The Land of the Green Man: A Journey through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles 9780755621606, 9781780769912

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For my god-daughters, Sophie, Cara and Romy, and also for Julia, Eleanor and Henry

Published in 2015 by I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd Reprinted twice in 2015 London . New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2015 Carolyne Larrington The right of Carolyne Larrington to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. ISBN  978 1 78076 991 2 eISBN  978 0 85772 934 7 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Designed and typeset in Perpetua by illuminati, Grosmont Printed and bound in Sweden by ScandBook AB

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front The Ulster werewolves, © The British Library Board. Royal Ms 13b, f.018r iii Fig. 1 The Witch of Compton, temporary installation by David Gosling, photograph by Damian Ward 6 Fig. 2 Hippogriff, from E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros, illustration by Keith Henderson (1922) 9 Fig. 3 The Calf of Man and the islet of Kitterland 15 Fig. 4 The Giants of Ettinsmoor, from C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair 27 Fig. 5 Gog and Magog, the Guildhall Giants 29 Fig. 6 Grendel, from Beowulf: Dragonslayer by Rosemary Sutcliff. Illustrations © Charles Keeping. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. 33 Fig. 7 The submerged forest of Sarn, Ceredigion, Wales 47 Fig. 8 The Eildon Hills, photograph from geograph.org.uk by Tom Chisholm 52 Fig. 9 ‘Thomas the Rhymer and the Elf-Queen’, from A Book of Old Ballads, introduced by Beverley Nichols, illustrated by H.M. Brock (1934). 55 Fig. 10 ‘White and golden Lizzie stood’, from Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’, illustration by Arthur Rackham 70 Fig. 11 ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, sketch by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 77 Fig. 12 The Black Shuck clawmarks, Blythburgh, Suffolk 89 Fig. 13 The Hound of the Baskervilles, Puffin Book cover 94 F ig. 14 The Banshee Appears, in ‘The Whiteboys’, Halfpenny Miscellany, illustrated by R. Prowse (1862) 108 Fig. 15 The Wife of Usher’s Well, from A Book of Old Ballads (1934), introduced by Beverley Nichols, illustrated by H.M. Brock 116 Fig. 16 More of More Hall and the Dragon of Wantley, a chapbook illustration 130 Fig. 17 The Wantley Dragon, by Dave Pickersgill 131 Fig. 18 Fafnir the Dragon, from Richard Wagner’s Siegfried (1911), illustrated by Arthur Rackham 134

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Fig. 19 The ruined chimneys of the Rosewall and Ransom United Mines, photograph by Simon Jones 139 F ig. 20 A brownie or house-elf, from John Jacobs, English Fairy Tales (1890), illustrated by John D. Batten 145 Fig. 21 The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney 164 F ig. 22 Clerk Colvill, from A Book of Old Ballads (1934), introduced by Beverley Nichols, illustrated by H.M. Brock 175 Fig. 23 The Mermaid Chair in Zennor church, Cornwall 177 F ig. 24 The Laidly Worm of Spindlestone Heugh, from Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales (1890), illustrated by John D. Batten 182 F ig. 25 The Falkirk Kelpies, sculpture by Andy Scott 199 F ig. 26 Covers of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, The Owl Service and Elidor 206 f ig. 27 The Green Children of Woolpit on the Woolpit Village Sign, photograph by Diane Earl 210 F ig. 28 A changeling 215 F ig. 29 Original cover and 2006 reprint of John Gordon, The Giant under the Snow 231 F ig. 30 The Green Man sculpture (detail), Hamsterley Forest, Northumbria, carved by Phil Townsend 233

Ac k now l edge m e n t s

y interest in exploring the legends and folklore of the British Isles was largely fostered by the opportunity to teach a course about them on the Oxford Experience Summer Programme at Christ Church, University of Oxford, over a number of summers in the 1990s and the following decade. Other Junior Year Abroad programmes, notably Advanced Studies in England, also gave scope for developing my work and my thinking about these tales, and I thank Barbara White, Shirley Fawdrey and a good number of students for their support in this regard. Juliette Wood did much to encourage my interest in folklore. More recently, working with Maria Cecire on her D.Phil. has been an inspiration; discussions with David Clark, Tom Birkett and John Blair have thrown up all kinds of insights. I am grateful to Damian Ward, Simon Jones, Rudi Winter and Sigurd Towrie for kindly allowing me to use their photographs and other illustrative material. Henry Hudson has been a great help in reading and commenting on an early draft; my brother, David Larrington, has also read a draft and his wonderfully eclectic knowledge has left its imprint on this final version. Special thanks to Alex Wright at I.B.Tauris, who persuaded me to put these ideas into writing, and to Samir Shah and Max O’Brien for taking the book’s ideas forward into another medium altogether.

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I n t roduc t ion

Giants, trolls, kelpies, brownies, goblins, imps; wood, tree, mound, and water spirits; heath-people, hill-watchers, treasureguards, good people, little people, pishogues, leprechauns, night-riders, pixies, nixies, gnomes, and the rest – gone, all gone! I came into England with Oak, Ash and Thorn, and when Oak, Ash and Thorn are gone I shall go too. Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906)

t’s a warm August bank holiday weekend, and I’m lying on thick sheep-nibbled turf. Cotton-wool cumulus clouds are sailing over the valley in the mild summer breeze; the dog is lying on her back too, wriggling ecstatically as the smell of crushed grass fills her sensitive snout. Just below us on the hillside are families: mums, dads, older and younger children, and groups of friends. They’re all hard at work, piling powdered white chalk onto a huge outline carved on the hillside, in a tradition that goes back many centuries. It’s the Scouring of the White Horse, that wonderfully elegant chalk figure that lies along White Horse Hill, high above the Oxfordshire vale to which it gives its name. Nearly three thousand years old, the Horse is visible from the Great Western railway as it runs from Didcot to Swindon, if you know where to look for it. The Scouring of the Horse is now a decorous family-centred affair organised by the National Trust, but a hundred and fifty years ago all the local villages

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would be involved in scrubbing up their famous landmark. Every seven years there was a Scouring Festival. Its highlights included horse races up the hill to the Ridgeway at the top, and the excitement of bowling a huge cheese down the valley known as the Manger – if you caught the cheese you could keep it. But you could also try your luck at climbing a greasy pole for a leg of mutton, wrestling and fighting with sticks, running races; the men would look forward to the ‘running for a peg [pig] too, and they as could ketch ’un and hang ’un up by the tayl, had ’un’. And the girls, too, would ‘run races for smocks’, or so an account from 1859 tells us. When all this athleticism was over, the evening was passed in dancing, singing, poetry contests, drinking and storytelling. We owe this description to Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days, who was a proud Berkshire man (the White Horse lay in Berkshire before the county boundaries were redrawn) and someone who deeply loved its hills, valleys and fields and the stories they contain. The White Horse isn’t the only ancient site to be found within these few square miles of what’s now South Oxfordshire. There’s Uffington Castle – not a castle at all, but an Iron Age hill fort, and the ancient Ridgeway, often called Britain’s oldest road. The Ridgeway has been walked for five thousand years, taking folk from coast to coast: for it originally ran from the Wash to the Dorset shore, passing close to the ancient mysteries of Stonehenge and Silbury Hill. Barrows and chamber graves – Scutchamer Knob near East Hendred, an Iron Age round barrow, and Wayland’s Smithy, a Bronze Age chamber grave – lie on the Ridgeway: the Smithy’s only a mile along the track, hedged with fresh-smelling hawthorn and pinkish-white dog rose, from where I am now, up above the Horse. And, as well as these man-made homes for the dead, there are dramatic natural features: the Manger, a steep glaciated valley with oddly stepped sides known as the Giant’s Steps, and Dragon Hill, a smaller rounded chalk tump, where white chalky patches show through the turf. This is where St

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George slew the dragon; the patches show where its poisonous blood seared through the grass. History and prehistory have written all across this little patch of South Oxfordshire landscape. Our ancestors have long walked here; from those unknown tribespeople who tramped out the Ridgeway route, to the Anglo-Saxons who did battle against the great Viking army at Ashdown, and the merrymakers of Woolstone, Uffington and Compton Beauchamp who chased after the squealing pig at the Scouring. For me, the White Horse is a magical place, a spot where the presence of the past and the generations who’ve gone before us seem still to be sensed. More interesting to me, though, than the archaeology and history of hill fort and tumulus are the stories that are attached to them. These are tales rooted in a particular earth, which have blossomed forth, over the years, in different forms. So, as I gaze down on Dragon Hill, I conjure up that brave young knight in his silver-shining armour on his proud white horse which echoes the figure on the hillside above. The tall, still princess stands waiting for him, holding her breath in the tremulous hope that she may after all live to see sunset, and the great gleaming green serpent glides forward; its vast scarlet mouth is agape and the bright sunshine bounces off its dazzling array of teeth. The figures are frozen in the moment when there’s still all to play for, before the dragon lunges, the horse rears, and George’s sword strikes home. The legend of George and the Dragon is an international story, told of many places from Cappadocia all the way to Uffington; the tales associated with the Horse on the other hand are as local as they come. The Horse, so the antiquarians of the nineteenth century believed, was only fifteen hundred years old. It had been carved into the hillside in imitation of the horses on Anglo-Saxon battle standards in order to commemorate the victory of Prince, later King, Alfred over the grim Scandinavian invaders, followers of the raven banner, at Ashdown in 871. We now know from new archaeological dating techniques that the

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lowest levels of chalk were laid down between around 1200 and 800 BCe, so the carving is much older than Alfred’s day. But one of the other things we know is that once a year the Horse rises up and gallops to graze its fill from the manger and quench its thirst in the river. Knowing the Horse’s age and knowing the tale of the Horse’s habits: these are two crucially different modes of understanding the British landscape, both its past and its present. ‘They thought as there was something to find there, / But couldn’t find it, by digging, anywhere’, comments an old countryman in Edward Thomas’s poem of 1917, ‘Lob’, which lovingly celebrates English folk tradition. The archaeologists excavate their sherds, their bones and metalwork, but they won’t uncover the names, traditions and stories which ‘Lob’ preserves. And it’s that ‘something’ that they were looking for, that second kind of knowing, that this book is interested in. The breeze is growing a little cooler now, and the sun is sinking lower beyond the western end of the Vale. The dog has stopped her wriggling and she’s wagging her tail expectantly; she’s ready to trot back to the car and head for home. I live at quite the other end of Oxfordshire, not in the Vale of the White Horse, but near the Vale of the Red Horse, a broad, fertile valley which lies now in Warwickshire. The Red Horse, another giant landscape figure, cut this time in clay, is first mentioned in 1607 by the antiquary William Camden in his Britannia. The Red Horse has been lost, recut and lost again several times and it’s not to be seen any longer. At least five horses are known to have been carved into different hillsides across the Vale; the outline of the oldest one can still be seen quite clearly from the air, if viewed at the right angle and in the right light. As well as the vanished Red Horse, about whom no stories survive, my part of Oxfordshire also lies close to the Rollright Stones, a group of three Neolithic stone monuments: the Kingstone, the Whispering Knights and the Kingsmen stone circle. These do have a tale, as their descriptive names suggest: the stones are none other than a transformed king and his army.

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Men, knights and king were on their path of conquest, heading north and west towards the village of Long Compton in the valley below. But just before they crested the brow the king met a witch, who held the territory across which the army was marching. She prophesied to the king, ‘Seven long strides shalt thou take, and if Long Compton thou canst see, King of England thou shalt be!’ The arrogant king, who thought that he was almost at the top of the hill, replied, fatally, ‘Stick, stock, stone, as King of England I shall be known!’ And he took seven long strides forward. But he had reckoned without the long mound of earth that lay just before the edge of the slope – which you can still see lying beyond the Kingstone today. And since he had failed, the witch turned him into the very stone that he had sworn by in his boast. The Whispering Knights, who stand at some distance, lower down the hill to the east, behind both king and his men, are the remains of a dolmen. They lean conspiratorially towards one another, plotting rebellion perhaps against the overweening king, and that’s why they were lagging behind. The Kingstone stands well ahead of his army on the other side of the Rollright road; as is often the case with stone circles, it’s said that if you count the Kingsmen you’ll never get the same result twice. Local legend also insists that the stones must never be moved. A farmer once dragged a stone down the hill to incorporate in his barn, but the rock was almost too heavy to lift into his cart and the oxen pulling the wagon were reluctant to move. Only the whip got them down the hill, and when they finally came to the farm all three beasts dropped dead and the wagon crumbled into pieces. Notwithstanding this ill omen, the farmer manoeuvred the stone into place as a lintel in his barn, and from that day on his luck deserted him. Soon he had no beasts left at all, only one poor old nag, and, now believing the warnings he’d ignored, he decided to take the accursed rock back. Up went the stone into his battered old wagon that had seen better days; the old horse was harnessed to it and the beast trotted up the hill

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F ig. 1  The Witch of Compton, a temporary installation by David Gosling.

again, as lively as a four-year-old. Once the stone was dropped back in its place, the farmer’s heart lightened, his luck turned and soon he was rich as ever he was. And no one ever meddled with the Stones again. The legend of the Stones is in outline a common one: a supernatural power turns arrogant humans into stones for their folly or sin. But the tale of the king and the witch also has something to say about masculine ambition and sense of entitlement, and about female resistance. It also highlights the power of words, particularly when framed as prophecies or vows, and there’s a clear moral of not counting your chickens before they’re hatched. The king was overreaching himself, as his Whispering Knights suspected. Underestimating the power of the witch, the protective female figure who was looking after her land, he falls into the trap of making a bargain with the supernatural without fully considering the terms. Serves him right! When I was up at the Stones a couple of summers ago I saw that the witch had returned. Made of woven saplings by the local artist David Gosling, she stood 8 feet tall or so atop the fateful mound that stood between the king and his glory. One spiky arm pointed

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threateningly towards the king, while her right arm stretched behind her back, gesturing down towards Long Compton. Sadly, the sculpture has now been dismantled, and this year only a pile of withies and poles remained where she previously stood. But the encounter between the flexible, female woven form and the stubborn stone figure was extremely effective. Gosling’s Witch, as we’ll see, is just one of the many temporary wooden or wicker sculptures which spring up in the British landscape in dialogue with the stories of the past. These Oxfordshire places and their stories, the White Horse and the Rollright Stones, have become increasingly important to me over the more than thirty years I’ve been living in the county; they symbolise the landscape that I now call home. I don’t come from here though – as a ‘forces brat’, as we children of the military call ourselves, I don’t come from anywhere at all. By the time I was eighteen I’d lived in ten different places (and thirteen different houses); I’ve often envied my husband and his family their strong sense of identity, of truly belonging to their own patch of south-east London. Many of us in this age of migration – to the town from the village, to the city, or to another country altogether – have lost contact with the landscape where we first noticed the hills and trees, heard the birdsong and spotted the shy wild animals skulking in the hedgerows. But our yearning to belong somewhere, to find a space to call home, is an enormously powerful human drive, and the strength of our bonds with the land, even with the city streets, should never be underestimated. And strong too is our longing to be told stories, tales which draw their energy from the places where we live or where we travel. The land, as in the little tale of the White Horse and the Manger, generates anecdotes in order to explain its features. Other kinds of stories have sprung up in different parts of these islands: tales of supernatural figures and their interactions with the humans who live in these strange and magical places. Many of these tales are centuries old. In the nineteenth century it

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was thought that they were in danger of being lost. Enthusiastic collectors of local lore, parsons, squires, university scholars, doctors, and ladies of the manor all made it their business to ask the ordinary folk about these tales, to write them down in forms which ranged from plain yarns to sentimentalised romances, and to preserve them in stout four-volume sets, which have long languished on library shelves. The same impetus brought into existence the Folklore Society, founded in 1878, which studies popular culture: not just stories, but songs, dances, crafts, superstitions and customs. Once they were gathered into the academy (though contributors to the journal Folklore came from all walks of life), there was a risk that these stories would be regarded as quaint, outmoded, records of superstition which no longer had any relevance to the modern age. It was feared, as Puck laments in the epigraph at the beginning of this section, that the supernatural creatures of Britain in all their variety and abundance would disappear. Not that they’d take ship to leave England for ever, but they’d vanish into libraries, locked up in leather covers, to become the preserve of the kinds of mad-eyed enthusiasts parodied by novelists such as Kingsley Amis or Angus Wilson. But, unexpectedly perhaps, the stories fought back. Kipling knew their power and retold them to reinforce his particular ideas about English identity at the very height of the British Empire, when so many Britons both lived and died at the other side of the world from their homeland. In the universities, particularly at Oxford, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were harnessing their love of medieval literature with its rich mythologies and dramatic legends to a realisation that the great heroic legend cycles had their counterparts in the local and the individual. For Tolkien and Lewis, and those writers of fantasy who came after them, understood that British folk legends and the supernatural creatures who inhabit them have important things to say about human existence. Thinking about life and death, about children and animals, about riches and poverty, about love and desire,

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past and future: all this is work that can be accomplished through hearing, reading and considering our traditional tales. What these stories preserve isn’t straightforward magical thinking, the superstition and peasant foolishness that the clergyman collectors of the nineteenth century decried. Nor is it the beautiful lie, the romance of the ‘beautiful and impossible things’ that Oscar Wilde imagined: the Hippogriff ‘champing his gilded oats’ and dragons who ‘wander about the waste places’, the ornamental exotic that Wilde celebrates in his defence of aestheticism, ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891). Rather, I argue, the legends of our past offer particular kinds of answers – beautiful and mysterious answers as Wilde would agree – to very large questions through a kind of meta­ phorical thinking, through structures and patterns which, in their stripped-down clarity, show us what’s really important in an unfamiliar light. It’s tempting to see that summer day in the early 1930s when Tolkien found himself scribbling ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ on the back of an exam paper as a kind of tipping point for British folklore and fantasy writing. Before Tolkien,

F ig. 2  The Hippogriff.

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there were antiquarians and academics, amateur and professional folklorists who collected up traditional tales, and writers who drew on the lore of their own counties to add colour to their novels or who incorporated the legendary supernatural into their own kinds of mysticism and romanticism. The unexpected appearance of Pan in Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s classic The Wind in the Willows shows us how some writers might appropriate legends in a way which could risk sentimentality or feyness. After Tolkien, though, there came a slew of writers – from C.S. Lewis to Diana Wynne Jones, to Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman and, above all, J.K. Rowling – who have called up the creatures of British folklore to take centre stage in their writings, and who, as we’ll see, have reshaped the legends and their characters to explore perennially vital themes: life, death and everything in-between. Giants, selkies, hobs, mermaids, wild men, knockers, werewolves and, above all, fairies remain good to think with and good to feel with – they tap into our concerns, anxieties, questions about being human and about how we live now, in this land. Nor are our cities no-go zones for the creatures of folklore. As we’ll see, mighty giants guard the City of London and march regularly through Liverpool; the terrible black Padfoot stalks through the garth of Wakefield Cathedral; and a baby-eating giant called Tarquin lived in the castle which gives its name to Castlefield in Manchester, until Sir Lancelot brought him to justice. And in consequence, according to this legend, if not to the etymologists and place-name experts, Lancashire takes its name from Queen Guenevere’s bold French lover. In St Andrew’s churchyard in Rodney Street, Liverpool, entombed within a pyramid, sitting bolt upright at a card table with a winning hand laid out before him, is William Mackenzie. The gambling man hopes to thwart the pact he made with the Devil in order to get that very winning hand, for he agreed to render his soul to the Evil One the moment he was laid in earth. Old Nick is still waiting for it. And perhaps, as Neil Gaiman has imagined for

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America in his great novel American Gods (2001), new gods and creatures are beginning to take up new homes within the British legendary. Gaiman’s 2005 novel Anansi Boys brings the West African spider- and trickster-god via the Caribbean to the streets of London; Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series imagines a new black Mother Thames who has taken over the tidal reach of the river from Old Father Thames, and whose daughters, saucy nymphs and severe demi-goddesses, are the lost rivers of London: Tyburn, Effra, Fleet and Beverley Brook. Hybridising old traditions of the supernatural with new figures drawn from London’s immigrant communities is a bold, interesting move on the part of these two fantasy writers. Gaiman, as we shall see, has a deeper and more sustained understanding of folklore as a vehicle for important metaphysical themes than does Aaronovitch, whose novels are enjoyably witty rather than profound. Twenty or more years ago, I used to teach short courses on the myths and legends of the British Isles, for ever since I was a child I’ve been fascinated by stories of gods, heroes, giants and other-world creatures, and I relished the chance to dig down into the folk tales and beliefs of Britain. My students and I were not so much interested in sources, parallels or transmission – not the mapping and categorisation of folklore – but, rather, we wanted to probe into what these stories mean, what they were for. What kind of work did they do for the people who told and retold them? How did they use these tales to think about what was important in their lives? And, we asked ourselves, how do they speak to us today? Back in those days there were a few authors who’d studied English in Oxford and who were steeped in medieval literature and folklore traditions: Alan Garner and Susan Cooper among them. But we didn’t foresee the rise of Harry Potter and the dawning of the day when all the creatures of British folklore could be found on Tolkien and Lewis wikis and the Potter encyclopedia. In writing this book, I have gone back to the collections of folk tales, in the old nineteenthcentury editions, now very often available online, and to the

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more modern selections of tales which are listed in this book’s ‘Further Reading’ section. I focus on supernatural beings, those unseen forces which have dealings with us mortals and which change our destinies. And I’ve brought in too those modern revisitings in a range of poems and novels: ones which I’ve read and enjoyed, and which have renovated and made relevant once again our folklore heritage in these islands. Puck’s ‘Giants, trolls, kelpies and brownies’ are still very much with us today, in literature, in film and television adaptations and on the multitude of websites that map the country’s folklore. And they’re also astonishingly alive in our imaginations. We mostly all know now what house-elves are like, how to lay vampires and werewolves, how to bargain with a fairy, and when to keep away from black dogs. We’ve learned how to distinguish between a troll, a trow and a giant: distinctions which only professional folklorists would have understood eighty years ago. And if you don’t know the difference between a troll and a trow, this book will be your guide. Our wanderings will take us the length and breadth of the British Isles, to Ireland, Shetland and Man, from Cornwall to the Highlands, from Stornoway to Suffolk. In the first chapter we’ll see how the land came to be formed and made fit for humans to live in, and learn about those kingdoms which have vanished for ever. Chapter 2 leads us into the forest and to fairyland, teasing out the differences between lust, love and the loss that love so often entails. Death, darkness, devil hounds and white ladies who breach the boundary between living and dead are faced in Chapter 3. In the fourth chapter we’ll open up the account book of gain and loss: riches can be won and squandered with the supernatural’s help, power seized and maintained, or frittered away. The beast and the human – the animal with knowing human eyes, the beast that lurks within human form – are found in Chapter 5. Met with by land and sea, these hybrid creatures raise troubling questions about what it really means to be human, how we deal with our animal

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aspects and with the other creatures that share the land with us. The last chapter looks both backwards and forwards, reflecting on how the past returns in the present, and how we imagine the future: the domain of our children and our children’s children. Here at last we’ll meet the Green Man, that figure both ancient and modern who has stepped down from the bosses and capitals of our ancient cathedrals into our contemporary consciousness to warn of our planet’s precarious future if we won’t learn the lessons the stories tell. And now let our journey begin.

One

T h e L a n d Ov e r T i m e

here was once a giant who lived high up in the Welsh Brecon Beacons. For reasons lost in the mists of time, he became embroiled in a feud with the citizens of Shrewsbury and decided to make an end of his foes. Intending to dam the River Severn, to flood the town and drown its inhabitants, the giant dug up a great mass of earth and carried it off on his spade. But by the time he got close to Wellington in Shropshire he was very tired and somewhat lost. By chance he met a cobbler with a large sack of shoes for repair, walking home from Shrewsbury along the road. The cobbler asked the giant where he was bound, with his mighty spadeful of earth, and the giant revealed his plan. The cobbler was appalled at the idea that all his prosperous Shrewsbury customers might be annihilated, so, thinking on his feet, he showed him the contents of his sack. ‘You’ll never make it to Shrewsbury, neither today nor tomorrow’, he explained. ‘Why, I’ve worn out all these shoes just coming from Shrewsbury!’ The weary giant changed his mind and dumped his spade-load at the side of the road, thus forming the great hill of the Wrekin in the Shropshire Marches. Pausing only to scrape the excess earth off his boots – the smaller hill known as the Ercall – the giant stumped off home. Like many of his kind, this giant was extremely large and none too bright, but he does his job in this tale: to explain the appearance of an extraordinary landscape feature. Just as the anthropologist Mary Douglas described dirt as ‘matter in the wrong place’, so the

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Wrekin and the Ercall seem wrong in scale, in comparison to their flatter, less dramatic surroundings. So someone must have put them there. The clever cobbler, by the way, appears widely in folk-tale tradition, cunningly heading off potential enemies from towns or cities. In the Norse Saga of Ragnar Shaggy-Breeches, the ferocious Viking sons of Ragnar are persuaded to abandon their expedition to sack Rome by just such a ruse.

Engineering the Landscape Giants provide an answer to the question: How did the land come to be this way? Huge natural features like the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, and, in Manx legend, the channels between the Calf of Man and the islet of Kitterland, and between Kitter­land and the Isle, are outcomes of giant conflict: in the Manx case a battle between a native ogre, the Buggane, and the giant Finn mac Cool, whom we shall meet below. Since they are often violent and prone to pique, giants throwing things about in rage can cause significant changes in the environment. British giants, like the Titans of Greek legend, or the Norse giants to whom they are quite closely related,

F ig. 3  The Calf of Man and the islet of Kitterland.

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account for huge land features; the mighty, desolate mountains and glaciers of central Norway are known as Jotunheim (Land of Giants). The giants symbolise the geological and ecological processes which have shaped the British landscape in the past, mostly those associated with erosion, and volcanic or glacial formations. These features come about very slowly, at the pace of geological time, but the tale of the Wrekin’s origin reminds us that the potentiality for dramatic land change is by no means dormant; the Severn’s floods are nowadays constrained by flood defences, but, as the inundations of the last few years have warned us, these man-made barriers cannot always hold back the water. Safety from the turbulent power of the river when it rises is by no means assured, and communities who live with the threat of danger do well to anticipate the impact of huge, unseen and hard-to-tame natural forces. The outlines of the giants themselves are rarely visible in the land, apart from such huge man-made figures as the Giant of Cerne Abbas and the Long Man of Wilmington, now thought to have been carved in the 1700s. We’ll find John Gordon’s fictional land-giant, from his popular children’s book The Giant under the Snow, lumbering into dangerous life in Chapter 6. Although giants’ graves, or the monuments (like Stonehenge) which they set up, are quite identifiable, their builders aren’t thought of as slumbering under the earth as some giants do in other traditions. The lack of active volcanic geology, and the relative rareness of earthquakes and lesser seismic tremors, may account for the lack of restless and turbulent sleeping giants in these islands.

The Giant Builders High up on the North Yorkshire moors above the little town of Whitby, where for many years I was at school, lies an ancient paved road or causeway, crossing the thick purple heather of Wheeldale Moor. A gently sloping embankment paved on top with flagstones runs for about a mile. Sounds like a Roman road,

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you might say, and perhaps one that originally linked up with the Roman road remains near Pickering and Flamborough, connecting outlying camps with the garrison at Malton. Archaeologists have thought so too, though a more ancient origin in the Neolithic period has more recently been suggested. But folk around Whitby know differently: the land feature is Wade’s Causey (Causeway), and its builders were not Roman legionaries or ingenious Britons, but rather a pair of vigorous giants. Wade and his wife Bell lived up on the moors where they were assiduous builders and improvers. They are credited with building Pickering Castle and the earliest castle at Mulgrave, near Lythe, just north of Whitby. The Causey was built to link the two castles, say some tales; others suggest that, given the unpromising grazing on the moors, the couple kept their cow some distance away down the sloping moor side. Wade laid down the Causey so that Bell wouldn’t have to squelch her way through the bogs in order to milk the beast. A giant rib from Bell’s cow (in reality a whale jawbone) was displayed during the eighteenth century at Mulgrave Castle and curious visitors would carve their initials on it. The two giants had only one hammer between them for their building work; this they threw from one site to the other, hollering to warn their spouse that the hammer was coming. Bell used to carry loose stones in her apron and often dropped them on her way to one or other castle; this explains the numerous cairns and stone piles which dot the moorland. A standing stone along the A174 between Whitby and Loftus was previously known as Wade’s Grave; there was once a second stone standing near it which marked the grave’s extent. Wade the giant is mentioned in some medieval written texts, though they don’t tell us a huge amount about him. The earliest is the Old English poem Widsith (Far Traveller) in which the speaker Widsith notes that Wade ruled over a Scandinavian tribe, the Helsingas. A later Scandinavian saga records him as Vadi; according to the fourteenth-century Saga of Thidrek, he was the son of King Vilkinus and a mermaid. Vadi grows up a

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giant in stature, large enough to be able to wade across the sea which separates the constituent islands of Denmark. Vadi does little else in the saga than father Velent (Wayland), whom we will meet later in this chapter. The boy is apprenticed by his father both to the legendary Norse smith Mimir and to a group of highly skilled but malevolent dwarfs, so it is not surprising that Velent should prove to be a remarkable craftsman. The dwarfs strike a bargain with Vadi that, if he fails to collect his son from them on the appointed day, they can cut off the boy’s head. Vadi has to agree, and he makes sure to arrive early for the rendezvous, but he falls asleep while waiting for the mountain in which the dwarfs live to open up and admit him. He snores very loudly and, perhaps caused by this, an earthquake occurs. A huge landslide of rocks, mud and trees hurtles down on top of Vadi and kills him. Despite his father’s entombment Velent nevertheless manages to escape the murderous dwarfs, for Vadi had secretly hidden a sword near the mountain as a precautionary measure against being late. Velent makes good use of it. These Scandinavian Wade traditions make all the more puzzling the piecemeal knowledge of Wade which Geoffrey Chaucer, also writing in the fourteenth century, exhibits. In Chaucer’s great poem Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus entertains his niece Criseyde with ‘tale of Wade’ during a supper-party at his house; perhaps it was a folk tale or a heroic romance like the Norse saga. The protagonist of Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale’, on the other hand, makes a mysterious reference to Wade’s boat in a tone which suggests that it has some sexual connotations. January claims that he does not want to marry a mature widow, for such women know a great deal of trickery ‘on Wades boot’ (on Wade’s boat). Perhaps Wade needed a particularly large boat to cross those oceans that he could not simply stroll through; whether this is a vulgar term for the experienced woman’s sexual organs is a matter of guesswork. Wade and Bell were not the only giants who were hard at work in the British landscape. Back in bygone days, giants pioneered

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the shaping of the land on a gigantic scale. Finn mac Cool, a giant who lived on the Antrim coast in Northern Ireland, laid down the Giant’s Causeway in order to cross the sea to Scotland. Like many another giant, for they can be contentious creatures, Finn had a mortal enemy, the Red Man (also known as Benandonner), who lived in Scotland. The two giants would hurl insults, and sometimes larger missiles, at one another. Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the province of Ulster, was formed when Finn tore up a huge clod to throw at his enemy. Finn’s aim was wild, and the earth mass fell into the sea, forming the Isle of Man – where legends of Finn’s battle with the fearsome Buggane still survive. Once Finn had laid down his causeway and marched towards Scotland shouting his threats, he seems to have bottled the fight with the Red Man. Whether this was because he was exhausted from his building work, or because the Red Man turned out to be much larger when viewed from close up than Finn had expected, isn’t clear, but Finn thought better of the attack and made for home, hotly pursued by his enemy. Oonagh, Finn’s wife, thought of a clever trick that worked to save her husband’s face and to repel the Red Man: she swaddled Finn like a baby and laid him in a cradle. When the Red Man huffed and puffed his way to the house, she claimed that her husband was out. Catching sight of the gigantic infant, the Red Man concluded that the father must be of terrifying dimensions, and ran away in his turn, tearing up the Causeway in his haste to flee. Finn is also connected to Fingal’s Cave on the Hebridean island of Staffa, which shares the basalt rock-formations of the Causeway. Fingal represents a later spelling of Finn mac Cool (or Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish). We will hear more of Finn (the human forebear of the legendary giant) and his band of forest-dwelling outlaws, the Fianna, later in this book. Nowadays, Finn and Benandonner can be found frequenting the Giant’s Causeway Visitor Centre: Finn (whose name means ‘white’) is strikingly blond and cheerful-looking; red-haired Benandonner wears a kilt and a snarl.

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Giant Origins Where did our British giants come from? Native Germanic tradition, Celtic tales and biblical and classical learning fall together, but they don’t provide an altogether coherent set of origins. Germanic giants, closely associated like Vadi with mountain habitats, are creatures of the rocks and wilderness. Celtic giants, like the Welsh king Bran Bendigeidfran, who waded across the Irish Sea to avenge his sister’s mistreatment, tend to be heroic individuals, much like humans but on a larger scale; his tale is told in the second branch of the Welsh legendary collection, the Mabinogi. The Old Testament and associated Jewish traditions suggest that the original giants were created by liaisons between the ‘sons of God and the daughters of men’. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. (Genesis 6)

These giants, sinners like most of the rest of the world’s inhabitants, were later drowned in the Flood. According to later Jewish tradition, only the huge Og, king of Bashan, survived, for the floodwater only came up to his ankles; he was finally slain by Moses. Jewish legends also tell us that the offspring of Cain evolved into giants, and were to be found in various parts of the world, where they kept up a sustained hostility towards their human cousins. Grendel, Beowulf’s antagonist in the Old English poem of that name, was both descended from Cain and related to the pre-Flood giants. The engulfing of his giant ancestors in the ‘water’s whelm’ is depicted on a golden sword hilt: all that survives of the sword Beowulf uses to behead Grendel’s Mother after its blade melts away through the action of her poisonous blood. This ancient treasure, like the ruined cities discussed below, is said by the poet to be enta ærgeweorc … wundorsmiþa (the ancient work of giants, of wondrous smiths). Classical tradition also imagined giants as an aboriginal race; savage and

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untameable, they need to be exterminated before civilisation can thrive. Some short twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts, composed in Middle English and Anglo-Norman French, explain how such giants came to be found in Britain. Princess Albina is the eldest of thirty-three sisters, all of whom are married to husbands whom they regard as disastrously far below them in status and whom they refuse to obey. Summoned back to their father’s house to be rebuked, the sisters (in one version at least) murder their husbands; as a punishment they are set adrift in a ship. The vessel brings them to an uninhabited western island where the women disembark; they name it Albion after their ringleader Albina. Having rejected their earlier sexual partners the women are now driven to coupling with the multitude of demons who throng Britain, and thus they come to give birth to a race of giants: these unruly women become the progenitors of an even more violent and uncivilised offspring. This legend explains why, when Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas and founder of Britain, comes to these shores, he finds a large population of giants, whom he systematically wipes out. At least that’s what the cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, written in the late 1130s, tells us. Goemagog, whose name derives from the biblical giant pair, Gog and Magog, was one of the last survivors among the indigenous giants. Corineus, Brutus’ lieutenant, who gave his name to Cornwall (according to Geoffrey), killed Goemagog by hurling him from Plymouth Hoe; on the other side of the country the Gogmagog Hills, just south of Cambridge, also preserve his name.

Big (un)Friendly Giants Despite Corineus’ best efforts, Cornwall remains a particular habitat of giants; these beings are less inclined to make major interventions in the landscape on the scale of Finn mac Cool’s endeavours. Rather, like Wade and Bell, they spend much of their time moving piles of stones about on the moorland. The Giant of Carn Galva in the far west of Cornwall guarded the folk of

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Zennor and Morvah from less amiable giants who lived nearby. The Carn Galva giant liked to pile up stones, then playfully knock them down again, and he also set up some rocking stones (one of which, known as the Logan Stone, can still be seen). The giant could rock himself to sleep on top of it while he gazed westwards at the fiery sun sinking into the gold of the western sea. So friendly was this giant that he had a young human friend who would come up on the moor to play ‘bob’, a game involving the throwing of quoits over the scattered stones. At the end of one day’s play, the young man threw down his quoit, ready to head home, and the friendly giant tapped him playfully on the head to encourage him to return for another game the next day. But the poor giant did not know his own strength, and his fingers went straight through the lad’s skull; he dropped dead on the spot. The heartbroken giant cradled his friend’s body, lamenting loudly, ‘Oh, my son, my son, why didn’t they make the shell of thy noddle stronger? A es as plum [it is as soft] as a pie-crust, dough-baked, and made too thin by the half!’ And the poor giant pined away and died within seven years of a broken heart. The remainder of his playthings, and the missiles he stockpiled against enemy giants, can still be seen up on Carn Galva. The tradition of giants in the West Country is a living one; in 2006 the Giant’s Chair, a 6-metre-high chair made of green wood, appeared near Natsworthy in the Dartmoor National Park. The Chair could be picked out on Google Earth and was a popular attraction for some time. Planning permission, retrospectively sought, was finally refused, and the Chair was dismantled in 2010. The Chair spoke to the many giant-built features on the Cornish and Devon moorlands, suggesting that the concept of giants remains vital in the West Country; similar temporary wooden sculptures quite often pop up, entering into dialogue with ancient stones, across Britain (like the Witch of Compton at Rollright; see the Introduction). Not all Cornish giants are as kindly as the Giant of Carn Galva; better known perhaps are the people-eating ‘Fee–fi–fo–fum’

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figures of such folk tales as ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. One such evil giant is Bolster, of St Agnes on the north Cornish coast, just a little way up from Morvah, the village protected by the Giant of Carn Galva. He was prone to eating both cattle and children, until he fell in love with the maiden Agnes. She asked the giant to fill a hole in the clifftop with his blood to prove his love for her, but the hole was bottomless and connected only to the sea. The lovelorn giant bled to death, but he is still celebrated every May Day in the village. His sanguinary fate explains why the cliffs nearby are stained red: a natural phenomenon which calls for some kind of explanation. This kind of ‘just-so’ story is known technically as an aetiology. Often, however, the giants who interact with humans are not especially hostile to humans, though their size and unthinkingness can make them, like the Giant of Carn Galva, a bit dangerous to be around. The giants of the Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire series, who fight on the side of the Wildlings, are huge and uncommunicative, and apparently rather shy: at least they don’t like be stared at, or so Ygritte warns Jon Snow. She also swears that she once saw an offended giant hammer a man into the ground as if he were a nail. These giants, who live very far north of the wall, appear to be useful allies for the Wildlings, but their size makes them unmanoeuvrable and thus something of a liability. When the Wildlings attack Castle Black (in season 4, episode 9, ‘The Watchers on the Wall’), a giant rides a mammoth which is used to try to drag the gates of the castle from their hinges; mammoths, like elephants, spook easily, however, and its giant handler – along with a good number of Wildlings – is crushed when the monstrous creature runs amok. Giants tend to have a strong affinity with animals; flocks of sheep or goats represent part of their wealth, and they cherish the beasts in their care. Chrétien de Troyes’ French romance Yvain, translated into English in the fourteenth century as Ywain and Gawain, tells of a Giant Herdsman, with a head as big as a horse’s, ears like an elephant and the tusks of a wild boar. Yet

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the Herdsman talks in a friendly fashion to Sir Colgrevance, explaining that he has authority over the animals of the forest: ‘To me thai cum when I tham call, / And I am maister of tham all’ (They come to me when I call them / and I am the master of all of them). In an addition to the French text, the English translation notes that the Herdsman is ‘the karl of Kaymes kin’ – a churl descended from Cain; the Old English belief that Cain’s descendants, like Grendel, could be gigantic, was still current many centuries later. Where Chrétien found this figure remains obscure. He has been associated with the Celtic god Cernunnos, the Horned God, whom we shall meet in Chapter 3, who may be depicted on the great silver Gundestrup Cauldron, found in a Danish bog and dating from the first century BCe. But the horned figure shown there, though he is surrounded by all kinds of beasts, is neither grotesque nor ugly. If the Giant Herdsman does originate in this figure he has become hybridised with the animals he cares for, and has come to look like another figure often encountered in the forest: the Loathly Lady. The embodiment of royal sovereignty, this monstrous female appears to men who are trying to establish their claims to the royal throne; we will hear more of her in Chapter 4. The friendship between giant and human in the Giant of Carn Galva story offers a humane counterbalance to the wicked giant of folk tale, and suggests an ancestry for J.K. Rowling’s kindly if clumsy Hagrid, half-giant, half-human. Hagrid’s mother, Fridwulfa, bears a Norse/Anglo-Saxon name, and he himself hails from the Forest of Dean, just next door to the traditional giant habitats of the West Country. Hagrid is reluctant to admit to his giant genetic inheritance, for giant blood carries a stigma in the Potterverse and he is aware that his mother’s kindred have dwindled to a tiny beleaguered minority who are holding out somewhere in eastern Europe. Yet the company he keeps confirms Hagrid’s ties to giantkind: there’s Aragog, the monstrous spider-like creature who haunts the Forbidden Forest, and whose name chimes both with Gogmagog and Tolkien’s Shelob,

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and Hagrid’s huge half-brother Grawp, whose name sounds rather like Grip, a frequent giant name in Scandinavian legends. Like Wade and many another giant, Hagrid grows prodigiously large early in life: at the age of six he can pick up his father and put him on the dresser, and he often forgets his own strength. Unlike the friendly but deadly head-taps of the Giant of Carn Galva, however, the affectionate pats on the back Hagrid gives his human friends just tend to send the recipients flying. And Hagrid’s affinity with animals and with the natural world, even the more monstrous species within it, is evident throughout the books; his home is on the edge of the woods and he is usually able to mediate between the young wizards and the unpredictable, often dangerous, domains of the forest and the wilderness. Giants, as we’ll see in the next section, begin after a while to move into the cities, and to live in proper houses with lovely, well-tended gardens. At the beginning of Oscar Wilde’s poignant short story ‘The Selfish Giant’ (1888), the Giant has been away from his splendid garden for seven years, visiting his friend ‘the Cornish Ogre’ (not, we suppose, the Giant of Carn Galva), and the local children have become used to playing freely in his garden. But when he returns, the Giant evicts the children and nails up a sign, ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’. Then spring arrives everywhere else, but fails to bring the Giant’s garden back to life. At last, the children find their way back in through a hole in the garden wall, and spring comes again. The Giant, repenting of his misanthropy, lifts one little boy up into the last tree which remains covered with frost and snow; that too breaks into blossom and the child gives him a kiss. Learning his lesson, the Giant now breaks down the wall of the garden so that the children can play there whenever they want. He often looks for the little boy he lifted into the tree, but he can never find him again. The no-longer-Selfish Giant had come to love the missing child, ‘for he had kissed him’. One day the child reappears. From the marks on his hands and feet it is clear that he is in fact the Christ-child, come to take the Giant with him to Paradise.

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Despite the cloying Victorian sentimentality of the ending, Wilde has a strong understanding of the dynamics of fairy tale. His mother, Lady Wilde, had been a keen collector of Irish folk tales and Oscar surely absorbed both the structures and traditions of British legends from her. Wilde’s Giant remains closely allied with the forces of nature, if a nature tamed within a walled city garden, but unless he opens up the green spaces to humans the garden remains frozen and barren. Giants and people must cooperate for civilisation to flourish; some way must be found to bring the meadows and the metropolis together.

Giants and the City The premise of the Brutus tradition is that, although giants can build relatively straightforward features, such as causeways, on a gigantic scale, they have no concept of civilisation; indeed their propensity to fight with one another militates against the very idea of a giant community. Giants thus haunt the wilderness and roam the margins; the city is no place for them – we have already seen how the giant of the Wrekin story was bent on destroying the town of Shrewsbury and its inhabitants. Surprisingly perhaps, Anglo-Saxon tradition clearly imagined the giants of the past both as city-builders and as skilled workers in stone. The Anglo-Saxons did not know how to build in stone when they first arrived in the British Isles, preferring wood and wattle-and-daub. The splendid cities of Verulamium, Deva and Eboracum (St Albans, Chester and York, respectively) built by the Romans were probably not maintained after the legions were recalled to Rome, and their stone structures must have fallen into dangerous disrepair. Only later in the Anglo-Saxon period did the immigrants start to build in stone, often dismantling parts of surviving Roman buildings to provide ready-worked stone for their new projects. A number of Old English poems refer to stone buildings as ‘the ancient works of giants’. The Ruin, a fragmentary celebration of the city of Bath, casts a nostalgic glance over the ruins of the Roman settlement, imagining the now roofless

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F ig. 4  The Giants of Ettinsmoor, from C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair.

buildings when they resounded with the cheerful noise made by the citizens, when mead halls were full of singing, laughter and pleasure and ‘many men, / cheerful and gold-adorned, in gleaming armour,  / proud and merry with wine, shone in splendid trappings’. The poem’s location is identifiable as Bath from the references to the hot springs which stood at the centre of the once ‘bright city’, pouring down into the ‘round bath’. So, too, the Old English poem The Wanderer associates crumbling, snow-covered walls with giants, while in the wisdom poem known as Maxims II, cities (ceastra, deriving from Latin caster ‘camp’), with splendid stone ramparts, are said still to stand; they are described as orþanc enta geweorc (the well-thought-out work of giants). This resonant phrase haunted J.R.R. Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon literature at Oxford, who chose Orthanc for the name of the great tower of Isengard, the headquarters of the wizard Saruman, in The Lord of the Rings. And his Ents, the enormously tall Shepherds of Trees, represent another version of the positively conceived giant whose function within the natural world is both protective and ecologically aware; we’ll meet them again in Chapter 6. In contrast, C.S. Lewis’s giants of Ettinsmoor, in The Silver Chair, are much more like the rather

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stupid giants of the British uplands, spending their time fighting among themselves or chucking stones about. The word etin survived into Middle English and in dialect; the Red Man, Finn’s enemy, is also known as the Red Etin, and a three-headed giant of the same name is to be found kidnapping the king of Scotland’s daughter in the nineteenth-century author Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book. More closely associated with Tolkien’s idea of the ent/etin as reflecting the positive ecological aspect of the giant – unsurprisingly since Tolkien edited and translated the poem – is the Green Knight of the anonymous fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Arriving unexpectedly at Camelot on New Year’s Day, the Green Knight, half-man, half-etayn in erde (a giant on earth) appears as both aggressive and peaceable. He brandishes a huge axe and flourishes a holly wreath, embodying an otherworldly threat to Arthur’s court. Whether he also offers a seasonal reminder that winter will pass and the green spring come again is a more controversial matter, to be returned to when we meet the Green Man and other relatives of the Green Knight in Chapter 6. Gog and Magog (the biblical giants mentioned as a pair in Revelation 20 rather than Geoffrey of Monmouth’s single emblematic giant) are patrons of the City of London. Enormous wooden statues of the two giants stood for centuries outside the Guildhall; their first incarnation was burnt up in the Great Fire of London, while the second pair, installed in 1708, were casualties of the Blitz. Their replacements, carved by the sculptor David Evans, stand 9 foot 3 inches tall and were installed inside the Guildhall once more in 1953. Magog traditionally bears a phoenix on his shield, symbolising rebirth from fire. Since 2006, Gog and Magog have once again led the annual procession at the Lord Mayor’s Show. Reconstituted by the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers, these huge wicker figures are light enough to be carried, though they are perhaps as dangerously inflammable as their predecessors. Their cousins include the Gigantes celebrated yearly in September

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F ig. 5  Gog and Magog, the Guildhall Giants.

in Barcelona, and the hugely popular marionette Giants who have appeared more than once in Liverpool, dramatising the city’s connection with the Titanic in 2012, and its history in World War I in 2014. These urban giants fulfil multiple roles. In Thomas Boreman’s Gigantick History, published in 1741, they are said to symbolise the fact that ‘just as much as those huge giants exceed in stature the common bulk of mankind’, so the City of London towers above all others in defending ‘the honour of the country and the liberties of this their City’. But Gog and Magog have a larger function, I think, speaking very clearly to the dualities which giants symbolise. On the one hand, in their embodiment of nature, as huge and terrifying, they are co-opted to warn all supernatural evil forces that the City can call on powerful and determined guardians to repel its enemies. ‘Our’ friendly giants are valuable allies and dangerous foes. And on the other, they reintroduce the natural, the non-human into the city. They remind the city-dwellers that there are forces which, despite their ingenious technologies, their concreting over the clay, humans cannot control, and which they must remember

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to propitiate. Gog and Magog also recall to the merchants and moneymakers of the City how the land and its resources underpin the wealth generated in the buildings they guard; they foreground an ecological awareness in the metropolitan environment, bringing nature back to spaces where the green world seems to have been banished. The land of Britain, then, is shaped, originally inhabited and guarded by giants. Embodying the titanic forces of glaciation, erosion and volcanism, they leave their mark on the coastlines, moors and uplands of the country. Wicked, devouring giants originate in a medieval Christian understanding that they represent the unnatural miscegenation of mortal women and demons and they must be overcome by human cunning and resourcefulness. Lads called Jack, often in league with kindly supernatural helper figures, can usually cut them down to size. Other giants are neutral so far as humans are concerned, living useful lives in marginal lands. Their labours, like those of Wade and Bell, may help their human neighbours and they too write upon the land. A third category of giant, one who intersects with the modern conception of the Green Man and other protective nature spirits, can also be invoked, one who brings the green into the city, the wild back into the civilised, and calls into question the idea of progress and culture. Yet there’s always something melancholy about giants; they seem to belong definitively in the past and their legends are often sorrowful in complicated ways. The Anglo-Saxons understood this when they associated giants and ruins, both markers of a time gone before, a time which can never be recovered.

Land Cleansing and Clearing Giants do much of the heavy lifting in shaping the land; mountains, rocks, clefts and gullies bear witness to their activity, and sometimes, as a by-product of their own endeavours to make life easier for themselves, they bring tangible benefits to humans. Making the land habitable and cultivable is a more complex task

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however; other kinds of supernatural creatures are involved in patrolling the borders between the wild and the tame and converting the one into the other. Saints often choose to make their homes in waste places; they separate themselves from the quotidian round of life in monasteries, founding hermitages where they can commune with God without being distracted by their less devout brothers. This move is not without problems: spirits of place, already inhabiting the wilderness, tend to object rather strongly to the irruption of the divine into their demonhaunted territory. St Guthlac of Crowland, a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon saint, was nobly born and spent the early part of his life as a soldier. Then he found God; he trained in a monastery in Repton in Derbyshire before deciding that he wished to live a more austere life of solitude in the fenlands of eastern England. Guthlac’s story (related in two Old English poems known as Guthlac A and Guthlac B, and in Felix the monk’s eighth-century Latin life) tells how, after Guthlac set up his ‘home on the hill’, the local demons assailed him. They ‘heaved him up into the high air’ to show him monasteries where the young folk were illdisciplined in the hope of shaking his faith. Next, after putting once again very forcefully to Guthlac that he should leave their neighbourhood, they dragged him down to the doors of hell, ‘where doomed spirits full of wickedness were seeking entrance into the terrible place  / the bottomless pit, down below the cliffs’. The demons threatened to hurl the saint straight into hell, but at that very moment St Bartholomew appeared and brought an end to Guthlac’s unusual martyrdom. ‘He shall rule over the countryside, you may not defend the dwelling against him’, pronounced Bartholomew, and the fiends were definitively put to flight. And then the land bursts into blossom, the birds sing and ‘that green meadow stood in God’s keeping’. Guthlac’s courage, in the face of these fierce land spirits who sought to keep their territory out of God’s and Guthlac’s hands, has made the place clean again; the demons flee and nature, blossom and bird, celebrates God’s creation as he intended it to be.

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This gang of fen demons is routed through God’s power, but these creatures, formerly fallen angels, are not destroyed: they are simply displaced. Grendel, the monster fought by the Old English hero Beowulf, is called, among other things, a thurs, a kind of ogre who, according to a contemporary wisdom poem, also lives in the fens and walks in darkness. Grendel’s fury is aroused when the king of Denmark decides to build the greatest mead hall ever seen, not in the centre of his kingdom, but at its margins, on the edge of the wilderness of mountain and moor where Grendel and his mother live. King Hrothgar may not have known of the existence of his monstrous neighbours when he chose to civilise the borderlands by erecting that prime symbol of Germanic civilisation, the mead hall, there, but on the night of the hall’s inauguration he discovers the truth. A poet sings God’s praises in the grand new hall of Heorot and the sound of singing, laughter and, very likely, the gist of the poet’s song, provokes Grendel to terrible fury. He bursts into the hall, snatching up men from the benches and stuffing them in his maw; thirty thegns are devoured on that first night alone, and many more die over the twelve-year interval before Beowulf comes to defeat the human-devouring giant. Film versions of Beowulf, notably the Robert Zemeckis motion-capture version of 2007, starring Ray Winstone, but also the 1999 cyberpunk version directed by Graham Baker and starring Christopher Lambert, foreground the sense that Hrothgar’s hall is sited in dangerously marginal territory, where other forces have long held sway and still wield a power which opposes that of the king. Grendel’s Mother, especially as portrayed by Angelina Jolie in the 2007 version, is conceived of as seductive and stunningly beautiful; as an ancient goddess whom the lords of the land must appease through sexual coupling, and who survives to give birth to successive generations of monsters. Neil Gaiman (who shares writing credits for the 2007 Beowulf screenplay) wrote a novella sequel to his great novel American Gods (2001), which was first published in 2004. The tale is called

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F ig. 6  Grendel from Beowulf: Dragonslayer by Rosemary Sutcliff.

The Monarch of the Glen, an ironic reference to Sir Edwin Landseer’s 1851 painting of a mighty stag dominating the autumnal Scottish landscape. Gaiman’s long-suffering protagonist Shadow finds himself taking on Beowulf’s role: he is the returning hero who must do annual battle with Grendel and his hag-mother in the bleak, far north of Scotland. Shadow invokes the assistance of other local supernatural creatures of Scandinavian origin, for the Norse gods and a hulder-woman (a kind of Norwegian elfwoman) still linger in these old Viking territories. Their powers allow him both to spare the monster and to survive the battle himself. Gaiman wrote The Monarch of the Glen at the same time as he was working on the Beowulf script; in both works it is clear that the noise, rapacity and sense of entitlement of the incomers stir up ancient creatures, who may be monstrous in form, but who also identify strongly with, and are deeply rooted in, a wilderness which belongs to them rather than the new arrivals. In both the Old English poem and the film versions, Beowulf cleanses the king’s mead hall of the monsters’ predations. Guthlac too re-hallows the wasteland, but his prayers don’t transform the fens to make them habitable for anyone other than

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the monastic community that grew up where he had lived and died – and, of course, the monks want solitude, not agricultural prosperity. Other, earlier, kinds of gods possess the strength, the knowledge and the will to turn the unpromising wilderness into rich, rolling farmland, plains where men can build and found communities. The Irish myth ‘The Wooing of Etáin’ tells how the god Mider wants to marry the most beautiful woman in Ireland: Etáin, the daughter of Ailill, king of Ulster. Her father spells out the price of gaining her: Twelve lands of mine that are nothing but desert and forest are to be cleared so that cattle may graze on them and men dwell there at all times, so that they may be suitable for games and assemblies and meetings and fortifications.

Mider’s foster-son, the Macc Oc, who is acting as an intermediary in Mider’s wooing, persuades his father, the divine Dagdae, to clear the twelve plains in a single night. Next, Ailill demands that ‘twelve great rivers that are in springs and bogs and moors’ should be diverted to run into the sea. Thus ‘the fruits of the sea will be brought to all peoples and families thus, and the land will be drained.’ This too the Dagdae achieves. Mider finally offers her own weight in gold for Etáin and she becomes his. But through the actions of Mider’s jealous first wife Fúamnach, Etáin becomes lost to her husband, and ‘one thousand and twelve years’ later she is reborn, and married to another king, Echu. When Mider tries to regain his long-lost wife by playing the board-game fidchell against her husband, Echu imposes further tasks on him: ‘clearing Mide of stones, laying rushes over Tethbae, laying a causeway over Móin Lámrige, foresting Bréifne’. Mider mobilises the people of the Sidhe, the Irish ‘hidden folk’, to help him, and orders that all humans should stay indoors while the work is in progress – that is, until sunrise. But Echu sends his steward out to spy on what is going on; although he has learned a better way of yoking oxen together than men had previously known about, his infraction

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of the god’s command means the causeway is shorter than it was meant to be and thus not so useful. As in other legends human curiosity and disobedience to the commands of the Otherworld folk brings an imperfect outcome. Mider finally gets back his former wife. Although this represents a significant loss to her human husband, the whole country gains from the exchange: the land of Ireland has become more habitable because of the god’s unchanging desire. Supernatural creatures of huge stature, like the Dagdae, who wields an enormous club as his attribute, or, alternatively, multitudinous teams of Otherworld beings, cooperate to convert the uncultivable land, the bogs and moors, into usable pasture; they make the rivers navigable so that inland regions can communicate with the sea. Causeways are laid over impassable bogs, and the plains are smoothed out, not just for farming, but in order to enable human civilisation. ‘Games and assemblies, meetings and fortifications’ spring up where once there was wilderness. Humans can now live well, thanks to the activities of the land shapers and clearers. Nevertheless, as we shall see in later chapters, the people of the Sidhe, and their British counterparts, the fairies, don’t undertake all this effort out of sheer altruism. Something is always required in return, in this case the loveliest woman in Ireland, and their instructions must be followed exactly. If the taboo laid on the humans by the fairies is broken, adverse consequences will always follow.

Giants’ Dances ‘Where beth thei biforen us weren?’ (Where are they who were here before us?) asks a plaintive Middle English lyric. And who were they? Successive waves of migrants into the British Isles, from the first tribes to cross the Channel after the end of the Ice Age, through Celts and Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, to the Norman French and many other immigrant groups, have looked at the Neolithic monuments which survive throughout the island and have interpreted them in their own stories.

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Almost every stone circle has its legend, from the Whispering Knights and the King Stone at Great Rollright (see Introduction) to Stonehenge, to the Callanish Standing Stones at Uig on the island of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, or the Haltadans of Fetlar on Shetland. Stonehenge is called the Giants’ Ring or Giants’ Dance in Geoffrey of Monmouth, who relates how the stones came to stand on Salisbury Plain. A large number of Britons had been treacherously murdered by Hengest and his Saxon invaders, and the leader of the British forces, Aurelius Ambrosianus, wanted to set up a monument to them. Merlin advised him to bring the Giant’s Ring over from Ireland, telling him that the stones had originally been transported by giants from Africa and they have strong healing powers when brought into conjunction with water. Aurelius sent his brother Uther Pendragon (Arthur’s father) to fetch the stones. But, although he won a bold victory over Gillomanius, king of Ireland, who had vowed that not a single pebble would be taken from the Ring, Uther was daunted by the task when he saw the size and number of the stones. Merlin challenged the army to use ropes, ladders and pulleys to shift the stones, but all was in vain. Then the enchanter laughed, and ‘prepared contrivances of his own … and took down the stones with incredible ease’. They were loaded onto ships and re-erected at the burial site, demonstrating, as Geoffrey notes, the triumph of brains over brawn. No doubt many an archaeologist would like to discover the machinationes Merlin used to move the stones. Though the bluestones which form the main surviving part of the monument actually originate in the Prescelly Hills in Pembrokeshire, West Wales, Geoffrey’s account suggests that there may have been a folk memory of the stones’ origin far in the west and of their transportation by water across or along the River Severn. Geoffrey was right, too, about the association with burial; many Neolithic skeletons have been excavated at Stonehenge and cremated remains were also deposited among the stones in prehistoric times. Long before Geoffrey wove his tale of Merlin

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and the giants, Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Wessex seem to have identified Stonehenge (the henge element comes from Old English hengen ‘to hang’ and means ‘stone gallows’) as a strange and marginal space. A skeleton was discovered there in 1923; the dead man, aged between 28 and 32, was an Anglo-Saxon who had been beheaded with a single stroke, probably from a sword. He had been interred during the seventh century, carbon dating suggests, at the foot of one of the stones on the circle’s south side in a shallow grave that was slightly too small for the body; the corpse must have been squashed unceremoniously into it. It seems likely that this was an execution – which would fit with the idea of the ‘stone gallows’ – and that the man was doubly punished, not only by judicial killing but by burial in an unholy place. The name of Giants’ Dance points to a widespread, probably medieval, belief that Neolithic stone circles represent dancers who are somehow out of control, who are turned into stone for their sinful behaviour: dancing on the Sabbath or cavorting in a holy place such as a churchyard. At Callanish, the stones are actual giants who refused either to be baptised or to build a church when St Kieran arrived to bring them Christianity. The Haltadans (Limping Dance) in Shetland were formerly a group of trows (the Northern Isles’ equivalent of fairies or hidden people, though their name derives from the Norse troll, a very different kind of being). Like their Scandinavian counterparts, the Shetland trows can only emerge from their mounds at night; on this occasion they were so carried away by dancing to the music of a trowie fiddler that they overstayed their return underground. Sunrise turned them all to stone, and the figure of the fiddler and his wife, also petrified, stand at a little distance from the group. Trows were legendary fiddlers; and the human who was lucky enough to overhear a trowie fiddler and learn the tune from him would never want for praise. ‘Da Peerie Hoose in under da Hill’ (The Little House under the Hill) is one such trowie tune whose name reveals its otherworldly origins.

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Barrows and their Inhabitants Barrows or chamber graves, older even than Stonehenge, are to be found on the chalk ridges and downs of southern England. We saw above how the Anglo-Saxons seem to have regarded ancient stone monuments in the landscape as uncanny places, the opposite of the familiar and comforting churchyard which was clearly under God’s protection. Tolkien, who knew such things better than most, situates his eerie Barrow Downs at the eastern edge of the hobbits’ Shire, high up on chalkland like the hills that circumscribe the Vale of the White Horse. Mysterious barrows and odd megaliths are found there, and here Frodo and his companions nearly come to grief at the spectral hands of the Barrow-wights, the reanimated inhabitants of these monumental tombs. The hobbits had been sternly warned to make sure that they passed the barrows on the western side, but they disregarded this good advice – it seems likely that their path was thus counter-clockwise, a direction with sinister implications – and the Barrow-wights were conjured up. Only the intervention of Tom Bombadil, that cheerful incarnation of the English bucolic spirit, could save the hobbits from the wights’ evil enchantment. Tolkien borrowed these particular undead figures from Norse literature, where mound-dwelling corpses often fight with those who dare to venture inside, and who occasionally leave their tombs to lay waste the homesteads of the living. Wight, however, derives from an Old English word meaning ‘creature’, or ‘being’, and it has strong supernatural resonances. One such real-life barrow is Wayland’s Smithy, a tomb dating from the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth centuries BCe, lying about a mile along the Ridgeway from the White Horse at Uffington. Fourteen people were originally buried in the first barrow on the site, after which it was closed. About one hundred to one hundred and fifty years later, a new grave was constructed on top of the old monument. This chamber grave, constructed with two small chambers on either side of the entrance, and a long central space,

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was already being identified with Wayland by 955 ce according to the evidence of an Anglo-Saxon charter. Anglo-Saxons would map out the extent of a piece of land by referring to the local landmarks at its boundaries; and one such charter, delineating the estate of Compton Beauchamp, mentions ‘Yelandes Smiððan’ as forming part of the estate’s edges. Today the Smithy lies in a strangely peaceful grove of tall trees, which were planted only a few hundred years ago. A great deal of modern-day ritual goes on there: flowers, candles, stones and coins are left as offerings – to who knows what supernatural power? If the savage story of Wayland were better known today, I suspect that those who make offerings at the Smithy would be rather wary of invoking his powers. Wayland was, as mentioned above, thought in later Scandinavian tradition to be Wade’s son. A gruesome tale of vengeance is told about him in the ‘Poem of Völund’ in the great collection of Old Norse mythic poems, the Poetic Edda. This story was also known to the Anglo-Saxons; the Old English poem Deor notes how Welund (the Old English form of his name) had ‘strong sinew-bonds’ laid upon him by King Nidhad, an allusive reference which suggests that the English version of the story was much like the Norse one. Völund was a remarkable smith, perhaps of elvish origin. He was captured by King Nidud, who, at his queen’s suggestion, had the smith hamstrung so that he could not escape. Völund was then imprisoned on an island, where he forged ‘subtle things’ for his new master. When the king’s two sons came to visit Völund he advised them to come again without letting anyone know that they were visiting the forge. When they returned, the smith murdered them, concealed their bodies under the mud beneath his anvil and used their heads – skulls, eyes and teeth – to make more treasures for their parents and sister. The boys’ sister, Bödvild, also visited the smithy, seeking the repair of a ring which had belonged to Völund’s wife; her the smith ‘overcame with beer’, and he either raped or seduced her before making good his escape. How he gets away is quite

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unclear, but he seems to take to flight; perhaps repossession of the ring enables his departure. Pregnant Bödvild is left sorrowing: for the death of her brothers – though the Old English poem suggests that she does not grieve for them as much as for her own condition – and her vanished lover. The story may not end quite so unhappily; in The Saga of Thidrek of Bern Völund returns with an army. He kills Nidud, marries Bödvild and their son becomes another well-known Germanic hero. The Old English poem knows at least of the hamstringing, the death of the brothers and the pregnancy of their sister, here called Beadohild. And since Deor’s refrain is ‘that passed over, this may too’, a promise of happier resolution also seems to lie ahead of the Old English couple. Well into the nineteenth century, locals in the Vale of the White Horse believed that Wayland would emerge from his smithy up on the Ridgeway and would shoe their horses for them, expecting only a penny in return. In Rudyard Kipling’s story cycle about English folk tradition, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), the narrator, Shakespeare’s impish Puck, tells how Weland (as Kipling spells him) arrived in England as a somewhat sinister idol in an Anglo-Saxon ship: ‘Weland’s image – a big, black wooden thing with amber beads round his neck – lay in the bows of a black thirty-two-oar galley that they had just beached’, Puck recalls. In Kipling’s imagination, Weland is a god, and quite a successful one, but eventually, like the other gods brought by migrants to the British Isles, he dwindles into a merely folkloric figure after the arrival of Christianity. Puck encounters him centuries later, shoeing horses for pennies, hoping for release from his toil and to be allowed to leave English shores. A novice monk forces a surly farmer to thank Weland for his work; being appreciated at last frees him to stride away through the dense forests of the Sussex Weald, down to the harbour where he first arrived, and away he goes for ever, back to his Continental homeland. Puck’s account of Weland’s liberation explains why his story remains little known in twentieth-century England. As cars took over from carts, and

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smiths were replaced by motor garages and repair shops, Weland was no longer needed in the modern imagination. Wayland is a significant figure in Susan Cooper’s five-volume series The Dark is Rising. Each novel in the series is set in different locations in the British Isles: the action of the second novel (published in 1973), which shares its title with that of the whole series, takes place in the Thames Valley. Cooper draws on local folk traditions to give form to the supernatural – both the Old Ones, who are forces for good, and the figures associated with the Dark. Will Stanton, the eleven-year-old hero of the novel, finds himself drawn back into mythic time where he meets a smith called John Smith, but who is later revealed to be Wayland. In Will’s own time this man is an ordinary farmer’s son, but in the transfigured past he is a smith who must shoe the horses of all the folk, whether good or evil, who stop at his forge. Will’s encounter with John Wayland Smith signals his realisation that he has a special destiny; the smith protects him from the sinister Rider, the dark and threatening horseman on a midnight-black mount, who tries to draw Will into his power. At the end of the book, it is John Wayland Smith who forges together the Six Signs which Will has collected, making a protective chain which Will keeps when the adventures of the novel are over and the Dark is, at least temporarily, repelled. Susan Cooper’s knowledge of English folklore is put to striking use in the sequence; another Thames Valley supernatural figure from The Dark is Rising will be encountered in Chapter 3. Wayland’s strange and dangerous nature corresponds to the ambivalent smith figure in other cultures. Often lame, like Vulcan/Hephaistos, the smith of the Roman and Greek gods, and like Völund after his hamstringing, he is the master of arcane knowledge, knowing how to transform unpromising and dirty ore into pliable, shining metal, and, further, to shape that metal into weapons, jewellery, drinking-cups or to make the metalwork on horse tack. Magically he brings together the four elements, fire, water, air (in the bellows) and the bones of the

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earth, the clods of ore, in his craft, welding them together to shape wonderful things. But the smith can also be an outcast, consigned to living and working at the edge of the community, because of the noise and disruptiveness of his craft and the superstitious awe he attracts. No wonder Völund was described as ‘prince of elves’ in the Norse version of his story; his artistic sensitivity and his ruthlessness in revenge chime with the little that we know of such creatures. For elves seem largely to have disappeared from British folklore with the coming of the Normans. The Anglo-Saxons feared and revered them as unseen creatures who brought pestilence and disease to beasts and humans, and who needed to be warded off with charms and spells. They were also – particularly elfwomen – radiantly beautiful and able to make wonderful objects. In the earliest account of King Arthur’s life and death that was written in English, Layamon’s Brut, from around 1200, Arthur is said to have a coat of mail made by Wygar the elf-smith. Elves, like the later fairy godmothers, welcome the infant king into the world, endow him with gifts and prophesy about his greatness. And after his final battle, he passes into Avalon, and into the care of Argante, a noble queen and beautiful elf-lady, who will heal his wounds and enable him to return to Britain one day, when he is most needed. Norse tradition divided the elves (the álfar) into dark and light elves, but tells us little more about them than that. They also manufacture precious objects, and the light elves at least seem to be on the same side as the gods. Our indigenous English elves were largely replaced by fairies: the Queen of Elfland and the Queen of the Fairies, whom we’ll meet in the next chapter, are indistinguishable. Modern fantasy writers have seized on the dark/light dichotomy they found in Norse: Alan Garner has both kinds of elf in his two Alderley novels (see Chapter 6). Tolkien’s elves, tall, shadowy forest-dwellers, immortal creatures who are largely detached from the world of men, owe much to the fragmentary information about the elves

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that Tolkien gleaned from Anglo-Saxon texts, and much less to later French-influenced ideas about fairies. Tolkien’s recently published posthumous poem ‘The Fall of Arthur’ (2013) brings the Arthurian legend together with his own mythology – and with the Brut tradition – in (according to his notes for the unwritten ending) reconfiguring Avalon as the Island of the High Elves where Lancelot will sail to try to find news of his lost king. ‘King Arthur was an Elf!’ was how one excitable fan responded online to this revelation. Although Tolkien strenuously denied the Celtic element in his depiction of elves, his idea that they are diminished reflexes of an earlier, more powerful race, destined to vanish from the human world, echoes Irish beliefs about the successive tribes of supernatural figures who seized power over that island, only to have to cede it to the next generation of incoming deities. Thus the Irish gods, the Tuatha Dé Danaan, who helped Mider regain Etáin, retreat into the Sidhe, or fairy, mounds of the island, disappearing from our world, but continuing to inhabit a splendid Otherworld of palaces, gardens, wealth and beauty, hidden from human eyes. We will see in later chapters how hard it is for humans, once they have fallen prey to the delights of that Otherworld, to tear themselves away from it, and how reluctant its inhabitants are to release them to return.

The Lost Lands in the West Cardinal directions – north, south, east and west – have very strong metaphorical associations. For the inhabitants of Britain, the north is cold and forbidding, the south warm and inviting, and the east is the direction of sunrise, the quarter from which new things come, promising hope of new life, of resurrection. And the west, where the sun sets, is where the boundless ocean stretches away beyond Ireland. The last rays of the sun colouring the horizon with misty pinks and deep crimsons hint at the lands that lie out there; unknown islands, undiscovered territories, and countries once known, but lost for ever. Irish

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tradition has adventure tales (echtrae), in which heroes journey to the Otherworld, and the immramas, frame tales which tell of sea voyages to the west where remarkable islands are visited and wonders are seen. The tradition of St Brendan, in both Irish and Latin, tells how the saint and his companions voyaged west, discovering islands which included the western version of the earthly paradise and the island where Judas Iscariot is allowed brief respite (Sundays and holidays only) from the hellish torment he normally endures for his betrayal of Christ. An island of blacksmiths, islands of birds, of sheep, of monks who maintain perfect silence are also explored, and the sailors ill-advisedly make camp on yet another island, which turns out to be a whale, who, not surprisingly, dives down into the ocean depths once a fire is lit on its back. The Brendan tradition preserves a memory of the Irish religious, who between the seventh and tenth centuries would set sail in their coracles with only limited amounts of food; they trusted in God to bring them where he wished them to be. A version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in an entry for the year 891 tells how three ‘Scottas’ (Irishmen) left Ireland in a leather boat without oars and supplied with only seven nights’ food. By the grace of God, when the seven nights had passed, they made landfall in Cornwall, from where they made their way to the court of King Alfred. These three Irishmen, Dubslane, Macc Bethu and Mælinmun, as the Chronicle identifies them, had set sail for elþiodignesse (foreign places, exile) for the love of God, and they did not mind at all where they ended up, so the Chronicle tells us. Iceland and perhaps other northern Atlantic islands were originally settled by Irish monks who set out to unknown destinations, trusting in God’s providence. The oldest history of Iceland, composed around 1120, relates that Irish men, with bells, croziers and books – all the paraphernalia of Christianity – were the first inhabitants of the island, but they fled when the dragon prows of Norwegian longships bearing the first Viking explorers were sighted in the fjords. Icelandic archaeologists

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are now beginning to find evidence to support the tradition of Celtic settlement and a number of Icelandic place names, typically including the Irish element Pap, meaning ‘priest’, also preserve evidence for the Irish presence. There is good reason, then, to believe that the Irish really were extraordinary travellers – though whether they discovered America before either the Scandinavians or Columbus remains highly suppositious – and that their voyages, in their tiny coracles of hide and wood, out into the unknown west encouraged beliefs that marvellous lands did indeed lie beyond the sunset. Closer to home than the islands mapped by the bold St Brendan are those legendary lands which lie just off the western coast. Once happy and prosperous places, they were engulfed by the ocean’s waves, their citizens drowned and their civilisations destroyed. These are versions of Atlantis in our own backyard. The most famous of them is the drowned city of Ys, off the coast of Brittany, destroyed because of the wickedness and decadence of their citizens. Ys was ruled by Dahut, daughter of the original founder Gradlon; she refused to reform her wickedness, despite warnings from St Winwaloe that God’s patience was running out. The city was protected from the power of the ocean by dikes built by Gradlon; lockable gates gave access to the city. In the various versions of the legend, Dahut opens the gates during a tempest, whether for her own mysterious reasons or at the behest of a lover (sometimes a demon in disguise). The city – and Dahut herself – is lost beneath the waves, but Gradlon escapes on a speedy horse which is able to outrun the tsunami. Having learned his lesson about maritime urban settlements, he founds the city of Quimper safely on dry land. A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession retells this fundamentally Celtic legend as a counterpart to the English folklore, French legends and Norse myths which underpin the rest of the novel; the story is central to the sojourn in Brittany of the heroine of the novel’s Victorian strand. The legend of Ys is only the best known of the sunken city stories; two more are recorded from Wales. One lost city is

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at Llys Helig in the Conwy estuary; its underwater bells are sometimes heard ringing beneath the tide. The ruins of Helig’s palace (actually glacial moraine) can occasionally be seen when the tide is exceptionally low. And a Dahut-like figure is also associated with the different versions of the legend of Cantr’er Gwaelod or Cantref-y-Gwaelod, a lost land lying out in Cardigan Bay. This territory, founded by Lord Gwyddno, was protected by a system of sluice gates; here it is human error rather than sustained or perverse sinfulness that leads to the kingdom’s loss. Was the foolish Seithennin, the keeper of the sluices, who got drunk one stormy night and forgot to close the gates, to blame for the catastrophe? Or did the young girl charged with closing the gates become distracted by the overtures of a visiting king? Or perhaps, as in the earliest known version, it was Meririd the priestess, guardian of a fairy well, who neglectfully let it overflow. A different origin story for Lough Neagh from Finn’s giant conflict with the Red Giant of Scotland ascribes the lake’s existence to a spring. This first came into existence when a magical horse, lent to a certain Echaid, who was eloping with his stepmother, urinated at that stop. Though Echaid had been warned not to let the horse rest, he decided to build a house at the spring and cover it over with a capstone to stop it overflowing. And of course one night a girl forgets to replace the capstone, and Echaid and his whole family are drowned; he is commemorated in the Lough’s Irish name, Loch nEathach. It’s carelessness, rather than divine punishment or demonic conspiracy, that leads to the realm’s destruction in these stories. The woman responsible for the disaster perishes, along with the other citizens, while the noble male founder (Gradlon/Gwyddno) manages to outrace the inrushing waters and escape. Dahut and her Welsh sisters are thought to have become mermaids; they still haunt the waves over the sunken city, trying to destroy more unfortunate men through death by drowning. The drowned city recurs in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence: in Silver on the Tree, the final novel from 1977, which

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most closely engages with Welsh folk tradition. Both this novel and the preceding one, The Grey King, are set near Aberdyfi, the village closest to Cantre’r Gwaelod, where Cooper’s grandmother and her parents were born and brought up. Malcolm Pryce’s series of comic Welsh noir novels, the first of which, Aberystwyth mon Amour, was published in 2001, is set in an alternative Welsh universe. Here Cantref-y-Gwaelod, as the lost homeland of the Welsh, becomes the focus of nostalgia. The brilliant teenage genius Dai Brainbocs succeeds in plotting the coordinates of the underwater kingdom and his teacher Lovespoon plans to reclaim the territory from the sea. Lovespoon is the Grand Wizard, the leader of the Druids, and the sinister villain whose deranged scheme to return to Cantref-y-Gwaelod to rule over his people there drives the novel’s events. An ark is secretly built, tickets for the exodus are sold, and a plot to flood Aberystwyth in order to float the ark out to sea is set in motion. In early 2014, the petrified forest of Sarn Borth, ‘an army of ghostly spikes’ as the New York Times reported, became visible once again off the coast of mid-Cardiganshire. The trees, oak

F ig. 7  The submerged forest of Sarn, Ceredigion, Wales.

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and pine for the most part, had disappeared into a peat bog between five and six thousand years ago; like other organic material sunk into bogs, the trees are remarkably well preserved. The footprints of humans and animals are also preserved at Borth, for the area was not just forest, but ‘a complex human environment’, says geoarchaeologist Martin Bates. Periodically revealed by the right combination of wind and tide, the sunken forest must have fuelled the legend of Cantre’r Gwaelod, just as a similar petrified forest lying in Mount’s Bay, Cornwall, supports the somewhat later legend of the lost land of Lyonesse. Sea-level rises of around 130 feet after the end of the Ice Age submerged the woods and the places where people walked and perhaps lived. Was the sea-level rise gradual or was it as catastrophic as the loss of Cantre’r Gwaelod? we might wonder. These stories raise interesting questions about the persistence of folk memory: could these Celtic stories of the lost sunken kingdom reflect ancient memories of the end of the Ice Age and the rise of the sea? I doubt that stories largely preserved in Celtic areas and languages could recall events which happened long before the Celts migrated across the English Channel. How such stories could be transmitted across millennia and across linguistic boundaries is extremely unclear. But what is certain is that the legend of the drowned land persists in our imaginings of the west, brought into English literature by writers such as Tennyson, who imagined, in his Idylls of the King, the sunset bound of Lyonesse – A land of old upheaven from the abyss By fire, to sink into the abyss again; Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt.

Walter de la Mare’s 1922 poem ‘Sunk Lyonesse’ describes the shadowy buildings of the lost city, the home of fish and mermaid, but yet a place which retains a memory of what it once was:

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In sea-cold Lyonesse, when the Sabbath eve shafts down On the roofs, walls, belfries, Of the foundered town, the Nereids pluck their lyres … And the ocean water stirs In salt-worn casement and porch.

The drowned city, the lost land: these are evocative tales. Human sinfulness, greed, selfishness, or mere heedlessness, brings about ecological catastrophe. The rulers escape the consequences of siting their city in dangerously marginal territory, while their luckless subjects perish. This time it is not the monstrous wild, the swamp-creature Grendel and his murderous mere-hag of a mother, which rises up against the civilising settlement, for such creatures can be destroyed by the determined hero if God wills it. But no heroism, no human endeavour, can stand forever against the ineluctable force of the rising ocean. Seithennin the drunken sluice ward, Meririd the negligent well-keeper: these foolish and careless figures speak to the consequences of human-driven climate change. Speaking out of the legendary past they admonish us to think carefully and inclusively about our relationship to the planet. Our journeys in this chapter have led us from the east coast of Yorkshire, from the moorlands high above the ancient settlement of Whitby, westwards to the West Country, that extraordinary habitat of giants. We have walked the wild coast of Antrim and gazed westwards to the unseen islands which must, surely, lie just beyond the western horizon, obscured by the low light of the setting sun. Unexpectedly, perhaps, we also strolled through the concrete canyons of the City of London, with its new palaces and spires of metal and glass, still under the guardianship of Gog and Magog, those stout club-wielding protectors who, paradoxically, have fallen regular victim to fire, the most dangerous foe of the ancient and modern city. We have wondered at the ancient standing stones, the circles and

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megaliths, dolmens and barrows which mark a past lying beyond the writing of history or the oral tradition of storytelling, but which nevertheless have been assimilated to the great heroes of the British past, to the mysterious murderous smith Wayland. And we have finally come to the western edges where the lost lands lie beneath the waves, the cities whose bells can be heard tolling on stormy nights, as a warning to landlubbers of disasters to come. The tales told here, the giants, monsters, gods, kings and heroes we have encountered, have thrown up important questions about how we live in this land. They ask us to think about how the landscapes we inhabit were formed, how they became civilised, how our imposition of human culture on nature has changed the land – and changed us. They remind us that the wild cannot always be kept at bay, indeed that the wild must be allowed into our cities and towns if we are to live good lives within them. Themes of the margin, of liminal places, will recur in later chapters, when we come to think about economic and spiritual questions of loss and gain, of winning riches and losing souls. Space and place, where and how we live, are integral to these legends. And so too is history. Time has written on these islands, leaving traces which successive generations have sought to read, and which they have overwritten with their own tales, incorporating the ancient stones into new rituals and modern novels. The complacent dwellers in the drowned cities, de la Mare reminds us, did not ever think that their belfries and casements would become the haunt of the unearthly ‘blunt-nosed fish / with fire in his skull for torch’. What has been won from the sea and the forest, what the giants carved out and the gods cleared, can still be lost.

Two

Lu s t

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hree steep peaks – the Eildon Hills – rear above the Scottish Borders near Melrose by the valley of the River Tweed. Thickly forested on the south side, abrupt and bare to the north, except when the brilliant golden gorse is in bloom, they give stunning views over the main road down into Northumberland. Once a Bronze Age hill fort was sited here; the Hills are believed to be hollow and are rumoured to contain one of the many caves in which King Arthur and his knights are sleeping (see Chapter 6). Here, on Huntly Bank, there grew a crooked hawthorn tree, and in the tree’s dappled shade one sunny day young Thomas of Erceldoune lay down to rest. Thomas was watching the clouds scudding across the spring sky when he saw below him, riding over the bracken-covered hillside, a beautiful woman. Her gleaming dress of grass-green silk was partly covered by a rich velvet mantle, and fifty-nine silver bells jingled from the plaited tresses of her horse’s mane. Thomas is a bold young man, and he speaks to the lady. Bowing low and sweeping off his hat, he calls out to her, with a cheeky courtliness, ‘All hail, thou mighty queen of heaven! / for your like on earth I never did see!’ Thomas should – and doubtless does – know better than to mistake this lady, clad in green, for the Blessed Virgin, whose habitual colour is blue. His chat-up line meets with an unsettling response: ‘O no, O no, Thomas’ she says, ‘That name does not belong to me.’ How does she know his name? Thomas has made a dangerous

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F ig. 8  The Eildon Hills.

misstep in addressing this lovely lady, for she is not the queen of heaven, but rather the Queen of Elfland, and now Thomas has placed himself in her power. He must go with her, whether he likes it or not, and serve her for seven years. Thomas does not protest, but leaps up behind her on the milk-white steed and away they go. After a while, they come to a wonderful, fecund orchard, where Thomas offers to pluck fruit for his mistress, but she warns him off: the fruit is cursed with the plagues of hell, and she is carrying bread and wine to refresh the two of them. Three roads lie ahead of them: the narrow road ‘thick beset with thorns and briars’ that leads to righteousness; the ‘lillie leven’, the broad, smooth road that leads to hell; and a third way, ‘the bonny road / that winds about the fernie brae’. This is the road to Elfland, and the journey there takes forty days and forty nights. The white horse must wade through blood up to his knee and there is an eerie half-light, for neither sun nor moon is visible, and the only sound is the roaring of the sea. Here in Elfland, Thomas does indeed serve the queen for seven years,

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during which he is not permitted to speak, and at the end of this period, wearing a coat of ‘even’ (smooth) cloth and shoes of green, the queen’s own colour, he is released from service and, we assume, returns to the human world. Granted enhanced powers of speech for his obedience to the queen, he becomes renowned as a poet, a prophet and a truth-teller.

The Queen of Elfland So runs the traditional Scots ballad of True Thomas or Thomas the Rhymer. It was written down in the late eighteenth century by Sir Walter Scott and his associate Robert Jamieson, and published in Scott’s collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). Scott and Jamieson heard the ballad from the lips of Anna Gordon (Mrs Brown of Falkland), one of the most important sources for Scots ballads. Mrs Brown had learned very many of these traditional songs in her childhood, and although she also read voraciously and probably incorporated some of her reading into her recollections of the ballads, her versions are still central to collections of traditional ballads in English and Scots. Thomas of Erceldoune (now Earlston, south of Melrose) was a real individual who lived in the thirteenth century, though we know almost nothing about him. He was believed to be the source of a series of political prophecies, all of which refer to events that occurred later than Thomas’s lifetime. In these, and in other later verse, he became associated with the figure of William ‘Braveheart’ Wallace and his battles for Scottish freedom. Thomas was also credited with prophesying the death of King Alexander III and other ‘mony strange and meruellous things’. Memories of Thomas were long in Scotland: in the 1598 witch trial of a certain Andro Man, it was claimed that the Queen of Elfin told Andro that he would come to know all things, just as Thomas the Rhymer did. Thomas’s story is also told in a fourteenth-century romance, composed somewhere in the north of England and written down in three fifteenth-century manuscripts. In the opening

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scene, Thomas greets a lady who is out hunting with her pack of hounds. Nor is she the queen of heaven. Far from it, for she succumbs to Thomas’s request to lie with her. Although she warns him that sex with him will cause her to lose her beauty, Thomas swears that he will serve her always. He and the queen make love seven times. But when the lovemaking is finally over, Thomas is horribly frightened by his lady’s sudden transformation. She becomes a hideous corpse-like figure, naked, now apparently eyeless, and with ‘one leg black, the other gray / and all her body like lead’. Despite his promise, he tries to conjure her away with the sign of the Cross, but she remains immovable, briskly reminding him of his undertaking. Thomas must take his leave of sun, moon, trees and grass and go with the queen, who leads him into a fairyland within Eildon Hill, to her impressive castle where she lives with the king. The queen recovers her beauty – to have remained in her loathsome state would have revealed her adultery to the king – and Thomas is sworn to silence. After three days, or so it seems, of pleasure in the fairy castle, the lady tells him he must return to earth. Thomas protests – he is rather enjoying life in the Otherworld – but the lady is adamant. ‘Of helle the foul fiend’ is coming to ‘fetch his fee’ the next day, and she fears that he will seize Thomas on account of his size and handsomeness. Thomas is whisked back to the Eildon Tree, where he finds that three years, not three days, have passed. As a parting gift the queen gives him a tongue that will never lie, and relates a series of prophecies to him. The ballad and romance probably came into existence to authenticate the prophecies, but these imagined histories of True Thomas take on an important life of their own. Themes of sex, of obedience and service, and of salvation are in play in the True Thomas story, and it’s one which chimes with many other tales of bold young men who encounter strange and lovely ladies in the forest or wilderness. The men are bewitched by the women’s beauty; they pay a high price for their dealings with these stunning creatures, but the exchange often pays off.

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F ig. 9  ‘Thomas the Rhymer and the Elf-Queen’ by H.M. Brock (1934).

The fairy queen of the ballad has powerful agency, obliging Thomas to come with her and to surrender his speech because he spoke out of turn to her; his boldness, and his loafing under the tree, place him in her power. In the romance, on the other hand, Thomas offers to serve the lady always; it’s the force of his promise (and the sexual bargain that they contract) which makes the young man subject to her. Our journey in this chapter takes us through the Scottish borders, the scene of many of the ballads that tell of fairy queens and elf-knights. And the fairies that we’ll meet on the way are not the tiny folk of Victorian flower paintings, nor the miniaturised creatures that Shakespeare makes Mercutio describe in

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Romeo and Juliet. Queen Mab, the fairies’ midwife, or so claims Mercutio, in his wonderfully vivid monologue, is responsible for distributing dreams. She is ‘in shape no bigger than an agate-stone / On the fore-finger of an alderman’. Her chariot is an ‘empty hazel-nut’, whose driver is ‘a small grey-coated gnat’. Like Puck, and some of the mischievous house spirits we’ll meet in Chapter 4, Mab is also said to be responsible for tangling horses’ manes and matting human hair into elf locks, escaping detection because of her diminutive size. Medieval and folklore fairies are much the same size as humans, however, though they are inhuman in both their beauty and cruelty. They live in a hidden world, often underground or in another dimension; neither evil nor particularly kindly, they pursue their own distinctive agendas. If humans obey fairy commands and keep fairy bargains, doing exactly what they are told, human–fairy interactions can be very positive. But men and women are nothing if not wayward, and, though fairies are strict followers of the rules, one false step on the part of the human can bring disaster. The exchange is always a perilous one, for the stakes are high. It’s not just a matter of life and death; the victim’s very soul is at hazard. And, as Thomas’s story shows, mortals easily fall into the power of the fairies: by sleeping under trees in the noonday sun, by falling from a horse, by addressing them directly, or simply by being captivated by the attractive things they have to offer. Most of all, fairies offer ways of thinking and feeling about the opposite sex, and that is the theme of this chapter. What would men and women be like if their sexual desires were uninhibited by the Church? these tales ask. What might each of us not do out in the forest, far from society’s disapproving eyes? And, if we lose what we most love to the fairies, what would we be prepared to do to get it back? Thomas’s desire for the fairy queen is instant and powerful. Though the recorded ballad versions suppress any description of the moment of sexual union, it seems likely that Thomas would have

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taken her by the milk-white hand and by the grass-green sleeve and laid her on the bonnie bank and asked of her no leave.

This seduction verse is found in a number of other ballads. In the romance, Thomas is quick to assure the anxious lady: ‘My trowche I plyght to the,  / whethere thou wylt to heveyne or hell’ (my troth I pledge to you, whether you are going to heaven or hell), but he is equally quick to change his mind when she becomes transformed into a hideous animated corpse. Thomas’s attempt to renege on his promise seems not to matter too much to the queen. Like the Loathly Ladies of Celtic myth, whom we will meet in Chapter 4, the queen apparently has the power to resume her loveliness when she gets home to her husband and castle; her temporary hideousness tested the strength of Thomas’s promise. For human women, however, illicit sex has a transformative effect which cannot be reversed so simply; the queen’s deadly pallor hints at how easily a soul can be lost. Nor can the fatal consequences of sexual sin be shaken off as easily as the queen takes back her beauty. The moral consequences of sex – the paths to heaven, paradise, purgatory and hell – are neatly evaded by Thomas and the queen, by taking the middle way to fairyland, and judgement is postponed. The queen is not totally insouciant though; she would rather be hanged or burned, she says, than have her lord know what she has been up to. Whether Thomas and the queen continue their liaison in the castle is unclear; the young man gives himself up to ‘revell, game and play’, and the company of ‘lovely ladyes, fayre and fre’, the unending pleasures of the Otherworld where time passes at a different rate to the human world. Thomas keeps his vow, remains silent, and reaps his reward. In both ballad and romance he is willing to surrender an important part of himself, his ready tongue – which of course first placed him in the Queen of Elfland’s power – and this is returned to him with new possibilities: a preternatural gift of speaking true, of poetry and of prophecy.

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Thomas’s sexual appetite is prodigious: he makes love with the queen a magical seven times before she is hideously transformed: ‘Man, the lykes thine playe / whate byrde in boure maye delle with the?’ (Man, you’re enjoying yourself  / what lady in her bower could deal with you?), she asks sardonically. Thomas’s importunity does not permanently damage the queen, despite her initial anxiety, and a genuine affection seems to spring up between them. She prevents Thomas from falling for ever into the clutches of the fiend by following another of his appetites and plucking the cursed fruit; she invites Thomas, in an intimate gesture, to lay his head upon her knee. Their final farewells are affectionate: ‘Yete, lovely lady! goode and gay  / Abyde!’ cries Thomas as she turns to go. ‘Thomas gude’, she calls him as she begins to deliver her prophecies. In the ballad tradition, the absence of the sexual motif proposes a more hierarchical relationship: the queen commands and Thomas serves. But his new green shoes and smart coat of ‘even cloth’ suggest that he has taken on fairy qualities which will stand him in good stead in his life back among mortals.

‘To come or gae by Carterhaugh’ Let’s head westwards from the Eildon Hills through the gently rolling hills of the Borders. It’s only half a day’s walk to Carterhaugh, close to where the sparkling Ettrick Water and the Yarrow Water, home to silver salmon and lively trout, flow together. And here, according to another of Mrs Brown’s ballads, it was dangerous for well-born girls to venture. For Tam Lin lurked in the wood there, and every woman would have to leave him a pledge: a ring, a green mantle – that fairy colour again – or her virginity. At the start of the ballad of Tam Lin, bold Janet immediately sets out to the well in the Carterhaugh woods when she hears the prohibition. Plucking one of the roses that grow by the well summons Tam Lin, and Janet returns home no virgin. When her pregnancy begins to show she returns to the woodland – in

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some versions she is urged by her brother to find herbs to cause an abortion – and calls up her lover again. Tam Lin reveals that he is not ‘an elfin grey’, but rather a mortal man in the clutches of the Elfin Queen. He’s high born, the Earl of Roxburgh’s heir; when he was out hunting one day his horse stumbled and this propelled him into the queen’s power. In another version Tam’s wicked stepmother cursed him to fall asleep under a tree, another situation which seems to risk drawing fairy interest to the sleeper. Now Tam seems happy enough to keep company with the fairy folk, but, as in the romance of True Thomas, the time is coming when the fairies pay the tithe to hell, and, he adds, ‘I am sae fat and fair of flesh / I fear ’twill be mysell’, suggesting that the fiends intend to have the tithe victim for dinner. Tam tells Janet how he may be rescued from the queen’s power. The next day is Hallowe’en; if she comes to Miles Cross, and lets the first two companies of the fairy court, riding black and brown horses, go by, she will see Tam among the third company on white horses. He’ll wear only one glove, his hat will be cocked up and his hair combed down. These signs not only identify him, they also place him in a liminal or transitional state: neither barehanded nor gloved, neither bareheaded nor wearing a hat, he will already be on the verge of leaving the fairy world. Janet must pull him down from his horse, then hold on to him as he is transformed into a succession of terrifying shapes: adder, bear, lion, a red-hot iron bar. In the last incarnation, he’ll become a burning coal. She is to hurl him into the well, where he will recover his human shape; once she throws her mantle over his nakedness, he will be hers. Janet follows Tam’s instructions, and succeeds in liberating ‘the father of her child’ from the fairies. At the end of the ballad the elf-queen calls out that, had she known of Tam’s plan, she would ‘hae taen out thy twa grey een / And put in twa een o tree’ (have taken out your two grey eyes / And put in two eyes of wood). In other versions, she’d also have exchanged his heart of flesh for a heart of stone.

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Janet is triumphant and the powers of the fairies are overcome. She makes an attractive heroine, refusing to be told where she may not go, indeed claiming Carterhaugh woods as her own property, and seeking out a sexual partner of her own choosing. Like many a ballad maiden – and we will meet more later in this chapter – she heads off into the greenwood seeking sexual autonomy and freedom. If any woman can tame the predatory Tam Lin, it is surely she. Nor does Janet regard the ensuing pregnancy as shameful. She retorts to an old knight who makes public her condition that he need not fear: she will not claim him as the child’s father. She defies her mother, sister and brother, who urge her to seek out abortifacient herbs. She makes careful enquiry of Tam before she commits herself to his rescue; fortunately he is Christian in upbringing, well-born (in some versions the two were childhood sweethearts before Tam was snatched), and he seems keen to claim the child as his own. There’s a degree of self-interest here, however; Tam was enjoying life among the fairies and his seduction of young human women, until he began to suspect that he might be identified as the next tithe victim. Janet quells her fears, makes her way to the Cross at ‘the mirk and midnight hour’ on Hallowe’en and shows extraordinary courage in hanging on to her man, until the furious Queen of the Fairies admits defeat. Is Tam worth all this trouble? The baby needs a father who will recognise it, but there are enough ambiguities in the story to pique the interest of later writers as to how the story might end. Liz Lochhead, the Scots Makar, equivalent to the Poet Laureate, is less certain that this is a ‘happy-ever-after’ tale. In the poem ‘Tam Lin’s Lady’, published in her 1981 collection, The Grimm Sisters, Lochhead vocalises the doubts of one of Janet’s female friends about the outcome. Tam Lin’s lady is a schoolgirl when she is seduced; her lover persuades her to go through with the pregnancy and tells her what she needs to do to rescue him from his current partner (‘the Old One’). Like Janet, this girl does indeed ‘hang on, hang on tight’, and she gets her man.

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But, her friend wonders, after the girl has held on to Tam so that the two of them can marry, how will he deal with what happens to her as she matures into a woman, and presumably a mother? Lochhead’s speaker sees the ballad as a version of the old, old story – the bored married man, the lively, curious, fresh-faced schoolgirl, the problematic pregnancy, the end of the earlier marriage. The poem is interleaved with the language of ballad: the wedding is celebrated with claret and muscadine. But once the glamour (a word which originally meant ‘magic’) has worn off and the romance of the wood, the rose, the horses and the well is dispelled, after the trouncing of the old wife, the wedding and the baby, how long will it be before Tam takes up his old tricks? ‘Tam Lin’ can be read as a companion piece to ‘True Thomas’. The ballads are often considered together: ‘True Thomas’ telling of the beginning of the affair when the protagonist willingly puts himself in thrall to the sexual allure of the queen and ‘Tam Lin’ (‘Tam’ is a Scots variant of ‘Tom’) marking its end. Tam/ Tom becomes disillusioned with his former lover, and seeks out a new one; the story then becomes a battle between two strong women for one rather passively imagined man. Diana Wynne Jones, a writer who often took her inspiration from mythic, folkloric or medieval themes, ran together the two ballads in her 1985 novel Fire and Hemlock. In this novel, the heroine, Polly, meets Mr Thomas Lynn when she is only ten, and for a long time does not properly understand his ambiguous relationship with Laurel, who is the fairy queen figure. Nor can she fathom the strange power held over him by the family at the local manor house, the fairy headquarters. Lynn is both True Thomas, with the double-edged gift of being unable to lie, so that anything he makes up becomes true – to his detriment, and Tam Lin, the beloved who must be rescued. Polly grows up over the course of the novel and comes, in part, to understand the complexities of male–female relationships, from observing her own miserable and clinging mother Ivy and the distant and

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fascinating Laurel. Polly’s name, chiming with Holly, aligns her with the two dangerous mothers Ivy and Laurel, but Polly as poly- also expresses the multiplicities in the girl’s nature. At the end of the novel, Wynne Jones throws together a good number of other mythological concepts, in addition to the ‘Thomas/ Tam Lin’ theme, in a hotchpotch which tends to leave readers baffled. Among these is the sacrificial king, drawn from Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough, who must die in order to renew the immortals; this idea amplifies the purpose of that fateful ‘tithe to hell’. Polly perversely saves Thomas not by hanging on, but by rejecting him, by doing the opposite of what is expected. She comes to perceive the enormous power of words, of reading and imagination, and their proximity to spell-making; her realisation that she can turn the fairies’ rule-bound natures against themselves, and, finally, her rejection of traditional romance, make Thomas Lynn’s rescue possible. These two tales of the fairies lurking in the Scots borderlands conjure up twin worlds – this one and the Otherworld – which have different understandings of the darkness and danger of desire. Thomas’s desires bring him new knowledge, at the same time as he skirts close to a hell that is ready to devour him. Delicious-looking fruit, wonderfully exotic in the romance, tasty-looking enough in the ballad, symbolises the double-edged nature of knowledge and desire; it recalls the primal scene of forbidden knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Janet’s desire might have spelled social disaster for her with its outcomes of seduction and pregnancy, but her determination to get a father for her child, to force the seducer to acknowledge his responsibility, gives her courage and brings her a husband of high social status. Although, like other elf-knight stories considered below, ‘Tam Lin’ might have been understood as a cautionary tale for young women, Janet’s risk-taking pays off as far as the ballad’s end. After that – well, Polly and Tom’s future in Fire and Hemlock is unclear. ‘To love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go for ever or you did not love them that much’, Polly

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reasons when the crisis is over. But ‘there had to be some way to get round Laurel’s chilly logic. Perhaps there always was a way.’ Diana Wynne Jones steps away from Liz Lochhead’s cynicism into the clear light of the first frost of winter, away from the preternatural fertility of the fairies’ garden, and with that step, for Polly ‘the jet of misery died away and became a warm welling of hope’. Perhaps there is a ‘happy ever after’, after all.

Desire and the Elf-Knight Once they are out in the forest, away from the disapproving eyes of court and castle, young women discover things about themselves that they perhaps did not know. In the romance of Sir Degaré, probably composed in the fourteenth century, a widowed father dotes too much on his only daughter. She seems to have little hope of finding a husband, since her father is reluctant to part with her. One day, visiting her mother’s grave at an abbey in the forest, she becomes separated from her entourage. Anxiously the princess searches for her companions (who are asleep under another of those mysterious trees); she is at first reassured when a knight appears, a ‘gentil, young, and jolif man’. He wears a scarlet robe, and to the girl’s eye has a handsome face, and well-shaped legs, feet and hands; it looks as if rescue is at hand. But, although he speaks courteously to her at first, he is ‘a fairi knyghte’, who has loved her from afar for years. Now that they are alone, he threatens, ‘Thous best mi lemman ar thou go  / Wether the liketh wel or wo’ (You will be my lover / whether you like it or not). Though the princess weeps and tries to flee, he rapes her. The fairy knight prophesies that she will bear a son, gives her his broken-tipped sword as a recognition token for when the boy wants to seek his father, and, with a casual ‘Have god dai! I mot gon henne’ (Good day to you! I must be off), departs. The princess succeeds in keeping her pregnancy secret until a handmaiden asks why she weeps so often; the girl admits what has happened and adds that she fears as much as anything that people will believe that ‘mi fader the King hit wan’ (my father

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the King begot it). With the maiden’s help, the baby is whisked away after birth and entrusted to a hermit to raise. The rest of the romance is concerned with the son’s discovery of his own identity; though he narrowly avoids marrying his mother and does battle with his unknown father, by the end Degaré manages to reunite his parents and they finally marry. The early section of this romance, like a number of other traditional romances and the fairy tale ‘Donkeyskin’, is anxious about how the princess is ever going to find a husband, given her father’s obsession with her. In parallel stories this obsession shades into incestuous desire. The daughter has to flee her father and find a prince who can see through her dirty disguise (the donkey skin for example), one who perceives her true worth. In ‘Sir Degaré’, the girl’s visit to her mother’s grave works to re-establish proper family roles; the king is reminded that he had a wife, and the daughter encounters a sexual partner who comes from outside the family. As elsewhere, the forest provides a space of sexual freedom and experimentation; it’s a place where men and women meet on different terms, liberated from the constraints of their normal social roles. Nevertheless, the fairy knight’s rape – for rape is what it is – makes the princess’s transition from daughter to wife and mother extremely difficult. The girl is by no means passive – she tries very hard to escape from her rapist – and for her the psychological outcome of the journey into the forest is both traumatic and hard to remedy. The princess lacks Janet’s agency and information (for it’s not clear how she could ever find the fairy knight again). This story warns young women of the risks involved when they enter unfamiliar space, and in being alone with a man, even one who claims to be a knight and to love you. Ballads admonish us that there are plenty of predatory elfknights lurking in the forest in the hope of attracting human women. One such is ‘The Elfin-Knight’, which, like the other ballads that are sources for the stories in this chapter, is recorded in multiple versions. In this song, a girl hears the elfin-knight

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blowing his horn, and she wishes that she might have ‘that horn in her chest’ and ‘the knight in my arms’. As in the story of ‘True Thomas’, by expressing her sexual desire out loud, the girl magics the knight immediately to her bedside. The elf-knight wonders about the girl’s age: is she even old enough to be his wife? She reassures him that her sister is already wed – in one version, her sister turns out to be eleven while the speaker is only nine! The elf-knight promises himself to her, but only if she can perform an impossible task: making him a shirt with no seams, cut out with neither knife nor scissors, and sewn with neither needle nor thread. It seems that he is hoping to renege on the bargain that his response to the girl’s wish has established, so that he can get out of the obligation to sleep with and/or marry her. The smart girl, perhaps also keen, now that she is faced with having to make good on her sexual offer, to find a way out, counters with another series of impossible tasks. The knight must plough the land which lies between the strand and the sea, an uncannily liminal space. He must sow it with corn, reap, stack and thresh the crop and then bring it to her: ‘And when that ye have done your wark / Come back to me, and ye’ll get your sark.’ Only then will he get his shirt. The elf-knight refuses; he will not give over the plaid he wears in exchange for this hypothetical shirt, for, he reveals, he already has a wife and seven children. And since he has decided not to exercise his power, the girl retorts that she will keep her maidenhead too: ‘let the elphin knight do what he will’. The sequence of impossible tasks is also found in the well-known song ‘Scarborough Fair’, a variant of this ballad, but without the dangerous invocation of the elf-knight at the beginning. Like ‘Tam Lin’, ‘The Elfin-Knight’ is another traditional tale that is interested in women’s – or, here, young girls’ – desire. The invitation is unmistakable: the girl’s wish to have the horn in her chest is a very obvious sexual metaphor and she is intrigued by the opportunity to explore her own budding sexual attractiveness – and her own attraction to a man. Although

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the rules of human–elf interaction demand that the knight and the girl should become lovers once she has called out to him, both parties seem to have second thoughts on seeing one another close up. The girl expects marriage if she is to surrender her maidenhead; the elf-knight is worried about her youth and her assumption that sex will entail marriage when he is married already. The series of impossible tasks acts as a face-saving escape from their dilemma. The girl’s precocious desire is neutralised for the moment, but she is neither blamed nor punished for feeling drawn to the mysterious sound of the elfin horn. Encounters with elf-knights open up questions about women’s erotic drives, signalling that both pleasure and danger are involved when a woman wants to give herself to an unfamiliar, but alluring, man. No elf-knight is more dangerous than the serial killer of ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’, another ballad which has a similar opening to ‘The Elfin-Knight’. Isabel is sewing in her bower when she hears the elf horn and she too wishes out loud that she had both horn and knight. The elf-knight immediately appears: ‘“It’s a very strange matter, fair maiden”, said he,  / “I canna blaw my horn but ye call on me”.’ He invites her to ride into the greenwood with him. But they have not travelled far before he orders her to dismount; they have come to the place where he has already drowned seven king’s daughters and here she is fated to die too. Lady Isabel uses guile to catch the murderer off-guard. In one version she asks him if he will rest his head in her lap while she lulls him to sleep, then she ties him up with his sword belt and stabs him with his own dagger. Most often, though, the elf-knight expresses the view that the lady’s clothes are too valuable to be cast into the sea with her; she agrees to remove them provided that he turns his back to respect her modesty: He turned about, with his back to the cliff, And his face to the willow-tree; So sudden she took him up in her arms, And threw him in the sea.

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The evil-doer quickly changes his tune once he is bobbing in the ocean, offering both his apologies and marriage, but Isabel is quite unmoved: ‘If seven king’s daughters here ye hae slain, / Lye ye here, a husband to them a’, she commands. And she returns home with no harm done, although in some versions she has to bribe her parrot to keep quiet about her escapade. Lady Isabel’s narrow squeak serves initially as a warning; the stranger who promises marriage, who, in some versions, induces the girl to steal her parents’ gold and the finest horse in the stable, may not be all that he seems. Throwing normal constraint to the wind carries risks, both physical and social, but, thanks to her quick intelligence and her willingness to invoke the kinds of knightly norms (recognising that a lady should not be viewed naked) that the elf-knight pretends to observe, Isabel rescues herself and rides home, no doubt the wiser for her adventure. Trying to determine your own fate, striking out for yourself in terms of choosing whom you will give yourself to, whom you will love, is a risky endeavour; the grass on the other side is not always greener, nor the apples in the walled orchard always tastier.

Forbidden Fruit Fruit is a powerful and universal symbol of temptation. We saw how True Thomas lusted after the fruit he saw as he rode along with the Queen of Elfland, but fortunately she was provisioned with more wholesome fare, with the bread and wine associated rather with the Eucharist than with the ‘plagues of hell’ which lurk within these other-world delicacies, and Thomas is saved from the diabolical consequences of his greed. Otherworld food is dangerous; to eat it, to incorporate it within your body, entails an obligation to remain where hospitality has been accepted. As Persephone discovered, even after her rescue by her mother, she was still forced to spend some months every year in Hades on account of the few pomegranate seeds she had swallowed during her sojourn there. If you’ve seen Hayao

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Miyazaki’s 2001 animation Spirited Away, you will remember how Chihiro’s parents ignored the clues that the food that they tuck into in the abandoned theme park might have a sinister effect, and, sure enough, they both turn into pigs and become trapped in a demonic Otherworld from which their daughter has to rescue them. A resourceful and well-informed hero knows not to touch any foodstuffs in the Otherworld: Saint Collen, who gives his name to Llangollen, wisely took some holy water with him when he was invited to visit Gwyn, the Welsh king of the Underworld. Gwyn’s palace lies under Glastonbury Tor, where Collen had set up a hermitage, and the saint knew that he had to be chary when accepting the invitation. He refused the fairy king’s hospitality in the form of food and drink, made rude remarks about the king’s habitation, and finally sprinkled his holy water liberally about, causing the palace and its inhabitants to disappear. Neil Gaiman makes use of this tradition in his novel American Gods; his hero, Shadow, learns very quickly not to consume anything that’s tendered to him by the various supernatural figures he encounters on his quest, unless they have sworn a formal oath that the food – even a cup of tea – is offered without any conditions attached. Of all Otherworld foodstuffs, fruit is the most dangerous; it is the food which Eve could be persuaded to taste in the Garden of Eden, precipitating her fall into knowledge and mortality. And, as the nineteenth-century poet Christina Rossetti knew well, ripe fruit is lusciously enticing. Rossetti’s poem ‘Goblin Market’, composed in 1859 and published in 1862, puts her forbidden fruit into the baskets of ugly goblin merchants, rather than appealingly handsome fairy men. Rossetti might have seen the disturbing fairy paintings made by the painter Richard Dadd before he was confined to Broadmoor, for her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti was well acquainted with the generation of painters who preceded his own Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but her goblins look more like the hybrid animal-demons of Hieronymus Bosch. Gobelyne was originally a personal demon

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name, like Satan or Beelzebub, and such creatures are sometimes equated with fairies in medieval texts. By the nineteenth century, in such influential novels as George Macdonald’s 1872 The Princess and the Goblin, they were envisaged as small, grotesque and malevolent. No nineteenth-century poem speaks to the female erotic as powerfully as Rossetti’s imagining of the sensual pleasure offered by the little men of the Otherworld, and of the terrible price paid by those who fall prey to their delicious temptations. ‘Goblin Market’ tells of two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, who share a village cottage and lead quietly domestic lives. But in the evenings they often hear the call of the goblin fruit-sellers who come out of the wild and down the glen, offering all kinds of ripe fruit, from the sharp ‘wild free-born cranberries’ to ‘bloom-down-cheek’d peaches’, even pomegranates, melons, and ‘figs to fill your mouth’. Lizzie resists, closing her eyes to the sinister sellers, but Laura lingers to look at the strange little men, who sport animal features: ‘One had a cat’s face … One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry.’ There’s an enticing mix of the homely and the exotic, both in the fruit on sale and in the ‘little men’ themselves: the wombat-goblin must have been put in to please Dante Gabriel, who had long been obsessed with wombats and who would later keep a couple as pets at his bohemian household in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Laura purchases some goblin fruit with a lock of her golden hair, and soon she is gobbling it as the goblins do: she ‘suck’d and suck’d the more / Fruits which that unknown orchard bore’. Lizzie warned that they did not know what sinister soil had nourished the fruit, recalling how another maiden had once eaten the goblin wares, then pined away and died. Although the goblins visit regularly in order to tempt girls, once a maiden has succumbed to desire she can no longer hear or see the sellers, and her addiction to what she has once tasted remains forever unsated. So too with Laura; she is fixated to the exclusion of all else on the fruit which is now forever beyond her reach. Lizzie resolves to help

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F ig. 10  ‘White and golden Lizzie stood’, by Arthur Rackham.

her sick sister, who by now is ‘knocking at Death’s door’; she visits the goblins. Although she does not ingest any of their produce, despite their beatings and blows, she comes home smeared with juice, which Laura greedily licks from her face. This ‘fiery antidote’, once so sweet and desirable, now tastes bitter, as ‘wormwood to her tongue’. But the fatal longing is extinguished, and after a fevered night Laura awakens free and healthy once more.

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The moral of the poem, as summed up in the closing lines, when both sisters are married and have become mothers, is that ‘there is no friend like a sister’; Laura relates her story, but she does not warn her own children against the ‘wicked quaint fruit-merchant men’. Their allure and their danger are a discovery each girl must make for herself. The lure of the goblins’ merchandise is easy to understand: its ripeness, juiciness and lusciousness contrasts with the simple round of life in the girls’ village. Lizzie’s strength lies in her capacity to withstand the goblins’ vicious assaults, a kind of attempted rape, and to outwit them in their own marketplace. She does not pay for the fruit or enter into exchange with the goblins, but rather she knows instinctively how she can bring home the antidote which will undo Laura’s fall into desire. It will also reshape that desire into a positively inflected love, for sister and children (though, tellingly, after this dangerous encounter with the masculine goblins, husbands are absent from the final idyll). No prince comes along to rescue Laura by fighting the goblins and forcing them to hand over the antidote; Lizzie’s silent resistance proves more powerful than battling with the Otherworld creatures on their own terms. Christina Rossetti herself spent most of her life living with female relatives, her mother, sister and finally her two aunts. Her invalidism gave her the space to explore the imaginative possibilities of art and to write, but she was also strongly attracted to the idea of sisterhood, especially after her elder sister Maria became a nun. As in the other stories of the dangerous male supernatural we have considered above, young women’s wits, determination and, ultimately, the power of their love enable them to leap up to the challenge. They seize the new experience and knowledge, incorporating them into their own wisdom, which they can then use to overcome the threat the Other poses. The encounter with violent versions of masculinity, learning how to cope with them, by rejecting and withstanding them, is a crucial stage for these heroines in their paths to growing into adult female identities.

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Rossetti’s poem takes us into a simple, rural world – the fact that the goblins come from the ‘glen’ with their cornucopia of fruit hints at a still Scots milieu. Down in the south-west, many of the kinds of stories which are told of the fairies or the Hidden People further north are ascribed to the piskies. And it is here, in one of the villages of northern Cornwall, which nestle in the hidden crevices of the moorlands or cling to the cliffs of the coast, that Cherry, another fairy victim, lives. Poor but ambitious, Cherry comes from the village of Zennor. She sets out one day, despite her family’s disapproval, to seek domestic service in the valleys south of her home. But she gets lost on the Lady Downs, a mysterious moorland area of ancient barrows and tumuli, and she sits weeping at a crossroads, wondering if she should go home. Suddenly a gentleman appears, who tells her that he is looking to hire just such a nice clean girl to take care of his little boy and himself, and Cherry agrees to take service with him. Off they walk, and soon Cherry finds herself in dark shaded lanes, where ‘sweetbriars and honeysuckles perfumed the air, and the reddest of ripe apples hung from the trees over the lane.’ Crossing a crystal-clear river, across which the gentleman carries her, Cherry and her companion come to a beautiful garden, full of flowers, fruit and birdsong, and with a splendid house at its centre. The little boy has strangely piercing eyes, and there is also a bad-tempered old woman, who is to leave as soon as Cherry has learned her duties. These include general housework and taking care of the garden, but she is also to wash the boy’s eyes every morning at the spring and to anoint them with a special ointment, which she must take care never to apply to her own eyes. The old woman seeks to unnerve Cherry by showing her the darker parts of the house; there lying on a shining floor she sees a multitude of people who seem to have been turned to stone. When the master discovers the two women in the private apartments, the older one is sent packing and Cherry is given a cordial which suppresses her memories of what she saw. Life in the house is idyllic; Cherry comes to love the master of

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the house very much and he would sometimes kiss her when she had finished her work. But, as is so often the case, Cherry’s human curiosity gets the better of her and one day she tries the ointment on her own eyes. It burns so terribly that she rushes to the spring to wash it, and there in the water she sees ‘hundreds of little people, mostly ladies, playing – and there was her master, as small as the others, playing with them’. Now Cherry’s eyes are opened to where she really is, but she keeps her secret until she spies on her master in the dark, private part of the house, singing and dancing with the reanimated stone people – and kissing one of them who is dressed like a queen. Jealousy overwhelms her, and the next day when her master tries to kiss her, she slaps his face and tells him to kiss the Small People instead. Cherry is cast out of the house and finds herself back on the desolate moor. She returns to her parents and tells them her strange tale. But people said that she was never right in the head afterwards, and ‘on moonlit nights, until she died, she would wander on to the Lady Downs to look for her master’. Cherry had unknowingly entered into a bargain with a fairy master; all the signs, from his sudden appearance on the moors to their mysterious journey into the Otherworld, into a place where the sun does not shine and where yet fruit and flowers grow in unearthly profusion, were there to warn her. But Cherry was happy to accept the position; the bad-tempered old woman, we surmise, was her predecessor, who had made the same bargain but had grown old in service – for fairies age at a very different rate from humans – and who now needed to be replaced. The enchanted folk imprisoned and kept motionless in the house nevertheless come to life at the fairy master’s whim and spend their nights in fairy revelry; we shall meet their counterparts in other fairy legends. Curiosity and jealousy are Cherry’s undoing, and she is cast out of paradise on very much less favourable terms than Thomas of Erceldoune, for he was obedient and she was not. This version of the ‘Fairy Master’ tale is preserved in a nineteenth-century folk collection; Victorian

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morality has very likely turned what was probably a sexual relationship between Cherry and Robin, her master, into a matter of exchanging kisses. Here is one heroine who, once she knows that she is in fairyland, nevertheless embraces her new life willingly and is happy to turn a blind eye to the strange goings-on around her. As we shall see, the fairy eye-salve recurs in a number of stories; the Little People are particularly interested in eyes, and in controlling what humans can and can’t see. It’s the ointment, not the fruit, that is Cherry’s undoing, but both are a proxy for a loss of innocence, a fall into knowledge and desire which has irreversible consequences.

The Fairy Mistress and La Belle Dame sans Merci Tam Lin escaped from the fairies through Janet’s determination; Thomas of Erceldoune negotiated his return to the world through his obedience to the queen’s orders – but not every man who meets a fairy is so fortunate. The fairy queen represents an unattainable ideal of beauty and desirability; the hero may set out to search for her and fail to find her at all. By the time Chaucer was composing his Canterbury Tales in the late fourteenth century, the quest for the fairy queen had clearly become a cliché of romance. In the ‘Tale of Sir Thopas’ which Chaucer assigns to his own character in the story-telling competition, the ridiculous and self-regarding Sir Thopas decides that, although many maidens pine for him, he will love an ‘elf-queen’: for in this world no womman is worthy to be my make in towne; Alle othere wommen I forsake And to an elf-queene I me take By dale and eke by downe. (for in this world no woman is worthy to be my match, in any town; I will forsake all other women and give myself up to an elf-queen, by hill and also by dale).

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Thopas’s quest for the elf-queen has only limited success. Although he reaches ‘the contree of Fairye, / so wilde’ where the queen dwells amid music provided by harp, pipe and ‘symphonye’ (a hurdy-gurdy), Thopas is intercepted by the fearsome giant Sir Oliphaunt, and challenged to a fight. Since Thopas is not properly armed for the battle he prudently retreats, and no more is heard of Sir Oliphaunt, nor of the elf-queen, before the host rudely interrupts the poet’s ‘drasty rymying’ (worthless rhyming). When Thopas falls in a ‘love-longynge’ in this poem it is on a rather theoretical basis; his knightly pretensions demand that he fall in love, and he chooses the elf-queen for that purpose, though since they never meet he neither becomes enslaved to her nor wins her love. It’s easy to see why Thopas should want to find the elf-queen and become her lover when we consider the popular romance topos of the fairy mistress. In these stories, originating in Brittany, but translated into Anglo-Norman French and then into English, a knight, often one who is down on his luck, encounters a beautiful woman and her entourage in the forest. She has long loved him from afar, she declares; she invites him to become her lover – an offer he swiftly accepts – and showers riches and gifts upon him. She will come to visit him whenever he calls her. In return, he must accept a taboo: he is never to mention her existence. The arrangement works for a while, but eventually, in order to rebut charges of a peculiar lack of interest in women, raising the suspicion that he might have homosexual inclinations, the knight is forced to reveal that he does indeed have a lady. The admission is forced from him by the queen, who is disappointed when her attempt to seduce the young man fails; he compounds his offence by claiming to the aggrieved queen that his lady’s beauty is superior to hers. When the knight next calls for his mistress, she does not come, for he has broken the terms of their agreement. This places the knight in a perilous position, for, typically, he is charged with producing the lady whose beauty he has praised so highly, or else he faces execution

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for insulting the queen. At the very last moment, the lovely lady arrives to save him from the scaffold, forgiving him for breaching the taboo, and they retreat to the Otherworld together. In the Middle English Sir Launfal, Triamour, the fairy, blows on the predatory queen’s eyes so that she becomes blind – a motif we recognise from the threat uttered by Tam Lin’s fairy queen and which we’ll encounter elsewhere as a fairy preoccupation. The fairy mistress tale, in which a quite ordinary, often luckless, knight is chosen by a beautiful, generous and powerful woman, is a kind of wish-fulfilment fantasy. The knight’s fortunes hit rock-bottom – penniless Launfal’s horse had fallen over in a muddy bog, making him filthy and causing everyone to laugh at him – when the fairy appears. The taboo seems straightforward enough and it should be easy to observe, for discretion in love affairs is an important part of the knightly code. Yet Launfal is placed in an impossible position, for his story is, at one level, a fundamental critique of the court and the king. Launfal is poor because the king and queen have not rewarded his service properly; the queen is a lustful adultress, and the king her foolish dupe. No wonder, then, that once he is vindicated, Launfal prefers to leave this corrupt social milieu to live with his lady – though the romance tells us that once a year he returns to the mortal world to joust with anyone who wants to challenge him. Launfal has not entirely ceded his masculinity by giving himself over to his fairy lover. The story of Mélusine, translated into English from French around 1500, which we’ll find in Chapter 4, is a variant of the fairy mistress story; the encounter with the supernatural lady combing her hair and singing by the fountain underpins the good fortunes of Raimondin de Lusignan and his dynasty. Other knights who meet a beautiful woman in the forest are not so fortunate; once they have surrendered to her, she vanishes, taking some crucial part of their souls with her. John Keats’s imitation of the ballad form, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, composed in 1819, makes deft use of the fairy mistress motif.

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F ig. 11  ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, sketch by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The unhappy speaker tells how he met ‘a faery’s child’ in the meads; ‘she look’d at me as she did love,  / And made sweet moan’. The knight listens to her enchanting song, eats the ‘roots of relish sweet’, the honey and manna dew which she offers him, and believes her when she says ‘in language strange’ that she truly loves him. They kiss; the speaker is lulled to sleep, and in his dream a procession of ‘pale kings and princes too / pale warriors, death-pale were they all’ appears to warn him that it is La Belle Dame sans Merci who has enchanted him.

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In thrall to a Romantic vision of beauty and unearthliness, rather like poor Cherry of Zennor waiting for ever on the Lady Downs, the knight roams aimlessly in a wintry landscape, hoping to recapture an Otherworldly experience that will never come again. Keats’s poem figures the clash of the ideal and the real; the human who stakes everything on desire for the fairy woman is doomed to disappointment, even despair. As in ‘Goblin Market’, once the supernatural has seized hold of you, there is no help, except through the loving sacrifice of another human, but for this knight, who awakens alone on the cold hill’s side, no salvation can ever be found in a human woman’s love.

The Lost Wife These fairy legends take their energy largely from the force of passionate desire: the man who lays eyes on the elf-queen immediately and unthinkingly surrenders himself to her power; the woman who risks her own destruction in her flirtation with the elf-knight, escaping only through her wit and resourcefulness. Lust is powerful but, these stories suggest, it is not enough to sustain a lasting relationship, especially perhaps when the Other­ world partner is as good as immortal, while the human grows older and begins to long for home. Love, on the other hand, struggles to overcome the power of the supernatural, yet it sometimes prevails so that the lost beloved can be snatched back from the clutches of the fairies. Back in the Scottish Lowlands, in the little fishing village of New Abbey, eight miles south of Dumfries, there lived a poor man called Alexander Harg. He had married a lovely girl, whom, it was well known, the fairies were anxious to entice away. One night not long after the wedding he was standing with his fishing nets on the shoreline (a highly liminal area, as noted above, in the impossible task sequence in ‘The Elfin-Knight’). He heard a noise coming from one of two old wrecks lying out in the river mouth, long reputed to be a haunt of fairies. It was the sound of carpentry; from the other wreck a voice called out asking what the carpenter was doing.

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‘I’m making a wyfe to Sandy Harg!’ was the reply. The anxious husband rushed home, shut all the windows and doors and lay down, clasping his wife tightly in his arms. At midnight came a thunderous knocking on the door, and then all the cows began to low and the horses to whinny. Sandy’s wife begged him to go out and see what was happening, but he stayed immobile all night long, keeping silent and hanging on to her. When dawn came he dared to go outside, and there he found an ugly stock of moss oak, propped against his garden wall. The fairies had intended to exchange this for the wife, if Sandy had been foolish enough to speak or to let go of her. Sandy’s loving embrace, and his knowledge that fairies must be dealt with in silence, had thwarted the plan. The evil object was burned, and the fairies never troubled the couple again. Somewhat further north, in Menstrie, Clackmannanshire, there lived a miller whose lovely wife had gone off with the King of the Fairies of her own free will. The miller was heartbroken, and had no idea how to get her back. Then he began to hear her voice singing in the mornings: O! Alva woods are bonnie, Tillicoultry hills are fair: But when I think on the braes o’ Menstrie, It makes my heart aye sair.

The regretful wife remained invisible, imprisoned by the power of her fairy lover. One morning when he was sieving the chaff from the grain and standing on his threshold, the miller chanced to stand on one foot. This was enough to break the enchantment – for thresholds are liminal areas (limen is indeed Latin for threshold) and magic is both at work and can be countered there, and standing on one foot also has ritual force. The wife was immediately returned to him; the miller was wise enough not to ask what had happened to her in her sojourn in the Other­ world, and she never spoke of it. Doubtless the husband’s tact in this regard contributed to a happy reunion, and encouraged

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the wife not to repeat her escapade; good marital psychology is clearly at work in this tale. In one version of this story, the miller consults a witch, who reveals where his wife has gone. She teaches him a magic trick to perform with his sieve that will bring her back. It’s worth stopping to think about sieves for a moment, for they are intrinsically magical objects; moreover, they’re also known as riddles: paradoxically they can retain solid substances while allowing liquid to flow unhindered through them. Carrying water in a sieve often features in the kind of impossible challenges which figure in contests between humans and Otherworld creatures; it takes a certain kind of ingenuity to work out how to fulfil that task, and that’s a riddle you will have to work out for yourself. That the original name of Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter’s terrible opponent, should be Tom Riddle shows how thoroughly J.K. Rowling has absorbed traditions of fairies and the folklore of her adopted Scottish home. His first name echoes the Thomases we met in the Borders who trafficked with the fairies; Riddle indicates the mystery that’s attached to Voldemort’s origins and childhood. Nevertheless it is significant that Harry Potter is able to decode the riddle of Tom Riddle by using Dumbledore’s Pensieve, a magical device, punning of course on pensive, that sieves out thoughts and memories so that the significant ones can be identified and that reveals Riddle’s identity. No wonder, then, that the miller was able to pierce the veil between the worlds with this useful tool of his trade. The recovery of the lost wife from the Otherworld is an ancient legend, best known to us from the Greek myth of Orpheus. Sir Orfeo, a medieval version of the story, incorporates a great deal of Celtic belief about fairies as kidnappers of mortals, and about the possibilities of rescuing the lost loved ones from within the fairy mounds. Unlike the best-known version of the myth recounted in Virgil’s Georgics, the romance has a happy ending. Orfeo is king of Winchester, and a skilled harper. His wife Heurodis falls asleep one noontime under a tree

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in her orchard, and thus places herself in the King of the Fairies’ power. He appears and tells her he will carry her off the next day. Distraught Heurodis warns Orfeo of the danger; despite surrounding his queen with companies of men-at-arms, Orfeo is confounded when she is suddenly ‘oway y-twight’ (twitched away) from the knights’ midst. The king gives over his crown to his steward, and, taking his harp, goes off into the wilderness, where he waits patiently for ten years or more, playing to the wild beasts who love to listen to him. Occasionally he sees the fairy king and his company ‘com to hunt him al about / With dim cri and bloweing’; at other times he sees them dancing. At last he catches sight of Heurodis with a company of fairy women, hunting with hawks. Although the husband and wife recognise one another and she weeps, they cannot communicate in words. Orfeo tracks the hunting party into a rock, into the Otherworld: a land which gleams with gold, silver and precious stones. Believing him to be a wandering harper, a porter admits him to the fairy palace. Inside he finds a large number of people, ‘who seemed dead and yet were not’; stolen by the fairies they lie in the postures in which they were taken. Like the stone people in ‘Cherry of Zennor’ they are the fairies’ prisoners. Some are drowned, some stabbed, burned, or lie in childbed, while others are raving mad and confined in bonds: ‘Each was thus in this world y-nome / with fairi thither y-come’ (Each was thus snatched from this world  / and had come there through faery). And here he sees Heurodis, lying asleep under the tree which put her, like Sir Degaré’s mother, into the fairies’ power. Orfeo plays so beautifully for the king that he grants him a boon as his reward, but when Orfeo asks for Heurodis the king hesitates, for she is beautiful and the harper is ‘lean and rough and black’. Orfeo admits that he is indeed a ‘foul thing’, but states that it would be a fouler thing still for a king to go back on his word. So Heurodis is released unconditionally, and the loving couple return to Winchester where the steward willingly cedes the kingdom to his former master.

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Orfeo’s love for his wife – along with his musical skill – overcomes the power of the fairies. Though the romance doesn’t make it explicit, it seems that his renunciation of his kingdom, his luxurious life, and his royal authority for a poor, hermit-like existence in the wilderness, surviving on roots and berries, are what make it possible for him to find Heurodis again. His suffering and endurance enable him to be in the right place to see her among the fairy hunt and thus to follow her into the Otherworld. The strange postures of the captives there betray the Celtic origins of the romance’s imagining of fairy power: those who die suddenly, by accident, or who lose their wits were believed to have been taken by the fairies. And of course it’s a belief that has huge explanatory power: why should this person – and not that one – die unexpectedly? The very human desire to undo death and to bring back the beloved, the belief that you could rescue the lost person if only you love enough, if only you can find out the secret which will force the underworld king to release his prey, is both ancient and near-universal. Documents assembled for the witchcraft trial of Bessy Dunlop in Scotland in 1576 mention the belief that the dead are not in fact dead, but taken. Well into the twentieth century in Scotland and Ireland, it was believed that the Hidden People, the Sidhe, took the dying straight into the Otherworld, substituting a lifeless effigy like the moss-oak stock for the stolen individual. A number of Celtic tales known from Brittany, Ireland and Scotland relate how a man saw the wife he thought was dead and buried out riding with the fairy hunt; in one Irish story a wife appears to her husband in a dream and tells him that he can win her back if (as in the tale of Tam Lin) he can drag her down from her horse as the hunt passes by. It’s the lost wife, not the lost husband, who can be won back from the Otherworld in these stories; the woman is coveted by the fairies for her beauty and charm and is taken away. As we’ll see in Chapter 6, these mortal women seem to have an important role in the fairies’ breeding programme. This cull of

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females may reflect the deaths of wives in childbirth; the idea of exchange – a life for a life – is a powerful one. Susanna Clarke’s monumental novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, published in 2004, is premissed on an early-nineteenth-century alternative world where magic has been rediscovered. Mr Norrell, the magician who almost single-handedly revives it, makes a bad bargain with a fairy, ‘the gentleman with thistle-down hair’ whose name we never learn, in order to bring a woman back from the dead. This, as you can imagine, calls for very powerful magic indeed. And, as we know, when dealing with fairies it is extremely important to be crystal-clear about the terms of the exchange. Arrogant and foolish, Mr Norrell neglects to specify the terms of his bargain precisely enough and Lady Pole, though restored to life, is forced to spend her nights dancing at an eternal fairy ball in the fairy gentleman’s castle of Lost-Hope. Whenever she tries to speak of her plight to other humans, that magical control of speech that Thomas’s Queen of Elfland exercises comes into play. Poor Lady Pole finds herself babbling about irrelevant matters; often, as the fairy’s hold over her deepens, she is forced to relate stories of enchantment from the novel’s imagined past. Unlike the Otherworlds we’ve glimpsed in this chapter, the Otherworld in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a dark and terrifying place, a world of shadows and ruins, lying behind the mirrors of this world, or, more poetically, ‘on the other side of the rain’. The fairy is wonderfully drawn: capricious, unsympathetic to human feelings, petulant and powerful, the thistle-down hair gentleman lays his plans to ensnare the wife of Jonathan Strange, the novel’s other magician. With the aid of a helper who is also under his enchantment, he prepares a stock of black moss-oak, dug up from a dismal bog. With greater success than the fairies who plotted to steal the wife of Sandy Harg, the fairy pulls off his substitution and Arabella is drawn entirely into the fairy world. Jonathan Strange rescues both of the enchanted women, with the aid of Mr Norrell, but the magicians must pay

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a considerable price to overcome the fairy’s malevolent powers; without the return of John Uskglass the Raven King, the legendary King of the North, their enterprise might well have failed. Susanna Clarke knows her fairy lore intimately; one of the book’s many delights is its detailed footnotes, which document the imagined history of magic and explain the ways of fairies as they appear to humans. Clarke draws on the kinds of traditions we’ve seen in this chapter, and will meet again in Chapter 6. It’s the story of the lost wife that’s foregrounded in the novel: Jonathan Strange’s gradual realisation that Arabella is enchanted rather than dead, and the ambivalent ending. But Clarke also paints rich pictures of early-nineteenth-century London, of Venice and, in particular, of Yorkshire, where Mr Norrell’s sinister home in the tellingly named Hurtfew Abbey contrasts with the bustle and jollity of York, where he confounds the Learned Society of York Magicians. The novel also touches on the fairy habit of stealing away human children (John Uskglass, the Raven King, was one such). In a satisfying resolution to one plot line, Lascelles, a particularly vicious, honour-obsessed aristocratic hanger-on, challenges and overcomes a fairy knight by taking out a gun and shooting him. In keeping with chivalric romance tradition, Lascelles must now take his opponent’s place, doomed for all eternity to guard the passage to the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart against all challengers. The man Lascelles kills wears the uniform of the Eleventh Light Dragoons, signalling that the human world and the fairy world are closely aligned at the castle. It’s a place where human champions become enchanted by Otherworld magic, yet they also entrap themselves through their arrogance and empty obsession with honour. Lascelles notices, as he shoots, that a figure, watching from the castle window, leans forward to observe more closely what happens. The fairy lady who, we surmise, lives within, feeds off the deaths of her defenders; how long will the loathsome Lascelles last in that role?

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‘Hold on, hold on tight’ Our travels in this chapter have taken us through Scotland, Cornwall and the medieval forests of England, but, as Jonathan Strange notes, ‘Faerie is never very far away … and there are a thousand ways of getting there.’ For men and women, for those who lust and those who love, the fairy world which shadows ours opens up possibilities of enrichment and pleasure, but more often it conceals the dark threats of loss which are intimately intertwined with human love and desire. Fairies tempt humans with their beauty or, as we shall see in Chapter 4, with the power and treasures that they have to offer, but there is always a price – sometimes a shocking and savage one – for what the fairies dangle before human eyes. Fairy power is enormous, but it is constrained by rules; if you fear the encounter you can avoid it by staying silent when you see something strange and lovely, by not falling asleep under trees at midday, or by staying safely at home. Such cautiousness is blinkered and limiting though; if we don’t open ourselves up to the questions about desire and love which fairies are keen to probe into, we miss much of what it means to be human. The ballads and tales explored in this chapter recognise the overwhelming force of desire: for the elf-queen or for goblin fruit, a very human reaching out to the beautiful without considering the risks involved in its pursuit. Sometimes the gamble pays off: Thomas gains the power of poetry and prophecy; sometimes, like the victims of the Belle Dame sans Merci, the gambler loses his very identity. The soul comes under threat in the fairy exchange, not because the fairies are engaged in the diabolic enterprise of enticing people to damnation but because the all-encompassing nature of desire takes us on a journey that winds between the difficult road to heaven and the broad and inviting highway to hell. No wonder that the denizens of hell come for their tithes to those in thrall to fairy pleasures.

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When it comes to love, however, people need wits, courage and determination. To win back the one you love from the fairy queen or the fairy king demands ingenuity. Orfeo’s glorious harp-playing is enough to win a boon from the entranced king, but it’s his quick perception, drawing on his own understanding of the nature of kingship, that kings must keep their promises, which triggers the fairy king’s acquiescence and the return of Heurodis. Bravery – to go to Miles Cross at midnight on Hallowe’en – and the determination to hold on to the beloved, even when he becomes a bear, an adder or a glowing red-hot bar of iron, wins Janet her Tam Lin and a father for her baby. In Fire and Hemlock, Polly needs the courage to face down Laurel’s claims on Thomas, but also the cleverness to work out that she must, paradoxically, renounce rather than cling to the man she must save. And that insight is what manages to overcome the powerful tide of fairy magic that is about to pull him under for ever. Lizzie, too, is clever enough to work out how to win the antidote to Laura’s enchantment, and she negotiates the fine edge between opening her mouth to the goblins’ luscious juices, yielding like her sister to beauty and sweetness, staying silent under the brutal beatings of the enraged imps, and finally comes home in the triumphant morning to kiss her sister back from living death. Human love is stronger than the blandishments of the fairies, stronger than the horrible enervating death-in-life which Susanna Clarke imagines for Lady Pole and Arabella, but not – alas – stronger than death itself, as we shall see in the next chapter.

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The Black Dog unset’s nearly done on this warm summer evening; there’s no wind and the moon is starting to come up over the quiet fields bordering the road. You are bowling along on your bicycle, making good speed for home along the Essex coast road, not far from the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy. You begin to hear a noise behind you, not the sound of a rising wind, but something else, more akin to panting. You glance over your shoulder but see nothing, except the red glow of some tail lights. Another glance: wait – shouldn’t those tail lights be getting further away? But they are now somehow closer, and the panting noise is louder. A third glance confirms your terrible intuition: what’s coming up behind you at a steady, but closing, pace is a huge black dog. You know all too well what haunts this lonely East Anglian road and you pedal harder, hoping to outrun the beast, but, though you daren’t look round again, the panting is louder and closer now, and you hear the clatter of claws on the road. A mile further down the road, heart nearly bursting, you can’t cycle any faster and the beast is level with you, snarling now as well as panting. Time to stop and face what’s coming at you. As you turn towards the animal, you register its size – it’s as big as a calf; shaggy and unkempt, with a lolling red tongue and fiery glowing eyes. As you stop, it turns sharply through the front wheel of your bike – and disappears, leaving an eerie and brooding silence in its wake. You stop for a drink at a lonely pub

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on the outskirts of Maldon; the other drinkers nod knowingly when they hear your tale, and an old man observes that only a fool would take that road at night. This encounter with the terrifying Black Shuck of East Anglia happened not in the early part of last century, but actually during my lifetime – and maybe yours too. It was the summer of 1960, and the witness recalled the tale twenty years later in an article for a local magazine. Other parts of Britain have their black dogs, and we’ll meet whole packs of them later in this chapter, but nowhere is the legend more lively and living than in the east of England. Black Shuck is a huge black dog, with burning red eyes and a rasping pant. One of the earliest sightings of this creature was at Bungay in 1577. Abraham Fleming’s near-contemporary account relates how, on Sunday, 4 August, ‘a straunge and Terrible wunder’ occurred ‘in a great tempest of violent raine, lightning and thunder, the like whereof hath been seldome seen’. The good folk of Bungay were gathered in St Mary’s church, praying for deliverance from the storm when ‘an horrible shapen thing’, in the form of a great black dog, ran down the aisle of the church and, passing between two people kneeling at prayer, ‘wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward’. This was not the end of it; the dog also attacked another man, who was not killed but was left ‘drawen together and shrunk up, as it were a peece of lether scorched in a hot fire’. On the very same day, the dog visited Blythburgh where, once again inside the church, he leapt down from the roof beams, killing two men and a boy. It seems likely from this description of the weather conditions that the black dog was in fact ball lightning, produced by the storm; a lightning strike would certainly account for the scorching of the Bungay victim compared to the ‘peece of lether’. At Blythburgh the claw marks of (or, rather, some marks attributed to) the black dog can still be seen on the church door. The tale of the Bungay and Blythburgh incidents is immortalised in a rousing song by the Lowestoft band ‘The Darkness’:

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F ig. 12  The Black Shuck clawmarks, Blythburgh, Suffolk.

‘a nimbus of blue fire surrounds a crimson paw / As he takes a fatal swipe at Blythburgh church door’. ‘Black Shuck’ is on their 2003 album, Permission to Land. In May 2014 the bones of an extremely large dog were excavated at Leiston Abbey in Suffolk, prompting the Daily Mail to ask whether this was the origin of the ‘legendary devil dog, Black Shuck’. A duller explanation might be that one of the fifteenth-century abbots of Leiston kept something like an Irish wolfhound among his hunting dogs; for monks, as Chaucer tells us in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, were notoriously fond of spending days in the hunting field. But it

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seems unlikely that, despite the match between the date of the dog skeleton and the black dog attack in Bungay, the abbot’s dog could have given rise to the story, given how many litter-mates he has around the country. In Yorkshire we find the Bargest or Barghest, who is often sighted roaming through York; in Leeds and Wakefield he is known as the Padfoot. The huge black hound causes alarm when he’s spotted, but he doesn’t necessarily presage disaster. Church-Grims are a particular variety of this creature, haunting churchyards, most often in dog form, and protecting the graves from evil. Sometimes they take other animal forms: in Denmark the Grim quite often manifests itself as a sow, somehow a bit less frightening. Shuck and his avatars are most frequently sighted in East Anglia. His name derives most likely from the Old English word scucca, meaning something like ‘demon’, and his appearance has different consequences across the counties. In Norfolk, those who see Black Shuck are thought not to live for long. One tale, in which a group of teenagers saw a black dog leap onto a car bonnet, relates that many of the witnesses died unexplained or unexpected deaths thereafter: car accidents, cancer, even suicide claimed their lives. However, so many Norfolk sightings have been reported by healthy witnesses quite a long time after the event that we can conclude that Black Shuck’s appearance doesn’t always prove fatal. In Suffolk, meanwhile, he is relatively harmless, sometimes even protecting those who see him. No wonder then that, as a Suffolk band, ‘The Darkness’ don’t fear to invoke him. The Shuck’s presence can ward off worse evildoers, just as black dog appearances elsewhere in the country are thought to do. A Yorkshire tale recorded by Augustus Hare in 1901 recounts how one Johnnie Greenwood of Swancliffe had to ride through a dark wood at night to visit his friend. At the edge of the wood, a large black dog joined him and ‘pattered along by his side’. When it grew too dark to see the beast among the trees, he could still hear the pattering of paws. At the edge of the wood the dog vanished, but when Johnnie later rode

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home the dog reappeared, accompanying him on his homeward journey until he had passed through the woods. Years later, two robbers confessed to the chaplain of York gaol that they had been lurking in the wood that night, intending to rob and murder Johnnie, but they abandoned their plan when they saw the dog at his side. Several variants of the protective dog story are known from elsewhere in Britain; mothers in the Quantock Hills of Somerset were happy to let their children play outside and did not bother to keep a close watch over them, for they knew that the Gurt Dog would guard them from harm. Why are black dogs so frequent, and yet so equivocal in what they portend? Dogs are, by dint of their very closeness to humans, complicated symbols of different kinds of relationship. We recognise in the dog its capacity to do us harm, to savage us if it has a mind to do so, and it’s clear too that a dog under someone else’s command can represent a very grave threat. And, when encountered alone, at night or in an unexpected place, our deepest instincts warn us that the dog could be foe or friend; his cousins may lie quietly by our hearths, but some part of us remembers that his ancestors were wolves. Canine loyalty can be construed as an unwelcome persistence; Winston Churchill called attention to the doggedness of the depressive episodes to which he was prone by calling his illness ‘the black dog’, an expression he had found in the writings of Samuel Johnson. The 1970s musician Nick Drake, also afflicted by depression, composed one of his last recorded songs ‘Black-Eyed Dog’ about a black-eyed dog that called at his door, an image which draws on Churchill and Johnson’s metaphor. The black dog has now become a symbol of depressive illness in contemporary discussion of mental health issues; he does not presage death in these discussions, but rather a life-sapping, soul-destroying presence that blocks any chance of joyfulness or contentment. Matthew Johnstone’s video I had a black dog, his name was depression, made in conjunction with the World Health Organisation in 2012, gives a wonderful view of the black dog’s persistence and

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glumness, but eventually, through a range of therapies, it shows how the dog is shrunk down to a manageable size, and no longer interposes his sorrowful features and drooping tail between the speaker and everyone else in his life. Dogs are also our close friends; they guard our property, defend us from harm and give us their love and loyalty. Thus it’s hardly surprising that ghost dogs should appear to protect travellers or to reassure the anxious. Some of the East Anglian black dogs are said to be the ghosts of faithful hounds who pined away after the loss of their masters; shipwrecked fishing boats, falling from a horse or other accidental deaths leave the dog waiting for his master to return home, until he finally dies of a broken heart. If some black dog apparitions are ghosts, others are perhaps the Devil in disguise. The Mauthe Doog or Moddy Doo of Peel Castle on the Isle of Man was sighted by the soldiers garrisoned there in the reign of Charles II. Like Shuck in appearance, with a rough, shaggy coat, he roamed about the castle, but no one knew to whom he belonged. Eventually the men in the guardroom got used to the black dog lying before the hearth, but none of them was brave enough, after locking the castle gate at night, to go alone from the guardroom down a dark passage to deliver the keys to the captain of the guard. Normally they would only walk down there in pairs. One night, however, a soldier who had drunk too much boasted that he would take the keys alone – and worse, he dared the dog to come with him. ‘Let him come! … I’ll see whether he be dog or devil!’ And the dog got up and padded down the passageway after him. None of his companions dared move; rather, they waited in dreadful silence. Nothing could be heard at first but the dashing of the waves against the castle islet, but then unearthly screams and terrible howling came from the passageway. The braggart, his face ashen and contorted with terror, fell back into the guardroom. He could not speak of what he had experienced, and died without uttering another word three days later. The dog was never seen again; perhaps he was

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indeed the Devil, seeking to entrap the drunken boaster and to claim his soul. In Jersey, the Black Dog pub at Bouley Bay has a sign which depicts Le Tchien, the Devil Dog of Bouley. With fiery eyes as big as saucers, he overtakes people walking the cliff paths of the Jersey north coast. The Tchien drags a long chain behind him, and he circles his victims menacingly. Although those who see him are terrified, they usually come to no further harm. It has been suggested that the Tchien and his beat were invented to keep folk away from the coastal footpaths used by smugglers, but the tradition seems likely to be older than the eighteenth-century smuggling trade. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was well acquainted with these black dog legends when he came to write The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialised in the Strand Magazine of 1901–2 before its publication in book form. Many counties claim that their particular black dog was Conan Doyle’s inspiration; a Norfolk golfing holiday in March 1901 which he took with his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson may have brought Black Shuck to mind. The Baskerville family lived in Clyro Court, near Clyro in the Welsh borders. It has now been renamed Baskerville Hall, and is run as a hotel. Arthur Conan Doyle is said to have stayed with the family there from time to time; here he would have heard the local legends about the Vaughans, who held the land before the Baskervilles built the house in 1845, and who kept packs of black dogs. Indeed, Black Vaughan, who died in 1469, still rode the countryside, accompanied by a pack of howling red-eyed black beasts. The story’s setting on Dartmoor, however, points to more local West Country dog legends, and Fletcher Robinson in fact hailed from that part of the country. The Wisht Hounds, which we’ll meet below, are a spectral baying cry of hounds, glimpsed in the lowering skies over the moorland; and the Yeth Hound, said to be headless, yet still somehow able to howl, is also a native of Devon. Dartmoor is, even in the sunshine, an eerie place, with its dark crags and tors silhouetted against the light, with its treacherous green bogs and sucking marshes.

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F ig. 13  The Hound of the Baskervilles, Puffin book cover.

Whenever I’ve stopped on the moors to let the dog run around on the way back from Cornwall, I’ve always been reminded of her eerie dark-coated kindred and am quite glad to get back in the car. Nevertheless, the ‘gigantic hound’ that terrifies Sir Henry Baskerville’s uncle to death in Conan Doyle’s tale turns out to be a mortal, if enormous, dog which Holmes and Watson shoot dead just before it can tear out Sir Henry’s throat: In mere size and strength it was a terrible creature … gaunt, savage, and as large as a small lioness. Even now in the stillness of death, the huge jaws seemed to be dripping with a bluish flame and the small, deep-set, cruel eyes were ringed with fire. I placed my hand upon the glowing muzzle, and as I held them up my own fingers smouldered and gleamed in the darkness. ‘Phosphorus,’ I said.

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This dog turns out to have a mundane origin: bought in London from ‘Ross and Mangles, the dealers in Fulham Road … the strongest and most savage in their possession’. The Hound’s mystique is compounded by the phosphorus daubed over its face, and by the legend of the Baskervilles, preserved in an eighteenth-century manuscript, and revealed to the detective and Dr Watson early in the story. According to this tale, Sir Hugo Baskerville had kidnapped a girl and brought her to the Hall. While Hugo caroused downstairs, the girl climbed out of the window and made her escape; on discovering this Hugo vowed that he would ‘render his body and soul to the Powers of Evil if he might but overtake the wench’. Setting his hounds on her trail, Hugo and his disreputable friends rode out across the moors in pursuit. Hugo broke away from his companions; when at last they caught up with him they found the girl dead of fear, and Hugo lying dead beside her, his throat torn out by ‘a foul thing, a great black beast, shaped like a hound … [which] turned its blazing eyes and dripping jaws upon them’. One witness expired from the horror that very night, while the other two were broken men for the rest of their days. No wonder, with such a tradition in the family, that a man with a weak heart could be terrified to death by a large dog smeared with phosphorus. Conan Doyle’s Hound is more akin to Black Shuck than the packs of hellhounds more usually associated with Devon, but the author also likely knew the legend of Richard Cabell, whose tomb can still be seen in Buckfastleigh churchyard. Cabell, who lived just north of the Devon town, was reputed to be so evil that at his death a pack of ghostly hellhounds, baying loudly and with fiery eyes aglow, came loping across the moors to escort his soul to hell. Other versions of the legend suggest that Cabell murdered his wife and that he sold his soul to the Devil; he may even have pursued his runaway wife with hounds, as Hugo pursued the captured girl. The wife’s faithful dog is said to have turned on Cabell and both were killed. Clearly not all of these

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stories can be true; the elements involving the wife and the savaging of her pursuer sound suspiciously as if they have been imported directly from Conan Doyle’s tale. On the anniversary of his death, Cabell was said to be seen out hunting with the hounds; what certainly is true is that an extremely large slab of stone was laid on top of his grave, and erected over it is a small roofed building with iron bars (usually proof against haunting) around the sides. An adapted and updated version of the tale, entitled ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’, was screened in the second series of the BBC’s popular Sherlock. Written by Mark Gatiss, this retelling was situated squarely within the horror genre. Rather disappointingly for the black dog enthusiast like me, Sherlock’s ‘gigantic hound’ turns out to be a hallucination, while the real powers of darkness are, as Gatiss noted, ‘faceless government and conspiracy theories’. Instead of the haunted house and cursed lineage, Baskerville is a research facility with ‘dark rumours about the “things” they’re breeding in there’. Part of the episode was filmed on Dartmoor, at, appropriately enough, Hound Tor, a deserted medieval village, not far from the prehistoric site of Grimspound. Grimspound, in turn, may have lent its name to the Grimpen Mire, the terrifying bog into which Conan Doyle’s villain Stapleton disappears, though Fox Tor Mires is likely the topographical original: ‘Somewhere in the heart of the great Grimpen Mire, down in the foul slime of the huge morass which had sucked him in, this cold and cruel-hearted man is forever buried’, Watson observes at the adventure’s end. Stapleton is unlikely to devise further supernatural mischief, alive or dead. The Harry Potter universe makes play with the black dog legend in different guises. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry is alarmed to catch sight, from time to time, of a huge black dog with fiery eyes which seems to be tailing him. His friends fear that this creature may be a Grim, the kind of spectral hound whose name J.K. Rowling borrowed from the canine ghost said to haunt churchyards, and a well-known

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portent of death in the Potterverse. The sceptical Hermione gets into an impassioned argument with Ron as to whether the Grim is a supernatural omen of death, or whether its mere appearance is enough to make the witness die of terror. And thus it has no predictive power: ‘There you are then. They see the Grim and die of fright. The Grim’s not an omen, it’s the cause of death!’, she asserts with typical Hermione logic. It’s causation not correlation that is at stake in her argument, and she almost succeeds in debunking the Grim’s prophetic powers. But the creature on Harry’s trail is not a Grim at all, but rather a manifestation of his shape-changing godfather, Sirius Black. Sirius takes his first name from the Dog Star, the constellation which can be seen in the dog days of summer, while his surname echoes the ambivalence with which the black dog is regarded in British folklore. Is Sirius a force for good or evil? He is an Animagus, capable of animal transformation, and his chosen form is the massive black dog which has terrified his young godson. Sirius’s boyhood nickname, it transpires, is Padfoot, that version of the black dog which roams the Leeds–Wakefield area. Rowling, here as elsewhere in the series, deftly deploys long-established folklore motifs to kindle the imaginations of her readers, young and old alike. It’s not just memories of the Hound of the Baskervilles which create the terror that the black dog embodies, but a centuries-old belief in the baleful implications of such beasts.

The Wild Hunt and Its Hounds These tales of individual phantom dogs are closely related to the idea of packs of hounds who run on the trail of the doomed or damned. Let’s make our way back to Dartmoor, this time on a still, moonlit night. A farmer is making his way homewards from that jolly occasion Widdecombe Fair when he hears the baying of a pack of hounds: the Wisht Hounds are out near Wistman’s Wood. It’s too far to run for home, so the man stands his ground and waits for the pack to catch him up. Led by a

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dark-clad huntsman, muffled up to his strange, dead eyes, the hounds swirl about him. The farmer, having had a bit to drink at the fair, calls out boldly to the huntsman, ‘Have you had good hunting?’ ‘That I have’, replies the huntsman. Made even bolder by this response, the man cries, ‘Then give us some of your game!’ The hunter tosses him a bundle and takes off across the moorland, the dogs howling at his heels. And the man, pleased with himself for braving the spectre and for getting himself and his wife some fine fare for dinner, rallies his horse and hurries on home. As he comes through the door, he calls out triumphantly, ‘Here’s our dinner, wife’, and tosses the bundle on to the table. But, as its wrappings unravel, he and his distraught wife realise that what he has brought home is the lifeless body of their own child. Someone must die when the Wisht Hounds, the Devon Yell Hounds, the Yorkshire Gabriel Hounds or the Welsh Cwn Annwn are glimpsed, or heard howling in the sky; very often the victims are children. The stories reflect the disturbing rates of child mortality before the modern period – only two children out of three making it to the age of five, carried off by childhood illnesses, fevers or infections. Like the fairies who unexpectedly snatch mortals away, the hunter and his hounds deal in swift and sudden death. As with the fairies, mortals do better to offer respect to the leader of the Wild Hunt if they come across him; the farmer’s drunken impertinence cost him his child’s life. The first recorded evidence of the Wild Hunt, the phantom riders with their packs of baying, ghostly hounds, is an account recorded in the Peterborough version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Under the year 1127, the chronicler relates how terrible portents were seen before the unpopular Henry of Poitou was appointed abbot of the local abbey. One Sunday, several persons saw and heard many huntsmen hunting. The hunters were swarthy, and huge, and ugly; and their hounds were all black, and wide-eyed, and ugly. And they rode on black horses, and black he-goats. This was seen in the very deer-park

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in the town of Peterborough, and in all the woods from that same town as far as Stamford. And the monks heard their horns blowing in the night. Credible men, who saw them in the night, said that they thought there might well be about twenty or thirty horn-blowers.

These supernatural hunters – for surely real hunters wouldn’t be mounted on goats – are a version of the Wild Hunt, a sure sign of disaster to come, often presaging death to those who witness it. The Hunt is well-known across northern Europe; in Scandinavia and Germany it is often led by Odin or his German counterpart Wotan, while in Britain a number of different figures are said to ride at its head. Although the Peterborough Chronicle’s portents are the earliest sighting of the Hunt, there are several other early legends which tell how dislocating contact with this kind of supernatural can be. We need to make our way westwards once more to Here­ fordshire to hear the earliest account of the Hunt’s origin and its leader. According to Walter Map, whose Trifles for Courtiers, composed in the 1190s, offers a wealth of unusual lore and legends, a certain early British king, Herla, was visited in his court by a dwarf-king, riding on a goat (maybe one of those Peterborough goat-steeds). The dwarf said that he would attend Herla’s wedding and invited him in return to come to his own wedding in a year’s time. Herla accepted the invitation. On Herla’s wedding day the dwarf appeared, bringing a host of small servitors and pitching brightly coloured pavilions about Herla’s court. From these the servants brought food, presented on gold plates, and wine in goblets carved from a single gemstone. The dwarf-servants scurried around bringing lustre to the feast; finally the king reminded Herla of his promise and vanished at cock-crow. A year later he returned to fetch his wedding guests, and Herla and his retinue followed him into a cave, deep into darkness. After a while they came to a place illuminated by hundreds of lamps and here the king’s wedding was celebrated. After

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the festivities, Herla and his followers were given splendid gifts: hawks, horses, dogs and hunting gear. The dwarf-king led them to the edge of the darkness, gave Herla a final gift – a small bloodhound, which he placed directly in his arms – and warned the king and his party not to dismount until the dog leapt down to the ground. When they emerged into daylight, the king asked an old shepherd for news of the queen, but to his great surprise he found that the man could barely understand him. For the shepherd was a Saxon, who dimly remembered hearing tell of a long-dead queen bearing the name of Herla’s wife, ‘and it is now two hundred years since the Saxons took control of this kingdom’. Herla had thought that he had only been away for three days, and sat stock still in amazement. Some of the company, forgetting the warning, jumped down from their horses and crumbled straightaway into dust; but the king has kept riding with the rest of his cavalcade, waiting for the moment that the dog jumps down. And it has not jumped down yet. The story of the Wild Hunt’s origins suggests that Herla was tricked by a fairy, perhaps the fairy king Oberon, perhaps another figure. It’s well known that time in the Otherworld passes at a different rate from time in this world; folk tales are full of figures who think they have been away three days and in fact have been absent for three hundred years. Usually some momentous change has come about in the time that the hero has been away; in this story it’s the coming of the Saxons. In the Irish legend of Oisín, the hero goes off to the Otherworld with a fairy woman (see Chapter 5). When he returns, he finds that Finn, his father and leader of the Fianna (a band of outlaws living in the Irish forests), is long dead, as is the High King at Tara, and that St Patrick has come, bringing Christianity to Ireland. Oisín is grief-stricken to find that he has outlived everyone he knew and loved, and horrified to find that a companion who dismounts dissolves, like Herla’s riders, into dust. St Patrick points out that Oisín has good fortune; unlike his relatives, he has survived long

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enough to be able to hear the truth of Christianity and be baptised. He can, in contrast to his father and the rest of the pagan Fianna, achieve salvation. Oisín prefers, however, to accept the fate which overtook the ancestors and refuses baptism, and he too dismounts and falls immediately into decay. These tales bring together the ideas of death and loss both on an individual and on a cultural level. To give oneself over to the Otherworld has consequences, ones which are usually not spelled out by the fairies or Otherworld folk in advance. For they have much longer lifespans than humans do, and time affects them quite differently; those Otherworld dwellers who love mortals seek to keep them with them, insulated from the effects of time and change. That old paradox – is it worth living for ever, if you lose contact with everyone you have known and loved? – is explored through the story of the Otherworld sojourn, but the legend also speaks to our apprehension that change is happening all around us, but that we can’t necessarily see it on a day-to-day basis. Herla’s story offers a thought experiment: what would it be like to be whisked forward in time, and find yourself on the other side of a social and political revolution? Our modern time-travel stories are usually interested in new forms of social organisation: the future offers glorious utopias or horrifying dystopias, astonishing technological advances or the terrible threat of apocalypse. The leap forward to a later era, operating of course in hindsight, from Walter Map’s point of view, suggests that human lives have not changed very much – there are still shepherds and sheep – but the unhappy Herla remains trapped within the old paradigm. He cannot step down into the new world, but must forever continue his wild flight through a present he can have no part in. In Normandy, the Hunt is known as the mesnie Hellekin, its leader a certain Hellekin, whose name chimes suggestively both with King Herla, swept up into an English Wild Hunt, and with Harlequin, the silent, often luckless, figure from Italian commedia dell’arte. It’s not clear whether Hellekin, the demonic rider, and

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Harlequin originate in the same figure; they’ve certainly evolved in very different directions. In this tradition, the Wild Hunt has become moralised. Criminals and evil-doers can be glimpsed riding among the mesnie; though often they are not yet dead, their appearance with the spectres foreshadows their speedy demise. The most recent novel in the Commissaire Adamsberg series by the French crime writer Fred Vargas is an intriguing tale titled L’armée furieuse (2011), translated as The Ghost Riders of Ordebec (2013), which won the International Dagger Award. Set in rural Normandy, it makes ingenious use of the Wild Hunt tradition alongside more down-to-earth crime-solving techniques. In the south of England, and in later tradition, the antler-bearing figure of Herne the Hunter leads the Hunt; his history is related below. The Dandy Dogs of Cornwall have a distinctly earthly origin, though they too evolve into devil-dogs. Dando was a jolly hunting priest, who neglected his parish duties for the joys of the hunting field and other pleasures of the flesh. One Sunday he was out hunting instead of taking divine service, when he called for a drink. All his companions’ flasks had long since been emptied, and they wondered where they might find some more drink. ‘Go to hell for it, if you can’t find it on earth’, laughed Dando, tickled by the fact that the estate they were riding over was called ‘Earth’. At that moment, a dark stranger appeared among the riders and handed Dando a hip flask. Dando swigged deeply from it, and smacked his lips over the taste. ‘Do the gods drink such nectar?’ he inquired. ‘Devils do’, replied the stranger. Well, we can’t say that Dando wasn’t given fair warning. In recompense for the drink, Dando’s new friend began to help himself to some of the game that had been caught. The priest flew at him in a violent rage. Already drunk, he tumbled to the earth while the stranger triumphantly brandished his booty and made to ride away. ‘I’ll go to hell after them, but I’ll get them from thee’, shouted Dando. And so he did, for the dark hunter lifted him up on the horse and rode off at speed. Fire

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leapt up from the horse’s hoofprints with every stride and the dogs followed in full noisy cry. Dando was never seen again, but the baying of his hounds is often heard, especially on a Sunday morning, reminding its hearers of the sinfulness of breaking the Sabbath in pleasure-seeking. Those who become surrounded by the infernal pack, ‘snorting fire and uttering a yelp of indescribably frightful tone’, do best to fling themselves face downwards so that they can’t see the apparitions, and to pray with all their might; just such providential action saved a poor herdsman on Dartmoor one night. The Devil here is strikingly fair-minded; as in Chaucer’s ‘Friar’s Tale’, he makes no secret of his identity, and it’s Dando’s drunken irascibility, not the fiend’s wiles, that brings about his doom. Death comes to each of us, these stories suggest, but surely it does not come unannounced. The dark, foreboding powers which come for the unwitting – the Shuck or the Gabriel Hounds – warn those whose death is near that they should prepare for it while there is still time. It’s usually with hindsight, though, that those left behind realise that they heard the hounds before an unforeseen death. Child mortality, as noted above in the tale of the farmer and the Wisht Hounds, is an important element in the tradition; the Dandy Dogs and other spectral hounds are sometimes said to be the souls of unbaptised children, destined to run forever through a kind of limbo, being neither damned nor saved. These stories of the Wild Hunt warn us that death can come at any time, that one should always be prepared to encounter it and to repent and make good the wrongs done to others. A late-nineteenth-century writer, F.K. Robinson, who was compiling a glossary of words used in the Whitby district, explained the Gabble Ratchets (a local term for the Gabriel Hounds, where ratchet is an old word for a hunting dog) as the sound of migrating wild geese, heading south, ‘in the twilight evenings of autumn, their cry being more audible than the assemblage is visible’. Robinson noted that the townsfolk would close their ears and cover their eyes until the uncanny

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sound was past. Though this explanation for the phantom hounds is perhaps disappointingly rational, it’s easy to imagine, as the autumn nights begin to draw in, and there’s a nip in the air, how the eerie cries of the unseen creatures rightly signal the mortality of vulnerable old folk and children which a sharp northern winter would inevitably bring.

Herne the Hunter In the south of England, and in later tradition, the antler-bearing figure of Herne the Hunter leads the Hunt. Herne himself has multiple origins; in one aspect he is the leader of the Wild Hunt, but he also keeps the forests and protects the deer from overhunting. He wears antlers on his head as his insignia. He is an important folklore figure in the Thames Valley region. Herne is first mentioned in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, where he is clearly a demonic figure ‘with great ragg’d horns’, who damages trees and cattle ‘and makes milch-kine yield blood’. Herne shakes a chain ‘in a most hideous and dreadful manner’, suggesting that he is a spirit normally kept chained in Purgatory. He walks in the winter at midnight, and was once a keeper in the forest. A nineteenth-century romantic novel by William Ainsworth gives a full account of Herne’s story; although it has all the hallmarks of Victorian invention, it has come to be accepted as the original legend. Ainsworth’s Windsor Castle (1842) tells how Herne was the king’s favourite keeper, able to find and stalk deer when no one else could track them in the huge forest that Windsor Great Park was in the old days. Herne saved the king’s life when he interposed himself between the monarch and a charging stag; his wounds were cured by a wizard who had given himself up to black magic. Part of the cure was the strapping of antlers to Herne’s head; he is also said to have been bound to an oak tree. Herne’s gifts had made his fellow keepers envious, and they paid the wizard to destroy Herne’s understanding of woodcraft and the ways of the deer. No longer able to find the animals for the hunt, the unhappy

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keeper fell from the king’s favour and eventually hanged himself from an oak tree in Windsor Great Park. The jealous huntsmen were compelled into Herne’s train, to ride with him for all eternity, and other wicked spirits have come to join them over the years. Herne’s story combines a number of elements. In the first instance, he’s a mistreated and underappreciated employee whose fall from favour brings him to sucidal despair. There’s also the pact with the powers of darkness and a remarkable sympathy with the creatures of the forest, which has made some people connect him with Cernunnos, the Horned God, whom we met in Chapter 1. It’s possible that their names are related – though Herne may also derive his name from the Old English herne, meaning ‘a forest clearing or glade’, but their functions don’t seem to be quite the same: Herne is not the guardian of the beasts in the forest. Herne and his companions have been sighted a number of times ranging across Berkshire, before the outbreaks of both world wars and on many occasions of national trauma since then. Witnesses have ranged from Eton scholars out at night and up to no good, to blameless ladies from Cookham Dene and other Thames-side villages. Fantasy writers have co-opted him as a heroic figure, as symbolising a peculiarly English strength which stems from his sympathies with the ancient world of the greenwood; he and the Hunt are often pitted against the powers of darkness. Herne and the Hunt appear in John Masefield’s sequel to The Midnight Folk (1927), The Box of Delights (1935); in Alan Garner’s The Moon of Gomrath (1964), discussed in Chapter 6; and in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising (1973), mentioned in Chapter 1. At the climax to Cooper’s story, Will calls upon Herne and his Yell Hounds (not this time black dogs, but rather a pack of white, red-eared, red-eyed hunting hounds whose origin lies in Celtic myth). Herne is an altogether terrifying figure: ‘Indeed he was half-beast. The dark branches of Herne’s antlers curved up over Will, the moonlight glinting on their velvety sheen,

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and the Hunter laughed softly. He looked down at Will out of his yellow eyes.’ Herne is an ancient, non-aligned power in the book’s battle between the Old Ones and the adherents of the Dark. His kinship with the animal kingdom, the cruelty and the ‘pitiless impulse to revenge’ that Will sees marked on his face is beneficial only when harnessed for good by the Signs which Will has collected over the course of the novel, and which mark his initiation as an Old One. And the Hunter and his Hounds successfully see off the powers of the Dark, at least for the time being.

The White Lady and White Ladies The dead who ride with Herne the Hunter and his avatars are at least under their leader’s control, while the black dogs, whether singly or in hellhound packs, warn of dire things to come. A figure of contrasting hue, the White Lady, the Bean Sidhe, or Woman of Fairy, the female figure who becomes known as the banshee, portends the coming of death in areas of Celtic tradition. Nowadays she’s mostly associated with loud wailing or howling and people don’t have much idea what she looks like, but in Scotland banshees are attached to particular families, and encounters with them can occasionally be beneficial. In the legend of the Black Lad MacCrimmon, from the Scottish Highlands, the Black Lad is taught how to play the bagpipes by the banshee of the castle. The banshee did not belong to the MacCrimmon family; rather, she seems to have been attracted from her normal haunts by the sounds of the aspirant bagpiper, for we know that Scottish fairies and trows are particularly fond of music provided the musician has some talent, and they are themselves often virtuoso performers. Recognising the Black Lad’s latent capacities perhaps, the banshee gives him a choice between acquiring skill without success, or success without skill. The Black Lad chooses the first – and the right – option; the banshee enchants his playing so that he becomes the greatest piper ever known in the Highlands. In Skye the gruagach,

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thought to be a long-dead mistress of the household, often one who perished in childbirth, is a tall, thin figure with long white hair, clad in a misty white robe. Although she appears to foretell death, she also helps the family who live in her household. She watches over the children, protects the simple-minded and sees to the cattle, and she’s very partial to the odd dish of cream. But if you have a gruagach attached to your home, you must keep the dogs away from her, for neither can abide the other. More often, the banshee is an omen of death: a woman with long white hair who is heard keening and clapping her hands together. An Irish tale from County Cork, recorded in 1825, tells of a well-loved minister who fell ill. Kavanagh the herdsman was sent to town to fetch medicine for him. He returned with the bottle all right, but was weeping and trembling uncontrollably. When the minister’s daughter asked what had happened, he declared that ‘the master … is going from us’. The daughter had supposed that her father was on the mend and assured Kavanagh of this, but he related how as I came through the glen of Ballybeg, [the banshee] was along with me keening, and screeching, and clapping her hands, by my side, every step of the way, with her long white hair falling about her shoulders, and I could hear her repeat the master’s name every now and then, as plain as ever I heard it. When I came to the old abbey, she parted from me there, and turned into the pigeon-field … The minister took a turn for the worse after this. A week later the sounds of moaning and the clapping of hands were heard right outside the sickroom window, for the hour, and the Banshee, were drawing closer. When the family went to look who might be lurking outside, no one was there, but the wails and clapping continued until the dawn – and by then the minister was dead.

In Scotland, the banshee is often conflated with a figure with a different origin, the Washer at the Ford. The Bean Nighe is seen at a ford or a river, washing out bloodstained clothing;

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F ig. 14 ‘The Banshee Appears’ (1862).

she sometimes has webbed feet. She is also said to be a woman who died in childbirth, and, if you question her, she will reveal whose death is at hand. In Irish myth the Washer at the Ford is a recurrent figure; she is an avatar of the Morrígan, the goddess of battle, who determines defeat or victory, and who sometimes takes the form of a crow. When the great Irish hero Cú Chulainn (Cú means ‘Dog’) is on his way to what will be his final battle, accompanied by his teacher Cathbad the Druid, he sees just such an omen. And presently they came to a ford, and there they saw a young girl, thin and white-skinned and having yellow hair, washing and ever washing, and wringing out clothing that was stained crimson red, and she crying and keening all the time. ‘Little Hound’, said Cathbad, ‘do you see what it is that young girl is doing? It is your red clothes she is washing, and crying as she washes, because she knows you are going to your death … And

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take the warning now and turn back again.’ ‘Dear master’, said Cuchulainn, ‘you have followed me far enough; for I will not turn back from my vengeance on the men of Ireland that are come to burn and to destroy my house and my country. And what is it to me, the woman of the Sidhe to be washing red clothing for me? It is not long till there will be clothing enough, and armour and arms, lying soaked in pools of blood, by my own sword and my spear.

And sure enough, despite a heroic last stand in which he binds himself to a tree-trunk in order to die on his feet, Cú Chulainn is indeed slain, for powerful wizards have been mobilised against him. Not all of these female portents are dressed in white, though the colour is traditionally associated with them. There are plenty of other White Ladies to be found in England and Wales; these are ghosts, rather than ancestors or death-spirits, and were often disappointed in love while alive. Murdered on their wedding nights, or losing their fiancés before the marriage, they are long-haired, dressed in white, and usually wail, moan and wring their hands. These White Ladies don’t necessarily portend death or disaster; rather, they are unhappy souls who cannot move on into the next life. In pre-Reformation England such revenants could usually be assisted through the saying of Masses for their souls, or by making some kind of restitution on the spirit’s behalf. Those who had seen them knew exactly how to help them, and the grateful ghost might appear for a final time to express its thanks at being released from its halfway existence. With the decline in belief in Purgatory, however, these beings are less easily dealt with; those who see them tend to flee in terror rather than inquire what it might be that the restless Lady wants or needs, and perhaps that is why they tend to persist in their haunting. We no longer know how to lay such ghosts. The highly respectable Martha Jane Bury of Darwen, Lancashire, who lived from 1850 to 1913, and who was active both in the cooperative movement and the local temperance movement,

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is commemorated by a fine white statue in Darwen cemetery. The figure shows a resolute-looking woman in Edwardian dress, her shawl closed at the neck with a brooch, and with her skirts gathered up in one hand, in which she holds a much-eroded book – perhaps a temperance tract. A more blameless matron is hard to imagine, yet poor Martha Jane has attracted both traditional White Lady tales and a modern so-called ‘urban legend’. Despite her age at death, it’s claimed that, like many other White Ladies, she died in childbirth, or as a consequence of rape accompanied by the kidnap of her child. Martha Jane will appear if you call ‘White Lady, White Lady, I killed your black baby’ (a traditional ditty found elsewhere in the country in White Lady tales), but she will then attack whoever summoned her. Various websites repeat the story that the Lady killed a group of teenagers who were camping in their tent in nearby White Hall Park in the late 1980s, a motif which has surely migrated into Martha Jane’s legend from contemporary horror films. The tales associated with other White Ladies reflect community consciousness of violence against women, of women as victims. Some (like the Bean Nighe) have died in childbirth – a horribly common cause of death before the advent of modern medicine. Their deaths are, in a sense, sacrificial: they die to give birth to the next generation, but also because they cannot refuse sexual activity to their husbands; they must, in the old-fashioned term, pay him the marriage debt, and it is they who suffer the dangerous consequences of problematic pregnancies and perilous childbed. Other White Ladies are murdered by their vicious lovers or husbands, attacked by gangs of men, or commit suicide after being jilted by their faithless fiancés. Their stories attest to female victimhood and to male guilt; no wonder perhaps that their unhappiness can never be assuaged, and no wonder that some of them want to seek revenge for their wrongs. Why are the supernatural figures who portend death almost without exception female? Men call out for their mothers on their deathbeds, it’s often said; that death should be gendered

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female comes as no surprise. Harbingers of death, such as the banshee and the Washer at the Ford, but also the figure of the fetch, who occurs in areas of Britain settled by Scandinavians in the late Anglo-Saxon period, tend to come for death-bound men, rather than for dying women. Some older Norse poetry preserves the idea of death, particularly death in battle, as an erotic encounter. The desirable, seductive woman reaches out to the fighter: death is figured not as violent and agonising at the hands of the enemy, but as welcome, as a warm, loving embrace, as a sexualised encounter which conflates death throes with the shudders of orgasmic pleasure. So the valkyries, the battle-women of Norse myth, and the Irish Morrígan fulfil an important role in warrior societies, comforting fighters who face death and mutilation on a near-daily basis by conflating death and sex, reinforcing heroic ideologies of death with the powerful drives of sex and life and reconfiguring death as desirable. In other folk tales, however, the female death-bringer echoes another social role, that of the mourning female relative. Just as the warrior’s mother or sister would prepare his dead body for burial, removing and washing his bloodstained armour before wrapping him in clean white linen, so the Washer at the Ford signals what is to come, prefiguring the loss the whole kin group, but particularly the womenfolk, will suffer when the man dies and, in a sense, preparing them for the new role. ‘Women must weep and men must remember’, the Roman writer Tacitus noted in 98 ce, as a customary saying among the German tribes who were the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons. Women are the ones who most actively perform the rituals of mourning: wailing and keening for the dead man, lamenting the gap left in their lives. It usually falls to men, in traditional societies, to sum up the dead man’s achievements, to fix his reputation, his posthumous glory, in poems or speeches which will preserve his memory after death. The banshee, whether in the form of the young woman or of the crone-figure, as she often manifests herself in Scotland, models the behaviour of

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the bereaved womenfolk, showing them how they will need to respond when the news of the death comes. Giving a female face to death works to mitigate its horror, to ready those who will be left behind, and to make more peaceful that transition into the darkness, as if into the welcoming arms of a mother or a lover, bringing peace and calm to the one who must depart.

The Walking Dead Not always though. Sometimes the dead just won’t stay in their graves, but keep coming back to molest the living. The horror of the animated corpse, the shambling figure of the zombie, with mouldering face and fingers clutching after living human flesh for sustenance, is a popular trope of modern filmmaking. The zombie figures profound social fears generated by the overcrowding and the many other pressures of modern urban environments. In zombie movies, the world of the city is already full enough, crammed with shops and car-clogged highways; there are claustrophobic metro systems and hordes of people hurrying to work. How much worse a place the city becomes when the dead refuse to stay dead, safely confined underground, and begin to press in on the living, taking their space, their food, their air, their very lives! The living dead are transformed into parodic consumers, armies that lurch through shopping malls in search of a nourishment which does not nourish, whose actions perpetuate a vicious feedback cycle of zombie multiplication. Zombies also speak to our anxieties about disease, of incurable epidemics – as I write, the ebola virus is raging in West Africa – for zombieism is horrifyingly infectious. And the medieval walking dead, corpses who would not stay in their graves but walked malevolently abroad, probably also reflect contemporary fears about contagion. The Anglo-Saxon historian John Blair has written about the alarming case recorded in the two villages of Stapenhill and Drakelow, just across the River Trent from Burton Abbey. Here, in the late eleventh century,

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two peasants who had recently died had been seen wandering through the village street, carrying their coffins on their backs. They would hammer on the doors of the living and call on them by name; sickness and death followed for their victims. Tiring of the perversity of these corpses, the villagers finally dared to open up the graves to see what lay within. And, as we might expect, the bodies were strangely undecayed, and the cloths which lay over the dead men’s faces were stained with fresh blood. Desperate – but tried and tested – methods were called for; the heads of the miscreants were cut off and laid between their legs, their hearts excised and the graves closed up again. This solved the problem; the hearts were burnt on a pyre at the parish boundary and a black crow was seen flying upwards out of the flames, whereupon those who had fallen ill recovered. These wicked Burton revenants were not the only examples from early England; the chronicler William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190s, told of four cases (one from Buckinghamshire and no less than three from the Borders) of corpses who came out of their graves to bother the living. The Buckinghamshire revenant tried to get into bed with his widow and almost crushed her to death. When one of the northern walkers (possibly from Alnwick in Northumberland) proved to be bloated and swollen with blood when its grave was opened, it was declared to be a sanguisuga or bloodsucker. Vampire-like features, such as pools of fresh blood in the graves, occur in a number of these cases, as Blair notes. Another troublesome corpse was a monk from Melrose in southern Scotland who had conceived an unholy passion for a lady whose confessor he had been in life. He took to hovering post-mortem around her bedchamber, uttering ‘loud groans and horrible murmurs’. And, even more extraordinarily, William tells his readers that such undead behaviour was so commonplace in his times that it was almost too tedious to write about. These stories tend to become less frequent after around 1200, though James Tankerley, a fourteenth-century rector who lived near Byland Abbey

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in North Yorkshire, left his grave and attacked his mistress, gouging out her eye. Consequently, his coffin was exhumed and sunk into Gormire, a rather gloomy lake nearby. Indeed a sizeable group of tales recorded at Byland around 1400 note the appearances of a considerable number of walking corpses. Some of these shape-shift into unholy animals, such as the crows seen at Drakelow. Unlike the unrepentant Tankerley, the other unquiet dead could be consoled by spiritual means: the granting of absolution, the saying of Masses or some form of Christian exorcism put an end to their post-mortem prowling. The peasants in the Drakelow story had already run away from their lord, breaking their feudal oaths to him, when they died, and it’s clear from the other stories that antisocial behaviour, sexual promiscuity, oath-breaking and various kinds of wickedness could make the dead lie unquiet in their graves. These unrepentant sinners, church writers supposed, had the misfortune to be animated by evil spirits who possessed the corpses and made them walk again. They were an entirely different phenomenon from those ghosts who manifested themselves in spirit, not uncanny flesh, and whose lack of rest could be helped through prayer and restitution. The walking dead are all too material, and their behaviour, like that of zombies, is an affront to the normal understanding of the boundaries between life and death. There are many Scandinavian stories of the undead whose attacks on the living generate further undead revenants; like the Drakelow peasants they can be dealt with by decapitation or imprisonment in sealed coffins, sunk into bogs, deep lakes or hot springs. These are often outsiders, violent in life as in death, troublesome and unsociable, and their postmortem behaviour serves only to confirm the low opinion that the living held of them in life. Modern zombie fantasies, like the American television series (based on an earlier comic book) The Walking Dead, assume that some external apocalyptic force has created the undead.

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Medieval belief held that any human, but particularly the evildoer, had the capacity to walk again; the wicked heart could easily be taken over by demons and the corpse mobilised to plague the living. The epidemic of revenants that William of Newburgh commented on seems likely to have reflected the unease produced by social dislocation. The transition from Anglo-Saxon to Norman rule, with the establishment of new laws and the overthrow of old customs, and the growth of towns with their propensity to harbour disease where inhabitants lived cheek by jowl, fuelled popular ideas about the proximity of the dead to the living; all these factors contributed to the dead’s restlessness. It’s also important to note that before the coming of modern medicine, it wasn’t always easy to tell whether someone was actually dead, or in a coma, or merely temporarily unconscious. The records compiled for the canonisation of various medieval saints often tell us of children who fall ill with fever, tumble into streams, plummet out of trees, or who succumb to the many other perils which can beset an unsupervised toddler. Very often, prayers to the saint, or vows to visit his or her tomb on pilgrimage, or measuring the apparently dead child and promising to have a candle made as long as the victim, to be burned in the saint’s honour, was enough to revive the moribund boy or girl. Whether the undead of Drakelow were not really dead is another question, but the case reminds us that the boundaries between life and death can be understood differently at different times. It’s always important to carry out the prescribed social rituals to allow the living to grieve, and then to get on with their lives, and to allow the dead to rest in peace. And it’s perhaps a gap in our own cultural practices that we no longer really know how to appease the unhappy dead when they return to trouble us.

Mourning (Too Much) ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’ (Child 79) was collected, along with the ballads mentioned in the previous chapter, in Sir Walter

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F ig. 15  The Wife of Usher’s Well.

Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Like the speakers in ‘The Unquiet Grave’ (Child 78), which the ballad collector Francis Child categorised as closely related to it, the Wife mourns too much for her lost children, and so they get no rest. The ballad exists in various versions, Scottish and American, but in all versions the Wife sends her three sons away, either over the sea to trade, or away to school to learn ‘grammarye’ – that is, perhaps, magic, but equally perhaps simply to study grammar. The ship sinks, or fever comes to the school; she hears that her children are dead. The Wife wishes that the winds may never cease blowing until her boys come home. Around Martinmas (11 November) at the onset of winter and not too long after All Souls’ Day, when the dead are commemorated, the boys do indeed come home. They are wearing hats made of birch bark: a bark that grows on no earthly tree; rather, a tree that springs up in Paradise. The mother welcomes them, preparing a feast of bread and wine (with overtones of the Eucharist), and making a bed for them covered with her own

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mantle, but when the red cock crows at dawn, the young men must leave and return to where ‘the channerin [devouring] worm doth chide’. In some versions of the ballad they rebuke their mother. They cannot sleep easy under the green grass of their graves because every tear that she lets fall in grieving for them wets their winding sheet. Though the best-known American version assures us that the children must return to dwell with their Saviour, the mother seems to derive little comfort from this. In some versions, when she asks when they will come to visit again the response is the sequence of verses which recurs in a number of ballads: ‘when the sun and moon dance on the green  / and that will never be’. In ‘The Unquiet Grave’ (Child 78), a lover, male or female in the different versions, sits by the grave of the lost beloved: for ‘in the cold grave was she lain’; ‘in the greenwood was he slain’. After twelve months of being mourned, the dead person remonstrates: ‘Oh who sits weeping on my grave  / And will not let me sleep?’ The bereaved lover replies that she or he only wishes to ‘crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips’. The dead person warns that its breath is ‘earthy and strong’, and that a kiss will be fatal to the living mourner. In the A-version, the speaker urges the lover to ‘make yourself content, my love, / Till God calls you away’. These ballads make clear that the boundary between the dead and the living can be permeable, but only on very limited terms, and that excessive mourning means that the survivor is, in effect, living as if dead. The longing of the living for the dead can be matched by the unnatural desire of the dead for the living. In ‘The Unquiet Grave’ the dead beloved cares too much for the one they have left behind to wish to drag them down to join them in death. ‘The Spectre Bridegroom’ is a well-known international folk tale; a Cornish version was recorded by the folklorist Robert Hunt and first published in 1865. The story is set near Land’s End, where a farming couple, the Lenines, had only one son, Frank. In the household was also Nancy, a serving-girl, and the

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two young people became very close, to the point that Frank determined that he would marry Nancy, and asked his parents’ permission. Though they had indulged their only boy in almost everything else, it was too much for the parents to accept that their son might marry a low-born Trenoweth. Nancy was sent home to her parents, and Frank forbidden ever to see her again. Frank, however, would go to visit his sweetheart regularly, and they promised one another that they would be united, dead or alive, making their vows in such places as the Holy Well and Logan Rock, where the unseen powers are very strong. Before too long Nancy became pregnant and her parents pressed insistently for the wedding to take place. But Frank’s father, still dead set against the match, took his son off to Plymouth and dispatched him on a ship bound for India. Nancy heard nothing from Frank, who could not write, and after the baby was born she took domestic service again. After three years, a terrible November storm wrecked a ship on the nearby Bernowhall Cliff. Almost everyone on board perished, but Frank, who had returned to the country on board, was washed up on the shore and lived long enough to beg that Nancy be sent for so that he could finally make her his wife. Too late; by the time he had been carried up into the town he was dead, and his parents had him buried without sending word to Nancy. On the night of the funeral Nancy looked out of her door and saw a horseman, who called her by name and asked her to climb up on his mount. Nancy recognised Frank’s voice. Accepting his explanation that he had just arrived home and had come to fetch his bride, Nancy duly climbed up behind him. Once mounted she noted the icy hand of her beloved and felt a terrible chill when she put her arms around his waist. She lost the power of speech and clung in terror to the rider as they raced towards his home. When the moon shone full on the horseman’s face, Nancy could see that he was clothed in a shroud, and realised her terrible plight. As they hurtled towards the churchyard, they passed a forge where the smith was still at work. The sight of fire

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and iron (good weapons against the supernatural) empowered Nancy to call out to him, ‘Save me! Save me!’ and the smith, holding the red-hot iron in his hand, rushed out from the forge. He caught hold of Nancy to pull her from the horse, but the spectre too seized Nancy’s dress with such uncanny strength that girl and smith were dragged along the road. Finally the smith had the wit to burn through the fragment of dress in the creature’s clutches, and he and Nancy tumbled from the horse. Nancy was carried home but she did not live long, requesting that she be buried in Frank’s grave. Frank’s horse was discovered at the cliffs, stone dead with its eyes starting from its head and its swollen tongue hanging out of its mouth. And on top of Frank’s grave lay the charred fragment of Nancy’s dress. Nancy had put herself in Frank’s power, not just by the oaths that the couple had sworn to one another, but by taking part in a ritual on Hallowe’en that had conjured up dangerous forces. Together with some other girls, she had gone out at midnight to sow hempseed, reciting: ‘Hemp-seed I sow thee, / Hemp-seed grow thee / And he who will my true love be, / Come after me and show thee.’ This was repeated three times, and then she looked over her left shoulder to see Frank, who looked so furious that she screamed with fear and broke the spell. One of the sailors who had survived the wreck related how, on Hallowe’en, Frank had fallen into a frenzy, then had collapsed and lain as if dead for hours. When he revived he told how he had been dragged to the village, and that if he married the girl who had cast the spell he would punish her for drawing his soul out of his body so. In other versions of the story, the girl is sometimes alerted to the nature of the bridegroom by his inability to utter the word ‘God’ or to hear a prayer. The story warns against wilfulness and lack of self-control in the young people, but more particularly against using folk magic. It also points to the danger of extravagant promises and rash words. For the supernatural will take us at our word, and those phrases carelessly uttered in the

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heat of the moment become formal speech acts which bind us to make good on what we have said. Swearing that they would be together, dead or alive, at places where both Christian (the Holy Well) and pagan (the Logan Rock) powers are strong, is to awaken uncanny forces; no wonder, then, that Frank did not lie quietly in his grave. Unusual in this version of the story is the bridegroom’s rage kindled by the out-of-body summoning which left him shattered, and which may, at some level, have contributed to the fatal storm and shipwreck. Normally it is a love that transcends death which animates the dead man to come to his beloved and try to take her living into the grave. The dead, then, long for the living, as much as the living long for the dead. Proper mourning rituals allow the living to process the idea of loss; traditional religion allows the belief that the dead person is happy in heaven, gathered, like the children in ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’, into the arms of the Saviour. In modern Anglicanism at least, we have lost the fear that those we love may be suffering in Purgatory or burning in hell. Outside the consolations of Christianity, however, our modern imaginings of how to deal with the dead are hard to categorise. For Tolkien, Gandalf’s disappearance into the abyss after his battle with the fiery Balrog is not the end of him; resurrected as Gandalf the White, he returns to aid men and hobbits in various battles and then takes ship with the elves, Frodo and Bilbo to sail away into the west. And, as noted in Chapter 1, the spirits of past kings and heroes can manifest themselves as Ringwraiths and Barrowwights, and exercise real power over mortals in Tolkien’s world. For J.K. Rowling, death cannot be circumvented; nor can the dead ever return, no matter how much the living long for them. Albus Dumbledore, whose death comes as an unexpected blow in both the books and the film, is given to philosophical remarks about death and its consequence. ‘After all, to the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure’, he observes in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Nevertheless, Rowling sets up metaphysical grey areas. After Voldemort’s Killing Curse

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fails to destroy Harry, the young wizard is cast into a limbo where he is able to talk to Dumbledore’s spirit, which is still hovering between worlds. Dumbledore takes the opportunity to impart crucial information to Harry; after his near-death experience the hero is able to return to the world of the living, while Dumbledore boards a train which takes him on to the next stage of the adventure of post-mortem existence. This permeable space between worlds is not completely unprepared for in the Potterverse. The Department of Mysteries, within the Ministry of Magic, contains a chamber where the Veil, an ancient stone archway, separates the dead from the living. Those who pass through the Veil will die, but those who stand close to it can hear the voices of the dead who continue in some mode of existence. It’s possible to evade the total annihilation of identity, either by remaining as a ghost (an often undignified and comic existence, like that of Nearly-Headless Nick, played by John Cleese in the films) or by the strategic storage of parts of the soul in a Horcrux. Yet Death cannot finally be outwitted; a thoughtful and highly folkloric tale about the origin of the Deathly Hallows explains how three wizards met Death on a magic bridge and gained three treasures from him. Angry at being baulked of his prey by the wizards’ magical ability, Death encoded death within each of the treasures. Two of the wizard brothers did indeed meet their ends through their possession of the Hallows. Only the third and youngest brother, who had made ethical and sparing use of the Invisibility Cloak, lived to a good age until, ready for death, he handed the cloak on to his son and embraced Death as an old friend, not as an enemy. Nowadays, a post-Christian understanding of the metaphysics of death allows the sense that the Harry Potter story makes use of: that the dead remain somehow with us, and that they watch over us from another dimension, from which they may return to warn us or to stave off danger from us. Since we lack the kinds of formal mourning rituals and behaviours – the wearing of black, periods of seclusion – that earlier generations observed,

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we aren’t always confident about how to mourn the dead properly. The 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply, starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, explored the idea that unresolved mourning causes problems both for the survivor and for the dead man. The prospect of resurrection in the body, a staple of Catholic belief, has become a horror trope, however; that the dead might come out of their graves and move among the living is still as potently uncanny as the tale of the Spectre Bridegroom. But, despite the lines of communication opened up between dead and living in modern fantasy writers, the Veil remains impermeable – and that’s how we want it to stay.

Conclusion Our journeys in this chapter have taken us through east England, over the heathland and mires of Dartmoor, to the Borders and North Yorkshire where corpses once roamed, and as far as Land’s End, where Frank tried to carry away his Nancy. But every part of the country, every crossroads, every bridge and every graveyard bears the imprint of those who lived before us: both those who sleep quietly in their graves and those whose eternal rest is troubled by dreams of what they should have done and what might still be done for them. If we see Black Shuck on our trail or glimpse the Wild Hunt careering past us on an open road, if we hear the wailing of the banshee or the baying of the ghostly Hounds running in the heavens, we should count ourselves fortunate to be given warning to put our lives in order before the light fades for us. Death is an enigma which humans cannot solve, however preoccupied our stories are with it. Stories of the dead who do not stay where they should be but come to pester the living used to function as conundrums, inviting those left behind to find out what the undead need and to take steps to pacify and console them. With the collapse of Christian belief, the dead are perhaps more importunate; they cannot so easily be consigned to their proper places in the afterlife, and their pleading with us

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goes unheeded. The stories of this chapter remind us that loss is inevitable; that we cannot resist the changes wrought by time in our own lives or on the scale of history. We must come to terms with our own losses, mourn our dead decently and accept the existential conditions that we can’t change. And the survivors must, of course, go on living. In the next chapter we’ll see how humans can work with unseen powers to make their fortunes, to make the land fertile and bountiful, and to tap the resources of the Otherworld to make this world better. We’ll also see how communities living on the edge must come to terms with the forces that threaten them; how lack can be turned into gain, and rags into riches.

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Billy Biter and the Dragon of Filey Brigg illy Biter was a poor, put-upon and henpecked tailor who lived just inland from Filey in East Yorkshire. His wife was a nag and a drunk, and if it weren’t for his kind neighbours in the village down below there’s many a night that Billy might have starved. As it was, he and the cat were lucky to get a hot meal or a fire made for them, and quite often Tom Puss and Billy would spend the night on the roof of their hovel, hugging the chimney for warmth, rather than be inside and face Mrs Biter – Hepzibah – when she’d had a few. Now, as luck would have it, near Billy’s house there was a deep gully. And in the gully there lived a dragon. The farmers had moved all their livestock away from the hillside above where the dragon lived, and the monster was getting hungrier and hungrier. One evening Billy was making his way home with some vittles and a good-sized faggot of wood for his fire which the kind folks in the village had given him. Suddenly he smelled something so good it brought him out of his way home, to the wood on the edge of the gully where the wise woman Mrs Greenaway lived. Somehow, she got him to hand over his vittles in exchange for what she’d been baking: a big slab of sticky, spicy Yorkshire parkin – a kind of gingerbread. There was a big bit for Billy, a bit for Tom Puss, and a mere corner for Hepzibah.

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It was a misty-moisty night, they say, and so it wasn’t too surprising that Billy and his remaining load should tumble ‘arseyversey’ over the edge of the dragon’s gully, and very nearly down his gullet too. ‘That be my eye you be poking your faggot in’, grumbled the dragon. ‘Let’s have a proper look at what I’m to dine on.’ Billy was so frightened that he dropped his parkin under the dragon’s nose, and out came the long, red, hot tongue of the dragon and swallowed it. But the parkin was so sticky that it wouldn’t swallow, but stuck to the dragon’s teeth. ‘What do ee call this?’ he growled through the stickiness. ‘P–p–parkin’, the trembling Billy replied. ‘Then go back and bring me some more’, demanded the dragon, and he sneezed a great sneeze which blew Billy out of the gully and back onto his own cottage roof, next to Tom Puss. And his load, with the ropes securing it all scorched from the dragon’s breath, fell down the chimney, landing next to Hepzibah, who was passed out with the drink below. But the smell of the parkin woke her up and she gobbled down what was left of it. When she learned that it was parkin she’d been feasting on, she got proper annoyed – ‘I’ll show thee how to bake parkin!’ She baked up a ‘hugeous round’, smelling ‘rich and strange’, and off she went to show Mrs Greenaway, that ‘old witch’, how you properly bake parkin. But she tripped over her shoelace on the way out the door, and dropped the round of parkin, which went bowling down over the edge into the gully where the dragon was still waiting hopefully. And as Hepzibah staggered after it, the dragon swallowed her right up. ‘Twadn’t a very tasty morsel’, he complained, but then after her came the parkin. ‘Cor!’ said the dragon, ‘and he bit into it hearty’. But then his teeth became that stuck that he could barely snort, and so he headed down to the sea to wash the parkin from his teeth ‘where it were clinging so loving as an ivy-bine’. The village folk who had come to see what the noise was about followed him and saw him ker-flop into the deep water. They ran up and whacked him on the nose half a dozen times, which stopped his breath. Then they ran back to safety while a great onrush of waves

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drowned the poor dragon. And the dragon’s bones turned into a long stretch of rock, Filey Brigg, which you can still see today. This is a Yorkshire tale, but it was recorded in Somerset, which is doubtless why the dragon says ‘Cor!’ rather than ‘By ’eck’, as a proper Yorkshire dragon would. But the outcome of the story remains the same: once the dragon nuisance was eliminated (along with the fire-breathing Hepzibah), prosperity and happiness were restored to the district. Work – the curse of Adam, who must labour in the sweat of his brow to make a living – profit and loss, getting by and getting rich are themes of this chapter. The benefits, as we will see, that accrue from unseen forces aren’t always material; special skills can be imparted, and authority is closely scrutinised. Detriments too are dealt out by the spirits who watch over households and kingdoms if their interests are not properly respected. Humans will work very hard, with hand and brain, and they’ll conclude all kinds of covenants with strange powers if they think that they can make their fortunes. Sometimes the supernatural visitor simply marks the presence of treasure, and the brave person has to seize his chance. In the tale of the Black Dog of Lyme Regis, for example, a farmer found that every evening a spectral black dog took up its seat on the other side of the fireplace from where he habitually sat. Though he did not mind the creature too much, his friends used to urge him to get rid of it. One day, emboldened by drink, he seized a poker and rushed at the beast. The dog fled into the attic and, with a great bound, disappeared up through the ceiling. The furious farmer struck at the ceiling with the poker – and down fell a small bag containing gold and silver coins from Charles I’s reign. His courage had been rewarded and the treasure saw the light of day once more. The dog was never seen in the house again, but is said still to prowl the lanes near the now-demolished farmhouse, frightening both travellers and any other dogs who come across it at night. The farmer took quite a risk in challenging his black dog visitor – as you’ll remember, things turned out rather less well for the man

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who drunkenly braved the Moddy Doo of Peel Castle in the last chapter – but it’s probably significant that he had cold iron in the form of a poker in his hand, for iron is highly efficacious against the supernatural. The black dog may have been the ghost of the person who hid the treasure, though it’s odd that he continued to haunt the lanes after the treasure was found; he seems to have metamorphosed into a kind of shuck.

Dragons, Damsels and Cows Every county in England has its dragon tales, and there are a good few from Wales and Scotland as well. Orkney, Shetland and the Faroe Islands are in fact the remains of the Mester Stoor Worm, a sea dragon that ate seven girls every Saturday. Finally, an unpromising youth called Assipattle rowed out to meet him with burning peat in a bucket. The dragon swallowed him up, but the peat set his liver on fire and, in his death-agony, he spewed out the hero before perishing. Assipattle married the king’s daughter, while the dragon’s teeth fell out, forming the various North Atlantic archipelagos. His body is Iceland, where his still-smouldering liver is responsible for the continuing volcanic activity on the island. Geraldine McCaughrean’s 1999 novel The Stones are Hatching imagines that the Stoor Worm has been stirred back into life by the pounding mortars of the First World War, and that the eggs she guards in her mouth are gradually hatching out, unleashing new, supernatural horrors on the peaceful British countryside. Phelim Green is the boy destined to battle the Stoor Worm once again, who encounters on his quest the supernatural creatures of Europe. From the Russian domovoy who lives behind the stove and must be appeased with milk, to the household glashans, a kind of Manx boggart, via fairies, merrows (a sort of mermaid) and Mad Sweeney from Irish tradition, Phelim finds allies, learns about sacrifice, loss and gain, and, like Assipattle, thinks on his feet when he must face up to his destiny. For Phelim, ‘something which is too big to see is too big to be frightening, because it does not fit inside

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your head’, but instead of finding the Worm in his head, he must enter the head of the monster. In McCaughrean’s conception, ‘the Stoor Worm was not in the landscape; it was the landscape, though several thousand years of sleep had blurred its outline.’ The Worm figures a land traumatised by war, a seaboard which now lies unquiet and has, nightmarishly, begun to breed forth all the monsters we have met – and will meet later in this book: the monsters of the European, and particularly the British, imagination. Dragon tales are broadly similar to one another in outline, and they often refer to some local landmark where the dragon dwelt before he was vanquished by the hero. In a few cases – as we’ll see below – the hero is a saint who uses his own God-given methods to rid the land of the monster. The dragon represents particular kinds of threat to rural communities, which are often living on the economic edge. Losing cattle or milk (to which a number of dragons are very partial) or women to thieves, disease or accident can mean the difference between making it through the winter and not surviving. Dragons signal disaster, then. As in the tale of Billy Biter and the Dragon, whole swathes of grazing become unusable because of the threat from the beast; land is laid waste for humans and livestock. Folklorists have speculated as to what gives rise to these highly localised dragon legends. There seems to be no particular correlation with the discovery of dinosaur bones, nor with the sites of ancient battlefields – where the discovery of many bones might suggest that a dragon had been consuming human prey. Nor can they easily be connected with historical figures: evil and rapacious landlords, tyrants with dragons in their coats of arms, and so on. Quite a number of noble families claim the dragon-killer as an ancestor, as with the Lambton Worm, described below, and they do often have dragon motifs carved on their castles, or displayed in their armorial bearings. But just as often the dragon is overcome by the lucky working man like Billy or a smart peasant lad like Assipattle.

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Whatever their origins, dragons need to be got rid of by fair means or foul, and the dragon legends of Britain frequently demonstrate that human ingenuity is called upon to destroy the creature – mere courage isn’t usually enough. Sometimes, of course, it was human carelessness that allowed the dragon to gain ground in the first place. The Lambton Worm, for example, came into existence when young Lambton of Lambton Castle, near Chester-le-Street, County Durham, went fishing in the River Wear on a Sunday, caught a ‘varry queer’-looking fish and ‘waddn’t fash te carry it hyem’, so he threw it down a well. It’s never a good idea to pollute the community’s water supply with foreign matter, and Lambton has been extremely foolish. For, once in the well, nourished by the life-giving water, the creature grew and grew – and soon became a menace to cattle and humans, though it could be pacified with large troughs of milk. The Worm constituted a considerable economic cost, but at least the creature didn’t destroy the community’s livestock. One version of the story moralises Lambton’s sin; he goes off to the Crusades in repentance for his Sunday fishing, and then has to deal with the enormous dragon when he returns. A witch advises him to wear spiked armour and to fight the beast on a rock in the river so that, as he chopped it into segments, the current would carry off the severed bits and prevent them from rejoining and reconstituting the serpent. This works very well and the dragon is destroyed, but the witch has demanded as recompense the life of the first creature Lambton sees after his victory. Lambton has tried to ensure that this would be his dog, but it was his father. Lambton refuses to kill him, and draws down on himself the witch’s curse: that no Lambton would ever die in his bed. Visitors to Lambton Castle in the nineteenth century could see the dragon’s drinking trough, a bit of his skin and various figures representing the hero and the witch. Dragon legends turned from serious to comic over the centuries; the story of More of More Hall near Rotherham in South Yorkshire, who also had a spiked suit of armour, and

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F ig. 16  More of More Hall and the Dragon of Wantley, a chapbook illustration.

who dispatched his dragon – the fearsome Dragon of Wantley – by kicking it in its one vulnerable spot, its arsehole, with his spike-toed metal boot, gave rise to a ballad. Printed in 1699, this relates how the dragon expired, piteously lamenting, ‘Had you but missed that place, you could  / Have done me no mischief!’ Nor was the dragon of Filey Brigg the only dragon to perish through his greed for sweet things. Down in West Sussex, at a deep, tree-shaded pool called Knucker Hole, near the little town of Lyminster, there once lived a fearsome dragon. He would crawl out of the pool and devour all the cattle around until the king of Sussex offered his daughter to any knight who would kill the creature. A knight turned up and heroically slew

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F ig. 17  The Wantley Dragon, by Dave Pickersgill.

the dragon; his gravestone, the Slayer’s Slab, can be seen in Lyminster’s handsome church. A cross and herringbone pattern are carved on it; these, it’s said, represent the knight’s sword and the dragon’s ribs. That’s a conventional dragon-killing tale. An early-twentieth-century version relates how a certain Jim Puttock dealt with the creature in an equally effective and ingenious way. He made an enormous suet-type pudding, and took it by horse and cart to the edge of the Knucker Hole. The dragon popped up his head: ‘How do, Man?’ ‘How do, Dragon?’ says Jim. ‘What you got there?’ says Dragon, sniffing. ‘Pudden’, says Jim.

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The dragon swallowed up horse, cart and pudding, and liked the pudding so much he demanded more. In one version of the story the second pudding is enough to sink the dragon down into the depths of Knucker Hole and he is never seen again; in another the effect of the pudding is to give the dragon collywobbles, and, pretending to offer a restorative pill, Jim whips out an axe and strikes off the dragon’s head. The name ‘Knucker’, as we’ll see in the next chapter, suggests that the dragon was originally a nicor, a distinctive kind of water monster, rather than the poison- or fire-breathing type of beast. Nevertheless, a good few British dragons make their homes in wells, springs or lakes, from which they are difficult to dislodge, despite the damp. These are dragons as nuisance, and quite comic ones at that. Other dragons are associated with treasure and their presence signals potential good fortune rather than danger. These dragons remain unconquered by brave heroes. They include such creatures as the dragon that lurks in a pool in Lincolnshire, the beast that flies across the Exe valley from Dolbury Hill to Cadbury Castle and back every night, and the Shropshire Worm that lives in Wormelowe Barrow (the clue’s in the name there, of course). All of them are still dwelling in their mounds, along with the fabulous hoards that they guard. In the earliest recorded English dragon legend, told in Beowulf, and set in what’s now southern Sweden, a dragon discovers an unguarded treasure hoard, deposited in a barrow by a man who was the last surviving member of his tribe. The dragon lives quietly on top of his pile of gleaming cups, armour, arm rings and bracelets for three hundred years until a thief breaks in and steals a single jewelled cup. Able to detect that just a tiny part of his hoard is missing and hugely provoked by this loss, the dragon goes on the rampage. Flying out from his lair at night, he unleashes fiery terror, burning down Beowulf’s royal hall, as well as other

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dwellings. Clearly the old king must deal with this dangerous creature, and a large pitch-covered shield is prepared for him. Beowulf’s fight proves fatal both for him and for the dragon. The dying hero is comforted by the thought that he has won a great prize for his people, the Geats. But the mourning Geats see no future for themselves after their king’s death; they burn some of the treasure on his funeral pyre and inter the remainder in his burial mound. And there it lies still, ‘as useless to men as it ever was’, the poet observes. Old English wisdom poetry knows that dragons are ‘wise, exulting in treasure’ and that they live in mounds; and we’ve seen from the later English legends that dragons can quite often talk, even if the content of their conversations is not very edifying. The most famous treasure-guarding dragon of them all is, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Smaug in The Hobbit, whose ancestry lies both in the Beowulf-dragon and in the greatest dragon of Old Norse heroic legend, Fafnir, slain by the hero Sigurd. Fafnir was formerly human in shape, it seems, and he murdered his father in order to get his hands on a huge treasure hoard. This had been paid over by the gods in compensation for their killing of Otr, Fafnir’s brother. Fafnir then turned into a dragon and slunk off to live on the remote Gnita heath with his prize. Fafnir was poison-snorting rather than fire-breathing; Sigurd dug a series of pits in the path down which the dragon crawled to drink, and stabbed him from below in a vulnerable spot. The dragon’s poison and blood drained safely away and Sigurd was able to emerge from his pit and hold a conversation with the monster before he finally expired. Sigurd knew enough to hide his real name at first, lest Fafnir curse him with his dying breath, but he also listened to a series of dire prophecies uttered by the dragon. Fafnir’s remaining brother, who was Sigurd’s foster-father, the smith Regin, ordered the hero to roast the dragon’s heart. When he prodded it to see if it was done, he burnt his finger and put it in his mouth to suck. To his surprise, he found he could now understand the language of birds. A flock

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F ig. 18  Fafnir the Dragon by Arthur Rackham (1911).

of nearby nuthatches warned him that Regin was planning to murder him for the gold, and so Sigurd forestalled this fate by killing his sleeping foster-father. Sigurd’s story was very well known on the Isle of Man, where scenes from it are depicted in a series of Viking-age stone sculptures, preserved in the Island’s churches. Tolkien, of course, knew the tale from his studies as professor of Old English and he brought both English and Norse traditions to bear in his creation of Smaug. Like the Beowulf dragon, Smaug (whose name comes from an Old Norse verb meaning ‘crept’) is a fire-drake. When he discovers that Bilbo has stolen a single cup from his hoard, his

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capacity to fly brings devastation to the men of Esgaroth. Tolkien describes the attack vividly: Fire leaped from the dragon’s jaws. He circled for a while high in the air above them lighting all the lake; the trees by the shores shone like copper and like blood with leaping shadows of dense black at their feet. Then down he swooped straight through the arrow-storm, reckless in his rage, taking no heed to turn his scaly sides towards his foes, seeking only to set their town ablaze.

Bilbo has held a long conversation with Smaug in his earlier visit to the dragon’s lair. Like Sigurd, he thinks it best to conceal his identity and to try to bamboozle the dragon by speaking in riddles. These intrigue Smaug, for, as the narrator notes, This of course is the way to talk to dragons, if you don’t want to reveal your proper name (which is wise), and don’t want to infuriate them by a flat refusal (which is also very wise). No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk and of wasting time trying to understand it.

Bilbo is unsettled by what Smaug has to say to him in return; the dragon raises some very practical questions about how the dwarfs propose to steal and transport away the vast piles of gold and jewels over which he is lord. But the hobbit keeps his head and, by dint of flattery, he gets Smaug, who is boasting of the invulnerability of his hide, to roll over and show his belly, and there he sees a large patch under the left breast ‘as bare as a snail out its shell’. Once this weak spot is revealed to the dragon’s enemy, we can be sure that a hero will locate it and bring the dragon down. As Smaug rains fiery terror down on Lake-town, a thrush communicates the information about the hollow under the breast to Bard the Bowman, a descendant of the Lord of Dale. For Bard, like all the Men of Dale (and Sigurd) understands the language of birds. Here we can see how Tolkien reshapes the motif of understanding the language of birds. No longer connected with roasting the dragon’s heart, it

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has become a genetic trait in one of the human clans in Middle Earth, but it’s still closely connected with death and dragons. Smaug has other typical dragon habits. Once he had moved into the Lonely Mountain he would come to Dale by night ‘and carry away people, especially maidens, to eat, until Dale was ruined’, Gandalf recalls. Smaug is clearly not the kind of dragon that can be appeased with milk, however large a trough might be left out for him.

The King, the Saint and the Dragon Dragons also feature in some saints’ lives; here they have a somewhat different function. St Carantoc was the son of the king of Cardigan in Wales, but he preferred a hermit’s life. When his father died, the people tried to press him to take the throne, and so he fled away across the Severn Estuary. On the way, his portable altar fell overboard and was washed up in Carhampton in the Somerset Levels. Before the drainage ditches were dug in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Levels were very marshy indeed, often completely flooded. And at that very time a fierce dragon was lurking in the marshes near Dunster. King Arthur was in the neighbourhood, attempting to deal with him, but every time he sallied out to seek the dragon it would sink down beneath the surface of the bogs, and he was unable to make headway against it. Arthur found the marble altar miraculously floating on the Severn and took charge of it; shortly afterwards he met a stranger who enquired about the altar. Arthur feared that the stranger might be a sorcerer or a demon, bent on harm to the sacred object, so he demanded that the stranger identify himself. When he claimed to be the saint himself, Arthur charged him to prove it by summoning the dragon from his marshy lair. The man called out in a commanding voice and the dragon obediently emerged. Impressed, Arthur asked for Carantoc’s advice for dealing with the reptilian nuisance; the saint draped his stole around the dragon’s neck and led it away, where it could do no harm. Where the dragon went,

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no one now remembers, but Carantoc won the king’s help to build a church at Carhampton, and his recovered altar gleamed white at its heart. Apart from soldier-saints of dubious authenticity like St George, saints aren’t really equipped to attack dragons with swords, lances or even sticky-sweet local delicacies. Rather, in contradistinction to the dragon-slaying stories we’ve been thinking about above, saint-and-dragon stories demonstrate the power of God over even the most terrifying of his creatures. The saint knows that in God’s Creation there is, somewhere, a place for the dragon where he will not prey on men, maidens and livestock, an ecosystem where he no longer threatens human subsistence. The saint is as powerful as the hero, and more effective than the king, in this kind of story. A good number of European saints are associated with the elimination of dragons by peaceful means: they include St Martha of Tarascon, St Geneviève of Paris and St Radegund of Poitiers (though Radegund is depicted as fiercely trampling the submissive dragon after overcoming him). The bridling and rehoming of the dragon is a miracle which female saints can carry out just as well as males; and perhaps it’s more humane to find the dragon a new habitat than to stick the poor beast with a spear as St George did.

Fairy Gifts Keeping monstrous threats away from human communities, protecting them against depredation and damage, is a key role for the hero or the saint. More ordinary folk are sometimes able to capitalise on those gifts offered to them by the supernatural. Usually, as with other kinds of fairy exchange, these come hedged about with rules and taboos, but if the smart person plays his or her cards right, great benefits can ensue. And, consequently, any misstep in such dealings can result in dramatic losses. The tin miners of Cornwall, who laboured away in the darkness under those tall and elegant chimneys which still dot the open, tawny-coloured heathlands, knew that they must

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appease the knockers. These were a particular kind of fairy or pisky living in the mines who could warn of danger and bring great fortune. If they were not respected, they could equally cause disaster. At Ransom mine in the St Ives district they could be heard knocking away in a distant part of the mine, but no one was brave enough to venture into the dark, dangerous tunnels to see whether there was a rich lode to be dug out there. The bold miner Trenwith and his son went out one midsummer eve at midnight and kept watch: they saw the Small People bringing up the ore. The men struck a bargain with the knockers: they would save them the trouble of digging and breaking down the ore and would leave one-tenth of the ‘richest stuff’ for them, if the fairy miners would relinquish that part of the mine to them. The deal was made and kept to; Trenwith and his son exploited their ‘pitch’ and made their fortunes. But once the old man was dead, the son grew greedy and tried to cheat the knockers by withholding their share. Whereupon the lode failed: he could find no more ore, took to drink and died a ruined man. Greed, lack of respect for the unseen powers (whose protection is sorely needed in that most dangerous of occupations, mining) and exploitativeness destroyed the profitable and friendly arrangement. If you want to win the favour of the Hidden Folk, it’s the Scottish fairies who seem to be the ones most inclined to do kindnesses to humans. They are happy to come to a mutually beneficial agreement – at least until human stupidity or greed destroys the deal. Let’s head over the steeply sloping island of Sanntraigh (Sandray), towards the southern end of the Outer Hebrides. A spine of grey grit runs through its centre, but on either side are green rounded hills, towering golden sand dunes and huge echoing hollow sea caves. Now only seals, minke whales and seabirds frequent the island, but, back in the day, a woman lived there who had a very advantageous arrangement with the fairies. Doubtless because of the repellent effects that iron has on those of fairy blood, every day a fairy woman (a

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F ig. 19  The ruined chimneys of the Rosewall and Ransom United Mines.

‘woman of peace’ is the local term, translated from the Gaelic) would come to the housewife and borrow her kettle. The wife would recite a verse, ‘A smith is able to make / Cold iron hot with coal. / The due of a kettle is bones / And to bring it back again whole.’ And the woman of peace would return the kettle every day with some bones and flesh in it, the remnant of the fairies’ meal. This continued very satisfactorily until one day the housewife had an errand to run elsewhere. So she explained to her husband what he needed to do. He wasn’t paying much attention, and when the woman of peace arrived for the kettle, he was so terrified that he shut the door on her. She jumped up on the roof and in two bounds the kettle leapt out of a hole in the ridge into her hands. And off she went with it. When the wife came home, the husband explained what had happened, and that the woman of peace had not returned the kettle. ‘She will surely come tomorrow’, said the husband. ‘Good-for-nothing

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wretch, what didst thou do? There are two that will be ill off – thyself and I’, retorted the wife. She set off for the fairies’ mound, where they had all finished their dinner and gone out hunting. The wife seized hold of her kettle, which was very heavy with the remaining fairy food, and made off with it. An old man who’d stayed behind in the fairy mound called out to a watchman to let slip ‘the black’ and ‘the fierce’: two fairy dogs – not exactly dogs of peace. The wife fled and threw a quarter of the kettle’s contents to the pursuing dogs. This held them up for a while, but soon they were hot on her trail again. She threw them another quarter of the contents, and ran onwards. When she was almost at her farm, she emptied the remaining contents out for the fairy dogs. The town dogs started barking and the dogs of peace gobbled down the rest of the food and retreated. But the woman of peace never came back again to borrow the kettle and the family’s extra food supply vanished. The two women had a profitable arrangement with one another, until the husband became involved and forgot both his courage and his courtesy. The housewife shows her resourcefulness in going to claim her kettle back again and in knowing how to deal strategically with the pursuing dogs: what to sacrifice and when. In another Western Isles tale, a housewife managed to persuade her neighbourhood fairies from the mound of Dunvuilg to help her with her weaving. They chanted as they worked to remind themselves of the process of preparing the wool for the weaving, and for finishing the length of cloth: ‘Teazing, carding, mixing, distaff, weaving loom, water for waulking on the fire, the thrifty housewife herself is the best at sitting up late!’ And well she might sit up late of an evening with others doing her work for her! An envious neighbour stuck her head in the door and shouted, ‘Dunvuilg is on fire! Dunvuilg is on fire!’ and the fairy company ran off, lamenting loudly as they went for everything that they thought they would lose. The story of the weaving fairies (akin in some respects to brownies) is widespread in the Highlands too; there it’s the housewife herself who calls

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out that Dunvuilg is on fire in order to get rid of her helpers – fearing what they might turn their hands to when the weaving was finally done. In Kirkcudbright, a tale is told of a household where the mother was rocking her newborn baby when she suddenly became aware of a tall, elegantly dressed lady all in green wearing a coronet of pearls, who asked if she could borrow a basin of oatmeal. As the woman’s husband was a miller, it was no trouble to hand over some oatmeal, and the lady disappeared with it. Next day, a little creature dressed in green with a shrill yelping voice brought back the basin full of oatmeal, and advised, ‘Braw meal, it’s the top pickle of the sin corn.’ The family, as the visitor advised, ate up the oatmeal and thought it was excellent; but one of the servants refused it on the grounds that it was likely bewitched, and soon after he took ill and died. Not long after that, another little green-dressed person knocked at the door late at night and asked the miller to set the mill wheel going, for she’d meal to grind. He might go to bed and leave her to it – and indeed in the morning all was left in order. All goes well for this family who deal fairly and generously with the fairies and are treated kindly in return. Ill fortune comes over those who scorn fairy gifts, however. A man was travelling at night on the island of Harris and he was very thirsty. Inside the fairy knoll that he was passing he heard the sound of churning: ‘I had rather’, he said, ‘that my thirst was on the herdswoman’, wishing to give his thirst to the woman who owned the churning milk and to have his own thirst slaked. Within a short distance a woman wearing a fine green petticoat came to meet him; she had a jug of warm milk in her hands. She offered it to him, but he would not drink it. ‘Thou one who sought my draught and took not my draught, mayest thou not be long alive’, she said, laying a curse upon him for his timorousness and ingratitude. The man journeyed onwards and took a boat over the narrows between Harris and another island. The boat capsized and he was drowned.

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These stories of the Highlands and Islands are interested in generosity, kindness and fair dealing in exchange. Both fairies and humans can benefit one another; the fairies by making use of the iron which they cannot work themselves or even, in some traditions, keep in their homes. The open-handedness of the human neighbour is tested: if they are generous, then benefits accrue; not just the return of an equal amount of, or even tastier, oatmeal, but a gift which is magically imbued with the power to prevent serious illness. Trust in the fairies is hard to acquire. We remember how Thomas the Rhymer was warned to keep away from the fruit on his journey, for the one who eats fairy food when in the Otherworld is often trapped there. But what about fairy food in this world? The Harris man should have known better than to invoke a fairy and then scorn its gifts; that is guaranteed to cause trouble. Showing courtesy to the Hidden People, as to humans, generates its own reward.

Spirits of Home and Farm On the grey, still Orkney day that I visited the Ring of Brodgar and the extraordinary chamber tomb of Maes Howe (see Chapter 5), we drove past a farm, a little to the north of the Ring. It looked much like other Orkney farms, with low grey stone buildings, whitewashed outbuildings, a few wind-bent trees offering a little shelter from the northern gales, and a hummocky home field where very pregnant ewes were grazing. A good place to live, you might think, and so it is now. But thirty or so years ago, new owners of that same farm made a terrible error, and they paid the price. For many, even most, old Orkney farmsteads come with their own hogboon, a word derived from Old Norse which means ‘one who dwells in the mound’. In Scandinavian tradition, the mound was the burial place of a powerful ancestor, who would then watch over the farm and its inhabitants. Norse sagas suggest that if anyone were foolish – or brave – enough to dig down into

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the mound in the hope of finding the treasure buried with the ancestor, they might well find that the inhabitant was one of the undead, and would put up a considerable fight to hang on to his sword and arm rings. In Orkney the hogboon is offended if the mound is not treated with respect; children shouldn’t play on it nor livestock graze it. As for digging into the mound, well, that’s unthinkable. But the folk who moved into the farm north of the Ring of Brodgar in the 1960s were modern people, so the story goes. Though it’s not clear whether they were incomers or islanders, they didn’t take milk and oatcakes to the hogboon’s mound; nor did they even bother to introduce themselves and pay their respects. For the next twenty years they suffered one misfortune after another: animals died, children failed to thrive, their finances were disastrous. Finally they gave in and sold up. The new owners, or so I heard, were very careful indeed to acknowledge the hogboon’s authority and to give him his due. The hogboon oversees the farm’s fortunes, but he doesn’t himself lift a hand to agricultural work. That’s the province of the hob or the brownie, and there are many stories, in Scotland, Yorkshire and East Anglia in particular, of these hard-working creatures. They are usually to be found in the barn, threshing and binding, though they may also keep an eye on the cattle and horses. In a Lincolnshire tale, the farmer at East Halton had a brownie, a little shrunken goblin-like creature. One evening he forgot to bring in his sheep, ready for shearing the next day, but when he got up early to fetch them in, to his surprise he found them already jostling one another in the barn. As he counted them up, he was even more amazed to find a full-grown hare among them. The brownie, who was sitting up in the rafters, complained bitterly to him that the ‘little grey sheep’ had been more trouble to drive into the barn than all the rest of them put together. The Fynodyree of the Isle of Man also managed to bring in a hare with the sheep when they were threatened by a sudden snowstorm: ‘My seven curses on the little brown loaghtan [the four-horned native Manx sheep]!’ he complained.

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‘I was twice round Barrule Mooar afther her, but I caught her for all.’ Whether the hare in these tales is really a witch (see Chapter 5) isn’t clear. At any rate, it doesn’t seem to be causing mischief in among the flock, and I think it’s more likely that the helper’s innocent boast shows off his extraordinary herding skill and the effort he’s prepared to make to help his human friend. The East Halton brownie did all sorts of work on the farm, and all he is said to have required in return was a linen smock, left for him each New Year’s Eve. Whether the farmer was stingy, or simply wanted rid of his helper, isn’t known, but one year he left a garment of coarse hemp sacking instead. And then a verse was heard, in an annoyed little voice: Harden, harden, harden hemp! I will neither grind nor stamp, Had you given me linen gear I had served you many a year. Thrift may go, hard luck may stay, I shall travel far away!

And that was the last the farmer saw of his brownie. The farm’s fortunes declined dramatically after that and the farmer often wished he had his drudge back again. This verse is a traditional one; variants of it often appear in brownie tales. What’s unusual in the Lincolnshire story, though, is that the brownie would accept any sort of clothing as his annual fee, for usually it’s the provision of a tunic, meant as a kindly gift from his human family, that offends him and causes him to desert the farm to which he is attached. In Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, dating from the sixteenth century, we hear that Robin Goodfellow, that archetype of the household spirit, is said to have retorted, ‘What have we here? Hemton, hamten, here will I never more tread nor stampen’ when he was given clothing. According to Scot, a ‘messe of white bread and milke … was his standing fee’. So too the hob of Hart Hall, at Glaisdale in North Yorkshire, ‘a little brown

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F ig. 20  A brownie or house-elf, by John D. Batten (1890).

man all covered with hair’ who could thresh more corn in one night than all the men of the farm could do in a day, took umbrage at a well-meant gift. The Hart Hall folk had thought it ‘wad be sair an’ cau’d for him, gannan’ oot iv lathe wiv nobbut thae au’d rags’ (it would be sore and cold for him, going out of the barn with nothing but the old rags). But they were wrong, and the hob calls out a version of the ‘hempen’ verse and disappears for ever. ‘More mercenary than punctilious as to considerations of privacy’ says the Reverend Atkinson who recorded this story, but he somewhat misses the point. He’s right that it wasn’t being spied on that upset the hob; the well-meant provision of clothing of any sort was what gave offence. A fine linen smock would have been equally badly received. In southern Scotland there was a hard-working brownie at Cranshaws, a peel tower built to shelter folk and cattle from Border raiders. He was assiduous at threshing the corn harvest, until one day someone thoughtlessly criticised the way in which he stacked up (‘mowed’) the leftover straw stalks when the threshing was done. Again he expresses his feelings in a verse:

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It’s no weel mowed! It’s no weel mowed! Then it’s ne’er be mowed by me again; I’ll scatter it oure the Raven-stane, And they’ll hae some wark e’er it’s mowed again! (It’s not well mowed! It’s not well mowed! Then it will never be mowed by me again; I’ll scatter it over the Raven-stone, and they’ll have some work before it’s mown again!)

The Raven-stane was a crag not far away from the tower, with a burn running under its foot, and that was where the enraged brownie dumped all the corn. And, like the rest of his sensitive kindred, he was never seen at Cranshaws again. You may be thinking that brownies are more trouble than they’re worth, but the farmer who loses his, whether through misjudged kindness or grudging miserliness, is always sorry afterwards, and the luck of the farm often vanishes along with the supernatural helper. Brownies fulfil a fantasy of the hardpressed farmer: a labourer who doesn’t need paying, scarcely eats and who works all night for the farm’s good. Often he does not like to be spied on in his labours – like a good few supernatural creatures – and it’s the breaking of that first taboo that leads to the gift of clothing. This is understood as offensive by the brownie, for, back in the days before labourers were paid in cash, the servants of a household were often given a new suit of clothes at New Year in lieu of, or as part of, their wages. The brownie gives his labour for free; to offer him clothing is to render him equivalent to the mere hired help, and that’s a severe affront. When the cash economy began to replace payment in kind, medieval moralists warned that the complex and deeply felt bonds of service would be fractured once people began to work, and readily to change employers, for money. So too with the brownie: though the brownie of East Halton seems to have got ideas above his station when he complained that he should have been given a linen shirt!

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Dobby and Other House-elves Once we understand the significance of clothing in brownie tales, we can see why, in the Harry Potter novels, Dobby the House-Elf becomes a figure through which the story debates questions of loyalty, service, labour and payment. Dobby, like the other house-elves in the Potterverse, is attached to a single family, the Malfoys, for whom he must work without reward or even gratitude. He is liberated from his enslavement when Harry tricks Lucius Malfoy into throwing a sock up in the air, which Dobby catches – a version of the giving of garments – which frees him from his connection with his unpleasant and overbearing masters. Once he is given his freedom, Dobby rejoices in it. Yet the other elves taunt him because he feels no shame at having sundered the bonds of servitude, and so he re-enters the labour market, but, crucially, as a salaried employee, working in the Hogwarts kitchens for one Galleon a week. And when he is killed in the battle against various servants of Voldemort, Harry makes sure that carved on his tomb are the words: ‘Here lies Dobby, a Free Elf’. Dobby’s history inverts the traditional brownie tale: he joyfully embraces his freedom and is empowered to negotiate his new employment conditions. Other elves – the unfortunate Winky, who takes to drink after losing her position with the Crouch family, and the somewhat unpleasant Kreacher – don’t fare so well. The house-elves’ positions reflect different ways of imagining the magical economy’s unskilled workers. Their subordinate status is clear from their deferential and cringing language; they constantly refer to themselves in the third person. Hermione, indeed, concerned about the working conditions of elves, founds the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare, and takes to making clothing in bulk for them in order to bring about their liberation. The house-elves who do all the domestic labour in Hogwarts are, like Winky, classic victims of false consciousness, as Marx might have put it; ‘uneducated and

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brainwashed’, Hermione observes, not a little patronisingly. The elves strongly resist the idea of their liberation and Hermione’s campaign has little practical effect. She does however succeed in raising the consciousness of her fellow-wizards about the elves’ highly exploited position as representatives of the proletariat in the magical labour market. Treating them in a humane fashion brings positive results; Kreacher is induced to give Harry strategically important information to which he is privy, thanks to his service with the Black family, and Dobby – though ostracised by other house-elves because of his progressive views – dies a hero in Harry’s eyes and in his own estimation. J.K. Rowling’s treatment of the brownie/house-elf position is interesting. She seems pessimistic about the capacity of the proletarian elves to free themselves from enslavement to unethical masters, and she characterises them as displaying an unsettling, creeping servility in their dealings with almost everyone. Hermione’s idealism is that of the liberal do-gooder. In failing to consult the house-elf constituency she alienates those whom she is trying to help: the classic dilemma of the intelligentsia trying to persuade the workers of what’s good for them. It’s notable too that the other pupils, who benefit mightily from the unrewarded domestic labour of the underclass, don’t take Hermione’s idea of the liberation struggle very seriously. Nor is it clear, at the end of the series, that the elves do achieve any kind of lasting improvement in their working conditions; Dobby’s failure to engage his fellow elves in revolutionary struggle, perhaps because of his ambiguous relationship with Harry and his friends, hints at Rowling’s cynicism about the politics of the left.

Boggarts and Hobs For every brownie who works to keep a household prosperous, there’s a boggart who does just the opposite. One tale from Northumberland suggests that the fed-up brownie can indeed become a boggart. Boggarts are a native version of poltergeists

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(an originally German term, first recorded in English in 1848). They do mischief rather than help: scatter the ashes that have been swept up on the hearth, break dishes instead of washing them, or get into the butter churn and prevent the butter from forming. One notorious boggart from North Yorkshire is the hobthrush, associated with a farm at Farndale. Nowadays he’s remembered as living in a mound, Obtrusch Rocks, up on the North Yorkshire moors, not far from Pickering. This creature was both a bogie – the kind of creature that suddenly appears on the road at night and makes horses rear – and a boggart of the indoor type. He hung about the farm, throwing and untidying things; he made such a nuisance of himself that the farmer at Farndale decided there was no help for it, they’d have to move. So he found another farm where he could take up the tenancy, loaded all his possessions onto a cart, along with his wife and children, and set out along the road. Then he met a neighbour, who enquired, ‘Eh up, lad! Art flittin?’ – that is, ‘Are you moving?’ And a voice from deep within the milk churn replied, ‘Ay, we’re flittin!’ The hobthrush was bent on coming with them to their new home. Whereupon the farmer turned round, realising there was no escape from the boggart, wherever he and his family might move, and so they might as well stay put. ‘Ay, we’re flittin’ is a well-known story both in Scandinavia and elsewhere in England; it’s also told of Boggart Hole Clough in Lancashire. The hob was an active creature in this part of North Yorkshire where I grew up. As well as his Rock (in reality a Bronze Age round cairn), there’s a Hob Hole pool up on the moors near Westerdale, and there’s also Hob Hole, near Runswick Bay. This is an old fishing village north of Whitby, full of higgledy-piggledy cottages and narrow lanes. If you follow a hawthorn-tunnel track down to the beach, you come to a series of dramatic sea caves. This hob seems to have been better disposed towards humans, for he would cure children of whooping cough if the afflicted child was brought to his cave there. He could be invoked with cries of ‘Hob Hole Hob!

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My bairn’s got kink-cough, tak’ it off! tak’ it off!’ Whooping cough is much less common now, since the vaccine for it was developed, and it seems likely that the Hob Hole Hob has moved on to fresh pastures. But if you are on the beach at Runswick Bay, fossicking for fossils or jet – it’s a great place for finding such treasures – you might stick your head into his Hole and give him a shout. And if you are thinking that the chime of ‘Hob’ and ‘Hole’ is somehow familiar, then you may be thinking of the opening line of one of the most famous books of the twentieth century: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ Now, hobbits are not hobs, although some hobs are quite hairy; they are too hardworking to laze about smoking pipes and eating in comfortably furnished hob(bit) holes, but it’s quite possible that Tolkien, who taught at the University of Leeds for a time, had heard of, perhaps even visited, some of North Yorkshire’s Hob Holes.

Fairy Women, Gift and Taboo These tales of fairies, brownies, boggarts and hobs illustrate the complicated give-and-take involved in relationships with the Otherworld when it comes to profit and loss, benefit and detriment. Human relationships are equally complicated in that, to make a success of a marriage, empathy and consideration, give-and-take is needed. Fairy women, like human women, bring their energy, their knowledge and their particular gifts to their marriages. If the husband trusts his wife, listens to what she tells him and acknowledges that she has her own point of view and her own identity within their relationship, the marriage enriches both of them, bringing happiness and prosperity. If, however, he does not listen to her, discounts the requests she makes of him and denigrates her perspective, then that happiness is easily destroyed. Up in the Black Mountains of Wales, curving around the foot of steep, bare green hills, lies the peaceful, glacial lake of Llyn y Fan Fach. And near the lake in the olden days was a

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farm where a widow and her son dwelt. The son was herding their cattle one day by the lake and there he saw a beautiful woman – the Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach – combing her hair with a golden comb. Eventually she agreed to become his wife. But, she explained, if he were to strike her three causeless blows (tri ergyd diachos), their marriage would be over. The two were married and lived happily together for many years, and the huge numbers of sheep, cows, pigs, goats and horses that she brought with her from her home in the lake added to the farm’s prosperity. One day, when their oldest child was about seven years old, the couple were about to head to a neighbour’s wedding when the wife said she would rather not go, for it was too far. Her husband suggested that she might ride rather than walk, and told her to catch a horse, while he fetched the saddle and bridle, and her gloves, which she had left inside the house. When he came out again, she hadn’t stirred from the spot, and so he playfully flicked her with her glove (in some versions, he throws the bridle to her and it strikes her). ‘That is the first causeless blow’, she said. Some years later, they were at a christening, where all the guests were rejoicing at the arrival of the new baby. Only the Lady did not rejoice; on the contrary, she wept. Her husband tapped her on the shoulder (in some versions he strikes her again) and she explained that she wept for the little child entering into a world of pain and woe. And that was the second causeless blow. Not long after that, they were at a funeral, where everyone wept. But the Lady laughed long and loud, and her husband shook her (or struck her), demanding an explanation. She laughed, the Lady said, because the dead person was now free from pain and suffering and had gone to a better place. ‘And now the third causeless blow has been struck. Farewell.’ The wife set off back to the lake, calling up all the livestock she had brought to the marriage, those beasts’ descendants, and even the little slaughtered black calf that was hanging on the hook as she went. Lady and all disappeared into Llyn y Fan Fach’s dark blue depths.

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In some versions, the husband plunges into the lake after her and ends his life; in others he simply laments for the rest of his days. The couple’s three sons visit the lake regularly to bewail their mother; one day she emerges and declares that their mission is to relieve human pain by becoming physicians. She shows them a nearby place where healing herbs grow and teaches them which plants relieve which illnesses. And the Lady’s sons and their sons do indeed become famous as the Physicians of Myddfai, and their fame was known across the whole of Wales. The simple taboo that the husband had to observe – not to strike his wife – proved too hard for him. In the ‘Welsh Fairy Book’ version, the blows are softened into accidental taps and the rules of the Otherworld are made to seem unreasonable. In less sentimentalised versions of the tale, the husband strikes his wife as husbands were prone to do, and thus the tale has something to say about domestic violence and the respect that a husband should have for his wife, especially perhaps one who has brought him both prosperity and children. One aspect of the tale which is particularly noteworthy is the Lady’s apparent aversion to human rites of passage: christenings, weddings and funerals. From her Otherworldly perspective the logic of human behaviour is hard to fathom; if Christians believe that this world is a vale of tears and that heaven is a place of delight, why should they not reflect this dogma in their emotional responses to a birth and a death? In the traditional versions of the tale, the refusal to go to the wedding occasions the last breach of taboo, for striking a fairy woman with the iron of the horse bit is doubly forbidden; as we know, fairies have a great antipathy to iron. The Lady’s views are unsettling, topsy-turvy even, and her expression of them is socially disturbing. Humans don’t much like such truth-telling, and we are rather intolerant of aberrant behaviour. The story doesn’t just warn against using violence against a woman, but also suggests that the key to a successful marriage lies in trying to see the other person’s point of view, to listen and accept their perceptions of the world, especially, perhaps, with regard

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to matters of belief and custom. Yet, however misguided the husband (for marriages with supernatural women are rarely lastingly successful), the sons have not offended their mother, nor infringed the taboo, and thus are worthy of the supernatural gifts bestowed on them. Half-fairy themselves, they are better placed to learn and adapt, and they put their knowledge at the service of the sick: an altruism which earns them both fame and fortune. Thinking about other people’s perspectives, developing empathy, is key to the physicians’ success too. The Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach shares her story with the better-known French figure of Mélusine, a fairy who married a mortal, Raimondin of Lusignan, bore him nearly a dozen sons, cleared forests, fortified cities, founded churches and raised her less-talented husband to the status of a great lord. Mélusine asked only one thing of her husband in return, that he should not seek to know what she did on Saturdays. Of course Raimondin proved unable to restrain his curiosity. He peeped through a hole he had made in the door of his wife’s chamber one Saturday, saw her taking a bath – and discovered her secret. For on Saturdays Mélusine re-assumed to her other identity: a half-serpent woman, from the waist down a scaly, gleaming snake, striped with thick bands of silver and azure. Raimondin kept silent about his knowledge until, in the aftermath of a terrible family crisis, he publicly called his wife a serpent. Her secret made manifest, Mélusine reverted to her original shape and flew away, lamenting heart-rendingly. For she had truly loved her husband, and she knew that she had now lost her chance of salvation; she was under a curse that decreed that she could only achieve heaven if she could stay married to a mortal man until his life’s end. Mélusine was the progenitor of the French House of Lusignan: her descendants were kings of Cyprus and Armenia. Her story was translated into English around 1500. We can’t claim Mélusine as a British folklore figure, though her story is integral to A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession, which harnesses Norse myth, Mélusine’s tale, Breton folklore and a

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host of other legendary allusions in its parallel love stories set in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the Victorian strand of the plot, Christabel LaMotte is composing a long poem about the ‘Fairy Melusina’ when she meets and falls in love with the well-established and married poet Randolph Ash, himself engaged in writing an epic poem about the Norse gods. Christabel and Randolph steal away together to spend some time in Whitby, where they must pretend to be husband and wife; they visit some local sights with folkloric associations – places which resonate in the poems they are composing. Christabel also writes stories which retell folk tales or old beliefs, and she is greatly taken with the Hob of Hob Hole and with the names of the standing stones on the moorland: ‘Fat Betty, the Nan Stone, Slavering Ciss’. ‘There’s a terrible tale to be told’ she said, ‘and a few bright guineas to be earned, of Slavering Ciss.’ Sadly, in the world of the novel we never learn what that tale might be. Frank Elgee, the author of The Moor-lands of North-Eastern Yorkshire (1912), who records these names for the stones, remarks that the origin of Slavering Ciss’s name is one for the place-name scholars. Since he gives no more information, you will have to make up Slavering Ciss’s story for yourself. Roland and Maud, the two modern academics who become obsessed with researching the poets’ hidden history, also visit North Yorkshire on the lovers’ trail, for ‘“Literary critics make natural detectives,” said Maud.’ They identify the places that the Victorian couple visited, such as the glorious cavern-like Thomason Foss with its ‘greenish-goldish-white rush of the fall’ and ‘the troubled and turning pool’: these hidden spots of stern beauty are refracted in the novel’s poetry. Byatt’s pastiche of Victorian verse is gorgeously lyrical and evocative, incorporating Yorkshire dialect terms such as ‘gill’ and ‘rigg’ in its attentive and sensuous descriptions of nature and atmosphere. There’s no space here to unpack the different uses of folklore and legend that Byatt incorporates into her novel, but the Mélusine theme of the fairy who stakes everything on her investment in the

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man she loves and the price she ends up paying, the wonder and beauty that she brings into the mortal man’s life, plays out in the tragic story of Randolph and Christabel. The section in which Roland and Maud track the Yorkshire places that the couple visited draws on Byatt’s own knowledge of the moors and waterfalls around the pretty village of Goathland, the cove of Boggle Hole near Robin Hood’s Bay, the standing stones up on the tops, and even mentions the legend of Wade and Bell, where we started our journey through north-east Yorkshire in Chapter 1. Byatt, born in Sheffield and schooled in York, knows this stunning landscape of dales, moors, cliffs and rocky beaches very well. It’s forty years since I last walked the paths round Goathland and saw the clear shining fall of Mallyan Spout, but I can see the landscapes Byatt describes as clearly as if I were setting off along the track beside the rippling stream to Beck Hole in the course of a school Saturday walk.

Sovereignty King Arthur kept court at Carlisle as well as Camelot; when he was visiting the northern parts of his realm he would often go hunting in the mighty Inglewood Forest around Penrith. And, according to the romance of ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’, it was deep in the green woods that he saw a splendid hart, lurking unmoving in the undergrowth. Arthur left his men and went stalking the deer; after following him for half a mile or more, he shot and killed his prey. Arthur was busy butchering the deer when he was surprised by a strange man, ‘Armyd welle and sure  / A knyght fulle strong and of greatt myghte’ (Well and securely armed  / A very strong knight of great power). The stranger has a complaint to make: Arthur has seized his lands and given them to Sir Gawain. Arthur is in peril; he is all alone, and only armed for hunting. He persuades the angry knight, whose odd name is Sir Gromer Somer Joure, that he will make good the wrong done him, but the knight demands that he return in a twelvemonth, bringing the answer

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to the tricky question, ‘Whate wemen love best in feld and town’ (What do women, in country and town, love most?). If he does not provide the right answer, the king will be killed on the spot. Arthur swears to the arrangement and returns home to Carlisle where he confides his dilemma to Sir Gawain. King and knight resolve to ride out and question people, and write down their answers. When the opinion-gathering exercise is over, ‘eyther on others pamplett dyd loke’ (each one looked at the other one’s pamphlet). Gawain is confident that they must have the right answer; the king less so, and since there is still a month to go, he rides out into Inglewood Forest once more. Here he meets a hideously ugly hag – ‘lyke a barrell she was made’ – riding on a splendid horse. The hag, Dame Ragnell, promises to give the king the right answer to the question, and to save his life, but only if she is allowed to marry Sir Gawain. The king rides home to Carlisle and acquaints Gawain with his dilemma, making no secret of the lady’s hideousness. ‘Ys this alle?’ enquires Gawain, and promises to marry her to save the king’s life, ‘though she were as foull as Belsabub [Beelzebub]’. When Arthur returns to the forest with Gawain’s promise, the hag reveals that what women most want is ‘sovereyneté’: control over their husbands and over themselves. And Arthur, content with that answer, rides to meet Sir Gromer Somer Joure and offers him the two books. The hostile knight leafs through and scorns the variety of answers within, but when Arthur communicates the intelligence given to him by Ragnell, the knight cannot gainsay it. Ragnell turns out to be Sir Gromer’s sister, whom he calls ‘that old scott’ (a highly derogatory term meaning a clapped-out horse) for thwarting his plan. Meanwhile, Ragnell has earned her reward and insists on riding publicly into Carlisle with the king and on having the wedding formally announced. Gawain himself doesn’t flinch at the sight of his bride’s boar-like tusks, nor at her prodigious appetite at the wedding breakfast. A leaf of the manuscript is missing, and the story resumes with the courteous knight in bed with his lady. Gawain

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is reluctant to initiate sex, for which the lady rebukes him, and she demands that he kiss her at least. ‘I woll do more than kysse!’ says Gawain, who traditionally is quite a ladies’ man, and he draws her into his embrace. As she turns towards him she is transformed into a beautiful maiden. The lady explains that Gawain has a choice: he can have her fair by night and foul by day, putting his private pleasure above his public reputation, or vice versa, foul by night and fair by day, winning admiration for his wife’s beauty, but having to endure her ugliness in their most intimate moments. Gawain ponders a while, but soon returns the choice to his bride, having learned well the lesson about sovereignty and women’s autonomy. Once empowered to make that choice, she chooses to be beautiful all the time. Her stepmother had enchanted her into her hideous state and thus she was doomed to remain until the best man in England agreed to wed her and give her sovereignty over his body and goods. Gawain and his lady live happily for the rest of her life (alas, only five more years) and, despite the insult and threats offered to the king, Arthur is a ‘good lord’ to Gromer Somer Jour, at his sister’s behest, and perhaps his lost lands are restored. This story is a version of a tale first encountered in Irish, in which a number of brothers, all candidates for the throne of Ireland, encounter a hideous hag in the forest. She demands that they kiss her (at least in the Victorian version; likely in the original tradition the request was for sex). Four of the five brothers baulk at the notion. The fifth brother, Niall, not only kisses her, but offers to do more, and at that moment she transforms into a beauty. She is, she tells him, the Sovereignty of Ireland, ugly and difficult when being sought, but wonderful when you finally grasp it. These early instances of the story are interested in how a kingdom is gained and the dirty deeds which may have to be done to secure hold of the throne, especially one which is apparently vacant and therefore open to contest. Becoming king is the biggest triumph imaginable in medieval thinking, and supernatural endorsement of the

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successful candidate imparts a powerful aura both to king and to institution. Versions of this ‘Loathly Lady’ tale, as it’s often called, abounded in medieval Britain. In Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’, John Gower’s ‘Tale of Florent’ and the two surviving versions of ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawain’, it is usually not a kingdom that’s the prize, but rather marital happiness and recognition of a woman’s right to be regarded as having a real stake in the relationship. The woman too brings a perspective, an individual identity, to the marriage, and she must be allowed self-expression and the autonomy which her husband exercises as of right. And you might also recognise this story as the one that is so neatly subverted in the Dreamworks animated film of 2001, Shrek, in which the intermittent ogre, Princess Fiona, chooses, unlike the classic Loathly Lady, to stay ugly all the time since her true love turns out to be a kind-hearted ogre. This story isn’t just about gender politics, though; Gawain and Ragnell’s story is juxtaposed with the question of Arthur’s apparently unjust apportioning of Gromer Somer Joure’s lands to Gawain. Gromer Somer Joure is both a dangerous and a supernaturalseeming character; his name suggests ‘summer’s day’ and may be associated with the kinds of festivities and topsy-turvyness of Midsummer’s Day. ‘Gromer’ may either mean ‘man’ (as in ‘bridegroom’) or be a variant of ‘grim’ – at all events he is certainly not in a good temper when he threatens Arthur. This poem, along with five other related fifteenth-century Arthurian romances, is set in the country around Carlisle, in Inglewood or at the Tarn Wadling. The Tarn is a lake within the forest, near the charming village of High Hesket, but it has now largely dried up, only reappearing when there’s exceptional rainfall. In the ballad version of ‘The Marriage’, recorded in the eighteenth-century Percy manuscript, the confrontations between king, knight and hag take place specifically at the Tarn. In another of the poems, Gawain and Guinevere meet the ghost of Guinevere’s mother, risen out of Purgatory to chastise her

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daughter, at the same uncanny spot. Later in the same poem, ‘The Awntyrs [Adventures] Off Arthur’, it emerges that the king has taken Galloway from a certain Sir Galaron, and given it to Sir Gawain; as in ‘Gawain and Ragnell’, the king’s expropriation of land to reward his kinsmen comes under scrutiny. Threatening, often supernatural, figures challenge the way in which Arthur conducts his rule, the behaviour of his knights and the morality of his queen in these poems. A critical eye is cast on the way that the king exercises his lordship – in particular on a southern king’s propensity to redistribute northern land – and dire warnings are given about the Round Table’s future, even the courteous Gawain’s destiny. Why should these northern poems want to probe into questions of sovereignty and kingship in this way? The Borders, on the Scottish side in particular, as we’ve seen already, are haunted by supernatural figures; fairies ride and corpses walk again there, signalling by their disquiet an uneasiness about conditions among the living. The Borders are a liminal space both politically and imaginatively: neither quite one kingdom nor the other, anything can happen there. So, in these romances of Arthur, there’s a strong sense that the supernatural has become operational during, and in the aftermath of, the Wars of the Roses. Civil war had wracked the kingdom for decades; kings took the throne, were deposed and then seized the throne once again. The definitive Tudor victory in 1485 brought a new dynasty to power, one that claimed to unite the White Rose and the Red, the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions. These debatable borderlands are a long way from London, and also far from Edinburgh; here power lies in the hands of the great Border families, the Lowthers, Dacres and, pre-eminently, the Nevilles, the Earls of Westmorland. The second earl died in the terrible Battle of Towton in 1461, the bloodiest battle ever to take place on English soil. The third earl served Richard III, but then willingly made his peace with Henry VII. That the wild men, ghosts and magical knights of the region should

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confront the idea of the monarchy when the king and court are outside the safety of their well-fortified castles, vulnerably alone in the wilderness of the forest, suggests disturbance in the commonwealth and in the hearts and minds of the borderland dwellers, who hope that stability will at last return and that their ownership of the ancestral lands will be confirmed.

Conclusion We’ve left behind the comic sweet-toothed dragons of Filey and West Sussex, travelling past the fairy mounds of the Highlands and Islands, and the deep lakes of the Brecon Beacons, to end up in the wild forests of Cumbria where Otherworld figures probe into the value and practices of kingship. It’s clear that human nature has always been interested in the get-rich-quick possibilities of finding buried treasure, of gaining something for nothing through luck and quick wits when the opportunity presents itself. Nevertheless, many more of the stories and traditions connected with lack and gain are about the realities of human existence: the fact that we all have to work for our livings, often in repetitive, chancy occupations such as farming, cloth manufacture, mining or fishing. When you live and work close to the land, small improvements or small setbacks can make or break your fortunes. No wonder, then, that the Cornish miners were anxious to keep on the right side of the knockers who could unleash floods, fatal gases and cave-ins deep in the mines where they risked their lives on a daily basis. But they also hoped that the knockers would lead them to valuable finds – to thick lodes of gold ore or tin – and would secure their return to the surface at the end of the day with treasure to show for their labours. No wonder that fishermen have their own traditions and language: that they will not put to sea in their little open boats if they’ve seen the vicar, or heard a whistling woman. Disaster looms if someone calls for a knife when on board, or if the womenfolk at home should happen to mention pigs. To this day on English waterways, old hands among the

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narrowboat-men will refer to ‘grunters’; they refuse to use ‘the p–i–g word’, believing that it brings bad luck. The tales of fairies and brownies who lend a helping hand to relieve the back-breaking daily labour of making a living symbolise the pact that those who work by growing, harvesting or digging natural resources make with unseen powers, with nature herself, but also with that elusive quality: luck. And bad luck too has its supernatural causes. Whether it’s a dragon in the neighbourhood systematically munching its way through livestock and maidens, ruining the grazing and the village’s hopes of survival, or a brownie-turned-bad, a boggart who doesn’t destroy the household, but who just makes everyday life that little bit more difficult, unseen forces conspire against humans who are just trying to get by. Some of that bad luck is caused by human greed, folly and stinginess: stinting on the cloth for the East Halton brownie’s tunic, carping at the Cranshaws brownie’s stacking skills, or carelessly throwing a strange fish into a well, instead of taking it home or putting it back in the river. But some tales illustrate how the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. Acts intended as kindness cause sensitive creatures to bridle, to take umbrage and withdraw their services. Hermione’s do-gooding campaign among the house-elves brings into focus the oppressed elves’ own acceptance of their slavery and raises questions about what sort of progress can be made when the downtrodden are not empowered to decide for themselves what they want. And the ways in which farmers and householders (and, apparently, wizards) treat their unpaid helpers reflect upon their dealings with those humans who actually work for them. Dehumanising labour – refusing to see the people who clean up after us, who serve us food, or who take our money in supermarkets, as people – is not simply a by-product of industrial, globalised societies. The problem has long and ancient roots. Other kinds of benefits, not simply economic advantages, are mediated by supernatural forces. Contact with Otherworld

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creatures is, as we know, fraught with danger; even those who keenly follow the rules of exchange can lose everything through a moment’s inattention or through ineradicable human curiosity. Yet compensation for the loss of their mother, in the form of exceptional skills, is given to the Physicians of Myddfai. Kings are not exempt from critical monitoring by unseen, other-world powers. The saint can, through the power of God, cause a dragon to relocate when the king fails; the supernatural knight challenges King Arthur’s governance and his gender politics: even the highest in the land are subject to scrutiny and correction by the spirits which haunt the forest of Inglewood. This chapter has investigated how folk tales and traditional beliefs about interaction with the supernatural tell stories about humans’ relationships with other humans, with members of the opposite sex, with other social classes, and with nature itself. The next chapter will probe more deeply into the question of how far humans are shaped by their culture and how this allows them to differentiate themselves from animals. Is the beast within under control? Are we also beasts outside – and how do we interact with those kinds of being whose constitutions are more strongly animal than ours?

five

T h e Be a s t & the Hum an The Selkie f you fly into Kirkwall on the little eighteen-seater planes that ply between Orkney and the Scottish mainland, you’ll see the low green islands, like the curving backs of dolphins, showing above the splashing waves, and to the west the towering island of Hoy, the High Island with its cliffs and stacks, home to a myriad seabirds. And as you journey through the islands, by bus, car or ferry, you come to realise how the sea does not separate the communities of Orkney, but rather unites them; a brisk row or putter across the sound soon brings people from different islands together. Orkney is an ancient archipelago, with its prehistoric settlements of Skara Brae, the huge Maes Howe burial mound with its Viking graffiti and splendid dragon, and its mysterious standing stones. I stood in the Ring of Brodgar early one grey, still April morning when nothing could be heard but the calling of the birds: the whistling of the curlew and the twitter of the peewit. A band of lemon-coloured light lay along the horizon and only a whisper of traffic – the school bus on its way along the main road – reminded me that humans still lived in this mythic landscape. Just off the shore in the Harray Loch, curious faces reared up; some of the seal-folk had perhaps come to see what was happening up at the stones. Seals, with their expressive faces, huge eyes and twitching whiskers, so graceful in the sea and clumsy on land, are social creatures, living in sizeable groups. They communicate with

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F ig. 21  The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney.

each other quite noisily, with barks, yaps and grunts. I’ve heard the sound of their conversations carrying over the still water from Kitterland near the Calf of Man to the smooth, green headland at the Isle’s southern tip. On Britain’s western and northern islands, seals live alongside the fishing communities. Although they are sometimes blamed when the fish are hard to find, the seals (or selkies as they are called in dialect) have earned the respect of the islanders, and many tales are told of selkie–human interaction. One such from Orkney is a variant of a widespread international tale-type: the Grateful Lion (Tale Type 156). Mansie Meur (Magnus Muir) the fisherman is gathering limpets on the rocks at Hacksness on the island of Sanday, when he spots a female seal. She is giving birth with great difficulty, while the father seal is waiting at a decent distance. Finally the pups are born and make for their mother’s dugs. The fisherman thinks that the two babies will make him a fine waistcoat and seizes hold of them, while the mother makes her escape, sliding off the skerry away into the sea. The mother seal gazes at him with such despair and pleading, utters a groan ‘sae dismal an’ how, an’ sae human like, that hid geed stra’cht tae his hert an’ fairly owercam’ him’ (so dismal and so hollow, and so

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human-like that it went straight to his heart and fair overcame him). At last the mother begins to weep, tears streaming from both eyes. Now Mansie can’t steel himself to snatch her pups; he puts them back on the skerry, and the mother gathers them to her. Some forty years later, Mansie went fishing for coal-fish on a tidal rock off the west side of Eday, one to which it was easy to walk at low tide. It took a long time for the fish to start biting, but with the flood tide he began to have some luck and was soon filling his creel. His success was such that he quite forgot to keep an eye on the pathway back, until, to his horror, he realised that he had been cut off by the tide. Though he screamed and shouted, the west of Eday is a lonely place and he realised that he was going to drown. The water crept up by degrees, but just as it was lapping at his chin and beginning to wash into his mouth, he felt something seize hold of his collar, swing him off his feet and drag him through the water towards the shore. Once his feet could safely touch bottom, Mansie looked back to the rock where he’d been stranded and there he saw the seal, fetching his creel of fish, which she brought to him in her mouth. Mansie recognised her as the seal whose pups he’d spared all those years ago, now grown elderly, but yet a wise and kindly figure. And he said with all his heart, ‘Geud bliss the selkie that deus no’ forget’ (God bless the selkie that does not forget). The story gives a vivid picture of life on the Islands, the hard work of limpet-gathering and fishing on desolate rocky shores where no one will hear cries for help. And that long moment of pity and sympathy that Mansie feels, his realisation of shared emotion between human and animal, is foregrounded in this version of the tale. Walter Traill Dennison, an Orkney folklorist, published it in 1880. Dennison himself lived on Sanday and he recorded a good number of local tales in his Orcadian Sketchbook, many written down in the local dialect. There’s a Victorian sentimentality to the idea that the mother seal wept when she feared that she would lose the pups she had just given

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birth to with such agony. But it’s also clear that the informant from whom Dennison collected this tale regarded the selkie-folk as much like humans, except that they happen to live in the sea, wearing their selkie skins. How much animals are like humans, and how much humans are like animals, is the theme of this chapter. The borderline between man and beast is a permeable one, as we’ll see; under certain circumstances we can communicate with our fellow creatures, and we certainly owe them respect. For we are also animals, though we can speak, and we think ourselves better than the beasts. Quite often the human can revert to the bestial and give expression to feelings and behaviours which civilised people have managed to repress. In the tales of selkies, werewolves, deer-women and witch-hares that follow, we’ll see how the different kinds of human–animal interaction that they relate can also figure human–human relations, particularly those of men and women.

Selkies and Sex The touching tale of the selkie of Hacksness keeps the selkie mother firmly in seal form. Though she seems to have and express human feelings of sadness and gratitude, and to have a long memory and good recognition, she does not shed her selkie skin to show the human form within, and nor can she speak. Another of Dennison’s tales explains how the descendants of a certain family come to have a hard, horn-like growth over their hands and feet – a phenomenon that Dennison had seen for himself. This genetic trait came about through the wilful behaviour of the family’s ancestress, to whom Dennison gives the name ‘Ursilla’ (Ursula). Ursilla was the daughter of a great Orkney family of a rather forbidding demeanour. She decided to choose her own husband and, after her father’s death, elected to marry a humble young man who had worked with the animals in the barn – perhaps deciding that she did not want a husband who would try to boss her around. Once she had the husband she had long desired, Ursilla was not happy. Dennison skates over the

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problem, but, perhaps because of the social gulf between husband and wife, and Ursilla’s efficient running of household and farm, the husband felt emasculated. Neither sexual satisfaction nor children seemed likely to come to Ursilla. With the pragmatic approach that characterises her earlier behaviour, Ursilla solved the problem by going down to the shore, sitting at the high-tide mark, and, at high tide, she let seven tears fall into the sea. This summoned a big male selkie who put his head out of the water and asked what the lady’s will might be. Ursilla told him of her plight, and he agreed to come to her at the seventh spring tide, for then he could assume human form. Ursilla and the selkie thus became lovers, and they lay together very frequently. And so every bairn that Ursilla bore had seal-like webbing between fingers and toes. The midwife clipped away the telltale webbing, but it would grow back in the form of a horn-like crust over the hands and feet. Some of Ursilla’s descendants were entirely free of the problem, but one or two in each family and each generation would suffer from the disfigurement. There’s no explicit moralising in this tale, though it’s clear that if Ursilla had married one of her equals instead of following her desire for the lowly barn-man, she could have had a normal marriage and children. Ursilla’s solution to her marital difficulties harnesses a widely held belief that selkie-men find human women desirable. Genetic abnormalities in families are, of course, often explained by untoward behaviour by mothers, or by unusual encounters during pregnancy. Ursilla’s name means ‘Little Bear’, which suggests that she already has an affinity with the animal world. And the belief that animals can somehow transmit their traits to the foetus in the womb is an ancient and widespread one. Ursilla deliberately chose her selkie lover; his selkie form ensured discretion about their relationship, and the couple seem to have come to a mutually satisfactory arrangement. The unfortunate heroine of the ballad ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie’ took a lover and had a child by him without knowing the truth about his identity. In the version collected by Francis Child (Child 113)

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she laments that she does not know who the baby’s father is or where he can be found. At this a figure appears at the foot of the bed where she is nursing her child, ‘and a grumly guest I’m sure was he’ – a terrifying apparition. The creature reveals that he is a man on land and a selkie in the sea, and Sule Skerrie, far out in the northern ocean, is where he dwells in seal form. He hands her a purse of gold as her ‘nourris-fee’ (nurse’s fee) and demands his son. He will teach him, he tells the mother, to swim in the sea in selkie form, on ‘a simmer’s day / When the sin shines het on evera stane’ (on a summer day / when the sun shines hot on every stone). The mother, he prophesies, will marry a ‘proud gunner’, and that man will one day – unwittingly – shoot dead both selkie father and son. In other versions of the ballad, the son is given a golden chain to wear about his neck; this identifies him in seal form, but it does not prevent his death in the gunsights of his stepfather. Sometimes the father offers marriage, which the young woman rejects, but when the selkie comes to claim his son, she changes her mind about the match, only to be rejected in her turn. The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie, like the Elf-Knight ballads of Chapter 2, warns girls against unregulated sex with men whose background they don’t know and who don’t come to woo them formally and win their family’s consent. And, since it’s still generally expected in the west that a woman will move to live with her husband, rather than absorb him into her own community, she needs to think carefully about whether she can be integrated among his people with their different customs and habitat. In this story, then, the mother is caught in a double predicament – who can she name as father to her child, and how, once he has identified himself, could she ever find a way of living with a selkie? The Great Silkie acknowledges his responsibilities by revealing himself and by handing over gold for the baby’s upkeep, though his claim that this is a ‘nourris-fee’ suggests that he underestimates the bond between mother and child, and has no real intention of forming a family. The gold

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chain is a concession to the mother’s love for her child; as a recognition token it allows her to identify her son when she visits him in his seal habitat, and, poignantly, to discover that her new husband’s prey is her child. The Silkie is an entirely patriarchal figure, interested primarily in claiming his son and allowing him to develop his dual human/selkie nature; the mother has no right to keep her child with her. The son’s departure with his father enables her to marry, however, and to marry well; the new husband is characterised as both rich and proud. His shooting of the seal father and son is construed as accidental, but the story expresses a deep-rooted unconscious male hostility towards these two rivals for his wife’s affection: her former lover and their child. The uncanny tale of animal seduction is strongly shaped by human sexual, social and family dynamics: the seduced woman gets limited reparation for her social shame, but the father’s claiming of his son brings her nothing but sorrow and portends disaster for the child. The destruction of father and son, entirely licit since they are only seals, results in one version in the mother’s death from a broken heart. A final selkie tale from Orkney is a version of the international Tale Type 402: the Animal Bride. The Goodman of Wastness was, according to Dennison, a proud man who would have nothing to do with the many girls who admired him. One day as he is down at the shoreline, he sees the selkie-folk who have shed their skins, and who are splashing and playing in the sea, or sunning themselves on the rocks. He creeps round behind the rocks to get a closer look. When they notice him, the selkies snatch up their skins and dive back into the sea – all except one lovely girl, who forgets her skin. The Goodman takes up the skin and makes off with it; the girl comes out of the sea and follows him, weeping and pleading for its return. But the Goodman likes the look of her too much, and, refusing to give the skin back, asks her to come and live with him. The selkie-woman cannot survive in the sea without her skin, and so unwillingly she accedes. As the years pass she bears the

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Goodman seven children, but she is often to be seen gazing longingly out to sea, and she teaches her children many strange songs, never heard before. One day, the older children are out fishing with their father, the younger children are out gathering limpets, and the youngest child has stayed at home with a sore foot, which she has propped up on a stool. The mother determines now to find her lost skin and searches everywhere for it, but to no avail. The child asks what she seeks, and the mother explains that she is looking for a skin with which she could make a little hide sandal to protect the child’s foot. The girl reveals that she has seen her father with just such a skin, which, when he thought no one was looking, he lifted down and looked at, and then hid back up in the rafters over the bed. The mother loses no time in finding the skin, and with a cry of ‘Farewell, peerie buddo!’ (little child), runs down to the sea, sliding back into her skin as she goes. As she plunges into the water, a male selkie swims up to greet her with clear signs of joy and delight. The Goodman is rowing home from the day’s fishing when she pops up in the water beside him and uncovers her face, reciting this verse: Goodman o’ Wastness, fareweel tae thee! I liked dee weel, doo war geud tae me; bit I lo’e better me man o’ the sea! (Goodman of Wastness, farewell to you! I liked you well, you were good to me; but I love better my man of the sea!)

And the selkie-wife was never seen again, though the Goodman would often walk along the beach in search of her. In some versions of this tale, which is found in the Hebrides as well as the Northern Isles, the mother takes her half-selkie children with her, leaving the husband who had forced her into marriage truly bereft. The same Animal Bride tale is told of swan-maidens in northern Eurasia, and also of mermaids, particularly in Cornwall. The sea-girt British Isles give rise to

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tales which imagine the realm of the Other as the ocean, rather than the distant lands to which the swan-maiden flies away when she gets her swan-skin back. This selkie story is one of identity before and after marriage and it still resonates with us today. Although it is not so common for women to be married off without their consent, many women leave their communities and their former lives behind when they wed. Often the wife puts her husband’s career first and she finds herself trapped in the home, looking after the children and doing the best that she can. The selkie tale warns that when the opportunity arises for the wife to reassert her identity and find her freedom once again, she may well seize it. Despite the strong social expectation that she should put others’ needs first, despite the demands of the children and the feelings of the husband, who had assumed that his uncomplaining wife was happy, she goes away, sacrificing all the benefits which marriage is assumed to bring, but finding herself again in the process. Amy Sackville’s novel Orkney, published in 2013, tells the story of Richard, an elderly English don, and his ex-student (never named) whom he has married. Richard and his wife have come to Orkney, where his wife was born, on honeymoon. There Richard tries to work, while his wife spends more and more time on the shore, gazing out to sea. Her father, who dis­appeared when she was young, has some part in the psychic drama in which both she and Richard are players; so also her dreams about drowning begin to infect her husband’s imagination. The novel is somewhat unreliably narrated by Richard, and charts his growing anxiety about his wife. Feeding his fears are the age gap between them, which fuels his jealousy of all other men, her refusal to talk about her past, and her strange silver hair and Otherworldly air. Sackville evokes the Orkney landscape with a clarity which contrasts with the ungraspable events that occur in the human sphere. The islands are ‘a herd of cragged beasts, their scurfy backs just breaking the surface of the water’, and the light of the sun is strangely muted as if

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always seen through the fog which clouds the reader’s apprehension of what’s really going on. Whether Orkney is a tale of the supernatural or a folie à deux isn’t perhaps clear, but the book plays on the selkie and mermaid stories which the wife relates to her increasingly anxious husband. Though much of the book is overwritten and the impossibly fey girl-wife becomes increasingly annoying, as a modern reframing of a selkie tale Orkney understands the essential unknowability of the seal-woman and the uncomprehending, overpossessive and insecure husband.

The Merry Mermaid There are many mermaid tales from the south-west which belong to the same tale type as the selkie-wife story. Many a bold young Cornishman has stolen a wife from the waves, and lived to regret it, either because she deserts him and the children or, worse still, she takes him down into the sea where he has no hope of survival. Unlike selkie-women, mermaids go quite out of their way to attract humans. The long Cornish tale ‘Droll of the Mermaid’ tells of Lutey, who lived near Lizard Point and one day chanced upon a very unhappy mermaid who had become stranded in a rockpool. Though she could wait for the tide to wash her back out to sea, she fears that her bad-tempered husband (who is, alas, not unusual among mermen) will start eating their children if she doesn’t come back with his dinner. Lutey offers to carry her to the sea; she gives him her comb, which he can use to summon her, and grants him three wishes. Lutey asks for the knowledge to break other people’s spells, for power over familiar spirits, and that these capacities should continue to run in his family. These the mermaid promises him as he bears her in his arms towards the sea. She winds her arms around his neck as he wades through the shallows, inviting him in seductive tones to come to visit her world beneath the waves. Lutey is almost bewitched and up to his waist in the water when his dog, left behind on shore, begins to bark. He looks back and realises that he cannot leave all that is precious to him on

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land, but the mermaid tightens her grip around his neck, and no longer whispers seductively to him, but looks determined to drag him under. Lutey just has the presence of mind to draw his knife from his belt and threaten her with it; the sight of cold steel makes her loosen her grasp, but as she swims away, she sings out that she will come for him in nine years’ time. The mermaid nevertheless made good on her promise, and Lutey became a well-known healer and white witch, his powers bringing him prosperity and renown. But nine years to the day after Lutey met the mermaid, he was out on the sea on a calm and moonlit evening, fishing with a companion, when the mermaid suddenly appeared beside the boat with her golden hair floating behind her on the water, and she called his name. ‘My hour is come!’, said Lutey, and he promptly leapt overboard and was never seen again. A more friendly mermaid lived in the waters of Gob Ny Ooyl on the east coast of the Isle of Man. The local Sayle family were on good terms with her, and regularly brought her apples: she was very fond of them, and they are hard for sea-dwellers to get hold of. As old man Sayle got more decrepit, he could no longer go out fishing and the family’s luck began to diminish; their creels were empty and the older sons went out with the herring fleet instead. Evan, the youngest son, was out in the boat one day, shaking his head over the empty creels, when he saw a fine young woman sitting on the edge of a rock. She asked after his father, then, saying that she hoped to see him again, dived into the sea. When young Evan told his father about the encounter, he brightened up and told his son to take some apples with him next time. The mermaid was delighted, singing: The luck o’ the sea be with you, but don’t forgetful be, Of bringing some sweet lan’ eggs for the children of the sea.

And, of course, Evan’s luck in fishing changed from that day forth. He spent a lot of time out on the water, restoring the family fortunes and chatting with the mermaid, but after a

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while he decided he’d like to travel, to go for a sailor in foreign parts. This made the mermaid miserable, but he promised her that he would plant an apple tree on the brow of the hill above her haunt. And so he did, and the family’s luck held while the tree was growing. But although he had promised that the apples would drop down to her in the water by themselves, the tree was quite slow in maturing and the mermaid’s patience wore thin. She would sit beneath the tree on the rocks of an evening, singing sad songs and gazing up at the tree, but finally she gave up and decided to go off across the ocean in search of her young friend. Neither he nor the mermaid ever came back to Gob Ny Ooyl, but the apple tree bore its ripe red fruit down by the water for many years after that. Mermaids long for what the land has, whether it’s handsome men, human prey, or the ‘land eggs’ which the sea can’t provide. They pop their heads above the water to warn that storms are coming, but they also hope to pull men down to drown and to make them their lovers. Lutey’s mermaid tried her wiles on him, but when he resisted the temptations she offered she kept her promise; as we know, the creatures of the Otherworld are bound by the words they speak. Freshwater mermaids are just as ambivalent as their maritime equivalents.The Mermaid of Black Mere (now Blake Mere) near Leek in Staffordshire would cheerfully drown men if she could draw them close enough with her singing, and the Laird of Lorntie on Tayside had a narrow escape. Riding past a lonely lake one evening, he caught sight of a lovely woman sinking in its depths and shrieking for help. He was about to plunge in to rescue her when his servant held him back, warning him that ‘the wauling madam’ was none other than the mermaid. And so it was, for she rose out of the water and uttered the blood-curdling verse: Lorntie, Lorntie, Weren’t na your man, I had gart your heart’s blude Skirl in my pan.

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F ig. 22  Clerk Colvill by H.M. Brock (1934).

(Lorntie, Lorntie, were it not for your man, I’d have made your heart’s blood swirl in my pan.)

The ballad of Clerk Colvill, recorded by Child, warns what can happen when you fall into the mermaid’s clutches. Though the clerk is warned not to go to the well of Stream, he fails to heed the warning, and falls in love with the mermaid there. There’s a gap in the middle of the ballad, but when it resumes, the clerk’s head is aching horribly. The mermaid tells him that he can only be cured if he cuts a bandage from her shirt to bind his throbbing temples – but the remedy makes his agony worse. He draws his knife to slay her, but she springs away into the stream, ‘And merrily laughed the mermaiden / It will ay be war [worse] till ye be dead’. And so the clerk dies a miserable and painful death. Other Scots mermaids, especially the freshwater sort, are kindly until crossed; the mermaid of Port Glasgow, witnessing

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a funeral procession for a girl who had died of consumption, recommended a concoction of mugwort and nettles against the disease, and this was found to be effective. The mermaid of Galloway would sit of an evening on a block of granite, giving sound medical advice to the locals until a religiously minded woman, holding tightly to her Bible for protection, pushed the mermaid’s chair into the pool where the mermaid lived. The next day the woman’s child was dead in its cradle, and the mermaid was heard singing of the empty cradle and her lost stone. Finally the mermaid was driven out of the pool because so much dirt and polluting matter was thrown into it. Mermaids, then, like other forms of the supernatural, must be treated with respect; promises made to them must be kept, whether you like it or not, and they will keep their pledges. They can be well disposed to humans and have surprising healing knowledge, which they are willing to share. So the mermaid brings both life and death; the freshwater springs over which she presides are often auspicious places of healing. But she demands sacrifices too; men must die for her, whether dragged down below the lake’s placid surface or struggling in the towering seas when the ocean is stirred up by tempests. In Julia Blackburn’s wonderfully meditative novel The Leper’s Companions (1999), the washing up of a mermaid on the shore of a little medieval community signals the beginning of strange happenings and ill luck. By the time the village is roused to come and look at the spectacle she has vanished back into the ocean, leaving behind only a hank of dark, lank hair, like seaweed. But the mermaid and her avatar, carved above the door arch of the village church, with ‘her fat fish legs spread wide … and a look of lechery on her face as she smiles to reveal a row of pointed teeth’ are recurrent figures, for women with lascivious smiles showing those strange, pointed teeth, and drowned females haunt the rest of the novel. As the door-arch sculpture in this English village indicates, the mermaid is an ancient and ambivalent symbol. She is often

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F ig. 23  The Mermaid Chair in Zennor church, Cornwall.

found carved in churches, as in the Norman chapel in Durham Cathedral, where she appears on a capital, or depicted on the wonderful sixteenth-century chair in the church of St Senara at Zennor; she signifies love and death in equal parts.

The Deer-Woman, the Pig-Headed Princess and the Laidly Worm Let’s cross over the Irish Sea now to Ireland, to hear another animal bride tale, one with a different motivation. In Chapter 3 we met the hero Oisín, son of Finn, the famous leader of the Fianna, and the time-shifting outcome of his stay in the land of the Sidhe, the Irish fairies. The story of Oisín’s mother explains some of his affinity with the Otherworld and its women, for she

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was Sadb the deer-woman. Finn, his men of the Fianna, and his faithful and sagacious hounds Bran and Sceolan were out hunting one day when they started up a beautiful fawn. Instead of attacking it, the dogs licked the little creature and began to play with it. Finn was surprised, and the more so when, as he set off for his home in Almhuin, the fawn followed. That evening, a beautiful woman stepped into the house and explained that she was that very fawn, who had been enchanted into animal form by Fear Doriche, the Dark Druid of the Sidhe, whose love she had refused. It was decreed that if she could come within the fortress or dun of the Fianna, she would be safe from the Dark Druid and would regain her human form. Finn of course fell in love with Sadb, and she became pregnant by him. But then invaders came and Finn was called away to fight the enemies of Ireland. When he returned, there was no sign of Sadb. He learned that, while he was gone, a semblance of himself and the two hounds had appeared at the dun gates and Sadb had run down joyfully to meet him. The shadowy figure stretched out its arms; as Sadb flung herself into them, it lifted up a hazel rod and struck her with it, and turned her back into a fawn. As the little deer tried to run back to the safety of the dun, the shadow-dogs dragged her back by the throat and they all disappeared. The distraught Finn kept searching for his lost wife, until, seven years later, on the slopes of Ben Bulben, the hounds found a long-haired, naked boy – whom Bran and Sceolan greeted with keen licking, whining and tail-wagging. They took the boy home with them. As he learned to speak human language, he told them his story. He had been raised by a deer in an enclosed valley where they lived on roots and herbs in the summer, and where food was left for them in the winter. A man with a dark aspect would come to visit the deer, sometimes speaking softly, sometimes shouting angrily, until finally he struck her with a hazel rod and forced her to follow him away. The deer looked back many times and wept, but had no power to resist. The boy had tried to follow the deer, but had finally collapsed on the

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grass, where the hounds had found him. Finn thought the boy had more than a look of his lost Sadb, and he was named Oisín, which means ‘Little Deer’. The story of a woman enchanted into animal or monstrous form by a spurned suitor or a jealous stepmother is well known; some ballad examples are discussed below. Usually the dis­ enchantment is successful and the hero and the rescued girl can live happily ever after. In this tale, however, the dark powers of the Druid turn Sadb’s love for her husband Finn back against her, and trick her into leaving the magically protected space of the dun. Yet Sadb had continued to resist, and to remain in her deer form, taking care of her child. Once the boy is seven, however, he is old enough to take care of himself and the Druid can reclaim the mother without jeopardising the life of the innocent child. It’s a tale of family violence and dysfunction, of a woman’s subjection to a brutal man and the consequences for the child. The mother’s new partner resents her son, fathered by another man, but he can’t bring himself to kill the boy. Sadb and Oisín’s history has a great deal of resonance. The mother is never rescued from the man who oppresses her, but her son grows up sympathetic and kindly towards women, especially those from the Otherworld who, perhaps, recall his lost mother to him. Oisín stays with his father, growing up to be a poet and a hero, but his fate remains entangled with the Otherworld. In one tale, ‘Niamh of the Golden Hair’, the queen of Tir na n’Og, the Country of the Young, falls in love with him from afar, and she comes to Almhuin and fetches Oisín away with her, despite the forebodings on the part of father and son that they will not see one another again. Another story tells how the king of Tir na n’Og was chosen every seven years through a running competition: the competitors must race up a mountain and the first to sit upon a chair at the top is king thereafter. One king who had held the throne for a long time was anxious to continue his rule and he asked his Druid how long he would reign. ‘You will keep the chair and crown for ever’, said the Druid, ‘unless

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your son-in-law takes them from you.’ The king had only one daughter, a girl of extraordinary beauty, so he took precautionary steps. He struck her with the Druid’s rod and replaced her lovely head with that of a pig, confident that he had ruined her chances of marriage for ever. The distraught princess went to see the Druid, who revealed that she could be disenchanted, if only she could marry one of the sons of Finn mac Cumhail. The pig-headed princess left Tir na n’Og for County Leinster, the haunt of the Fianna, and there she saw Oisín out hunting, a sight that pleased her very much. Oisín was so successful in the hunt that he could not carry home all his game and the princess offered to carry some for him. After a while they stopped to rest, for the day was hot, and the princess opened her dress to cool down. Oisín looked at her white bosom and shapely form and said, perhaps rather ungallantly, ‘It’s a pity you have the pig’s head on you, for I have never seen such an appearance on a woman in all my life before.’ The princess revealed that marriage would lift the enchantment, and Oisín immediately agreed. As soon as the marriage was consummated, there and then the girl regained her beauty, but she stipulated to Oisín that she had now to go back to Tir na n’Og; unless he went with her, they would be parted. Oisín set out for Tir na n’Og that very day, without troubling to bid his father and the Fianna farewell. And, of course, next time the race for kingship was run, Oisín was an easy winner, and he ruled over the Land of Youth for many a year. Oisín is able to use his imagination to see beyond appearances, to realise perhaps that the woman who is ready to help carry his heavy burden of game would make a good wife and helpmeet, despite her porcine features. It’s not the princess’s helpfulness that prompts him to ask about her condition, however, but her figure and white breasts; if he’s willing to take a risk on her truthfulness the transformed hybrid woman can be rescued. There is a moral here that suggests that surface appearances – a pig’s snout and hairy ears – may mask an inner loveliness, but Oisín seems to know that the girl is telling him the truth. This

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tale is a variant of a motif called the fier baiser (proud kiss) when it appears in romance. Closely related to the Loathly Lady that we learned about in Chapter 4, the heroine of fier baiser stories has usually been enchanted by a wicked stepmother. Let’s cross back over the Irish Sea now and make our way to the mighty Bamburgh Castle, which towers over the long yellow beaches and grey rocks of the Northumbrian seashore. Bamburgh was the home of a kindly king who had two children: a daughter, Margaret, and a son known as Childe Wynd. The king was widowed and he married again, while the Childe set off adventuring over the sea. Margaret’s stepmother took a jealous dislike to her stepdaughter and cast a spell over her: I weird ye to be a Laidly Worm, And borrowed shall ye never be, Until Childe Wynd, the King’s own son, Come to the Heugh and thrice kiss thee; Until the world comes to an end, Borrowed shall ye never be. (I curse you to be a Loathly Worm, and disenchanted you shall never be, until Childe Wynd, the King’s own son, comes to the Heugh and kisses you three times; until the world comes to an end, disenchanted shall you never be.)

Margaret became a monstrous dragon, a loathly (laidly) worm who coiled her gleaming body many times round the Heugh, or mound, at nearby Spindleston. Hunger drove her to devastate the country all about, devouring flocks of beasts, until a wise man realised who she was and how her hunger could be appeased – by setting aside seven cows whose milk was enough to sustain her. And there poor Margaret remained. Over the sea, Childe Wynd heard what had befallen his sister and vowed to rescue her. He built a ship with a keel of rowan wood – proof against witchcraft – and sailed for Bamburgh. Though the stepmother raised a mighty storm against him, the rowan keel kept him safe and he was able to land at Buddle Creek, just out of sight

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F ig. 24  The Laidly Worm of Spindlestone Heugh, by John D. Batten (1890).

of the castle. There he found the Laidly Worm; he had raised his sword to slay it when it spoke to him with his sister’s voice, warning him that he must kiss her to break the spell. Though Childe Wynd wasn’t sure whether more devilment might not be involved, he took the risk and kissed the foul-smelling, hideous dragon on the mouth. Nothing happened, so he kissed it again. He was on the point of giving up when the Worm pleaded with him to try once more – if she was not disenchanted by sunset she was doomed to remain in this form for ever. One final kiss – and the grim coils of the dragon dropped away, as Margaret stepped out from among them.

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Brother and sister made their way home to Bamburgh, where Childe Wynd touched the witch-queen with a rowan twig and turned her into a toad. To this day, a hideous Laidly Toad lives in the cellars of Bamburgh Castle, and she too can only be disenchanted with three kisses. But so far no one has volunteered. Jealous stepmothers are of course common figures in fairy and folk tale, and the woman transformed into a dragon often appears in chivalric romances in which the knight’s courage is challenged in a different way from the usual feats of combat. Crossing a field of bones of those who have failed the test, closing your eyes and kissing the ugly fang-filled mouth with its corpse breath and horrible whiskers, is a trial at which many knights baulk. In some versions of the story the dragon-woman remains enchanted to this very day, and her disappointment in those who shrink from the ordeal makes her the more savage, lashing out at the men who can’t bring themselves to try. One interesting feature of the ‘Laidly Worm’ is that it’s a brother who comes to rescue his sister, not a potential lover. Folk tales frequently tell of sisters sacrificing themselves for their brothers, often by having to remain silent while completing a painful and difficult task, in order to lift a spell (the wonderful Scottish fairy tale ‘The Shirts of Bog-Cotton’ is a case in point), but brothers are less inclined to show such exemplary loyalty to their sisters. Margaret and Childe Wynd perhaps are bonded by a distrust of their new stepmother; yet, while the young man can sail away and does not have to deal with his father’s new relationship, his sister has no refuge from her stepmother’s cruelty. In other reflexes of this story, such as the ballad ‘Kemp Owyne’ (Child 34), Dove Isabel, transformed into a monstrous creature, has to wait for her true love to come for her. This savage beast has three treasures – a belt, a ring and a sword – each of which she gives to Kemp Owyne in exchange for a kiss. ‘Her breath was strang, her hair was lang, and twisted thrice about the tree’, but with each kiss, provided he can dart in and plant the kisses without touching any other part of her, the beast’s hair untwists

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a little, until finally ‘her breath was sweet, her hair grew short’ and she comes smiling towards her beloved. In these tales, the hero really does have to summon up his courage and imagination to see beyond the monster before him, the one threatening to devour him if he does not do exactly what he is asked, and to have faith that the beloved really is waiting under the horror she presents to him. These tales of animal brides are the converse of the much more familiar ‘Beauty and the Beast’ story. ‘Beauty and the Beast’ speaks to the woman’s fear of marriage and sexual intimacy, teaching that a woman can learn to love what lies beneath the husband’s external appearance: the bristling beard, rough skin, work-worn hands and physical size. The animal-wives remind men that women are indeed different from them, that the ways in which they think and feel may be hard to fathom, and that they may not express directly what it is that they want. To me the plight of the animal-bride, the selkie or mermaid longing for the sea, seems to anticipate what Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, would call ‘the problem without a name’, the sense that marriage does not necessarily offer a woman total fulfilment. Where the woman is in fact transformed into a beast and pins her hopes on a man seeing through her beastly exterior to the true identity beneath, a more conventionally romantic assumption seems to be at work: the woman must be saved by the man, be he husband or brother, for she has no agency to transform herself back again. ‘Some day my prince will come’, she must hope; like the classic Disney princess, she is condemned to wait for Mr Right. Unlike the Loathly Lady we met in Chapter 4, Sadb, the pig-headed princess and Margaret are subject to powerful magic from which they can’t free themselves. It’s not surprising then that when the rescuer’s nerve fails and he recoils from the hideous monster, her dis­ appointment and frustration should vent themselves in fury, and that the dragon’s cave should be littered with the bones of those who failed her.

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The Wolf and the Man Deep in the tall forests of Ireland, on the border of Ulster and Meath, a priest and his companions were overtaken by nightfall. They made a fire, and huddled round it, praying that no harm would come to them in the hours of darkness. Imagine their terror when a wolf calmly strolled up to the group – and imagine their astonishment when he began to speak to them! ‘Stay calm, don’t be afraid, for there’s no reason to fear, when nothing frightening is happening’, the wolf said, encouragingly. Although the travellers were understandably terrified, the wolf reassured them further by talking about God, and he answered the priest’s questions about Christian belief in an entirely orthodox way. Eventually he explained that his family came from Ossory to the south of Meath, and they’d been cursed by St Natalis. Every seven years, a male and female of the family would be turned into wolves and had to lope away into the forest. If they survived for seven years in wolf form, they regained their human shapes and could return home; another man and woman were then fated to take their place as wolves. The wolf further explained that his female companion was lying dangerously ill nearby; on the point of death, she needed the last rites from the priest. And he led the priest a little distance to where a female wolf was indeed lying, sighing and groaning like a human being. She greeted the priest courteously and thanked God that she had been sent spiritual help. The priest gave her the rites, but demurred at offering this strange creature the Eucharist and pretended to have no consecrated wafers with him. But the he-wolf pointed out that he did in fact have the Host within the prayer book he was carrying. In order to remove the priest’s last doubts, with his claws he slashed open the she-wolf’s skin from the head to the navel, revealing that there was indeed an old woman within. The priest’s doubts were dissipated and he administered the sacrament; then the wolf zipped the woman back into her skin. The he-wolf spent the

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night chatting with his new friends and in the morning guided them safely out of the wood. What happened to his female companion is not, alas, recorded, but it doesn’t seem likely that she recovered. This story is recounted by Gerald of Wales, in his description of Ireland, composed around 1188 (see frontispiece). Gerald went to Ireland with the son of Henry II, Earl John. He concludes his wolf anecdote by observing that when he visited Meath, about two years after the occurrence, there was still a great deal of discussion in religious circles as to whether the priest had acted correctly in giving communion to the she-wolf. Gerald himself thinks that the action was appropriate and cites various other examples known to him of humans changing shape into animals – including the witch-hares we will meet later in this chapter. There’s a real philosophical question at stake here: when a human is changed into an animal, does he or she lose human identity? The Irish werewolves retain their human rationality, even speech; Gerald does not mention whether they behaved wolvishly when out of human sight. Other werewolves alternate between wolf and human form, perfectly sociable men in their normal lives but behaving as wolves when in a transformed state, killing animals (and perhaps people) and eating raw meat. Being a wolf is certainly uncivilised, for one of the most important distinctions between the natural and the cultural is the capacity to transform the raw flesh eaten by animals into the cooked meat enjoyed by humans. We might wonder why St Natalis was so incensed against the Ossory family. Usually saints are put out by the obduracy of those they seek to convert, and perhaps the original wolves were simply being made to manifest their wolvish and unbelieving spirits in an external form. But this poor wolf and his companion were obviously good Christians, so it seems rather unfair of the saint not to lift the curse, six hundred years later, now that the Ossory clan were better disposed to the new faith. Gerald’s account is one of the earliest werewolf stories recorded in the British Isles. Around the same time as Gerald

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was writing in Latin, a woman called Marie was composing poems in Anglo-Norman French somewhere in England. Marie tells the story of Bisclavret, who himself lived in Brittany; his name simply means ‘werewolf’ in Breton. Once told in Britain, the story of the werewolf and his unfaithful wife migrated into British belief and became attached to figures associated with King Arthur. Bisclavret himself was a baron who was destined to spend three days a week as a wolf. He would go into the woods, remove his human clothing, hide it in a safe place and assume wolf form. When he needed to turn back into a human he would put on his clothes once more. Bisclavret makes the error of confiding his condition to his wife, who is horrified and disgusted by his confession. She conspires with a knight who loves her to steal Bisclavret’s clothing and leave him trapped in his wolf aspect. And since her husband has vanished without trace, the wife marries the knight and they rule over his barony. Wolf-Bisclavret meets the king, who is out hunting, and runs to him to beg for mercy. Although he cannot speak, the wolf’s behaviour alerts the wise king to the fact that there is more to the matter than meets the eye, and Bisclavret is taken to court to live with the king. Sometime later, Bisclavret’s wife and her new husband come to court. When the wolf sees her he leaps at her and tears off her nose. Though the court is indignant and claims that the wolf should never have been trusted, again the king is wise enough to investigate. The wife and her lover are tortured and admit their crime. The clothing is restored to Bisclavret, who resumes human form and his rule over his barony. His wife and lover are exiled; her descendants are recognisable, for the females of the line are often born without noses. Bisclavret’s story seems to have become attached in English to a certain Sir Marrok, who was one of Arthur’s knights. Thomas Malory mentions mysteriously in passing that Marrok was betrayed by his wife and spent seven years as a werewolf. In another Arthurian tale, ‘Arthur and Gorlagon’, this time composed in Latin, King Arthur surprises everyone by kissing his

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wife passionately in full view of the court. The queen rebukes him and accuses him of not understanding women’s minds and their ways. The king then – as he does in a number of other medieval tales (see Chapter 4) – sets out on a quest to find out what women want. Eventually he comes to the court of King Gorlagon, who welcomes him, and Arthur reveals his quest: to discover the minds, the arts and the ways of women. Gorlagon tells him the story of a certain king whose life and identity were bound up with a tree which had grown up from the ground at the hour when he was born. The king knew that if someone cut down the tree and struck him with it, crying ‘Be a wolf!’, he would be transformed. The king’s treacherous wife suspects that he harbours some secret connected with the tree and gets it out of him, though when she transforms him she accidentally commands him to be a wolf ‘with the reason of a man’ instead of adding the rider that he should have a wolf’s mind too. As in the Bisclavret story the wolf is eventually restored to his human form through the wisdom and kindness of another king, and the faithless wife is condemned to sit ever at her former husband’s table with the embalmed head of her lover before her. Every time the husband kisses his new wife, she must kiss the lover’s head. Arthur thanks Gorlagon for his tale, which turns out to be his own autobiography, and returns home. Whether he now knows what women want isn’t very obvious, but he has certainly had clear warning of their capacity for treachery, and that may turn out to be useful. These werewolf tales belong to courtly rather than popular culture; though they draw on the belief that humans can change form, they are more interested in using the idea either to open up the philosophical question of what it means to be human, or to prove the wickedness of women, figured in their capability of transforming a decent and trusting man into a wild animal. Folk tales have a different view of the werewolf. In Shetland the Wulfver is a gentle and kindly creature. He has a wolf’s head and a man’s body, lives in caves and keeps himself to himself. He likes to fish and will leave his catch on the window sill of

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someone who is in need of supplies. If you are lost in the wild weather or sudden sea fogs of Shetland he will sometimes appear and lead you safely homewards. Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk also celebrates the wolf, this time an ordinary beast, rather than a shape-changed human. When King Edmund was captured and killed by Vikings in 871, so his Life tells us, his head was cut off and spitefully thrown into the brambles by his enemies. They intended to confound the king’s subjects, who wanted to give him proper burial. When Edmund’s people went out into the dense and dangerous woods in search of the head, it called out to them, crying ‘Here! Here!’ When they came upon it, the head was safely lodged between the forepaws of a huge grey wolf. The wolf was guarding the saint’s head against the depredations of other wild animals, but he willingly surrendered it to the human seekers. Indeed he trotted along beside the party until they were safely back at the town, making sure that neither they nor the head came to any harm. In the cathedral of St Edmundsbury in Bury St Edmunds you can see the wolf with the head still between its paws, carved high up on the canopy over the bishop’s throne, and he also surmounts the shield in the town’s coat of arms. As in the tale of St Carantoc and the dragon, whom we met in the last chapter, this story shows how God’s power extends over the most savage of beasts and that the wolf is more respectful of the royal saint’s numinous power than the wolvish Vikings who martyred and decapitated him.

Witches and their Transformations We tend to associate witches with the black cats that operate as their familiar spirits, but more traditionally the witch transforms herself into a hare in order to steal milk from the neighbours’ cows. The witch-hare has other moneymaking sidelines, however: in one rather jolly tale from Tavistock in Devon, she gives the hare-hunters a run for their money. In a letter written in 1833, a certain Mrs Bray relates how a young boy would earn money by starting hares for the local hare hunters – he was always able

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to find one when they seemed scarce. Somehow, the hare always managed to get away. This made the huntsmen suspicious, so on one occasion the hounds were teed up to get on their prey’s trail more quickly. The hare zigged and zagged to cries from the boy of ‘Granny! Quick! Run for your life!’ Aha! The hare just made it into the boy’s grandmother’s cottage through a little hole. When the huntsmen broke in, no animal was to be seen. But the old woman was quite out of breath, and she had scratches, as if she had been running through brambles. In a Yorkshire version, it’s Nanny ——, the witch herself (wisely kept anonymous), who volunteers ‘where you will find a hare ligging [lying] and a grand one and all … Only, whativver ye deea [whatever you do], minnd ye dinna slip a black dog at her’. Inevitably, after a great chase across the moorland, a random black dog who isn’t one of the hound pack joins in the chase and, as the hare escapes through a ‘smout-hole’ into Nanny ——’s garden, the black dog seizes hold of the hare’s back leg, tearing off some fur and a little bit of skin. When the coursers go into the house to see how Nanny —— is faring, she is lying in bed, claiming to be a bit lame. When examined, the injury is found, of course, to be exactly where the dog had bitten the hare. Tales like this, about witches as hares, can be found in almost every part of the country. Typically, suspicions are roused by the low yield of milk from local cows or, in another Yorkshire tale, the nibbling of young saplings in a plantation. Here the culprit is found to be ‘a great, foul old ram-cat ov a heear’, deliberately and systematically taking the tops off each of the little trees. The injured parties procure bullets of silver – quite often a melted-down silver sixpence, or someone’s sacrificed silver buttons – and fire at the fleeing hare. It escapes, but they sometimes succeed in tracking it to a cottage, or sometimes simply burst into the home of the chief suspect. And she will be nursing an injury in the very spot where the hare was shot. Why hares? They were familiar animals before the industrial­ isation of the countryside, and their habit of rearing up on their

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hind legs and their distinctive zigzag run made them easy to pick out. They are swift and clever – which explains how they always manage to get back to the witches’ houses before they are caught – and they have long been indigenous to the British landscape. Hares thus appear in a good deal of folklore across the country. The white hare figures the deceived maiden who died of grief in Cornish legend, whose mystery is hinted at in Seth Lakeman’s song ‘The White Hare’. She may, like the Belle Dame sans Merci, try to steal your spirit away. Closer to the game hares of the Yorkshire witch stories is the legendary uncatchable white hare of English folksong, despite the county’s best hounds being set on her tail, like the White Hare of Howden (Yorkshire) or, sometimes, Oldham (Lancs). I’ve seen hares myself near where I live in North Oxfordshire, up by the Roman road that runs along the southern side of Madmarston Hill near Swalcliffe: two big beasts on their hind legs, boxing away at one another like a couple of prizefighters, until they spotted me and the dog. Then they swerved away over the stubbly March fields, only to take up their bout again at a more distant corner. These hares were probably a male/female pair, rather than rival males duking it out: the female was trying to repel the male’s advances, with limited success. And hares do indeed gather together in what looks like a convocation; eight or ten of them sitting in a circle and gazing at one another as if in silent communication. The writer Justine Picardie mentions seeing just such a phenomenon in June 2012 in the Scottish Highlands: On the way here last night, a magical scene: glimpsed in a field beside the lane, a circle of hares, all gazing inwards, motionless in the moment that we passed. I’ve heard occasional stories of these rarely witnessed gatherings – known as a parliament of hares – but never seen one for myself. No camera to hand – although if we’d stopped, I’m sure the hares would have vanished – yet a sight impossible to forget.

But we know of course that these were no ordinary hares, but surely a gathering of witches in their hare forms. An Ulster tale,

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recorded in 1959, tells of a couple who had a strange mirror in their house; when Mary gazed into it she saw her ears getting longer and furrier, and her back legs too. She hopped out of the house and felt drawn to head off in a certain direction. Her husband Pat came into the house to look for his missing wife, but he too gazed in the mirror and the same transformation occurred. Soon the two of them were running along, together with a great many other hares, and they fetched up in a field in Clonmallon. There all the hares began to dance, and so did the transformed humans. Then a big buck called them all to order and began to discuss hare business; the two witnesses understood all that he said. But then he stopped, twitched his whiskers and said that he suspected that there were hares present who should not be there. Mary and Pat felt uneasy at this, and all the other hares began to look at them rather pointedly. They ran for their lives, and just made it home, with the other hares in pursuit; the mirror effected their transformation back again. Just as well, I am sure; an enraged hare could do some serious damage, and an angry witch even worse. If you are old enough you may remember Masquerade, a children’s book designed by Kit Williams which contained clues to a treasure hunt. Williams crafted a beautiful golden and bejewelled hare, which he buried in a secret location in August 1979. The book told the story of Jack Hare, who set out to carry the treasure from the Moon to her beloved, the Sun. But on the way Jack lost the golden hare, and it was the task of the book’s readers to work out the code and uncover the treasure. The hare treasure was finally located, buried near Catherine of Aragon’s Cross at Ampthill Park in Bedfordshire, in 1982; eight years later a scandal was broken by the Sunday Times, which alleged that the finder had had some inside knowledge and had not properly solved the clues. The hare was sold at auction to a private buyer, and was temporarily on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2012. In eastern mythology, in China and Japan, as also in Mexico, a rabbit or hare lives on the moon, which may explain

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Williams’s cosmic associations for his hare hero. And, although they can scarcely be connected with witchcraft, churches in the West Country have over thirty instances of a three-hare motif, displayed in carvings and roof bosses. This is an intricate puzzle of three hares, carved so that each animal shares an ear with its neighbour; if you look at any individual hare it will have two ears, but the three hares together have only three ears between them. The motif originated in the Far East; its prevalence in the West Country remains unexplained. Perhaps the three beasts represent the Holy Trinity, or, since hares were thought to be hermaphrodites who could reproduce without sex, they might allude to the Virgin Mary. Witches in their hare form are relatively unthreatening. Their crimes are the kinds of misdemeanours and mischief that are annoying in a rural community, but the hare itself is a wonderful and quite rare sight, leaping across the ploughed furrows of the fields in March or standing alertly on its hind legs, whiskers aquiver. But the British countryside contains more dangerous creatures than the harmless hare, and it’s important to stay on one’s guard against them.

The Water-Horse Journeying westwards from the hare parliament that Justine Picardie saw on that peaceful midsummer night, we come to the lochs and lakes of the Highlands and Islands. Lurking in them, very likely, is the highly dangerous water-horse. Once in the Hebrides a young woman was herding cattle and she took them off to a distant hill-slope. As she sat watching them, a handsome young man came along, and he fell asleep with his head resting in her lap. A charmingly pastoral scene, but as the girl gazed down at her sleeping swain she realised, to her horror, that he had horses’ hooves. Quietly, so as not to arouse the sleeper, she cleverly cut away the parts of her clothes on which the man’s head lay, and made good her escape. When the water-horse awoke and realised that she had fled, ‘it made a dreadful outcry’. The

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girl and the water-horse is a widespread story; sometimes the shape-shifter is detected by the sand and riverweed in his hair, and sometimes the girl is foolish enough to make an assignation with the young man, after which she is never seen again. The cattle-herder missed a trick with her trustful sleeper, for if she had got hold of the silver chain that usually hangs round the imposter’s neck, she would have had power over him. The silver chain represents the water-horse’s bridle; without it, like the selkie, he can’t return to his horse form nor survive in the water. John Gregorson Campbell, the minister of the Hebridean island of Tiree, and a fluent speaker of Scots Gaelic, collected this and a good many other water-horse stories. His stories about water-horses appeared in 1900, and they give a good conspectus of the creature’s wiles. One such story, widespread in the Highlands, is that of the Nine Children. Instead of going to church these children went out to amuse themselves on a Sunday, in the neighbourhood of Sunart, near Lochaber. They found a horse grazing near the unpromisingly named ‘Loch of Disaster’ (Loch na Dunach) and thought it would be fun to ride it. The beast’s back grew longer and longer until eight of them were all mounted on it. The ninth happened to have a Bible in his pocket and he cautiously touched the horse with one finger. The finger stuck to the horse, and the boy had to cut it off to save himself, for the horse rushed into the loch with the other children on its back, and they were never seen again. Except that the liver of one of them washed ashore the next day. Indeed, in related stories only the livers or other bits of entrails, the parts of the body that float easily, bob up on the surface of the water to indicate the horror beneath. Campbell suspects, I’m sure with good reason, that this tale was invented to make sure that children didn’t roam about on Sundays and make free with other people’s horses, and it certainly caught on. In other variants the survivor is already on the horse’s back when he realises what is afoot and has to cut off several fingers which cannot loosen their grip on the monstrous beast’s mane. Again, had the children

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looked closely, they’d have seen telltale water weed and sand in the horse’s coat and would have known to keep their distance. I suggested above that the girl who had to cut her clothes from under the sleeping horse might have done better to force him into her power. This doesn’t always work out for the best, however. The tale of the Laird of Morphie, in Aberdeenshire, warns against exploitation of the water-horse. The Laird captured the water-horse either by slipping a bridle over him or, more likely, by taking possession of the creature’s own bridle, so that the water-horse had to do his bidding. The Laird was building a castle at Morphie, on the banks of the North Esk where the water-horse lived. He struck a bargain with his captive: that if the horse hauled stone for him for a year, he would give him his freedom. The Laird worked the poor horse very hard indeed, so that, when he was finally let loose, the unhappy labourer recited this verse: Sair back and sair banes Drivin’ the Laird of Morphie’s stanes! The Laird of Morphie shall never thrive As long as the kelpie is alive.

The water-horse returned to the river, but he liked his verse so much that he was often heard repeating it with relish; and indeed the line of the Grahams of Morphie failed, the castle fell into disrepair and now all that hard-hauled stone has been carted away to repair other buildings. The story warns, then, like some of the brownie tales, against exploiting and mistreating those who work for you. In this verse, and more generally in the east of Scotland, kelpies and water-horses are regarded as interchangeable; Campbell of Tiree, on the other hand, maintains that they are separate creatures, and that the kelpie lurks in fords and falls, where, suddenly and capriciously, he will make the water levels rise to drown the unwary traveller. In Shetland the kelpie will seize hold of the waterwheel at the mill, so that the millstream continues to rush past, while the wheel is unmoving;

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a supernatural clog on the mill’s production, the kind of trick that is more typical of boggarts. The Nuggle is a Northern Isles water-horse that will pull travellers down from the bridge across the burn, or entice riders onto its back, in much the same way as his mainland and Western Isles counterpart. Such river-demons are both common and not always equine in form. Further south, in Lancashire there’s the Shellycoat, whose clattering coat of shells serves to warn his victims that he means to lure them to the river and drown them. More southerly still are Peg Powler, Jenny Greenteeth and a legion of female river hags, whose long green hair resembles the water weed that drags their prey down, and who have sharp teeth and long, slender fingers. The River Conon, in Ross-shire, is a stretch of water about which, all the way along its length, different kelpie or waterspirit stories are told. These include a woman dressed in green who was known to drag people down to their deaths. One of the most dramatic stories concerns the stretch of the river by Conon House. There’s a swampy meadow with cheerful yellow water flags and rushes, and in the midst of it a hillock surrounded by willows; the river whirls past in dark eddies. Deep, thick woods grow on either side of the river; above lies an old cemetery and the ruins of a church. In it can still be seen the remains of a rose window, and a trough that once held holy water – or so it was said in the late nineteenth century. Three hundred years or more ago, before the church was ruined, a party of Highlanders were busy harvesting the corn one summer’s day in the field by the church. Suddenly they heard a voice coming from the river. ‘The hour is come, but not the man’, it proclaimed. When they gazed down, they saw the kelpie standing in ‘the false ford’, a part of the river which looked as if it was shallow and safe to cross, but had a treacherous eddy. The kelpie repeated his words and then, ‘flashing through the water like a drake’, vanished. Just at that moment, a man on horseback came dashing down the hill. The harvesters tried to warn him not to cross, to take some other route, or at least to wait until the fatal hour had

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passed. The man was in a great hurry and did not believe their tale, so, in desperation, they bundled him from his horse and locked him inside the church, all for his own good. When the hour had passed, they flung open the church doors – only to find the man face down in the holy-water trough, drowned and dead, having had, so the witnesses speculated, some kind of seizure or fit. The kelpie had got his man, one way or another. The most dreadful of these northern water fiends is the terrible Nuckelavee, who roams in both Shetland and Orkney. This creature is neither man nor horse, but a horrible hybrid of the two. His head is that of a man, but much bigger, with a huge gaping mouth. And, most horrifying of all, he has no skin. Tammas was making his way home one dark moonless, but starry, night. On one side of the road lay the sea; on the other, a freshwater loch hemmed him in. Suddenly he saw a huge shapeless thing looming up ahead, and advancing towards him. As it approached, he saw that it was indeed the Nuckelavee, both horse and misshapen man; since it lacked any skin, Tammas could see its ‘red raw flesh … [with] blood, black as tar, running through yellow veins, and great white sinews, thick as horse tethers, twisting, stretching and contracting as the monster moved’. Now luckily, although Tammas felt icy spasms of fear running across his scalp and down his spine, he had the instinctive sense to swerve towards the freshwater-loch side of the road – and as he did so, he kicked up some water, which splashed onto the Nuckelavee. It reared and snorted, buying Tammas valuable time, and he sprinted away along the road. In front of him was a little rivulet running across the road, taking the surplus loch water into the sea. Tammas knew that if he could put running water between himself and the monster, he had a chance. The Nuckelavee reached out for him with its abnormally long arms, just as the man sprang over the water, but all it caught was his bonnet; Tammas fell senseless on the safe side of the water. The Nuckelavee’s fear of fresh water limits his depredations, for he won’t venture on land if he thinks it’s going to rain;

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moreover in Orkney and Shetland the Sea Mither [Mother], the spirit of the calm and nurturing summer sea, keeps him somewhat under control. These various water-horses and kelpies symbolise the risks associated with rivers, lakes and lochs. Fast-flowing mountain streams and known deep and inaccessible stretches of river can also claim human lives, especially when rain or snowmelt upstream produces a sudden surge lower down. But these tales are also conscious of the deceptive nature of lakes with their unseen currents, clammy and clinging weed, and the sucking mud of the water’s edge. Horses too are dangerous and unpredictable animals, especially so perhaps to the peasants and cotters who have neither the need nor the resources to keep them, but who only see them galloping past with a noble laird on their back, or who encounter them at pasture, taking the grazing that the cotter needs for his own sustenance. The water-horse has many relatives, among them the Loch Ness monster. When this elusive beast is first encountered, in Adomnan’s Life of St Columba, the saint is informed that the monster has just killed a man. One of Columba’s disciples is sent to swim across the River Ness in order to lure it out; the beast strikes again, but is repelled by the swimmer quickly making the sign of the cross. In Iceland there’s the nykr, who shares the monster’s habits; this creature has Old English counterparts, the nicoras (doubtless related to the pudding-eating monster of Knucker Hole). Nicoras are found lazing in the sun at the edge of Grendel’s Mere when Beowulf tracks the murderous water-hag, Grendel’s Mother, ‘the she-wolf of the depths’, to her lair. And Grendel’s Mother herself is surely the progenitor of such figures as Jenny Greenteeth and her sisters, who lurk in the stagnant weed-choked depths of ponds and standing water, on the lookout for the unwary, especially heedless little children. The tale of the ‘Laird of Morphie’ warns employers against exploitation of their workers; for, as we saw in Chapter 4, even supernatural workers need to be treated fairly, to be rewarded and appreciated. And the eerily prophetic kelpie of Conon shows, like many folk tales,

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F ig. 25  The Falkirk Kelpies, by Andy Scott.

how fate cannot be circumvented; if you go round one way to avoid Death, he will meet you coming in the other direction. Two contemporary incarnations of the kelpie – huge, shining in stainless steel, towering 30 metres on either side of the new extension to the Forth and Clyde canal at Falkirk – were completed in October 2013. Sculptor Andy Scott responded to the tradition of the mythic water-horse’s strength, linking its impressive horse-power (as in the tale of the ‘Laird of Morphie’) with the role of the horse in the Scottish Industrial Revolution and, indeed, in towing barges along the canal. These kelpies, though their heads seem to rear and strain as they emerge from the ground, are benign creatures, equine guardians who have moved beyond the sinister implications of their mythological ancestors. These mighty beasts also speak to the horses of the south, the White Horse of Sutton Bank in Yorkshire, the eighteenth-century horses of the chalklands of southern England, and of course the ancient, gloriously graceful White Horse of Uffington where our journey started. And perhaps one day the kelpies will neigh their greetings to Mark Wallinger’s 50-metre high White Horse of Ebbsfleet, if that colossal creature is ever built.

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Con t i n u i t y & C h a nge The Sleepers under the Hill bold farmer was riding from Mobberley along the alarmingly steep escarpment of Alderley Edge on his way to Macclesfield Fair, where he intended to sell his milk-white horse. As he came along the Edge an old man, ‘tall and strangely clad in a deep flowing garment’, hailed him and offered him money for the horse. The farmer thought it wasn’t quite enough so he turned the offer down. The old man retorted that he wouldn’t be able to sell the beast at market and that he would buy it from him later that day. To the farmer’s surprise – for it was, he thought, a very fine horse – no one in Macclesfield did want to buy it, and so he turned for home with the horse still in his possession. And there indeed, on the Edge, stood the old man, waiting. ‘Follow me!’ he commanded and the farmer fell in behind him. Suddenly he thought he heard neighing deep underground, and the old man stretched out his staff and struck a rock. Immediately a pair of heavy iron gates appeared that flew open at his touch. The horse reared up at the thunderous noise, and the terrified farmer fell to his knees and prayed for his life. The old man led him inside and they went through a series of caverns, filled with men and milk-white horses – one horse to each man, all except for one – and every single creature, horse and man, was fast asleep. In the innermost cavern lay a great heap of treasure. The old man told the farmer to take the price of his horse from the treasure and be gone. And he prophesied

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that when ‘George the son of George shall reign’ the sleepers would awaken, fight a great battle and save the country. As the farmer made his way through the iron gates, they clanged shut at his heels, and back home he went to Mobberley, somewhat the wiser and much the richer for his adventure. Local Cheshire tradition names the sleepers and their leader as King Arthur and his men. This is not the only place where Arthur and his knights are said to be sleeping. The same is true of the Eildon Hills in the Borders, below Thomas the Rhymer’s tree; Caerleon in Wales; a mysterious vault under Richmond Castle in North Yorkshire; and Freeborough Hill, not far from Wade the Giant’s grave on the Whitby–Guisborough Road. In the cave under Richmond Castle, Potter Thompson sees a sheathed sword and a horn lying by the sleepers and his guide invites him to choose between them. He sets his hand to the sword, but is rattled by the sleepers’ signs of wakening as he draws it from its sheath. And as he takes to his heels, a voice calls after him: Potter, Potter Thompson! If thou had either drawn The sword or blown that horn, Thou’d been the luckiest man That ever yet was born.

Why Potter Thompson would have been so fortunate isn’t clear. I suppose he might have taken on the role of the king’s right-hand man, explaining the circumstances in which Arthur had awoken, and he would have gained glory as the king reestablished his reign, but all in all he may have been wise to abandon the sword and horn and leave the sleepers to their slumbers. Similar sleeper legends are told of the Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa, asleep in the Kyffhäuser mountains in Germany, and of the Danish hero Holger Danske, who dozes under Hamlet’s castle of Kronborg at Helsingør: all these heroes will arise and protect their homelands when the hour of greatest need should

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come. So far that dark hour never has arrived – though many modern authors have experimented with the idea of Arthur’s return in the twentieth century, as we’ll see below. Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first writer to hint at Arthur’s unusual fate, remarking mysteriously that after his final battle against his nephew the usurper Mordred, the king was carried away to the Isle of Avalon to be cured of his wounds. So it seemed to Geoffrey in 1138; in a later account of Arthur which he composed around 1148 Geoffrey changes his story somewhat. Here, Merlin learns from the legendary Welsh poet Taliesin how he has taken Arthur away to the Fortunate Islands, where Morgen the enchantress and her sisters are tending to him and where – so Morgen says – he will be healed if he stays with her and follows the regime she recommends. In the poem Merlin wonders, given the chaos now reigning in Britain, whether it might be time to send for the king to come back and rule once again, but he finally decides against it. And, somehow, it never is quite time for Arthur to return, once and future king though he may be, as Sir Thomas Malory reports. The legend of the sleepers looks back to the past with a powerful nostalgia for an age which was better and brighter, when men were noble, ladies lovely, and kings were both strong and assured of victory. And it offers the possibility that this golden age of chivalry and the lost national glory could be recovered even in duller, undramatic times. In parallel stories of underground sleepers from around the world, it’s always a charismatic leader who rests under the hill, whether it’s J.F. Kennedy, Harold Godwinsson (the loser at the Battle of Hastings), Charlemagne or Finn mac Cumhaill, the leader of the Fianna, who sleeps within a rock on the Isle of Skye. The leader’s continuing slumbers offer his people the dubious comfort that, when the country’s plight seems at its worst, it is still not so bad that the supernatural needs to mobilise to rescue it; the story offers a strange kind of reassurance that even if things ain’t what they used to be, they could indeed be a great deal worse.

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The comic-book genre and its Hollywood offspring remain deeply interested in the idea of figures like Arthur, but more frequently in the gods of the past, such as Thor or Hercules, who erupt into the modern world, and fight great metaphysical (and physical) battles against ancient enemies reborn: the svart (dark) elves, who are the gods’ enemies in the Thor movies, for example, who are borrowed from Norse myth. These iterations of the superhero myth are renewed for each generation. The comic-book series Camelot 3000 (1982–85) by Mike Barr and Brian Bolland begins with Arthur awakened from his resting place under Glastonbury Tor by an archaeology student. Soon, once Merlin has been released from magical entrapment at Stonehenge, the Round Table is reconstituted to battle against alien invaders in league with the evil Morgan le Fay and a reincarnation of Mordred. The latest popular treatment of the Arthurian myth, the BBC television fantasy drama series Merlin, which ran between 2008 and 2012, keeps its characters firmly in the medieval past; Arthur remains decidedly a ‘once’ rather than a ‘future’ king. Perhaps it is better that the lost past, of glory and national greatness, should indeed remain dormant, that the outdated heroes are not marshalled again. The present and the future need to generate their own ideas of what constitutes the good and the heroic. Twentieth-century European history shows all too clearly what can happen when nations decide to reach back into their own legendary past in order to shape their political present. World War II propaganda mobilised German heroic legend, depicting Hitler as Siegfried and Germany as the sleeping valkyrie; Mussolini’s Fascism, taking its name from the fasces, the bundle of wooden rods which symbolised power in republican and imperial Rome, projected a vision of Romanitas, of a renewed Roman Empire encompassing all the shores of the Mediterranean. The sleeping Arthur is envisaged as coming to the defence of his former kingdom, rather than underwriting imperial aggression, but since he hasn’t yet become a tool of renewed English (or British) nationalism he can safely be left to

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his slumbers. The tale of the sleeping hero nevertheless reminds us that the past lingers into the present and does important imaginative work in forming ideas about identity at the level of nation and region. The supernatural creatures we’ve already met in this book are also tasked with shaping our future, as individuals, as families and lineages and as a nation.

The Past in the Present Alderley Edge, where the farmer of Mobberley encountered his wizard, is a dramatic and mysterious landscape feature; a high red sandstone escarpment, thickly covered in trees, which looks out over the flat Cheshire plain. Just 15 miles away, on the other side of Macclesfield, is the remarkable site of Ludchurch, a deep wooded chasm in the Peak District National Park, which has a good claim to be the site of the uncanny Green Chapel of the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A deep rocky cleft where streams plunge dizzy­ingly downwards and where ‘each hill had a hat, a mist-hakel (cloak) huge’, the Green Chapel itself turns out to be ‘nobbut an old cave’. Gawain fears the Devil has lured him here in order to destroy him, but it’s a different kind of testing which he has to face on that icy New Year’s Day. There are no distinctive legends associated with Alderley Edge, apart from that of the wizard and the sleepers he guards and a few sightings of our old friend Black Shuck. But thanks to the writings of Alan Garner, born in nearby Congleton and long resident near the Edge, the area has acquired strong new folkloric associations. If you’ve read Garner’s trilogy The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath and the more recently published Boneland, or his other novels such as Thursbitch, you will know how this Cheshire landscape, with its contrasting rocky heights, steeply slanting slopes and rolling lowlands, seems to have become written over with countless layers of legend, of history and even prehistory: ancient scripts which transform the landscape into a palimpsest of still half-visible traces. Tracks of other-world creatures trace the green woods and sweeping escarpment, and

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the topography and the places named in Garner’s stories, sketched in the books’ endpaper maps, are at once real and yet mythical. The Weirdstone centres on the legend of the sleepers in the cave; the old man who guards them is Cadellin, a wizard and practitioner of high magic. A brother and sister, Colin and Susan, are drawn into the battle to recover Firefrost, the Weirdstone of the title, which is crucial to preserving the sleepers. Garner mixes up his mythological names and concepts in this story, drawing on Norse and Celtic figures to populate his Otherworld. The Norse-named figures tend to be evil – though one of the worst is the Morrigan, a dark witch-like female figure, who shares her name with the Celtic goddess of battle. An agent of Nastrond, the absent evil overlord whose name is often invoked, Cadellin’s opponent (and brother) Grimnir bears one of the names by which Odin is known, and there are also light and dark elves (lios alfar and svart alfar). These align themselves with good and evil respectively. They are also important forces in The Moon of Gomrath. On the side of good are dwarfs: Fenodyree shares his name with the Manx brownie/hob figure we met in Chapter 4, and Durathror’s name is Norse in origin. The children have to journey with the Weirdstone across the landscape, attacked and aided in turn by supernatural figures until, high on Shutlingsloe hill, not far from Alderley, a cosmic battle takes place. Managarm, the Wolf of the Moon, is unleashed: Racing out of the north was a cloud, lower than any that hid the sun and black. Monstrous it was, and in shape a ravening wolf. Its loins fell below the horizon, and its lean body arched across the sky to pounding shoulders, and a head with jaws agape that even now was over the far end of the valley … All the sky to the north and east was wolf head. The mouth yawned wider, till there was nothing to be seen but the black, cavernous maw, rushing down to swallow hill and valley whole.

This is one of the most intensely terrifying passages I ever read as a child, and rereading it still sends shivers up my spine. Only

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f ig. 26  Covers of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, The Owl Service and Elidor.

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Firefrost, the Weirdstone, can dispel the wolf of eternal winter and put the world to rights again. In The Moon of Gomrath, Colin and Susan reappear, along with a largely different set of supernatural figures. The second novel is more attuned to Celtic legend, but the lios alfar, the light elves who aid the children in their battle against the Morrigan, her evil palug-cats and goblins, are figures from Norse legend. The most terrifying figure in the Morrigan’s alliance is the Brollachan, a diabolical creature which manifests itself in the form of a horse, like the Scottish water-horses that we met in the last chapter. This beast entices Susan onto its back, gallops away into the flooded quarry with her and then – at least temporarily – possesses her. At the climax of the novel the Wild Hunt (see Chapter 3) appears, as in Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, to sweep away the powers of darkness and restore order in the human world. Weirdstone and Gomrath were published in 1960 and 1963 respectively. Garner has written other books which engage more directly with British myth, such as Elidor and The Owl Service. Elidor melds Irish myth and the English folk tale of Childe Roland and Burd Ellen, while The Owl Service reconfigures the Welsh Mabinogi tale of Lleu and his wife Blodeuedd. In 2012 Garner published Boneland, the long-awaited sequel to the two earlier Alderley books. Colin, now an old man, is an astronomer working at Jodrell Bank, his gaze eternally fixed on the distant edges of the universe, while in the present he struggles with madness, trying to process the loss of his sister and the strange events of his past. Intercut with Colin’s story is the tale of a man living in the pre-Ice Age era who must journey back and forwards into Ludchurch (called ‘Ludcruck’ in the book) to perform important rites both for himself and for the maintenance of cosmic order: making sure that the stars move in their courses. Each year he sang and danced in Ludcruck and cut between the worlds to make the beasts free and bring their spirits from behind the rock so that they could spread across the land. And

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in winter he watched the Bull climb the wall of the sky cave and the Stone Spirit riding to send out eagles to feed the stars. All this he did, though it brought no woman. But every year the sun turned, because of the dance.

The supernatural is suppressed in Boneland, at least in Colin’s tale, though the psychotherapist Meg Massey, a commandingly ambivalent female figure, evokes disturbing echoes of the earlier books’ Morrigan. She also maintains a mysterious association with a taxi driver called Bert, which recalls the sinister alliance between Morgan and Bertilak in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; at the end of the book, as at the end of the poem, both seem to vanish once their work is done. Thursbitch, published in 2003, is about a strange, closed-in and deserted valley a little distance from the landscapes of the Alderley novels; its name means ‘valley of the thyrs’, the Old English word for the kind of ogre that Grendel is. Ancient monoliths abound in this eerie place; a crumbling ruined farmhouse is overlooked by a cave, a natural stone enclosure which is easily imagined as a cult site. In Thursbitch, as in Boneland, and the earlier novels, Garner’s time, as he himself notes, operates like a Möbius strip: the stories of the past and the present become inseparable, twisted together and yet always flipping, so that to follow one narrative is in some sense also to read the other. The peculiar disposition of rock, well and stone, and the snatches of the past which the modern couple glimpse through the valley’s mist, increasingly tap into a deeper, more primeval kind of memory, as the past bleeds into the present, drawing its energy from an even deeper, mythic prehistory. And that perhaps is one way of thinking about the themes of this chapter: the presence of the past in our present, and the ways in which ancient folk tradition frames the imagined future. Novelists like Garner and the other fantasy writers whose work we’ve been thinking about in the course of this book not only bring the beliefs of the past to light; they reinvent and reshape them in the course of their rewritings; and, in Garner’s case

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particularly, they come to overwrite the terrain in which their books are set. Readers of his novels find themselves longing to visit Alderley Edge, so strongly imbued with the suggestion that landscape itself is sentient, that powerful interactions are possible between place and person, which aren’t simply a case of us projecting our imaginings onto that space. For we all know that some places have a particular feel to them, one which we sense as unsettling or eerie, or, equally, as blessed or numinous, and there’s something in our subconscious that is calibrated to register such sensations. If other dimensions of time coexist with ours, so might other spatial dimensions lie just on the other side of our everyday existence, these writers propose. This might be a kind of fairyland, of the sort envisaged in the tales of fairies we’ve encountered already, a place of mingled pleasure and terror.

The Green Children Our ancestors, too, knew of other lands which are contiguous in some way with the Britain in which they lived – and not just those fairy realms lurking deep within the smooth green hillsides. Ralph of Coggeshall, abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Coggeshall in Essex, composed a Latin chronicle around 1210 in which he relates a strange story that has long puzzled folklorists and historians alike. Ralph records how, at the nearby village of Woolpit (Old English wulfpytt, a pit for trapping wolves), at the mouth of one of the pits for which the village was named, two strange children were found. A boy and a girl, their skins were bright green and the language that they spoke was unintelligible. They were taken to the local manor house of Sir Richard de Calne. There they refused to eat anything but beans, once they’d been shown how to get them out of the pod. The boy did not thrive and eventually died; but the girl flourished, began to eat other food and lost her greenness through the more varied diet. She lived in Sir Richard’s house for many years – turning out rather wanton,

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Ralph notes disapprovingly – and she learnt to speak English. Then she could explain how her people were all green-skinned, that they lived in a land where it was always twilight and the sun never shone. She and her brother had been herding their flocks when they happened upon a cavern from which came the sound of bells. They followed the sound through the cavern and came to another exit where the light was so bright as to stun them. When they recovered their senses they tried to find their way back into the cave, but were then caught by the villagers. William of Newburgh, a contemporary of Ralph’s, adds further details; the green children appeared during the realm of King Stephen (around seventy years earlier) and they were found at harvest time. In his account both children survived, and the girl later wedded a man from Lynn. The land from which they came was called St Martin’s Land and was Christian; William’s account confirmed the detail about the lack of sun, and added a bright territory that could be glimpsed across the river from where the children dwelled.

F ig. 27  Woolpit village sign.

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These green children seem to have wandered out of fairyland into the human world; their tale is the converse of all those stories of humans snatched by the fairies. Just as in many of the human cases, it is impossible for them to find their way home. Some of the details that the girl relays – the dim light and the green hue – mesh with the accounts of the fairy world that we’ve seen in other legends. By the time the girl had learned to speak intelligibly, however, it seems likely that she too would have heard such stories and have shaped her account accordingly – or else the two chroniclers added details of what the hidden land must, in their estimation, be like. These children, far from a home to which they can never return, are emblematic of a particular type of change: of migration and movement. For medieval horizons were becoming less bounded when Ralph was writing; folk were getting up and going places, on crusade or on pilgrimage, encountering unguessed-at customs, foodstuffs, skin tones and climates. Ralph of Coggeshall and William were both ready to imagine (for they knew that the world was round, and they knew of the idea of the Antipodes) that other places might lie close to their own land, places where people were quite different – and green – and yet were also in some ways the same: making a living by herding flocks and attracted by the joyous sound of pealing bells. But a rational explanation of the green children’s origins has eluded modern commentators. They aren’t hybrid creatures like selkies or mermaids; nor are they monsters. Rather, they are described as just like other foreigners, unused to English food, ignorant of the language and only gradually adapting to the mores of their new home. One of these lost children managed to make a future for herself in her new home; the other could not adapt, it seems, and faded away. Their different fates remind us that children are the seeds of the future; they carry forward family names, inherit houses and land, and maintain long-practised family trades. Long after we are no longer walking the earth, our descendants will remember us – or so we hope – and will continue our

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traditions. And so the knowledge of a pregnancy and the birth of a child brings great joy, but also great anxiety. Can a baby indeed be successfully conceived and will its birth be survived by both mother and child? Will it thrive and grow strong and happy? The most obvious form of continuity is that of the family; without children the future is in jeopardy. It’s no wonder, then, that folklore about childbirth and child-rearing is fraught with danger, and that the supernatural impinges very closely indeed on the human world when children’s welfare is at stake.

Midwife to the Fairies It’s not only humans who worry about worry about bearing and rearing children; for fairies, too, reproduction is a chancy business and fairy children need the help of an experienced human midwife to make their way into the world. In the little town of Stowmarket in Suffolk there lived a skilled midwife. One day she found a little man on her doorstep, asking for her help with his wife who was in labour. She went off with him and the baby was born safely. Some time later she was at the market in Stowmarket, where to her surprise she caught sight of the fairy man helping himself to quantities of beef in the butcher’s shop. As fairies are normally invisible to humans, the butcher of course was quite unaware of what was going on. The midwife greeted her acquaintance cheerfully and asked him how the baby was. Mother and child were doing well, she was told. The little man asked her with which eye she could see him. She pointed to the eye – for while in fairyland she had rubbed some ointment intended for the child’s eyes on her own eye – and the fairy man blew on it. After that she never saw him again. The ‘Midwife to the Fairies’ tale is a common one, found in Scotland and Wales as well as being widespread across England. The Stowmarket woman was fortunate, for in some versions the fairy simply blinds the eye with which he can be seen. The midwife is usually well rewarded for her work, bringing a good purse of gold or coins back from the Otherworld, but her

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curiosity and her human sympathy for the mother and baby she helped is her undoing. Fairies seem to be remarkably concerned with sight and eyes; we remember how the Queen of the Fairies vengefully wished that she could have given Tam Lin ‘eyes of tree’. Sir Launfal’s fairy mistress Triamour blinded the lustful queen who had tried to seduce her lover and then brought him to trial for insulting her. And Cherry of Zennor’s downfall was making use of the ointment with which she anointed her charge’s eyes on her account; once she could clearly see the fairies by whom she was surrounded, she became jealous and demanding. To see clearly, to perceive the supernatural figures who move invisibly around us, is to possess a dangerous kind of knowledge; no wonder the fairies themselves keep a sharp eye out for those who have that special kind of sight. Sometimes the fairies are not content with employing, rewarding and releasing the midwife, but rather they seek to keep her in fairyland for ever. In a Scots version of the tale, the midwife delivers the baby, and the fairy man says that she may go home, but could she first bake some bannocks (a kind of flat bread) and use up all the flour in the meal chest? The obliging midwife bakes a batch in order to sustain the new mother and her family, and then she tips the spare meal back into the chest. But it seems just as full as before, so she bakes another batch – with the same result. At last the mother calls out from the bed that she will never empty the chest if she tips the spare flour back in; rather, she should throw it on the fire. She takes the advice and soon, to the annoyance of the fairy man, the chest is empty and the midwife must be allowed to go home. In this story it looks as if this mother was in fact a mortal, snatched away into fairyland; one who does not want a fellow human to suffer her own unhappy fate. There’s a Welsh tale of a midwife who, rubbing the ointment for the child on her eye, perceives that the richly furnished room she thought she was in is in fact a cave, and that the woman to whom she is ministering is her own lost maidservant Eilian, who’d disappeared with the Tylwyth

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Teg (the Welsh fairies) some time before. She is given her fee and returns to the mortal world; she makes the usual error of greeting the fairy man when she spots him in a crowd a little later, but in this version she’s subjected to nothing worse than the erasure of her fairy vision. The ‘Midwife to the Fairies’ tale, like the story of Cherry of Zennor, notes the habitual curiosity and disobedience of humans when fairies or Otherworld creatures demand that they follow a particular set of orders. As in Cherry’s case, the ointment has the effect of making the illusion, or the scales of innocence, fall from the woman’s eyes, so that she perceives things as they really are; the rich surroundings are a grim cave under the hill, and the splendid furnishings no better than the rushes and bare floors of the human world. She sees too that the supernatural is always walking among humans, and that we should doubtless be vigilant about letting ourselves fall into their power. Why the fairies should have no midwives of their own, why they need human helpers and nurses to make sure that all goes well when babies are born, isn’t clear. Katharine Briggs’s suggestion that all the suffering mothers are abducted human women would explain why they need their own kind with them when giving birth. Cherry’s master represented himself as a widower; perhaps his human wife had died, being mortal, while her half-fairy child needed ointment to initiate him fully into fairyhood, and to make sure that his loyalties lay with his paternal kindred in the Otherworld.

Changelings Bringing new fairies into the world is a business fraught with peril, especially if it has to be underpinned by the abduction of mortal women. It’s not surprising, then, that fairies are frequent abductors of human children. Various explanations are given for this habit. Fairy babies are remarkably ugly and they take a long time to develop. They benefit considerably if given the loving care of human women; human babies are coveted by the fairies,

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F ig. 28  A changeling.

particularly if they are healthy and golden-haired. In another story from the fairy-haunted Scottish Borders, a woman from Nithsdale was suckling her firstborn child and busily spinning when a fairy lady in a green mantle appeared and asked if she would let her baby take one suck. The woman kindly agreed, and so the fairy lady, pronouncing, ‘Nurse kin’ and ne’er want’ (Nurse it kindly and you will never want), decided to leave her child to be fostered for a whole year. Every morning rich clothes for the children and delicious fairy food would be left – for the record, fairy food tastes like wheaten bread mixed with wine and honey. After a year the fairy mother returned and was delighted to see how her child had flourished under human care. She led the foster-mother into the green hill, anointed her left eye and showed her all the rich and splendid territories which lay within. When her other eye was anointed, however, the foster-mother observed several friends and acquaintances busy labouring in the cornfields and orchards – a punishment for their evil deeds, said the fairy lady severely. Afterwards the

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foster-mother returned home with fine weaving and chests of precious ointments; she often saw fairies roaming in the mortal world. She too made the error of greeting her fosterling’s mother when she chanced to run into her and was deprived of her fairy sight as a consequence. As her ability to see fairies was a result of the fairy lady deliberately administering the ointment, rather than of her disobedience, she was not blinded, as some other human women are. There’s a touch of Christian moralisation in the story too. The woman’s left eye sees a delusional version of fairyland as delightful, while the right eye sees the truth: that the fairy realm is a place of punishment for the wicked, more akin to hell. This charitable and cooperative action of fostering a fairy child alongside one’s own is rather less frequent than the fairies’ stealing of a human infant and its replacement with a dull, wizened, uncommunicative child which neither grows nor thrives. The many traditional tales of changelings make distressing reading, whether they feature mothers who do their best to love the difficult child who seems to have replaced their bonny, smiling youngster (sometimes gaining a coin a day in their apron pocket as encouragement and reward), or mothers who subject the changeling child to mistreatment, even torment, in order to get it to admit its changeling status. For if the imposter can be brought to confess its fairy identity, then it must go back to fairyland and the human baby for which it was exchanged will return. Two of my favourite changeling stories involve little cruelty and a good measure of humour. In a widespread tale, this version from Ireland, the parents suspect that their child has been exchanged for a changeling and seek advice from a local wise woman. She suggests an odd course of action, and although the parents are sceptical they decide to give it a try. The mother empties out some eggshells, brings hops, water and mash, and begins to brew beer in them over the fire. Instead of lying immobile or screeching in its cradle, the changeling sits up and takes an interest in the proceedings, finally bursting out

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with, ‘I’m fifteen hundred years old, and I never saw a brewery of eggshells before!’ The mother had been advised that, if the changeling thus revealed himself, she should attack him with a red-hot poker; but before she could do so, she realised that her very own child was back in the cradle and that the imposter had vanished. In a Scottish changeling tale, ‘Johnnie in the Cradle’, the parents ask their neighbour, a tailor, to mind their unpromising, bawling child so that they can go to the market. The parents are no sooner gone than the baby stops crying, stands up in its cot and asks, ‘Is ma mither and ma faither awa?’ ‘They are, indeed’, replies the tailor. ‘Gie’s a drink of whisky, then’, demands the child, for there’s a bottle in the cupboard. Next thing, the child wants a tune on the pipes. Since the tailor has no bagpipes, and there are none in the house, the infant sends him out to fetch a straw from the byre, and he plays a splendid tune on it. Tailor and creature spend the day chatting amiably, but as soon as the parents come home the baby resumes its meaningless noises and unresponsive behaviour. The tailor takes the parents aside and tells them what has happened, and so the next day they pretend they must go to market again. The tailor is summoned to babysit while the parents lurk outside. All happens as before, and once they hear the piping the parents know for sure that they’re dealing with a fairy. The father bursts in and sets a griddle over the fire, and a half-bag of horse manure on top. When he goes to seize the child to set it on the griddle, it looks at him ‘with wild eyes’ and disappears up the chimney. And their own rightful child is heard crying outside the house, immediately restored to them. Heaven knows what kind of cruelties were visited on children with disabilities in the belief that the lost perfect child could somehow be brought back. In these stories – and even in some court cases – babies are thrown on the fire, or in the stream, or left outside for their fairy parents to reclaim, and we can well imagine how many infants must have died as a result of this wellmeant ill-treatment. Changeling tales reach down into parents’

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profoundest fears for their sons (for the changeling is almost without exception male): what seems a healthy baby at birth may turn out to have developmental disorders and will neither grow nor thrive. The sense that such a child may be better off dead than enduring a limited existence, confined to its cradle, never walking or talking, underlies the tales of ill-treatment: the hope that somehow the harm can be undone and the child be made better. In the title story of his collection The Acid House (1994) Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, makes wonderfully creative use of the changeling legend. In this tale, set in Edinburgh, a foul-mouthed, drunken and lecherous football hooligan – a Hibs supporter, in fact – is struck by lightning at the very moment that a baby is being born to a middle-class English mother in a nearby hospital. Somehow, the baby’s soul and that of Coco Bryce, the football fan, are exchanged through the lightning strike. While Coco’s body lies dribbling and incontinent in the hospital bed, possessing the soul and capacities of a new-born baby, Jenny happily takes home Tom, her new changeling infant, unaware that her precious child has the mind of a working-class football hooligan. For a while, the baby with Coco’s consciousness remains content with drinking milk and sleazily admiring its mother’s breasts, but it’s not long before he’s nipping out of his cot to steal whisky and standing upright with a horribly knowing air in order to watch his parents having sex. After the whisky incident, Jenny begins to suspect that her husband is abusing Tom, and, to the baby’s horror, she proposes to take him home to her mother in England. Tom has to try to talk her out of it, switching between his original working-class dialect and an imitation of his mother’s middle-class English, and he claims truthfully to be a kind of phenomenon whose intelligence must remain a secret between mother and child. Soon he’s demanding steak for dinner and cajoling his mother into taking him to see the Hearts–Hibs game, an experience which Jenny quite enjoys. The adult Coco meanwhile remembers nothing of his

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former life, and is taken in hand by his girlfriend Kirsty, who finds him now quite malleable and cooperative. Soon Coco has renounced drugs, has ‘stopped running with the casuals’ and marries Kirsty. The story ends with baby Tom and adult Coco bumping into one another on a bus; whether this encounter is enough to reverse the exchange isn’t clear. In this story Welsh makes ingenious and comic use of the Scots changeling tradition, as exemplified in ‘Johnnie in the Cradle’. The infant’s taste for whisky remains, though its enthusiasm for the bagpipes is updated as a passion for football and the violence associated with it. Welsh’s knowing modernisation of the changeling tale contains a great deal of comedy, particularly when the baby begins to speak in Coco’s voice, and in the satirical suggestion that the women in this story come to enjoy being with the unusual males produced by the soul-swap. Baby Tom is certainly more fun than his ineffectual, vegetarian and feminised father Rory, while the infantilised Coco is putty in Kirsty’s formidable hands. In modern Scotland, the women’s satisfaction with these two new models of masculinity provides a happier ending than the restoration of the stolen child to his anxious parents.

The Demon Child A corollary of the changeling tale is the medieval romance of Sir Gowther, a story which suggests that the nightmare child can reform. It also speaks to the adolescent fantasy that your parents – these hopeless adults who don’t understand you – can’t possibly be your real parents; that something must explain how this mismatch came about. The opposite of ‘the foundling who is really a prince’ motif, Gowther’s biography suggests that a disastrous genetic inheritance can be overcome through a sincere wish to change and the grace of God. Gowther’s mother is a duchess who cannot conceive and whose husband threatens to put her away for her infertility. The duchess prays to God and the Virgin Mary to ‘give her grace to have a child  / On what manner she ne rought [did not care]’.

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Rash words, for her prayer is mischievously answered. In her orchard one afternoon she meets a man who looks just like the duke and who asks her to make love with him under a tree – a dangerous place, as we know from Chapter 2. When the deed is done, he leaps up, revealing himself to be a foul and shaggy fiend, and tells her that he has engendered a child who will be fierce and wild. The quick-thinking duchess hastens home, tells her husband that an angel has prophesied that she will conceive that day, and bundles him into bed. The baby is, we learn, half-brother to Merlin, begotten by the very same demon; once born he clearly reveals his diabolic temperament. He kills nine of his wet nurses through his ferocious suckling and gnaws off his own mother’s nipple. Gowther grows very quickly indeed, and soon forges himself a sword, with which his hapless father knights him, shortly before he dies of sorrow. Once Gowther becomes duke, he makes a point of persecuting religious folk: raping nuns, then burning them alive, forcing friars to jump off cliffs and hanging priests. Finally a noble earl calls him to account, telling him that he cannot possibly be the son of the good duke, but must rather be ‘sum fendys son’ (the son of some fiend). Gowther forces his mother at knifepoint to tell him the truth; once he hears the story of his conception he is stricken with fear and repentance. The rest of the romance tells how Gowther seeks redemption from the Pope; his penance is to remain silent and to eat only food he takes from the mouths of dogs. Eventually, through defending a Christian realm against a Saracen army, he redeems himself, marries a princess, and sets about supporting rather than attacking the Church, in one version even ending up as a saint. One of the aspects of this tale that I find most striking is that Gowther’s change of heart comes when he is apprised of his parentage. Suddenly, it seems, he has an explanation for his violent temperament, one which makes him look hard at his life and the consequences of his actions, and which triggers the behaviour that finally brings him salvation. Being a devil’s son

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is quite a lot worse than being a fairy’s child; but within the Christian framework of the Middle Ages, Gowther can redeem himself, once he decides that he wants to become a good person, rather than the Devil’s tool. Just so, Merlin, fathered by the same demon on a pious woman in her sleep, was saved by a speedy baptism and the teachings of his mother and her priestconfessor, though some degree of moral ambivalence still clings to him in his later career – it’s not always easy to eliminate the diabolical from your genes. The idea that even the most virtuous and well-meaning of women can become the Devil’s sexual victim, without knowledge of or consent to the liaison, is a recurrent horror trope in modern as in medieval times: films such as The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby are only two of the modern revisitings of the idea that the Devil can become embodied in a human child. The uncontrollable, violent, perversely evil child becomes a focus for fears about parenting, about the difficulties all mothers and fathers face in socialising their offspring, enabling them to fit into the world outside the family home. At the same time, they need to try to respect their children’s individuality and allow them space to develop their own identities. And outside the home, a recurrent anxiety, at times fanned by tabloid newspapers, but nonetheless deep-rooted, is that the younger generation, those much-loved and longed-for children, will cast aside the values of their parents’ generation, smash all the traditions and structures of the current modern world which adults understand and approve, and metamorphose into something we no longer recognise. The continuity between generations, which we both expect and value, could be shattered if the next generation’s essential humanity is compromised or damaged: a recurrent anxiety when contemplating posterity and the legacies of today.

The Wild Man and the Green Man Now we come to one of the greatest fears that haunts us about our future, the future of this land and indeed of our planet.

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What is happening to nature, to our forests, meadows, moorlands, marshes and to our seas? The industrialisation not just of our cities but also of our countryside has awakened old mythic figures and created a new one to raise awareness of the threats to the landscapes that nurture and sustain us. Medieval people had a rather different sense of their relationship with the natural world, and very different fears. The forest was not a place where you might wander at your ease, admiring the majesty of the trees, while squirrels and rabbits hopped charmingly about your feet. For a start, forests mostly belonged to great lords, and ordinary people had no business to be there: they were likely to be suspected of poaching or other kinds of theft. And medieval forests were very difficult to find a way through. The tale of St Edmund (see Chapter 5) in which the kindly wolf guards the saint’s head against predators reminds us how, when you went into a medieval wood, you’d be fighting through nettles and brambles, hacking through choking undergrowth, while, all the time, your senses would be alert for boars, wolves, bears or other predators who might attack at any moment. Outlaws too made their homes in the forest, as the legend of Robin Hood bears witness; though Robin and his merry men are kindly towards those who cross their paths, unless they happen to be rich and corrupt, many of the real human denizens of the woodlands might be more dangerous than the beasts. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the hero sets out in early November to try to find the Green Chapel, where he must meet his supernatural opponent on New Year’s Day. Sir Gawain makes a testing and arduous journey from the comforts of Camelot out into the wintry weather. Unlike most romance heroes, he rides through a landscape which is imagined in detail, through chilly winter weather, with sleet and hail assailing him as he lies out at night in his freezing armour, icicles hanging over his head among the crags and rocks through which he journeys. In the forest he encounters various foes, some straightforwardly zoological, some legendary, and one rather unusual kind of enemy:

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Sumwhyle wyth wormez he werrez, and with wolues als, Sumwhyle wyth wodwos, þat woned in þe knarrez, Boþe wyth bullez and berez, and borez oþerquyle, And etaynez, þat hym anelede of þe heghe felle; (Sometimes he battles with dragons, and with wolves too, Sometimes with wodwoses, that lived in the crags, Both with bulls and bears, and other times boars, And giants, that harassed him from the high fells)

Who were these wodwoses that gave Gawain so much grief? They were Wild Men, creatures covered in long shaggy hair, who lived in the forest and were usually thought to be lacking in human language. Only their faces, hands and breasts (especially in the case of wild women) were devoid of hair; sometimes the women’s breasts are so long and drooping that they can conveniently throw them over their shoulders when they run, as female yetis are said to do. They usually carry clubs, are strong enough to uproot large trees and can tame savage beasts, with whom they have an unspoken bond. In this respect they are rather like the Giant Herdsman, whom we met in Chapter 1, though they don’t engage in conversations like the long chat the Guardian of the Beasts has with Sir Ywain when the knight encounters him in the forest. Medieval romance believed that knights, those epitomes of chivalry and civilisation, could become like the wodwose if they were to suffer some terrible psychological blow, as Ywain does later in his career and as does Sir Lancelot too. Believing that they have lost for ever the woman that they love, the two knights run mad in the forest: they tear off their clothes, stop using language, live off roots and plants or by hunting animals whose meat they devour raw, and revert to the primitive beast-like state which lurks within the most cultivated of men. Children too might be raised in the forest by animals. In the late medieval romance Valentine and Orson, Orson is separated at birth from his twin brother and reared by a kindly she-bear (Orson = ‘bear-cub’). Orson

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grows up a menace; killing livestock and running amok with his bear friends, he becomes in short a wodwose or Wild Man. Valentine, who has been raised as a knight at the court of his uncle, the French king, eventually captures and tames this strange creature, teaches him language and trains him in chivalry, unaware that this is his lost twin brother. Together the twins make an impressive knightly team; they discover their brotherly relationship, rescue their mother from an importunate giant and reunite her with her lost husband and alienated brother. In this case Orson’s noble lineage overcomes the disadvantages of being raised by a bear. His uncouthness is an accident of nurture rather than an inherent part of his nature, and he becomes as brave and virtuous a knight as his brother. There are few tales about the wodwose proper. Woodhouse Road, which runs round the perimeter of the University of Leeds, is named after him – an echo of the legendary past which wouldn’t have escaped Tolkien’s attention when he was teaching there. And perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that the modern wodwose was reinvented by Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes, who found the creature, just as we did above, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Hughes entitled his 1967 collection of poems Wodwo, stripping out the final s of the medieval word. The title poem explores the wodwo’s emergence into self-consciousness and into language. As if suddenly becoming aware of his own existence, of his mind and his capacity to express these phenomena in words, the wodwo observes the trees among which he finds himself, the woodland scents, the stream in which he immerses himself, the frog which he pulls open in order to explore its innards. The wodwo worries about his name, his identity, whether someone else owns him, even whether he is ‘huge’ – for what should he compare himself with? Isolated from any social relationships, part of no family and no group, the wodwo cannot work out where he stands in the scheme of things, nor exactly what the scheme of things might be. Hughes’s wodwo walks only within the wood which gives him the first part of its name (wod

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= ‘wood’), but he knows that he exists, knows that he did not grow like the trees that surround him, or the weeds beneath them, and that he can go anywhere he pleases. He’s a wild man on the verge of becoming un-wild; yet his innocence remains uncorrupted by civilisation and unaffected by interaction with others, and he’s rather more evolved than his kinsmen who made war on Gawain as he rode through the wintry woods. The wodwose appears a great deal in late medieval and Renaissance art – in coats of arms and the like – and there’s a rather splendid carving of one on the roof of Haverhill church in Suffolk. Wild Men are often mentioned in descriptions of late medieval and early modern processions and pageants, where they represented the untamed, primitive man, the converse of the civilised city-dwellers or courtiers who staged the pageants. The wodwose was often paired with the Green Man in these civic and court displays: the splendidly named ‘whifflers’, the sets of men whose duty it was to clear a pathway through the crowd in advance of such processions, might be attired as a hybrid of the Green and the Wild Man. We have a record for the 1610 pageant staged in Chester to welcome Prince Henry, the heir to the throne. Two men appeared, ‘their habit Embroydred and Stitch’d on with Ivieleaves … having hanging to their shoulders, a huge black shaggie Hayre, Savage-like, with Ivie Garlands upon their heads, bearing Herculian Clubbes in their hands’. Their role too, like the whifflers, was to clear a path for the rest of the procession. The Green Men also entertained the crowd with their antics – the Chester pair battled with a dragon as they marched ahead of the show – and it’s quite possible that they pretended to be drunk, for the Green Man was already a well-established symbol of the distillery trade, and the pub sign. In the late seventeenth century, John Bagford noted that the figure of a man, covered in leaves, with a club and shaggy beard, was used by those in the sign-painting trade: ‘a fit emblem for those that use that intosticating licker which berefts them of their sennes’, he notes

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disapprovingly, for too much booze does indeed make people inarticulate, violent and antisocial. This connection brings us at last to the Green Man, the paradoxical folkloric figure after whom this book is named. The Green Man is originally a decorative motif: typically, an image of a man’s face peering out from a cluster of stylised oak-leaves, leaves which, in turn, grow out of his cheeks and forehead. This ‘foliate head’, as the image is technically called, is very widespread in English church architecture. Occasionally the club-wielding Green Man, the type who can be described as the ‘combative Green Man’ is to be found emerging out of the vegetation surrounding just such a head. In a classic article in the journal Folklore, published in 1939, Lady Julia Raglan identified the foliate head with a whole clutch of folkloric characters: ‘the Green Man, Jack-in-the-Green, Robin Hood, the King of May and the Garland’. Quite a number of disparate figures find themselves bundled together here, as she seeks to argue that the foliate head is a representation of some ancient vegetation god, the spirit of spring regrowth and natural fertility. Lady Raglan’s list includes well-attested customs, such as the garland, which is mentioned from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. On May Morning, workers – very often milkmaids or chimney sweeps – would wear pyramid-like headdresses as they danced in the street. The headdresses very often contained leaves, flowers and branches, though silver tankards were also frequently piled up on the heads of stronger individuals. The Jack-in-the-Green, a dancing man inside a wicker framework covered in leaves and branches, originated, it’s fairly clear, in money-making performances got up by chimney sweeps in the late eighteenth century, as Roy Judge has shown. It’s a tradition which has gradually become attached to various May Day and other folk festivals. Figures crowned with garlands, such as the May kings and queens of peasant tradition, are again not to be identified with the human–plant hybrid that is shown in the

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ecclesiastical carvings. Nor does Robin Hood, though closely associated with the forest and clad in Lincoln green, have leaves growing out of his body. The Green Man as an ancient folkloric figure, a vegetation god that’s come down in the world, has been shown not to exist. Or, rather, he did not exist. One of the consequences of Julia Raglan’s important article was – in effect – to invent the Green Man for a world which was beginning to need him, a world in which people were gradually realising how industrialisation was stealthily degrading our planet. The figure clearly has some antecedents – in the pub signs, distiller emblems, and those ‘leafy whifflers’ of early modern pageants – but as a symbol of the untouched natural world, the protector and guardian of the forests, he has rather a short pedigree. The mysterious figure of the Green Knight of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was interpreted as an avatar of Lady Raglan’s Green Man/vegetation god by post-war literary scholars, and this helped to consolidate the belief that the Green Man was a genuine, medieval, folkloric figure. The Green Knight is not just dressed in green, but is green all over, hair, face and skin, and so is his horse. No wonder, then, that he causes consternation when he appears on New Year’s Day at Arthur’s court of Camelot, demanding that someone cut off his head, and that he be permitted to strike a similar blow against his beheader in a year’s time. The Green Knight’s colour certainly confirms him as supernatural; as we have seen, green is the colour of the fairies, and it’s also associated with the Devil in medieval thought: anyone who can survive beheading is clearly not of this world. But the fact that he is carrying a holly garland isn’t really enough to make the Green Knight a persuasive symbol of the natural. Quite the opposite, for the Green Knight is, in his other life, also a jolly and hospitable man called Sir Bertilak, who entertains Gawain on his quest to locate the Green Chapel where he is to face his doom. And, while Gawain lies late in bed, recovering his energies and resisting the attempts of

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Bertilak’s wife to seduce him, Bertilak proves to be an enthusiastic hunter, crashing through the forests of his demesne in pursuit of deer, a fearsome wild boar, and, on the last day of the hunt, an unimpressive, if tricksy, fox. This makes it hard to see him as a conservationist and nature lover while he is inhabiting his chivalric identity: hunting game animals both furnished vital supplies of meat and kept the numbers of these large beasts down, limiting the damage to orchards, hedges and crops that a nibbling herd of deer or a rootling family of wild boar could do. Neither medieval aristocrats nor the peasants on their estates could afford to be romantic about nature; the yearly cycle, the alternation of famine and surplus, was in the gift of God. The Green Knight intends to challenge the chivalric code by which the court of Camelot lives, and he chooses his colour to signal his supernatural associations, but he’s certainly not a Green in the modern sense. Yet, following on from the (re)birth of the Green Man in the 1940s and 1950s, the idea of an ancient vegetation god, a hybrid of man and tree, a fierce defender against human trespass into the wild, struck a resonant chord in contemporary culture. We saw in Chapter 1 how Tolkien employed the Old English word for ‘giant’, eoten, for his grave, ancient tree-creatures the Ents. These mighty, slow-moving creatures are well-disposed towards humans; perhaps their finest hour is their destruction of Saruman’s fortress and their reclamation of a part of his territory for reforesting, creating the Treegarth of Orthanc. The Ents are Shepherds of the Trees, but they are powerless against human and dwarf depredations of the mighty forests of Middle Earth. The felling of trees by men to build ships and by dwarfs for fuel to fire their forges echoes the fates of the great forests of England, as Tolkien well knew. Kingsley Amis’s influential ghost story The Green Man (1969) is set in a pub of that name in a village in Hertfordshire, situated unromantically close to the supposed A595, as the narrator often mentions. The protagonist, the pub’s unlikeable landlord and inveterate drunk,

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Maurice Allington, is haunted by a seventeenth-century ghost, Thomas Underhill, who had been able to call up a horrifying and murderous figure – the Green Man himself – out of the depths of the woodland surrounding the pub, and had set it to kill his enemies. And Allington himself, in some ways not dissimilar to Underhill, though obsessed with sex rather than the occult, finds that the creature is walking once again. Amis had been taught Old English by Tolkien at Oxford and seems to have disliked him and his subject intensely. The glimpses Allington has of the Green Man make clear that this is no benevolent forest deity, no kindly, twinkly Treebeard, but an entirely malign and horrifying force, a kind of anti-Ent: it was made up of lumps of timber, some with thickly ribbed bark, some with a thin glistening skin, of bundles of twigs and of ropes and compressed masses of green and dead and rotting leaves.

The creature even has a face: with irregular eye-sockets in which a fungoid luminescence glimmered, and a wide grinning mouth that showed more than a dozen teeth made of jagged stumps of rotting wood.

It’s hard for Allington to persuade others that this monstrous creature is not simply a product of his drinking: a hallucination produced by his alcoholism, but at the climax of the book the Green Man is real enough to kill the family cat and to come within inches of murdering Allington himself. Pre-dating Amis’s terrifying forest monster by only a year is the Green Man in John Gordon’s children’s book The Giant under the Snow. The legend that lies behind the supernatural happenings in this story draws on the chalk figures of the southern English downlands, the idea of the Green Man, and the notions of giants as the mighty, none-too-bright, and rather dangerous figures that were registered in Chapter 1. The Green Man, so the legend narrated in the novel goes, walked from Wiltshire

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to East Anglia, and was meant to find a new home in the city of Norwich – that familiar country–city trajectory which giants tend to follow, as in Chapter 1. Yet somehow he ended up in the ‘backlands’, an area of forest, gravel moraines, heath and bog, corresponding to the Norfolk Breckland. And it’s here, on a school trip, that the book’s heroine, Jonk, accidentally stumbles across him and the ancient buckle which, once reunited with the belt that it fastens, gives the holder power over the huge being. In the ancient past, the belt had belonged to an evil and nameless warlord. Along with his followers – emblematic with their dragon-prowed boat of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian invaders – and using a dark kind of magic, the warlord had tyrannised the land. Expelled from East Anglia, he had fled west to Wiltshire, where he had found the Green Man carved into the hillside and whom he had brought to life with his sorcery. The warlord had ridden on the Green Man’s shoulder back to his old territory with his hideously shrunken entourage, the terrifying Leather Men, at his heels. Although they were temporarily routed by Elizabeth, the ‘guardian spirit of this land’, the power unleashed if the buckle and the warlord’s belt were reunited would restore the warlord’s evil rule and unleash the giant. At the book’s climax, at dawn on Christmas Day, the Green Man is indeed brought back to life through the warlord’s wizardry and the properties of the belt. Only Jonk and her two friends can prevent his triumph. This Green Man is much huger than Amis’s tree-like monster, a true animated land form. He has a ‘shaggy chin, deep gulf of a mouth, broad hill of a nose and caverns of eyes … the green grass of his brow’. The giant is not evil, except when possessed by the warlord’s spirit; rather he has ‘huge sad pits of … eyes’. But once the power of the belt is undone, the Green Man returns to himself, ‘the caverns of his eyes closed and the landscape of his face became gentle’, and he collapses back into the ground, once more a human-shaped mound on a scale that’s unrecognisable to the tiny human figures who might walk over him.

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F ig. 29  Original cover and 2006 reprint of The Giant under the Snow.

The cover of the book’s first edition shows a ship rather like the Anglo-Saxon vessel discovered in Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk in 1939. There’s also a sinister horned-helmeted figure and a blank-eyed black dog; the warmongers and enemy forces are the cover’s focus. The 2006 reprint, with somewhat updated contents, is, in contrast, almost entirely green. On a stylised pattern of leaves the image of the buckle is superimposed, emphasising the increased importance of the giant’s greenness over the nearly forty years between the first publication and the appearance of the revised edition. Gordon’s Green Man – now a much greener man – is a chalkland figure like the White and Red Horses we met in the Introduction, a powerful territorial marker who is wrenched away from his habitat on the Wiltshire downs and marched away to a barren heathland where he does not belong. His sleeping outline is out of place in the Norfolk sand and moraine; his literal dislocation at the invader’s

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command signals the warlord’s failure to engage with England except as a conquest, and the evil-doer is finally destroyed by the creature he seeks to control. England, with its rolling green hills, its crags, moors, pastures and valleys, cannot be so easily subjected to alien powers.

‘Learn from the green world what can be thy place’ The Green Man, then, very much like the Giants of the City that we met in Chapter 1, has become a representative of all that the modern world undervalues, excludes or lacks. He doesn’t do anything; he has no story, no legend, except those invented for him by modern writers, but his appearance, as a hybrid of man and plant, insists that humans are inextricably part of that natural world which we in the West are so keen to subjugate. We have relied on technology to guarantee us freedom from want, a progress originally predicated on the felling of trees to build houses and ships, to fuel workshops and factories and to turn the wild places into tame farmland. But progress has its limits, the Green Man seems to warn. His gaze is distant, focused on an elsewhere and perhaps another time when nature was a mightier force than culture, a time when the great forests of Britain were places of terror and danger. It’s hard to read the expression in his face; if he’s smiling it’s an enigmatic smile, hidden among the foliage. Neither kindly nor welcoming, his stare suggests a countryside that has become deeply alienated from the modern human. In some ways, of course, it’s a mistake to think that there ever was a pure, unaffected ‘nature’, one which lacked the presence of humans. For ‘nature’ only comes into existence when humans (like the wodwo) begin to define it as such, to understand it in ways which have always reflected the natural world through human culture. Boneland’s Palaeolithic protagonist, repeatedly making his exhausted way across the Cheshire plains to the strange chasm where he must dance the dances and perform the rites which make the seasons revolve, already frames the world

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F ig. 30  Phil Townsend’s Green Man sculpture, Hamsterley Forest.

in which he lives as one which he must act upon with his rituals. He already knows and tells himself stories about the land he trudges across and the skies in which he reads the constellations as celestial beasts. Yet the Green Man figure, even if he is largely a twentieth-century invention, is one which speaks loudly and clearly out of the landscapes where he’s intuited or situated. In Hamsterley Forest near Barnard Castle in County Durham, the artist Phil Townsend has carved a striking installation which embodies the Green Man in triple aspect: as Greenson, Greenman and Greenfather in a work called Green Man’s Life-Cycle. Townsend himself has commented, ‘The traditional depiction of the Green Man as a gloomy and rather forbidding figure did not seem conducive to promoting a love and understanding of nature, but rather generating fear and lack of regard for it.’ He

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carves his figures as smiling or quizzical, rather than affronted by humanity’s destructive and exploitative treatment of the planet. The Green Man of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries wants to be loved; he frames the natural world as an entity which is friendly and welcoming, which invites us to love and care for it in return. His is not a nature which should be feared; but nor should we seek to tame or master it. Townsend’s Green Man embodies the spirit of the English wild, symbolising the work of cherishing, protecting and expanding what remains of our woodlands. But he has relatives, like that dark, rage-filled spirit conjured up by Kingsley Amis, who are not smiling at the deforestation of our world, and the damage done to nature – beast and tree – in the name of progress. And like the giant who made the Wrekin, whom we met in Chapter 1, those other Green Men may once more rise to reshape this green world, as one without humans at all.

The End of the Journey Here our journey is nearing its end. We’ve seen how the folk traditions of Britain, its legends, myths and superstitions, are inscribed on its landscapes. They lie there still waiting to be read by those who want to unlock the stories which shaped the ways in which our ancestors thought about the places where they lived. These stories are not just old-wives’ tales, entertainment for an evening by the fireside; rather, they were ways of exploring large, urgent questions, allowing speculation and discussion about life, death, love, children, beasts, men and women, the lie of the land and its multifaceted history. We’ve seen how nineteenth-century authors, parsons and doctors, writers and landowners collected up the stories which form the basis for this book, travelling around their home localities to question the old folk who retained the stories in their memories, writing them down in dialect, or translating them from Welsh, Manx, Gaelic or Norn, the ancient languages of these islands. These collectors wrote them down, ordered them and classified them; and, as

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good Victorians, they made them fit for their own times, cleaning up the rude bits, glossing over the sex and toning down the smut. They added sentiment, invented detail and injected pathos and tenderness into their tales, and they captured a world of barns and stables, of dairymaids and kitchen hearths, of fishing cobles and limpet-gathering that was already disappearing in their own day. The country was changing; people were uprooting themselves from the villages and market towns to make their way to the cities where the tales and the landscapes where they were set risked being lost. The twentieth century brought the scientific study of folklore, placing it in a comparative context, and allowing the classification of these traditional tales into types and paradigms. Stories lose their immediacy, their sense of localness, once they are fixed as specimens of (for example) Tale Type 415. Folklorists can now compare stories and traditions widely across Europe and indeed the rest of the world; the Wild Man of English late medieval art is fleetingly glimpsed among the highest peaks of the Himalayas, in the elusive shape of the Yeti, and as the Bigfoot he leaves his huge footprints in the tall, rain-soaked forests of the Pacific Northwest. It’s writers, though, from the late nineteenth century onwards, who have brought the stories out of the dense and dusty collections where they were imprisoned, muddled up with now-outdated theories about vegetation deities, nature gods, Indo-European pantheons and folk memories of Neanderthals and dinosaur bones. Fiction authors have breathed new life into the creatures of the British supernatural, unleashing them into the imaginations of young and old alike, in fantasy novels, poetry and other kinds of genre fiction. So Neil Gaiman, in Neverwhere, and, more recently, Ben Aaronovitch, in his Rivers of London series, have created versions of London where spirits and demons live in the underground, where the rivers, even the lost rivers of London, have their multicultural gods who must be propitiated, and where the human who looks closely, who opens the hidden door, or who is initiated into magical

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procedures, becomes drawn into a world of terrible danger and astonishing allure. Hollywood too has played its part in bringing werewolves, house-elves, dragons and Green Men to fresh life. Films such as the Harry Potter series, the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, arthouse movies such as Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), cult films like An American Werewolf in London (1981), or even How to Train Your Dragon (2010), build their worlds from the raw stuff of the legends and folklore we’ve been thinking about in this book. Nevertheless, the ways in which these creatures mean, the significance of their stories and the ways that humans are imagined as interacting with them, has not changed so very much in that time. We still know to be cautious in eating the food of the Otherworld, to be very clear about the terms of the bargains we conclude with supernatural figures – and we’re still likely to end up regretting them. We also believe that perhaps, just perhaps, those we have loved and lost could be rescued from the clutches of those who have taken them, that death can be undone, and the restless dead be calmed or appeased. These stories still give us much to think about and to think with: ways of asking and answering questions about what it means to be human. The journeys we have made through this book have asked us to meditate on living in this land, as heirs to a past which still affects the ways in which Britishness is defined, experiencing and differentiating between love and desire, facing up to death and loss, interacting with the animals we live alongside, and acknowledging the sometimes beastly drives that lurk within us. And – finally – that quest continues, as we look forward into a future where new generations will listen to, learn from and reshape the stories of the Land of the Green Man.

Not e s

These notes give sources for the stories discussed in each chapter, and for quotation from works of modern literature. I have added the URLs where texts are available online. Since sources are discussed in broad terms, the numbers below, to the left of the page, relate to pages rather than specific quotations or references.

The Land Over Time 14 ‘How Far is it to Shrewsbury?’, Shropshire Folklore: A Sheaf of Gleanings, from the Collections of Georgina F. Jackson, ed. Charlotte Burne (Wakefield, 1973) 15 ‘Finn Mac Cooilley and the Buggane’, Sophia Morrison, Manx Fairytales (London, 1911); www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/fulltext/sm1911/p042.htm (Oxford, 1988) 18 Edward Haymes, The Saga of Thidrek of Bern (New York, 1988) 18 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde and ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, in Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.M. Benson (Oxford, 1988) 20 ‘Bran the Blessed’, The Mabinogion, trans. Sioned Davies (Oxford, 2008) 20 ‘Grendel’s Ancestry’, Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (London, 1999) 21 ‘Origin of the British Giants’, Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1966) 21 ‘The Giant of Carn Galva’, in William Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories of Cornwall (Penzance, 1870); http://sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/swc1/swc104.htm 23 ‘The Giant Bolster’, Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England, 3rd edn (London, 1881); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/prwe/prwe019.htm 23 Ywain and Gawain; Sir Percyvell of Gales; the Anturs of Arther, ed. Maldwyn Mills and Malcolm Andrew (London, 1992) 25 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Selfish Giant’, The Happy Prince and Other Stories, in The Complete Works, 3rd edn (London, 1994) 27 T.A. Shippey, Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge, 1976) 28 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Bernard O’Donoghue (London, 2006) 31 Guthlac A in translation at http://anglosaxonpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/guthlac‑a 33 Neil Gaiman, ‘The Monarch of the Glen’, Fragile Things (London, 2007) 34 ‘The Wooing of Etáin’, Early Irish Myths and Sagas, trans. Jeffrey Gantz (Harmondsworth, 1981) 35 ‘Poem of Völund’, The Poetic Edda, 2nd edn, trans. Carolyne Larrington (Oxford, 2014) 43 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 2013) 47 Malcolm Pryce, Aberystwyth Mon Amour (London, 2001)

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Lust & Love 51 ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ (Child 37), The English and Scottish Ballads, ed. F.J. Child (Boston, 1857), 4 vols; www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch037.htm 54 The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. James Murray (London, 1875); https://archive.org/details/romanceprophecie00thomuoft 58 ‘Tam Lin’ (Child 39); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch039.htm 60 Liz Lochhead, ‘Tam Lin’, The Grimm Sisters (London, 1981) 61 Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock (London, 1985) 63 ‘Sir Degaré’, Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, 1995); http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/laskaya-andsalisbury-middle-english-breton-lays 64 ‘The Elfin Knight’ (Child 2); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch002.htm 66 ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight (Child 3); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ ch004.htm 68 Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’, Goblin Market and Other Poems (Cambridge, 1862); www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174262 72 ‘The Adventure of Cherry of Zennor’, Hunt, Popular Romances; https://openlibrary. org/books/OL7133820M/Popular_romances_of_the_west_of_England 74 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Tale of Sir Thopas’, Riverside Chaucer 76 ‘Sir Launfal’, in Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Laskaya and Salisbury; http://d.lib. rochester.edu/teams/publication/laskaya-and-salisbury-middle-english-breton-lays 76 John Keats, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’; www.bartleby.com/126/55.html 78 ‘A Wife to Sandy Harg’, in R.H. Cromek, Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (Paisley, 1880); https://archive.org/details/remainsnithsdal00gillgoog 79 ‘The Miller’s Wife of Menstrie’, in Jennifer Westwood and Sophia Kingshill, The Lore of Scotland: a Guide to Scottish Legends (London, 2009), pp. 95–6 80 ‘Sir Orfeo’, in Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Laskaya and Salisbury; http://d.lib. rochester.edu/teams/publication/laskaya-and-salisbury-middle-english-breton-lays 83 Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (London, 2004)

Death & Loss 87 For a good collection of Black Shuck legends, see www.hiddenea.com/shuckland/ introduction.htm 88 ‘The Black Dog of Bungay’, Abraham Fleming, A Straunge and Terrible Wunder wrought very late in the Parish Church of Bongay .... the fourth of this August 1577, in a great tempest of violent raine, lightning, and thunder … With the appearance of a horrible-shaped Thing, sensibly perceived of the people then and there assembled (London, 1577) 91 Augustus Hare, In My Solitary Life: Being an Abridgement of the Last Three Volumes of the Story of My Life (London, 1953) 91 Black Dog video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiCrniLQGYc 92 ‘The Moddey Doo’, Morrison, Manx Fairytales; www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/fulltext/sm1911/index.htm 93 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (London and New York, 1902); www.literature.org/authors/doyle-arthur-conan/hound 97 ‘The Wisht Hounds’, Sabine Baring-Gould, A Book of the West, vol. 1: Devon (London, 1900); https://archive.org/details/bookofwest01bari 99 Walter Map, De nugis curialium (Courtiers’ Trifles), ed. and trans. M.R. James, Christopher Brookes and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983) 100 ‘Oisin’s Return’, Thomas Rolleston, Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (London,

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1911); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/mlcr/index.htm 102 ‘The Devil and his Dandy Dogs’, Hunt, Popular Romances; https://openlibrary. org/books/OL7133820M/Popular_romances_of_the_west_of_England 103 ‘Gabriel-Hounds’, F.K. Robinson, A Glossary of Words used in the Neighbourhood of Whitby (London, 1875), p. 74 104 ‘Herne the Hunter’, William Ainsworth, Windsor Castle (London, 1842; repr. 1853) 105 Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising (London, 1973), p. 197 106 ‘The Black Lad of MacCrimmon’, James McDougall, Folk Tales and Fairy Lore in Gaelic and English (Edinburgh, 1910), pp. 174–9; https://openlibrary.org/books/ OL24829667M/Folk_tales_and_fairy_lore_in_Gaelic_and_English 107 ‘The Banshee and Kavanagh’, Thomas Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (London, 1834); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/flat/flat17.htm 108 ‘The Death of Cú Chulainn’, Lady Augusta Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne (London, 1902); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/cuch/lgc23.htm 112 On the undead, see John Blair, ‘The Dangerous Dead in Early Medieval England’, Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. Stephen Baxter, Catherine Karkov et al. (Aldershot, 2009), pp. 539–59 115 ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’ (Child 79); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ ch079.htm 117 ‘The Unquiet Grave’ (Child 78); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch078. htm 117 ‘The Spectre Bridegroom’ (Aarne-Thompson Tale Type 365), Hunt, Popular Romances; https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7133820M/Popular_romances_of_ the_west_of_England

Gain & Lack 124 ‘Billy Biter and the Parkin’, Ruth L. Tongue, ‘Billy Biter and the Parkin: A Yorkshire Folk-Tale Recovered from a Somerset Stable’, Folklore 78 (1967): 137–41 126 ‘The Black Dog of Lyme Regis’, J.S. Udal, Dorsetshire Folklore (Hertford, 1922) 127 Geraldine McCaughrean, The Stones are Hatching (Oxford, 1999), pp. 133, 153 129 ‘The Lambton Worm’, Jacqueline Simpson, ‘Fifty Dragon Tales: An Analysis’, Folklore 89 (1978): 79–93 130 ‘Dragon of Knucker Hole’, Jennifer Westwood, Albion: A Guide to Legendary Britain (London, 1985), pp. 94–6 135 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: or, There and Back Again (London, 1937), ch. 14 136 ‘St Carantoc and the Dragon’, Katharine Briggs, A Sampler of British Folk-Tales (London, 2002), pp. 144–5 138 ‘Trenwith and the Knockers’, Hunt, Popular Romances; www.sacred-texts.com/ neu/eng/prwe/prwe032.htm 138 ‘The Fairy Woman of Sanntraigh’, J.F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands vol 2. (Paisley, 1890); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/pt2/pt210.htm 140 ‘Dunvuilg is on fire!’, Campbell, Popular Tales, vol. 2; www.sacred-texts.com/ neu/celt/pt2/pt212.htm 141 ‘Borrowing Oatmeal’, Campbell, Popular Tales, vol. 2; www.sacred-texts.com/ neu/celt/pt2/pt213.htm 141 ‘Tale from Harris’, Campbell, Popular Tales, vol. 2; www.sacred-texts.com/neu/ celt/pt2/pt217.htm 143 ‘Brownie of East Halton’, Peter Binnall, ‘A Brownie Legend from Lincolnshire’, Folklore 51 (1940): 219–22

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143 ‘The Fynodyree’, Morrison, Manx Fairy Tales; www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/fulltext/sm1911/p048.htm 144 ‘The Hob of Hart Hall’, J.C. Atkinson, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish: Reminiscences and Researches in Danby in Cleveland (London, 1891); https://openlibrary.org/books/ OL6997155M/Forty_years_in_a_moorland_parish 145 ‘Brownie of Cranshaws’, Robert Chambers, The Picture of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1827); Westwood, Albion, pp. 357–8 149 ‘Ay, we’re flittin’, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology (London, 1892); www. gutenberg.org/files/41006/41006-h/41006-h.htm 150 ‘Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach’, W. Jenkyn Thomas, The Welsh Fairy Book (London, 1907); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/wfb/wfb03.htm 154 A.S. Byatt, Possession (London, 1990) 155 ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawayne and Dame Ragnell’, Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo, 1995); http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/ publication/hahn-sir-gawain 159 ‘The Awntyrs off Arthur’, Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances; http://d.lib.rochester.edu/ teams/publication/hahn-sir-gawain

The Beast & the Human 164 ‘The Grateful Selkie’, Walter Traill Dennison, An Orcadian Sketchbook (Kirkwall, 1880) 166 ‘Ursilla’, Dennison, Orcadian Sketchbook; G.F. Black, County Folklore III: Examples of Printed Folklore Concerning the Orkney and Shetland Islands (London, 1903); https:// archive.org/stream/countyfolklore03folkuoft#page/n5/mode/2up 168 ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie’ (Child 113); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/ child/ch113.htm 169 ‘The Goodman of Wastness’, Black, County Folklore III; https://archive.org/stream/ countyfolklore03folkuoft#page/n5/mode/2up 172 ‘The Droll of the Mermaid’, Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories 173 ‘Mermaid of Gob Ny Ooyl, Morrison, Manx Fairy Tales; www.isle-of-man.com/ manxnotebook/fulltext/sm1911/p071.htm 174 ‘Laird of Lorntie’, Robert Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland (London, 1870), https://archive.org/details/popularrhymesofs00chamrich 175 ‘Clerk Colvill’ (Child 42); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch042.htm 176 Julia Blackburn, The Leper’s Companions (London, 1999), p. 63 178 ‘Oisín’s Mother’, Rolleston, Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race; www.sacred-texts. com/neu/celt/mlcr/mlcr06.htm 180 ‘Oisín and the Pig-Headed Princess’, Jeremiah Curtin, Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (Boston, 1890); www.pitt.edu/~dash/oisin.html 181 ‘The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh’, Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy-Tales (London, 1890); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/eft/eft34.htm 183 ‘Kemp Owyne’ (Child 34); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch034.htm 185 ‘The Wolf of Ossory’, The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, trans. Thomas Wright (London, 1894); https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7038028M/The_historical_works_of_Giraldus_Cambrensis 187 ‘Bisclavret’, The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Glyn Burgess and Keith Busby (London 2011); translated by Judith Shoaf at www.clas.ufl.edu/users/jshoaf/ Marie/bisclavret.pdf 189 ‘Arthur and Gorlagon’, http://ebooks.gutenberg.us/WorldeBookLibrary.com/ artgorlg.htm

notes

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189 ‘The Witch-Hare of Tavistock’, Westwood, Albion, p. 30 1 90 ‘The Witch-Hare of Yorkshire’, Atkinson, Forty Years; https://openlibrary.org/ books/OL6997155M/Forty_years_in_a_moorland_parish 191 ‘The Parliament of Hares’, http://justine-picardie.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/ parliament-of-hares-and-downpour-of.html; Briggs, Sampler, pp. 295–6 193 ‘The Water-Horse’, J.F. Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (Glasgow, 1900), pp. 206–15; https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13842132M/ Superstitions_of_the_Highlands_and_Islands_of_Scotland 195 ‘The Laird of Morphie’, George Douglas, Scottish Fairy and Folk-Tales (London, 1901); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/sfft/sfft55.htm 196 ‘The Kelpie of Conan’, Douglas, Scottish Fairy and Folk-Tales; www.sacred-texts. com/neu/celt/sfft/sfft54.htm 197 ‘The Nuckelavee’, Douglas, Scottish Fairy and Folk-Tales; www.sacred-texts.com/ neu/celt/sfft/sfft61.htm

Continuity & Change 200 ‘The Wizard of Alderley Edge’, William Axon, Cheshire Gleanings (Manchester, 1884); www.pitt.edu/~dash/sleep.html#alderley 201 ‘Potter Thompson’, Eliza Gutch, County Folk-Lore II: Examples of Printed Folklore Concerning the North Riding of Yorkshire, York and the Ainsty (London, 1901); www. pitt.edu/~dash/sleep.html#richmond 204 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Bernard O’Donoghue 204 Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (London, 1960); The Moon of Gomrath (London, 1963); Boneland (London, 2012); Thursbitch (London, 2003) 205 ‘The Green Children’, Edwin Hartland, English Fairy and Other Folk Tales (London, 1890); www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/efft/efft32.htm 212 ‘Midwife to the Fairies’, Westwood, Albion, pp. 160–1 213 ‘Sir Launfal’, in Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Laskaya and Salisbury; http://d.lib. rochester.edu/teams/publication/laskaya-and-salisbury-middle-english-breton-lays 213 ‘Midwife and Meal-Chest’, Briggs, Sampler, p. 164 213 ‘Eilian and the Tylwyth Teg’, John Rhys, Celtic-Folklore: Welsh and Manx, vol. I (Oxford, 1901), p. 213; www.sacred-texts.com/neu/cfwm/cf107.htm 215 ‘The Fairies’ Nurse in Nithsdale’, Keightley, Fairy Mythology; www.gutenberg. org/files/41006/41006-h/41006-h.htm#Page_127 216 ‘Brewery of Eggshells’, Croker, Fairy Legends; www.pitt.edu/~dash/britchange. html#Brewery 217 ‘Johnnie in the Cradle’, Briggs, Sampler, pp. 161–2; http://plover.net/~agarvin/ faerie/story/johnnie.html 218 Irvine Welsh, The Acid House (London, 1994) 219 ‘Sir Gowther’, in Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Laskaya and Salisbury; http://d.lib. rochester.edu/teams/publication/laskaya-and-salisbury-middle-english-breton-lays 224 ‘Wodwo’, Ted Hughes, Wodwo (London, 1967) 225 ‘The Green Man’, Brandon Centerwall, ‘The Name of the Green Man’, Folklore 108 (1997): 25–33; Julia, Lady Raglan, ‘The Green Man in Church Architecture’, Folklore 50 (1939): 45–57 226 ‘The Jack-in-the-Green’, Roy Judge, The Jack-in-the-Green 2nd edn (London, 2000) 228 Kingsley Amis, The Green Man (London, 1969), pp. 129, 198 229 John Gordon, The Giant under the Snow (London, 1968) 231 ‘The Green Man in Hamsterley Forest’, https://thecompanyofthegreenman. wordpress.com/category/green-man-miscellaneous

F u rt h e r R e a di ng

There are a lot of wonderful books about the folklore and traditions of the British Isles. Chief among them is the indispensable K.M. Briggs, Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language, 2 vols (London, 1970, 1971). Other vital resources include: Katharine M. Briggs, British Folk-Tales and Legends: A Sampler (London, 2002) Gordon Jarvie, Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan (London, 2008) Neil Philip, The Penguin Book of English Folktales (London, 1991) Neil Philip, The Penguin Book of Scottish Folktales (London, 1995) Jacqueline Simpson and Stephen Roud, eds, A Dictionary of Folklore (Oxford, 2003) Ruth Tongue, Forgotten Folk-Tales of the English Counties (London, 1970) Jennifer Westwood, Albion: A Guide to Legendary Britain (London, 1985) Jennifer Westwood and Sophia Kingshill, The Lore of Scotland: A Guide to Scottish Legends (London, 2009) Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys (London, 2005) If you can obtain access to the journal Folklore, you will find all sorts of extremely interesting articles in it. Useful websites include: http://mysteriousbritain.co.uk http://faeryfolklorist.blogspot.co.uk www.themodernantiquarian.com www.pitt.edu/~dash/folklinks.html www.folklore-society.com www.hiddenea.com www.orkneyjar.com/folklore A good number of the nineteenth-century folk-tale collections are now available online at sites such as Google Books. At www.sacred-texts.com: J.F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, vol. 2 (Paisley, 1890) F.J. Child, ed., The English and Scottish Ballads (Boston, 1857), 4 vols Thomas Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (London, 1834) George Douglas, Scottish Fairy and Folk-Tales (London, 1901) Lady Augusta Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne (London, 1902) Edwin Hartland, English Fairy and Other Folk Tales (London, 1890) Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England, 3rd edn (London, 1881)

further reading

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Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy-Tales (London, 1890) John Rhys, Celtic-Folklore: Welsh and Manx (Oxford,1901) Thomas Rolleston, Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (London, 1911) W. Jenkyn Thomas, The Welsh Fairy Book (London, 1907) At https://archive.org: J.C. Atkinson, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish: Reminiscences and Researches in Danby in Cleveland (London, 1891) Sabine Baring-Gould, A Book of the West, vol. 1: Devon (London, 1900) G.F. Black, County Folklore III: Examples of Printed Folklore Concerning the Orkney and Shetland Islands (London, 1903) J.F. Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (Glasgow, 1900) Robert Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland (London, 1870) R.H. Cromek, Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (Paisley, 1880) The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. James Murray (London, 1875) Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology (London, 1892) can be found at www.gutenberg.org Sophia Morrison, Manx Fairytales (London, 1911) is at www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/fulltext/sm1911/index.htm

I n de x

Aaronovitch, Ben  11, 235 Aberdyfi (Gwynedd)  47 Aberystwyth (Ceredigion)  47 Ailill, King of Ulster  34 Albina, Princess  21 Alderley Edge (Cheshire)  199, 204–9 Alfred, King  3, 4, 44 Alnwick (Northumberland)  113 Amis, Kingsley  8, 228–9, 230, 234 Anglo-Norman French, 21, 75, 187 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The  44, 98 Anglo-Saxons  3, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 37–40, 42, 43, 111, 112, 115, 230 Antrim (Ulster)  19, 49 apples  67, 72, 173–4 Argante 42 Arthur, King  28, 36, 42, 43, 51, 136, 155–7, 158–9, 162, 187–8, 201–3 ‘Arthur and Gorlagon’  187–8 Assipattle 127–8 Avalon  42, 43, 202 ‘The Awntyrs Off Arthur’  158 ‘Ay, we’re flittin’  149 ballads  53–67, 76, 85, 115–17, 130, 158, 167–8, 175, 183 Ballybeg (Co. Waterford, Eire) 107 Bamburgh (Northumberland)  181–3 banshees, Bean Sidhe  106–11, 122 Bargest, Barghest  90 Barnard Castle (Co. Durham)  233 barrow-wights 38 barrows  2, 38–9, 50, 72, 120, 132 Barrule Mooar (Isle of Man)  144 Baskervilles, Hound of  93–7 Bath, city of  26–7 Beadohild, Bödvild  39–40 Bell (giant)  17–18, 21, 30, 155

Belle Dame sans Merci, La  74, 76–7, 85, 191 Benandonner 19 Beowulf, Beowulf  20, 32–3, 132–4, 198 Billy Biter  124–6, 128 black dogs  12, 87–97, 106, 126–7, 190, 231 ‘Black-Eyed Dog’ (Nick Drake)  91 Black Lad MacCrimmon  106 Black Shuck  87–90, 93, 95, 122, 204 Blackburn, Julia  176 Blair, John  112–13 Blythburgh (Suffolk)  88–9 boggarts  127, 148, 150, 161, 196 bogie 149 Bolster (giant)  23 Bouley Bay (Jersey)  93 Bran Bendigeidfran  20 Brecon Beacons  14, 160 Brendan, Saint  44–5 Briggs, Katharine  214 Brittany  45, 75, 82, 155, 187 Brodgar, Ring of (Orkney)  142, 143, 163, 164 brownies  1, 12, 140, 143–8, 150, 161, 195, 205 Brutus  21, 26 Buckfastleigh (Devon)  95 Buggane, the  15, 19 Bungay (Suffolk)  88–90 Bury, Martha Jane  109–10 Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk)  189 Byatt, A.S.  45, 153–5 Byland Abbey (North Yorks)  113–14 Cabell, Richard  95–6 Cadbury Castle (Somerset)  132 Caerleon (Gwent)  201 Calf of Man, the  15–16, 164 Callanish Standing Stones (Lewis)  36, 37

index Camelot  28, 155, 222, 227, 228 Cantr’er, Cantref-y-Gwaelod  46–8 Carantoc, Saint  136–7, 189 Carhampton (Somerset)  136–7 Carlisle (Cumbria)  155–6, 158 Carn Galva, Giant of  21–2, 23, 24, 25 Carterhaugh (Borders)  58, 60 cats, black cats  124, 129, 189, 207 Cathbad the Druid  108 caves  19, 51, 99, 138, 149, 154, 184, 188, 199, 201, 204, 205, 208, 210, 213–14 Cerne Abbas, Giant of (Dorset)  16 Cernunnos, the Horned God  24, 105 changelings 215–19 Chaucer, Geoffrey  18, 74, 89, 103, 158 Cherry of Zennor  72–4, 78, 81, 213, 214 Chester  26, 225 Chester-le-Street (Co. Durham)  129 Childe Wynd  181–3 Chrétien de Troyes  23–4 Clarke, Susanna  83–4 Clerk Colvill  175 Colgrevance, Sir  23 Collen, Saint  68 Columba, Saint  198 Congleton (Derbys)  204 Conon, River (Ross)  196–7 Cooper, Susan  11, 41, 46–7, 105–6, 207 Corineus 21 Cornish Ogre, the  25 County Cork (Eire)  107 County Leinster (Eire)  180 Cranshaws, brownie of  145–6, 161 Crowland (Lincs) 31 Cú Chulainn, Cuchulainn 108–9 Cwn Annwn  98 Dagdae, the  34–5 Dahut 45–6 Dando, Dandy Dogs  102–3 Dark Druid of the Sidhe (Fear Doriche)  178 Darkness, The (Suffolk band)  88, 90 Dartmoor (Devon)  93–4, 96, 97, 103, 122 Darwen (Lancs)  109–10 deer  98, 104, 155, 166, 177–9, 228 Degaré, Sir, Sir Degaré  63–4, 81 demons  21, 30–2, 45, 68, 90, 101, 104, 115, 36, 196, 219–21, 235 deor  39, 40 Devil, the  92, 93, 102–3, 204, 220–1, 27 Devil Dog of Bouley, the (Le Tchien) 93 Dobby the House-Elf  147–8 dogs, hounds  1, 4, 12, 54, 87–100, 102–4, 105–7, 108, 122, 126–7, 129, 140, 172, 178, 190–1, 220, 231

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Douglas, Mary  14 Dove Isabel  184–5 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan  93–6 dragons  2–3, 44, 124–37, 160–2, 163, 181–3, 184, 189, 223, 225, 230, 236 Drake, Nick  91 Drakelow (Derbys) 112–13, 114–15 ‘Droll of the Mermaid’, the  172–3 druids  47, 108, 178–80 Dunster (Somerset)  136 Durham 176–7 dwarfs  18, 99–100, 135, 205, 228 East Halton (Lincs)  143–4, 146, 161 Edmund, king  189, 222 Eildon Hills (Borders)  51–4, 58, 201 elf-knights, ‘The Elfin-Knight’  55, 62, 63–7, 78, 168 Elf-Queen, see Fairy Queen elves, álfar  12, 42–3, 120, 147–8, 161, 203, 205, 207, 236 Ents  27, 228 Ercall, the (Shrops)  14 Étain  34, 43 Fafnir 133–4 fairies  12, 42, 55–63, 68, 72–86, 100, 137–42, 150–5, 160, 209–11, 212–18, 221 Fairy King, the  68, 81, 86, 100 fairy mounds  43, 160 Fairy Queen, Elf-Queen, 55, 56–63, 74–6, 78, 85, 86 Farndale (N. Yorks)  149 fens 31–3 Fetlar (Shetland)  36 Fianna, the  19, 100–1, 177–8, 180, 202 Filey (N. Yorks)  124–6, 130, 160 Fingal’s Cave (Staffa, Hebrides)  19 Finn (Giant), Finn mac Cool, Finn mac Cumhaill  19–20, 28, 46, 100, 177–9, 180, 202 fish, fishing  48–9, 78, 92, 129, 160, 161, 164–5, 170, 173, 176, 189, 235 fords  95, 108, 111, 196 forests, greenwood  25, 40, 48, 58, 60, 66, 79, 91, 85, 100, 104–6, 117, 152, 155, 160, 180, 187, 189, 196, 204, 222, 227–8, 232–4 Frazer, Sir James  62 Freeborough Hill (Cleveland)  201 fruit  52, 58, 62, 67–72, 73, 74, 85, 142, 174 Fúamnach 34 Fynodyree, the (Isle of Man)  143

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Gabriel Hounds, Gabble-Ratchets  98, 103 Gaiman, Neil  10–11, 32–3, 68, 235 Galloway  159, 176 Garner, Alan  11, 42, 105, 204–9 Gawain, Sir  23, 28, 155–8, 159, 204, 208, 222–3, 224–5, 227 ‘Gawain and Ragnell’  155–8, 159 Geoffrey of Monmouth  21, 28, 36, 202 George, Saint  3, 137 Gerald of Wales  186 ghosts  109–10, 114, 121, 127, 158, 159, 228, 229 giants  1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 14–30, 32, 35, 36–7, 46, 49, 50, 75, 201, 223, 224, 228–31, 232, 234 Giant’s Causeway, the (Co. Antrim, Ulster)  15, 19 Giants’ Dance, Giants’ Ring  36–7 Glaisdale (N. Yorks)  144 Glastonbury Tor (Somerset)  68, 203 goats  23, 98–9, 151 Gob Ny Ooyl (Isle of Man)  173–4 ‘Goblin Market’  68–72, 78 goblins  1, 68–72, 85, 86, 143, 207 Goemagog, Gog  21, 28–30, 49 Gogmagog Hills (Cambs)  21 Goodfellow, Robin  144 Goodman of Wastness, the  169–70 Gordon, John  16, 229–32 Gorlagon, king  187–8 Gosling, David  6 Gowther, Sir Gowther 219–21 Gradlon  45, 46 Grahame, Kenneth  10 Great Silkie, the  167–9 Green Children, the  209–11 Green Man, the  225–34, 226 ‘Green Man’s Life-Cycle’  233–4 Grendel  20, 24, 32–3, 49, 208 Grendel’s Mother  20, 32–3, 49, 198 Grims  90, 96–7 Gromer Somer Joure, Sir  155–8 Gruagach (Skye)  106–7 Guildhall, the (London)  28–9 Guthlac, Saint, Guthlac A, Guthlac B 31–3 Gwyddno 46 Gwyn 68 Haltadans (Fetlar, Shetland)  36, 37 hares  143–4, 166, 186, 189–93 Harg, Alexander  78–9 Harris (Outer Hebrides)  141–2 Harry Potter  11, 80, 96, 120, 121, 147–8, 236 Hart Hall (N. Yorks)  144–5

Haverhill church (Suffolk)  225 hell  31, 52, 54, 57, 59, 62, 67, 87, 95, 101, 102, 120, 161, 216 Hellekin 101 Herla, King  99–101 Herne the Hunter  102, 104–6 hidden folk, hidden people  34, 37, 72, 82, 138, 142 Hob Hole (N. Yorks)  149–50, 154 hobs  10, 143–5, 148–50, 154, 205 hobbits  9, 38, 120, 133, 150, 236 Hobthrush (Farndale, N. Yorks)  149 Hogboon (Orkney)  142–3 Holmes, Sherlock  93–5, 96 horses 1–4, 5, 7, 38, 40–1, 46, 52, 56, 59, 67, 76, 82, 92, 102, 119, 131–2, 151, 152, 156, 197, 198, 199, 200–1, 207, 227; see also water-horses Hughes, Ted  224 Hughes, Thomas  2 Inglewood Forest (Cumbria)  155, 156, 158, 162 ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’  23 Jack-in-the-Green 226 Jenny Greenteeth  196, 198 Jersey 93 ‘Johnnie in the Cradle’  217, 219 Johnstone, Matthew  91 Jones, Diana Wynne  10, 61–3 Judge, Roy  226 Keats, John  76–8 kelpies  1, 12, 195–9 Kemp Owyne, ‘Kemp Owyne’  183–4 Kipling, Rudyard  1, 8, 40 Kitterland (Isle of Man)  15, 164 knockers  10, 138, 160 Knucker Hole (W. Sussex)  130–2, 198 ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’  66–7 ‘Laidly Worm’  177, 181–2 Lakeman, Seth  191 Lambton (Co. Durham), Lambton Worm 128–9 Land’s End (Cornwall)  117, 122 Landseer, Sir Edwin  33 Lang, Andrew  28 Launfal, Sir, Sir Launfal  76, 213 Layamon 42 Leeds  90, 97, 150, 224 Lewis, C.S.  8, 10, 11, 29, 30 Lewis (Outer Hebrides)  36 Liverpool  10, 29

index Lizard Point (Cornwall)  172 Lleu 207 Llyn y Fan Fach, lady of Llyn y Fan Fach 150–3 Loathly Lady  24, 57, 158, 184 Loch Ness monster  198 Lochhead, Liz  60–1, 63 London  7, 10, 28, 29, 49, 84, 95, 159, 235, 236 Long Compton (Oxon)  5, 7 Lorntie, laird of  174–5 Ludchurch (Staffs)  204, 207 Lyminster (W. Sussex)  130–1 Lyonesse, lost land of  48–9 Mab, Queen  56 Mabinogi  20, 207 McCaughrean, Geraldine  127–8 Macdonald, George  69 Magog  21, 28–30, 49 Malory, Sir Thomas  187, 202 Manchester 10 Mansie Meur (Magnus Muir)  164–5 Map, Walter  99, 101 Mare, Walter de la  48–50 Masefield, John  105 Mauthe Doog, Moddy Doo  92–3 May, May-Day  23, 89, 226–7 Meath (Eire)  185–6 Mélusine  76, 153–5 Menstrie (Clackmannanshire)  79 Meririd  46, 49 Merlin  36, 202, 203, 220, 221 mermaids  127, 170, 172–7, 184, 211 Mider  34–5, 43 ‘Midwife to the Fairies’  56, 212–14 miners  137–8, 160 Miyazaki, Hayao  67–8 Mobberley (Cheshire)  200–1, 204 More of More Hall  129–30 Morgan le Fay, Morgen  202, 203, 208 Morphie (Aberdeenshire)  195, 198 Morrígan, goddess of battle  108, 111, 205, 207–8 Mount’s Bay (Cornwall)  48 Mulgrave (N. Yorks)  17 Myddfai, the Physicians of  152, 162 New Abbey (Dumfries)  78 Niall 157 Niamh of the Golden Hair  179 nicors  132, 198 Nidhad, Nidud, king 39–40 Nine Children, tale of (Highlands)  194–5 Nithsdale (Dumfries)  215

247

Norwich 230 Nuckelavee, the  197 Oberon, fairy-king  100 Odin, Wotan  99, 205 ogres  15, 25, 32, 158, 208 Oisín  100–1, 177–80  Orfeo, Sir Orfeo  80–2, 86 Ossory (Ulster)  185–6 outlaws  19, 100, 222 Padfoot  10, 90, 97 Patrick, Saint  100 Peel Castle (Isle of Man)  92, 127 Peg Powler  196 Peterborough, Peterborough Chronicle (Cambs) 98–9  Picardie, Justine  191 Plymouth, Plymouth Hoe (Devon)  21, 118 Port Glasgow (Renfrewshire)  175–6 Pryce, Malcolm  47 Puck  8, 12, 40, 56 Pullman, Philip  10 Quantock Hills (Somerset)  91 Raglan, Lady Julia  226–7 Ragnell, Dame  155–9 Ralph of Coggeshall  209–11 Red Giant, Red Man, Red Etin  19, 28, 46 Red Horse, Vale of (Warwicks)  4, 231 Regin, the smith  133–4 revenants  109, 112–15 Richmond Castle (N. Yorks) Robin Hood  222, 226 Rollright Stones, the (Oxon)  4–5, 7, 22, 36 Rossetti, Christina  68–72 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  68, 69, 77 Rowling, J. K.  10, 24, 80, 96–7, 120, 148 Ruin, The 26–7 Runswick Bay (N. Yorks)  149 Sackville, Amy  171–2 Sadb 178–9 Saga of Ragnar Shaggy-Breeches 15 Saga of Thidrek of Bern 17–18 Sanday (Orkney)  164–5 Sanntraigh, Sandray (Outer Hebrides) 138–40 Sarn Borth, petrified forest of  47–8 ‘Scarborough Fair’  65 Scott, Andy  199 Scott, Sir Walter  53 Sea Mither, the  198 seal, seals, selkies  138, 163–72, 184, 194

248

The Land of the Green Man

Seithennin  46, 49 Severn, River  14, 16, 36, 136 Shellycoat, the  196 ‘The Shirts of Bog-Cotton’  183 Shrewsbury (Shrops)  14, 26 Shropshire Worm  132 Sidhe  34, 35, 43, 82, 109, 177, 178 Siegfried, Sigurd  133–4, 135, 203 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  28, 204, 208, 222–3, 224–5, 227 Skye, Isle of (Inner Hebrides) 106, 202 sleepers  59, 193–4, 200–5 smiths  18, 20, 39–42, 44, 50, 118–19, 133, 139 sovereignty  24, 155–8, 159, 181 ‘Spectre Bridegroom’  117–20 St Agnes (Cornwall)  23 St Ives (Cornwall)  138 Stonehenge  2, 16, 36–7, 38, 203 Stoor Worm, Mester  127–8 Stowmarket (Suffolk)  212 Sutton Hoo (Suffolk)  231 swan-maidens 170–1

vampires  12, 112–14 Vargas, Fred  102

Wade, Vadi  17–18, 21, 25, 30, 39, 155, 201 Wallace, William ‘Braveheart’  53 Wallinger, Mark  199 Wanderer, The 27 Washer at the Ford (Bean Nighe)  107–9, 111 water-horses  193–6, 198, 199 Wayland, Welund, Weland, Velent  2, 18, 38, 39–42, 50 Wayland’s Smithy (Oxon)  2, 38 Welsh, Irvine  218–19 werewolves  10, 12, 166, 186–9, 236 Whitby (N. Yorks)  17–18, 49, 103, 149, 154, 201 White Horses, of Uffington, Sutton Bank, Ebbsfleet  1–4, 7, 38, 40, 199 White Ladies  12, 106, 109–10; see also banshees, Bean Sidhe Widsith, Widsith  17 ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’  115–17, 120 Wild Hunt, the  97–106, 122, 207 Taliesin 202 Wild Men  10, 159, 221–5, 235 Tam Lin  58–63, 65, 74, 76, 82, 86, 213 Wilde, Oscar  25–6 Tennyson, Alfred Lord  48 William of Newburgh  113, 115, 210 Thomas, Edward  4 Thomas of Erceldoune, Thomas the Rhymer, Williams, Kit  192–3 ‘True Thomas’  51–8, 59, 61–3, 65, 73, 74, Wilmington, Long Man of (E. Sussex) 16 Windsor Great Park  104–5 80, 83, 85, 142, 201 Wisht Hounds, the  93, 97–8, 103 Thompson, Potter  201 Witch of Rollright, the  5–7 Tir na n’Og  179–80 witches  5–7, 22, 53, 80, 82, 129, 144, 166, Tiree (Inner Hebrides)  194–5 173, 181–3, 186, 189–93, 205 Tolkien, J.R.R .  8, 9, 10, 11, 24, 27, 28, 38, wizards  25, 27, 47, 104, 109, 121, 148, 161, 42–3, 120, 133–5, 150, 224, 228, 229 204, 205, 230 Tolleshunt D’Arcy (Essex)  87 wodwoses  223–25, 232 Townsend, Phil  233–4 wolves  185–9, 205, 207, 222 treasure  1, 20, 39, 121, 126–7, 132–5, 143, ‘The Wooing of Étain’  34–5 160, 183, 192, 200 trees  1, 25, 51, 55, 59, 66, 80, 81, 103, 105, Woolpit (Suffolk)  209–10 Wrekin, the (Shrops)  14–15, 16, 26, 109, 116, 174, 188, 201, 203, 220, 228, 234 230, 234 Wulfver, the  188–9 trolls  1, 12, 37 Wygar the elf-smith  42 trows  12, 37, 106 Tuatha Dé Danaan  43 Yell Hounds  98, 105 Tylwyth Teg, Welsh fairies  213–14 Yeth Hound  93 Ys 45–6 Uig (Lewis, Outer Hebrides)  36 Yvain, Ywain and Gawain, Ywain  23, 223 ‘The Unquiet Grave’  116–17 Ursilla (Orkney)  166–7 Zennor (Cornwall)  22, 72, 78, 81, 177, 213, 214 Valentine and Orson 223–4 zombies  112, 114 valkyries  111, 203