Lord Byron and his imbibing from a skull
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Did the romantic poet Lord Byron really drink out of a skull?
Sun 6 October 2024 11:00, UK
He was mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, Lord Byron led a life that continues to fascinate and, in some cases, disgust, with his existence mind-blowing in his time and our own. A key figure in the establishment of the Romantic movement and deemed one of the most important British poets of all time, these two gilded accolades barely scratch beneath the surface of a man who was more complex than his era could comprehend.
He was a salacious character who practised free love centuries before the idea germinated. While his sexual escapades were the stuff of legend and immense notoriety, Byron was also an explorer, delving headfirst into untapped and untamed corners of Europe, an adventurer whose spirit could not be contained. Joining the Greek War of Independence to combat the Ottomans was such a bold and unheard-of move that it led to Greece revering him as a folk hero, making his cultural significance much more substantial than many of the famous faces he rubbed shoulders with.
One cultural aspect that Byron helped shape was gothic literature and, by extension, the entire goth subculture. While gothic literature is a spin-off or cousin of romantic literature, many people forget that he also put in motion the events that would lead to Mary Shelley writing her magnum opus, Frankenstein. During the rainy summer of 1816, in the infamous ‘Year Without a Summer’ when the world was locked in an extensive winter due to the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, Shelley, her lover and future husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and writer John Polidori visited Lord Byron at a Villa by Lake Geneva.
As the group couldn’t enjoy themselves outside, they stayed inside the villa instead, and Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. While Shelley would initially come up short, the topical idea of Galvanism, a terrifying "waking dream" one night, and the tragic suicide of her half-sister led to the creation of the widely influential Frankenstein. As for Polidori, he wrote The Vampyre just a few years later, the precursor to Dracula and Twilight. Both novels provided the start of the gothic genre as we know it.
It wasn’t just this indirect influence, though; Byron also lived very gothically years before it was done. His commitment to the subculture puts all those who flock to Whitby yearly to shame. They drink from plastic skulls, he drunk from a real one.
So, did Lord Byron actually drink out of a real skull?
The story goes that one day, a gardener found a skull buried in the grounds of the sprawling country estate where Byron grew up, in an old, nonfunctioning abbey. Possessing a wild imagination, Byron presumed it belonged to "some jolly friar or monk" and, in his truly bizarro form, greeted it with such respect that he had it turned into a goblet so he could drink from it. That wouldn’t be anyone’s first thought.
He became obsessed with the skull and dubbed himself Abbot of the Skull. Byron also formed the Order of the Skull, where friends would don black robes when feeling glum, and they would pass around the wine-filled cranium and lampoon the dead. Allegedly, after Bysshe Shelley died in a boat accident, Byron tried to convince the family to take the skull home but was refused. Only two years later, Byron passed away in Greece, and an argument over his own body parts erupted. According to some sources, his heart stayed in Missolonghi.
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