#thomas godbless

[fol-de-lol]

I’m sorry, but...

I just read that Thomas Godbless’ fairy servant was called

Dick-come-Tuesday.

[mythopoeticreality]

So I can’t believe this didn’t strike me until just now, but this is how these things go sometimes I guess *shrugs*

Anyway, in the book, when Strange is learning about the Johannites from Sir Walter you come to a footnote about the various false Raven Kings that have risen up over the centuries, and among them is mentioned the Summer King, who apparently “taught his followers to revere nature and wild creatures -- a creed which seems closer to the teachings  of the twelfth century magician, Thomas Godbless, than anything the Raven King ever proposed.”

I’ve always had a bit of trouble trying to knot out how exactly Thomas Godbless (and the Summer Kings’s) approaches to magic and their relationship with it  were different from the Raven King’s own views, especially as magic is shown to be so much reliant on nature and the spirits and beings that reside within it. Shouldn’t Thomas Godbless and the Raven King have similar approaches in that case?

But no, the answer really is there, spelled out in the text. Thomas Godbless reveres nature. It is something to be emulated, looked upon as greater than oneself. He recognizes the need to respect nature, as it is at the center of magic -- but in revering it, Thomas Godbless  places it on a pedistal, above himself. You might make a request of something or someone you revere, but you don’t expect to be treated on equal terms with it. There is a knowledge there that anything done on your account is only done by the other being’s good grace. And in doing that, Thomas Godbless also sperates himself from nature, placeing it apart from himself.

Meanwhile, the Raven King had grown up in Faerie, has lived his entire life amongst Fairy Courts and Kingdoms -- before he’d even  gotten to England, he’d clawed himself up onto his own throne in Faerie. He would regard nature and view magic in much the same way that Fairies do. He doesn’t revere nature, because he sees himself on an equal footing with it. A Treaty? and Alliance? These are means of sorting out power, political tools meant to sort out relationships where both  parties are expecting to be gaining something, and that is how Fairies relate to nature and magic, that is how John Uskglass relates to nature and magic. A Magician -- A Person-- in the Raven King’s view isn’t outside of Nature but very much a part of it. Magic is a form of politics to him, and a King and an Oak Tree can very much be on the same level for him. 

[mythopoeticreality]

Reasons to Love Thomas Godbless:

Lover of nature and animals. Basically a medieval hippy living out in the woods.

Taught himself magic, thank you very much!

“What’s that? The Master of Nottingham isn’t letting woman practice magic? No, no, you hang out with me in my forest and do your thing and we’ll see what he says about that!”

*shows up to the party 15 minutes late and with no starbucks*  "Lord, I bring you the trees and hills. I bring you the wind and the rain."

And that actually *worked* he got the Raven King to *smile*

look, just basically, Thomas Godbless is awesome

[fyeahjsmnquotesandfootnotes]

He fell to musing upon the various stories he had heard concerning the great English magicians and their fairy-servants. Martin Pale with Master Witcherley, Master Fallowthought and all the rest. Thomas Godbless and Dick-come-Tuesday; Meraud with Coleman Gray; and most famous of all Ralph Stokesey and Col Tom Blue. When Stokesey first saw Col Tom Blue, he was a wild, unruly person--the last fairy in the world to ally himself to an English magician. So Stokesey had followed him into Faerie, to Col Tom Blue's own castle* and had gone about invisibly and discovered many interesting things.**

*Brugh, the ancient Sidhe word for the homes of the fairies, is usually translated as castle or mansion, but in fact means the interior of a barrow or hollow hill.

**Stokesey summoned Col Tom Blue to his house in Exeter. When the fairy refused for the third time to serve him, Stokesey made himself invisible and followed Col Tom Blue out of the town. Col Tom Blue walked along a fairy road and soon arrived in a place that was not England. There was a low brown hill by a pool of still water. In answer to Col Tom Blue’s command a door opened in the hillside and he went inside. Stokesey went after him.

In the centre of the hill Stokesey found an enchanted hall where everyone was dancing. He waited until one of the dancers came close. Then he rolled a magic apple towards her and she picked it up. Naturally it was the best and most beautiful apple in all the worlds that ever were. As soon as the fairy woman had eaten it, she desired nothing so much as another one just the same. She looked around, but saw no one. “Who sent me that apple?” she asked. “The East Wind,” whispered Stokesey. On the next night Stokesey again followed Col Tom Blue inside the hill. He watched the dancers and again he rolled an apple towards the woman. When she asked who had sent it to her, he replied that it was the East Wind. On the third night he kept the apple in his hand. The fairy woman left the other dancers and looked round. “East Wind! East Wind!” she whispered. “Where is my apple?” “Tell me where Col Tom Blue sleeps,” whispered Stokesey, “and I will give you the apple.” So she told him: deep in the ground, on the northernmost edge of the brugh.

On the following nights Stokesey impersonated the West Wind, the North Wind and the South Wind and he used his apples to persuade other inhabitants of the mound to give him information about Col Tom Blue. From a shepherd he learnt what animals guarded Col Tom Blue while he slept--a wild she-pig and an even wilder he-goat. From Col Tom Blue’s nurse he learnt what Col Tom Blue held in his hand while he slept--a very particular and important pebble. And from a kitchen-boy he learnt what three words Col Tom Blue said every morning upon waking.

In this way Stokesey learnt enough to gain power over Col Tom Blue. But before he could use his new knowledge, Col Tom Blue came to him and said he had reconsidered: he believed he would like to serve Stokesey after all.

What had happened was this: Col Tom Blue had discovered that the East Wind, the West Wind, the North Wind and the South Wind had all been asking questions about him. He had no idea what he could have done to offend these important personages, but he was seriously alarmed, An alliance with a powerful and learned English magician suddenly seemed a great deal more attractive.

[fyeahjsmnquotesandfootnotes]

There is another version of this story which contains no magic ring, no eternally-burning wood, no phoenix--no miracles at all, in fact. According to this version Margaret Ford and the Master of Nottingham’s daughter (whose name was Donata Torel) were not enemies at all, but the leaders of a fellowship of female magicians that flourished in Nottinghamshire in the twelfth century. Hugh Torel, the Master of Nottingham, opposed the fellowship and took great pains to destroy it (though his own daughter was a member). He very nearly succeeded, until the women left their homes and fathers and husbands and went to live in the woods under the protection of Thomas Godbless, a much greater magician than Hugh Torel. This less colourful version of the story has never been as popular as the other but it is this version which Jonathan Strange said was the true one and which he included in The History and Practice of English Magic.

A description of the alternate (and perhaps more accurate) events of The Master of Nottingham’s Daughter and the Enchanted Ring.

[fyeahjsmnquotesandfootnotes]

There have been very few magicians who did not learn magic from another practitioner. The Raven King was not the first British magician. There had been others before him--notably the seventh-century half-man, half-demon, Merlin--but at the time the Raven King came into England there were none. Little enough is known about the Raven King's early years, but it is reasonable to suppose that he learnt both magic and kingship at the court of a King of Faerie. Early magicians in mediaeval England learnt their art at the court of the Raven King and these magicians trained others.One exception may be the Nottinghamshire magician, Thomas Godbless (1105?-82). Most of his life is entirely obscure to us. He certainly spent some time with the Raven King, but this seems to have been late in his life when he had already been a magician for years. He is perhaps one example that a magician may be self-created--as of course were both Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange.

A brief history of pre-Uskglass magic in Britain, one of Uskglass’s notable disciples, and the necessity of apprenticeship in the study of magic. Whether the assertion of the Revival Age magicians as “self-created” may be arguable, as both had, to some degree, the wisdom passed on to them in books.

[fyeahjsmnquotesandfootnotes]

The first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic and books of magic. And the second thing he learns is that a perfectly respectable example of the former may be had for two or three guineas at a good bookseller, and that the value of the latter is above rubies*.

* Magicians, as we know from Jonathan Strange’s maxim, will quarrel about any thing and many years and much learning has been applied to the vexed question of whether such and such a volume qualifies as a book of magic. But most laymen find they are served well enough by this simple rule: book written before magic ended in England are books of magic, books written later are books about magic. The principle, from which the layman’s rule of thumb derives, is that a book of magic should be written by a practising magician, rather than a theoretical magician or a historian of magic. What could be more reasonable? And yet already we are in difficulties. The great masters of magic, those we term the Golden Age or Aureate magicians, (Thomas Godbless, Ralph Stokesey, Catherine of Winchester, the Raven King) wrote little, or little has survived. It is probable that Thomas Godbless could not write. Stokesey learnt Latin at a little grammar school in his native Devonshire, but all that we know of him comes from other writers.

Magicians only applied themselves to writing books when magic was already in decline. Darkness was already approaching to quench the glory of English magic; those men we callthe Silver Age or Argentine magicians (Thomas Lanchester, 1518-90; Jacques Belasis, 1526-1604; Nicholas Goubert, 1535-78; Gregory Absalom, 1507-99) were flickering candles in the twilight; they were scholars first and magicians second. Certainly they claimed to do magic, some even had a fairy-servant or two, but they seem to have accomplished very little in this way and some modern scholars have doubted whether they could do magic at all.