Fairies and Folklore and Andrew Lang by Catherine Hokin

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales.” ~ Albert Einstein

I've been spending a lot of time immersed in fairy stories and folk lore lately. Partly because I've been writing some rather dark ones (see January's Writers' Forum and the current Mslexia, apologies for the shamelss plug) and partly because I've been reading fellow History Girl Anna Mazzola's rather wonderful The Story Keeper (out in July, no apologies for the plug).

 The Story Teller by Arthur Rackham

There is very little difference in general terms between fairy and folk tales. Although the former is likely to include a higher degree of magic or fantasy, there is a lot of crossover and both owe their origins to an oral tradition which is 'popular' in the sense that they derive not from an elite but from the masses, the Volk. Literary fashions come and go but the fascination with fairy tales is a constant. They act both as a nostalgic link to our, perhaps romanticised and certainly mythologised, past and also live very much in the present, providing a form of entertainment which can act as a common vehicle for shared fears, values and dilemmas. Pyschologist Bruno Brettelheim describes them as carrying important messages to the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious mind or, as GK Chesterton rather more whimsically puts it: Fairytales are more than true, not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. It is that message, with its important caveat can be not will be, which keeps them relevant. The use of fear and violence in fairy stories has always been contentious, perhaps because of a refusal to accept that sweet-little children like dark things. The Victorians didn't believe the red-in-tooth-and claw scenarios or malevolent fairies of earlier incarnations were suitable for children, and don't get me started on the horrors perpetrated by Disney's prettifying. Having always been of the opinion that a bit of fear is good for the rug-rats (and having spent a lot of my own childhood as an unsupervised reader) mine grew up with the un-sanitised versions which probably made them responsible for a lot of wide-eyes among their friends.

 Company of Wolves - a good time to go home

Every culture has its own tales and its own collecting history. Historian Marina Warner has described this as a map with two prominent landmarks: Charles Perrault’s
Tales of Olden Times (1697) which included Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, and the Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales (1812–57). This map then widens to include The Tales of the Thousand and One Nights in the east, Hans Christian Anderson in Denmark; Alexander Afanasyev in Russia; Walter Scott collecting the rich cultural heritage of Scotland and women such as Fannie Hardy Eckstorm in America who focused particularly on ballads. Perrault himself was quite clear on the moral element of his stories, particularly the warning about predatory men in Little Red Riding Hood: I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous! A sentiment echoed in Angela Carter's updated version of the story, Company of Wolves, to never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle. The original Ms Red jumped into bed and was, of course, eaten.

 The Crown Returns to the Queen
of the Fishes. HJ Ford. The
Orange Fairy Book

I must have dipped in and out of all the above collections at some point but my favourite set of books has never changed: Andrew Lang's Fairy Books of Many Colours. Lang (1844-1912) was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic and collector of fairy tales whose first book on the subject, The Blue Fairy Book, was published in 1889. The full set comprises 25 books published between 1889-1913, of which the 12 beautifully illustrated coloured books (named for their covers) are probably the most well known. The stories come not just from Scotland and Europe (which were already familiar to me) but from all over the world, including America, Persia, Australia and China, adding a further layer of magic for a child growing up in the isolation that was 1960s and 1970s Cumbria. I lived in those books for years. The stories were unfiltered and unprettied - in publishing them Lang was fighting the traditionalists of the day who, in the words of writer and academic Roger Lancelyn Green, judged the tales' unreality, brutality, and escapism to be harmful for young readers, while holding that such stories were beneath the serious consideration of those of mature age. The popularity of the collections, however, completely changed this perception and spawned a raft of imitators.

 Hansel & Gretel
HJ Ford

Was I frightened by the parade of monsters and murderers? Yes, and so were my children and it did us no harm. Fairy stories gave the monsters that live in childhood fears a name and make us realise that everyone fears the same things - the nameless predator, the lurking disaster. As Mary Wakefield of The Spectator put it a few years ago and the original Little Red Riding Hood rather harshly learned: in folk tales, but only rarely in modern children’s tales, there’s a strong feeling that the hero or heroine really could screw up; that they must stay on their mettle to survive. Good intentions are no excuse in fairyland...if you ignore sound advice...you end up as wolf bait...In Disney-land, a heroine need not be on her guard, because the good guy always wins. And we all know how that turned out.

Fairy stories provide some valuable real-life lessons with a bit of entertainment to sweeten the message and they do it so well because they tap into our deepest darkest dreads. It's no surprise that many of the countries trying to re-introduce wolves face objections from local communities which the worthies describe as irrational - or why we're all terrified of the robot dogs currently featured everywhere, it's in our folklore DNA.  Fairy stories are still the first shared experience most of us have of story-telling. We will continue to read and pass them on, they will continue to evolve. We live these days in strange, dark times when we need to remember our commonalities not our differences. Perhaps the stories we should tell on these never-ending winter nights need less pitchforks pointed at those we shouldn't be afraid of and a lot more banding together to beat the big bad wolf still hiding in plain sight.

In praise of Henry Justice Ford by Adèle Geras

This below is the cover of my most precious book. It's TALES OF TROY by Andrew Lang, whom older readers may remember as the author of the coloured Fairy Books. It's a school text book, one of the Longman's Class Books of English Literature. It was published in 1915 which means that when Miss Cooke gave it to me in Ibadan, Nigeria in 1951 it was already an old book, possibly one of Miss Cooke's own childhood favourites.

It's important to me because it answers, at least for three of my own novels, the question all writers are asked: Where do you get your ideas from?  This book, and reading it and learning a great many pages of it by heart by the time I was eight years old, coloured my view of Ancient Greece and made sure that those stories, and especially the tale of Troy and the war fought over Helen, permeated my childhood and have been favourites of mine ever since. 

But the subject of this post is Henry  Justice Ford. If you go to Wikipedia, there's a page for him but you have to hunt about a bit.  He was born in 1860  and died in 1941. He married Emily Amelia Hoff, who was thirty-five years younger than he was.  There were several famous cricketers in his family. He illustrated Andrew Lang's Coloured Fairy books and you can see some of those pictures in Wikipedia Commons under the link I've put at the end of this post. 

The pictures I've photographed all come from Tales of Troy. These images are so firmly branded on my imagination that I see all my own  characters in my mind as though they've been depicted by H. J. Ford. The features, the clothes, the landscapes...everything about these drawings seem to me a perfect representation of the things they're describing. For instance, Helen, below, will always look just like this to me.

The rather ornate, decorative, style which is marked by the influence of the Pre Raphaelites and also of the Arts and Crafts movement and William Morris, is one I find very beautiful. I think these illustrations have enough in them of menace and darkness to avoid the charge of being too pretty. The women in them are very lovely. Oenone has a breast almost showing (that's the picture with  Paris stretched out on the ground at her feet) even though this is a school text book. 

The text, of which I reproduce a sample (above) is as florid as you might expect. I thought this was completely wonderful when I was seven and I still love it, though I recognise the over the top elements of it as well.

Look at the clothes. I'm sure it's these images which have formed my taste for draped, flowing fabrics; maybe for fabrics in general. H.J. Ford is very interested in what people are wearing and I am, too. The men have splendid helmets and breastplates and the women have dresses that might as well be made of water for all the cover they give their wearers. There's a strong element of the erotic in these depictions of the Ancient World and I am surprised that Messrs Longman and co weren't aware of it. You may be sure that the pre - Great War young men and women who studied from this book will have pored over it with renewed enthusiasm for the Classics. Those thighs! Those arms! That uncovered breast....and the hair. Everywhere there is hair falling over shoulders and curling on skin. 

I feel that H. J. Ford has not had the notice he should have had.  I think it's time there was a revival of interest in his art. I live in hope that someone, somewhere (Tristram Hunt, at the V&A, are you a follower of the History Girls?) might mount some kind of exhibition of his work. I, for one, would love to see him hailed as a giant of illustration.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Henry_Justice_Ford

How it all began...by Adèle Geras

When I was seven years old, in 1951, this is what I was reading. There wasn't much of anything else around at the time. I didn't come to Enid Blyton properly till I was about eight, in North Borneo. While I lived in Nigeria, from 1950 - 1952 or early 1953, I mostly read OUR ISLAND STORY (and I've written about this experience on this blog in the past. Here is the link: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/blog-post.html and a book called TALES OF TROY by Andrew Lang. It's not the kind of thing you'd think of giving a seven-year-old to read nowadays but I adored it and could recite long passages from the book off by heart. I read it all the time, eagerly, avidly, and I fell in love from that moment with the story of the Trojan War.

On every single recto page are the words: ULYSSES, SACKER OF CITIES, almost as though this were a kind of subtitle to the legend on the verso pages: TALES OF TROY. This obviously planted something in my mind because I've always taken the side of the Trojans in the war that lasted so many years and that ended with the most famous city destruction of them all, though there have been a few contenders more recently for this dubious honour.

One of the chief attractions of this book is the illustrations. I'm putting up two examples. This one because I used to love declaiming the words that accompany the drawing of the mortally-wounded Paris, throwing himself on Oenone's mercy. I'm going to quote the words I loved so much, just because I still love them. "Lady, despise me not and hate me not, for my pain is more than I can bear. Truly it was by no will of mine that I left you lonely here, for the Fates that no man may escape led me to Helen. Would that I had died in your arms before I saw her face! But now I beseech you in the name of the Gods, and for the memory of our love, that you will have pity on me and heal my hurt and not refuse your grace and let me die here at your feet."
Oenone's expression conveys perfectly what she's feeling: a mixture of still-burning love, pity for a wounded man and a good bit of "I'm not going to be tricked into listening to your blandishments, you bastard!"

The picture of Helen on the walls of Troy, pointing something out to Priam, was my favourite drawing of all. I think it's the dress. I just longed to own one precisely like that and it's still my benchmark for all 'classical' garments.

So this is where my interest in all things classical began. I went on to read Virgil's Aenied Book 2 and then Book 4 while at school. I didn't study Ancient Greek but read translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I read, as student of French, LA GUERRE DE TROIE N'AURA PAS LIEU by Jean Anouilh. And in the fullness of time I wrote my own novel, TROY, which is the story of five normal teenagers who just happened to have grown up during the time that their city was besieged by Ulysses. And we know who he was, do we not? The Sacker of Cities. It's a story that's endured for thousands of years and every time someone retells it, it lives again. I am proud to have taken my place in a long line of writers who've been inspired by this tale.

P.S. TROY is out of print, but probably findable in a library near you.

The Ghost That Spoke Gaelic - by Katherine Langrish

'An Incident at the Battle of Culloden' by David Morier, oil on canvas.

It was 1749, just four years after the failed Jacobite rising, and the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the clans at the Battle of Culloden. Reprisals had been severe; the wearing of kilt and tartan was forbidden; the rising was still fresh and sore in everyone’s minds and by no means necessarily still over. Messages (and money) flew between the Prince in exile and his loyal supporter Cluny MacPherson, in hiding on Ben Alder.

Into this volatile, still smouldering arena marched, in summer of 1749, the newly married – and, it has to be said, completely and complacently naïve – Sergeant Arthur Davies of ‘Guise’s Regiment’, in charge of a patrol of eight private soldiers, heading over the mountains from Aberdeen to Dunrach in Braemar, for no more interesting purpose than to keep a general eye on the countryside.

This kind of countryside...

Sergeant Davies was a fine figure of a man, but not at all sensibly dressed considering what he was about. He carried on him a green silk purse containing fifteen and a half guineas which he had saved; he wore a silver watch and two gold rings. There were silver buckles on his brogues, two dozen silver buttons on his striped ‘lute string’ waistcoat; he had a silk ribbon to tie his hair, and a silver-laced hat. Thus attired he said goodbye to his wife, who never saw him again, and set off – encountering on the way one John Growar, in Glenclunie, whom he told off for carrying a tartan coat. And shortly after this, the over-confident Sergeant left his men and went off alone over the hill, to try and shoot a stag.

And ‘vanished as if the fairies had taken him’. His men and his captain searched for four days, while rumours ran wild about the countryside that Davies had been killed by Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald. But no body was found…

Until, in June 1750, a shepherd called Alexander MacPherson came to visit Donald Farquharson, the son of the man with whom Sergeant Davies had been lodging before his death. MacPherson, who was living in a shepherd’s hut or shieling up on the hills, complained that he ‘was greatly troubled by the ghost of Sergeant Davies’ who had appeared to him as a man dressed in blue and shown MacPherson where his bones lay. The ghost had also named and denounced his murderers – in fluent Gaelic, of which in life, Sergeant Davies had of course not spoken a word… But Farquharson accompanied MacPherson, and the bones were duly found in a peat-moss, about half a mile from the road the patrol had used, minus silver buckles and articles of value. The two men buried the bones on the spot where they lay, and kept quiet about it.

But of course the story spread. Nevertheless it was not till three years later, in 1753, that Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald were arrested for the Sergeant’s murder on the testimony of his ghost. At the trial Isobel MacHardie who had shared shepherd MacPherson’s shieling during the summer of the ghost, swore that ‘she saw something naked come in at the door which frighted her so much she drew the clothes over her head. That when it appeared, it came in a bowing posture, and that next morning she asked MacPherson what it was, and he replied not to be afeared, it would not trouble them any more.’

Apart from the ghostly testimony, there was plenty of circumstantial evidence to convict the murderers. Clerk’s wife had been seen wearing Davies’ ring; after the murder Clerk had become suddenly rich. And a number of the Camerons later claimed to have witnessed the murder itself, at sunset, from a hollow on top of the hill: they never volunteered an explanation of what they themselves had been doing up there – doubtless engaged in the illicit business of smuggling gold from Cluny to the Prince.

Things looked black for the accused murderers. Yet a jury of Edinburgh tradesmen, moved by the sarcastic jokes of the defence, acquitted the prisoners. They could not take the ghost story seriously - not necessarily because it was a ghost: though scepticism was on the rise, ordinary people were still superstitious: the last Scottish prosecution for witchcraft had been only in 1727.  But they could not believe in a ghost which had managed to learn Gaelic.

Andrew Lang, in whose ‘Book of Dreams and Ghosts’ I came across this tale, adds a postscript sent to him by a friend: the words of an old lady, ‘a native of Braemar’, who ‘left the district when about twenty years old and who has never been back’. Lang’s friend had asked her whether she had ever heard anything about the Sergeant’s murder, and when she denied it, he told her the story as it was known to him. When he had finished she broke out:

“That isn’t the way of it at all, for… a forebear of my own saw it. He had gone out to try and get a stag, and had his gun and a deerhound with him. He saw the men on the hill doing something, and thinking they had got a deer, he went towards them. When he got near them, the hound began to run on in front of him, and at that minute he saw what it was they had. He called to the dog, and turned to run away, but saw at once he had made a mistake, for he had called their attention to himself, and a shot was fired after him, which wounded the dog. He then ran home as fast as he could…”

But at this point, the old lady ‘became conscious she was telling the story,’ and clammed up. No more could be got out of her.

What a skein this is of tangled loyalties and hatreds, of secret goings-on in the heather, of rebellion and politics, of a murder where the whole countryside knew straight away who’d done it, but wouldn’t - or dared not - say; of a ghost’s evidence, and of poor, foolish Sergeant Davies in the middle of the Highlands, four years after the ’45, behaving as though it was an adventure playground through which he could strut in his finery and shoot at stags... What a lesson for more recent times too, in places where foreign troops attempt to patrol wartorn countrysides riven by conflicting loyalties and fears.

And how ironic that the very ghost story which brought the murder to light – almost certainly devised by Alexander MacPherson in order to denounce the murderers without bringing unwelcome attention upon himself – seemed so incredible to a Lowlands jury that they would not convict.



Photo credit: Glen Clunie & Clunie Water, the road from Braemar  © Copyright Nigel Corby