Saint Gwynnog of Llanwonno

Saint Gwynno’s Church, Llanwonno, Wales

In the Holy Orthodox Church, the twenty-sixth of October is the feast-day – along with that of Saint Éata of Hexham and Saint Ælfrǽd the Great – of Saint Gwynnog, a Breton holy man of the Welsh Age of Saints who accompanied both Saint Illtud the Knight and Saint Dyfrig the Bishop. Unfortunately, there is little else we know about him for certain.

Saint Gwynnog [also Gwynno or Gwonno] was probably born in Armorica – that is to say, Brittany – to a man named Cau [who is also called Euryn y Coed aur]. He was likely a student of Saint Illtud in West Wales. There was a pestilence in West Wales at some point after Illtud’s repose in the Lord, called the Yellow Plague of Rhôs; this is the same plague that bore off my sinful ancestor Maelgwn Gwynedd and may very well have done the same to Saint Illtud. Many of the monks who were at Cor Tewdws fled from thence into Brittany; Saint Gwynnog is supposed to have been among these. When he returned to Wales he settled in Glamorgan, where he founded two church enclosures, Llanwonno (literally, ‘Saint Gwynnog’s Church’) and Llantrisant (‘Church of the Three Saints’; the other two being Saint Illtud and Saint Tyfodwg). A nearby farmhouse at Daerwynno may have been the dwelling-place of the saint.

There is no record of any miracles performed by the saint; neither are any of his writings still extant. Not even the whereabouts of his grave or his relics are known. But his churches both still stand, and so do the toponyms of Llanwonno and Daerwynno which attest to his presence as a Christian missionary there. A holy well, Ffynnon Wonno, is located near the church and had been restored sometime in recent centuries, though now it is somewhat overgrown. Holy saint Gwynnog, missionary in the Welsh south, pray unto Christ our God for our salvation!

The English David

Saint Ælfrǽd of Wessex

Today in the Holy Orthodox Church we commemorate the Holy and Right-believing Ælfrǽd the Great, King of Wessex, better known by his modernised name Alfred. Saint Ælfrǽd was truly a pivotal figure, not only in English but in Christian and indeed world history. Of course there were other sainted princes and potentates before him – indeed, plenty of them and perhaps a few too many – and of course there were copious other princes and potentates who truly desired and endeavoured to rule justly. But Ælfrǽd was the first of the ‘barbarian kings’ to truly succeed in uniting the Christian radicalism born of the Benedictine witness to the demands of sacral statecraft. Before Queen Tamara, before Prince Vladimir, and even before Duke Václav – there stood Ælfrǽd. ‘Elf-counsel’, to wit his name, and indeed from his life we can see that his decision-making and his policies were truly fortunate – blessed not by elves but by God.

Ælfrǽd’s quality was not merely shown in war, though his spirited defence of England which stopped the marauding heathen Danes dead in their tracks is certainly worthy of mention, as is his establishment of a reserve force and coast guard to assist in this defence. It was also shown in his passionate love for the education of his people both in the classical mode and in their own vernacular. For him it was not enough merely to have a small, privileged and clerical literate caste as the servitors and interpreters of the nobility both sæcular and ecclesiastical – no. He wanted to inculcate learning among the laity, and not only to high-born sons, through his ‘court school’. And he promoted the bejeezus out of it, not least by wading into the field of scholarly work and popular education himself. He translated Pope Saint Gregory Dialogos’s Pastoral Care, Boëthius’s Consolations of Philosophy and Saint Bede’s History of the English Church and People into, well, English, and also authored his own works on theology, history and gæography in Latin. He commissioned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He even sent shipmen as far afield as Estonia and the White Sea in order to map the coastlines.

Ælfrǽd also personally promoted a codified system of law which was in itself a remarkably ambitious attempt to harmonise the legal customs of the English handed down from Teutonic heathen antiquity, with the Laws of Moses. Legally speaking, he was not only a progressive but downright radical. He forbade private feuds: no small step in an honour culture such the one as he lived in. He took the power of high justice out of the uneven hands of the landlords and placed it in judges who were to deliver impartial judgements in the King’s name and in God’s. He expressly forbade his judges from issuing harsh judgements to the poor while delivering slaps on the wrists of the rich.

Speaking of which, Ælfrǽd also drastically expanded the money supply and instituted a progressive tax code similar to (and possibly inspired by) that of Emperor Constantine. It was based on the productivity and extent of ‘hides’ or landholdings: rich landowners paid proportionally more and contributed more men to the common defence; while poor landowners and smallholders owed proportionally less. And of the revenues he collected from it, one eighth would be directly earmarked what we would consider to be ‘social welfare’: directly given to beggars, hospitals, wayhouses and other sick and needy people. He also made it illegal to make anyone work on Sundays and holidays. Ælfrǽd was committed to a strongly social vision of the common good, not only educationally but œconomically.

In addition to this, he poured massive amounts of energy, time and resources into the building of public works: fortifications of towns or burgs; repairs to cities and roads ruined by Danish pillage; renovations of old and foundations of new churches and monasteries. This energetic promotion of learning and law, welfare and works; this relentless pursuit of a common good – this did not proceed solely from the mind and heart of a man, but it sprang from one enlightened by a sincere and single-minded desire to serve Christ Jesus. Ælfrǽd spent much of his day in prayer and in the reading of the Psalms. He desired to attend – and often did, behind the backs of his þegnas – all the hours that the Benedictines kept, and even fretted that he was oft prevented from doing so by the seasonal and meteorological variability of England’s sunlight!

It is also worth remembering that Ælfrǽd was the youngest son of his father Æþelwulf and mother Ósburg, the youngest indeed of five brothers – a slightly-built boy, and at that one who was often ill with a fearsome and then-unknown ailment (nowadays thought to be Crohn’s disease). It is said his parents brought him to Ireland, seeking healing for him from that nation’s many holy wells and saintly shrines. His mind, though, was active and hungry – according to Bishop Asser, he won from his mother a book of English poems that she offered to the first of her children who could commit it to memory.

Saint Ælfrǽd accompanied his father on pilgrimage to Rome when he was but six years old, and may have met Pope Leo IV there. His father, however, died when he was only nine years old, leaving the kingdom of Wessex to his elder brothers. It was only when Ælfrǽd’s third brother, Æþelræd, ascended the throne, that he began to show his skill – and even then, he was hard-pressed. The West Saxons lost battle after battle to the Great Heathen Here, and in those dark days it looked as though the flickering candle of English independence and Christianity was to be snuffed out forever. But the tenacity of Ælfrǽd and his ability to somehow retain and direct the loyalty of his men under such circumstances changed the tide. He managed to win an engagement against an evenly-manned force of Danes in the Berkshire Downs despite having to fight uphill. However, the losses for the West Saxons kept mounting – including Æþelræd himself, who took a blow which may have killed him at the battle of Marton in April 871.

The kingdom of Wessex, and the fate of England, thus fell upon the slight, sickly shoulders of a twenty-one-year-old Ælfrǽd. After another string of defeats Ælfrǽd was essentially forced to buy the Danes off, in an attempt to buy time for Wessex to lick her own wounds and recover. The Danes did not keep their word and, under a new king named Guðrum, kept on attacking the West Saxons, killing and raping as they went. Ælfrǽd was kept alive through his repeated and seemingly-hopeless engagements through what appears to be the grace of God – and the intercessions of Saint Cuðberht, to whom Ælfrǽd was deeply devoted – combined with sheer cussed stubbornness. He wound up at the head of a hardscrabble, ragtag band that hid out in the scrubby marshlands at Athelney and all that spring mounted hit-and-run asymmetrical attacks and supply raids on the occupying Danes. They won enough help from the lowly folk of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire through the levy at Ecgbryht’s Stone, that they were ultimately able to make a stand at Edington. Unaided by any outside help save that of Christ, they faced the Great Heathen Here which had terrorised and murdered its way across Great Britain for the past decade and more.

Here the English David proved his mettle against the Danish Goliath, for the battle of Edington was a rout for Guðrum and his Danes. The West Saxons formed ‘a dense shield-wall’ and refused to budge; the way that warfare was waged in those days, because the Northmen could not sustain their momentum by breaking through the shield-wall or forcing the West Saxons to give ground, they quickly tired and were beaten back. Ælfrǽd lay siege to the Danish fortress at Chippenham and forced their surrender by starving them out. The Danes promised to withdraw and leave Ælfrǽd’s territory, but significantly Ælfrǽd extracted another concession: the baptism of Guðrum, with Ælfrǽd himself standing as his sponsor.

Ælfrǽd did not merely trust in this baptism to keep the Danes at bay forever, though. He called up his reserve force on a permanent defensive footing, and began his project of constructing fortified towns. He also quickly made a series of politically-astute alliances. He found a high-born Mercian girl, Ealhswíþ (later a saint in her own right), and married her – the better to cement a much-needed alliance between Wessex and Mercia against the Danes. He also spoke frith with the Welsh to his west and the Frisians and Flemings on the Continent – these latter proved helpful to him in building ships which he used to maintain a coast guard against Danish raids from the sea.

Ælfrǽd’s political and educational reforms mentioned above sprang, it seems, both from pragmatic concerns about defence and from a sincere desire to serve God. However, they had the salutary effects of bolstering West Saxon resolve; strengthening and consolidating West Saxon political and military institutions; reinvigorating learning; and rebuilding trust among the common English folk, without whose help Edington and England would have been lost. It’s impossible to overstate how effective he was: at the beginning of Ælfrǽd’s reign Wessex was a beaten, occupied territory; but by the end, it was the undisputed nucleus of a great late flourishing of spiritual, cultural, intellectual and œconomic life in England. He is one of only two kings in England ever to receive the cognomen ‘the Great’, and that is fully deserved – not only on account of his successes in war but also on account of his ability to actively build the common good during peacetime. Holy and right-believing Ælfrǽd, learned prince and protector of the West Saxon lands, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Hearkening to the White Christ,
Thou camest forth from thy flood-girt fastness
To overcome the heathen and lead them forth to holy baptism.
Thou didst build churches, strongholds, shires and swift ships,
Restoring the law of God and making thyself beloved of all.
O wise King and glory of free England,
Who reignest in the Winchester of the heavenly England,
Thou who didst vanquish heathendom by Christendom,
Establish anew the Orthodox Faith in thy land
That we may glorify God, Who alone made thee great!

Holy Hierarch Cedd, Bishop of Lastingham

Saint Cedd of Lastingham

Today is not the Orthodox feast day – that’s the seventh of January – of Saint Cedd of Lastingham (emphatically not to be confused with his brother, Saint Ceadda of Lichfield, commemorated on the second of March), but given that it is his day of blessed repose in the Lord, I felt it would not be entirely unfit to give him a hagiographical blog post today.

Saint Cedd was, in fact, the eldest of four holy brothers – his younger ones being Saint Cynebill, Cælin and the aforementioned Saint Ceadda. All four brothers became priests. Saint Cedd was, like Saint Eata whose feast day we celebrate today, a pupil of Saint Aidan on the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne. He was remarkably astute and a quick learner, not only of sæcular knowledge but also of the ways of the Church Fathers. Such was his progress and his esteem among the monastic brothers that he was found worthy by Saint Finan of Lindisfarne to undertake a mission among the East Saxons. He was given a missionary omophor and sent southward to teach and work among the heathen, including those relapsed, there.

While in Essex, Saint Cedd took up residence at Saint Paul’s in London and again made it the centre of his mission. He founded a number of monasteries and churches, including those at Tilbury and Saint Peter’s at Bradwell-on-Sea. Yet although he was attentive and caring to his new East Saxon charges, his heart still belonged to his Northumbrian homeland and he often made voyages back to Lindisfarne for spiritual renewal. On one occasion, his brother Cælin, who was then þegn to Œðilwald King of Deira (the son of Saint Óswald and his wife Cyneburg, who was later deposed by Ealhfrið), managed to arrange a meeting between the king and Saint Cedd. Œðilwald was apparently charmed by Cedd, and invited the holy man to return. The king plied a reticent Saint Cedd with a sizeable parcel of land at Lastingham, on which he might found a monastery. This monastery and its chapel were dedicated to the Most Holy Theotokos.

Saint Cedd and Saint Cynebill between them spent forty days at Lastingham, praying and fasting strictly in order to purify the site and consecrate it for the monastery. On the thirtieth day of the fast, Saint Cedd was recalled to Essex, and Saint Cynebill continued and completed the forty-day fast in his stead. Saint Cedd would thereafter serve both as abbot in Lastingham, and continue his work as a missionary bishop in the English southeast. Saint Cedd attended the Synod at Whitby and at first took the part of the Celtic faction in the argument over the date of Pascha; however, he seems to have been swayed to the Roman side of the dispute and accepted the ruling of the Synod before he returned to his monastery.

In 664, a pestilence ravaged Yorkshire and Lastingham in particular, and the abbey too succumbed. Both Saint Cedd and Saint Cynebill were claimed by this pestilence, though before they reposed in Christ they were able to commend the abbey to the care of their brother, Saint Ceadda. The burial of Saint Cedd, near the altar at the chapel of the Theotokos at Lastingham, was attended by thirty East Saxon monks from Bradwell-on-Sea, who sadly also fell victim to the same plague. Later, Saint Ceadda would have the relics of his beloved brothers translated to his own parish at Lichfield. Holy Father Cedd, blessed monk and missionary, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

Holy Hierarch Eata, Bishop of Hexham and Lindisfarne

Melrose Abbey

In the Orthodox Church, today we commemorate another holy bishop of Hexham, Eata. He was a close friend and associate of Holy Father Cuðberht of Lindisfarne. Like his friend Saint Cuðberht, he was also a particularly gentle bishop – in studied contrast to Saints Wilfrið and Colmán, his contemporaries on either side of the Synod at Whitby.

Saint Eata was a Northumbrian and, in his youth, a disciple of Saint Aidan, whose steadfast patience and care for others he did his best to emulate and embody in his own life. He studied under Saint Tuda, who was then the monastic Bishop of Lindisfarne and who preferred the Roman computation for the date of Pascha over the Celtic one. He was given the abbacy of Melrose in 651, and soon established his own monastery at Ripon in 658. A dispute with Ealhfrið King of Deira arose three years later, and Ealhfrið stripped Saint Eata of these lands and sent him into exile, during which he returned to Melrose. Saint Bede asserts that Saint Eata’s monks allowed the land to lie fallow before abandoning it. It seems equally likely that they were hounded out for political reasons; after all, the same king would do the same to Eata’s successor in Ripon, Saint Wilfrið, not long after.

Later, when Saint Theodore arrived on British strands and commenced his ecclesiastical reforms, Saint Eata was one of the beneficiaries of his policy of breaking the bishopric of Northumbria into smaller and less powerful diocæses. Theodore rendered to Eata the bishopric of Hexham. After the Synod of Whitby and the repose of Saint Tuda, Eata would become bishop also of Lindisfarne, thus making him the sole episcopal authority in the subkingdom of Bernicia. It was Saint Eata who appointed Cuðberht as abbot of Lindisfarne at this time. At the Synod of Whitby, Saint Eata – along with most of the Lindisfarne monks – preferred the Celtic method of computing Pascha over the Roman method. However, perhaps because of Saint Tuda’s influence, Eata (unlike Colmán) was prevailed upon to accept the Roman date for Pascha.

Saint Eata was prevailed upon by his friend Saint Cuðberht, who had been appointed bishop of Hexham, to switch diocæses in 685. Then Cuðberht became bishop of Lindisfarne and could keep his hermitage on the isle of Farne; and Eata could be nearer his beloved Melrose. Bishop Saint Eata stayed at Hexham for the last year of his life. He fell ill with dysentery and reposed in the Lord on the 26^th of October, 686.

Bishop Eata was very quickly recognised locally as a saint, given his personal meekness and approachability as a spiritual father to many. Holy Father Eata, beloved bishop and abbot, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Holy Hierarch Maelor, Bishop and Apostle to Guernsey and Sark

Abbaye Saint-Magloire de Lehon, France

The twenty-fourth of October is the feast of another Welsh holy man and saint in Brittany, the cousin and disciple of Saint Samson, Saint Maelor. He is renowned as the second bishop of Dol-de-Bretagne. He also has connexions with the Saxon Saint Helier of Jersey, having been a visitor at Jersey, and is also considered the first of the bearers of the Gospel to the isle of Sark in the Channel.

Saint Maelor [also Maglorius or Magloire] was quite close kin to Saint Samson: a double cousin, in fact. Maelor’s mother Afrel was the sister of Samson’s mother Anna of Gwent; and his father Umbrafel was the brother of Samson’s father Amon of Dyfed. Maelor was the eldest child: he had a younger brother Henwg (also commemorated as a local saint) and a youngest sibling, of which we know neither the name nor the gender. He was sent to school together with his kinsman Samson – the College of Theodosius, in fact. The two of them studied together under Saint Illtud, who gifted them not only with the sæcular knowledge of the liberal arts but also with the true knowledge: which is the love of Christ and the love of neighbour. When Samson departed Cor Tewdws for Cornwall and, later, Brittany – so too did Maelor.

Maelor assisted his illustrious and holy kinsman in all tasks, a dutiful, meek and ungrudging disciple who did what he was bidden without complaint. He worked wonders in both Cornwall and Brittany, and he accompanied Saint Samson to Dol. Once in Brittany, Maelor lived for five decades as an abbot at Lanmeur, some 150 kilometres west of Dol, on the other side of Saint-Brieuc. When Samson reposed in the Lord in 565, Maelor was named by his cousin and subsequently confirmed by common consent as the Bishop of Dol. However, he did not persist long in this office. Having been visited by an angel, he resigned his bishopric to Saint Beuzeg and embarked on a journey into the Channel Islands.

In his travels to Guernsey, it is reported that Saint Maelor healed the dumb and deaf daughter of Nivo, the chieftain there, and restored her speech and hearing. The chieftain gave the saint rule over a third of the island as reward. Saint Maelor also visited Saint Markulf’s monastery in Jersey, where he is popularly reputed to have encountered and slain a dragon. This may have indicated that he encountered some remnants of pagan worship on the island and destroyed one of the altars, as is the case with other similar hagiographical dragon-slayings.

In Brittany he also cured a local chieftain named Loyesco of a skin disease which may have been leprosy, which had afflicted him for seven years. In recompense, the chieftain gave Maelor first half, and then the whole, of the island of Sark in the English Channel, which had been part of his demesne. Maelor took sixty-two disciples with him and departed for Sark, establishing a monastery there on the island. He performed a number of wonders among the Celtic residents of Sark, including healings and saving folk from drowning. His stewardship of Sark was such that it was quickly reckoned something of a paradise. Crops sprang up and flourished with little effort, and fishermen hauled ashore nets teeming with their catches. Saint Maelor seems to have had that closeness to nature which was typical of the Brythonic hermits and holy men, including his master Illtud.

He was already a septuagenarian when he left Dol to Saint Beuzeg, and nearing eighty in the last months of his life. In the church he had built on Sark he was visited by an angel, who administered to him the Gifts. For six months afterwards until his repose in the Lord, Saint Maelor could not be drawn out of the Church except for very urgent business. Instead, he would recite the words of Psalm 26: ‘One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life.’ He reposed in the Lord on the twenty-fourth of October, 575, in the midst of his monastic brethren on Sark.

His tomb was the site of many wonders of the same sort he had wrought in life, healing the blind and deaf, curing skin diseases, calming storms and preventing folk from a drowning death. His relics were removed from Sark by stealth, by monks from the abbey of Léhon in the Côtes d’Armor, some miles south of Saint-Malo. In the 900s they were translated from Léhon to Paris, to save them from the onslaught of Norman invaders. Saint Maelor’s cultus is still active in the Channel Islands and in Brittany, particularly in Léhon. Holy father Maelor, meek disciple of your kinsman Samson and gentle father of monks, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

At the bidding of our Father Samson thou didst leave thy native Wales
To serve God in Lammeur’s monastery, O Father Maelor.
Having pleased God with the sweet fragrance of monastic struggle,
Thou didst grace the island of Sark with thy godly repose.
Pray to God for us, O blessed one, that He will spare us
From sudden and unprepared death and grant salvation to our souls.

St Peter’s Church, Sark

Holy Hierarch Mellon, Protobishop of Rouen

Saint Mellon of Rouen

The twenty-second of October is the Orthodox feast-day of Saint Mellon, a Romano-Briton of the early fourth century who became the first bishop of Rouen. Little reliable information exists about the life of Saint Mellon, but his cultus is active in both Wales and in France. He is confused with the Breton Saint Melaine, Bishop of Rennes (commemorated on 10 October), in much the same way that the two Custennins of Cornwall and Scotland are. Given that the constructed language Sindarin was based on Brythonic and Finnic-Ugric influences, it seems to be no accident that JRR Tolkien used the name of this saint as the Sindarin word for ‘friend’, and thus as the password in The Lord of the Rings to the Doors of Durin!

According to the hagiographical legend, Mellon [also Mello or Mellonius Probus] was born a pagan in a small village near Cardiff around the year 229, and throughout his youth he worshipped the old Roman gods. Being a youth of admirably athletic form and pleasing countenance, he was chosen in his twenty-eighth year to bear the tribute from his province to Rome. While in Rome he stopped at the Temple of Mars Ultor to make sacrifice. However, he was met by the strong-willed Pontiff of Rome, the holy martyr Saint Stephen I, as he was coming down from the Temple. Apparently this holy Pope had a strong impression on the youth Mellon, because Mellon had a conversion experience and asked to be baptised in the name of the Holy Trinity. This, Saint Stephen did for him, shortly the Pope and twelve others with him were assassinated in the Temple of Mars on the orders of the wicked Emperor Valerian.

Mellon stayed some time afterward in Rome. He sold all that he had and distributed the wealth among the poor. He was then ordained a priest, but was soon sent back to his native Britain. He went on foot. As he was passing through Gaul, he attended the Divine Liturgy at a church along the road. While the Holy Gifts were being presented, he saw behind the altar an angel of the Lord standing on the right hand of the altar. This angel emerged from the altar with a staff in its hands, and held it out to Mellon, saying:

Receive this staff, by which you will govern the people of the city of Rouen. Do not worry that your way is unknown and your work will be hard, for the Lord Jesus Christ will protect you under the shadow of his wings.

Mellon used the staff on his way as a walking-stick, and his feet were much eased by its use. When at last he came to the town of Rouen, which was then called Rotomagus, he was greeted by a throng of people who thirsted to hear the word of life. The new priest began to preach to them, and among them was a young man named Præcordius, who – like Zacchæus – had clambered up a rooftop the better to see and hear Mellon. Poor Præcordius did not watch his footing, sad to say. He fell from his perch; the fall killed him at once. Mellon hastened to the dead youth’s side and prostrated himself, making the Sign of the Cross and invoking the name of the Holy Trinity. The young man revived, and by this wonder many of the people of Rouen who had been heathens hitherto came to believe.

Mellon was afterwards given the honour of a bishopric in Rouen, and he held this position for forty years until his blessed repose in his old age, in the year 311. During his bishopric he was met with wondrous success, having made firm converts of the Gallo-Roman people who lived there, as Alban Butler says:

In the primitive ages, the surprising light of the gospel breaking in at once upon minds before clouded with darkness, men were startled at such great and infinitely important truths, and at the wondrous works and dispensations of the divine mercy, and the incomprehensible mysteries of love.

Saint Mellon was succeeded as Bishop of Rouen by Saint Avitus [or Avitianus], who is numbered among the Church Fathers of the Council of Arles in 314, and his relics were purportedly removed from Rouen to Pontoise (the Cathedral of Saint Malo) in 880 to preserve them from the depredations of the Normans, but they were destroyed in the French Revolution. Holy hierarch Mellon, pray unto Christ our God for the salvation of our souls!

Cathedral of Saint Malo, Pontoise, France

Chi Zijian’s The Last Quarter of the Moon

A family of Evenki reindeer herders

The Last Quarter of the Moon, or in Chinese The Right Bank of the Argun 《額爾古納河右岸》, Chi Zijian’s 遲子建 multigenerational epic of one extended family or band (urireng, or obshchina) of Evenkil as narrated and viewed through the eyes of a nameless elderly Evenki woman, a ‘long-time confidante of the rain and snow’, is an engrossing and moving read. It’s a panoramic view of life and death on the Chinese northeastern taiga – hunting, foraging, herding, cropping horns on the reindeer, trading furs for supplies, striking camp and moving, making rock paintings, smithing tools, weaving clothes, dancing, making love, rearing children, healing, performing ‘wind burials’ for the dead – across the nine decades of the narrator’s life: from the decline of the Qing Dynasty through ‘reform and opening’.

The language of the book may come across as rustic, and I wonder if something wasn’t lost in translation. There is a great deal of imagery of mountains and forests, of water and wind. The reindeer, not merely livestock but also beloved companions and even forest spirits in their own right, are also treated with reverence. We see through the narrator’s eyes that the human world and the natural world and the spirit world weave into each other. The decidedly shamanistic perspective of the narrator lends a decidedly supernatural ‘tone’ to many of the central events of the book. Omens and forebodings come true. Nature and human life are intertwined in profoundly spiritual ways. However, despite the poetry and folkish natural imagery, the traditional lifestyle is presented without adornment. It is done without papering over, romanticising or anæsthetising how tenuous and fragile that human life was. There is no idyll to be seen here: the urireng is not without plenteous regrets, suffering, sorrows, grudges, even all-consuming hatreds – not to mention sickness, stillbirths, amputations, mental degeneration. Modern medicines, when they come, are greeted with decided enthusiasm: not least because they lift a great burden off the shamaness.

At the same time, she takes a dim view of the coming of modernity and progress: the Sino-Japanese War, the Sino-Soviet split, the construction of roads and townships, the coming of the logging industry, the pull of the young people into the towns. Urbanisation and the decline of the traditional pastoralist Evenki lifeworld is accompanied by a familiar litany of evils: alcoholism, divorce, depression, suicide, promiscuity, crime (i.e., timber smuggling). The disconnexion of the Evenkil from their beloved forests and rivers seems to rob them, in our heroine’s view, of something vital and necessary to their survival. There is an intimation of loss – beautiful, heartbreaking – in the narrator’s elliptic descriptions of the changes that come to her urireng.

Our narrator is a passionate woman, born from a sweet and caring but seemingly ill-fated relationship between a beautiful dancer, Tamara, and a hunter, Linke. Linke’s younger brother Nidu, it turns out, had also pursued Tamara and lost an archery contest for her hand to his brother – and he took up the controlled madness of the shaman as an outlet for his loss. She lives in the shirangju with her parents, her elder sister Lena and her younger brother Luni. Other residents of the urireng are drawn with equal patience, with their characters being illuminated as much by the narrator’s own maturation as by their own decisions and changes in outlook. Ivan, the tribe’s blacksmith who marries a Russian Orthodox KVŽDist former prostitute and fathers two children with her – she leaves him, taking the children, when the Japanese invade; he later becomes a Soviet partisan. Maria and Hase, and their tender-hearted son Dashi. The bitter and caustic Yveline, yoked into an unloving marriage with Kunde by her son Jilende. The brave and gentle Lajide, a hunter from a neighbouring urireng who wins the narrator’s heart. Nihau, the beautiful dancer who marries Luni – but who takes on Nidu’s mantle of shamanism (much to her grief, as her spirit dances cause her to lose her own children).

As the narrator herself bears children, the urireng becomes progressively more shaped by their personalities and perspectives – though her children by Lajide and later Volodya are often ‘echoes’ of their ancestors: particularly their fathers and grandfather Linke. Even though the Evenkil are familiar with the outside through their Russian anda Rolinsky (who sells them tools, sugar, tea, other supplies), the coming of the Japanese causes the outside world of politics and war and technology to break in on the Evenki community in a drastic way.

The Evenki men are conscripted by the Japanese Army – though Ivan runs away and joins the Soviets when the sadistic Japanese commander Suzuki sics the army attack dogs on Kunde for faltering during a marching drill. Their Han contacts change with the coming of the Chinese Communists. Ivan comes under suspicion for his Soviet ties after the Sino-Soviet split. He later requests, out of affection for his estranged wife, a Russian Orthodox funeral rather than a ‘wind burial’. (Many of the Evenki characters possess Russian names, even if they are not of Russian heritage.) Baijiu makes its appearance as a trade good, as a companion at village dances, as a deceptive friend and as a hidden killer. As Han townships pop up, intermarriages occur. Young people leave the urireng and live in the towns – then come back. Modern artworks and attempts at committing Evenki language, song and folklore to writing occur – but are they the preservation of the living embers that Tamara handed down to her daughter, or are they ‘destined to be buried in a grave’? These transitions are ambiguous. They are left hanging over the present-day framing of the narrator’s tale of her past.

Death – whether sudden or lingering, whether it strikes young or old – is a constant presence. And even though we know it and we see it coming, we still feel it, viscerally, when it hits those people whom the narrator loves or comes to love. Small gestures and small actions are given an outsized meaning whenever a parting, however brief or incomplete, might be a final one. In many cases, even characters who are deformed or bitter or who do wicked things, the narrator manages to paint in sympathetic tones based on the losses they suffered. Our narrator is a kind soul – even and especially to those she dislikes. She learns to be so because of her tragic sensibility: her awareness of the proximity and the finality of loss. The collectivism of the Evenki mindset – that collectivism which made them (at first, before Stalin) so amenable to the Soviet system – comes to the surface in this way particularly: even the difficult people are a part of the narrator’s life in indelible ways. It’s one of Chi Zijian’s gifts as an author that we can be made to feel the deaths of even these difficult, wounded people.

The magical realism of The Last Quarter of the Moon – which truly deserves that label despite decidedly not being in the New World, Latin American literary movement which birthed the name – stems from precisely this overlap of the tragic-shamanic (super)natural with blunt portrayals of pastoralist life in transition. Perhaps it would be better to call this genre ‘shamanic realism’. At any rate, this is a bittersweet tearjerker of a novel – but exquisitely written. As far as contemporary Chinese literature goes, it would be very hard not to recommend this one.