Funeral for A Virgin - Maidens Crowns

A Maiden's Crown

In the seventeenth century, the death of an unmarried young woman was commemorated by the making of an unusual wreath or garland. If you died unmarried, it was considered you were now married to God. So during the funeral procession a garland shaped like a crown, represnting the 'Crown of Glory' would be placed on the coffin or carried before it. The oldest surviving garland was made in 1680 and is displayed at St Mary's Church, in Beverley, Yorkshire. The one below is a drawing of one from Matlock in Derbyshire.

In the early days of Christianity, funeral garlands were emblems of Virgin Martyrs and the practice of making maidens' garlands is likely to have derived from that. The deceased, who in some parishes could be male or female, must have been both baptised and confirmed and have been unmarried before death. During the funeral procession, the funeral crown was suspended from a white rod and carried before the coffin by another young virgin dressed in white. It was common for the crown to hang above the deceased person's pew as a sort of test, for three weeks. If nobody challenged its right to remain, it was then hung permanently from a bracket in the church.

The garland was shaped as a crown, because you would be becoming the 'consort' of  Christ the King, it was a headdress like a wreath, shaped top form a high crown, made of wood and wrapped in white lace. Families would make these for their daughter because she would never have a wedding, and often they included ribbons, handkerchiefs and flowers, both fabric and real. In the spring, primroses were often included, and at other times when flowers were much less plentiful, fake flowers made of ruched paper or cloth were used. Many young girls died of chlorosis, sparking a legend that young unmarried girls who died from this anaemia – of which one sign was a yellow-green complexion – were turned into primroses.

Virgins, time past, known were these,Troubled with Green-sicknesses,Turn’d to flowers: stil the hieuSickly Girles, they beare of you.

Herrick

According to Adkins History Website , their manufacture was described in a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1747 by a resident of Bromley in Kent:

Minsterley Garland

‘The lower rim, or circlet, was a broad hoop of wood, whereunto were fix’d, at the sides thereof, part of two other hoops, crossing each other at the top at right angles, which formed the upper part, being about one third longer than the width; these hoops were wholly covered with artificial flowers of paper, dy’d horn, or silk, and more or less beauteous, according to the skill or ingenuity of the performer. In the vacancy of the inside, from the top, hung white paper, cut in the form of gloves, whereon was wrote the deceased’s name, age, etc. together with long slips of various-colour’d paper, or ribbons. These were many times intermix’d with gilded or painted empty shells of blown eggs, as farther ornaments; or, it may be, as emblems of the bubbles or bitterness of this life; whilst other garlands had only a solitary hour-glass hanging therein, as a more significant symbol of mortality.’

Gloves and crants

Traditionally the crowns also had gloves tied to them, because gloves symbolised the binding of hands, and the young woman was being 'married' to death and eternity. When the coffin was eventually lowered into the ground, the crown remained in the church, probably displayed over her pew, over her grave, or in the chancel – as a token of her purity and virginity and as a memorial.  Interestingly, the customm was not only for young women, as the pcture below shows, but for any unwed woman.

A more modern crown from Abbots Ann, Hampshire.

In the original version of Hamlet, at Ophelia’s burial, the crown or 'crant' is referred to. The word ‘crants’  is an old Dutch word for a garland or wreath, retained by the Saxons.

Yet here she is allowed her virgin crants, Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home 

Of bell and burial.

Later editors substitute the word 'crants' with  'rites', making the lines easier to understand. Dr Johnson who was the first to explain the word crant,  revealed that the custom was still alive in his day. In earlier centuries it was considered unlucky to remove these garlands, or break bits from them, but as they decayed the fallen pieces were gathered up and buried in the church yard. 

The Minsterley Crowns or Garlands suspended in the church

Very few of these garlands, crowns, or crants survive now - victims of over-zealous cleaning and tidying in churches, and possibly the uncertainty of finding a virgin! But some can still be seen as a poignant reminder, now yellowed with age. The church at Minsterley has the biggest number of seven surviving crowns. Six of them, dating from the first half of the 18th Century, can be seen displayed on the wall of the church. Each one hangs on its own wooden peg which juts from the wall and is finished off a wooden heart, on which are inscribed the maid’s initials and the date of her death. All of the surviving garlands date from the first half of the 18th Century.

The Minsterley garlands have recently been a focus of conservation, and one of them is displayed in a glass case, so vistors can get a close look, But it is a rather sad affair now, disintegrating and brown with age.

Most of my books include a death or two, but so far no virgin deaths. Such an interesting custom deserves to be immortalized in a novel, don't you agree?

Thank you for reading! Find me on Twitter @swiftstory, or on my website www.deborahswift.com, 

A Short History of Mermaids by Catherine Hokin

I've been pondering on mythical creatures lately (too many publisher/audience/bookseller witticisms here to indulge in so I'll resist) and in particular mermaids, largely because I've just lost the best part of a weekend to the very wonderful The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gower.

 Mermaid from The Medieval Bestiary, British Library

Given how much water there is on the planet, it's hard not to wonder what might be down in the depths and it's equally hard not to hope that its mermaids rather than some of the more terrifying creatures that stop me watching nature programmes. From the little one to the mischief makers who lived in Peter Pan's lagoon, the mermaid of Zennor and all the others who flitted through Andrew Lang's fairy books, mermaids were a big part of my childhood, as Ariel was in my daughter's. Perhaps because I was brought up in the Lake District and loved to swim, a mostly human creature who could live underwater, had great hair and wore a lot of pearls always struck me as an ideal playmate.

Our curiosity about these creatures, and belief/hope that they exist, goes back thousands of years, although they have always had a sinister side outside children's tales, particularly among sailors who viewed them as both beautiful and dangerous. The earliest known depiction of a mermaid dates back to the 18th century BC on a Babylonian sealstone and there are mermaid paintings still visible at Pompeii. One of the earliest stories is about Alexander the Great’s sister, Thessalonike. After her death, a legend sprang up that she had turned into a mermaid who would ask the sailors on any ship she would encounter the question: “Is King Alexander alive?”. If the sailors answered “He lives and reigns and conquers the world” then she would leave the sea calm. If there was any other answer, she would stir up a terrible storm, destroying the ship and all its crew.

 Medieval carved mermaid with mirror & comb

This dual and conflicting aspect, beautiful and seductive or siren-esque beast, is a key part of mermaid mythology. Who needs to blame God for a storm or a mysterious wrecking that sinks a ship, when you can blame a malicious beautiful woman out to kill human men in the full knowledge that the Church would happily support your view? Unsurprisingly, as the Christian Church sought to crush pagan beliefs, mermaids were increasingly depicted as vain and lustful, tempting men to risk not only their lives but also their souls. Their iconography of comb and mirror stems from this idea of vanity and mermaids were regularly used as pictorial shorthand for the deadly sin of lust. The image of a mermaid continued to have dark sexual connotations down the centuries and was employed as a euphemism for a prostitute with even Mary Queen of Scots falling foul of it: the people of Edinburgh depicting her as a mermaid when she married Bothwell in May 1567, a few weeks after Lord Darnley's murder.

The reality of mermaids existing was assumed during medieval times, when a belief endured that anything that moved on land had a counterpart in the sea. In 1430 in the Netherlands, it was said that, after the dikes near the town of Edam gave way during a storm, some girls rowing around in a boat found a mermaid floundering in shallow, muddy waters. According to the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, They got her into the bat, took her home, [and] dressed her in women’s cloths. She remained, however, totally mute. Interestingly, by the 1600s the story had evolved somewhat. This time the injured mermaid was taken to a nearby lake and soon nursed back to health. She eventually became a productive citizen, learning to speak Dutch, perform household chores, and eventually converting to Catholicism. Little miss lusty turned into a proper woman then.

 John William Waterhouse: Sketch for a Mermaid

Other sightings include John Smith, of Pocahontas fame in 1614, who saw a mermaid swimming about with all possible grace. He noted that she had large eyes, a finely shaped nose that was somewhat short, and well-formed ears that were rather too long and that her long green hair imparted to her an original character that was by no means unattractive. Christopher Columbus in 1493, however, was less impressed,  writing in his diary: The day before, when the Admiral was going to the Rio del Oro, he said he saw three mermaids who came quite high out of the water but were not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in the face they look like men. Perhaps his lack of enchantment would have made him better placed to listen to Olaus Magnus, a 16th century writer and cartographer whose map Carta Marina catalogued the many monsters of the seas around Scandinavia. He warned that fishermen maintain that if you reel in a mermaid and do not presently let them go, such a cruel tempest will arise, and such a horrid lamentation of that sort of men comes with it, and of some other monsters joining with them, that you would think the sky should fall. 

What had they seen? Probably manatees or dugongs which have a flat, mermaid-like tail and two flippers that resemble stubby arms. Not a beautiful maiden by any stretch but many 'sightings' were from quite a distance away, possibly in poor light or during storms when fear was high and, being mostly submerged in water and waves, only parts of the 'mermaid's' body would be visible. A glimpse of a head, arm, or tail just before a creature dives under the waves in those circumstances might be just enough to spawn a legend.

 The Fiji Mermaid, Mead Art Museum

By the 1800s, the fake mermaid trade was big business with hoaxers churning them out by the dozen. One of the best known was the Feejee Mermaid displayed by P.T. Barnum in the 1840s. However, your 50 cents bought not a svelte, fish-tailed lovely combing her hair but a small and rather more grotesque fake corpse made (probably in Japan) of monkey bones, papier-mache, painted wood and the bottom part of a fish. 

Since then, mermaid encounters tend to be of the oddly-coloured hair/Starbucks cup/Disney type although news reports in 2009 claimed that a mermaid had been sighted off the coast of Israel in the town of town of Kiryat Yam, performing tricks for onlookers before just before sunset, then disappearing. One of the first people to see the mermaid, Shlomo Cohen, said, I was with friends when suddenly we saw a woman laying on the sand in a weird way. At first I thought she was just another sunbather, but when we approached she jumped into the water and disappeared. We were all in shock because we saw she had a tail. The town's tourism board offered a $1 million reward for the first person to photograph the creature but no one came forward and the mermaid has disappeared. I'm betting she's run off with Nessie.

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.

Folklore and Memory - by Katherine Langrish

[This is the text of a talk I gave at the University of Warwick, 25th January 2017 in which I consider the fluidity of the relationships between folklore, memory and history.]

I’m here to talk to you about folklore and memory. What I’m really going to do is tell you a lot of stories, and when we get on to the discussion part of this, I hope you’ll feel able to tell some stories to me.  First of all, though, it would be helpful to define some terms. I’m going to assume we have some kind of collective agreement of what memory is or at least what it feels like. Memory is about personal identity: we depend on memories, however fragmentary, for our sense of who we are – which is why it’s so awful when we lose them. But what, please, is folklore?

I want to suggest that folklore can be a form of memory and that memory actually is a form of folklore. Both are fascinating, both can be highly unreliable, and I think both are unreliable-but-powerful forms of history. I’ll try and explain why, as I go on.  

Let’s start with family folklore – personal tales passed down to us from our parents and grandparents. (These are known as 'memorates': tales of personal experience told from memory.) Perhaps there was a family tragedy or a wartime adventure, or some striking act of generosity or betrayal. Most of us know several stories about our parents – anecdotes about their childhood, the story of how they met. We probably know fewer about our grandparents and quite possibly none at all about our great-grandparents: but family folklore seems to provide a sense of identity. We like to ‘know where we came from’. It gives us roots. One of my grandmothers was brought up in India, where she was born in 1886. She was a great raconteur and extremely pretty even as an old lady.  Here she is, aged about eighteen.

Many if not most of her stories involved men whose attentions she had to evade or fight off. Whether consciously or not, she told stories which emphasised her own attractiveness, courage and resource. There was one about encountering four soldiers as she came home from playing tennis (‘All I had with me was my tennis racket, Katherine!’) and another which involved an amorous male in a railway carriage, from whom she escaped with the assistance of an old lady and a parrot. I wish I could remember it, but I was only sixteen or so when she was telling me these stories, and hadn’t really been paying attention. Only the most striking of family tales survive three generations.

Most of the stories of most the people in all the generations before us have been lost. Some are simply forgotten, others are deliberately suppressed. Successful stories by definition are the ones we continue for some reason to value and therefore to tell. Before I go on, let me just say that folklore is a massively inclusive genre. It is quite literally the stuff people tell to one another, from practical information on how to to treat a cough or get bloodstains out of linen, to how to keep on the right side of the fairies, or the gods, or God. (Also practical!) Folklore includes myths and legends, songs, skipping rhymes and lullabies – ghost stories, fairy tales and jokes – family history, local history, natural history…  All these categories shade into one another. Let’s get some of them out of the way. 

First off, I’m not going to be talking today about myths or legends. Myths attempt to make emotional sense of the world and our place in it.  (So the story of Persephone’s abduction by Hades is a religious, poetic exploration of the mysteries of winter and summer, death and birth.) Legends recount the deeds of heroes, like Achilles or King Arthur. There are often whole cycles of legends about single outstanding figures. 

I’m not going to be talking much about fairy tales either. The difference between folk tales and fairy tales is that fairy tales don’t ask to be believed. They are set far away and long ago. No one’s ever thought there was an historical Little Snow White or tried to point out the ruins of the Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Fairy tales are quite definitely fiction.

A folk tale is a humbler, more local affair. (By the way, as I’m talking today I’m going to be using the terms folk tale and story more or less interchangeably.) A folk tale’s protagonists may be well-known neighbourhood characters or they may be anonymous, but specific places become important. Folk tales are set in real, named landscapes. Local hills, lakes, stones and even churches are explained as the work of giants, trolls or the Devil.  Folk tales often also involve legendary heroes, because everyone wants to be close to fame.

All over Britain, from Tintagel to Edinburgh and beyond, there are places associated with King Arthur. This is Arthur’s Stone near Dorston, Herefordshire – a Neolithic chamber tomb which according to various stories was either built by Arthur, or was his burial place, or was a place where he fought and buried a rival king. I said that fairy tales don’t ask to be believed. Well, folk tales do. Often – not always, but often – they tug at our sleeves, hinting they contain some kind of truth. We know there wasn’t ever a real Sleeping Beauty. But was there ever a real King Arthur? Was there a real Robin Hood?

Well, was there? Do folk tales ever preserve ‘genuine’ folk memories?  As in, historical truths?  Here’s a man who thought not.

This grim-but-dapper-looking gentleman is Fitzroy Richard Somerset, 4th Baron Raglan (1885-1964), amateur anthropologist and one-time President of the Folklore Society. In his 1936 book The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama, he provides a delightfully sceptical example of the way in which a tradition may become attached to a place:

1: ‘This house dates from Elizabethan times, and since it lies close to the road which the Virgin Queen must have taken when travelling from X to Y, it may well have been visited by her.’

2: ‘This house is said to have been visited by Queen Elizabeth on her way from X to Y.’

3: ‘The state bedroom is over the entrance. It is this room which Queen Elizabeth probably occupied when she broke her journey here on her way from X to Y.’

4: ‘According to local tradition, the truth of which there is no reason to doubt, the bed in the room over the entrance is that in which Queen Elizabeth slept when she stayed here on her way from X to Y.’

This is very shrewd and funny. All the same, any individual instance of such a story is going to be hard to kill, because the Queen undoubtedly did spend the night in a great many different English country houses, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The owner of the house, who takes pride in the story, will not want to listen to Lord Raglan casting cold water. The owner wants to believe it.  

Stories grow in the telling, too. Here’s another tale. A couple of years ago, BBC Radio 4 ran a series called ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’. It was organised and written by the British Museum’s director Neil McGregor, and of course there was also a book.  Ranging from a 2 million year old African handaxe to a modern solar powered Chinese lamp, McGregor used artifacts in the British Museum as the focus for a hundred thoughtful essays on the cultures and circumstances which produced them. Number 19 in the series is this.  

It’s a gold cape, it dates from between 1900 to 1600 BC, and it was found near Mold in North Wales in 1833. Here’s how McGregor introduces it:

For the local workmen, it must have seemed as if the old Welsh legends were true. They’d been sent to quarry stone in a field known as Bryn yr Ellyllon, which translates as the Fairies’ Hill or the Goblins’ Hill. Sightings of a ghostly boy, clad in gold, a glittering apparition in the moonlight, had been reported frequently enough for travellers to avoid the hill after dark. As the workmen dug into a large mound, they uncovered a stone-lined grave. In it were hundreds of amber beads, several bronze fragments, and the remains of a skeleton. And wrapped around the skeleton was a mysterious crushed object – a large and finely decorated broken sheet of pure gold.

McGregor goes on to tell how the workmen ‘eagerly shared out chunks’ of the gold, with ‘the tenant farmer taking the largest pieces’, and that it was only ‘three years after the spoils had been divided’ that the BM bought from the tenant farmer ‘the first and largest of the fragments of gold which had been his share of the booty’.

It’s quite a story. I blogged about it myself back in 2013. I wrote:

The mound those workmen were digging into was in a field called Bryn yr Ellyllon, the Hill of the Elves; and the legend of the hill was that it was haunted by a ghostly boy, clad all in gold.  Isn’t it possible that the sight of a young man being laid to rest in his shimmering golden cape so impressed and touched the onlookers that for nearly four thousand years if a child said, ‘Mother, who’s buried in that hill?’ the answer was ‘a boy all dressed in gold?’

When my friend the writer Susan Price expressed some scepticism about all this, I did some checking, and unfortunately for me and Mr Neil McGregor, I discovered problems, even some inaccuracies in this romantic account. The discovery was originally made public on December 17^th 1835 when John Gage, FRS, exhibited the flattened remains of the cape to the Society of Antiquaries of London.  The cape had been dug up two years and two months previously, on 11^th October 1833 (which seems to me speedy work for the early 19^th century) and the tenant farmer – Mr John Langford – had been corresponding with antiquaries about it as early as January 1835; so to represent him as a treasure hunter interested only in ‘booty’ is rather unfair. A further letter of the same year written by the Vicar of Mold, Charles Butler Clough, provides the fullest account.

A short time before the discovery of the Corselet, workmen had … made a considerable pit for some yards into the adjoining field. A new tenant, Mr John Langford … employed persons to fill in the hole by shovelling down the top of the bank. While so employed … about four feet from the top of the bank and without doubt upon the original surface, they perceived the Corselet.

The Vicar goes on to describe the burial in detail and then provides the only evidence for the ghost story.

Connected with this subject, it is certainly a strange circumstance that an elderly woman, who had been to Mold to lead her husband home late at night from a public house, should have seen or fancied, a spectre “of unusual size, and clothed in a coat of gold, which shone like the sun”  to have crossed the road before her to the identical mound of gravel, and that she should tell the story next morning many years ago, amongst others to the very person, Mr John Langland, whose workmen drew the treasure out of its prison-house. Her having related such a story is an undoubted fact. I cannot, however, learn that there was any tradition of such an interment having taken place; though possibly this old woman might have heard something of the kind in her youth, which still dwelt upon her memory … associated with the common appellation of the Bank, the Fairies’ or Goblins’ Hill, and a very general idea that the place was haunted.

So there hadn’t been ‘frequent sightings’, plural, of a ‘glittering apparition’ of a ‘golden boy’: the Vicar of Mold never says if the old woman thought the figure was male or female, young or old. And she saw it only once. But no one can resist a ghost story, can they?  And they get embroidered. If you Google ‘Mold Gold Cape’ today you’ll come across references to ‘numerous past sightings’ of a ‘ghostly, giant warrior in golden armour’ who even used to ‘beckon travellers’ towards his burial place. However all that can be said for sure is that this spot, like many another in Wales, was named ‘Hill of the Elves’ before the finding, and was believed to be haunted. Since the vicar couldn’t turn up any other accounts of a golden ghost or a golden burial, bang goes the ‘information preserved in folklore’ theory, in this instance at least. If the old woman’s vision truly predated the finding of the cape, it was probably a coincidence.

It’s all very sad. If you’re anything like me, you’d love to believe at least SOME folktales preserve real folk memories. A percentage of them may, perhaps, but which ones and how could it be verified? The author Adam Nichols, in his recent book about Homer, ‘The Mighty Dead’ (read it, it’s wonderful) tells an interesting story. In 1953, just 8 years after the end of the War, an American-Greek professor of ethnography, James Notopoulos, travelled to the Cretan province of Sfakia. Everywhere he went, men were singing songs about the War, the cruelty of the Germans, the burning of villages, the heroism of the defenders. The professor recorded many of these songs. 

One of the most daring acts of the war on Crete had been the successful kidnapping of Crete’s German commander, General Kreipe, by two British officers, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss, who were embedded in the Cretan resistance. They impersonated German soldiers, intercepted the general’s car, killed the driver, held a knife to the general’s throat and drove him through 22 German checkpoints before abandoning the car and taking to the mountain paths, where they hid up in the day and travelled by night for the next 20 days while the Germans combed the area for them. Finally they bundled the General on to a British Navy launch and took him to Alexandria.

The professor was surprised he hadn’t yet heard any songs about this feat, and said as much to one of the local bards, a gifted young man called Andreas Kafkalas. Kafkalas agreed, and said he thought he could compose a song about it right now, ‘to fulfil the obligations of Cretan hospitality’. He began at once, using ‘the traditional Cretan fifteen syllable line’, and the professor recorded it. 

The story had changed almost beyond recognition.

In Kafkalas’ version, the two English officers are replaced by an unnamed English general who arrives in Crete and summons before him a local Sfakian hero, Lefteris Tambakis - who did exist, but who had no connection with this operation. The English general ‘draws himself up to his full height, weeps over the cruelties being done by the Germans to the people of “desolate Crete” and reads out the order to the Sfakian people that Kreipe be captured, dead or alive [all untrue – no such order existed].’ Next, Tambakis recruits a beautiful girl who sacrifices her ‘woman’s honour’ by seducing Kreipe (renamed “Kaiseri", which I assume means something like ‘the big boss’) who tells her all his plans. She passes these to Tambakis, who, riding a beautiful horse, intercepts the general’s car. ‘No horses were involved,’ Nicols tells us, ‘but they always are in old Cretan songs. The Cretan fighters strip the general naked [they didn’t] and he begs for mercy [he didn’t, but this is a motif that usually appears at these moments in Cretan poetry].’ Finally, after the journey over the mountains, a submarine takes the general away to Egypt. Hitler is in despair, and ‘Never before in the history of the world has such a deed been done.’  

‘If this is what could happen to a modern story in nine years,’ Nichols asks, ‘how could anyone hope that anything true might survive in the Iliad of the Odyssey?’

Well, in this folk version of the story, at least the core event remains - the successful kidnapping by Resistance fighters of a German General in occupied Crete during the Second World War. None of the other details are true, and though the reason Kafkalas changed them may partly be due to the formulaic structure of traditional songs, it seems obvious the main reason must be that he wasn’t emotionally invested in a story about two English heroes. He has transformed this true and dramatic event – far too good to forget - into a Cretan patriotic epic.  National pride demanded no less.

Pride trumps history.

The story that ‘Queen Elizabeth slept here’ means a lot to the man who owns the house; not much to anyone else.  We are all most invested in what is closest to us, belongs to us.  I grew up in Ilkley, Yorkshire, ‘knowing’ – and I don’t know who told me – that fairies were once seen splashing about in the well-preserved Roman Baths on Ilkley Moor, known as White Wells. The caretaker opened the door one morning and saw them ducking and splashing in the water, and when they saw him they rushed past him out of the door screaming like swallows.

I didn’t believe the story but I knew the place, and I think I was proud of the fact that such a striking tale belonged to my town. But such local folk tales are unimportant or unknown to people living ten miles away (who have their own). There’s always the chance they’ll be lost. A storyteller dies. A family moves away. New people arrive. And no one remembers any more.

And sometimes stories die because a deliberate effort has been made to erase them. Here’s an example. My third book, Troll Blood, is the final volume of a fantasy trilogy set in the Viking Age, incorporating a lot of Scandinavian folklore about trolls and other supernatural creatures. In this last book, my young hero and heroine set sail in a Viking ship to cross the North Atlantic and arrive in America as described in the ‘Greenlanders’ Saga’ and which we now know from archeological evidence the Vikings actually did.

Because the book is a fantasy I wanted also to introduce, as players on the North American scene, creatures in some way parallel to the trolls with whom my Norse characters shared their world. A folk belief in trolls is part of one people’s way of apprehending the world which defines and differentiates them from another group, for example one which believes in nymphs. (Trolls are rougher-edged, with snow on their boots.) I wanted to use stories from Native American folklore because I felt that to leave out any reference to the belief systems of the people I was writing about would be to lose a dimension. In travelling to North America, my Norse characters would have to meet Native Americans, and it was important that the latter should have a voice. For reasons I won’t go into here I chose to investigate the folklore of the Mi’kmaq of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, whose ancestors at least could have encountered the Norse voyagers. (No one really knows.) I spent at least six months, probably more, going through ancient copies of the Journal of American Folklore in the Bodleian, tracking down primary sources wherever I could, especially stories taken down verbatim from named individuals.  One of these was a story collected in the mid 1920s by the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons from a Mi’kmaw woman called Isabelle Googoo Morris.

THE HAMAJA’LU

These are very small beings, no larger than two finger joints.  There are thousands of them who live along the shore. Water-worn, pitted stones are associated with them, “they have chewed in them, picked in them”. Once when some men landed on the shore for a short time, before they took to their boat again they saw a model of themselves and their boat made in stones by the hamaja’lu.  They work very fast.

               Elsie Clews Parsons, ‘Micmac Folklore’, p94, J. of A. F., v.38, 1925

I thought this was charming, and the hamaja’lu went into my story. When the book was finished I sent it to be vetted by Dr Ruth Holmes Whitehead, an expert in Mi’kmaq studies, who kindly set me right on a number of important points. But I was rather dismayed when she asked me to correct ‘the hamaja’lu’ to  ‘the wiklatmuj’ik’, a far more difficult word to read and pronounce. (My editor was certainly not going to like it!) So I asked her ‘Why? After all, the word ‘hamaja’lu’ is there, written down in a verbatim account.’   And she wrote back, ‘Because there is no ‘h’ in modern Mi’kmaq, and this word is obsolete. The word used today is the one I have given you.’   I wanted to be sensitive, yet felt I had to express surprise.  How could it be that a word used so freely in the 1920’s – there were several stories about the ‘hamaja’lu’ – could have died out?  Back came the reply: ‘You would not find it so surprising if you were aware that, during the course of the 20^th century, generations of Mi’kmaq children were taken from their parents, put into homes, taught European ways, and punished – beaten, shut in cupboards, thrown down stairs – for speaking their own language.’

The sorry pattern of dominant Western culture imposing itself on the cultures of indigenous peoples has been repeated many times. Though stories about the hamaja’lu were written down in the 1920s, it seems they’re not told any more. (The wiklatmuj’ik aren’t really the same.) Such tales are more than curiosities. In many, many ways, folk tales make us. They define us as individuals, as families, clans and nations. Though the now-forgotten hamaja’lu may never have had objective reality, they were once part of a wider story, a belief system, part of the truth of Mi’kmaq identity.  That was what the Canadian Government was trying to eradicate.

Lord Raglan was a real hard-liner about folk tales. He didn’t believe that any of them preserved any historical information at all. He defines history like this: History is the recital in chronological sequence of events which are known to have occurred. Insisting that history depends entirely on written chronology, he claimed that since (what he termed) ‘the savage’ cannot write, ‘…the savage can have no interest in history.’

I’ll let you gasp. He continues:

Since interest in the past is induced solely by books, the savage can take no interest in the past; the events of the past are in fact completely lost.

Pause for another gasp. One more quote if you can stand it.

When we read of the Irish blacksmith who said that his smithy was much older than the local dolmen … or of the English rustic who said that the parish church (13^th C) was very old indeed, it was there before he came into the parish, and that was over 40 years ago – we are apt to suppose the speaker exceptionally stupid or ignorant, but their attitude towards the past is similar to that of the Australian black who began a story with: ‘Long long ago, when my mother was a baby, the sun shone all day and all night’, and is the inevitable result of illiteracy. [My italics]

You know what? The man who poured scholarly scepticism on traditional tales about Queen Elizabeth, has no right to take these others at face value. He can’t have it both ways. Breaking his own rule, Raglan does not even source the first two anecdotes, which appear to be racist shaggy dog stories. In the third example, Raglan makes a category error. The Aboriginal storyteller is clearly opening a traditional story with the type of formulaic phrase found all over the world – a nonsense formula which places it firmly in the land of long ago and far away. In other words, a fairytale.

‘Long long ago, when my mother was a baby, the sun shone all day and all night.’ 

Compare with this, from the Brothers Grimm:

Once upon a time, when wishing still helped one, there was a king who had three daughters.

Or with this super-exuberant opening from Romania:
             Once upon a time, long long ago (and if this story were not true, it would never have been told), when all the poplar trees were covered with pears, and the willows with nuts, when bears switched their tails like cows, when wolves and lambs loved each other like brothers, when fleas with ninety-nine pounds of iron on their backs hopped high in the sky and brought back wonderful stories, when flies wrote rhymes like this on the wall – ‘A tap on the nose for all who doze/Who doubts my lore shall hear no more’ – once upon a time, then, there was a powerful emperor who had three sons. 

Or even this: 

               Long long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

None of these openings are naïve. The Aboriginal storyteller and her audience know perfectly well there never was a time when the sun shone all day and night. That’s the whole point. The concept is deliberately, joyfully surreal. Far from from making any claim to be true, fairy tales openly delight in their unbelievability.   

How does Raglan miss all this?  Partly because his sense of privilege and superiority blinds him to the sophistication of illiterate narrators. And in my view he misunderstands folk narratives. What he really wants to do with folklore is to prove that ‘All traditional narratives originate in ritual’, which is a very 1930s thing to think.  Take the widespread folk motif of ‘The Faithful Hound’. The best-known British version is about Gelert, favourite wolfhound of the Welsh prince Llewellyn. The only thing Llewellyn loves better than his dog is his own baby son.  Coming home from hunting one day, he’s horrified when Gelert, whom he’d left guarding the child, bounds to greet him, jaws and muzzle covered in blood. He rushes into the castle hall to find the baby’s cradle overturned, the sheets bloodied, the child nowhere in sight. ‘Faithless hound,’ he cries. ‘You have murdered my son!’ and drawing his sword, strikes Gelert dead.  Then he hears a baby chuckle, and behind the cradle finds the child tugging at the fur of a huge dead wolf – which Gelert has clearly fought and slain. In deep remorse, the prince buries Gelert and raises a stone in memory of his faithful friend.  

Lord Raglan tries to convince the reader that this well-known tale-type preserves, as if in aspic, references to a type of ritual drama going back to the days of Abraham and Isaac when child sacrifice was replaced by animal substitutes. This is as much baseless conjecture as any ‘Queen Elizabeth Slept Here’ story.

Now, OK, this is a guy writing in 1936: do we need to listen to his outmoded theories about what is and what isn’t history? Well, I think it’s salutary, I think it can provoke thought, because here’s where he goes wrong. He thinks, and a lot of people still think, history is all facts and dates and dated events, and being able to prove conclusively that certain things happened and where they happened, and when. Of course that’s essential. But another view of history could be that it’s what goes on inside people’s heads. It’s what we remember and what we forget, it’s what we’ve been taught and what we’ve never had a chance to learn. And it’s shaped and driven by all sorts of inconvenient emotions such as pride and shame and patriotism and nationalism.  

This is a book called ‘OUR ISLAND STORY, a History of England for Boys and Girls’, by H.E. Marshall, first published in 1904.

The opening chapter,  ‘Albion and Brutus’, tells how Neptune and Amphitrite had a lovely little boy called Albion. They wanted to give him an island all of his own, so they sent the mermaids far and wide to find somewhere good enough, till at last one pretty little mermaid came back with news of an island ‘like a beautiful gem in the blue water’. So Albion ruled over this island for seven years, until he was killed in a fight with Hercules, and then Brutus arrived from Troy and fought and killed various giants who lived here, and finally, when Neptune retired as a god, because he had loved Albion so much he gave his sceptre to the islands now called Britannia – ‘For we know – Britannia rules the waves.’

Now that’s clearly a fairy tale, even if parts of it are based on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12^th century History of the Kings of Britain, which itself, as you’ll know, is almost entirely fiction. The author, who was Australian, winds up the chapter like this, loading it with nostalgia for the imagined past.

In this book you will find the story of the people of Britain. The story tells how they grew to be a great people, till the little green island set in the lonely sea was longer large enough to contain them all. Then they sailed away over the blue waves to far-distant countries. Now the people of the little island possess lands all over the world. … Yet the people who live in them still look back lovingly to the little island, from which they or their fathers came, and call it ‘Home’.

David Cameron (remember him?) has gone on record three times to describe Our Island Story as his favourite book. Clearly, its version of British history shaped his mind. In a speech delivered in 2014 just before the Scottish Referendum he says:

I have an old copy of Our Island Story, my favourite book as a child, and I want to give it to my three children, and I want to be able to teach my youngest, when she’s old enough to understand, that she is part of this great, world-beating story. And I passionately hope that my children will be able to teach their children the same … that together, these islands really do stand for more than the sum of their parts; they stand for bigger ideas, nobler causes, greater values. Our brilliant United Kingdom: brave, brilliant, buccaneering, generous, tolerant, proud – this is our country.

‘Our Island Story’ is absolutely jam-packed with pure folk tales. It’s got a chapter about how Merlin brought the Giants’ Dance (Stonehenge ) to Britain from Ireland for the legendary Aurelieus Ambrosius. It’s got a chapter about King Arthur (‘only fifteen when he was made king, but the bravest, wisest and best king that had ever ruled in Britain.’) It’s got the story of King Canute and the waves, and Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and Sir Walter Raleigh throwing down his cloak so Queen Elizabeth can walk across a puddle, an act beloved of illustrators such as Herbert Moore whose colourful picture of 1908 is reproduced at the head of this post, though there is no contemporary evidence Raleigh ever did such a thing. More bizarrely, 'Our Island Story' presents Raleigh as a benefactor of the Irish people; listen to this:

Two of the things Raleigh brought home with him [from the Americas] were tobacco and potatoes. [Queen] Elizabeth had given him estates in Ireland, and there he planted the potatoes and showed the people how to grow them. Even to this day the poor people in Ireland grow potatoes and live on them very largely.

Raleigh received his Irish lands as a reward for helping to put down the Desmond Rebellions, when he took part in at least one massacre, so this vision of him as a sort of kindly agriculturalist is ‘alternative truth’ of a high order. These are folk tales, not history. H.E. Marshall admits this openly in her introduction.

I must tell you that this is not a history lesson, but a story book. There are many facts in school histories, that seem to children to belong to lessons only. Some of these you will not find here. But you will find some stories that are not to be found in your school books – stories which wise people say are only fairy tales and not history.  But it seems to me that they are part of Our Island Story, and ought not to be forgotten, any more than those stories about which there is no doubt.

This is highly equivocal. The book is subtitled ‘A History of England for Boys and Girls’. In fact it’s a complete mélange of fact, folklore and fiction, and there’s very little way for a child to tell what’s true and what’s not. If anything, Marshall favours and prioritises the unlikely but emotionally weighted tales. This is not history, but a book of stories chosen and designed to give a child a particular identity, that of the son or daughter of a heroic, benign and glorious British race. It is still in print. Lord Raglan – I assume – would have deplored it and he’d be right. But even if they’re exaggerated, even when they’re total inventions, these stories, these folk tales, have become woven into the British historical narrative and won’t go away. They still influence real people, real politicians, real events.

Stories are very powerful. With every story told to us, especially if it’s one which pretends to a thread of truth, it’s worth pausing to consider who is telling it, and why. The stories we choose to remember and pass on, as individuals, families, societies and nations, have real agency. Don’t think for a moment you can ignore them.

Picture credits

Raleigh lays his cloak before Queen Elizabeth. Illustration by Herbert Moore, 1908, from 'The Men Who Found America' by Frederick Winthrop Hutchinson, 1909

Arthur's Stone, Herefordshire.  Photo by UKgeofan at Wikimedia Commons  

Lord Raglan. Photo by Evelina B at Wikimedia

Mold Gold Cape. Photo by kind permisson of the British Museum.

Pebble figure found on sand-dunes - Photo by Katherine Langrish

Llewellyn and Gelert. Engraving by Gourlay Steell RSA 1819-1894

Our Island Story, cover. Photo by Katherine Langrish

Stained glass, black dogs and music halls by Imogen Robertson

I often get asked why I choose to write historical fiction and usually the question leaves me floundering. I think this is because it implies I had some sort of choice in the matter, whereas, to tell the truth, what I have is a series of post-rationalisations. It was what I wanted to write, so that was what I wrote. There was no study of the market place or check list of pros and cons between genres. I was reading a lot about 18th century history, largely inspired by the fresh light cast on the period by the work of Amanda Vickery, and I like reading books where Stuff Happens. Stuff always happens in crime novels and usually quite a lot of it, so I wrote Instruments of Darkness, a crime novel set in 1780.

So if you don’t really decide what you write, the question becomes ‘why do you write?’  I know the usual line is something about a need to communicate; an urge to create and share stories and in so doing stake a claim to some corner of a stranger’s mental landscape, but I don’t really buy that. If that was what writers wanted, wouldn’t we all want to be stand-up comedians?  Writers need to be happy spending most of their time alone, and though these days we are all encouraged to do as many events as possible and stalk about the internet letting everyone know how clever we are, most writers I know would rather be off in their towers with their imaginary friends. In fact most writers I know regard the phone as an instrument of torture and have trained friends and family to only ever communicate by email, or text in an emergency. 

You need to be driven to write, but driven by curiosity, I think, not by a need for fame and acclaim. Your subject, your story needs to be all absorbing for you. You need to be hungry for the research then obsessive about spending your time in the world you’re discovering. 

We are told, too often, write what you know. I’ve always thought that advice about as good as ‘if you want to get an agent follow them to parties with the unbound pages of your latest manuscript’.  It speaks to the stereotype of writer as show off who has a desperate need to share their story. A lot of us are shy bunnies and I have no great interest in sharing my story. I don’t think it’s that interesting. I write because I’m fascinated by other people’s stories, particularly those hidden by time and ironed out of history by the  grand narratives of wars and rulers. Write what you want to know about, that’s what I say. If you do that you’ll write something interesting.  

I did a talk with Liz Freemantle and Vanora Bennett this week and a question came up about the current interest in historical fiction. Liz made the very good point that it might be something to do with the fact that history itself is being written very differently these days. There’s an interest what everyone else was up to while the grand narratives rolled by in a haze of gunsmoke. Social historians, historians of folklore, the researchers going through the account books of the provincial music halls - those are the people feeding historical fiction now, and huzzah for that because I want to know the story of the artist who painted the glass in Westminster abbey, more than that of the king crowned underneath them, I want to know why devil dogs lope along the lanes of Britain, I want to know what it was to huddle in the galleries, eating fish and chips and joining in with the chorus of the comic songs, or what it was to step out onto the stage and sing them. I want to write these stories, because they are what I want to read and they are there, hiding in slim academic volumes or just out of view in the archives, the court records and account books, in the glass and under the stones lying along the old paths. You just have to want to go and find them.

Lost Stories in the Land by Imogen Robertson

My mother rang me just before Christmas and offered to buy me an ipad. She is a very nice person, and had probably noticed that I kept nicking hers whenever my husband and I go to visit in Darlington. 

I can’t help it. It’s shiny and you can find pictures of amusing cats with it. I put the phone down and told Ned I was going to get a shiny, funny kittens machine all of my very own and he made a face. I don’t think he has anything against cats, but he did point out that I didn’t really need an ipad because I’m rarely more than three feet away from an internet enabled device in our flat. Wasn’t there something else I could buy instead? Hadn’t I been going on about a book I wanted, but felt guilty about the price?

He was right. A few months ago we were in Bath and I spotted in a second hand book-shop in the centre of the city the four volume Dictionary of British Folklore complied by Katherine M Briggs. I cashed Mum’s cheque and caught the train to be reunited with it. I did check with Mum first, by the way.

For those who don’t know her, Katherine M. Briggs (1898-1980) devoted her life to writing on folklore. I became a devotee of her work when I read The Fairies in Tradition and Literature last year. The book is a brilliant corrective to anyone who thinks of fairies as sweet, child-like inhabitants of the English Country Garden. Fairies, known by many names and existing in various forms, are dangerous, ambiguous creatures. They are beings of the liminal world; of bridges and ruins, barrows and circles. They might deal honourably with humans who treat with with respect, but they are best avoided. They blind, cheat, steal and punish. Sometimes they are associated with the dead, sometimes not. But seriously, do not go looking for these guys. No good will come of it. Having read that book the world looked more interesting to me. More mysterious, more complex.

An installation on the Hebden Bridge Sculpture Trail at Hardcastle Crags in 2004 Phil Champion

There are plenty of Fairies in the Dictionary of British Folklore. There are also witches, saints, ghosts, black dogs, demons, lost treasures, lost leaders, warriors and giants. Reading through the stories, each one with its sources and motifs noted, Britain becomes a magical country where every hill, crossroads, forest and pathway has its own history. So my husband was right. Better than amusing cats. I’ve also developed a bit of a thing for a series of books called Highways and Byways of x (where x = eg, East Anglia, Somerset, Surrey), and Auther Mee’s county books, both are stuffed with local legends and anecdote. I want them all. 

I am a fan of human invention and I’m delighted to live in the world of the internet, the mobile phone, antibiotics and modern dentistry, but reading through Brigg’s work, I can’t help thinking about what we have lost too. We are still all telling stories to each other in novels, on TV, in newspapers, on social media, but while we are sharing those stories over great distances, are we at the same time loosing our local legends and tales? We are loosing our local dialects, so perhaps it is inevitable that we are also loosing the local stories that were told in those dialects. That’s tragic and serious. It must loosen our connections to the landscape if we no longer remember the tales of which giant created which hills, how the crags were named, and which King fell in the river and which local saint pulled him out. I’m glad we now all have the advantage of knowing what Benedict Cumberbatch had for breakfast, I'm just saying perhaps there is something more. Of course these folkloric local histories were changeable over time, a nest of unreliable narratives and narrators, but they still tied each generation into their particular landscapes. We were made by them, and made them. 

Rydale Water by Nessy-Pic on wikimedia commons

So I have a proposal because, as usual, I would like the best of both worlds. There must be one of the 1% out there who would like to construct a map / database of Britain’s folklore. Just think what a resource that would be. Brilliant for schools, students, tourists but mostly I mean it would be brilliant for me. Next time I’m out walking in the countryside, after tweeting about the weather, taking a picture of my pub lunch to post on facebook, and - who knows - maybe just looking about at stuff, I’d like to tell Siri or Google Glass to share with me the stories of the landscape I am in. A straight narration at first, then lots of nested footnotes on sources, themes and alternate versions for when I feel geeky. Most of all though, I want my technology to replace what is lost, to be my virtual grandmother telling the stories of my home ground by the fireside or while walking the old ways. I want to know about the dancers turned to stone there, and the route the phantom carriage of the impious landowner takes across the heath, and yes, where I should be careful to avoid meeting the fairies at dusk.  

Imogen's latest book is The Paris Winter and has nothing to do with British folklore.

www.imogenrobertson.com