In the spring, the roadside banks and hedgerows in Cornwall are dotted with the delicate-stemmed flowers of the wild violet, yellow stars of celandine, and nodding clusters of early bluebells – colours coaxed from their hiding places by the warm sun in this most southwestern tip of Britain. Down one of these winding country lanes near Penzance lies the ancient site of Sancreed Well. Many wells like this one have survived from the time of Middle-earth. A survey conducted in the 1950s identified over twelve hundred in Wales alone.
The path to the well runs from the lane and past an old church, which was probably built in the vicinity of the well, like many churches in those times, to discourage people from seeking spirits at enchanted spots of the landscape in favour of worshipping at the altars of the new religion of Christianity. The path past the church is well trodden, worn hard over the centuries by people who have continued to come here to visit the waters.
Throughout the thousand years of Middle-earth, people came to these wells and sat in their presence in silence, or danced, sang, left offerings and dipped ritual objects into the waters. They used the wells as a way of connecting with the powers of the spirit world.
The first glimpse of the Sancreed Well is not of the well itself but the thorn trees which stand next to it. When I visited one May, their branches were heavy with white blossom, like aromatic snow. And hanging from the branches were scores of coloured ribbons, rags, pieces of material, tied and knotted into place by streams of visitors over the previous months, or even years. Small banners spun in the wind, longer ones draped over the branches and rocked back and forth, a few tied low down dragged onto the ground. Some were quite new and still brightly coloured; most were faded with exposure to the weather, a few very tattered and breaking up with age. The effect is stunning and even eerie. Even now, a thousand years and more since the end of the time of Middle-earth, these tokens carried with them the human need for connection with greater forces, for help, for blessing. Other wells across the country are similarly festooned; the spirit trees are often thorns, but also old ‘blasted oaks’, beech trees and others.
The entrance to the Sancreed Well is a low stone archway, cut into a large mound formed of earth covered with turf. The interior of the entrance glows with soft sunlight slanting through the arch. Inside, stone steps descend steeply into darkness. Stepping carefully down the worn steps, I saw that the interior of the well was lined with stones reaching to a ceiling above. The walls glistened with beads of moisture, and at the bottom of the steps the water sat still and clear as crystal, as it had for centuries.
As I reached the bottom step, the outside world seemed to disappear, and I was cocooned in a timeless space. It was so quiet in the well, so peaceful, so conducive to the floating of images in the mind, to plumbing the depths of one’s fears and wishes. I felt protected in the well’s cool, sparkling, softly-lit embrace. I crouched by the water, and gazed into its depths.
Not only the Celts, but also the later Anglo-Saxons used wells for connecting with the Otherworld. Even where the wells are no longer visible, surviving place-names mark their original presence. The village of Fritwell lies a few miles north of Oxford in the Cherwell Valley, alongside the M40 motorway. In the time of Middle-earth, it was a site of divination. The Anglo-Saxon word ‘friht’ and its derivative words referred to diviners – people who foresaw the future by consulting the oracles or supernatural powers, whereas ‘wella’ is a wellspring. And so Fritwell denotes a place where divination took place at a spring. These divinatory wells were anathema to the Christian church. The eleventh century Laws of the Northumbrian Priests assert that ‘If a sanctuary be on someone’s land around a stone or tree or well or any superstition of that kind then let him who made it pay “law-slight”, half to Christ, half to the landowner.’ The place-name ‘frihtwella’ must have been in use before such practices were outlawed.
Roman Wells
The Romans are counterpointed elsewhere in this book as lacking some of the imaginative sensitivities of Middle-earth culture. However, they also honoured wells. One well dating back to prehistoric times was rediscovered in 1876. Excavations showed that it had originally been built by the Celts and had subsequently been taken over by the occupying Romans. Displacing the indigenous Celts, or at least setting up military overlordship, they built a fort at the well right on the northern border of England, called Brocolita, now named Carrawbrough. Artefacts recovered at the well show that it was dedicated to Coventina, almost certainly a local Celtic goddess who was adopted by the Romans. The Celts presumably told the Romans about her – the soldiers may even have witnessed ceremonies at the well.
It is often said that for the Celts, Romans and later Anglo-Saxons, the wells represented fertility. But this word no longer captures the depth of meaning that it did in those distant times. Today, in the high-tech Western world, we are far more distanced from the sources of our sustenance, and do not therefore feel so attuned to its precious regeneration.
What did fertility mean for the Roman warrior? In the earliest times of the Empire, he was a man living in a remote garrison a thousand miles from the delights of Rome and the comforts of home, often distant from his family and loved ones. Or later in the Roman occupation, which lasted perhaps twenty generations – he may have been born in England, with his family living in a garrison town. But he was an enforcer of the overlordship of an indigenous culture in which resentment and rebellion were ever present dangers. And the posting at Brocolita was not a lonely one. In summer, the land on this northernmost edge of England is beautiful. But the fort was dangerously hard up against the frontier with the Picts, whom the Romans never successfully subjugated. In winter, the dreary desolation and boredom of a remote outpost would have dragged time into tedium. So perhaps Coventina’s special presence connected the centurion with distant loved ones, allayed fears of their health and well-being and vouched for their vitality, reassured against the constant threat of destruction by rampaging Picts suddenly attacking the fort. Perhaps in the summer, there were crops grown nearby which afforded fresh food, rather than the monotonous winter rations. Coventina could be thanked for that. And fertility was a kind of life-force, which sustained each person in body, mind and spirit. So she could respond to a visit by strengthening resolve, resistance, and hope.
It is doubtful that the Romans used Celtic wizards or priestesses to plumb the secret messages of the ancient well of Coventina. Did they use their own divination techniques at such a site? We cannot tell, but the excavations showed that during the time it had been in use, they had gone to the site and celebrated and communed with the goddess. At the very least, in the harsh winters they probably ducked down out of the wind, murmured or even voiced their thoughts, fears and desires, and cast offerings into the deep waters in exchange for a blessing, and perhaps a glimpse of their personal futures.
And not just occasionally, either. When the well was explored in the nineteenth century, the offerings recovered included twenty-four altars, and over fourteen thousand coins, glass, pottery and bronze figures, dating up to the fourth century AD, when the Romans abandoned the fort. The archaeological evidence shows that the well and associated altars may have been attacked around then. The Romans, now Christian, still honoured the wisdom of the wells, but may have been forced to abandon the fort in rapid retreat. Perhaps the Picts scaled their walls. Perhaps, as Christians, the Roman soldiers felt less attuned to Coventina – and therefore no longer under her protection.
Water and the Source
Wells, or natural springs, are formed by underground water trapped between two layers of impervious rock. The water is forced up out of the ground by the build-up of pressure and released through a small gap in the top layer of rock. Such a point of escape can occur naturally, or be engineered by digging or drilling a releasing shaft through the rock. These water phenomena, which we now understand in modern geological terms, were accorded special status among the people of ancient England. Sometimes, in thinking back to the times of Middle-earth, when less was known about the mechanics of springs, it might seem that those people’s precious regard for wells was based on ignorance of these laws of nature. We might imagine that when they came across such attractive features of nature, they were overcome with simple wonder at the sight of water flowing ‘miraculously’ from the ground.
But today in the technologically developed countries of the west, we take water for granted. It is piped into our houses, and we use it with barely a second thought for drinking, cooking, washing, bathing, showering, flushing waste, cleaning cars, watering lawns and swimming. Waterfountains spray attractively in our town squares, and fish swim hypnotically in the bubbling water of their tanks as palliatives in the dentist’s waiting room. Our everyday encounters with water are frequent, but not mindful.
However, the pulse of life beat more deeply for the people of Middle-earth than it does for us. Water was more than just a biological feature of life, to be used pragmatically. Every spring, every woodland brook, every river in glen or valley, even lakes were imbued with the presence of spirit. It was not the wide-eyed marvelling at the appearance of a spring which directed such sacred thoughts, but rather the sense of connection with a realm more encompassing, transcending and deeply imaginative. Waters were, for the people of Middle-earth, flowing from the very source of life.
Early goddesses like Coventina were not the all-encompassing major deities who as arose later in Middle-earth, possibly to counteract the incoming Christianity, with its single sky-god. Local goddesses were spirits, similar to elves. Such Otherworld presences at sources of water existed because the outpouring of this liquid from the earth was blessed, magical and powerful, and therefore emanated from and was protected by the spirit. Many of them had individually named spirit beings to whom blessings were offered.
Of course, the people of the real Middle-earth knew that water fell from the sky, drained into streams and rivers, and flowed to the ocean. But this pragmatic account of a geological and meteorological process was not enough. It described the mechanics of how, but not the why of origins. Water was more important than that – it was invested with spirit. And so any person in Middle-earth using water did so with an additional, parallel account of the flow of waters in mind and heart, a vision which dipped into their deep well of imagination.
Many of the main sources of rivers in western Europe were dedicated as sanctuaries, especially at their source. The spirits of these water sources had a strong presence and appearance. Most often people thought of them as beautiful female spirits who were associated, and represented the larger awareness of the Earth Mother.
The cosmological geography of the real Middle-earth’s Upperworld was of a land having twenty-seven great rivers flowing through it, unabated, and perpetually. Seven more great rivers connected the Upperworld with Middle-earth, the land of people. Snorri Sturluson names flowing rivers as called, ‘Slow, broad, cool, battle-defiant, loud-bubbling, forward-rushing, old, spear-teeming’, and a further list includes ‘frothing, greedy, strong, way-knowing, sweeping-people-away’. These were magical rivers, connecting and nourishing the heavens with the green landscape of Middle-earth.
Many names of rivers refer to the goddesses or spirits who embodied the life-force of the river. In England today, some rivers still bear their ancient names – the River Glen in Lincolnshire, and another River Glen in Northumberland, derive their name for a British Celtic root glanos, which means ‘clean, holy, beautiful’.
On the continent, too, the River Seine is named from Sequana, who was the beautiful goddess of its source for the Celtic peoples of ancient France. And again, the occupying Roman soldiers sustained their souls amid empire-building by taking over the honouring of a Celtic spirit. The archaeological excavations in 1964 at the head of the River Seine revealed nearly two hundred pieces of wood carving, including many of complete figures, the features of which confirmed that it had been the site of a healing centre in the Roman period during the early part of the first millennium.
The Wyrd Sisters and Water
The three Wyrd Sisters dwelled directly beneath one of the three massive roots of the World Tree in a cave by the side of the Well of Wyrd, a pool of great wisdom. And every night, under the glow of the moon, the sisters took water from the pool and, mixing it with clay from the banks, pasted the World Tree’s root to keep it moist. Snorri Sturluson describes it this way:
There stands an Ash
called Yggdrasil, I know,
a soaring tree with
white clay sprinkled;
dews drip from it
and fall into the dales:
it stands ever green
by the spring of Wyrd.
Through this nightly task the three were the nurturers of creation, with the water in the Well of Wyrd coming from the beginning of time. This water flowed into all wells, which therefore contained the essence of life.
Water as Vital Energy
The people of ancient Europe thought of the water in the Well of Wyrd as a vital energy which permeated all aspects of the cosmos. Iceland’s medieval historian Snorri Sturluson says that they believed the water in the well to be ‘so holy that all things which dip into the well become white as the film which lies within the shell of an egg’.
This precious vibrancy of water was expressed by Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, where the elf Queen Galadriel prepared a small crystal phial. It had special properties, with a special, glittering light. She told Frodo that the phial contained waters from her fountain, which carried within it the light from a distant star. It would glow in the dark and light its way at night.
In addition to the flowing rivers, the people of Anglo-Saxon England saw another way that the waters flowed to the Earth. At night, when the Wyrd Sisters watered the World Tree, their splashing and sprinkling fell all the way to Middle-earth, and sparkled as dewdrops in the early morning mist. The water poured onto the World Tree by the Wyrd Sisters came to Middle-earth as dew and rain, and then returned to their pool. By this notion the water we drink today is this same original water from the beginning of time, eternally recycled.
Birth
Childbirth was an enormously important aspect of life in tribal culture, and women made pilgrimages to wells, drank or bathed in the waters, wore some clothing which had been dipped in it, and implored the spirit of the well, in order to have an easy delivery or abundance of milk for breast-feeding the child. The Bride’s Well near Corgarff in Grampian was visited by the bride on the evening before her marriage. She would bathe her feet and upper body in well water to ensure that she would have children, and she placed a little bread and cheese in the well so that they would never go hungry.
The rituals carried out by the women in order to gain the favour of the well continued in some cases right up until recent times. In the late 1860s two men were by chance able secretly to watch a fertility ritual being practised at the sacred well of Melshach in the parish of Kennethmont in Grampian. They wrote this account:
On the first Sunday in May, a keeper, accompanied by an expert from Aberdeen, set out for the moors to investigate grouse disease then prevalent. From a distance they spied a group of women round the well. With the aid of a field-glass, the men watched their movements. The women, with garments fastened right up under their arms and with hands joined, were dancing in a circle around the well. An aged crone sat in their midst, and dipping a small vessel into the water, kept sprinkling them. They were married women who had proved childless and had to come to the well to experience its fertilizing virtues. No doubt words had been repeated, but the two observers were too far off to hear … the remarkable thing is that the custom lingered so late.
All over the world, wells have long been associated with women. Mythologist Joseph Campbell suggests that this link of women’s mysteries with water is essentially a connection between the waters of birth and that of the cosmos; the amniotic fluid is precisely comparable to the water that in many mythologies represents the elementary substance of all things. In early Europe, wells represented secret entrances to the body of the Earth Mother, the Underworld, all leading back to the Well of Wyrd. And because the life-force of water came from the Wyrd Sisters it was particularly associated with the mysteries of women. This bond between women and water is common to almost all traditional cultures.
At St Helen’s Well, Rudgate, there is a legend that the original spirit of the well used to accept offerings from young girls in the form of pieces of their clothing hung on the nearby tree. This is obviously an early example of the ritual of cloth ripping and hanging as seen on the Sancreed Well. In the legend, the spirit of St Helen’s Well, having received the offering, would then reveal to the girl, in a dream, the identity and image of her future husband. The Church rededicated the well to St Helen about eight hundred years ago, so this story refers to a period at least that old.
A similar legend attaches to Pin Well at Brayton, near Selby. A young girl going to the well for the same purpose would be turned into a fairy-sized being by the spirits of the place. In exchange for pins dropped into the well, to be used by the elves for ‘elf-shot’, the spirits agreed to reveal a vision of the girl’s ‘true love’. The local clergy exorcised the well and rededicated it as the Well of Our Lady.
Oracles
Tolkien applied the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon magic of waters to his character Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. She had powers of magic and sorcery. ‘Galadriel clear’ are the waters of your well, sang Gandalf, when Wormtongue accused him of being in league with that sorceress. Tolkien’s descriptions of her were remiscent of Coventina and other spirits of water sources. She worked her magic with water. She entered an enclosed garden, and descended a long flight of steps, which led into a grassy hollow. Through it ran a stream bubbling from a spring further up the hill. At the bottom of the hollow sat a wide, shallow basin, and a silver pitcher. Galadriel filled the basin with water from the stream, and breathed on it. When it had settled, she explained to Frodo that it was her ‘mirror’, and she invited him to look into it. She explained that he would be able to see in it things which were beyond everyday sight.
In the historical Middle-earth, wells joined people to the spirit-world, and helped wizards to foresee events, to be ‘far-seers’, to gain a glimpse into the future. As well as being sites of special significance at which one could pray, meditate, make offerings, the wells were also oracles. They answered whatever questions a wizard held in mind, through a number of signs. The manner in which the water flowed from the well, or the height of the water level in the well, whether bubbles appeared on the surface of the water when an offering was dropped into the well, whether objects dropped in sank or floated; and especially the visions that could be seen in the reflection of the well water: all these clues formed the nature of the well’s response, and provided answers to the questions being posed.
In the earliest time the questions were posed, and answers interpreted only by the wizards. One such wizard was Lodfaffir who features in one of the ancient Norse stories. Gazing into a well for information and insight, he declared: ‘I’ve stood and stared into the Well of Wyrd, stared in silence, wondered and pondered. For a long while I listened at the door of the High One’s hall. This is what I heard.’ He then recited the words of advice on life which Odin gave to him. Listening ‘… at the door of the High One’s hall’ meant that gazing into the water gave Lodfaffir the ability to eavesdrop on the god Odin. Lodfaffir was in Middle-earth, but the well connected him with a totally other realm: the Upperworld. This reflects the essential sweep of Middle-earth imagination: wells were precious sites, as were all sources of waters, but their potency rested on their own ultimate source – the huge parallel spirit world which existed alongside the preoccupations of everyday life.
By the end of the Middle-earth period, when Snorri Sturluson was writing the Icelandic sagas, Odin had been reified to the status of an all-round deity in Norse mythology, as a rival to the Christian God. But earlier in the millennium, his chief presence was as mentor to all wizards. Odin knew how to cast runes, how to ask questions about the origins of the cosmos, how to shape-shift, and to journey from his home in the Upperworld to Middle-earth, and to the Lowerworld. So for a wizard like Lodfaffir gaining knowledge and wisdom from Odin, the crystal-clear waters of a well served rather like the crystal ball of later legend.
We can understand today how meditation on a problem or question can be refocused by a psychological projection. The use of signals from the water, as from any such device like a pendulum or cards, can trigger an otherwise unconscious insight from deep inside our mind. The people of ancient England saw their minds reflected in water. It was a medium which provided a language for understanding themselves.
Voice of the Water
Much of the inner language of the waters has remained with us. We say, for example, that we have a stream of consciousness, that we will brook no opposition, and we will pool our resources. Secrets leak out, and we plunge into things new. Or, at least, we dip our toe in the water. A wide-ranging alteration in a point of view is a sea-change. When we see an aesthetically pleasing aspect we drink it in, people are shallow or deep, and you cannot buck the tide. In fact, in dealing with life’s issues, it never rains but it pours, and problems come in waves. We fish for a compliment, and throw the baby out with the bathwater. We overflow with emotion, and boil with rage. And, in going to a party, we hope to make a splash! Through these images we are seeing ourselves at least metaphorically as being at one with water.
Water seems especially to be the medium par excellence of the unconscious. Our conscious awareness of water is perhaps meant literally to be only the ‘tip of the iceberg’; all that below the surface represents the depths of the unconscious – deep images, flowing receptive, swirling, still and calm, raging and torrential. It is hardly surprising that this language comes naturally to us, for our own bodies consist largely of water. Looking into water is like looking at ourselves.
However, the people of ancient Europe saw in their water not only the reflection of their own faces, but also the essence of their souls. Water washed, purified and connected them with profound forces of life. And they thought of water as having special properties beyond a template upon which people could project intuitive knowledge. A glimpse of this perspective can be seen in the research by engineer Theodor Schwenk in the 1970s which discovered one path to understanding such communicative properties of water. It reveals that the surfaces of water function like receptors, made especially sensitive by the presence there of complex wave patterns that turn them into structures with some of the properties of living membranes. The water’s sensitivity may be as great as that of the human ear. A gentle breeze blowing over the surface of water immediately creases it into the tiniest capillary waves, and it passes this impression on rhythmically to its whole mass.
Christian Well Magic
Celebration of the life-force inherent in the waters of the well was recognized early by the Christian authorities. They were concerned to wrest control of such important sacred rituals from the indigenous wizards. They wanted instead to invest the powers of water in the Christian God, and in their own intervention as His earthly representatives. They preached and made proclamations against ‘magical’ activity at wells, banning them from use until they had been blessed by a bishop and placed under the auspices of a saint: the twenty-sixth canon of Anselm, written in 1102, says, ‘Let no one attribute reverence or sanctity to a fountain, without the bishop’s authority.’
The Christians did not deny the power of the well. Rather, they appropriated the connection with that power, and the wells were systematically changed in name to associate each of them with an Anglo-Saxon or Celtic saint. In some areas of activity, the Church seemed to accommodate indigenous Middle-earth practices even where it would wish not to. It allowed them to continue while claiming that they fell under the guise of Christianity. But in the case of wells, the priests seemed to honour them just as much, so long as they were under their jurisdiction. Many wells still bear the names of saints, and today, 1,500 years later, the belief in the health-giving life-force of sacred wells persists, as for example at Lourdes in France, now under the control of the Catholic Church.
A surviving example of Christian-sanctioned honouring of wells is the tradition of well-dressing. This practice was widespread at one time, and is still celebrated in the counties of Derbyshire and Staffordshire. In the nineteenth century the ‘Halliwell (Holy Well) Wakes’ at Rorrington, a hamlet near Chirbury on the Shropshire/Wales border, saw on Ascension Day the local people meeting at the well. It had been decorated with ‘a bower of green boughs, rushes and flowers’ and a maypole erected. The people ‘used to walk round the hill with fife, drum and fiddle, dancing and frolicking as they went’. This was followed by feasting, dancing and drinking. They drank the well water – and also ale which was specially brewed for the occasion. They also threw pins into the well, and they ate special flat spiced buns marked with a cross. When the man who brewed the ale died in the 1830s, the wake was no longer held.
The sacred, indeed magical, nature of rivers and wells seems to transcend religious conventions and restrictions. In medieval times, when people were making the gradual transition from the old ways of Middle-earth and taking up the new, official king’s religion of Christianity, many of them went on pilgrimages. When they arrived at their destination, they were awarded badges indicating that they had been there. But many of these pilgrims’ badges have been found in English rivers and streams, especially near towns. Beneath what had once been a ferry crossing over the Thames, over 250 of these badges from medieval times have been recovered from the river bed. So these people, devout enough about their new faith to go on a pilgrimage, had nevertheless on their homecoming committed their badge to the river, in a ritual long predating Christianity. They must have still believed in the magical powers of the water to grant them health, good fortune, protection from misadventure, perhaps glimpses of the future and so on. Our essential human relationship to the great forces beyond the ken of our everyday minds is magic. Religions are a temporary wrap giving context to that primeval act.
I leaned once again over the water in the Sancreed Well. The water glows in that soft light, and seems to fill with images of the future. I made a wish, and dipped my piece of cloth in the water, sending ripples shimmering across the surface. Then I turned from the Otherworld silence of the well, mounted the steps, and came out into the light of a spring day in England. Birds chattered and flitted from branch to branch. I knotted my cloth to the tree, as people have done since the days of Middle-earth.