patrolling Constable. Some personal radios were introduced in urban areas in the middle 1960's; unfortunately the range of this early equipment was too short for rural use. Traffic Division and Supervisory Officers had vehicles which were fitted with VHF radios, but mostly the Bobby's only means of communication was by telephone. This was achieved by a system of hourly fixed conference points, the Bobby would stand next to a prearranged public telephone box at a prearranged time, so that he could be contacted if required.

In High Wycombe we had the luxury of several Police telephone boxes... Without radios, Police response times to non urgent incidents could be a bit slow, but the public appeared to be aware of our limitations and reasonably tolerated the situation. A real bonus to my rural beat was the smart black 350cc Triumph motor cycle that went with the job, unfortunately, it was not equipped with a radio, but at least it beat cycling up those Chiltern hills. ...

[Mike Smith, "The Last Village Constable": https://www.laceygreen.com/Sections/Policing.php .]

I find I can't lay Watts' History aside yet, so here are a few other things that caught my eye:

Blacksmiths

Early policing was about maintaining quiet on the streets, especially at night. The police existed for a settled population of home-dwellers. The police's traditional opponents (in their eyes) were "vagrants", gipsies and army deserters. Vagrancy (having no visible means of support) was illegal. Domestic crime, on the other hand, makes little appearance in early police history. Some of those ancient patterns still cast their shadow today. 

It took a while for these informal policing boundaries to be established. For instance, in the early days constables used to enter public houses to clear out the drunks. But this made them apt to be assaulted, and in 1845 the practice was discontinued. It was hoped that landlords would become more prudent in serving liquor to those who were already intoxicated, knowing they could not count on the police to come to their aid (Watts, pp. 18-19).

Though army camps tended to be trouble hotspots, the police were closely connected with the military, e.g. by a similar attention to matters like uniform, and by a culture of licensed use of force. Early chief constables usually had a military background. The forces often worked together. 

Another activity was that of attempting to obtain volunteers for the Hampshire regiments of militia to try to bring them up to strength. For every volunteer who was approved 5s. was to be paid to the police constable who brought him forward. Bills publicising service with the militia were circulated and it is significant that the chief constable recommended that some should be affixed to the blacksmiths' shops. Rural life was still largely centred on horse transport and advertisements at the blacksmiths were likely to be as effective as those at service stations today.

(Watt, p. 13)

Centralization

Unification of the Winchester force with Hampshire did not occur until 1942, but there had been several earlier attempts to consolidate borough forces, which were fiercely opposed. "It was held to be inimical to the principle of municipal self-government and in some quarters was seen as a sinister step in the direction of the worst type of continental despotism". The Winchester Mayor's petition of protest (June 1854), regarding what would become the County and Borough Police Act of 1856, stated: 

That your petitioners regard the bill in question as an unconstitutional interference with the privileges of boroughs and subversive of the independence and right of self-government secured to them by the Municipal Corporations Reform Act, as it will practically place the entire control of the whole police of the kingdom in the hands of Her Majesty's Home Secretary.

(Watts, p. 17)

glass buildings shining with lights

I remember I was on the floor hugging her legs, kissing her knees. And I was begging, "Now, right now, this minute . . ."

The sharp teeth, the sharp mocking triangle of her brows. She leaned over and undid my badge, not saying a word.

"Yes! Yes, darling . . . darling." I started throwing my yuny off. But she, still without saying a word, brought the watch in my badge right up to my eyes. In five minutes it would be 22:30.

That put a chill on me. I knew what it meant to show yourself on the street after 22:30. All my madness seemed to be blown away from me all of a sudden. I was me again. One thing was clear: I hated her, I hated her, I hated her!

Without saying good-bye or looking back, I rushed out the room. Pinning my badge back on as I ran down the steps (taking the emergency stairs for fear of running into somebody in the elevator), I ran out onto the empty avenue.

Nothing was out of place -- the usual simple, customary, normal scene: glass buildings shining with lights, pale glass sky, the greenish quiet night. But underneath this quiet cool glass something wild, crimson, and hairy was silently rushing along. And I was racing along, fighting for breath, trying not to be late.

Suddenly I felt that the badge I'd stuck back on so hastily was coming off -- it came off, and clattered as it hit the glass sidewalk. I bent over to retrieve it, and in the momentary silence I heard someone's footsteps behind me. I turned. 

Something small and bent was rounding the corner, or at least that's how it seemed to me at the time.

I took off as fast as I could and heard nothing but the wind rushing past my ears. At the entrance I stopped: The clock showed one minute remaining before 22:30. I listened hard -- no-one back there. Stupid . . . I'd imagined the whole thing. Effect of the poison.

That night was torture. The bed under me rose and fell and rose again -- sailing along a sinusoid. I kept repeating to myself: "At night the Number's duty is to sleep. This is just as much an obligation as work during the day. It is required so that one can work during the day. Not to sleep at night is unlawful." And still I could not, I just could not.

I'm done for. I'm in no condition to fulfill my obligations to OneState. I . . .

(Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (written 1920), end of Record 10. Translation by Clarence Brown, 1993.)

*

And the energy for all those lights? Well, it comes from the Accumulator Tower, an enormously high tower. An accumulator is an energy storage device. Maybe Zamyatin got his idea, visually speaking, from the very tall hydraulic accumulators that were built in the mid-19th century, e.g. Grimsby Dock Tower. But his Accumulator Tower works by "sucking electricity" from the clouds (defusing electrical storms), and presumably storing it to power the city. When Zamyatin was writing We, electric lights in buildings were still a relative novelty. (To give one example, in 1919 only 6% of UK homes were connected to an electricity source.)

The Accumulator Tower has a secondary function, too. At the top it has a bell which strikes the hours of the day (Record 2). As demonstrated in this extract, the hours determine all the activity of OneState's inhabitants. 

The Accumulator Tower is visually prominent and is also prominent in the novel, in poetic cityscapes and in views from the air. (I'm seeing it like the Burj Khalifa over downtown Dubai.)

Symbolically you could say that it represents OneState's single Benefactor and also the unity of "We", the people who are numbers. 

But in its singleness it also seems strangely vulnerable. It is the obvious target of a revolution. Topple the Accumulator Tower, and OneState would instantly cease to function. 

It never happens in We. But the implication is clear: states, even OneState, are mortal, and they can be toppled. 

*

D-503 is, almost throughout the book, a true believer in OneState. His obsession with I-330 makes him do crazy things that contradict his beliefs, but have his beliefs actually changed? Yes, but the signs are subtle. D-503 himself doesn't consciously articulate the changes, he continues to think spasmodically in the received forms that have become automatic to him, and he cannot frame arguments against his former beliefs (e.g. when challenged by the Benefactor -- quoted below).

*

A few months ago I found a copy of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We in a local book-swap and I seized on it. It was the Clarence Brown translation of 1993, based on the Russian edition of 1988. [Alas, my copy doesn't include Brown's Introduction, but I found about half of it here by doing a Look Inside.]

Because, yes, We had finally been published in Russian in Russia, half a century after its author's death. You can only read snippets of Brown's translation online, but you can read the whole of We in the form that the world first saw it: Gregory Zilboorg's translation, published in New York in 1924. It isn't as lively or accurate as Clarence Brown's, but it's a decent translation, as well as a piece of history in its own right. It isn't the book George Orwell read, though: he wasn't able to track down a copy, so he read the French translation instead. In his 1946 review, he surmised that Aldous Huxley must have read We before embarking on Brave New World (1932). Huxley's novel is set in the World State, Zamyatin's in "the United State" (as Zilboorg calls it; Brown calls it "OneState"; Mirra Ginsburg and Natasha Randall "the One State"). Anyway Huxley said he hadn't read We, and I believe him. But both he and Zamyatin were kicking back at H.G. Wells' A Modern Utopia (1905) -- as was E.M. Forster in his astonishing story "The Machine Stops" (1909). Perhaps just as significant, Huxley was reacting against Henry Ford's production line and Zamyatin against Frederick Winslow Taylor's ideas of "scientific management" (time and motion, etc. Taylorism was very popular in Lenin's circle).

[You can also read Mirra Ginsburg's fine 1972 translation, here: https://libcom.org/article/we-yevgeny-zamyatin , along with its very useful Introduction (placed at the end)]

*

One thing I don't understand, though. This passage in Record 32:

(Zilboorg's translation:)

“Well, then. How much fuel for the motors shall we load on? If we count on three, or say three and a half hours.⁠ ⁠…”
I see before me, over a draught, my hand with the counter and the logarithmic dial at the figure 15.
“Fifteen tons. But you’d better take⁠ ⁠… yes, better take a thousand.”
I said that because I know that tomorrow.⁠ ⁠… I noticed that my hands and the dial began to tremble.
“A thousand! What do you need such a lot for? That would last a week! No, more than a week!”
“Well, nobody knows.⁠ ⁠…”

I do know....

(Brown's translation:)

"So what do you say? How much fuel shall we take on for the engines? If you count three, or say, three and a half hours . . ."

Before me, in three-dimensional projection on the diagram, I see my hand, which is holding a calculator, the logarithmic dial of which points to the number 15.

"Fifteen tons. No, better make that . . . Yes, make it 100 . . ."

This is because I do after all know that tomorrow . . .

And out of the corner of my eye I see my hand, the one holding the dial, begin almost imperceptibly to tremble. 

"A hundred? But why such a lot? That's enough for a week. What am I saying? For much longer than a week!"

"There's no telling . . . who knows?" I know. 

So Brown's translation, like the other modern ones, has D-503 asking for a hundred tons. But surely it's Zilboorg's translation that has the numbers right. If 15 tons is about right for 3.5 hours, then the Second Builder's comment about lasting more than a week must refer to a thousand tons (which would last about ten days), not a hundred (about 24 hours). 

*

Actually, there's plenty more I don't understand. Both Zilboorg and Brown talk of irrational numbers (Record 8), evidently meaning imaginary numbers; not the square root of 2, but the square root of -1. That must represent Zamyatin's own usage, I suppose.  

It was true that D-503's horror at imaginary numbers is reminiscent of how the Pythagoreans are said to have reacted to the discovery of irrational numbers. This is traditionally attributed to Hippasus of Metapontum. The proof attributed to him is elegant and can be understood even by a non-mathematician like me; it's in Wikipedia's entry on "Irrational Number". 

I'm calling the square root of -1 an imaginary number because that's what Descartes called it. I suppose you'd have to be a historian of mathematics, specifically Russian mathematics, to know what terms Zamyatin would have used. Could the name of his revolutionary heroine, I-330 (I for short), allude to i (the imaginary unit, i.e. the square root of -1)? Did he know Descartes' term "imaginary" and thus linked the square root of -1 with the human imagination, the thing that OneState realizes it must excise? (While on this subject, Zilboorg translates the latter as "fancy", not one of his best decisions). 

[When I was at school c. 1970, we called it j. I gather this is an acceptable alternative, but normally it's used only in contexts where i already has a different meaning, e.g. current in electrical engineering.]

*

I did some online tutoring this past summer; the book I taught was Lois Lowry's The Giver, a justly celebrated YA novel in which twelve-year-old Jonas gradually realizes that the utopian community he has grown up in is a dystopia in which the price of a safe, predictable existence is eugenics and the absence of meaningful choice or deep emotion.

[Jonas] smiled as he watched the newchild plant one small foot carefully before the other, grinning with glee at his own steps as he tried them out.

"I want to get to sleep early tonight," Father said. "Tomorrow's a busy day for me. The twins are being born to- morrow, and the test results show that they're identical."

"One for here, one for Elsewhere," Lily chanted. "One for here, one for Else — "

"Do you actually take it Elsewhere, Father?" Jonas asked.

"No, I just have to make the selection. I weigh them, hand the larger over to a Nurturer who's standing by, waiting, and then I get the smaller one all cleaned up and comfy. Then I perform a small Ceremony of Release and — " He glanced down, grinning at Gabriel. "Then I wave bye- bye," he said, in the special sweet voice he used when he spoke to the newchild. He waved his hand in the familiar gesture.

Gabriel giggled and waved bye-bye back to him. "And somebody else comes to get him? Somebody from Elsewhere?"

"That's right, Jonas-bonus."

Jonas rolled his eyes in embarrassment that his father had used the silly pet name.

(from Lois Lowry, The Giver (1993), Chapter 17.)

It's interesting to see The Giver and We adopting similar solutions to similar technical issues. Jonas grows up in "the community", a Stepford Wives sort of place surrounded by empty and wild nature. We are told that there are other communities, but the novel leaves them shadowy: we don't clearly grasp how much they interact with each other, what transport links exist, or what layer of government presides over them all. To all intents and purposes, the "community" that we see is the dystopia. Likewise in We, though there are very fleeting hints that other cities and other accumulator towers exist*, D-503 takes no interest in them. OneState as we come to know it is a single city state, population 10 million, surrounded by wild and trackless nature, its monolithic Benefactor presiding over everything. Both novels in fact adopt the point of view of a single protagonist in a single place; the superficial benefits and the underlying horrors are local. Yet both novels want to imply that the dystopia in question is universal, hence the vague hints of other communities, other cities...

(It's powerful and affecting, but it's very different from a colonial or post-colonial world in which some places enjoy most of the benefits while other places cope with most of the horrors.)

*

[* E.g. "living in cities that were cut off from one another by all the tangled green stuff" (Record 3), "our Accumulator Towers" (Record 25). In Record 5, D-503 tells us that after the 200-Years War, only 0.2 of the world's population survived, and he repeats this figure later in the same paragraph as "two tenths" (Ginsburg). Brown's translation says "zero point two tenths", which contradicts his earlier "0.2". That's one reason I don't feel quite confident of what Zamyatin intended here. The other is that the overall tone of the paragraph, e.g. its histrionic claim of the earth being cleansed of a thousand years of filth, seems to suggest that only a comparatively tiny fraction of the human population survived (0.2 per cent, perhaps). But if we accept 0.2 at face value, i.e. as a fifth... well the world population in 1920 was about 1800 million, so its reduction to a fifth would still leave a world population of 360 million. But the population of D-503's city is only ten million. So this passage, too, seems to imply the existence of other cities.] 

*

It all began, I suppose, with Plato's Republic. Just put the philosophers in charge (i.e. what we would call scientists), and they can design a better society. Even this early, the blatant authoritarianism and indifference to personal freedoms is a disquieting factor, but after all, this was only in a hypothetical world, where the philosopher's temptation to over-control could be safely indulged because no-one was actually oppressed by it. Sir Thomas More imagined a fictional Utopia, but already his lively curiosity suggested that such a society might not ever exist and might not be altogether utopian if it did. Johnson in Rasselas considered the pursuit of utopias entirely vain. But then -- with the industrial revolution, for instance -- utopias started to leave the study and emerge in the real world. They were admired, of course, but they were monstrous too.

Dystopian literature can be interpreted in a soft way; here is how bad things might get if technology is in the wrong hands, or is used to further a coercive agenda. 

Or it can be interpreted in a hard way: technology itself is the issue; it invariably has a cost, is intrinsically controlling and always generates dystopias; dystopian literature is thus a way of talking about the conditions we already live under. 

*

For science, both in its experimental and its applied form, likes a clean slate. It wants to control the conditions, and free will is like a dirty stain in the test tube that will ruin everything. So Plato and Wells, for example, were perfectly fine about placing rather severe limits on freedom in their utopias.

"... A true algebraic love of mankind will inevitably be inhuman, and the inevitable sign of the truth is its cruelty. Just as the inevitable sign of of fire is that it burns. Can you show me a fire that does not burn? Well? Prove it! Put up an argument!" 

How could I argue? How could I dispute what were (formerly) my own thoughts? 

(from Record 36, in which D-503 converses with the Benefactor.)

*

OneState is a dystopia, but Zamyatin himself was a utopian. Probably Zamyatin, a former naval engineer in love with mathematics, wasn't at all opposed to technology in itself. He was perhaps anticipating a post-modern view of science as revolutionary. The error of OneState is to see science as completed, and thus as justifying a system of totalitarian social control to match its fixed beliefs. 

Well, no, I need to rephrase that. OneState, and D-503, do admittedly see science as continuing to progress. In their first conversation he says rather sharply to I-330: "Science is going forward, and it's clear that, maybe not right away, but in fifty or a hundred years . . ." (Record 2) After all, D-503 is himself the builder of the INTEGRAL, now readying its first flight (Record 1). And what about that remarkable recent invention, the musicometer (Record 4)? And, in the course of the novel, the great medical advance: how to remove the imagination (Records 15, 26, 31)? 

But what we're seeing here is choreographed science, a science that proceeds dutifully along paths that have already been laid out; for instance, to make noses more alike. These new advances will not contradict existing science; to D-503 it's axiomatic that "OneState Science cannot make a mistake" (Record 3). The INTEGRAL program will head off into space not to learn anything new but to spread its own gospel and to subjugate the inhabitants of other worlds. The musicometer is remarkable only for its banality. And the great medical advance, if universally imposed, would eliminate the source of all further speculation. (But in fact this would condemn OneState itself to slow extinction; its scientific paradigm would be secure from internal questioning, but not to incursion from beyond its borders.)

[On Zamyatin's anticipation of postmodernist ideas of science, see Tony Burns, "Zamyatin's We and Postmodernism", Utopian Studies Vol. 11, No. 1 (2000), pp. 66-90. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25702458 ]

[On why Zamyatin should not be seen as rejecting utopianism per se, see Phillip E. Wegner, "On Zamyatin's We: A Critical Map of Utopia's 'Possible Worlds'", Utopian Studies Vol. 4, No. 2 (1993), pp. 94-116.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20719963 ]

[On the mathematics of OneState and its enemies, see Brett Cooke's fascinating and wide-ranging "Ancient and Modern Mathematics in Zamyatin's We":

https://www.academia.edu/843898/Ancient_and_Modern_Mathematics_in_Zamyatins_We 

(Apparently this is a chapter in a larger book, but I can't find any more details). ]