MER-13565 COVER 2011.indd - Merton College - University of Oxford

FEATURES MERTONIANS IN | LITERATURE
Mertonians in... Literature
MERTON IS STEEPED IN LITERARY HISTORY.
IT IS SAID TO BE THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE TABLE
ON WHICH ASLAN WAS SLAIN ON IN THE LION,
THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE AND ALSO OF
THE ENTS IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
Many written works by Mertonians can
now be found in the Bodleian Library,
founded, of course, by another Mertonian,
Sir Thomas Bodley. Max Beerbohm,
Edmund Clerihew Bentley, TS Eliot, Louis
MacNeice and JRR Tolkien have all added
to the rich story of Merton literature.
Postmaster has collected the thoughts
from a handful of contemporary Merton
writers who continue in their footsteps.
MICHAEL RIDPATH (1979)
They say second books are diffi cult, but I
found planning the second book in my series
about Magnus, my Icelandic detective,
fairly straightforward. The premise is that a
group of Icelanders decide to take revenge
on those whom they hold responsible for
the kreppa, their word for the credit crunch,
which crushed their country.
My editor liked the idea, but suggested
that I needed to add a touch of myth and
superstition. Myth and superstition? To the
credit crunch? A problem.
After some frantic head scratching and
speed reading, I booked myself a return
ticket to Iceland and borrowed a copy of
The Saga of the People of Eyri from the
London Library. This saga deals with the
experiences of a group of touchy Vikings
who arrived in the Snaefells Peninsula
in western Iceland at the turn of the
tenth century.
44 POSTMASTER | 2011
One story captured my imagination. Two
berserkers had been brought from Sweden
to Iceland as slaves. They proved diffi cult
to control. Eventually, their master, a local
farmer, told them to cut a path through the
lava fi eld between two farms. They drove
themselves into a berserk frenzy and cut
the path. When they had fi nished they were
exhausted and the farmer had no diffi culty
running them both through with a spear.
I reread the saga on the plane, hired a car
at Kefl avík airport and drove north for about
three hours, until I spied the snow-covered
dome of the Snaefells Glacier. I drove up
through a mountain pass, and pulled over
to the side of the road. Beneath me stretched
the Berserkjahraun, or Berserkers’ Lava
Field, a frozen river of grey stone, nibbled
at by mosses of russet, yellow and lime
green.
Close up, the folds of frozen lava reared
up into twisted sculptures of stone horses
and warriors. I found a faded wooden sign
pointing to the Berserkjagata. Sure enough,
this was a narrow path only a few inches
wide cut through the lava. I followed it for a
quarter of a mile until I came to a depression
in the ground and a low broad cairn. Inside
this, 19th-century archaeologists had found
two skeletons – not especially tall, but very
broad – which had been buried there a
thousand years before.
I fl ew home and began typing. Chapter
one of 66° North is about the demonstration
outside the Icelandic Parliament in the
winter of 2008. But chapter two begins with
two small boys, one of whom is Magnus’s
grandfather, playing berserkers in a lava
fi eld on the Snaefells Peninsula.
Michael Ridpath’s two Icelandic novels
are Where The Shadows Lie and 66° North.
HECTOR MACDONALD (1992)
My writing career wasn’t planned. I didn’t
pen short stories or poems as a teenager, I
didn’t read English Literature, and I never
sought work experience in a commissioning
editor’s offi ce. I was a biologist at Oxford,
and a strategy consultant thereafter. But I’ve
always loved reading novels, and it struck
me during a boring patch at work that I