These Our Monsters

by Katherine Davey

  These

  Our

  Monsters

  The English Heritage

  Book of New Folktale,

  Myth and Legend

  Edited by

  Katherine Davey

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  First published in 2019 by English Heritage

  Collection © English Heritage 2019

  ‘These Our Monsters’ © Edward Carey 2019

  ‘Great Pucklands’ © Alison MacLeod 2019

  ‘Goibert of the Moon’ © Paul Kingsnorth 2019

  ‘The Hand Under the Stone’ © Sarah Hall 2019

  ‘The Dark Thread’ © Graeme Macrae Burnet 2019

  ‘Breakynecky’ © Sarah Moss 2019

  ‘The Loathly Lady’ © Fiona Mozley 2019

  ‘Capture’ © Adam Thorpe 2019

  Cover and text illustrations © Clive Hicks-Jenkins 2019

  The right of English Heritage and the contributors to be identified

  as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance

  with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, or by photocopying, recording or otherwise,

  without prior permission of the copyright holder.

  Book layout: Derek Westwood

  Printed in England by Page Bros, Norwich

  ISBN 978-1-910907-40-5

  EPUB ISBN 978-1-912836-53-6

  KINDLE ISBN 978-1-912836-54-3

  Contents

  Introduction James Kidd

  These Our Monsters Edward Carey

  Great Pucklands Alison MacLeod

  Goibert of the Moon Paul Kingsnorth

  The Hand Under the Stone Sarah Hall

  The Dark Thread Graeme Macrae Burnet

  Breakynecky Sarah Moss

  The Loathly Lady Fiona Mozley

  Capture Adam Thorpe

  Afterword

  Myths, Legends and Folklore of English Heritage Sites

  Charles Kightly

  Biographical Notes

  ‘ … new matter offers to new observation, and they who

  write next, may perhaps find as much room for enlarging

  upon us, as we do upon those that have gone before.’

  From A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain

  by Daniel Defoe, 1724–7

  Introduction

  James Kidd

  ‘We will write our answers on paper, and when we return we shall compile the pages into a book.’ Fiona Mozley

  THE BOOK IN YOUR HAND one might imagine as the chronicle of a quest. Eight contemporary novelists – writers of a 21st-century Round Table, perhaps – picked one of eight points around England, each one preserved by English Heritage. As well as absorbing the atmosphere of their chosen site each was charged with recovering the history and folklore that over the centuries have enveloped that location.

  The eight stories in this book are the records of those expeditions, which extend from Berwick Castle on the Anglo-Scottish border to Tintagel Castle on the south-west tip of England, from the 12th century to a more or less recognisable present day.

  Some of the myths, legends and fairytales explored by the writers already enjoy rich artistic traditions: 600 years before Fiona Mozley resurrected Sir Gawain’s encounter with Dame Ragnelle somewhere in the vicinity of Carlisle, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath related it to her fellow pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. The arrival of Tristan and Iseult in Tintagel has inspired works by Thomas Malory in the 15th century and film director François Truffaut in the 20th, the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and the French composer Olivier Messiaen, the Bollywood director Subhash Ghai and (now) Adam Thorpe. While in Whitby, Bram Stoker channelled his adventures into his seminal novel Dracula (1897), as Graeme Macrae Burnet’s story reminds us, little suspecting how contagious vampirism would prove. The Count’s heirs, including that in Macrae Burnet’s story, continue, numerous and infamous: the German horror Nosferatu (1922); Bela Lugosi’s embodiment in the 1931 film; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Elizabeth Kostova’s novel The Historian (2005). Others (Dracula 3D and Dracula: Dead and Loving It spring to mind) would probably have Stoker turning in his grave.

  Others in this collection are of more elusive provenance, such as the dancing hare goddess of Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge stands, who persistently evades the rapt attention of Paul Kingsnorth’s narrator in ‘Goibert of the Moon’. Similarly the evil ‘Redcaps’ of Sarah Moss’s story, which might be defined as familiars haunting Berwick Castle, among other places on the English–Scottish border, but which were unfamiliar to me.

  Together they provide a vivid mosaic of England’s pasts and presents. Many of the stories explicitly layer history upon history, folklore upon folklore, rather as the Whitby cliffs formed of millennia’s worth of ammonites and alum in Macrae Burnet’s story, or the 12th-century origins of Tristan and Iseult refracted through the cut-glass voices of Thorpe’s early 20th-century teenagers (‘What a lark’, Louisa cries) who themselves refract the star-crossed lovers through the stained-glass 19th-century medievalism of Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris.

  The moods of the eight stories are similarly eclectic, by turns comic or uncanny, absurd or scholarly, angry or fanciful, unsettling or poignant. Horror rubs shoulders with tender, if tragic, family portraits. Romances cosy up to accounts of psychological breakdown. An almost Blytonesque celebration of youthful friendship dances around studies of isolation and loneliness.

  Navigating this diversity presents the reader with a quest of their own. But what might their goal be? As Mozley’s story ‘The Loathly Lady’ reminds us, quests, no matter how dizzying in scale and scope, are often launched by a single question. That in her own Arthurian update is the perpetually challenging: ‘what do women want?’ Just in case the task wasn’t difficult enough, failure to answer this question satisfactorily results in literal loss of face (or head). Fortunately for Arthur and his sidekick Gawain, there is an answer, although it comes with a price, for the handsome Gawain at least: he must marry Dame Ragnelle, undisputed winner of the 15th century’s ‘most repulsive creature in the known world’ competition.

  This is not merely the punchline of Mozley’s shaggy dog myth; it makes a trial of Gawain’s new-found knowledge. Was Dame Ragnelle’s secret merely the means to avoid losing one’s head? Or did Gawain actually learn something?

  What Mozley wittily demonstrates is that the answer, true enlightenment, is inextricable from the quest itself. Wisdom cannot simply be imparted in a few words, but requires effort, by turns physical, intellectual and emotional. Gawain progresses from a state of bafflement and panic about women’s desires towards genuine empathy with a perspective that his own chivalric code habitually objectifies, after its own sexist fashion, as alien, comical and, Mozley suggests, mythical: ‘It is an impossible task; an absurd question without an answer,’ that chivalric code initially considers. ‘It is a nothing, a nowhere, a never.’

  Gawain’s journey from this state of bewilderment towards practical, everyday knowledge is mirrored by the reader as they translate the seemingly remote courtly preoccupations into our own time, with its adherence to wealth, privilege and patriarchy. Mozley encourages the recognition of the similarity in the playful opening, which juxtaposes the original 15th-century poem ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle’ with an aside in something like Mozley’s own cheeky, sceptical voice: ‘Lythe and listenythe the lif of a lord riche (was there ever another kind?)’.

  But to return to the question of the reader’s quest, and the question
that might spark it: perhaps it is to find what holds these stories together, what they all have in common? But is it even possible to piece together such different times, places and folklore into some kind of wholeness? Bold as such a challenge might be, the pursuit of unity is the very stuff of folklore, at least according to JRR Tolkien, who, in his 1931 poem ‘Mythopoeia’ defined myth-making humanity as:

  the refracted light

  through whom is splintered from a single White

  to many hues, and endlessly combined

  in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

  For Tolkien, mythic works provide glimpses of a distant perfection: to ‘renew/from mirrored truth the likeness of the True’. Something similar has befallen folklore as a whole, which has itself broken into three ‘mirrors’ or forms of human truth: myth, legend, fairytale.

  Myths, it is generally agreed, possess a spiritual, or even religious character, and narrate foundational stories in which the mortal world is determined by fate, personified by divine powers. The act of creation can be a nation or a flower, an echo or an entire universe, but it leaves few in any doubt about a supernatural or fictional element. To quote the 17th-century polymath Sir Thomas Browne, they ‘containeth impossibilities, and things inconsistent with truth’, that is, the hard truth of science.

  Legends, by and large, have a surer footing in reality, or at least were once believed to be the real histories of real people, within, or nearly within, human memory – King Arthur, for instance. But as Mozley’s Arthur remembers, the act of telling, re-telling and re-re-telling a particular legend over time casts it into a liminal space where fact and fiction merge, rather like the puns on world, woods and would do in Mozley’s writing: ‘Arthur is everything and nothing, has everything, has no one, wants (for) nothing, desires a world. He is boy-king, man-boy, woods-man. He is king of these woods; he is a king who would.’

  Fairytales, by contrast, are not concerned with gods and the origins of worlds, or with an at-least possible human history. They have no qualms intruding fantastic beasts and magical beings on everyday reality. This is one reason, perhaps, why they have a reputation as stories intended for children – unfairly, according to Tolkien, as Théoden, King of the Rohan in The Lord of the Rings, puts it: ‘Songs we have that tell of these things, but we are forgetting them, teaching them only to children, as a careless custom. And now the songs have come down among us out of strange places, and walk visible under the Sun.’

  For Tolkien’s contemporary the philosopher Walter Benjamin fairytales were nothing less than humanity’s true foundational stories: ‘The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales.’ The reason, he continued, was because they liberated humanity from ‘the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest’. Avoiding the 12 volumes that would be required to unpack Benjamin’s ideas on the subject, suffice it to say fairytales encourage human agency in the face of mythical fate: ‘The wisest thing – so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day – is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits.’

  But whatever the differences between myth, legend and fairy-tale, they share an intimate relationship with the broadly fictional or unreal, which is one answer to the question of what they hold in common. Another is perhaps consequent upon it. For if this slipperiness makes folklore’s three major forms tricky to pin down, it does suggest a shared quality that allows them to glide so fluidly through history. If they are not bound by fact, they are not bound by time, either. ‘Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified. Perhaps it did not matter.’ This is the journalist, critic and poet Ann Wroe writing about myth’s greatest crooner, Orpheus. As if to prove her point, she immediately quotes Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film, Orphée: ‘Where does our story take place, and when? … It’s the privilege of legends to be ageless. Comme il vous plaira. As you please.’

  Folklore’s easy indifference to time’s usual boundaries – ‘As you please’ – is celebrated by William Morris in the prologue of The Earthly Paradise:

  So let me sing of names remembered,

  Because they, living not, can ne’er be dead,

  Or long time take their memory quite away

  From us poor singers of an empty day.

  ‘Because they, living not, can ne’er be dead’: it’s not difficult to make the leap from Mozley’s perpetually conditional Arthur (the ‘king who would’) across Morris’s ‘names remembered’ towards Count Dracula, who haunts Graeme Macrae Burnet’s ominous account of Bram Stoker’s visit to Whitby in 1890 – about two decades after Morris began his epic verse adaptation of Greek and Scandinavian myths.

  Dracula could be Morris’s vision of folklore made flesh (albeit strangely pale): three of the Count’s more celebrated powers are his ability to transcend time, defy gravity and change form (from a wolf to a mist to a bat). And while not invulnerable (daylight can wreak its revenge), he can regenerate himself by spreading his disease and – in some of the more outlandish adaptations by being resurrected.

  In Macrae Burnet’s allegory of folklore creation and transmission, Dracula is even more insubstantially fictional: he appears unformed as the spark of an idea, inspiration-in-progress, the glint-in-the-writer’s-eye. The ‘vampire who would’. His presence isn’t seen so much as insinuated through prophetic hints, innuendos and subliminal shivers: ‘I felt the blood coagulate in my veins’; ‘He has quite turned day into night’; ‘and yet when I gaze into the glass I see only myself’.

  This pliable draft of the Count’s own pliable character is reflected by that of Bram Stoker himself, who arrives in Whitby exhausted, paranoid and ‘on the cusp of losing my reason.’ This is personified by the ‘shadow’ that pursues his nocturnal walks through the town. The prime candidate for this ‘Horror’ is Stoker’s Henry Irving: ‘I fear that Mr Irving has drained all his reserves of energy and there is nothing left for his wife. In the evening he comes alive a little.’ Others include Stoker’s own unsteady mental health and his confused, repressed sexuality.

  What is really possessing Bram Stoker is vampiric folklore itself: the tales of the Irish Dearg-due told by his mother, Charlotte, the leaches applied by doctor Uncle William and his boss at Dublin’s Evening Mail, Sheridan le Fanu, author of the famous vampire story Carmilla. These are just a few of the forms of folklore that drift from one generation to the next, enticing willing victims (or readers) who, if they fell under its spell, might pass it on, to misquote Tolkien, ‘in undead shapes that move from mind to mind’.

  The tricky question of Stoker’s originality, not to mention his sanity, is neatly summarised by the line: ‘Whether this Horror is real or merely the handiwork of my imagination I cannot say.’ What Macrae Burnet is also emphasising is how Dracula’s lifeblood is really stories, transfused from one mind to another. What American shock-master Chuck Palahniuk writes about in his novel Choke (2001): ‘The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.’

  What Mozley and Macrae Burnet propose is that folklore’s forms endure, paradoxically, through flux and persist through transformation. Dracula might be Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman and, well, Leslie Nielsen, but he is always Dracula. ‘Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified.’

  What might all this entail for that vastest of concepts: truth? What happens when folklore, with its ‘impossibilities, and things inconsistent with truth’, sits beside fact – and its science, history? It is perhaps a particularly vexed question for our own multivalent, cut-and-paste, post (post (post?)) modernist age of remixing, fake news and virtual reality.

  There are certainly many examples of history’s material facts in all eight of
the stories, not least in the buildings, monuments and sites themselves that provide such atmospheric backdrops: ‘The eastern gable of the ancient Abbey, devoid of any protection from the elements, thrust above the horizon like the craggy eminences of the Carpathians’ (‘The Dark Thread’). The stone circle in Sarah Hall’s ‘The Hand Under the Stone’, each stone with ‘bumps, smooth bits, scrapes and chips; each has mountain-copied shapes, like the Castlerigg stones, flat-topped, saddle-backed, peaky; each is booming over or is still upright, has beardy moss or sparkle crystals inside’.

  Instead of being monolithic still lives, these testaments to historical endurance are fragile and mutable, and bear the marks of time’s passing: Whitby’s roofless abbey; the pockmarks in Hall’s stones; or the ruins of Tintagel which Thorpe describes as ‘like any other ruins: heaps of stone blocks loosely cemented together by a sort of ancient, crumbling mortar into precarious walls, chunks bitten out of them like traces of hungry rats in cheese’.

  Of course, what time takes away, modernity also restores and rebuilds. In ‘Breakynecky’, Moss describes the worn stone steps leading to Berwick Castle, which once ‘used to stand implacable against the sky, turreted like the stained-glass Jerusalem in the church windows’. Its current crumbling state is now emphasised by a later bridge, a ‘miracle of Victorian engineering’, and the even more recent construction work by ‘yellow-jacketed men’ and their ‘yolk-yellow machine hammers’. The perilous climb to Tintagel has been eased, in places, by a ‘new, cemented footpath’ served by a ‘hand-rail that saved any foolhardy visitors from slipping over’.

  This ebb and flow is nonetheless grounded in material reality, in the verifiable facts that anchor history. And if historians are a nation’s official biographers, then the storytellers of myth, legend and fairytale are their weird, wild and rakishly enticing older siblings, free to channel the ‘vivid flashes’ of ancient violence that assault Louisa’s imagination in Thorpe’s ‘Capture’ or to hear the whispers of Hall’s stone circle.