This is an interesting poem that is thought to describe an observer looking around the Roman ruins in the city of Bath.
Something that’s quite interesting is that the poem - an artifact over 1000 years old - depicts puzzled nostalgia and wonder for even older artifacts, making history seem collapsed and intimate. This strongly influenced Tolkien - and you can pick up some specific places where! (The original Anglo-Saxon narrator states “brosnað enta geweorc,” translated here as “the work of giants is in ruins.” The giants were the Romans; today we spot the word “Ents”, and know what Tolkien was thinking.)
Bath, a prosperous city in the southwest of England, is home to natural hot springs - the only British city with natural ones. Prior to Roman colonisation around AD 60, the city was held by a Celtic tribe who honoured the local goddess Sulis; the Romans, who believed in cultural colonisation, combined her aspects with Minerva to create the hybrid goddess Sulis Minerva. The hot springs were pounced on as an attractive seed for Rome’s famous infrastructure, and the Roman city flourished. As a children’s fantasy novel published in 1906 puts it:
The young man looked astonished for a moment. 'Aquae Solis,' he repeated. 'The best baths in Britain. just as good, I'm told, as Rome. All the old gluttons sit in hot water, and talk scandal and politics. And the Generals come through the streets with their guards behind them; and the magistrates come in their chairs with their stiff guards behind them; and you meet fortune-tellers, and goldsmiths, and merchants, and philosophers, and feather-sellers, and ultra-Roman Britons, and ultra-British Romans, and tame tribesmen pretending to be civilised, and Jew lecturers, and—oh, everybody interesting.”
— Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling
But in 410 AD, only a few hundred years later, Rome withdrew from Britain - and their city fell into ruins, as described in the poem.
Today, the poem itself is in ruins; the work of giants punched through with lacunae. Today, you cannot swim in the Roman Baths - they’re a bloody ancient historical monument, why would you - but you can swim as mystically as you like in the spring next door.
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