Buccmaster of Holland, the narrator of Paul Kingsnorth’s extraordinary debut novel, The Wake, is in a kind of psychic dialogue with “weland the smith”. Weland is sword-maker, god-figure: Weland, or Wayland, appears in early mythic texts ranging from the Icelandic Poetic Edda to Beowulf. Buccmaster confides in the reader his connection to Weland:
. . . it was my grandfather telt me first about eald weland the smith and the same tale i hierde later many times by fyrs and from gleomen and scopmen all ofer angland and efen in other places for weland he is in our blud and our land. eald he is ealdor efen than the lost gods under the mere eald he is lic the fenn and the seas… in weland smith is what angland is what our folc is… all the wundor in this land macd by him from the ore of erce…
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