Righteous Elen ‘Luyddog’ of Caernarfon

Saint Elen of Caernarfon

The twenty-second of May in the Orthodox Church is the feast of Saint Elen of Caernarfon, also called Elen ‘of the Hosts’ or Elen ‘of the Ways’. Because she shares a name, because her feast is the following day, because she also had a son named Constantine, because she was also an empress of Rome and because she is intimately linked with several holy sites in Britain, she is often confused with Saint Helena the mother of Emperor Constantine. However, they are two distinct people. Saint Elen lived and flourished about sixty years after Saint Helena; and she was also indisputably British, being the daughter of Eudaf Hen. Her husband was a Gallæcian general and emperor named Magnus Clemens Maximus Augustus, the Macsen Wledig of British folklore.

According to the version of the Dream of Macsen Wledig preserved in the Mabinogion, the tale of Saint Elen begins with Magnus Maximus taking a mid-day siesta under a makeshift tent of shields after a late summer hunt. As he napped, he began to dream. In his dream he went upstream on a river until he came to a high mountain with its peak in the clouds, and then crossed it into a fair countryside. He found a spring on the other side of the mountain and followed the river downstream until it spanned his whole field of vision from one bank to the other, and at last he came to the shoreline. On this a great city stood, bedecked with banners of every hue and pattern, and below it in the estuary docked a fleet of ships.

Magnus Maximus walked a wharf made from whalebone onto a gleaming ship that seemed to him wrought all from gold and silver. The ship touched off at great speed as he handled the rudder, and bore him as though of its own will over the seas, to an island more beautiful than any he’d ever seen waking. After the ship lay anchor, Maximus disembarked and began to explore its vales, its forests and leas, its moors and hills. He had never seen such a gorgeous isle. At last before him loomed a mighty fastening on the seaside, with its gates open. Within, he encountered two young men, playing chess on an ornate chessboard. When he turned he saw a golden hall, and seated on an ivory throne was an old man with a wild beard and a fierce gaze, who bore all the marks of kingship: a golden crown, a golden torc, and many rings upon his hands and arms. He was busy whittling chess pieces. And before that old man sat the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on.

This woman caught Maximus’s gaze, and beckoned him to her. She bade him sit with her, and of course he did so. She embraced him, and leaned her face toward him to be kissed, but then—

His servants and courtiers, who had left Magnus Maximus to doze on the ground the whole of the afternoon, began to be worried. They clashed their shields and set the hounds to baying, and bade him rise. They yarked Maximus out of his sweet dream, and it was in a bitter mood that he found none of it to have been real. They returned to the city, where Maximus began to brood, distracted from all affairs of his waking life. His mind was wholly bent on the woman he’d seen in his dream. At last his steward made bold to tell him that his servants were discontented and were seeking ways to find a new master. Magnus Maximus then told his steward about the dream, the island, the castle and the girl, and asked them how he might discover if they were real or not. The steward sent out messengers to all corners of the Empire, but for a year and a day they sought in vain. Magnus Maximus fell into a worse despair, and he took the steward back to where he had taken a nap on a hunt that day, and showed him the beginnings of where his dream began.

Acting on the advice of his steward, he sent out thirteen heralds along the route he had described in his dream. They followed it faithfully, and at last came to Britain, and the mountain of Yr Wyddfa, or Snowdon. Beneath Snowdon lay the castle as their master had described. The heralds were greeted in the name of Eudaf Hen, and when they asked to see the lady of the holding, to present to her Magnus’s suit, they were confronted by Eudaf’s daughter Elen.

Confronted is the right word. In her case, the stereotypes about Celtic women all held true. She abused these hapless Roman heralds to their faces, accusing them of mocking her, and demanded to see the man himself before she would consent to marry him. The heralds, tails between legs, went back to Magnus and told him all as it had fallen out with them.

What could Magnus Maximus do but go himself? He mustered his armies and went in force to Britain, and asked to be admitted to the castle beneath Snowdon. There he saw all as he remembered it from his dream. The two young men at play were there: Aeddan ap Eudaf and Cynan Meriadog. Cynan rose on seeing Magnus and tried to bar him bodily from entering the castle, but he was drawn away by Aeddan and allowed to enter. There too was the old man, Eudaf Hen. The instant he saw Elen verch Eudaf, he knew that he had found the right woman. He embraced her, proposed to her, and went to bed with her that night. The following day, Elen demanded of him as a morning-gift the whole island of Britain, to be ruled in her father’s name. She also asked him to build for her three fastenings: one at Caernarfon, one at Caerleon and one at Caerfyrddin. She also asked that roads be built between these three, so that troops could move between them the faster. (From this, she earned her epithet of ‘Luyddog’ – or ‘of the Hosts’.) Magnus agreed to all of this, and it was done just as she asked. He lived in Britain for seven years before his position in Rome was usurped by a rival, and he was forced to leave again to defend it. He is unable to prevail over his rivals until Elen and her cunning warrior kinsmen Aeddan and Cynan arrive from Britain and come to his aid.

There is much in the foregoing Mabinogion version of the tale that is fanciful. For one thing: there already was a Roman fortress and city at Caerleon by the fourth century, as well as roads leading from it to other strategic points on the island. However, what seems to be true is that Magnus Maximus was indeed married (though his wife’s name is not preserved in any primary documents), and that they had at least one son named Flavius Victor, and two daughters Severa and Maxima. Flavius Victor was executed by his father’s chief enemy Emperor Saint Theodosius after his Magnus Maximus surrendered and was killed at Aquileia. However, the mother and two daughters of Magnus Maximus were spared. His wife’s fate is unknown.

Magnus Maximus’s wife was, however, known to be deeply devout and orthodox in her faith. Her spiritual father was Saint Martin of Tours, with whom she often took counsel. She also seems to have urged her husband to defend Orthodoxy against hæresy where his sway held. Magnus Maximus rather ruthlessly put down, for example, the Priscillian Gnostics in his home province of Roman Gallæcia.

Based on the ease and readiness with which Magnus Maximus was able to call forth troops from Britain in the imperial intrigues of the 380s, he also seems to have had some family ties there, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that he married into them. He was stationed in Britain as a young officer; ambitious as he was, he could very well have married into the family of Eudaf Hen. This would also make sense chronologically, since his (and Saint Elen’s) son Flavius Victor was old enough to accompany him back to the Continent when he made his bid to keep the Western Empire. Elen’s name is also attested in toponyms: the Roman-era road Sarn Helen, leading out from Caernarfon, was named for her who ordered its construction. Several holy wells throughout Britain bear the name of Helen. However, those particularly in and around Yr Hen Ogledd are more likely named after the earlier Saint Helena, whose husband and son were both stationed at Eboracum.

Despite appearing to us only in these historical fragments and through the haze of half-christened Welsh legend, a picture of Saint Elen Luyddog does begin to emerge. The daughter of a Romano-British chieftain, self-assured and strong-willed, she was naturally drawn to an ambitious and somewhat reckless junior officer of the Roman Army who may have been stationed somewhere around Caernarfon. She was not content, as the wife of such a man, with mere domestic pursuits, but urged her rank-climbing husband to strengthen her native province’s fortifications and road networks. We may also surmise that she was a patroness of British churches, as attested by the numerous holy wells that bear her name. The Greek Orthodox Church is quite right to remember this feisty Briton the day after her more illustrious namesake from the East. Holy and righteous Elen of the Hosts, builder of roads and bastion of the faith, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

The Sarn Helen

Empress Helena, Equal-to-the-Apostles, Mother of Constantine

Saint Helena of Constantinople

My daughter Eleanore’s name day is today, the twenty-first of May. It’s the feast of her patron saint, Saint Helena the mother of Constantine. Actually, my wife’s first preference was to name her Helen, and it was me who insisted on naming her after Eleanor Roosevelt and Éléonore d’Aquitaine… and this, while she was still an atheist and I an Episcopalian. Ah well. Some things are just serendipitous. I have indeed written about Saint Helena before, but in such a cursory and unsatisfactory way that I feel I need to make another assay.

Helena was, according to the historian Procopius, an Ionian Greek from the city of Drepana in Asia Minor. His evidence seems to have been that her son, in order to do her honour when he acceded to the Imperium, named her home village after her: Helenopolis. However, there is also a Helenopolis in Palestine, and a Helenopolis in the Pontus – and all of these are likely named for the Empress. We do know, on the evidence of Saint Ambrose of Milan, that her origins were humble and working-class: she was a stabularia, or an inn-keeper. There is a later legend in Britain that Saint Helena was a Romano-Briton, the daughter of Coel Hen; though this may or may not be true, Saint Helena is nonetheless regarded as the patron saint of Colchester, and a number of holy wells in Yorkshire and Lancashire particularly are dedicated to her name: at Holbeck, at Eshton, at Sefton and at Kirkby Overblow.

She was a fairly attractive woman by all accounts, and she caught the eye of a general named Konstantios Khloros, a general from the province of Dardania (what is now North Macedonia) in the Eastern Roman Empire. It’s possible they met in her home province of Bithynia; the tradition has it that they were wearing identical silver bracelets, and Konstantios took this as a sign. He either married her or took her as his concubine, and they had a son together: the future emperor and saint, Konstantinos. Konstantios Khloros was an ambitious man, however, and he put Helena roughly aside, divorcing her in 289, in favour of a richer and more eminent woman: Theodōra the daughter of Maximian. Helena and her son moved to Nicomedia, and Konstantios Khloros was declared Cæsar shortly before he died, at the city of Eboracum in Britain (now York). Her son Konstantinos kept her in great affection and respected her deeply.

After Konstantinos became Cæsar of Rome, he favoured his mother with the imperial title of Augusta, which gave her a place of near equal honour to his own in the Empire. He also issued the Edict of Milan in 313, which for the first time officially proclaimed a policy of state toleration of Christianity, which was his mother’s faith. Saint Helena used her influence and authority for various charitable works of public philanthrōpia. It may be that she felt a sense of noblesse oblige, or a sense of Christian obligation; or it may have been the case that she never forgot her working-class roots and sought to give back out of her own substance to the people who lived hard lives at the bottom of the Roman social order.

She also used the public moneys to which she had access by virtue of her family connexion to the Cæsar, to mount expeditions into the Holy Land in search of relics of Jesus Christ and His Apostles. She gave great sums of money in particular to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, in particular funding the hospital and wayhouse for pilgrims associated with the church. At the behest of her son, who deeply revered the sign of the Cross, she went to the Holy Land herself in 326 – when she was already eighty years old! – in order to lead a search for the True Cross upon which our Lord was crucified at Golgotha. She searched without success until she was informed by a Jew named Jude that the Cross lay under the Temple of Venus built by Hadrian. Saint Helena had the temple demolished and excavated, and found the True Cross by a wonder of God. The precious article was led out and placed in a state of honour in a church Saint Helena dedicated for the purpose.

As one of the last acts of her long life, Saint Helena also funded one of the first free public hospitals in the world, in her son’s new city of Constantinople: an example which would be followed with admirable zeal by Saint Basil the Great. These were not mere last-minute worries for the state of her soul, either – all of her works of love and corporal mercy for the destitute proceeded from the same simple goodness of character which she possessed. As Eusebius put it in Chapter XLIV of his Life of Constantine:

Especially abundant were the gifts she bestowed on the naked and unprotected poor. To some she gave money, to others an ample supply of clothing: she liberated some from imprisonment, or from the bitter servitude of the mines; others she delivered from unjust oppression, and others again, she restored from exile.

In the following chapter, Eusebius writes:

She might be seen continually frequenting the Church, while at the same time she adorned the houses of prayer with splendid offerings, not overlooking the churches of the smallest cities. In short, this admirable woman was to be seen, in simple and modest attire, mingling with the crowd of worshippers, and testifying her devotion to God by a uniform course of pious conduct.

Eusebius even offers us a touching picture of her death. Saint Constantine attended his mother at her deathbed, as did her several grandchildren; and he even held her hands and comforted her as he attended her blessed passing. She was subsequently remembered as one of the great saints in the East, both on account of her ‘practical piety’ and on account of having ‘given birth to so extraordinary and admirable an offspring’.

Saint Helena truly is an exemplar of noblesse oblige and public philanthrōpia as mentioned above, and this largely out of public funds to which her position as the emperor’s mother entitled her. She is, in her own person, a standing rebuke to those who want to erect an artificial ethical boundary between the charity of private individuals and the organised public works which benefit everyone. She is also a remarkable bridge between Christians East and West. Regardless of whether she was, as later English legend claimed, a British chieftain’s daughter, or (more likely) a Greek stabularia, even if her only connexion with Roman Britain was her husband’s and son’s stationing at Eboracum, the attachment the mediæval English felt to this Equal-to-the-Apostles was considerable. Righteous and august empress Helena, holy mother of Constantine and devout follower of the True Cross, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

The Empress Helena, mother of Constantine,
Was with us before she sought the Cross in Jerusalem.
Thus, becoming like unto the apostles,
She calls us also to honour the Cross,
For in this sign, the standard of victory over the enemy.
We are granted salvation and resurrection
And the triumph of the Heavenly Jerusalem.
Wherefore, O holy Helena, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Kelin: beautifully brutal and bleak

The neatherd (Erjan Nurymbet) and Kelin (Gulsharat Jubaeva) in Kelin

Another Kazakh film that I watched recently was Ermek Tursynov’s 2009 art film Kelin (Келін), or Daughter-in-Law. In a nutshell: the cinematography of Kelin is amazing. The camera dwells lovingly on wide-angle shots of mountains and the taiga-to-tundra biome which the characters inhabit – not to mention the wildlife of sundry kinds (wolves, owls and vultures being the favourites). The period-specific props, costumes and make-up are simply exquisite. The soundtrack – khöömei throat singing and traditional flute and stringed instruments – is used sparsely and to effect. The acting, considering that the vast majority of the film has no dialogue whatsoever, is excellent. And the attractive Gulsharat Jubaeva (the actress who portrays the title character) provides ample eye candy for this heterosexual male viewer, anyway, spending several points in the film in candid love scenes and divers states of undress. But nonetheless: it is an intensely uncomfortable film to watch, and I can see why it sparked such controversy among Kazakh critics who saw the film as immoral and vulgar, even insulting. Riding alongside and underneath the marginal existence of the people and society portrayed in the film, is an undergirding of primordial atavism and barely-contained rage and violence.

WARNING: Spoilers to follow.

The titular kelin is being prepared to be married off by the women of her jüz, while the patriarch haggles with two prospective suitors – a hunter and a neatherd – over the bride-price. The neatherd makes the better offer, and the hunter goes off disappointed. The kelin runs after the hunter, who was her preferred suitor; he draws a knife and makes a blood oath with her. But her fate is sealed: she is taken by the neatherd back to his family – his brother and his mother. On the way, the neatherd brutalises the unwilling Kelin and forces her into sex. But after she spends some time in his home, she starts to enjoy his embraces, gets used to his home, and even starts to think she hasn’t fared too badly regarding her husband.

But her former lover, the hunter, returns and murders her husband in the woods, much to her and her in-laws’ grief when his body is found. They prepare her husband for a burial by exposure, and Kelin sees the hunter among the traders. Her feelings are decidedly conflicted when she meets him face to face. Kelin seduces her teenage brother-in-law, who had been interested in her since his brother first brought her home, but she finds the experience less than satisfactory. The hunter shows up again and seduces Kelin, but his efforts are discovered by Kelin’s mother-in-law – who begins to take measures against the two.

Kelin’s mother-in-law, who has shamanic abilities, ritualistically strips Kelin naked and cuts off her hair. She then pays a visit to the hunter, throws Kelin’s hair at him and puts a curse on him – but this does not deter the hunter from pursuing Kelin. He abducts her, but is discovered by Kelin’s mother-in-law and brother-in-law, who have different reactions. The brother-in-law confronts the hunter directly and picks a fight with him, stabbing him with a knife. The teenager loses the fight and is killed with his own blade; Kelin weeps over him but can do nothing. The mother-in-law flees to a mountaintop and begins chanting, causing an avalanche to fall over the trail where the hunter and Kelin are. The hunter sacrifices himself to save Kelin and is buried in the avalanche. When Kelin returns, her mother-in-law almost succeeds in strangling her to death, but discovers that she is pregnant and begins caring for her instead. The mother-in-law pampers Kelin, gathers herbs for her and assists in childbirth, and the two of them end up bonding over the baby. At the end of the film, the mother-in-law gives Kelin the staff she had used in her shamanic rituals – an understated but powerful moment of intergenerational solidarity. There is a strong implication in the final scene that the mother-in-law had gone through what Kelin had; but also that Kelin and her child would continue the same cycle.

End spoilers

The story of the film is fairly simple, and the motivations of the characters are straightforward enough so that the whole of the film, every emotion and action, can be carried effectively without dialogue. This lends the movie a visceral, raw and elemental core – a heroic-mythical weight and a broad common appeal that it might not otherwise have. The lack of dialogue combined with the broad, sweeping panoramic shots of the bleak tundra give us the distinct sense that this story is rooted in a timeless distant antiquity. One can be tempted to interpret it as a sort of cautionary tale about human nature generally. On the other hand, one can also interpret it as a movie about female endurance and survival – against the elements and against human violence. I am not surprised that many viewers thought the film was insulting to Kazakh culture, often portraying it as grim and brutal. But the female characters in particular demonstrate real spiritual strength through the various ordeals, even when they are pitted against each other by the harsh realities of their marginal lifestyle.

Even so, speaking personally – despite being well-scripted, brilliantly-executed and gorgeously-shot, Kelin is the sort of film I’m content to watch once, and I can see why it was considered controversial. I might recommend it to fans of art-house and wilderness-survival films both, but I can’t in good conscience recommend it generally.

Baikonur: space-age romanticism and færie realism

Gagarin (Asochakov) and Julie Mahé (de Villepin) in Baikonur

I recently watched the 2011 German-Kazakhstani romantic comedy Baikonur directed by Veit Helmer and starring Alexander Asochakov, Marie de Villepin and Sitora Farmonova. Outlandish and charming, its love story sometimes seems to take a back seat to broader themes, not least of which are the (post-)Soviet enthusiasm for space, the more prosaic impacts of the space programme on local life, and more generally on the tension in Kazakh life between tradition and modernity. Caught thematically between Jules Verne and the Brothers Grimm, ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ themes blend together in odd ways, as does the strange relationship between Kazakh semi-nomadic life and literal rocket science. Baikonur seems to delight in, and explore to a much better effect than I did, the odd confluence between folklore and space exploration. (I still think the folkloric choice of name for the Chinese rover, its landing on Tolkien’s birthday, and the actual attempt at lunar agriculture, are all more than a little suggestive that way!) It also makes a point of turning inside-out our expectations of sæcular space and time. Space is enchanted; even the old Soviet machinery of the ISS seems to operate by the logic of mediæval romances. And yet the characters who are most attuned to ‘færie’ are also the ones most drawn back to earth, to the realities of the situation of ‘the people here’.

The cinematography is excellent; it must be said that Helmer seems to have a taste for a human-level view of big things and big events. Helmer is judicious and effective, with a subtle wink and nod to the audience, in his use of archival footage of old Baikonur launches: he knows exactly the kind of space-age nostalgia and Star Trekky feelings of exploration he is evoking. In fact, the opening sequence sees Nazira sketching rocket launches in the sand, while archival footage of old Baikonur launches transitions in from the background.

We get treated to a lot of ground-level shots of the eponymous Cosmodrome and the Kazakh steppe – the grand stage for the very relatable and very poignant human drama among the protagonists. Speaking of which, the acting is also quite good. Asochakov absolutely nails his performance as Iskander ‘Gagarin’ Orynbekuly – a crafty but good-hearted Kazakh whiz-kid who aids his village by maintaining the radio equipment which helps them scavenge and trade in scrap metal from jettisoned modules of rocket launches at the nearby Cosmodrome. (The Kazakhs justify this with the principle that ‘whatever drops from the sky is a gift from God’.) Disarmingly earnest and sweet, Iskander’s dreams of becoming a cosmonaut himself are played arrow-straight, without the slightest hint of irony. His fellow nomad Nazira, played by Farmonova, clearly has a liking for Gagarin but shows it mostly by teasing him or by giving him folkloric advice (all of which seems to come true at one point or another in the film). But Gagarin has eyes only for the French tourist-cosmonaut Julie Mahé – played by Marie de Villepin – whom he watches prior to her launch on the television, and then later discovers comatose on the steppe after her capsule lands back on Earth.

Warning: as usual, there are SPOILERS in the discussion of the plot below.

In the broad strokes: we get introduced to the two sides of this love triangle early on. On the one side, we get scenes of Julie Mahé as she is preparing for her launch – long and loving shots of rockets being hauled on Soviet-era trucks to the launch site; a Russian Orthodox priest blessing the rocket and astronauts with aspergillum and holy water; the countdown and liftoff; Julie entranced by the outline of the earth as seen from space; the docking at the International Space Station. Mahé’s ecstasy is mirrored precisely in Gagarin’s love of everything rocketry- and space-related – he even keeps in touch with a Kazakh technician in the Cosmodrome who apparently comes from the same aul. Gagarin and Julie share the same rapturous gazes skyward, the same dreams of spaceflight. But Gagarin, when he turns on his old television set and sees Julie’s face there as she’s on her way up, finds his space-age romanticism transmuting itself into puppy love.

All the while, Gagarin’s perpetually-dishevelled childhood friend Nazira – like him, an orphan, due to the dangerous (and, we later learn, poisonous) nature of their aul’s scavenging work – likes to spend her time either yelling at him or insulting him. But it’s more than clear she harbours deeper feelings for him, and doesn’t see him merely as a geeky younger brother. (Nazira’s definitely a Type A tsun that way.) We see her offering him sage advice and camel dung for engineering purposes; and we get the clear sense that she’s something of a ‘diamond in the rough’, but Gagarin’s a bit too intent on his scavenging work (and daydreaming about space and Julie) to notice her. By the way – the wide-angle shots of the aul are terrific: traditional yurts decked out in bits and pieces of scrap metal from the Cosmodrome.

Julie’s ISS tour comes to a close and she is sent home – but a calculating error causes her module to overheat on reentry and crash into the Kazakh steppe ‘under the radar’. Gagarin finds her crashed pod and Julie herself inside, comatose – he carries her back to his yurt, makes her comfortable, but finds he can’t wake her up. Nazira suggests that he wake her up with a kiss, like in Sleeping Beauty, and then teases him about being a bad kisser when he can’t. (She then promptly demonstrates how to kiss properly – on him.) Gagarin eventually succeeds in waking Julie up – but she has amnesia and can’t remember anything about herself.

Due to several miscommunications on the part of Gagarin (who tries to get her the bathtub she asks for), Julie becomes convinced that she’s Gagarin’s köketai – his fiancée. Nazira is not too happy about this, and she throws some great shade on Julie and Gagarin as she remarks: ‘Must be nice to just forget everything.’ She later tells Gagarin: ‘If you touch her, you will lose her.’ The two bickering village elders also try to get Gagarin’s köketai off him with cash, each trying to outbid the other. When Gagarin’s grandfather informs the Cosmodrome that Julie has been found, Gagarin takes her out of the aul and into a cave, where Julie starts eagerly making love to him. As they climax, Julie suddenly – and awkwardly – regains her memory, and promptly storms out of the cave, furious with Gagarin for having deceived her. The hapless but entirely earnest Gagarin meekly offers to return her to the Cosmodrome… but later lands himself a job at the Cosmodrome by leveraging his discovery of Julie to the embarrassed and mortified director of spaceflight, who doesn’t want it leaked to the press that Baikonur lost one of its cosmonauts.

At the Cosmodrome, Gagarin makes every effort to get back in touch with Julie, but his efforts are frustrated. He even enters the cosmonaut programme and is promptly hazed by the Cosmodrome technicians by being put in the high-G centrifuge. (He acquits himself well at eight G’s – the gobsmacked technicians remark that he’s ‘just like the real Gagarin’.) He eventually manages to meet up with Julie, who is working on a solar panel in her spacesuit – for a moment, we are fooled into thinking that he went up to space to meet her, but, in a nice cinematographic touch, we learn they’re in the training tank when bubbles start rising around their helmets. Julie, who is eager to get up to the space station again, repeatedly puts him off – to the point where Gagarin uses camel dung from his village to sabotage the space launch so he can talk to Julie one last time.

When he finally does, Julie admits she’s impressed by Gagarin and that his köketai really did love him, but tells him point-blank that she’s not the person he thinks she is, and that her heart is already given to the stars – which appears to be a definitive moment at which Gagarin realises that he does, in fact, care about ‘the people down here’ more than he does about spaceflight.

This transition, if it had been handled cursorily or without a certain degree of foreshadowing, would have come off as a bit cheap. But Gagarin clearly does care about his aul, even when he’s bickering with Nazira or trying to skive off collecting space scrap. At the Cosmodrome, Nazira visits on horseback to tell him to either come back or teach her how to use the ham radio, so the old folks at home won’t starve – which Gagarin reluctantly does. (Nazira doesn’t succeed in using the radio, and to cool her frustration takes a bath in Julie’s bathtub instead.) Gagarin is clearly affected when he learns the village elders have injured each other in a fight over scrap, and he is shaken when he learns that the scrap metal they’d been harvesting is carcinogenic. When Gagarin’s friend the Kazakh technician tells him not to worry about the aul – he’s got a great cosmonaut career ahead of him – that’s when he decides to walk away from the Cosmodrome. Significantly, he dons a takiya and a traditional Kazakh jacket as he does so – and immediately goes out and buys two lambs for breeding. (This is where we get to see the cameo by Nursultan Nazarbaev’s granddaughter, as the incredibly-cute but hard bargain-driving shepherd girl.) He comes home to his aul and is greeted at once by a glowing, freshly-bathed Nazira in a clean koilek, who comes and sits with him as they watch Julie’s rocket lift off from the Cosmodrome.

End spoilers.

This film is, for the most part, a sweet and slightly sad tale of first loves – but it’s also in itself something of a mournful love song for a bygone age of space-bound optimism, enthusiasm, big dreams for a humanity united by common technological endeavor; and, at the end of the day, a reaffirmation of the realism of ancestral wisdom. Baikonur with all of its now-incredibly dated technology is shown pretty straight – big-box electronics with knobs and dials and incandescent indicator lights under bits of coloured plastic; exposed tubes and wires and hardware-store engineering – and that is sometimes (as in the part where Gagarin sabotages one of the valves with camel dung) played for laughs. But Helmer wants us to look at Baikonur through Gagarin’s and Julie’s eyes: to look heavenward and see and understand the enchantment of spaceflight as it took people during the space race. Helmer wants us to touch our hearts with the grand, Vernean Romanticism which inspired not just the Space Race, but also Star Trek and the American and Soviet science-fictional traditions.

By way of contrast, the Grimmish, Chestertonian-Tolkienian færie-tale logic embodied by Nazira’s proverbial wisdom actually manages to bring Gagarin (and us) back down to earth (or, dare I say, there and back again?), to get us to look level at ‘the people back here’. Nazira is the true believer in the ‘doctrine of conditional joy’; the one who keeps reminding us of the hidden costs of reaching for the stars. She’s the one who first suggests that: the metal is poisonous; that orphans should stick together; that the sleeping princess can be awoken with a kiss; that touching her will mean losing her; that to fly up into space is to trespass on the realm of the ancestors. Nazira’s heartfelt kiss might have had something of a delayed effect, but that was what woke Gagarin up from his space-bound dreams, and turned him back toward the aul, the nomadic life, the traditional œconomy. It’s the færie logic and the traditional wisdom that helps Gagarin to grow and mature as a character.

Still, Helmer is a skilled enough director that he doesn’t make his point in a ham-fisted way, or try to answer the dilemmas for us. The final frame manages to showcase the real draw on both sides of that – the fields where the lambs will graze being brilliantly lit up by a blastoff. Yet the question remains very much open whether the two of those can indeed coexist in the long run. I’m somewhat over-intellectualising it here, though. Baikonur is what it is – a sweet, quirky and very post-Soviet romantic comedy, and one which I would highly recommend to the age-appropriate audience.

Our father among the saints Dúnstán of Canterbury

Saint Dúnstán of Canterbury

Today in the Orthodox Church we venerate one of the best-known saints of Old England and one of the greatest Archbishops that Canterbury has ever had, a figure of nation-wide veneration in all the great apostolic Christian traditions, and a noteworthy champion of the monastic tradition, Saint Dúnstán*.

The year of Saint Dúnstán’s birth is not quite certain. (Most Orthodox sources I’ve seen list it as 909, but as a circa figure. Some sources, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, list it as late as 925.) However, we do know to whom he was born: a noble West Saxon þegn named Heorstán and his pious wife Cyneþrýð; and we also know where he was born: on their lands at Baltonsborough near Glastonbury in the far English southwest. Similarly to Saint Willibrord, the hagiographical accounts state that Saint Dúnstán’s mother was, during her pregnancy, given to understand in a dream her child’s future holiness.

Dúnstán was something of a wunderkind: bright, eager and aflame with interest in all fields of learning. This being so he caught the notice of his uncle, Saint Ælfhéah ‘the Bald’ of Minster, who was then serving as Bishop of Winchester. Ælfhéah directed his bright young nephew’s enthusiasm toward the church, and tonsured him a priest. His uncle then tried to persuade him to become a monk, but he was not convinced he was capable of leading a celibate life. (Note that priests in the Western Church at this time were not celibate!) After suffering from a painful tumorous disease of the skin which he briefly but erroneously thought was leprosy, and from which he wondrously recovered, he seems to have had a conversion experience. He took his uncle’s advice, turned toward the contemplative life and became a monk at Glastonbury Abbey – a site which had been revered both by the heathen and by Christians for its associations with Saint Joseph of Arimathea, King Arthur and the Holy Grail.

With his abbot’s permission, he built a small cell within the monastery precincts, lived as a hermit, and devoted himself to studies of all kinds. He absorbed the book-learning of the Irish monks who had there preserved and transmitted much holy writ from the Danish raiders. He also studied music, painting, manuscript illumination, calligraphy, engineering and the arts of blacksmithing, bronzesmithing and silversmithing, and, excelling in all these technical arts, became a leading light in the Church for both restoration and the commission and construction of new works of sacred art. Similarly to Saint Bernward in Germany, Saint Dúnstán was regarded in mediæval times as the patron of smiths, and now as a patron of machinists and metallurgists! Indeed there is a story in Dúnstán’s hagiography of how, while in his monastic cell, Saint Dúnstán was visited and tempted by the Devil – and he took a pair of blacksmith’s tongs and pinched the Devil by the nose with them.

According to the church tradition, it was Éadmund Æðeling who summoned his monastic kinsman to the royal court to act as the royal chaplain, only later to dismiss him unceremoniously. Éadmund had a hunting accident shortly after that nearly killed him. In gratitude to God for his life, Éadmund – remembering his ill-treatment of the man of the cloth – beckoned Dúnstán back and appointed him Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey. Once there, Dúnstán swiftly began regularising and rigorously enforcing the Rule of Saint Benedict among the monks of that house. In addition, he directed the monks to undertake both the useful and artistic endeavours he had taken the time and effort to master for the glory of God. Under the vigorous guidance of Saint Dúnstán, Glastonbury Abbey became a centre of both learning and material culture, and germinated a whole class of educated priests and monks.

Éadmund Æðeling therefore was responsible for the beginning of the great tenth-century Benedictine reform movement in England, of which Saint Dúnstán and Glastonbury Abbey were the vanguard. He was murdered in a political assassination not long afterward, though, and he was succeeded by his brother Éadred. Saint Dúnstán apparently also enjoyed a fairly close relationship with the new king of England, as Éadred continued to support the Benedictine reforms. Dúnstán was also responsible for helping Éadred king negotiate a lengthy period of peace with the Danes, leaving the Saxon kingdoms with some time and space to rebuild.

Éadred reigned for nine years and was succeeded by Éadmund Æðeling’s son Éadwig in 955. An infamous story that is often repeated in Saint Dúnstán’s hagiography is that of Éadwig’s coronation. At the feast where all the high and great among the English were gathered to witness and feast Éadwig’s crowning, Éadwig himself refused to show up. Saint Dúnstán took it upon himself to seek him out, and going into the young king’s bedchamber, found him enthusiastically making love with his third cousin Ælfgifu and with her mother Æþelgifu, with the crown of England cast idly onto the floor at the foot of the bed. Incensed, Dúnstán attacked the two women, rebuked his young kinsman harshly, grabbed him bodily and forced him back to the hall where his own feast was in full swing. The new teenage king did not take kindly to this reproof: he later had Saint Dúnstán cast out of Glastonbury Abbey and banished to Ghent, where he took up residence at the Abbey of Saint Peter.

Éadwig’s rule in England was tumultuous and brief. He married Ælfgifu, but was later forced to annul the marriage on account of the Church’s stand on consanguinity. He faced a large-scale insurrection in Northumbria. He also gave away an immense number of royal lands to both the nobility and the Church, particularly Abingdon Abbey. And he died only four years after taking the Crown, under circumstances which are still not particularly clear. (Naturally, neither sæcular nor churchly historians have been particularly kind to him.) Éadwig was succeeded by his brother Éadgár ‘the Frithsome’, one of whose first acts was to recall Saint Dúnstán from his lowland exile and name him, with the help of Archbishop Saint Oda of Canterbury, Bishop of Worcester.

Dúnstán took to his new charge as Bishop of Worcester with his usual energy and fervour, and was soon elevated to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. He was sent to Rome in the year 960 to claim his omophor; on the way there he was so generous in giving alms to the poor that the retainers sent with him objected, and Éadgár’s steward rebuked him for lavishness. Saint Dúnstán merely replied that they trust in Christ. Their prayers were answered, for they were given shelter and provisions that very night by a Benedictine abbot who resided on their road. On Saint Dúnstán’s return, he advised Éadgár to appoint Benedictine reformers to key positions within the Church hierarchy, and also to implement a vigorous defensive strategy against the Danes. In the years of peace which followed, by which Éadgár earned his byname, monasteries were reëstablished; churches were rebuilt; holy orders were rectified and the licence with which monks and priests behaved was sharply curbed. (Dúnstán was insistent that monks in particular take up useful and productive work within the cloister.) Saint Dúnstán even composed a coronation Liturgy for Éadgar in 973, of which the full text still survives, and which has served as the Liturgical basis for all English and British coronations ever since.

Saint Dúnstán also played a certain rôle in the events which led up to the coronation and martyrdom of the saintly Éadweard King, having taken the young king’s side against the evil machinations of his wicked and murderous stepmother Ælfþr‎ýð. At the coronation of Éadweard’s half-brother, Éadgár’s and Ælfþr‎ýð’s son Æþelræd, Saint Dúnstán was the one to prophesy that on account of Éadweard’s death many troubles would beset his rule. After that, his influence over kings was at an end. He retired to Canterbury where he would spend the rest of his life in monastic prayer, labour and contemplation.

Saint Dúnstán spent long hours in his devotions, and kept the Hours and the Liturgies regularly as the Rule dictated. He cultivated particular devotions to the local shrines of Saints Augustine and Æþelberht. He worked tirelessly at his handicrafts, writing and smithing, for the betterment of the monastic communities in England, and gave without reserve to all those who asked of him, having a particular love for the needy and the destitute, widows and orphans. (It needs to be remembered that this is more than mere hagiographical flourish. Dúnstán and his whole reform movement hearkened back to a time when the Benedictine houses were wayhouses for the sick, travellers and the needy, as they were intended to be.) Having a forevision of his death in 988, he made all due preparations and made peace with all of his fellow monks before receiving Unction and the Gifts for the last time. His last words were said to have been: ‘He hath made a remembrance of His wonderful works, being a merciful and gracious Lord; He hath given food to them that fear Him.’

Saint Dúnstán was buried in the Cathedral, and his tomb was a popular destination for pilgrims and the ailing throughout the Middle Ages. Until the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket, Saint Dúnstán enjoyed the distinction of being England’s most popular saint. Holy Father Dúnstán, inspired craftsman, rectifier of monks, lover of Christ’s poor, we ask you intercede with Him today for the salvation of our souls!

By thee, O Dúnstán, hath the whole land of England been wondrously adorned,
For thou didst labour unceasingly to restore all the monastic houses laid waste by the heathen,
To people them again with zealous monks and nuns,
And to provide them with strict rules of pious order wherewith to govern their lives.
Wherefore, the Church of Christ doth ever praise thine all-honourable name, O holy bishop.

* A brief orthographical note here, as I was asked this question specifically by fellow-blogger Chase Padusniak over at Patheos Catholic: why do I use acute accents when rendering Old English names like Dúnstán? I try to – but don’t always consistently – mark long vowels according to modern orthographical convention. For the same reason I still use the letters æsc, eð and þorn, but not ƿynn for ‘w’. At the same time, though, I follow the slightly-older usage of acute accents rather than macrons in marking long vowels because: a.) I did take a little bit of Icelandic first, and b.) I’m too lazy to symbol-insert macrons instead of keystroke-inserting acute accents in Word. (By the way, that’s the same reason I use circumflexes instead of macrons when transliterating Arabic or Japanese – but not Greek or Aramaic where these diacritic marks serve different orthographical purposes.) Even a near-miss obsessive-compulsive like yours truly has his limits.

Our venerable father Breandán ‘an Loingseoir’ of Clonfert

Saint Breandán of Clonfert

The sixteenth of May is the feast day of Saint Breandán of Clonfert, also known as Breandán ‘the Navigator’. One of the great itinerant Celtic Church fathers and a founder of many monasteries, he is noteworthy for his daring feats of seafaring and missionary exploration that earned him a deserved place in mediæval literature and legend.

Breandán [also Brendan, Bréanainn or Brandanus] was born in Tralee, in County Kerry in the firths of the far Irish southwest, in the year 484. His parents, Findlugán and Carae, appear to have been of humble background, but on the night he was born it was said that bright angels hovered over his house. He was nurtured early in his life and tutored in the faith not by a man, but by one of the Church’s holy mothers, Saint Íte of Killeedy; at the age of twenty-seven he was ordained a priest by his friend and mentor Saint Erc of Slane. At some point he may also have studied under Saint Fionnán of Clonard. It was shortly after his ordination, though, that he began making missionary and church-founding voyages by coracle, or hide-covered wicker boat – which he undertook for the next two decades of his life.

His first faring took him into the Aran Islands off the western coast of Ireland between Galway and Clare, where he founded a monastery. He then travelled to Hinba, or Eileach an Naoimh, off the coast of Scotland, where he visited the anchoress Eithne ni Mac Naue and her son Saint Colum Cille. Local tradition has it that he helped Eithne to found a full monastery there.

Subsequent voyages of Breandán an Loingseoir took him to Wales and the coast of Brittany, where he founded more churches and pastorally strengthened those which were already there. He founded monasteries near the coasts of his own homeland. Two with which his name is closely associated are Ardfert near his home in County Kerry, and Ballynavenooragh near Dingle. Later voyages he made took him to the Hebrides and the Orkneys, and he is even said to have visited the coast of Iceland, where he is locally known as Brandanus.

The monastery which Breandán is most closely associated with, though, is Clonfert in Galway, which the saint founded in the year 557. At its peak, the monastery founded by Saint Breandán housed three thousand monks, all striving tirelessly for the glory of God. However, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries it was sacked repeatedly by Danish invaders and its glory was significantly diminished; unfortunately, only the cathedral – dedicated to Saint Breandán – remains standing today. The holy saint of God lived to the age of eighty-three, and reposed in the Lord, at peace among his brothers, on the sixteenth of May, 577.

Illustration from Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis

Saint Breandán’s voyages were the subject of a significant piece of mediæval Latin literature, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, or Voyages of Saint Brendan the Abbot. Partly a work of travel literature like The Spiritual Meadow, and partly a work of fantasy, the Navigatio was quite popular in Western Europe and was translated into a number of vernacular languages. In the broad strokes, the story goes thus:

While Saint Breandán was still abbot at Ardfert, his monastery was visited by a monk named Barinthus, who in his worldly life had been a nobleman of the Northern Uí Néill. While he stays with Abbot Breandán, the monk begins to speak about his voyages to a great isle in the sea toward the west, the Land of Promise of the Saints. This isle was, in his telling, a paradise – a land which was always lit with daylight, filled with flowers and ripe fruits, where every stone on the ground was a precious gem. Half the isle was open to him, however, the greater and more glorious half was barred to him and all his companions, for they were not deemed worthy to set foot across the river that ran through the isle. Only his abbot Mernoc was allowed to cross, and he would often stay away from them months at a time. Only with great reluctance did Barinthus return to Ireland to bear word of this isle to the monks of Ardfert.

Abbot Breandán then selected fourteen of his monks to prepare for a voyage west. He fasted together with them for forty days, and afterwards Saint Breandán commended the abbey to his prior. He built a coracle, piled provisions for a forty-day journey inside, and pushed off with his fourteen monks from Ardfert into the Atlantic. Just before they left Ardfert, three more monks of his house begged to join him; with some reluctance Breandán allowed them, though he warned two of them that their motives were not pure, and that this voyage would likely be to their deaths.

At sea, the monks in the coracle encountered many strange, wondrous and perilous sights and situations. In one island, a spire of rock reaching the clouds, they found a marvellous treasury of silver in a cave beneath the water-line; but they only borrowed what they needed on which to break bread and eat, and took nothing. On another island, they beheld flocks of sheep which grew to be as heavy and strong as oxen, but which were tamer than lambs. On yet another island, they discovered a pure spring issuing forth the waters of sleep, surrounded by flowers and flocks of many-hued birds—which were actually fallen angels attempting to repent of having followed Lucifer. Another island they landed on turned out to be the back of some mighty sea creature, which moved along with the ship. They encountered a whale which they feared would devour the ship. They also encountered fantastic creatures such as gryphons, and landed on an island which seemed to be made entirely of crystal. At another time they came across an ancient man chained to a rock in the sea, who was buffeted by the waves – it turned out to be Judas Iscariot, who was condemned to remain there until the Last Judgement. Navigatio relates also, however, that the monks spent long stretches of time involuntarily fasting aboard their coracle, rationing food particularly when they were becalmed or when they spent many days at sea between islands.

One of the three monks, who had joined the coracle uninvited, being tempted by a devil of greed, stole a silver bridle-bit from one of the islands they visited. He repented of his sin, and Saint Breandán exorcised him of his devil and administered to him the Gifts. He died repentant. Another of the three monks, however, was carried off by devils and cast into hell through the mouth of an erupting volcano. The third of these monks was sent among a monastic community on the Isle of the Strong Men, there to live the rest of his days in constant repentance.

At last Saint Breandán and his monks made their way to the Island of the Promise which was described by Father Barinthus, and they found everything as he had described it. Everywhere was lit with daylight, even during the night when the sun set. Every tree was full of fruit, every other plant was in full flower, and the ground was covered with precious stones. They were met by a young monk who bade them take as much as they liked of the fruit and gems back to their boat and back to Ardfert Abbey, so that those who met them might see and wonder at God’s works. After spending three days as the guests of the Isle of the Promise, Saint Breandán gave thanks to the Holy Trinity and set back in his coracle to Ireland, where he did all as the young monk told him.

It was thought for some time during the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration that Saint Breandán had reached the shores of America. This tale was later, in a more ‘enlightened’ age, taken to be mere pious fiction. But one Anglo-Indian professor, author and explorer, Tim Severin, was taken with the tale of Saint Breandán. He set out to prove that a voyage to the Americas from Ireland may have been possible, in a coracle like the one described in the Navigatio. He and his team built a coracle with a wooden frame, used ox hides tanned with oak bark to cover it, and smeared the hides with rendered fat to waterproof them. Tim Severin set out in this coracle and used it to make his way from Ireland to the Hebrides, the Færœ Islands, Iceland (where he and his team spent the winter), and even all the way across to Newfoundland. He encountered icebergs, volcanoes and whales, encounters with the likes of which could have produced the descriptions seen in the Navigatio. Severin didn’t set out to prove conclusively that Breandán had landed in Newfoundland, only to show that such a voyage was possible with the technology and knowledge available to him at the time – similarly to how Thor Heyerdahl proved that it was possible for the Polynesians to have had contact with præ-Contact South America in his Kon-Tiki expedition.

It’s possible that Tim Severin’s recreation of Saint Breandán’s voyage was one of the real-life influences on the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode ‘Explorers’, in which Captain Benjamin Sisko and his son Jake board a sub-light space vessel with solar sails and attempt to ride particle currents to the next star system. Tellingly, the original script featured the expedition being led by CPO Miles O’Brien – the Irish station engineer portrayed by Colm Meaney. Holy father Breandán, voyager and founder of many monasteries, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

The Divine Likeness has been perfected in thee, O holy Father Breandán,
For taking up the Cross thou hast followed Christ,
And by thy deeds thou hast taught us to disdain the flesh for it passes away,
But to cultivate the soul for it is immortal:
Wherefore, O holy father, thy spirit rejoices with the Angels.

Clonfert Cathedral, Ireland

Virgin-Martyr Damhnait of Geel

Saint Damhnait of Geel

The fifteenth of May is the feast-day in the Orthodox Church of Saint Damhnait, a beautiful young woman who was murdered by her own father after fleeing to Belgium. This seventh-century virgin-martyr remains the patroness of the mentally ill, those suffering from depression and anxiety, and victims of incest and domestic abuse. A quick note on the saint’s name: the Greeks make an understandable mistake (as on this icon) with regard to the etymology, which is a mistake nonetheless. It is not, as they imagine, a local distortion of the mythology-derived Greek name Daphnē ‘laurel’, but is instead derived from the Gælic word damh ‘poet’ and the diminutive feminine suffix -ait. Though perhaps, on second thought, not so much a mistake as all that? We do, after all, call them ‘poet laureates’ for a reason.

Damhnait [more commonly in English Dymphna, but also erroneously Daphne as mentioned above] was born to a heathen king of Oriel named Damon, and his Christian wife, who was remarkably beautiful. Their daughter, whom her mother had secretly baptised as a Christian, grew up in her very image, and at the age of fourteen she conceived a desire to consecrate herself to God and to live as an anchoress. She got her wish, but shortly thereafter her mother fell ill and died.

Damon grieved greatly, and fell into a deep depression as a result of his wife’s death. His mental health deteriorated to such a degree that his chief advisers and stewards began to advise him to remarry. But he vowed he would touch no woman unless she was his former wife’s equal in beauty. This vow of his took a perverse turn, as after several years passed and no such woman was found in Ireland. The depressed king conceived an unlawful lust for his daughter, who very much resembled the wife that he had lost.

Damhnait, seeing and understanding this, resolved to preserve herself and her father by fleeing Ireland. She set off with her priest Gerebern, the court fool and two servants, and took a ship for the Continent. They eventually settled in the city of Geel, now in Belgium. (In the seventh century, Geel would probably have been under Frankish rule.) There they took shelter near a shrine that was dedicated to Saint Martin of Tours. Saint Damhnait had the idea to set up there a hospice, by which she might care for the poor, sick and needy of the village and its surrounding countryside. For the few months that she lived there basically as a political refugee, Damhnait gained a reputation for selfless charity toward people worse off than she was.

Saint Damhnait spent much of her wealth in building and maintaining this hospice, and some of the Irish coin that she spent found its way back to Oriel in trade. When her father began making inquiries about how traders from the Continent had gotten such coin into their possession, it didn’t take him long to deduce where his daughter had gone. He sent agents back along the trade route the merchants used with the same coins Saint Damhnait had used. When they showed these to an innkeeper near Geel, the man – innocent of their true intentions – told them openly of the beautiful young anchoress and her hospital. The spies brought this word back to Damon, who himself struck out and sailed for Geel, at the head of a band of armed men.

Damon came upon the hospital and at once found Gerebern and Damhnait. He ordered his men to slay Gerebern on the spot, and thus the poor Irish priest was martyred. He then tried to force Damhnait to return with him to Oriel, but she steadfastly refused. Roused to rage, the father ordered his daughter’s death. But Damon’s men dared not raise their blades against Damhnait. In pique, Damon drew his own blade and struck his daughter on the neck, severing her head. This happened on the fifteenth of May, around the year 650.

The local villagers came and found the bodies of the two martyrs Gerebern and Damhnait, coffined them decently and interred them in a cave. Later, the relics of these two saints were translated. Damhnait’s relics were moved into a silver reliquary at the church in Geel now named for her, and an active cultus of Damhnait arose in the fourteenth century around these relics, as they were visited in particular by pilgrims suffering from mental illness. Inspired by her Vita, the residents of Geel began taking people with mental problems into their homes as boarders and guests, a form of local Christian hospitality that has existed in an almost-unchanged form for nearly seven hundred years. As a model for treatment, it seems to work wonders, in part because it reduces the stigma on mental health issues and preserves the dignity and self-worth of the guests – whom the residents of Geel take care to treat on equal terms with themselves. The witness and charity of Saint Damhnait is still very much active there, and the approach that she has inspired to dealing with mental health issues deserves to be emulated elsewhere. Holy martyr Damhnait, swift and faithful advocate for the troubled in mind, intercede with Christ our God on behalf of us sinners!

Maddened by lust, the ungodly king raged mindlessly
When his abominable desires were steadfastly refused;
And, rebuked, he hewed down Gerebern the pious priest,
And likewise slew the holy Damhnait his daughter,
Who willingly died to preserve her virginity.
Wherefore, those who are deranged and deluded in mind
Find in her a steadfast advocate and a wellspring of wondrous healing!

Sint-Dimpnakirk, Geel, Belgium