FIG. 16 More of More Hall and the Dragon of Wantley, a chapbook illustration.
BILLY 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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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!’
FIG. 16 More of More Hall and the Dragon of Wantley, a chapbook illustration.
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 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.
‘Pudden?’ says Knucker. ‘What be that?’
‘Just you try’, says Jim.
FIG. 17 The Wantley Dragon, by Dave Pickersgill.
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 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 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.
FIG. 18 Fafnir the Dragon by Arthur Rackham (1911).
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 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 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.
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, 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.
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 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 ‘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 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.
FIG. 19 The ruined chimneys of the Rosewall and Ransom United Mines.
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 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.
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.
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 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. ‘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 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.
FIG. 20 A brownie or house-elf, by John D. Batten (1890).
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:
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 hard-pressed 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!
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 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.
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 (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! 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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 supernatural-seeming 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 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 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.
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 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 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?
