Wayland the Myth / Industrial Folklore
In the beginning, there was a tiny, almost imperceptible, spark. The spark was spun into flames, fuelled by the old forest. The flames breathed; they hissed and roared, made blistering hot by bellows pumping life into their heart, and the fire was so intense that it could soften even the hardest of iron from the earth. It could reshape it, repurpose it, all at the hands of the smiths - the alchemists of the forge.
The master-smith, the highest practitioner of the art, has had many names. The lame Roman God Vulcan worked beneath the earth where his echoing hammers caused eruptions and earthquakes. Vishvakarma, of Hindu traditions, was the divine architect, creating the universe and the weapons of the Gods – and presiding over all artisans. And Wēland or Wayland, a morally ambiguous construct of Germanic traditions, made swords that could split an iron anvil, as well as the finest, most intricate jewellery and trinkets.*
In Birmingham and the Black Country, such mythological connections were fully embraced, especially in the eighteenth century. Local artisans were described as the ‘mimic tribe’, taught their divine craft by such deities. Birmingham was coined ‘Vulcan’s smithy’, and the craftsmanship emerging from these Midland towns comparable to that of the God-smith himself.
Birmingham’s rewritten mythology was in reverence to Rome’s legends, but such figures had been imported from a distant, classical world. Yet, this was Wayland’s land. He is carved into relics of this isle, regaled in its poetry, and buried, apparently, in a long barrow in Oxfordshire. A place where tools, if left, miraculously repair themselves.
Wayland’s story tells us of the importance of artisanal skill, and how its ingenuity can be exploited. In his myth, he was captured and forced to produce only for the king, and disabled, the monarch cutting the tendons behind his knees so that he could not leave. Making, though, was Wayland’s escape, and he crafted wings of metal, inventing his own freedom from the fires of his forge.
The industrial origin story of Birmingham and the Black Country has shifted, in our modern reforging of it, as the consequences leave us with a climate crisis and a modernity of bewildering and, sometimes, dangerous technology. Yet, our inheritance is simultaneously the labour that was gradually harnessed, regulated, and scaled by power; and the wings fashioned by self-determination.
The Midland forges are, mostly, gone, yet they are remembered in the movement of the land. The canals, which were built to send the work of the mimic tribe across the way, mostly survive. They are the horizontal extension of Wayland’s myth: flight laid flat across the land, slowed to the pace of the old world, once carrying the artefacts of the forge.
The canals are Wayland’s afterimage.
This was once an Empyrean realm, one of iron and flame. Foundries rumbled. Their black smoke curled over the dim industrial landscape. Goods took flight along the waterways, the early predecessors of our modern, global flows. Today, the canals are the shadows of abandoned industry. Some survives in skeletal frames, reflected in the subterranean waters. A drip, drip seeps from brick bridges as the sun glints off their damp walls. The echo of hammers is remembered in the lapping water, and the smoke lingers in the mist rising off its surface at dawn. It all moves at the measured pace of a barge, or a towpath horse.
~ Wayland (Photography) ~
~ Industrial Folklore (Writing) ~
* Wayland was morally ambiguous because after escaping, he murdered the king's sons and made intricate trinkets from their teeth and eyes, and goblets from their skulls. Creative power is dangerous to sovereignty, so it must be contained. A system that outlives intention.