FIG. 26 Covers of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, The Owl Service and Elidor.
A 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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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 Firefrost, the Weirdstone, can dispel the wolf of eternal winter and put the world to rights again.
FIG. 26 Covers of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, The Owl Service and Elidor.
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 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 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.
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, 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.
FIG. 27 Woolpit village sign.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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, 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 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.
FIG. 28 A changeling. © Andy Paciorek, from the book Strange Lands: A Field Guide to the Celtic Otherworld.
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 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 well-meant ill-treatment. Changeling tales reach down into parents’ 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 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.
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]’. 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 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 priest-confessor, 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.
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. 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:
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 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 = ‘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 Ivie-leaves … 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
FIG. 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 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.
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 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, Green-man and Greenfather in a work called Green Man’s Life-Cycle.
FIG. 30 Phil Townsend’s Green Man sculpture, Hamsterley Forest.
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 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 twenty-first 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.
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 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 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.
