Nadaam – the Largest Empire Games

Guest post by Uuganaa Ramsay

Every year July 11th and 12th bring me the memories of Naadam, Mongolia’s traditional sporting summer festival. “Eriin gurvan naadam” (эрийн гурван наадам) means “The Three Games of Men”. The “games” are Mongolian wrestling, horse racing and archery.

Although they are classed as men’s sports, women have started taking part in the archery and girls in the horse-racing – but neither so far in the wrestling. The front of the Mongolian wrestler’s costume is open at the top, the myth being that many years ago a woman was discovered to have won the wrestling competition and the costume had to be altered to prove the wrestler was a man – by showing he had no breasts. In modern times, Naadam is a very colourful event and attracts tourists from across the world because of its traditional and cultural uniqueness and in 2010, Naadam was added to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of UNESCO.

Here in Glasgow the atmosphere is buzzing as the country gets ready for the Commonwealth Games, formerly known as the British Empire Games. There are 17 sports – and as in Naadam these include wrestling, shooting and cycling – as well as other team sports such as rugby, hockey and netball. The aquatics sports are almost non-existent in Mongolia, perhaps because of the country being one of the largest land-locked countries in the world.

‘Do you miss Mongolia?’ people ask me. Yes, days like today I miss the excitement of the horse-racing, passing binoculars amongst family and friends to spot whose horse is coming first and whose child (yes, child) is riding it this year. Mongolian folk songs playing everywhere and the chance to wear that beautiful silk deel which was made for the occasion. The taste buds tickled by the smell of deep fried dumplings – huushuur – and fermented mare’s milk is a rare treat if you can get hold of a litre or two. So, I think I’ll go and make some dumplings and see if I can watch Naadam live on my PC.

Happy Naadam!

Uuganaa Ramsay,
11th July, 2014

The story behind Unfashioned Creatures: guest post by Lesley McDowell

Lesley McDowell‘s Unfashioned Creatures is a gothic novel featuring Isabella Baxter Booth, who formed a close friendship with Mary Shelley during their formative teen years – when Mary began work on Frankenstein. In this guest post, Lesley tells us the story of why and how she wrote it.

Where does the idea for a book come from? I wish the answer for this was straightforward, but instead it’s full of stops and starts and sideways manoeuvring. I’d originally planned to write a novel about Claire Clairmont, the step-sister of Mary Shelley, after reading about her in 1998. Claire captivated me with her spirit and adventurousness. She’d had an affair with Byron, borne his child, and worked as a governess in Russia after her only protector, Shelley, had died.

But I couldn’t write her into a novel somehow. Claire was a great diary-keeper and letter-writer which meant lots of lovely personal information, but no space for me to invent my version of her. After I’d completed a rough manuscript I wasn’t happy with, I remembered Mary Shelley’s stay in Dundee, from 1812-1814, with the Baxter family. Mary had grown very close to Isabella Baxter, who was also only about fourteen at the time. Isabella went on to marry her dead sister’s husband, who was thirty years older than her. That struck me as a dramatic, romantic and odd thing to do; subsequently her husband experienced bouts of madness.

Mary Shelley

In 1823, after Shelley had died in Italy and Mary had come back to London, she met up with Isabella, whom she hadn’t seen for some time. This meeting greatly disturbed Mary, although she never quite explained why. All she said was that if it wasn’t for the memory of happier times, she would have nothing more to do with Isabella who, she related in a letter to her friend Leigh Hunt, was “very disturbed in her reason.”

That was almost all I needed. I’d always loved Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and the ambiguity surrounding the governess relating the tale – is she mad or does she really see ghosts? – was perfect for Isabella. Best of all, there was very little recorded in her own words – I had the space to imagine her as I wanted.

Then as I began to research the history of madness, I found the 1820s to be an extraordinary time, a time of real hope, of experimentation with new treatments for those “disturbed in their reason”. Practitioners of this new science truly believed they could ‘cure’ madness. A community at Gheel in Antwerp in Belgium also had a radical approach to treating madness.

Many things began to come together – the Scottish Enlightenment had thrown up all sorts of arguments about reason and what made humans human (the very question that leads us to a consideration of madness – if we lose our sanity, do we lose our ‘selves’?). I realised I needed a doctor’s narrative, and thought of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, with its dual structure. I tried to follow the same pattern and tell the story from two points of view – Isabella’s, and that of a young doctor’s, with whom she comes into contact.

I hadn’t written from the point of view of a young man before and wasn’t sure I could do it. I initially made my male protagonist, Alexander Balfour, a very old man but soon realised too much was told in flashback, holding up the pace of the narrative. So I put him in the same time frame as Isabella, and that was that. The sparks started to fly.

Some small liberties with the facts are always necessary with historical fiction, but staying true to the ideas of the time is important. My Isabella is an invention that I’m sure would have horrified the real Isabella, but what matters is that she’s convincing. I want readers to believe in her, and in her story.

Lesley McDowell

Cold Ice, Warm Hearts

With Valentine’s Day approaching, we are surrounded by stories of love and devotion to warm our hearts. A warm heart is particularly desirable for a polar explorer; Heart of the Hero, written by Kari Herbert, is an account of seven remarkable women who married these men of ice and snow.

Herbert’s book will be published on Valentine’s Day to mark the 100th anniversary of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott’s memorial at St Paul’s Cathedral, London. Poignantly, though, his wife, the eminent sculptor and fearless adventurer Kathleen, was not yet even aware of her husband’s fate. She was not to find out about his demise or the story of his final days until four days after the service; she was in Tahiti, en route to New Zealand, where she hoped to greet him on his return voyage.

Herbert has been immersed in polar history since childhood, making her first Arctic trip before she was even a year old. Herbert’s own father was the explorer Sir Wally Herbert (who became in 1969 the first man to walk [undisputed] to the North Pole), and she spent years of her childhood living with her family in an Inuit community on an island off the northwest coast of Greenland. Being so closely connected to this way of life, she was drawn to the stories of the explorers’ families. ‘It amazed me that no one had highlighted the crucial role of the wives of our polar heroes,’ she said.

Herbert noticed that the women were often the backbone of the explorers’ expeditions, commonly playing the role of ‘manager, publicist, mother figure, fundraiser, nurse, counselor, and most importantly, muse.’ Throughout her research of the polar explorers and their wives, she encountered unpublished journals and letters containing untold stories of love, drama and loneliness – personal tales that she felt a responsibility to share.

The polar accounts describe courageous and strong women who supported their husbands in their adventures. These women are Emily Shackleton, Eva Nansen, Kathleen Scott, Jane Franklin, Eleanor Anne Franklin, Jo Peary, and Marie Herbert, her own mother. While reflecting on writing her parents’ story, Herbert called the experience ‘strange’. She saw into a part of her parents’ lives that daughters don’t normally get to see, and tried to ‘put aside the fact I was their daughter in order to be able to write a balanced account of their lives.’

Through all the trials the women suffer, the two most challenging seem to be loneliness and a struggle to support their husbands’ financial needs. When the only hope of correspondence was to send off letters with ships in the hopes the crew might chance upon their husbands, Herbert admired the women and their ability to handle the separation with stoicism. Beyond that, they were quick to raise funds for their husbands in need, despite the years they often went without seeing one another. Herbert said, ‘Driven by love, pride and a fierce sense of loyalty, they each developed a bond with their husbands that transcended time, place and expectation…Simply put, these women were the beating heart behind some of the greatest polar stories.’

Ultimately, Herbert hopes that her account will help to balance out the record in the annals of polar history. ‘I hope readers will gain a fresh insight into some of our greatest stories of adventure, and will see a very different side to some of our iconic polar heroes. I hope too that these women from now on will gain a little more credit for their contribution, and be appreciated for the tirelessly loyal, adventurous, remarkable people that they were.’

Sir Ranulph Fiennes is amongst those who have stepped forward to praise Heart of the Hero: ‘An extraordinary depth of thinking … A fascinating and hugely enjoyable book which makes a valuable contribution to polar literature.’ ‘Herbert portrays seven wives not only as loyal, loving, resilient, inspirational and practical women,’ says Iain Finlayson in The Times, 9th February, ‘but also as moral heroines and capable achievers… in their own right.’

This post has been contributed by Emily Ferro, intern, currently studying for her MLitt in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling.