Abs, pecs, biceps, the glint of moonlight off a high-set cheekbone, suspiciously well-conditioned tumbling locks. If you know anything about the current taste for fae-based romantasy, you know the drill. A gut like a wine barrel, bandy legs, the glint of slime on a protruding brow bone, a jaunty little red hat. Is this a swoon-worthy love interest you would pursue to the ends of Tír na nÓg? Well, why ever not?

Unfortunately the hob doesn’t sell a novel, the tommyknocker never gets a love triangle, and the spriggan would certainly have trouble with chat up lines. It seems even the mystical and the magical aren't safe from British classism. The stuff gets everywhere. Indeed, the cruel fae prince may be as cruel as he likes, but at the end of the day he is still a prince.

Throughout this current revival of interest in the fairy realms, I’ve found the little guys have been sorely neglected. The reason is simple enough, beautiful fae are easy peasy in that they arrived pre-packaged in intrigue, danger and mystery. They are also, conspicuously, the upper echelons of fae society, beckoning with slender taloned fingers toward riches untold, moonlit trysts, and a three-book contract. It has long been my contention that in picking up books titled A Prince of Smouldering Pouts, we folklorists are barking up the wrong fairy tree. I believe we can actually learn a lot more about folklore’s fascinating social workings through a renewed focus on the guy who plumps the prince’s pillows, who mucks out his winged horse, who enjoys a nice bowl of milk after a long day’s graft. This essay is my love letter to the lumpy and the wrinkled, the stout and the diminutive, the hairy and the knobbly, and to what this toiling band of fairies can tell us about the rich working-class realities that have historically informed the mythos surrounding these cornerstones of British folklore.

Know your hob from your knocker

Of course, we cannot have any meaningful discussion without first understanding who it is we are actually talking about. The range of little guys roaming our folkloric landscape is surprisingly vast. No two wee folk are the same, with widely varying features, preferences and skills. Unfortunately, it is often the case that the smaller members of the fae become a homogenous mass of crooked noses, yellow teeth, and skin flaps. ‘Goblin’ is the word that frequently swallows up any nuance, the word can be stretched in all directions to simply account for something small, ugly and vaguely humanoid. Some of this flattening is simply etymological standard. ‘Goblin’ arrives in English via the French gobelin, itself most likely descended from Greek kobalos meaning a rogue or trickster spirit. By the time the word settled into Middle English, via the poem ‘Of Rybaudȝ’, it was already something of a loose umbrella.

The lumping-together can be itself read as a class act. Nobody collapses the distinction between a selkie and a banshee, because those figures were considered narratively rich enough to warrant careful cataloguing. The ugly little men doing unglamorous jobs in cellars and mine shafts seldom get this courtesy. It is high time we get to know these fellows a little better.

(this list is by no means exhaustive, and I certainly recommend further reading; but I hope to shed a little light on the richness of distinction among this overlooked group)

Hobs

In the Northern Dales and border country of England, you might find yourself pelted with stale bread by little unseen hands, or go to make breakfast and find your best cereal bowl smashed to pieces. Here, the hobs might be at work.

Hobs are largely agreeable little fellows, they tend to make home in farmhouse eves and cottage nooks. If left undisturbed, the hob can prove extremely helpful to the beneficent family. By night he threshes the corn, sweeps the floors and churns the butter, generally completing all the repetitive work a farm requires to keep running. The matter of reimbursement for this labour is where the anecdote earns its keep as fully fledged folklore. He works for milk, cream, or a bit of bread left out overnight, never wages, and he takes deep offence at the suggestion of formal payment. Give a hob a coat, a pair of shoes, anything that resembles a wage rather than a gift, and he vanishes, insulted, never to return. The hob simply wants a little involvement in the human hearth rather than a payslip.

Physical description of the hob varies by region, but generally the creature is figured as small, hairy, and wrinkled, sometimes with outrageously large feet. The name Hob became associated with the mythical creature as ‘a piece of rude familiarity to cover up uncertainty or fear’; essentially, calling these creatures by a common nickname was a way to make hairy little men less frightening.

One famous hob lived near Runswick Bay in a hobhole; this hob was believed to be able to cure young children of kink-cough (whooping cough). Parents would bring their sickly young to the hob’s cave dwelling and recite this verse:

Hobhole Hob!
Ma’ bairn’s gotten ‘t kink cough,
Tak’t off ! tak’t off!

For those even passingly familiar with Tolkien, the term ‘hob hole’ might ring a bell. Tolkien's Denham Tracts, an 1846 compilation of folklore names, lists ‘hobbit’" in a long, unglamorous inventory of English spirits, sandwiched between boggle-boes and hobgoblins, with no description attached beyond the name itself. Tolkien, by his own account, may never have consciously borrowed it, but the shape of the word and the shape of the creature both descend from the same source: hob, the nickname for a small household spirit. It is quite sweet that the hob, having spent centuries doing the folkloric equivalent of unpaid overtime, ended up furnishing the name for one of the best-loved characters in the entire fantasy canon, and it is quite sad that almost nobody who loves Bilbo Baggins has ever heard of his Hob Hole cousin.

Boggart

A boggart is essentially a hob gone sour. Typical descriptions show boggarts to be malevolent house dwellers, akin to the later more elusive poltergeist. It is said that the boggart crawls into people's beds at night and puts a clammy hand on their faces. Sometimes he strips the bedsheets off them. Delightful!

Unfortunately a boggart is not necessarily tied to a physical dwelling; it may in fact follow a family from place to place for generations. One Lancashire source vehemently advises that a boggart should never be named. Once named, this creature would become uncontrollable and destructive and could never be reasoned with. Though ‘boggart’ is ultimately a Lancastrian term, the word has certainly spread and may bear etymological relation to the wider used ‘bogeyman’, ‘bugaboo’, or ‘bugbear’.

The 1902 Saga-book of the Viking Club, Vol. 3. describes a certain boggart as ‘a squat hairy man, strong as a six year old horse, and with arms almost as long as tacklepoles.’ I would certainly not want to see this reaching out a clammy hand for me in the dead of night. As with most folkloric descriptions, the boggart’s appearance varies regionally and over time. Other accounts describe boggarts as being more bestial. The Boggart of Longar Hede from Yorkshire was said to be a fearsome creature the size of a calf, with long shaggy hair and eyes like saucers. It trailed a long chain after itself, which made a noise like a pack of hounds.

Knocker

The knocker, knacker, or tommyknocker is a subterranean humanoid figure said to dwell in the mines beneath Devon and Cornwall. The Cornish describe the creature as a little person 2 foot tall, with a disproportionately large head, long arms, wrinkled skin, and long white whiskers. Rather adorably, they are thought to wear tiny versions of the typical miner’s garb and get up to all sorts of mischief at the expense of their human counterparts. Knockers are popularly believed to steal miner’s unattended tools and food, and douse the candles and gas lamps lighting the tunnels. To appease the knockers, Cornish miners would often save the plaited crust of their pasty to toss into the depths of the mine. In return, it was hoped that the knockers might oblige to assist the hard labour of tin mining.

The knocker's name itself points to his chief way of helping. Miners believed the knockers would knock on passage walls, guiding them to rich veins of tin. As mining became a larger scale industry, there was an increased concern for safety. The knockers assumed a new responsibility of knocking on the mine walls to warn of impending collapse.

Cornish miners, much sought after in the years following the gold and silver rushes, brought knocker belief to the mineral rich areas of Colorado, Nevada, and California. These little men found new homes in the American cave systems, becoming the tommyknockers of early 19th century folklore. When asked whether they had any relatives back home willing to work a mine, Cornish miners had a stock answer: ‘Me cousin Jack over in Cornwall would come, if ye paid his boat ride.’ The phrase stuck, and Cornish miners emigrating abroad became known as Cousin Jacks. Wherever they went, they brought the knockers with them. A Cousin Jack wouldn't set foot in a new mine until management confirmed the knockers were already on duty, and it wasn't long before non-Cornish miners, working deep underground where the timbers creaked and groaned, came to respect these same spirits.

Puck

Perhaps the most literised of labouring spirits, Puck brings to mind the devious little trickster, spring around the stage of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Despite his theatrical fame, Puck is in fact far older in the folkloric record. Should you happen across this formidable figure any time soon, he might also answer to Robin Goodfellow.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898) describes Robin Goodfellow as a ‘drudging fiend,’ a cheerful domestic spirit best known for mischief and practical jokes, who nonetheless does the household little favours after dark. This folkloric heritage is actually paid some lovely homage in the final lines of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Puck states:

A fairy blessing, couched in the realities of domestic folklore, this has to be one of my favourite lines of all time and a lovely indicator of the traditional vein that runs deeply through many of the Bard’s works.

Puck might tackle small chores around the house, a bit of fine needlework, a session at the butter churn, but cross him and he’d just as happily undo it all with a well-placed prank. As a domestic spirit, he helped housewives with their work in expectation of an offering, usually white bread and milk, and if that offering was neglected, he simply took what he felt he was owed.

Pucks are also, by nature, solitary creatures. A little acknowledgement now and then is welcome, but mostly he prefers to lounge about in the eaves. (me too)

Spriggan

Perhaps the most volatile of the gang, Spriggans are usually pictured as grotesque, wizened old men with oddly childlike heads. They are small in build but capable of far more than their size suggests. They haunted old ruins, cairns, and barrows, standing guard over buried treasure, and folklore held that they were actually the ghosts of giants, which explained their retained strength. West Country folklorist Robert Hunt collected one story in which a spriggan swells to enormous size, and he linked the spirits to Trencrom Hill in Cornwall.

Their temperament certainly matched their looks. Spriggans had a reputation for spite, and they took real pleasure in punishing anyone who crossed them. They could whip up a sudden whirlwind to frighten a traveller, send storms to ruin a harvest, or steal a human child and leave one of their own ugly changelings behind in the cot. Any house that got robbed, building that collapsed, or cattle that went missing, the spriggans took the blame. One story turns the tables on them entirely:

an old woman is said to have outwitted a band of spriggans and made off with their treasure simply by turning her clothes inside out, a trick folklore rated as being just as effective against fairies as holy water or iron.

On Christmas Eve, they are believed to gather for a midnight Mass at the bottom of old mine shafts, and anyone passing by after dark might hear them singing. Drawing on Hunt and William Bottrell's collections, Katharine Briggs described spriggans as something closer to fairy bodyguards, while The English Dialect Dictionary (1905) put them in the same family as the Scandinavian troll.

Spriggans are a surprisingly popular fixture of fantasy pop culture and can be found in video games such as Elder Scrolls and World of Warcraft as well as having been a cornerstone of Dungeons and Dragons since the 1980s.

A big case for the little guys

Strip away the regional names and the small variations in temperament, and a single figure continue to crop up throughout our oral history. These are the small, unlovely someones whose entire folkloric function is to toil without being seen doing it.

The hob threshes corn at night. The knocker labours a mile underground. Puck churns butter while the household sleeps. In every case, the work happens in the dark, literally or figuratively, out of sight of the beneficiary. Nobody watches a hob sweep a floor or clocks a knocker’s shift. The value these creatures produce only becomes visible in its absence— it is the corn that’s already threshed by morning, or the mine that hasn’t collapsed. This is a fairly exact supernatural mirror of held to how real working-class labour has always functioned in the popular imagination. This labour has always been present in its results but invisible in its process. It is all to easy to take for granted simply because nobody has to watch it happen.

There is also the question of payment. Conspicuously, none of these fellows work for a wage. Offer any formal payment in coin, clothing or anything that resembles a contract rather than a gift, and the relationship breaks. This is the folklore of a pre-industrial economy in which most agricultural and domestic labour was paid in kind. Workers came to expect room, board, and the odd gift, rather than cash. The hob’s touchiness about being paid ‘properly’ reads less like quirky fairy lore and more like an anxiety about what happens when a cultural group’s paternalistic arrangement of service gets replaced by something more impersonal and more transactional.

Unmistakably, there is a common accent employed when depicting these strange little guys throughout pop culture. Collected accounts of hobs, boggarts, and their kin are full of dropped consonants and regional dialect, rendered on the page in a way that reads close to a cockney or broad-northern caricature. Many have noticed this particularly with games such as the Baldur’s Gate series. The choice, conscious or not, is deep rooted in a pervasive cultural stereotype of the cockney classes as ‘rough’ and violent; willing to do the grunt work, so to speak of their higher class employers.

Now we come to the physical ‘ugliness’ of this group. The image does more work, culturally than it might first appear to. Wizened faces, stunted bodies, warts, wrinkles, bandy legs, brow ridges are by no means neutral aesthetic choices. Physical grotesqueness has a long and unflattering history as shorthand for the poor and the marginalised in British visual and literary culture, the workhouse caricature, the music-hall grotesque, the ‘deserving’ versus ‘undeserving’ poor sorted partly by how palatable they looked. If you stack the hob or the spriggan up against a folklore collector’s tidy woodcut of a graceful Seelie court fairy, the class coding really does itself. Beauty, in this tradition, belongs to the aristocracy of Faerie. Ugliness belongs to everyone who shines the pointy shoes.

Taken together these repeated facets draw a coherent portrait, presented again and again across regions and centuries, of what a certain kind of British audience believed the working class looked like, sounded like, and deserved. And yet, for all that unflattering coding, these are also the creatures modern fantasy is built on. Every glittering fae court descends, however many literary generations removed, from the same folk tradition that gave us the hob and the knocker. You simply cannot have one without the other. Pull the working fairies out of the family tree and the aristocrats lose their roots becoming shiny decoration with little to no substance.

Which is really the argument for going back and having a good old proper look. To only ever reach for the pretty bits of folklore, in courts and crowns and the moonlit trysts, is to lose reams of real-world nuance in the process, all the detail that actually tells you something about the people who told these stories in the first place. A fae prince tells you what a culture wanted to dream about on a cold night where the air was biting at the holes in your socks. A hob tells you what that same culture believed about work, debt, gratitude, and fairness, what it feared underground, what it thought was owed to the people who kept the farm running while everyone else slept. This is, if anything, the richer seam, literally, in the case of the knocker, and it is the one that gives fantasy’s family tree an actual root system instead of just a very nice canopy.

None of this is to pretend the portraits themselves are comfortable. The caricature of it all was shaped by exactly the same classism this essay keeps circling back to, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But an unflattering portrait is not the same as a worthless one. These figures can be reclaimed rather than merely apologised for, brought back into the light not despite their grotesqueness but because of what that grotesqueness was recording all along. In folklore, as in life, the little guy has always been the one holding the whole thing up.

Redcap, hob, lob, knocker, brownie, spriggan, tiddy mun. No, this is not what I call my housemate when the last teabag goes missing under mysterious circumstances, though frankly some of these names would work. They are, instead a mere fraction of names the United Kingdom have assigned to our vast collection of weird little dudes. The British folk record is absolutely teeming with milk swiping, wall knocking, loot hoarding, cow tipping, ankle biting chaps.

In anticipation of a larger essay coming your way shortly, here is the thorough-ish kit of resources I keep in my mental satchel, for use whenever I am ambushed by a two-foot terror in my research.

Household Helpers (brownies, hobs, lobs, silkies)

Katharine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (1976)
Always the core reference in any dude-ology. This extensive work features alphabetical entries on brownies, hobs, silkies, killmoulis, with regional variants and source citations for each. Super accessible and certainly gives theses domestic tiny toilers their due.
Use: your first-stop lookup for any household spirit name you need to verify or expand.

William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1866)
The shape of this work is a little lumpier and bumpier but no less useful. Fieldwork-adjacent collection with strong brownie and hob material from the North. Though less polished, it is certainly more directly dialect-true than later anthologies.
Use: primary-flavoured quotes and regional specificity Briggs at times smooths over.

Michael Aislabie Denham, The Denham Tracts (2 vols, ed. Hardy, 1892–95)
An avid Victorian pamphleteer's obsessive county-by-county list of every supernatural being he could get named. This work features hundreds of local terms for household and boundary spirits.
Use: the closest thing to a primary anthology already in existence; good for exploring the sheer taxonomic sprawl you're wrestling into shape.

Ruth Tongue, Somerset Folklore (1965)
This is brilliant fieldwork collected directly from oral informants, with a great degree of attentiveness to speakers. A gentle trip through the West Country.
Use: gives you living-memory texture rather than antiquarian paraphrase. Useful in discovering the cultural persistence of the little fellow far beyond a pastoral past.

Mine and industrial spirits (knockers, killmoulis)

Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England (1865)
This is the standard Devonian and Cornish collection. The work features extensive knocker material, mining custom, and the etiquette of not offending them.
Use: your main knocker source; a great introduction to the tradition and a safety guide for when you next find yourself in a Cornish tin mine.

William Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (3 vols, 1870s)
Denser and more narrative than Hunt, this work is less anthologised and strong on mine-spirit belief as lived practice and functional cautionary tale rather than quaint parochial story.
Use: good for exploring how knocker belief functioned as actual workplace safety culture, not just cultural colour.

Redcaps, spriggans, and malevolent border/boundary spirits

William Henderson (above) also covers redcaps in Border-country context.

Robert Hunt (above) also covers spriggans as Cornish monument-guardians.

Jeremy Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions (2004)
This is an accessible site-specific approach, linking spirits to actual landscape features (barrows, standing stones, ruined keeps). A personal favourite in the guidance provided for physically walking small dude terrain.
Use: A colourful look at landscape/place as much as the creatures themselves, this is the book for the budding little guy explorer.

Fenland Fellas and ecological grievance (Tiddy Mun)

Marie Clothilde Balfour, ‘Legends of the Cars,’ Folk-Lore journal (1891)
This is the original recorded source for the Tiddy Mun and the fen-drainage legends. An excellent resource for tracing the heritage of a small chap who entirely embodies the landscape from whence he came.
Use: Tiddy Mun lore is thin on the ground elsewhere but highly important in the canon of small scoundrels.

Personal Favourites

Diane Purkiss, At the Bottom of the Garden (2000)
Insanely Sharp theoretical treatment of the weird little dude. This book is excellent at explaining why these figures cluster around anxiety, boundary-transgression, and unpaid/exploited labour.
Use: Great for those who desire to delve deeper in anthropological function.

Carole Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples (1998)
How Victorian folklorists sorted real belief into tidy literary taxonomies, with little regard for their folk source.
Use: A deep dive into the essential class aspect of the discussion.

Simon Young & Ceri Houlbrook (eds.), Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies, 500 AD to the Present (2018)
This is a recent essay collection with focus on regional specificity, and the evolution of belief over centuries rather than presenting folklore as static.
Use: A real insight into evolution and transformations throughout various regions.

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)
A novel of English magic set during the Napoleonic Wars, centred on the rivalry between two magicians reviving a lost English magical tradition. My favourite book of all time and a masterful example of accurate and well researched fairy lore employed in fiction.
Use: fairy logic built directly out of the older folkloric record. A good contrast case against the common Victorian, divorce of figure from tradition.

Francis Young, Fairies: A History (2026) A rewarding and comprehensive journey across continents and millennia, exploring the ever-evolving nature of otherworld traditions. Equal parts analytical and engaging. Use: Reaching further into the global record, with insight into colonial expansion of folk belief.

I wish you all happy exploring! I will be back next week with a companion essay, meeting a wide range of strange little dudes on their home turf. If you need me I will be ducking and weaving the bits of stale bread my resident brownie is throwing from the rafters.

If you want to feel a little soggy today, check out my media list:

Though it might be an uncomfortable, tooth-grinding exercise, I want you to imagine a data centre. 100,000 square feet of pure efficiency humming somewhere just beyond the edge of the city slicker’s comfortable notice. A squat, quadrilateral testimony to a race catapulting themselves into the next century, without so much as a glance over the shoulder. Can you see it?

Now we might imagine the complete opposite; the antithesis to this buzzing bastion of productivity.

We find ourselves knee deep in muck, the air is damp and green — a far cry from the faintly discomfiting ozone of the server farm. Black sludge wells up through wefts of centuries old sphagnum moss, tannin-dark and resinous. The land is almost writhing with vegetation: hosta, meadowsweet, creeping jenny, perhaps a feathery tuft of pale astilbe; constellations of marsh marigold. What might first be taken for quiet is, in fact, many layers of lazy sound. A curlew burbles and beeps, insects murmur to each other, the sucking mud ebbs and pops. Something is happening here. Slowly, by degrees the land is consumed in great squelching gulps. What goes down won't resurface, reformed, in our lifetimes.

The bog appears to be lapping at the ankles of many a disillusioned soul. Increasingly, across popular culture we are seeing a rise in marshland spaces as the antidote to the gleaming minimalism of our technological age.

At Paris Fashion Week 2026, elements of the mire could be seen throughout the works of several major fashion houses. Hermes and Louis Vuitton staged runways amid great spongy, moss covered sets, and independent brands such as IAMSIGO and Solitude Studios have released collections inspired by, and in collaboration with peatland. Solitude even submerged some of their garments in Danish peat marshes to achieve a rather arresting distressed effect.

At California's San José Museum of Art, Chalon Nation artist Christine Howard Sandoval’s October exhibition will bring together sculpture, drawing, and plant-dyed pieces that trace how the state's wetlands once served as places of Indigenous resistance and community. Across the pond, The Bog Bothy, a mobile design project by the Dublin-based architecture practice 12th Field in collaboration with the Irish Architecture Foundation, was inspired by the makeshift huts used by peat cutters who harvested the material for fuel. The bog is even seeping into our homes, with Edinburgh based designer Oisin Gallagher fashioning unique doorstops from bog oak scraps, carbon dated to 3300 BC.

June saw the release of Maggie O’ Farrell’s highly anticipated Land, a historical fiction following cartographer and famine survivor Tomas, as he journeys through Ireland’s rich wetland, producing an unofficial map that documents the landscape through the Irish language.

Across TikTok and Instagram, the ‘bog witch’ aesthetic is bubbling up between curated videos of pristine kitchens and sponsored skincare demonstrations. This movement favours patina, unkempt hair, bare feet, wet earth, slow fashion, and a healthy dose of intolerance for the hyper-consumerism perpetuated by the popular ‘clean girl’ lifestyle. This is cottagecore’s grimy cousin, the crest of a growing cultural wave that rejects the pristine domesticity of its predecessor in favour of something looser and altogether stranger.

TikTok user Leah Thomas says:

‘bog aesthetics reject the idea that nature has to be pristine or productive to be beautiful. A bog is messy, a bog is weird, a bog is mysterious and kind of icky at the same time.’

But why bogs, and why now?

Inhospitable, intriguing and bleakly beautiful, our wetlands are deeply functional spaces. Despite only making up around 3 to 4% of the Earth’s terrain, wetlands are responsible for housing 40% of our carbon stores. The UK alone boasts around 5.5bn tonnes of carbon: that’s over half of the entire country’s current carbon storage kept in bogs alone. Sphagnum moss, that spongy carpet of ochres, umbers, scarlets, and tungstens, thrives in bogland areas, soaking up to 8 times its weight in water. This absorption acts as the driving force behind peat bog ecosystems. By trapping water, sphagnum creates a permanently waterlogged, oxygen-poor environment that prevents dead plant material from decaying fully, allowing rich peat to form and store this massive amount of carbon. The unique biodiversity this promotes means a specialised niche is carved out for the growth of rare plants such as sundews, with low oxygen and acidic conditions keeping aggressive competitor plants out. Abundant aquatic invertebrates and amphibians in bog pools feed endangered or declining wetland birds, such as curlews and cranes, allowing populations to thrive in densities seen nowhere else in the world.

The UK and Ireland hold over 20% of the world’s blanket bog (a globally rare biome), making these rainy isles one of the most important places for this habitat. Unfortunately, these environments have borne centuries of misuse, and the land carries the scars. 94% of Britain’s raised bog and 99% of Ireland’s has been lost over the last century due to peat cutting, burning, drainage and afforestation. 44% of Scotland’s internationally important blanket peat bog was lost to afforestation and drainage from the 1940s to 1980s. Scientists now count this loss as a double blow: a hit to carbon storage, and a weakening of our defences against wildfire, just as the mounting climate crisis makes both matter more than ever. One need only look to the recent tragedy of Dunwich Heath, Suffolk to see the devastating effects of hotter summers and drier landscapes.

In this way, the bog and the data centre are opposites, not only in appearance, but in function. The bog takes centuries to become what it is. The data centre is built in months. And where the bog draws carbon down and holds it, layer upon patient layer, the data centre burns it up in real time, to keep the cloud, that great immaterial wilderness, running.

In prehistoric Europe, bogs were considered deeply productive sites, regarded with a spiritual reverence deserving of this unique, almost alien terrain. Clifton Bain, former director of the IUCN Peatland Programme. points out one can tell much about a community from its use of the terrain:

‘It’s an interesting part of the story. When you go to a peatland site, it’s all the stuff nearby that you should visit. The local culture helps you understand how the site has got to where it is. In Wales, for example, the old monasteries were industrial hubs of peat extraction. They can help explain the state of their local peatlands.’

The land produced fuel for industry, forageable plants and mushrooms, and quiet spaces for artistic creation. It also turned up something altogether spookier.

It is not uncommon to put an unwitting foot right through a centuries old skull, or to stumble over an ancient shin bone, newly spat up by the earth when tramping these strange lands. The phenomenon of bog bodies, is deeply ingrained in Northern European history and folk tradition.

Tollund Man, pulled from a Danish bog in 1950, still wears the noose he was hanged with, along with a felt cap and belt, nothing else. His last meal, porridge of barley and flax, survived in his stomach for over two thousand years. Grauballe Man, found a few miles away, met a rougher end: his throat cut so violently the blade nicked bone, his body preserved down to a stomach full of grain laced with ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus that some read as a clue and others as mere coincidence. Lindow Man, dragged out of a Cheshire bog in 1984 and Britain’s most complete find, died three times over: struck twice on the skull hard enough to drive bone into brain, garrotted, and cut at the throat, then laid face down in the water. Archaeologists call this overkill a tripartite death, and it resists any reading as ordinary murder.

What these deaths meant is where the certainty runs out. The dominant theory holds they were sacrifices, offered to a fertility god after a failed harvest, the ergot and other findings in their stomachs sometimes read as ritual meals eaten shortly before death. But sacrifice is not the only reading on the table: some were likely executed criminals, others victims of what would now be called judicial killing, and a few scholars argue the whole framework of ritual sacrifice says more about what nineteenth and twentieth-century archaeologists wanted to find in the Iron Age dead than what the bodies themselves can prove.

I have written more extensively on this phenomenon here:

Romanticon

Spring in its Cruelty

On the violent undercurrent of the season from T.S. Eliot and the Romantic elegists to bog bodies and the British folk record.Romanticon is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support our writers, consider becoming a paid subscriber…

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5 months ago · 106 likes · 1 comment · Romanticon and Lizzie Bickerstaff

What we can be sure of is the bog as an incredible space for historic preservation. These unique habitats are perhaps some of the land’s most reliable archives, preserving right down to the laces of one’s boot or the hairs on one’s head. The Faddan More Psalter, found by a peat cutter in 2006 was hailed by the National Museum of Ireland as one of the most significant Irish archaeological finds in decades. The prayer book can be dated to the late 8th century, with fragments of hand written text still legible today.

The conservation effort was a harrowing prospect:

‘It was absolutely terrifying,’ Conservator John Gillis said of the responsibility he felt. ‘I heard from someone in the British Museum that there was a picture of the mass on the walls in a staff area there with the words ‘if you think you have a bad day ahead …’ You had this nerve-racking scenario of disturbing this material, which meant losing evidence, when the whole point was trying to gain as much information as possible.’

The work was dried out and stabilised over two years, and eventually conservators were able to physically pick out individual letters from the text, before restoring a large portion of the psalter itself. Absolutely cosmic stuff.

On the 28th of May, 1891, a group of Danish peat cutters working a small bog called Rævemosen, near the village of Gundestrup in northern Jutland, struck silver. The cauldron unearthed had been taken apart deliberately, its base, its five inner plates, and seven of an original eight outer plates, stacked one inside the other and buried together, as though someone had wanted it hidden rather than lost. Palaeobotanical study of the surrounding peat later showed the land had been dry ground when the cauldron went in, the bog grew up and sealed over it only afterwards. The government paid the finders a reward substantial enough that they fell to quarrelling over how to split it, a very human coda to a very inhuman find.

What the cauldron actually is remains argued over more than a century later. Its silverwork, the largest surviving example of European Iron Age silver, carries imagery that scholars read as broadly Celtic: gods, warriors, sacrificial scenes, animals both real and mythic. But other details, a leaping horned figure, elephants, griffins, point somewhere further east, toward Thrace or Dacia in the Lower Danube. No one agrees whether it was made by Celts, made for Celts by someone else entirely, or carried across a continent as loot or gift long before it ever reached the bog it was found in. It remains, perhaps one of the greatest finds in the long history of the bog archive.

Marshlands are a prime example of what ecologists term the ‘Edge Effect.’ Where two different habitats meet you get a border zone that's richer in life than either habitat in isolation. The bog, being neither solid ground nor open water, habitable nor inhabitable holds the boundary open indefinitely, century after century, becoming a meeting place of disparate species, cultures and items that otherwise would not meet anywhere else.

This ecological rationalisation certainly lends clarity to the folklore’s fixation on hems, bounds, and fringes. We have come to half expect the magic and mayhem of our folkloric canon to unfold in the spaces ‘betwixt and between.’

Consider the will-o'-the-wisp, known in various parts of Britain as jack-o'-lantern, hinky punk, or spunkie, a light seen hovering over marsh and bog at night, always a little further off than it appears, always leading the traveller from the solid path. Science has since supplied a tidy explanation of marsh gases, methane and phosphine, released by decaying plant matter and prone to spontaneous ignition in the right conditions. What the wisp actually does, regardless of its chemistry, is punish the traveller for trusting a light where no light should be. It is a boundary keeping its own boundary.

The Tiddy Mun, despite its silly name, is a brilliant example of folklore functioning as early conservationist rhetoric. The little old marsh man with shrill laughter like the pewit call of the Northern Lapwing, reportedly became enraged in the mid 16th century when his peatland home was drained and shrunken by the surrounding populous. Enraged at the disturbance to his home, the Tiddy Mun issued a curse of pestilence on the villages involved. After this, he was not completely without pity, however – when flooding threatened, townsfolk would chant his name until they heard the pewit call, whereupon the waters would miraculously recede. The custom is still acknowledged in the Lincolnshire area today. This disgruntled little fellow seemed to serve as a sort of proto-caution to leave areas of ecological intrigue to their own devices, lest we disrupt the course of nature.

We can also see marsh folklore in its enduring function of childhood warning in the guise of bone-chilling dissuasive tale. The kelpie takes the shape of a horse, dark grey, black, occasionally white, found standing patient and riderless by a a body of water, mane always wet regardless of the weather around it. It looks tame. Crucially, it looks like something a child could climb onto. That is the entire mechanism of the story. Once mounted, the rider finds themselves stuck fast to the kelpie's hide, and the horse gallops straight down the bank and under the water, drowning its rider in the depths before eating what's left. It is sad to consider the very real origins of this tale: countless playing children pulled into the sticky peat, unaware of the true nature of the ground beneath them. In this we can see, the rhetoric built up around habitation in such areas, these stories simply part of a community’s navigation of the land over centuries. It is all in effort of giving some familiarity to a vast, ancient ecosystem continuously proving itself complex and unknowable.

More creatures can be read about here:

This is perhaps the crux of our growing cultural fascination with peatlands. We crave mystery in an age where everything is pulled apart and explained. We crave dirtiness in a society where cleanliness sits next to godliness. We crave slow, purposeful production in place of meaningless, quick-fix brainrot. We crave sacrifice in an age of rampant materialism. And above all, we crave a closeness to nature that is fast slipping through our fingers, a reverence for the living world that lets us stand alongside our ecosystems as marshals rather than owners.

We leave the bog to its own devices, and it leaves us to ours. That is the whole arrangement. No management plan, no extraction, no return on investment, just two things existing side by side, each shaped slowly by the other’s presence rather than the other’s use. It is, perhaps, the last relationship of its kind we have left. Everything else has been improved, optimised, monetised, or explained into submission. The bog alone still gets to keep its secrets, we must ensure it remains this way.

I will leave you with a few verses of Heaney’s haunting Tollund Man:

I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

---

Thanks for reading Lurker! This post is public so feel free to share it with your marshy mates.

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I’m sure many of us hold wonderful childhood memories of snivelling at the dinner table while our disgruntled parents implored us to eat our vegetables — ‘they’re not going to kill you.’ Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that we were only contending with a pile of soggy broccoli and not an ancient curse wielding, anthropomorphic root with a penchant for unleashing the din of a thousand damned souls. Small mercies, really.

The mandrake is a common fixture of magical practice and esoteric lore. It has lived several lives throughout recorded and vernacular history, making it one of the most extensively storied plants in the European folk record.

Nomenclature

To the casual etymologist it might appear that the word ‘mandrake’, is fairly straightforward, being a lexical collision of the Anglo-Saxon ‘man’ and ‘drake’, meaning dragon. However, dig a little deeper (haha) and it turns out that the actual roots (hahaha) of the word are more tangled. ‘Mandrake’ can be traced to the original Latin ‘mandragora’ which in fact does not have much at all to do with men or dragons. Given how frequently the root was used among the peasant classes of medieval Britain, it's little wonder the genus name fell victim to the usual bastardisations of vernacular English, especially for a plant whose shape left so little room for it to be regarded as anything else.

The anthropomorphic identification of the root can be seen further afield, popping up across Northern Europe under many names that insist on its resemblance to the human body. In France, the verbose vegetable is known as the ‘main-de-gloire,’ meaning ‘hand of glory.’ This naming is quite nuanced in that if you say ‘main-de-gloire’ three times quickly, you end up with something that sounds pretty similar to the Latinate parent ‘mandragora.’ This is an excellent phonetic corruption in itself, but the actual meaning of the main-de-gloire opens an entirely new can of worms.

Though the finger-shaped roots of the mandrake originally inspired this unusual name, over time, the plant's use to invite fortune and 'glory' became entangled with a separate, more gruesome folklore about the pickled hand of a hanged criminal. It's worth saying that this etymology is disputed rather than settled. Not every scholar accepts the ‘mandragora’ derivation, and the alternative reading (that ‘hand of glory’ is simply a literal, English-language description of the object, no corruption required) has its defenders too. But disputed etymologies are, if anything, more useful to the folklorist than settled ones, because the dispute itself tells you something: that two traditions this superficially different were close enough in function to become genuinely difficult to prise apart. Whether the confusion happened in the word or merely around it, the fact that anyone could confuse them at all is the more interesting inheritance.

Germany also saw a proliferation of mandragora strains in its loamy soil and similarly reached the conclusion that the roots were less plant matter and more human, giving it the name ‘galgenmannlein’ — ‘little gallows man.’ As with much of the German language, the term is pretty to the point and tells you virtually everything you need to know about the folk provenance of the vegetable. This stems from the belief that the mandrake would only grow at the base of a gallows that had recently seen a hanging. The criminal’s blood and semen would drip down into the soil beneath, from which would spring a new root, bearing the soul and likeness of the dead man. An elaborate set of conditions had to be met by the hanged man to produce the magic herb, given by the Grimms' Deutsche Sagen:

If a hanged man was a hereditary thief (Erbdieb), his mother had either stolen or contemplated stealing while carrying him, and he died a virgin, then the fluids that dropped would cause a ‘Galgn-Mänl’ to grow there.

Hopping next door, the Dutch shared a similar belief that the mandrake grew from the urine of the hanging man, earning it the colloquial name ‘pisdiefje’ or ‘little urine thief.’ Delightful!

Some English texts also feature the simple ‘brain thief,’ which likely refers to the notion that the plant might grow from the brain matter of dead ne'er-do-wells. Further, the nickname also provides a great clue as to the adverse physical effects the mandrake enacts on its victims.

Herbalism

All species of Mandragora contain highly biologically active alkaloids, particularly tropane alkaloids. This is what makes the plant highly poisonous. Even the smallest of roots boasts strong hallucinogenic and hypnotic effects. Its reported anticholinergic nature also means efficient quantities can cause fairly swift asphyxiation. Light or accidental poisoning (which was weirdly quite common) can cause a very rough night of incessant vomiting and diarrhoea.

More commonly reported are the intense psychological effects such as delirium, terrifying hallucinations, and manic activity. In his New Herball of 1568, Dr William Turner, the clerical-medical Dean of Wells Cathedral and father of English botany, described the risks of administering the herb:

‘Of the apples of mandrake, if a man smell of them thei will make hym slepe and also if they be eaten. But they that smell to muche of the apples become dum . . . thys herbe diverse wayes taken is very jepardus for a man and may kill hym if he eat it or drynk it out of measure and have no remedy from it.... If mandragora be taken out of measure, by and by slepe ensueth and a great lousing of the streyngthe with a forgetfulness.’

This anaesthetic affect, despite its dangers, was used frequently in classical medicine. Dioscorides, in De Materia Medica (1st century) writes that some in his profession may administer a ladle of mandrake reduction, made from the root boiled in wine until it shrivels to a third, before performing surgery. Pliny the Elder also repeats that a dose of mandragora potion is drunk by the patient before incisions or punctures are made on the body. Dioscorides was also one of the first authors to distinguish (mistakenly) between the male and female mandrake. Pliny claimed that mandrake roots could be identified through depiction of male or female genitalia and whether they were light (male) or dark (female) in colour. Ancient pharmacology if nothing else, was certainly creative.

If a man came into possession of a male or ‘phallic’ mandrake, this had the power to amplify sex appeal tenfold and would have you practically drowning in suitors in a matter of hours. Theophrastus in Historia Plantarum, wrote that the mandragora needed to be harvested by following a prescribed ritual for ultimate efficacy. One would ‘draw three circles around [the root] with a sword, and cut it facing west’; then in order to obtain a second piece, the harvester must dance around it while speaking as much lewd talk about sex as he possibly can.

These potent roots were not just useful to humans alone, in the Christian allegorical bestiary Physiologus, the chapter on the elephant claims that when the male desires offspring, it leads its mate to the growing ground for the female to find the mandragora and come into estrous, the female then brings the root to the male which in turn become inflamed and they mate, making the female immediately pregnant. Yes those are in fact elephants below.

Folk Belief

Perhaps the most famous belief is that once pulled up from the soil, the mandrake would scream and crying incessantly, killing its harvester. Some even believed these cries were devilish work and would instantly doom victims to hell. Shakespeare details this widely held belief in Henry VI stating that the cries:

‘Would curses kill, as doth the Mandrake’s groan,

I would invent as bitter-searching terms,

As curst, and harsh, and horrible to hear.’

And in Romeo & Juliet:

‘Shrieks like Mandrakes, torn out of the earth,

That living mortals, hearing them, ran mad.’

As is unfailingly human nature, the peril of the unearthing only made the reward more appealing. Naturally, harvesters devised some pretty gnarly methods to avoid falling victim to the mandrake’s wails.

One such method detailed by Joseph of Jerusalem goes like this:

‘A furrow must be dug around the root until its lower part is exposed, then a dog is tied to it, after which the person tying the dog must get away. The dog then endeavours to follow him, and so easily pulls up the root, but dies suddenly instead of his master. After this, the root can be handled without fear.’

According to Josephus, it was no easy task for the harvester, because the root would move away from the handler, and though it can be stopped by pouring a woman’s urine or menstrual blood on it, touching it will cause certain death. Certain death, I believe, is the only suitable punishment for greedy dog murderers.

Like the notion that the plant grew from criminal death juice, the fear of the mandrake’s scream seems to be a purely medieval embellishment, with no record in classical texts. The practical function of this fearmongering, may well have been a tactic in creating imagined scarcity and driving sales of the plant for herbalists and merchants of the time.

Many believed the mandrake could 'leap about like a will-o'-the-wisp,' glowing in the dark as it went. Arabic sources reportedly translate loosely to 'devil's lantern,' and the Old English Herbarium describes the plant shining at night like a lamp. Josephus, states that mandrake is like a flame in colour, and in the evening appears like a glittering light, but the definitive origin of this belief has been lost to time.

Thomas Moore asserts this idea in Lalla Rookh:

‘Such rank and deadly lustre dwells,

As in those hellish fires that light

The Mandrake’s charnel leaves at night.’

Witchcraft

Throughout the historic record, it seems no self-respecting witch’s cabinet was complete without a mandrake root or two. An alternative classical name for the plant ‘circeium’, derives from Circe, the celebrated ancient Greek enchantress, inferring its long history with witchery.

Its tropane alkaloids place mandrake in the same family as belladonna and henbane, the trio most commonly implicated in flying ointments. These were the hallucinogenic salves said to be rubbed onto skin, or onto broom handles and inserted somewhere considerably more (ahem) absorbent, to allow witch’s to fly to black sabbaths. Whether this allowed physical flight is debateable, though with the hallucinogenic effects of the concoction, they certainly would have been ‘flying’ in some respect.

Ben Jonson, in his Masque of Queens, introduces a conventicle of witches, who, as part of the business which has brought them together, relate their deeds. One of the hags, who has been gathering mandragora, croaks:

‘I last night lay all alone

On the ground, to hear the Mandrake groan;

And plucked him up, though he grew full low;

And, as I had done, the cock did crow.’

By the time of the early modern witch trials, simply owning a mandrake root was itself grounds for suspicion — not because you'd necessarily done anything with it, but because the root's entire cultural history made it legible as a tool of maleficium by default. In some sources, the mandrake might even be used as a kind of familiar or ‘little genius’ by an enchanter. This vegetal assistant not only cures a host of maladies, but discovers hidden treasures; doubling the amount of money locked up in a box, keeping off evil spirits, or acting as a love charm if provided the right care by the possessor. It was fed, dressed, and consulted like a familiar, which meant a woman keeping one in a box lined with silk was, depending on who was doing the accusing, either a herbalist with an unusually devoted houseplant or a witch keeping a small imprisoned demon on retainer. You can probably guess which answer Medieval and Early Modern witch hunters went with.

when, during her trial in 1431, Joan of Arc was accused of having a mandrake about her person, the suggestion helped send her to the stake. Among the many charges levelled at her trial was the accusation that she owned and consulted the plant regularly. She denied it flatly, admitting only to having heard the old belief that the mandrake brought luck. It was a minor charge against her, buried under far weightier ones but its presence certainly demonstrates how dangerous even the most simple inherited herbal beliefs could become in the wrong hands.

The Mandrake’s Cultural Endurance

It's worth pausing, at the end of all this, on the strangeness of the impulse itself — the cross-cultural personification of the mandrake. Every culture that got its hands on this root arrived at the conclusion that a body-shaped thing must contain a body's worth of meaning. Resemblance was evidence, and arguably the best information available to anyone standing in a field without a microscope. But I don't think that's the whole of it, or even the more interesting part. The other reason we keep finding ourselves in nature is that an indifferent universe is close to unbearable, and a populated one isn't. Weather that simply happens to you is far more harrowing than weather that can be bargained with. A root that just sits in the ground is less use to a frightened, mortal species than a root that screams; that can be fed and dressed and consulted like a small difficult relative.

This kind of knowledge — knowledge that reads the nonhuman world through the shape of the human body — though different is a no less rigorous way of knowing. There's a reading of the scream that doesn't require you to believe in it at all, only to ask what it does. A root this potent, this widely wanted, needed some mechanism to keep it out of careless or unauthorised hands, and a scream loud enough to kill the unprepared is about as effective a deterrent as folklore ever produced. This specialised knowledge is precisely the thing that separates the folk who know the root’s importance from the opportunists who don’t.

A species that narrates constantly, compulsively, to itself, is not going to leave the rest of the world unnarrated. We leak personhood into whatever we spend enough time looking at. From the strange, unseen world underground, we unearth an attempt to explain the natural in terms most recognisable to us, and to guard that knowledge once it's been claimed. The result of this impulse may be a strange, knobbly, screeching vegetable, but this strangeness is deeply, unequivocally human.

‘Pewit pewit, dee dee dee, grutto grutto grutto, hallloooo, tik tik tik, groor groor, roo roooo roo, chip chip chip chip, wacheeeer cheer, crex crex, quil!’

No better time than a midsummer dawn to hear a hearty avian discussion. It is easy to take such a magnificent din for granted when here in the UK we are surrounded by it constantly. Throw a stone in Britain, and you kill a bird (or two). Such common fixtures of our landscape are all too easy to overlook; but as we so often find with British vernacular tradition, it is out of the mundane that some of our most colourful lore unfurls. The mundane is held in common, and it's that very commonality upon which folklore depends to survive. We have all heard the doleful cry of the morning dove against winter’s white silence, all watched a comically round robin bobbing upon the arm of a park bench, all warily sheltered a portion of soggy chips as enormous gull shaped dive-bombers circle menacingly overhead.

The annals of British folklore are chiming with birdsong. Common garden birds, though seemingly unassuming, are among the most popular subjects of regional belief and tale. What unites these birds is constant, everyday visibility; familiarity breeds significance more often than it breeds indifference. It is easy to wish upon a bird, tell it your worries, feel it is hopping at your flat window for perhaps a more esoteric reason than the dried meal worms in your plastic feeder. Few creatures are as intriguing as birds, or as far removed from human beings. It is no wonder our innate curiosity, coupled with the mysteries of airborne life have given way to a plethora of magic ideology.

What exactly are the little birdies telling us?

If you have spent any length of time in rural Britain, you may well have heard the ever-popular nursery rhyme that informs listeners of near future happenings depending on the number of magpies or crows that appear at a given time. Though well known across regions, many reciters tend to trail off into nervous mumbling past the first two lines: ‘one for sorrow, two for joy.’ Perhaps we have all collectively held onto this line as really one only need know whether the next week holds good or bad fortune and work out the details later. Perhaps we are simply lazy. In truth, most variants of the rhyme are relatively short, often proceeding a little something like this:

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.

A slightly longer iteration of the folk proverb has been collected from Lancashire, continuing on in:

Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss,
Eleven for health,
Twelve for wealth,
Thirteen beware it's the devil himself!

Those Lancastrians certainly like to be prepared. Though the rhyme simply appears to be a fixture of playgrounds up and down the country (and don’t get me wrong, it has an excellent beat for skipping), this strange little utterance in fact has deep roots in the practice of Ornithomancy

Ornithomancy is a strand of divinatory magic that has always particularly tickled my fancy. I have previously covered the practice in my Valentines day post (below), but I think a healthy recap might benefit us here.

Ornithomancy in some form has been found across an incredibly wide range of pre-industrial peoples. The modern term derives from Greek ornis ‘bird’ and manteia ‘divination’; in Ancient Greek οἰωνίζομαι directly means ‘take omens from the flight and cries of birds.’ Think of it as birdwatching but instead of ‘ooh, a blue jay,’ it's ‘ooh, a portent of sorrowful ruin.’ Extreme birdwatching. Prophesying by birds appeared among the Hittites in Anatolia, with texts on bird oracles written in Hittite known from the 13th or 14th century BCE. This early form of the practice likely paved the way for use by the Greeks and Etruscans. The practice also made its way over to ancient Rome, but the Romans, always wanting to be different, knew it alternatively as ‘Augury.’

Ornithomancy could happen spontaneously or through a deliberate ritual: the diviner would orient themselves facing north, so that birds appearing to their right—towards the sunrise in the east—signalled good fortune, whereas Roman augurs, who faced the opposite direction (south), read the omens in reverse (surprise, surprise). While bird flight patterns and calls were the primary focus, virtually any bird behaviour could be read as a sign of things to come or a communication from the divine.

Cultural echoes of this more ritualistic practice can be heard chirruping across Europe, with many serious predictions becoming folk superstition. For a practice built on feathers and wishful thinking, ornithomancy has remarkably good staying power. Medieval England saw plenty of bird-based decision making, with perhaps the most notable belief being the divination of romantic fortunes from the appearance of birds on Valentine’s Day. Women in particular were advised to awake early and keep a close eye on their gardens on this auspicious day. The appearance of certain birds was thought to foretell the circumstances of your love life that year.

• Dove: Symbolises a happy, peaceful, and loving marriage.

• Duck: Predicts a stable, domestic relationship.

• Goldfinch: An omen that you will marry someone wealthy.

• Woodpecker: Bad news! This means you will not get married that year.

Though the foundation of this past time reaches back millennia, the seasonal aspect of this English belief might feasibly be traced to some pretty popular contemporary literature. Geoffrey Chaucer’s 1382 poem Parliament of Foules, depicts a gathering of speed-dating birds, organised by the Goddess Nature for the 14th of February. Links made in this widely circulated poetry might have made quite the impact on medieval communities. The society of Chaucer’s era were firmly agrarian and therefore rather in tune with nature’s behaviour and habits, making this concept contemporarily logical and endlessly sensible for the wistful and lovesick.

Unfortunately, our feathered friends did not always promise marital bliss or troves of silver and gold hidden down the back of the sofa. More often than not, the appearance of certain birds indicated it might be a good time to review your last will and testament. Across British folklore, the unexpected entrance of any wild bird into the home foretold grave consequence. The general consensus across regions is that a bird flying through the window, flapping about your rafters and then leaving indicates the imminent death of one of the dwelling’s residents. Some versions of this belief see a bird tapping on a closed window or coming down the chimney as just as disastrous. Researchers Opie and Tatem in their 2005 Dictionary Of Superstitions give an instance from 1792 where a bird that flew through a window and flapped around the bed of a sick girl. It was believed by all in attendance to predict that the child was ‘doomed to die.’ This, of course, came true a few days later.

Owls of all shapes and sizes are particularly accurate death messengers. The Great Horned Owl’s call meant sudden death, while the Screech Owl foretold the death of a child, and the Barred Owl indicated the death of a relative.

‘Out on ye Owls! nothing but songs of death’,

cries Shakespeare’s Richard III, before striking the messenger delivering him news of war and rebellion, likening the poor boy to the folkloric harbinger of doom and gloom.

Thankfully, in some cases the owl's verdict wasn't final. Silence the bird mid-hoot, and you could potentially disrupt the omen. Tradition held that pulling off a shoe and flipping it over would do the trick. Propping a broom against the door or throwing some salt into a lit hearth might also postpone your doom. Could the banshee's legend have roots in birdsong? The wail that supposedly predicted a family death bears an unsettling likeness to the barn owl's screech, a familiar sound across the bird’s native Britain and Ireland. Two huge glowing eyes, the scratch of talon on beechwood, and that characteristic blood-curdling shriek are certainly excellent ingredients for fireside ghost stories.

Back to more parochial turf.

Take the plainest garden bird, murmur its name to the right book, give it a little shake, and any number of tales will fall out. This abundance comes down to the fact that farmers, working the fields all day, would be constantly surrounded by the blighters. They'd come to know their migration patterns, their particular calls, which crop they favoured nibbling on. Naturally, they'd humanise them, assigning personality and purpose beyond mere ingrained habit. Ecologically speaking, most of these birds are harmless and coexist peacefully with their agricultural worker neighbours. Despite this, all manner of strange stories have developed surrounding field dwelling species over the years. Birds move between realms humans can’t and sometimes seem to vanish and reappear entirely. Migration wasn’t understood for most of history, and people genuinely didn’t know where commonly spotted birds such as swallows disappeared to in winter; one popular theory held by famous naturalists of the 1700s held that they overwintered in mud at the bottom of ponds! Anything capable of crossing between the visible and invisible worlds gets read as having access to secrets we don’t, tipping birds into the realm of the uncanny and even untrustworthy.

The yellowhammer has been a common fixture of agrarian life since we first learned to till the soil. It can still be seen today perching on stiles and fence posts, or as a flash of bright yellow against muddy furrow. It is more often heard before it is seen and the yellowhammer’s distinctive song is subject of much rural superstition. The yellowhammer is (wrongly) much persecuted and as my favourite native bird I will defend these sweet fellows to the last.

In both Welsh and Scottish folklore, these creatures are regarded as having strong ties to evildoing. One dark myth, contrasting the cheerful nature of the species, insists that each May Day the bird dips its beak in the devil’s blood. Due to the unusual colouration of its beak, this myth proliferated widely and the yellowhammer came to be known colloquially as the ‘devil’s bird.’ Many Scots still insist today that the bird’s high tune sounds eerily similar to the phrase ‘devil take you, devil take you, devil take you.’

The yellowhammer’s eggs are also distinctively marked with rather arresting looking scribble-like markings. This has earnt the bird the rather more endearing nicknames ‘scribble lark’ or ‘scribble jack.’ In some cases, however, this has not helped the genus’s public image, with some swearing that the scribbles are actually decipherable satanic messages, waiting to be decoded. Poor yellowhammer!

As much as they were feared, birds have equally been revered across time and region. Sometimes the smallest specimens hold immense folkloric power.

The wren is a very tiny bird yet, old tales collected throughout Britain and Ireland say it is the ‘king of all birds.’ The famous folk story goes something like this:

Long ago when they could discuss their politics freely without human interference, all the birds gathered to determine once and for all who might rule as their king. Each bird put forward their case, detailing their unique powers. The starling boasted teamwork, the heron patience, the raven intelligence. The debate lasted through the night and well into the next day. Finally the owl piped up and, being wise as he is, suggested a far simpler method of election.

‘Whoever can soar highest without tiring,’ said owl ‘should surely prove themselves fit to lead.’

As soon as the birds took off into the air, the little wren hid in the feathers of the eagle. She knew he could fly the highest, she had seen it herself; and besides, the eagle was far too proud to even notice the small stowaway.

Lo and behold, the eagle soared into the sky, leaving the others as tiny dots far below. Then as he came down, confident that he had won, he heard a voice from above him claiming ‘I am the king, I am the king!’

It was Mrs Wren. She had flown above the eagle unnoticed, wheeling around far above them all without tiring herself in the slightest.

The eagle had won by strength, but the wren had trumped him by wisdom. It was agreed by all that such wisdom should serve their kind well, no matter how small the bearer.

And so Mrs Wren was crowned King of the Birds.

Wren Day is still celebrated by many in Ireland on the 26th of December each year. This custom is also kept alive on the Isle of Man, Wales, the south of France and Newfoundland. Up until the late 19th century, it was customary to see groups of ‘Wren Boys’ hunting the small bird through the hedgerows. Once the bird was killed, the boys would go from home to home, asking for a small amount of money to bury the wren. Some might sing as they went:

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds
St Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze
Up with the kettle and down with the pan
Give us a penny to bury the ‘wran.’

Though the tradition is often observed today, far more savoury means of honouring the wren are practiced, seeing the exchange of soft toys and figurines or the singing of wren themed folk songs.

Next time you see a magpie, tip your cap and ask him how fares his wife and children, leave a penny at your door for your resident raven, refrain from wiping the pigeon poo off your best coat—your fortune may appear just around the next corner. Do we truly know birds, or do we simply think we do? Perhaps what we're really after is a re-enchantment of the world. These tall tales and superstitions can be functionally figured as a way to honour the wisdom of the common and the hedgerow, to outsource our luck and our misfortune onto something smaller and stranger than ourselves. Humans sprouting wings any time soon looks unlikely. But if we can't follow birds' patterns in body, we can still follow them in imagination: dreaming up the unknowable lives of our garden dwellers until, one way or another, all our birds come home to roost.

Arthur comes back on a Bank Holiday Monday, which all things considered, is the single worst possible day for historical returns. He claws up through several eras of consecrated turf, past a packet of quavers and promptly heaves up about 1,400 years of soil.

The Once and Future King lifts his gaze towards the gauzy sky, preparing to feel the singular glory of prophesised resurrection. The singular glory of prophesied resurrection turns out to smell strongly of a bin lorry, three streets over, starting its round. Shaking a few disgruntled worms from his kingly mane, Arthur stumbles (in a kingly fashion) through the abbey gates.

Reaching the top of the high street he stands there a while, one boot sole already coming loose and flapping faintly with each step. He takes it in, the heartland of his kingdom: the puzzling shoppes promising puzzling wares, boards scrawled with prices for some witchery called a ‘smoothie,’ a banner still up from festivities, seemingly long-since past, sagging between two great metal posts, topped with a sort of captive fire.

The feeble wash of a mid-march dawn is struggling to brighten the street. Buildings flatten in the half-hearted light, their colours gone soft and apologetic, the kind of grey-pinks, grey-blues one might turn away from in mild embarrassment. A grotty fox skitters over strange flagstones lumped with roots that no longer end in trees. It pauses in its flight to cast a one eyed glance of reprove at its startler, who is irritably contending with the sole of his fine leather boot, when a resounding clang announces coronet meeting tarmac.

Arthur pauses, looks around expectantly. Any minute now, at least thirty squires will come rushing from these strange dwellings, scrambling over one another to assist their liege with the holy, holy repositioning of holy, holy crown. A pigeon mewls pityingly from a porch that offers something called ‘a Righteous Reckoning of Root Vegetables.’ Nice to see the kingdom’s herbalists are still plying their trade.

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The female body, for as long as men have told tales, has been treated as something to be conquered and guarded: kept safe, or kept in check. But is this guarding for her benefit or for everybody else’s?

The motif of the vagina dentata maintains a distinct shape trans-culturally and often goes a little something like this: A man approaches a woman, or something woman-shaped, intending penetration, and instead gets a fairly nasty surprise. The consequences are almost comically morbid in their variety. Sometimes the man only loses his nerve, or a little finger. Sometimes a blade disappears without trace. Sometimes something far more valuable is severed. Almost always, another, better equipped fellow comes running to the rescue, breaking the teeth and asserting male control once more.

Folklorists have long treated such recurring motifs as compressed anxieties. Folk tales are enduringly handy in that they are small, portable units of dread that a culture can pass on without having to fully explain, what, exactly it is afraid of. This is a ground rule all good anthropologists pick up fairly early on. Though in all honesty, you don’t need a folkloristic excavator to uncover the fear belying this particular creation. Heaven forbid the female body might not willingly receive or that it might have an agency of its own—because, of course, there is no horror like sexual rejection.

The vagina dentata infers that penetration, imagined as a male act performed upon passive female terrain, could be reversed. Freud read this motif as a potent case for his theory of castration anxiety: the overwhelming fear of damage to, or loss of, the penis. Tales of literal emasculation frequently figure as allegory for more psychic degradation, with a man feeling insignificant or socially dominated; stripped of his patriarchal status. Eric Neumann, working the same seam through Jungian myth-criticism, termed this harrowing phenomenon the Terrible Mother, exploring the devouring aspect of a goddess figure who might take life just as easily as she gives it, consuming the male and taking him back into her body, effectively reducing him to a child once more. What both readings share is worthy of note: the terror belongs solely in the realm of the masculine with the story existing to manage and assuage patriarchal fear that might just tip over into instability.

A little odd to be sure, but we tell ourselves all kinds of nonsense to help us sleep at night. However, as we have learnt time and again, it does not stop there. A story that manages a man’s fear of a woman’s body is its own kind of technology; and like every other technology designed to manage sexual anxiety, it never simply soothes the frightened party without disciplining the frightener, however inadvertent the fright may have been.

Unfortunately, I cannot recall a single traditional tale in which the be-toothed woman keeps her pearly whites and simply continues to live out the rest of her days happily; safe in the knowledge that she might be the source of her own sexual agency and protection. A ‘hero’ arrives as heroes so tirelessly do, often specifically equipped with tools or supernatural guidance. The teeth are broken, frequently by means that seem unnecessarily cruel and unusual. Stone phalluses, animal bones, a saw have all been used to remove the offending gnashers. After the breaking, the woman is rendered ‘safe’ in that she is penetrable, marriageable and fertile in a sanctioned sense rather than a devouring one. What rendered woman so terrifying was her right to choose just who had access to her body, and with this overridden, the beast has been declawed, domestic order restored and the liberty of choice returned to the hands of man. Interestingly, Stith Thompson’s Folk Motif Index does not feature an entry about the toothed vagina in isolation. Rather, the concept of the vagina dentata is only present in relation to its inevitable conquering at the hands of a male counterpart:

A1313.3.1. A1313.3.1. Vaginal teeth broken. Women originally had toothed vaginas. Culture hero breaks teeth so that women will be harmless to men. S. Am. Indian (Toba, Mataco): Métraux MAFLS XL 99, 105, Métraux BBAE CXLIII (1) 367.

Just as we rarely see the woman’s escape, we also rarely see her outright destruction. This is the same narrative grammar you find wherever folklore handles a threat that cannot simply be eliminated because the culture needs the thing the threat is attached to. You must not kill the woman. You need her for the entire architecture of inheritance and kinship that depends on her body functioning as expected. However, some casual mutilation will do just fine in eliminating any threat and cowing her into submission once more. Ring out the wedding bells!

Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine (1993) did something folklore scholarship has largely failed to do so before her in that it stopped asking why men were afraid and started considering what work the fear was doing for the woman, so often side-lined in her own tale. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection—the horror provoked by anything that blurs the boundary between the self and other, the clean and unclean— Creed proposed that the vagina dentata goes beyond the characteristic teeth. In fact, these teeth simply serve as sign posts for an all-engulfing maternal body. In this way the monster is not frightening because she is simply other, but because she is your origin and origins are meant to stay behind you. Perhaps the ultimate fear here is being pulled back into the inconsequentiality from whence you first came.

Teeth (2007), the utterly wild American horror-comedy that gave the motif to a teenage protagonist as a weapon against would-be assailants, pulls the real social fear underpinning the fireside story right to the surface. Here the hero never arrives to file the teeth down and the defensive body wins. The teeth remain, and are used successfully, the story treating this as a satisfying ending rather than a problem to be solved or overcome. For a pretty pulpy silver screen romp Teeth does some fairly heavy lifting while retaining excellent nuance. The film does not deny the fear exists, but asks who benefits from said fear. Yes, the protagonist remains a social outlier but this is a kind of victory in that she retains both protection and choice (though in the extreme) on her own terms during perhaps the most vulnerable years of a woman’s life.

One tale, hailing from Siberia does something similar in that it uses the prevalence of the fear in service of something nearing proto-feminism:

In order to join two great families, a young woman, despite her significant resistance is forcibly married to a man near three times her age. The man is dirty and unkempt, short and squat with a great bulbous nose and a near-toothless leer. The girl might be young but she knows how these things go. Mere hours after their wedding ceremony she must bed her new husband to consummate the marriage in the eyes of God and their expectant families. After nights of fruitless prayer and pleading, the morning of the wedding arrives all too soon. She rises before dawn and steals down to the river, net in hand. After an age of trying against a rapidly lightening sky, the girl manages to catch a sizeable pike, complete with three rows of razor sharp teeth. Knowing, this might be her only chance, the girl beheads the fish, inserting the gaping maw between her thighs and waddles off to the village chapel. That night she smiles and simpers for the man as he prepares to complete the wedding ritual. Suddenly her new husband lets out a blood curdling wail, his eyes wide in pain and surprise. Looking up innocently, the girl chuckles and calls the old man a fool. ‘Didn’t you know we all have teeth?’

The use of a folk fear within a folk tale creates a delicious sort of meta-text that signifies just how deeply ingrained this anxiety is within our culture. It further demonstrates how such fantastical anxieties might be practically harnessed towards realistic social advantage, and how in turn, these acts of resistance might be mythologised themselves. It is a funny sort of reclamation, but a reclamation nonetheless figuring as an exceedingly rare full circle moment in motif study which, as an insufferable nerd, I absolutely adore.

The female vampire in literary history represents a similar kind of marriage between the vagina dentata and sexual autonomy. Where the ordinary body takes a mans life force (semen) into the womb and turns it into a child, the vampire takes it into her mouth (blood) and turns it into herself. Nothing is created, only consumed. This redirection is what makes her, specifically, unnatural. A body that should manufacture new life instead spends what it’s given on its own upkeep. She does not reproduce but persists eternally towards her own end. In this, she is read as a kind of thief who does not simply take from any one man, but from the whole forward motion civilisational advance depends on. Every child not born is a debt the she-vampire has declined to pay, choosing herself continually.

The ordinary vagina dentata, you'll recall, gets its teeth filed down and is returned to service. The vampire is not offered that deal. She cannot be domesticated back into the reproductive economy, because the whole point of her is that she has already opted out of it. This is perhaps why she is so rarely reformed in tales and instead simply killed. You’ll note the conspicuously large stake frequently employed by disgusted men as the ultimate undoing of these wayward women (do you think they might be compensating for something).

This is something that has always intrigued me, and I in fact wrote my undergraduate thesis on the subject and its ties to Victorian lesbianism a few years ago. Watch this space for a more in depth dissection soon!

Perhaps it is easy to shelve the matter as a curiosity from cultures that did not yet have anatomy textbooks and leave it at that. The underlying logic, however, is not going anywhere fast. Every era generates some version of the claim that female sexual agency is inherently dangerous, that it must be managed or filed down before it can be permitted. Whether the instrument is a folkloric hero with a stone phallus, Van Helsing and his comically giant stake, or a modern anxiety about women who consume too much without asking permission first, it is all the same. The motif perseveres even today, because unfortunately it is still relevant and it is still useful. The question worth asking of the vagina dentata is not whether the teeth are real; but who keeps finding a reason to file them down, and what they are so afraid would happen if nobody did.

Interesting Resources

• Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993)

• Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton University Press, 1972)

• Jane Ussher, Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body (Routledge, 2006)

• Teeth (dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007)

It is abundantly clear that Folklore is having a moment. If this were not true, you would not be reading this piece.

The growing number of people who want to know, urgently and personally, where their traditions come from cannot be denied. The cultural tempo of the current moment values propulsive industrial progression, harrying us impatiently towards an uncertain future as shiny new data centres buzz efficiently in once-quiet fields. As we know, with every action comes its reaction, and it is no surprise that we are reaching more for traditions, tales and customs that champion community, orality, imperfect craft and a closeness with our environment that seems to be fast slipping through our fingers.

The upsurge we are witnessing is a deeply human response to dislocation. The current wave in interest certainly feels like a profound collective desire for rootedness. You can certainly feel it stirring in packed village halls up and down these isles; in the remarkable crowds gathered for seasonal celebrations in towns most people have only ever seen through a car window. For those of us who have long believed in the vitality and relevance of folk culture, this is a genuinely wonderful thing to witness.

It is also a provocation. This exciting renaissance in folk interest carries a corresponding responsibility that we examine not just what we are reviving, but how. In whose name? To what end? Folklore is, by its very nature, perpetually mutable. It has never been a monument. Rather, it is a living process, shaped by every voice that carries it forward, altered by every new context it passes through. That characteristic mutability is precisely the source of folklore’s extraordinary endurance.

Unfortunately, folklore’s greatest strengths are equally its greatest vulnerabilities. Its distinct variability and accessibility often leave it dangerously exposed to distortion and misuse. Increasingly, we are seeing a phenomenon I recently dubbed ‘folkwashing’: the strategic stripping of nuance from living tradition, repackaged with a ribbon of false cultural authority in service of an agenda folklore never agreed to carry. folklore’s renewed popularity becomes a resource to be exploited. The traditions are stripped of their complexity and pressed into service of agendas that are profoundly exclusionary. This not only deadens the vibrancy of the appropriated custom or tale but stands in direct opposition to everything folklore represents in practice.

If we are serious about this renaissance—and I believe we must be—then we are obliged to revisit the values we bring to folk culture. We must ask what kind of practitioners, teachers, collectors, and advocates we intend to be. We must commit, clearly and actively, to keeping folklore accessible, intersectional, and genuinely alive. How can we ensure practice remains resistant to gatekeeping, resistant to co-option, and open to every community that has a story to tell?

The following manifesto is an attempt to articulate those commitments. It is, appropriately, a living, mutable document of rules I keep for myself as a folklorist, it is designed to be personalised, amended and carried forward by the next pair of hands. Which is to say: I hope it is faithfully the kind of document folklore demands.

Experience folk in its natural habitat. To study from a desk is often only a job half done. Consider folkways eternally experiential as well as recordable and reap the reward of a nuanced, rounded understanding that takes into account the variable landscapes shaping and informing tradition.

Keep folk amongst the folk. Both traditions themselves and the means of understanding them must remain open to the communities that live and breathe them, and to anyone who approaches with genuine curiosity. Folkloristic analysis is not an academic privilege; it is a natural extension of the human impulse to make meaning from shared experience. To gatekeep interpretation behind institutional walls is to betray the very subject studied.

Call out misrepresentation fiercely. Folklore misrepresented is a community misrepresented. Bigoted appropriation, and nationalist distortion are among the oldest violences done to folk culture. Speak out if you see custom trampled and know that a dog whistle is still a dog whistle even if it pipes a jolly little tune.

Know that folk is political. Folk is resistance. It is the language communities reach for when official channels fail them. To study folklore without a political conscience is to miss the point entirely. Every tradition carries within it a record of who held power and who did not, who was silenced and who found ways to speak anyway

Orality protects and should be protected. Generational stories are almost never simply stories. Often, they are integral to education, protection and to enforcing community bonds, particularly within marginalised groups. Use your tongue and your teeth to ensure the perseverance of tradition through pride in passing it on.

Folk is dynamic. The learning of the people should not simply be preserved in glass cases or between pages. Collection invites explanation and explanation invites reinterpretation. Culture becomes rigid through definitive and exclusionary record. Keep an open mind when faced with folklore and get amongst it.

Sharing is survival. Folklore dies with atomistic claim and tradition has always been a cultural smoothie. We are perpetually enriched by contact, exchange, and the willingness to be changed by the stranger at the door. Every attempt to purify folklore or to fix its borders is not conservation as much as it is suffocation.

Seek out the next generation. Create classrooms that are themselves participatory, cooperative folk spaces. Story-led, open teaching brightens the torch to be passed to students of folk who are moulded as critically thinking collaborators from day one.

Folk is intersectional. It always has been. No tradition worth its salt arrived fully formed from a single source. Every custom, song, and story bears the fingerprints of each community that ever touched it. Folklore endures so long as there are willing hands to steward and open ones to receive.

Folk is forever. Folk is for all.

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P.S A beautifully formatted version of this manifesto can be found in Unquiet Press’s Issue III, celebrating the Summer Solstice.

At times too numerous to count, I forget I am, in fact, an academic. This is, admittedly, an easy mistake to make when the line between your career, your hobby, and your slow psychological unravelling is less a line and more a poorly-funded smear. In all honesty, I would be muttering at my laptop in my pyjamas regardless; the institutional letterhead simply affords me a little more dignity.

I do not often share my actual academic endeavours on here, if at all. Certainly, the work I present is often tangential to my more formalised projects—looping off from a rather stuffy paragraph that makes passing mention of something along the lines of ‘landlocked mermaids’. It is, of course, only natural to feel a certain pride in your work, to unfold a letter, unread for 120 years, that finally connects the mad mosaic of sticky notes clinging to your bedroom wall and keep it all to yourself until the very last. It is a common habit, and one I will be running from for the rest of my days. More than anything, I do believe my reluctance to write perhaps more casually on my institutional pursuits stems from embarrassment. I would hate for my readers to see me as some be-jowled miser writing intensely dull tracts from my oh so very tall ivory tower. Partly out of vanity. Partly because the tower is less ivory and more a converted box room with a damp problem and a view of next door's bins. That is not who I am, and more importantly, it is not what folklore currently needs.

I feel I am stalling, and any more explanation risks collapsing entirely into the kind of self-justifying preamble that ends with me having convinced myself out of sharing anything at all. So, without further ado, here is my first tentative introduction to the woman at the very centre of my academic career.

The name Catherine Crowe first jumped out at me a few years ago while desperately ransacking the library catalogue for anything that might pass as research material for a compulsory project on the Anthropocene in literature. If you know anything about the Anthropocene (which I still don’t) you might know that the term refers to a new geological epoch where human activity is the driver of profound planetary and climatic change. The proposed ‘start’ of this epoch is continually being tossed up in the air and shot down by various academics; and our department wanted its bleary-eyed twenty-somethings to also have a crack at defining its commencing year. Anyway, me being—well—me, I felt this was a perfect opportunity to shoehorn my penchant for weird Victoriana into yet another rather rigid set of academic guidelines. To my delight, one of the proposed years for the Anthropocene’s beginnings is 1850, smack bang in the middle of my favourite period.

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Since 1945, Britain has lost over 300,000 miles of hedgerow. This figure might be hard to grasp in the abstract but to picture it: that is a strip of living habitat long enough to circle the earth about twelve times. While the hedgerow is of course a tried and true method of boundary making, it is a whole world in itself. It is a natural super highway for the rare hazel dormouse who struggles to safely cross open land; it holds the yellowhammer’s nest, and is the winter larder of the bank vole. It is, if you grew up reading a certain series of seasonal picture books, where the Thistledown family store their grain, where Mrs Apple makes rosehip jam, and where Wilfred Toadflax dozes in a tiny hammock strung between two blackberry briars.

Before Jill Barklem drew a single mouse, she spent five years learning the hedgerows that bordered her Essex market town. A children's illustrator doing the work of a naturalist, Barklem catalogued local botany with painstaking care. She knew by heart the precise curl of a bryony leaf, the way a blackthorn flowers in bright sprays, the exact shade of a hawthorn berry in October. This attention to detail rightly earned Brambly Hedge the accolade of being 'the most research-crammed fantasy ever set before small children.'

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What Barklem was cataloguing, though she may not have framed it this way, was a habitat already in decline. The four seasonal stories were published in 1980. By that point, Britain had already lost half its post-war hedgerow network as rapid urbanisation and changes to agriculture meant fields needed to be at best widened and at worse, replaced entirely. Though Barklem’s hedgerow certainly speaks to an idyllic English rurality that many can identify with, beyond the acorn cups and hazelnut cakes of her domestic mice, this illustrator was working against the clock to preserve an accurate rendering of what was already slipping through her fingers.

This matters because Brambly Hedge is so often received as pure enchantment. Of course the magic is undeniably present in this miniature world of mice in sensible knitwear and dungarees but to say it is pure escapism I fear is to undermine the ecological urgency that inspired its creator. Brambly Hedge excels in navigating the line between enchantment and reality, couching its narratives in worlds seldom seen, yet irrefutably real to corners of every field in England. Enchantment and urgency are by no means opposites; the world Barklem conjured with such care and tenderness was one she watched attentively and in some sense knew was passing us by unnoticed. Underneath the cosy cross sections of tree houses is a real, thriving ecosystem. The Thistledown’s Store Stump—so central to the happenings of the hedge—is a charming interpretation of how small mammals indeed use the hedgerow for survival, hoarding and preparing for the colder months.

I do not know a single soul who has flipped through a Brambly Hedge book without wistfully imagining what life might be like in a toadstool cottage or furnished grass nest. This enticement is a greater gateway. By drawing readers so completely into this world, Barklem compels us to reckon with what a loss its disappearance would be.

Anthropomorphism of charming woodland creatures is by no means a novelty in children’s literature. The British, in particular, have a penchant for the well dressed squirrel or toad; sympathetic small mammals have milled about the English countryside for quite some years. Kenneth Grahame’s hazy riverbank, Beatrix Potter’s fell farms, Julia Donaldson’s dank forest floor—all cornerstones of a literary tradition that grants the non-human world a kind of interior life that is, in turn, inhabitable by the curious reader. It seems each of these writers understood, rather instinctively, that a child will follow a small animal into places and feelings they might not follow a human. Though the species gap might impose a rift in total understanding, the emotional distance that the animal provides is paradoxically also a kind of closeness. One might approach close truths about survival, community and loss that might otherwise feel overwhelming.

Despite the excellent allegorical success of the personified beastie, the ways in which these animal worlds operate understandably differ from author to author. Naturally, there is simply no way of knowing what the chaffinches chirrup about, and so, these little societies often cannot avoid becoming backdrops upon which authors might project their personal interpretations of the world at large. Grahame’s riverbank is essentially a social comedy, its animals acting primarily as vehicles for Edwardian anxieties about class, mobility and belonging. Potter’s world, though closer to Barklem’s in its botanical precision,* frequently turns on danger and consequence that always keeps the fringes of the human environment visible. Donaldson’s animals, beloved as they are, tend towards the fable: their existence illuminating a moral truth with habitat serving as backdrop rather than subject.

Barklem differs in that her hedgerow is unmistakably the entire point. The seasonal structure of the original four books—Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter tales—reaches beyond the organisational. It insists that the lives of the Thistledown mice are intelligible only in relation to the natural world that sustains them, that their joys and tribulations often pivot first on the ecological and second on the personal. Yes this ‘loving and caring society’ of creatures happen to live in the hedgerow, but we rest assured their interpersonal dilemmas will always be resolved. What we should be less certain about is the integrity of the natural stage upon which they unfold.

Brambly Hedge is, in the language of conservation, a priority habitat. Hedgerows are the most widespread semi-natural habitat in Britain, supporting over 130 Biodiversity Action Plan species and providing food, shelter and movement corridors for creatures that simply cannot survive without them. The collection, whether intentional or otherwise, is a record of something we might not recognise beyond the next few centuries. The hazel dormouse, perhaps the creature most dependent on the hedgerow’s specific architecture of interlocking shrub and canopy, has declined by over half in the last two decades alone. Hedgehog populations have fallen by a similar proportion across the country since the turn of the century, with rural areas suffering most acutely as the field margins they rely on are lost to more intensive farming. Eighty-four percent of Britain's farmland birds rely on hedgerows for food and protection. Soon enough, we might no longer be able to delight in the almost incantatory names of the endangered cirl bunting, bullfinch or dunnock due to fast dwindling numbers in the wild.

The ecological case for hedgerow conservation is overwhelming and has been made repeatedly by bodies from Natural England to the Committee on Climate Change, which in 2019 recommended a forty percent increase in Britain's hedgerow network as part of the country's net zero commitments. Hedgerows sequester carbon. They prevent soil erosion. They filter water. The arguments are good arguments. And yet the hedgerows keep disappearing, because good arguments, marshalled at the level of policy ], have a limited purchase on the imagination.

This is where Barklem’s achievement veers decidedly away from the aesthetic and into the functional. The Thistledown mice have names and temperaments and favourite foods and complicated feelings about winter. A child who has spent just half an hour in their company has been afforded an intimate experience of hedgerow life. The dormouse is a neighbour, and a friendly one at that. But there is a deeper argument available here, one that our current ecological crisis has made harder to avoid. The idea that human lives are somehow separable from the natural systems that sustain them is the precise error that has allowed the destruction of hedgerows to continue. The diminutive nature of the hedgerow, coupled with the natural human impulse to break boundaries, unfortunately makes them easy victims of industrial progress. We have long treated the non-human world as resource or amenity, when in fact our own emotional and cultural lives are no more intelligible without it than those of Barklem's mice. Our seasons, country customs, instinct for the domestic are not separate from the natural world, rather they are bred from it.

One of my all time favourite nature writers, Robert Macfarlane has argued that language shapes what we are capable of noticing, and that the erosion of our vocabulary for the natural world is itself a form of ecological loss. His book Landmarks assembles thousands of words from regional British dialects for specific features of land and weather. The project is urgent precisely because those words, like the habitats they describe, are disappearing. Robin Wall Kimmerer makes the related argument from a different tradition: that the English language's grammatical habit of referring to living beings as ‘it’—objects rather than subjects—enacts a certain violence, converting the animate world into a collection of resources. To grant something personhood, to imagine its interior life, is a political act as much as a poetic one.

Something peculiar happens when domesticity appears where you do not expect it. A tiny patchwork quilt in an underground burrow, a lively picnic beneath a dandelion clock, a mushroom with a chimney and glowing circular window. Why should these be lightyears away from the neat weaving of a harvest mouse’s nest, a hedgehog’s worn path through the base of a hedge, a clutch of blackberries, all pecked just-so? A creature, in its own terms, has made a home, established a routine, solved the problem of shelter and warmth and food with a particularity that feels familiar to us. The reader who has spent time in the Store Stump, who knows where Mrs Apple keeps her preserves and how the mice bank up their stores against the cold, goes out into an actual hedgerow differently.

Brambly Hedge gives the reader an imaginative address in a world they might otherwise have walked past without stopping. To borrow Kimmerer's language: Barklem has utterly refused the dreaded ‘it’ of natural inanimation. Our hedgerows are full of neighbours and we do not, as a rule, watch our neighbours homes tumble down without feeling something. Jill Barklem, who never named herself as an activist, always had the right to the title. She gave the hedgerow a dozen little voices, showed us its larders, its seasons, its collective joys and anxieties. The hedgerow, in the minds of multiple reading generations is not only habitable but hospitable. In an age of ecological unravelling, The ability to imagine a wild place as something that welcomes us, rather than something we have merely failed to destroy is a necessity. Jill Barklem hid this in plain sight, tucked into every teapot, folded under every blanket, pressed into every page of Brambly Hedge.

*Beyond her work as storyteller and illustrator, Beatrix Potter was an avid naturalist and mycologist, as can be evidenced throughout her many works.

Interesting Resources

Jill Barklem, The Complete Brambly Hedge

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Burke and Copenhaver, Animals as People in Children's Literature, click here

Hedgelink, click here

Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks

Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, The Lost Words

John Wright, A Natural History of the Hedgerow: Ditches, Dykes and Dry Stone Walls

The Wildlife Trusts' formal partnership with the Brambly Hedge estate is also worth a note—it can be found at bramblyhedge.com

In front of me, as I write this: a jar of technicolour sea glass, a miniature Mini with a working bonnet and a tiny engine inside, a thumb sized ghost cut from blue slate, and a felt rabbit in a satchel and jumper. This tiny, mismatched committee has politely watched on for the last several years as I've muttered incoherently, leapt around the room, banged my head against my desk, and on one occasion got so excited I tipped backwards off my chair. Oh, to be a fly on the wall. Or indeed, a trinket on the table.

Through five house moves, this band of bibelots have somehow always assumed their same positions, lining up neatly to peek over my laptop screen while I chew my fingers and let my cup of tea grow cold. I know where each one came from. What I can't explain is why they've followed me—desk to desk, house to house—and why they always look like they belong together. Not that I'm complaining. I couldn't ask for a better support group, miniature or otherwise. I am also prepared to admit that each of them has a personality, a role, and opinions about my work that I have not solicited but nonetheless received.

As it happens, I am by no means the first or last to keep a collection of outwardly inconsequential doodads. For as long as people have had pockets, mantlepieces, and windowsills, they have filled them with small objects that mean nothing to anyone else and everything to them. Buttons have been pressed into palms, bottles filled with odds and ends, and small beasties fashioned from mud and clay. The impulse to ascribe value to the mundane, to carry a little meaning around in your pocket, is an essentially human one. It predates, by some margin, the troll doll or pez dispenser.

Britain, it seems, has been at this for quite some time.

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What is a trinket exactly?

Before we dive into the veritable curiosity shop that is the British folk record, it might first be useful to define the territory. The word ‘trinket’ first emerged in 1525, appearing in the writings of lawyer and printer John Rastell. Interestingly, the word has no definitive etymological origin. It is evidently a diminutive form of another word and is thought to have some relation to ‘trick.’ Similar terms circulated at this time with ‘trink’ from the 1570s, used to describe ‘a trick or fancy, style of adornment.’

Today, a trinket is defined as a small ornament, a small article of equipment or a thing of little value. A trinket is not an heirloom, which arrives with a story attached, nor a religious object, which carries instructions—it is, in every sense, self-appointed. The defining logic of a trinket is that its value is determined by the individual who carries it, with meaning existing not in the object itself but the reason for keeping it. Trinkets in folk memory are generally, small, cheap or handmade: the kind of thing that would not be out of place at a car boot sale. The magic, as always, is in the attached knowledge.

Crooked coins

Aside from the obvious benefit of securing the juiciest apple at the market or the coldest can from the corner shop, in folk belief the coin's uses stretch considerably beyond the monetary. Currency for the wishing well is perhaps the coin's most famous folkloric usage, and also, for our purposes, the least useful. The entire logic of the act requires parting with it and we are concerned with keepers, not throwers. On we go.

It is no wonder the penny lent itself so readily to folk tradition as coins have been in circulation in Britain since around 200 BC, which has given people considerable time to find uses for them beyond the strictly transactional, and few objects have ever been quite so consistently close to hand. The bent penny or crooked sixpence in particular has a long and storied history as a favoured trinket amongst the folk. The 14th century saw a marked rise in the practice of deliberately bending or folding a coin whilst praying to a saint. The purposeful deformation of currency marked it as spent, removing it from general circulation and instead consecrating it to a specific and personal purpose. Archaeologists are consistently unearthing these coins near major pilgrimage sites in England such as Winchester and Hereford, suggesting that the currency was bought as an offering to a saint with the hopes that said holy figure might be able to offer some help in return. These favours were commonly figured as prayers for the healing of the self or a loved one with the coins often recorded to be folded over the individual’s head while praying.

Sometimes these coins were not abandoned at a shrine or holy place and instead drilled to be worn around the neck as a pendant. The specific purpose of this choice is not entirely clear—human nature is a notoriously tricky thing to pin down. While the wearing of bent coins may simply be an act of sentimentality, it has been suggested that the hole created in the bending was itself significant. Drilled pennies many have been thought to ward off malicious spirits and, when looked through, to identify those of ill intent, much like the better known hag stone.

Saints, it appears, were not the only ones worth bending a coin for. By the 16th century the practice had taken a distinctly romantic turn. Bent coins passed between sweethearts served as tokens of commitment. The act of physically mangling a rather thick sixpence was thought to demonstrate the sheer strength of love a suitor carried for his beloved. Some couples even broke the coin in two. Each party kept half, the jagged edge acting as a kind of proof. You could not fake a matching piece.

Defacement of currency was illegal then and remains so today, though ardent lovers have never been particularly receptive to legal counsel. The risk, far from diminishing the act, did much to strengthen its symbolism. a coin bent transgressively and pressed into someone's hand carried a charge that a simple gift could not. It had been made worthless to the world in order to be made invaluable to one very special person.

Interestingly, many mudlarking expeditions have unearthed a multitude of these trinkets from the banks of the river Thames. While ostensibly London's historical refuse has always found its way to the river eventually, the reality may be more poignant and far more purposeful than that. It has been theorised that many of the crooked coins discovered along the riverside, carry tales of unrequited love.If rejected, a hopeful suitor might trudge dejectedly to the banks to hurl their token into the murk, simultaneously releasing any hope they had for courtship. The mudlarker who finds it eight hundred years later might have no idea they are holding someone's worst Tuesday.

Charms against ill wishing

If the coin speaks to hope of attraction, then the hag stone speaks to something altogether more defensive. Its once again time for my favourite phrase, say it with me now folks, its apotropaic magic!

The hag stone is, on the face of it, an unimpressive object. It is simply a small stone with a hole worn naturally by the tides over time. You could walk past a thousand of them on any British beach without a second glance. And yet, for centuries, the finding of one was considered an enormously significant gift from the sea shore. The idea goes that you could not make a hag stone; you found one, or indeed, one found you which was rather the point. Manufactured luck, in British folk belief, has always been regarded with a degree of suspicion.

Hung above a door, tied to a bedpost, or looped on a cord around the neck, the hag stone was understood to deflect malevolent forces such as witches, spirits, and the rather more nebulous but no less feared force of the evil eye. Looked through, it was said to reveal an unseen layer of everyday life: the true intentions of a stranger, the presence of something that had no business being there, a band of gnomes making off with your prized runner beans.

The evil eye—or overlooking, as it was more commonly known in Britain—was not a fringe concern. Deeply held and widely shared, the anxiety was rooted in the belief that envy, whether consciously directed or not, could cause genuine harm. The worry was not malice exactly, but surplus attention in the sense that to be looked at too keenly was to be made vulnerable. The British, as we know, have always had an uneasy relationship with being noticed, and folk belief, as it so often does, gives that anxiety a shape and a remedy.

While examples of hag stones can be found across Britain, the practice was particularly strong along coastal areas. Fishing communities in particular developed elaborate systems of protective charm keeping, and it is worth pausing on this for a moment. The sea is not a controllable environment. No amount of skill or preparation can fully account for what it might do on a given morning, which makes the fishing life one of managed uncertainty in a way that most occupations simply are not. That uncertainty in turn bred a sort of apotropaic toolkit in the form of the fish wife’s charm bag. These small pouches were assembled by wives and mothers on shore, packed with holed stones, knotted cords, and small objects whose protective properties were understood implicitly and discussed barely at all lest the fear become all too real.

The knotted cord deserves a brief mention of its own. Knots in British folk tradition carry a complicated charge—they can bind and they can protect, sometimes simultaneously. A cord knotted in a specific sequence, sometimes tied whilst reciting particular words, was thought to trap malevolent forces or seal good luck in place. A knot as a closed system in that it is a loop with no opening through which harm might enter. The knotted cord, though simple was well loved from sailors to midwives. They turn up in court records as evidence of witchcraft and in domestic inventories as unremarkable household objects, which says a great deal about how fine the line was between folk magic and outright accusation, depending largely on who was doing the looking.

Fairy-adjacent trinkets

Not all British folk belief concerning small objects is concerned with human relationships. Love, luck and jealousy are distinctly markers of humanity, and perhaps therefore more comprehensible. Some items needed to address an entirely different audience. The fae have historically and notoriously been believed to exist alongside our own lives, occasionally intersecting with us in ways that are rarely comfortable for the human party involved. The relationship between people and the fairy world in British tradition is one of careful negotiation, and carefully chosen objects were central to how that negotiation was conducted.

Iron is perhaps the most well-documented example. Cold iron, worked iron, the iron nail driven into a threshold or hung above a cradle was regarded as deeply hostile to fairy influence. The logic appears to be one of incompatibility: iron belongs entirely to the human world, to industry and agriculture and the forging of tools, and the fairy world, being older and otherwise constituted, cannot abide it (for more on this theory, see my recent essay on fairies and bread here!) A horseshoe above a door was a specific material declaration that nothing of the Otherworld was welcome to cross the threshold. Perhaps not luck as we would generally understand it, but certainly a lack of interference.

Wells occupy a particularly significant position in the geography of folky trinkets. The wishing well, as noted earlier, asks us to throw something in. But the folk logic of the sacred well runs considerably deeper than that. Springs and wells were understood as places where the world below communicated with the world above, and the objects deposited in them across centuries reflect this. Archaeologists have recovered pins, needles, coins, and small carved figures from British well sites dating back to the Iron Age. The pin in particular recurs with striking consistency, appearing across the UK. And perhaps no wonder when it is so conveniently small, metal, sharp, and easily spared. Its meaning was asserted in the moment of contact between the person who dropped it and whatever was understood to live in the water below.

Then there is the fairy stone or belemnite fossils. These are the cylindrical, bullet-shaped remains of an extinct cephalopod known across Britain by various regional names, among them thunderbolts, devil’s fingers, and, most relevantly for our purposes, fairy stones. Their regular geometric shape, so improbably precise for something produced by the earth made them objects of considerable folk interest. They were thought to be of supernatural origin, and consequently to carry supernatural properties, considered protective in some traditions, communicative in others, but always significant.

Which brings us to the notion that runs beneath all of this: the belief that small, unusual, shiny, or strangely shaped objects are of interest to non-human beings, and that this interest is itself a form of power. To carry an object that the fairy world covets, or fears, or recognises, is to carry something that operates in both worlds simultaneously. The trinket becomes a kind of passport, or weapon depending on what you have and who you are hoping to impress or deter. The fairy-adjacent trinket is, in this sense, the most philosophically ambitious of all the objects this essay has considered. It carries meaning across worlds, and if that sounds fanciful, consider that the impulse to leave something small and significant at a place that feels important. I’m sure we have all seen a coin on a gravestone, a pebble on a cairn, a flower pressed into the bark of a particular tree, a troll doll left on a roommate’s desk.

The grammar of small, special things

The Industrial Revolution puts the folk doodad on the production line. The question of whether commodification killed the folk belief or simply changed its appearance is, on reflection, not a difficult one. It changed its appearance. The impulse to ascribe meaning to the small and mundane is extraordinarily resistant to mass production and the rational self-image of the modern consumer. People who would laugh at the suggestion that a holed stone could ward off evil will nonetheless keep a specific mug for good writing days, or carry an old shell in their pocket because it was given to them by someone they loved and throwing it away is simply not something they are able to do. Contemporary revivals—crystal healing, modern witchcraft, the surge of interest in folk practice that arrived, perhaps not coincidentally, alongside a period of sustained collective anxiety—are simply the visible tips of something with pretty strong roots.

There is a certain grammar to the trinket. What I mean by this is a set of rules so old and so deeply held that most of us follow them without knowing we are doing so. You do not throw away an object given to you by someone you love. You do not move a lucky thing without a moment’s consideration. You notice when something small and significant is missing from its place. This grammar predates literacy and has outlasted every cultural force that should, by rights, have made it obsolete.

The knowledge the trinket holds is that human beings are not very good at living without meaning, and that meaning needs somewhere to live. A belief held entirely in the mind is fragile, subject to doubt and revision and the erosion of a bad night’s sleep. But a belief held in an object is different in that it may be picked up, turned over in the hand and retuned to its designated spot. Turn out your pockets. Scour the bottom of a bag. Cast an eye over your windowsill. The Sylvanian family figure you never returned to the toy box, the playing card that fell out of your favourite library book, the pebble that looks, in a certain light, uncannily like your grandpa. These are all proof of an enduring human inability to move through the world without gathering a little of it up and keeping it close.

On the line between Bristol Temple Meads and London Paddington, somewhere in that long, dreamy corridor of Wiltshire where the world flattens into cornfield and chalk downland, the reward for a split-second of your attention is extraordinary. Always, through something close to pure chance, I will look up from my book, laptop or whatever fog I’ve drifted into at precisely the right moment to catch a great white charger hurtling past the train window. A collection of sharp lines scored into the hillside, the Uffington Chalk Horse keeps pace for a few brilliant seconds before the fields swallow it once more.

My chalky pal has been a source of fascination for many years, though all too often that fascination is fleeting. A flash of surprise, a mental note—I really must write about you—and then back into the inbox, where a dozen unread emails are patiently waiting to drain the magic out of everything by Didcot station. This time, you find me writing on that very same train ride. As of five minutes ago, the horse has galloped by, and I intend to do it justice before it becomes a small, white, vaguely horsey-shaped blob in my mind.

The Uffington carving is by no means a one-off act of equine eccentricity. The chalk downlands of Southern England are, in fact, absolutely littered with the things. Wiltshire alone is home to eight of them, which raises the question of what exactly was going on in Wiltshire, and whether anyone was getting any other work done. Across Oxfordshire, Berkshire and beyond, hillsides have been etched with horses that have lasted centuries. Some carvings are thought to date back over a thousand years, others are more recent but no less baffling. So what is this great herd doing galloping across the south of England? How did they come to be ? And why?

The 16 officially recognised chalk horses carved into various British hillsides speak to something of a fondness in the South for enormous geoglyphic art projects. Geoglyphs are defined as:

Despite a wide range of stylistic interpretation from horse to horse, these hill figures are wonderfully consistent in the methodology of their creation. In order to achieve their signature brilliant white, turf is cut away from the hillside to reveal the chalk lying just beneath. Through this process, something called a ‘negative geoglyph’ is bought to life, with the artist removing layers of matter to create contrast between environment and motif.

Uffington

The Uffington horse carving is by far the oldest and perhaps the most enigmatic of this ragtag Southern herd. In 1990, the Oxford Archaeology team employed new Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) technology using limestone from the carving itself to estimate an origin date. Deposits from the lowest levels of the horse strongly indicated the figure emerged between 1380 and 550 BC making this creature over 3000 years old—the earliest discovered geoglyph in Europe by some margin. Despite a birthday firmly in the late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age, the horse appears almost modernist in style.

At an impressive 110 metres from nose to tail, old Uff is rendered not in painstaking naturalism but as a series of bold, sweeping lines. More distinctly Picasso than Stubbs, the carving is abstract, almost skeletal in its composition. Truly, the geoglyph would not be out of place in a hip and happening Shoreditch gallery. Yet here the Uffington Horse has rested against a weathered hillside for millennia as testament, perhaps, to the human impulse to reduce matters to their bare essentials.

What no one can quite agree on is just how Uff came to be all those years ago. Leading theories range from the rather sensible to the gloriously speculative, as is often the way with our ancient monuments—I'm looking at you, Stonehenge. Many largely subscribe to the idea that the horse was something of a Bronze Age planning notice. A local tribe might have carved the hill as an attempt to assert control over the surrounding territory. Certainly, many scholars attribute the handiwork to local Celtic tribes the Dobunni or Atrebates and note a distinct similarity between the style of the carving and designs found on coins unearthed from the surrounding area. Further speculation posits that the horse was in fact a site of great importance for a Celtic horse cult. Yes you read that correctly. Some investigations venture that the act of etching the great work at such a high vantage might have been in efforts to appease the goddess Epona, patron of horses, ponies and grain. She is often thought to have escorted souls to the afterlife—appropriately on horseback—and her sinister counterpart Melanippe, a black ‘night mare,’ has associations with foul weather and dark arts in Celtic folklore.

Interestingly, the track running below the Uffington White Horse is Icknield Way, thought to be the oldest road in Britain. The name itself may derive from the Celtic Eachanaidh, meaning the ‘people of the horse’, with further suggested links to the Iceni tribe. Erchofont, now known as Urchfont, could well have been the font or spring of the horses. Whether or not the etymology holds up to scrutiny, there is something pleasing in the idea that the oldest road in Britain runs beneath the oldest horse in Britain, and that both may have been named, in their different ways, for the same animal.

It is also interesting to note the parallels the carving carries with Welsh Goddess Rhiannon of the Mabinogi, who is often depicted atop her own white steed. As fun as this link is, little evidence suggests any direct influence. Perhaps my favourite—and arguably most poetic—of the theories surrounding Uff has been advanced in recent years by University of Southampton archaeologist Joshua Pollard. Pollard theorises that the figure was carved as a ‘solar horse’: a a physical expression of the ancient belief that the sun was dragged across the sky each day on horseback. And it must be said that the horse's position on the hill does align with the midwinter sun in a way that is difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

The earliest recording of the carving can be found in medieval Welsh Literature. The Llyfr Coch Hergest (Red Book of Hergest, 1375–1425) states that ‘Near to the town of Abinton there is a mountain with a figure of a stallion upon it, and it is white. Nothing grows upon it.’ Pretty spooky stuff. The horse also makes an appearance in the work of everyone's favourite antiquarian, John Aubrey, who noted it in the seventeenth century—which, given that Aubrey was also the man who first properly documented Stonehenge, suggests he had a reliable nose for a good monument. Aubrey suggested that perhaps the horse in fact originated from legendary Germanic brothers Hengist and Horsa who led the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, the progenitor groups of modern English people, in their invasion of Great Britain in the 5th century.

For all this very academic postulating, it may simply be that someone, three thousand years ago, looked at a hillside and thought: ‘yeah, that would be a good place for a horse.’ Human motivation has never been entirely rational, and there is no particular reason to assume it was any more so in 550 BC. Ultimately, we will never know the definitive origins of the great white horse—its dedicated artists have long since become part of the same chalky earth from whence it came. The not knowing, however, is part of the fun.

Naturally, with all this speculation comes folklore, developing steadily in the gaps between the official records. Mystery invites explanation, and it is no surprise just how many magical explanations this site has bred. Numerous tales concur that the horse is in fact a great mare, her foal once etched into a neighbouring hill, but since lost to nature. Legend has it that at night, the horse and her foal come down from the hills to drink from the bottom of the vale, aptly named ‘The Manger.’ The pair also drink from the Woolstone Wells nearby, thought to have been formed from the hoofprint of the horse herself. A local tradition also encourages those in need of a little luck to stand in the centre of the horse’s eye and spin three times to make a wish. This practice has since been discouraged due to the sheer amount of hopeful wishmakers eroding the eye! The carving also holds some excellent Arthurian lore, with many believing that when King Arthur finally awakens, she will dance atop Dragon Hill nearby—a brilliant image.

Westbury

Not too far from the vale, another white horse watches over the towns below. Just beyond Westbury can be found a distinctly more horsey-shaped horse. Some sources call this fellow the ‘Moon Stallion.’ Legend tells of this gentle giant leaving the hillside on a moonlit night as an enormous spectral stallion. The creature gallops along the Ridgeway, past Avebury and comes to rest beside his lover, the Uffington mare. By sunrise, the stallion has galloped all the way home once more, not a hoof out of place. Given that folk tell of a possible foal not too far from the Uffington hillside, I often like to think this chalky trio might be something of a little family.

Despite the myriad tales that have emerged surrounding the chalk herd scattered across the south of England, most of the horses themselves are far younger than we might first assume. In fact, the Uffington Horse has so far preceded her herdmates that she might reasonably be considered the grand-mare of the entire tradition. After her Bronze Age debut, the chalk hills of southern England remained notably horse-free for the best part of three thousand years. It was not until the late 1600s that the Westbury Horse appeared in Wiltshire.

Beyond

Once Westbury had done it, everyone wanted one. Cherhill followed in 1780, Marlborough in 1804, Osmington in 1808, Alton Barnes in 1812, Hackpen in 1838, Broad Town in 1864. Yorkshire got in on the act with Kilburn in 1857. The twentieth century added a few more, including the Pewsey Horse, recut entirely in 1937, and—most brilliantly—the Bulford Kiwi in 1919, carved into a Wiltshire hillside by homesick New Zealand troops waiting for a boat home after the First World War, which is either deeply touching or a very impressive act of boredom, depending on how you look at it. The most recent arrival is the Folkestone Horse, completed in 2003 and overlooking the Channel Tunnel terminal—a location that feels somehow both very English and not English at all.

Most of these younger horses were simply carved by locals wanting to get in on the action. That crazy bunch known as the Victorians were downright obsessed with ancient antiquities, with follies popping up all over the place during the long nineteenth century. The craze became so popular, in 1949, writer Morris Marples half-jokingly coined the term ‘leucippotomy’ to describe ‘the cutting of white horses and gigantotomy for the cutting of giants on rare occasions.’ It might be noted neither of those terms appear in any dictionary but very well should.

The smallest of the herd, residing in Marlborough, Wiltshire has perhaps my favourite origin story. The figure was cut in 1804 by boys at Mr Greasley's Academy. The horse was designed and marked out on the hill by a boy called William Canning who had long wished to create his own little bit of history. From then onwards, it was scoured every year, this becoming a tradition at the school marked by revelry. Greasley died about 1830, and the school was closed, leading to the horse being neglected for some years. By 1860, however, it was back in good condition and can be seen in a photograph taken that year at a cricket match. In 1873, Captain Reed, an old boy of Greasley's Academy who had taken part in the horse's creation, oversaw a new scouring that has continued since.

A verse of the Marlborough College school song actually refers to the horse:

While others, such as the Osmington Horse—carved in 1808 to honour King George III, who was a frequent visitor to nearby Weymouth—were tied to rulers and grand occasions, the majority of the herd were etched into the hillside for no particularly exalted reason. A landowner fancied one. A local farmer thought it would be a nice idea. Some students did it for a laugh. This is, perhaps, the most wonderful thing about them.

The Herd Perseveres

There is something quite profound about a species that will, entirely unprompted, climb a hill and spend considerable effort scraping a large horse into it. Perhaps not for God, not for king, not for any reason that would satisfy a grant application—just because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and because the result was pleasing to look at. And then, having done it, will come back every few years for centuries to make sure it stays there. The horses require constant maintenance. Grass as we know, given half the chance, will always win over human effort. And yet generation after generation has turned up with tools and chalk and apparently nothing better to do, preserving figures that were made by people whose names nobody remembers, for reasons nobody can quite agree on. There is no practical argument for this. There is no return on investment. There is only the stubborn human insistence that the horse should remain visible, because it has always been visible, and because something would be lost if it were not which is, when you think about it, as good a definition of culture as any.

There is also something strangely selfless in the chosen figure. When given a blank canvas—or in this case, a blank hillside—the human instinct is usually toward the self. We carve our initials into trees. We draw stick figures that are, at some level, us. We leave smileys, signatures, the visual equivalent of I was here. The horse offers none of that. It confers no obvious glory on the carver, whose name, in almost every case, has been completely forgotten.

The horse is something older than ego. It carries with it centuries of association with freedom and nobility and the kind of romantic energy that makes a grown adult want to scrape one into a hill. Fundamentally an act of attention paid outward rather than inward, it is homage to the animal, to the landscape, to whoever might look up from the valley below and feel, briefly, that something extraordinary has been placed there for them. This perhaps explains why we keep making them. And why, three thousand years later, a writer on a train from Bristol can look up at precisely the right moment and feel, for just a second, that she has been let in on something.

Before we embark on this literary journey into villages where the welcome is a little too warm, across moors where the path keeps moving, through fens that suck at your shoes with a strange kind of sentience, I believe some words of thanks are in order.

I started Lurker a little over eight months ago during a bout of near-Victorian illness, as a way to stay connected to my research from the damp comfort of my living room while unable to go out on my usual rambles. I could never have imagined the overwhelming support I would receive, nor the wonderful community that would grow around Lurker in such a short space of time. It quickly became a repository for the strange rabbit holes that punctuate my more academic research—a place that allowed me to step back and appreciate just how extraordinarily odd my field can be, and how lucky I am to spend my time immersed in that oddness.

All your continued support has only reaffirmed that I am very much on the right track, and that there is nothing I would rather do than spend my time sharing and unpicking the magic (literal and figurative) of these isles. In turn, this brilliant little community allows me to centre the ethos I hold at the heart of my study in making folklore inclusive, educational and accessible to all. Your kind donations have funded countless obscure books, train tickets to the middle of nowhere and a beautiful new pen after an unfortunate biro explosion left my bag looking like a smurf had detonated inside it. I am so grateful to be able to hold conversations around the essentiality of folklore and its social implications with such a supportive group and truly feel we are keeping the lore alive!

So, on to slightly newer frontiers. For some time, I had been racking my brains over how best to expand Lurker for a paid subscriber base. We all know what I research, of course, but how that research is actually done is an entirely different matter. This post is the first in a series that rummages through the proverbial archive boxes behind Lurker, pulling out the resources, notes, and methodologies that shape my work. There are reading lists, field notes, and personal insights aplenty to come, which I hope will add a little more flesh to the folkloric bones of this blog.

Thank you once again and without further ado, here is my comprehensive reading guide to my all time favourite genre: Folk Horror.

Buckle up, it is…

The Great Big Folk Horror Reading List

Folk horror is a genre with a strange property: it is easier to feel than to define. You know it when the camera lingers too long on a maypole. When the villagers are just a little too helpful. You’ll realise all too late as the wicker structure you find yourself in begins to sputter and smoke: ‘Aha! I’m in a folk horror!’

Read more

My research often leads me to fairly strange places. That, of course, is part and parcel of what I do. And yet I am frequently finding that the most interesting threads of inquiry can, in fact, be pulled from the most unassuming subject matter. This week, for instance, I have become convinced that fairies are gluten intolerant.

I have recently encountered several tales, particularly from the Scottish border country, that centre on the strategic deployment of baked goods as an anti-seelie ward. I am not sure whether I have simply been hungrier these past few weeks, but the motif seems to appear with disconcerting frequency in the tales I have been gathering. Bread, bread, everywhere bread—standing between the wilderness of the Otherworld and ordinary human life.

As someone who can never say no to a good old bit of apotropaic magic, I believe the untapped power of the humble loaf deserves far more attention when discussing the nuances of regional fairy lore. Let’s start with some thoughts from English poet and cleric Robert Herrick (yes, that’s Herrick the cleric), writing in the seventeenth century on fairy bread wards:

‘If ye feare to be affrighted,

When ye are (by chance) benighted,

In your pocket for a trust

Carrie nothing but a Crust:

For that holy piece of Bread,

Charmes the danger, and the dread.’

An excellent rhyme scheme—though with a name like that, perhaps it was inevitable. Enough of that, back to the bread. Though ostensibly rather obscure, Herrick’s verse speaks to a centuries long tradition of fairy aversion to grain-based produce.

It was in fact common practice throughout Britain to carry a crust in one’s pocket when travelling through suspected fairy country in order to avoid being pixie-led. This is a custom that can be traced all the way back to the medieval period, impressively cross-regionally. Derivative traditions appear up and down these isles as measures in protecting yourself or loved ones when venturing beyond the safety of the domestic border. A Scottish Highland equivalent sees travellers sprinkling oatmeal over their clothes to invoke protection on the road. In parts of Cornwall, it was customary for a new mother to take a small cake on her journey to the child’s baptism to give to the first person to cross her path. This apparently did wonders in ensuring the child’s protection from pixie abduction. A Manx tradition dictates that something called ‘blithe meat’ (bread and hard cheese) must be provided to all guests visiting the home of a new mother and child. An extra portion of ‘blithe meat’ would be set aside and evenly scattered around the home in order to please any unseen visitors crouching in the rafters. This practice not only reduced the risk of abduction but further invited any lingering fairies to act as protectors for the new-born, having been symbolically welcomed as part of the family.

It seems bread and babies often go hand in hand throughout much fairy lore. Scottish folklorist John Gregorson Campbell recorded numerous instances of baked goods as protective charms in the late nineteenth century. Perhaps the most widely observed practice was the act of placing a dry heel or crust of bread in or near an infant’s cradle. Unbaptised babies were considered uniquely vulnerable to fairy interference, existing in a liminal state between the human world and the supernatural one. Baptism was thought to close that gap, but in the days or weeks before the ceremony, the child needed protecting by other means. Some traditions specified that the bread should be salted, as salt carried its own independent protective power, making the combination doubly effective. Others specified iron-baked bread, connecting the charm to the separate tradition of fairy aversion to iron.

This idea was not always limited to the safety of the infant; many families believed that the new mother required similar protection. In her lying-in period she occupied the same liminal status as her unbaptised child, and bread charms were placed near her for the same reasons. Some accounts specify that she should not be left alone without bread in the room. Along the Scottish Borders, it was often encouraged to hang a bannock (oat cake) above the door of the house, turning away otherworldly unwanted guests.

The frequent convergence of bread and babies led me back to a tale some of you might remember I covered in my article on fairy midwives. In this story from the borders, a human woman is snatched away by the fae to deliver a fairy child. Having delivered the baby, the midwife decides to make bread for the family but fast finds something is amiss.

Here is the shortened version:

After baking, the midwife tosses the excess flour back into the meal chest and prepares to leave. However, upon glancing at the chest, she realises that it is somehow full once more. The midwife bakes another batch and once more the same problem arises. This goes on a few more times until the wife calls from the bedroom that the chest will never empty unless she throws the spare flour on the fire. The two women thank each other and the midwife is able to leave the strange realm.

In my previous essay, my analysis followed the notion that human empathy is both the fatal flaw and the greatest strength of the fairy abductee. While this remains undoubtedly the case, in light of recent findings, I believe something else is at play here.

The baking of endless loaves appears to go beyond cruel trick and veer into the territory of bitter mockery. It seems to me in this tale that perhaps an element of jealousy drives the perpetual bread. Notoriously, when bread appearing to be baked by the fairies crops up in tales, it is never quite right. A man from Dornoch describes being offered fairy bread by a mysterious figure and the substance tasting only of ‘tough cork’. A popular motif that also occurs throughout many Celtic tales goes like this:

F343.19.1. F343.19.1. Fairy bread must be eaten same day it is given or it turns to toadstools. Wales: Baughman.

Often, what appears to be delicious bread is something else entirely, becoming useless when passed to humans. It seems fairies simply cannot bake. This concept would likely explain the midwife’s floury ordeal in typical fairy fashion. While the midwife churns out loaves designed to sustain the new family, she is only ever being drained of energy in the process. This ironic punishment is a farcical rehash of a deeply human craft with no tangible result. Classic fairies. It seems in many of these tales, fairies are not only scared of bread but deeply jealous of it too. Such revisions are always wonderful to consider in light of new research, once again demonstrating the amalgamate layers of popular regional tales.

So why the envy? Why the fear? The religious argument is perhaps the most straightforward place to begin. Bread, following Christian logic, is a consecrated food —the body of Christ—and it stands to reason that traditionally pagan creatures would recoil from it accordingly. This logic surfaces rather charmingly in the Irish tradition of scoring a cross into the top of a soda loaf before baking, ostensibly to let the fairies out. It is a neat explanation, and not one to be dismissed. But I think there is something deeper going on. Beyond religious explanation, there lies an entrenched ‘us vs them’ logic.

Bread is, at its core, an act of civilisation. You take raw grain from the earth and you mill it, mix it, prove it, bake it. You transform the wilderness into something warm and nourishing and fundamentally, irreducibly domestic. Bread does not exist in nature. It has to be made, and making it requires exactly the kind of patient, empathetic, communal human labour that fairy life, by its very nature, cannot accommodate. The fairy realm is wild and capricious. It does not cultivate. It does not build. It does not bake. And so something so mundane as bread must appear to the fairy as genuinely alien. Strange and repellent in the way that the fairy realm appears to us: fascinating in the abstract and deeply uncomfortable up close. There is a pleasing symmetry here. We have always been drawn to faerie precisely because it represents everything civilisation is not. Equally, the fairy, if we extend the logic, recoils from us for exactly the same reason. We are too known. Too warm.

This notion invites further thinking about women’s central place in all of this. As I have touched on already, baking and babies seem to go hand in hand in fairy lore— because of course they would. Baking is the traditional province of the domestic, and the domestic is the traditional province of women. In this light, it is not quite the bread itself that disconcerts the fairy, but the act of labour that has gone into making it. Women’s labour: a process of love and nourishment that becomes, in the process, its own kind of protective spell. But the same logic that elevates also encumbers. If bread protects because it is labour made solid, then the need for that protection encodes an anxiety that runs in the opposite direction: that the domestic order is always provisional, always requiring maintenance, and that women are responsible for both its creation and its defence. The integrity of the hearthside as a traditionally female space is precisely what the fairy threat depends upon. Which means the onus falls squarely on the shoulders of mother and wife. Not as a gift but as a burden.

And here the folklore grows somewhat cruel. Because the corollary of all this protection is the question of what happens when it fails. If a changeling gets in then surely somewhere, a domestic vigilance has faltered. Had the mother forgotten the crust? Had she been lax in her baking? The fairy is blamed, naturally. But the blame has a way of doubling back.

So we find ourselves, as we so often do in folklore, standing at the intersection of several tensions at once. The fairy fears what we have built, and we fear what they represent. It seems humanity, with all its cultivated, cooperative, hearth-bound life, is the fairy’s wilderness. Us against them, certainly; but also, running underneath, perhaps just a dash of us against ourselves.

Interesting Resources

Robert Herrick, Hesperides.

Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature.

John Gregorson Campbell, The Gaelic Otherworld.

Robert Hunt, Cornish Folklore.

John Rhys, Manx Folklore.

One of the quiet pleasures of digging into the British folk record is the realisation that the year was never empty. Every day had something clinging to it, be it a a custom, a superstition, a festival that mattered enormously to one valley and was completely unknown three villages over. The calendar, it turns out, was never tidy. It was always a bit of a hodgepodge. It seems almost no day passes without some strange observance trailing it somewhere in these ancient isles. Today, I am delighted to inform you, is one such day: let me take you for a wander through the unsettling tradition of St Mark’s Eve.

Many readers might have only the haziest idea of who St. Mark actually was—which is fitting, since the historical record is itself fairly hazy. What we know, or believe: Mark the Evangelist, putative author of the second gospel and traditionally held to be the first Bishop of Alexandria, was martyred sometime around 68 AD. His feast day falls on the 25th of April. Is it important we know this information when discussing St Mark’s Eve? Not really, no (sorry Mark). The folk calendar, characteristically, decided it was the night before that mattered. Really, the only reason for the sharing in name is to calendrically ‘mark’ (hahaha) the event. In a Christian country, saint’s feast days were the pegs on which the folk calendar hung its older, stranger customs. Call it the 24th of April and receive a few blank stares; call it St. Mark’s Eve and those in the know might cock a ye olde eyebrow or furtively wink at you in understanding.

The theology of St Mark’s Eve is non-existent. The Church of England never sanctioned it or recognised the accompanying observances. The festival sits in that vast murky space of English folk belief that was neither pagan nor properly Christian but something stubbornly, indigenously its own. Nevertheless, particularly in Northern counties between the 17th and 19th centuries, St Marks Eve seemed well-absorbed into the rhythms of community life without needing any sort of doctrinal justification.

The Custom

Unfortunately for the St Mark’s novice, observance of the festivities are a real commitment. The evening was not your typical one-and-done magic fix, but rather a pretty strict process that relied on the strength of the individual’s adherence to belief. The custom had that particular quality of English folk ritual in that it was at once utterly specific and entirely unexplained, handed down with precise instructions and no justification whatsoever.

On the night before the Feast of St. Mark the Evangelist, you were to attend your parish church at eleven o’clock and to sit in the porch until one in the morning. Not inside the church, mind, we don’t want you so comfortable you doze off. If you were lucky, a few other adventurous villagers might join you, so that you might huddle for a bit of warmth on the cold flagstone floor. And then you went home. And the following year, on the same night, you did it again. And the year after that, again. Three consecutive years of sitting in the dark for two hours in late April, which says something considerable about either the depth of folk belief or the limited entertainment options of rural England—probably both.

It was only on the third year that anything happened. Or was supposed to happen. On that final vigil, if you had been patient and faithful and sufficiently hardy, you would finally see a little magic. The wraiths of every parishioner fated to die before the next St. Mark’s Day, would process silently through the lychgate and into the church, in the order of their deaths, as orderly in dying as they had rarely managed to be in life. If the tradition held true, the specific behaviours of the wraiths would tell you all you needed to know for the coming year, allowing you to prepare for some often fairly grisly deaths. Many accounts warned to brace for a conga line of headless or rotting corpses, others might see ghostly coffins and pallbearers.

Most widely acknowledged though seems to be the notion that the wraith would play out the moments of its demise. As Jaqueline Simpson and Steve Roud observe in A Dictionary of English Folklore: ‘If the person is to be drowned, his representative will come as if struggling and splashing in water, and so on for other cases of premature death.’ No doubt a rather unfortunate sight, and for some, perhaps quite embarrassing. It was also held in popular belief that a wraith that entered the church and did not emerge again meant that person would be dead before the year was out. One that came back out meant a recovery from illness, a near miss, or a reprieve of legal sentence. In some accounts, the watcher could count the shades and determine the sequence, recording who would go first and who last. Probably the most terrifying of all was the chance that you might come face to face with your own wraith, trailing along behind the others, and if you see your shade wander aimlessly into the church, you better cross your fingers and hope it walks back through the door.

Some said that watchers who fell asleep during the vigil were themselves marked for death. Others said the sleep was merciful, a divine refusal to show you what you weren't strong enough to bear. Either way, I’d suggest stocking up on lucozade.

If you’re not particularly taken with two hours of damp porch floor, this extract from an 1806 poem by James Montgomery really gives you a flavour of the experience without the leg cramp and chill blaines:

Truly all sunshine and rainbows!

A Yorkshire Obsession

The vigil was practiced across England, but its heartland was Yorkshire, where it embedded itself so deeply in parish life that it survived well into the 19th century. The regional folklorists who combed through northern England in the Victorian era—Henderson, Gutch, Brand—found it everywhere. Alleged witness accounts spoke of watchers who had seen their neighbours' ghosts, of families who refused to send a sick relative to church on St. Mark's Day because someone had seen their shade the night before, of communities where the vigil was simply an unremarkable part of the year and people, like clockwork, would take up their watch in the old porch.

The custom also braided itself, in some settlements, with romantic divination. St. Mark's Eve sat at a folk crossroads between death omens and love magic. In certain tellings, a young woman might not see the dead but her future husband walking into the church. This doubling is characteristic of the folk calendar wherein death and desire is near-constantly entangled. And rightly so, regarded by many as the two driving forces of mortal life.

Keats Gets Amongst It

Perhaps the most famous literary recording of this little known event comes in the form of an unfinished 1819 poem by none other than my favourite tragic darling, John Keats.

Keats knew the tradition, and was drawn to it with the instinct of a poet who understood that the best material arrives already half-lit. He began The Eve of St. Mark during that extraordinary eighteen-month stretch in which he also produced the great odes, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Lamia. The life of Keats was so brief and so bright that critics tend to feel they know the poet all too well. What often goes undiscussed is just how clued in Keats was to the folk beliefs and observances of his homeland (but this is a rant I might reserve for another day).

The fact that the poem remains unfinished only makes the work more intriguing. The loose ends of the piece feel entirely appropriate for its subject matter. There is absolutely something about St Mark’s Eve that seems to resist true resolution. What Keats left is a fragment of around 120 lines, and it is strange and beautiful and unlike almost anything else he wrote. The setting is a provincial English town at dusk with streets emptying for evensong in thick gold light. Against this a young woman named Bertha sits alone in her lamplit room, absorbed in an ancient illuminated manuscript, while outside the last of the townspeople file past her window toward the church. She does not go. She stays with her book, tracing its strange illustrations. The poem does not deliver its promised apparitions. The vigil never quite arrives. We are left in that lamplit room, suspended between the ordinary world and whatever is gathering at the threshold, and then the poem simply stops.

It is, in other words, a poem about waiting—exactly what St. Mark's Eve demanded of its observers. Aptly enough, it is often conjectured that the poem remained unfinished due to either Keats’s own failing health or the sudden death of his younger brother, Tom. Perhaps the subject matter was simply all too much for an ailing, grieving poet. Perhaps Keats shelved the poem for fear he might somehow conjure up his own wraith. Whatever the case, the fragment captures the tradition's particular atmosphere better than a finished poem might have: the sense of something approaching that never fully arrives and the vigil that may or may not be rewarded.

Here are some utterly beautiful lines from the fragment:

The Importance of the Eve

As with all folk practice, often belying festivity is function. Though the absurdities of the ritual are not lost on me, communities were also doing something deliberate and serious. The church porch, it seems to me, is one of the great liminal points of the English landscape. It is neither inside nor outside; neither wholly sacred or profane; private or public. There would be no better place to observe the threshold between life and death, than at the very threshold most consistently used by every member of the community. The three-year commitment required of the watcher demanded patience, repetition, and a relationship with the village that extended across years. You were watching for your people. You were willing to know, despite the risk you took yourself.

St Mark’s Eve offered a closeness to death that would frequently go unnoticed throughout the rest of the year. The event also offered something rather different from the the church’s highly developed, orderly account of death, mediated by the clergy. It situated death not in the abstract hereafter but in the immediate, local, utterly legible landscape of the parish—your neighbours, your church, the people you had sat next to at harvest suppers and argued with over field boundaries, now filing quietly past you in the dark. It made death a community affair rather than a private spiritual reckoning, and it gave the living something the Church conspicuously withheld: foreknowledge. Not salvation, not comfort exactly, but information. The folk imagination, it turns out, was less frightened of knowing than the clergy might have hoped. There is certainly a pragmatism buried in the vigil that feels distinctly English.

Tonight is St. Mark's Eve. The 24th of April, the threshold of the 25th. All over England the church porches stand empty. The custom is all but gone. But the date remains, as dates are known to do. Something in late April still feels like a threshold: the year balanced between what is dying and what is coming. Perhaps the night is a little longer than you expected, perhaps a little shorter. Who can say?

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In 1510, nine men were hauled before the Archbishop’s Court in York. Among the regularly scheduled cases of pilfered loaves and drunken pub brawls, this one was strikingly different. This unruly group had in fact been rumbled in the midst of some rather strange business. Gathering on a moor near Mixindale, the men reportedly set about performing some kind of necromantic ritual in the hopes that the spirits conjured might point them in the right direction of buried treasure. The mission, unsurprisingly, failed, no doubt disappointing the would-be treasure hunters. Still, their loss has become our gain in the court records left behind. The trial documents—carefully retrieved and translated by historians Frank Klaasen and Sharon Hubbs Wright—read as fairly mundane legal proceeding. There is no dramatic inquisition, no confession of a diabolical pact, no unfortunate wailing as his bones popped on the rack. What we are presented with is nine hopeful laymen, a desolate moor and a memorised spell.

The York case is an excellent place to start when considering folk necromancy as it immediately complicates the typical depiction with which most of us are familiar. In popular memory, the word necromancy often conjures (pun intended) images of robed figures and skeletal armies, scheming scholars communing with demons in consecrated circles, your great-grandma’s withered arm breaking through the soil to resume an unfinished cross-stitch. What the York trial shows us instead is something altogether more mundane in a community of ordinary men, working together to use the dead as a practical resource. No great mage required, no sacred geometry—bring a sandwich and a friend; lets make a day of it! In any case, public record reveals countless similar summonings, indicating that necromantic practice of a kind was rife among the common classes as a supplementary tool to everyday predicaments.

Naming the Thing

The history of the word necromancy is a characteristically tricksy thing. Derived from the Greek nekros (dead body) and manteia (divination), necromancy at its strictest means consulting the dead to obtain knowledge. Hidden items, love matters, family secrets—all might be revealed if only one could rouse the spirits from their slumber. The exact scope of knowledge the dead possessed did vary culture to culture. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that the dead only possessed as much knowledge as they had when they walked amongst the living. As such, You could ask your Aunt Bessie for her secret lemon drizzle recipe, but ask her the meaning of life and she might stare just as blankly as she did when she was alive.

Other cultures regarded death as something of a gateway to higher knowledge. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this notion appears in 1 Samuel 28 where Saul asks the witch of Endor to raise Samuel so that he might consult the prophet on how he might approach the Philistines. The witch obliges and Samuel predicts Saul and his army will die in the coming battle. Saul does not heed this prophecy, and subsequently commits suicide when his army fails. This is necromancy at the root. Think Ask Jeeves, except Jeeves is dead and often not especially cooperative.

By the medieval period, the Latin necromantia had drifted in popular usage towards nigromantia, literally meaning ‘black divination.’ The practice was beginning to blur in connotation, moving into a more general category of forbidden sorcery. This slippage matters when considering the class aspect of necromantic practice. When scholars and ecclesiastical authorities wrote about necromancy, they were describing something quite different to what was going on in churchyards, villages and farmhouses. The ‘necromancy’ condemned in scholarly and clerical texts was an elite, literate practice: elaborate rituals drawn from grimoires, performed by educated men (often clergymen, who had the Latin to read the handbooks), involving complex conjurations of demons or spirits. Richard Kieckhefer, the Northwestern University historian whose work on medieval magic remains foundational, has shown that a significant chunk of practitioners of this learned necromancy were in fact ‘diocesan priests, men and boys in minor orders, monks, and friars’ precisely because the grimoires required a degree of Latinity that most laypeople simply didn't have.

The necromancy practiced by commonfolk was an altogether different creature, moving via mouth rather than manuscript. It was concerned, as historian Dr Alexander Cummins—whose Folk Necromancy in Transmission series for Revelore Press is currently the most rigorous body of scholarship on the subject—has put it, with ‘the valuable, responsible, and nourishing work that can be done with the dead.’ Warding off troublesome ghosts, seeking guidance from the recently deceased, or commissioning the local churchyard as matchmaker; all practical, relational uses for the dead, embedded in everyday life.

The Dead as Neighbours

To understand folk necromancy, it might first be useful to acknowledge how pre-modern Europeans understood death. For most of recorded history, the dead have often been regarded as proximate rather than absent. Your relatives were leaning against their gravestones, curled up in their favourite saucepans, teasing the housecat that used to scratch up their furniture. The dead could dream through you; they could cause illness if displeased or bring protection if properly honoured. They retained, in a sense, a stake in the living community.

While more secular superstition might well have proliferated this parallel existence of the dead, the belief was also reinforced in coherent cosmology. The Church's doctrine of purgatory created a theology in which the dead were not only present but reactive and responsive. They could be aided by the prayers (and the purses) of the living and in turn, were regarded as retaining some capacity to act upon the world. Soul cakes were baked on All Souls Day to commemorate and feed the deceased, dumb suppers were held to welcome loved ones back into the home. Salt was placed around corpses; shrouds were carefully managed; the specific objects buried with the dead were chosen with attention to what the deceased might need, (or what the living might need to keep contained!)

In this sense, the churchyard would have been a place of immense accumulated power. Imbued with the knowledge of all those six feet below, the very soil of the cemetery was understood to carry spiritual change. Cunning Folk, the professional magicians of early modern Britain, understood this well. Folk magic practice often relied heavily on the resources of the churchyard. Graveyard dirt, winding cloths, powdered bone, gallows rope, could all be understood as working materials in ritual practice. It seemed the dead, when politely approached, could act.

Cunning Folk

The term ‘Cunning Folk’ is used primarily in England and Wales and refers to proffessional practitioners of folk magic who were integral members of many communities from the medieval period through to the early twentieth century. Though not nearly as common, cunning folk still exist today, actively practicing their craft for the benefit of those around them.

Cunning Folk go by many names: wise men, wise women, conjurers, wizards, and in Cornwall, ‘pellars’—possibly derived from ‘expellers,’ reflecting their role in driving out unwanted spirits. Historian Owen Davies has estimated that, up until the mid-nineteenth century, there may have been several thousand working in England alone at any given time. The cunning folk were typically from the artisan and farming classes. They were often semi-literate, of middling social status, and operating commercially with clients from all levels of society. Their magic was, as scholarship has consistently emphasised, ‘concerned not with the mysteries of the universe and the empowerment of the magus, so much as with practical remedies for specific problems.’ A stolen horse. A sickening child. A husband who had stopped coming home. A sense, nagging and persistent, that something restless was in the house. These were all within a practitioner’s remit and could be easily remedied for a fee.

These folks’ relationship with necromantic practice was equally pragmatic. The cunning man or woman would not summon great spirits through Latin doctrine or sacred geometry; they were concerned more with rousing the recently dead. Ritual involving such minor spirits often bordered on what we might now recognise as typical Shamanism. The dead were consulted in dreams or conjured through tapping on walls and floorboards. Parts of corpses such as hair, bone, or blood, were used in well recognised charm recipes that had circulated orally across generations.

For many cunning folk, the dead were really considered colleagues. Trial records from the sixteenth century Scottish witch trials contain scores of suspected ‘sorcerers’ who named deceased familiar spirits with which they were allegedly partnered:

• Patrick Lowrie, (1605) was given a kind of ‘hair belt’ by his familiar spirit Helena McBurnie (Books of Adjournal JC2/4 fo. 58v – 60v)

• Agnes Hendrie (1675) familiar spirit called Peiter Sollowy

• Isobel Inglis, (1675) named a spirit called Peter Drysdle (High Court Process Notes JC2/14 p. 346-354)

• Bessie Dunlops ‘spirit familiar’ named Thomas Reid: a man who had died at the battle of Pinkie Burn

Though many faced prosecution from ecclesiastical authority, What's striking, in the historical record, is how little this seemed to trouble their communities. The cunning folk were generally distinguished, in popular understanding, from the ‘evil’ of witches and from the learned necromancers of the grimoires, who were associated with demons and and the learned classes. The wise man or woman who could lay a ghost or identify the cause of a death was a community resource. They were solving problems that neither the Church nor the physician might adequately address.

The Position of the Church

The Church’s position on necromancy was formally clear and practically complicated. Officially, consulting the dead was condemned. The Book of Deuteronomy was unambiguous on this point and by the High Middle Ages, ecclesiastical authorities were increasingly anxious about the spread of necromantic manuscripts, which often circulated within the very clerical networks that were supposed to suppress them. The learned necromancy of the grimoires was a particular concern, not least because its practitioners were frequently educated clergymen using liturgical language in decidedly unsanctioned contexts.

But the Church’s own doctrines had, inadvertently, created the conditions for folk necromancy to flourish. The cult of the saints was, among other things, a system for working with powerful dead people. Prayers to martyrs, the veneration of relics, the belief that holy bones retained spiritual forces were all officially sanctioned practices that overlapped substantially, in their underlying logic, with what folk practitioners were doing in the churchyard or, indeed, on the moors on rather less official business. When a cunning woman placed a charm at a grave and asked the deceased to act on her behalf, she was in a way drawing on the same cosmological framework that sent pilgrims to Canterbury to touch the bones of Becket.

The Reformation complicated this further. The Protestant abolition of purgatory removed, at a stroke, the official theological basis for praying for the dead but it did nothing to remove the popular belief that the dead were still present and capable of making themselves felt. If anything, by severing the official channels for managing the relationship between living and dead, the Reformation may have driven folk necromantic practices further into the informal, oral economy in which they had always, to a significant degree, lived.

Shared Knowledge

One of the more surprising findings of recent scholarship is how networked the practitioners of folk and learned magic actually were. Klaassen and Wright’s research into the Tudor period reveals that magicians and cunning folk ‘operated in extended networks in which they exchanged knowledge, manuscripts, equipment, and even clients.’ Grimoires left monasteries, circulated, were copied and glossed with marginal notes. Necromantic ideas and made their way into the hands of practitioners who were working in traditions that blended the learned and the oral. This is one reason why the distinction between ‘folk’ and ‘learned’ necromancy, while analytically useful, should not be drawn too sharply. A cunning man might possess a manuscript—or a partial copy, or a garbled transcription—of a learned conjuration text, and adapt it for his own purposes.

In Britain, this hybridisation produced a rich and varied tradition. Sin-eating or the practice of consuming food placed on a corpse, understood to absorb the sins of the deceased, persisted in Wales and border counties into the nineteenth century. Dream-incubation, in which a practitioner would sleep in a graveyard or on a burial mound in order to receive communication from the dead, has ancient roots and documented early modern applications. The use of ‘dead man’s blood’ in charms, corpse hands for theft-detection, skulls as oracular objects: all of these appear across physical historical records, and far less sporadically than one might assume.

What the Dead Could Do

So what was folk necromancy actually for? Here are several overlapping functions.

First and most basically: information. The dead were believed to have knowledge that the living lacked. Consulting the dead was a form of divination, and in village contexts, it was often the most authoritative form available: the recently deceased knew who had stolen the horse, knew what had caused the child’s sickness, knew where dad’s last will and testament was hidden.

Second: justice. A striking number of folk necromantic practices are concerned with identifying wrongdoers. Corpses were understood to ‘bleed afresh’ in the presence of their murderers. This was a belief so widespread it was even cited in legal contexts in early modern Britain and Scotland. The dead, in this framework, were witnesses who could not be bribed or intimidated. The deed had already been done.

Third: protection. The bones, blood, and possessions of the dead carried power that could be turned toward defensive ends. Charms incorporating graveyard materials appear throughout the folk magical record as protection against witchcraft and ill-wishing.

Fourth: relationship. This is perhaps the most easily overlooked function, and in some ways the most important. Many folk necromantic practices were not about extracting information or power from the dead but about maintaining a relationship with them. The dead should be kept comfortable, ensuring they did not become restless. This would maintain a strong business relationship. Keeping lines of communication open and readily accessible would mean your ghostly counterpart might be called upon easily in the event you had misplaced your house keys.

Laying the Matter to Rest

By the nineteenth century, the professionalisation of medicine, the expansion of the Church, and increasing literacy had begun to erode the cunning folk tradition in Britain. Owen Davies has documented its gradual decline in England across the Victorian period. But it did not vanish. Elements of it persisted in folk custom, in the practices of those who continued to work with the dead outside official frameworks, and eventually in the revival movements of the twentieth century, which drew on the historical record to reconstruct and reinterpret what had been lost.

The phrase ‘folk necromancy’ might bring images of shrouded figures, gesticulating sinisterly at the fringes of the community, but the reality is that communication with and practical use of the dead was accepted and often entirely encouraged. In this way, a community could be regarded as far larger than those still walking the streets, made up of several unseen generations that might be happily consulted if shown the correct amount of respect in waking them. In this regard, it seems the nine men on the moor at Mixindale were not so different from anyone who has ever stood at a graveside and hoped that something of the person below might still be listening.

Interesting Resources

Frank Klaassen & Sharon Hubbs Wright, The Magic of Rogues: Necromancers in Early Tudor England (Penn State University Press).

Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century (Penn State University Press).

Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press).

Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (Hambledon Continuum).

Jim Baker, An Inquiry into Necromancy (Hadean Press).

Alexander Cummins & Jesse Hathaway Diaz (eds.), Folk Necromancy in Transmission series (Revelore Press).

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When I’m at the pub, talking to a friend of a friend, there’s a moment I can always see coming. The conversation drifts, as it inevitably does, to that question: “So, what do you do?” And I, clutching a sweating pint, sheepishly reply “folklorist.”

A pause. “And how does one get into something like that?”

One such recent encounter featuring my usual muddled strings of “oh you know”s and “I guess I just”s and “erm sort of like”s had me later wondering just how one really does ‘get into’ such a thing. I usually fall back on saying I was raised on Tolkien, White, and Lewis, which is true enough. That pipeline feels obvious in retrospect. And while these authors and their works are undoubtedly cornerstones of the folk-literary tradition, this answer tends to negate all the fascinating resources out there that focus on actual folkloristics—those wonderful inner workings of folklore study. What I mean is this: what even is a folktale, really? What are its moving parts? How do you take one apart and put it back together again like an old clock, just to see how it ticks? What does folklore do for people—how does it shape communities, build identities, carry meaning across generations? How does it get used, repurposed, politicised, kept alive? And what, exactly, are we meant to make of a man with the body of a human and the head of a hedgehog turning up in a regional tale?

What I really need is a good few hours and a couple of eagerly listening ears to truly do the question any sort of justice. Incidentally, that is exactly what I have here.

So: here follows my (more or less) comprehensive master list for a beginner’s curriculum in folkloristics. These are resources that I have found utterly invaluable over the years and can often be discovered at the foundation of my research.

The Field’s Conception and History

The beginning is always an excellent place to—well—begin. A common misconception when we talk about the ‘beginning’ of folklore studies is that I’m about to drag you all the way back to the dawn of time—that you’ll need to learn some kind of cave language made up of gestures and grunts, and from there we’ll painstakingly trace every tale as it passes from person to person, across all of human history. That, reassuringly, is not about to happen. Of course, folklore in itself is indeed older than the hills; but the formal naming and study of the phenomena need only be traced back a few hundred years. In 1846, the antiquarian William John Thoms proposed a new term for what had been known as ‘popular antiquities.’ Writing in the journal The Athenaeum, he suggested ‘folklore’ as a more precise and fitting name for the study of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories. The term stuck, and with it came a subtle shift toward recognising these materials as part of a living cultural practice rather than merely relics of the past.

As such, here comes my first recommendation: surprise, surprise it is

WJ Thoms’ Letter to The Athenaeum, 12 August 1846

In hopes of enlisting The Athenaeum’s aid in ‘garnering a few listening ears’, under the excellent pseudonym of Ambrose Merton, Thoms calls for the protection of ‘folk’ manners, tales, customs and observances as he observes ‘much that is curious and interesting in these matters is now entirely lost.’ In tow, comes the first coinage of the term ‘folklore,’ and the subsequent basis for a formalised field of study.

Though only two pages long, the proposal is wonderfully written and marks a turning point in how such material was understood as a coherent and meaningful field of study in its own right. If you are looking for more Thoms to fill your boots (which I highly recommend you do), the Athenaeum subsequently ran Thoms’ regular ‘folk-lore columns’ from 1846-9.

Examples may be found here.

As with any academic movement, the establishment of folkloristics is not without its controversies. Namely, the very notion that ‘the lore of the people’ be taken from said people and shaped in academia is inherently paradoxical. This tension has lingered, in one form or another, since the field’s beginnings. The strange paradox has always underpinned my research, and any budding folklorist would do well to remember the fine line they are treading in term’s of folklore’s class politics (particularly in Britain and Ireland). A brilliant companion to Thoms’ first foray into folklore is

In Search of Authenticity: Formation of Folklore Studies by Regina Bendix

Where Thoms gives us the moment of naming, Bendix unpacks the assumptions that came bundled with it—especially the field’s deep investment in ‘authenticity’ and the social politics beneath. She masterfully shows how folklore was often framed as something pure, rural, and belonging to ‘the people,’ even as it was being collected, categorised, and interpreted by educated elites. Read alongside Thoms, Bendix makes clear that folklore studies didn’t simply emerge as a neutral act of preservation. This monograph frames the field as an often-uneasy negotiation over who gets to define and speak for tradition. This monograph traces folklore’s legacy from the eighteenth century through to the late 1990s, and remains a valuable resource in folklore historiography.

The work is available to buy online.

Anthropological Function

We have the what; now we must turn to the why. Folklore does not and could not exist in a vacuum. The tales we pass down are born of practical function, forged in community bonds and beliefs, and hold their shape due to their continued use as inherited pedagogy. Afraid your children might stray too far from the village? Why not warn them of a fire breathing beast lurking at the forest’s edge? Such logic is the backbone of oral tradition and can reveal fascinating truths about civilisations past. An essay I find myself constantly referring to on this very topic is

Four Functions of Folklore by William R. Bascom

Written in 1954, anthropologist William Bascom sets out a model dictating four central uses of folklore within communities across the globe. This framework encourages a clear, practical way of thinking about what folklore actually does in society. By outlining its social roles, Bascom moves the discussion beyond simply collecting tales and into understanding their purpose and impact. I will always recommend this essay as it rightly treats folklore as an active concept with the ability to evolve as a tool in the hands of different groups.

You can find the essay here

Now expanding on this idea with an invaluable anthology that has continually inspired my own academic journey.

The Study of Folklore by Alan Dundes

This landmark 1965 anthology is an essential in any folklorist’s toolkit. Stating that ‘it is not enough to say that folklore is a mirror of culture, we must see what that mirror reflects,’ Dundes makes great strides in reorienting folklore study from popular collection and organisation to questions of education and functionalism. This work places people firmly back at the centre of the discourse and its incredibly deft in its handling of protected custom and material. Dundes is a giant in the field and a voice I find myself favouring often in my own work.

You can find the book here.

Morphology and Structure

Though function is at the heart of how I conduct my own research, structuralism cannot be ignored, the two often going hand in hand to create enduring lore. I could not rightly create this list without including a foundational resource that I’m sure has found many a scholar with their head in their hands on more than one ocassion.

The Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp

This monograph is is so important because it offers one of the first systematic ways of breaking folktales down into their component parts. Rather than focusing on characters or themes, Propp identified a series of recurring narrative events that happen in a consistent order across many tales, showing that wildly different stories often share the same underlying structure. In doing so, he treats the folktale almost like a mechanism: something that can be taken apart, examined, and understood in terms of how its pieces fit together.

This work becomes foundational for the broader structuralist approach to folklore, later developed by thinkers like Claude Lévi-Strauss. Structuralism takes seriously the idea that cultural expressions are shaped by deep, often unconscious patterns in human thought. Once again, the book marks an imperative shift away from simple collection.

You can find the book here.

Hand in hand with this rather dense work comes the ever-reliable

Motif-Index of Folk-Literature by Stith Thompson

Once I had a handle on how folktales might be read as strings of motifs, I was naturally intrigued to find out just how many motifs there could be. Turns out the answer is in the high thousands. Thompson’s seminal reference guide painstakingly catalogues each one across myriad folk stories internationally. Complete with reference number, description and countries of origin, Thompson’s guide demonstrates the universality of folk tales, grouping motifs not by country, but by feature.

Thompson’s index speaks for itself, showing that folklore extends well beyond borders and appears, in one form or another, in almost every one of my essays’ footnotes. It is also great fun to skim casually as it features some rather strange and amusing motifs—my favourites being:

H1114. Task: climbing a glass mountain

G303.4.1. the devil has cloven hooves but is betrayed by them at inconvenient moments

B29.8. B29.8. Man-hedgehog. Upper half of body like hedgehog

A free PDF is available here.

Application and Evolution

I am acutely aware that many of the resources suggested have publication dates that place them firmly before the turn of the last century. Such is a given as we move into an era in which folkloristics is now viewed as a well-established field. However, this is not to say that the study has been exhausted—far from it. Folklore right now might just be more exciting than ever. We are currently seeing an immense revival in folkloric interest, with writers and artists alike focusing on what folklore might mean in our modern age. In this way, we are seeing the preservation, mobilisation and reformation of tale and custom as a means of reckoning with our own social progressions. Once again we find folklore asserted as a perpetually active force in not only shaping the world, but questioning it.

Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain by Zakia Sewell

I am so excited to include this one in the list. Released just last month, Finding Albion represents a significant intervention in contemporary British folkloristics, arriving at a moment when symbols of English national identity have been increasingly co-opted by far-right narratives, making Sewell's reframing of folk tradition as a counter to those narratives feel urgently necessary. Drawing on her dual heritage—her father White British and her maternal grandparents from the Caribbean island of Carriacou—Sewell searches for new myths and folk practices that might provide an alternative, unifying heritage for Britain, one that acknowledges and welcomes the contributions of people from other places. This is a timely call for a rethink about how we approach our folk culture, particularly in the UK where social tensions have only risen over the past decade. Sewell brings the social tensions of folklore that began with Thoms to the fore, no longer treating it as an inconvenient hurdle in folkloristics but a central contention.

An equally essential recent work is of course

The Lost Folk by Lally Macbeth

Fundamentally challenging who and what gets to count as folk, The Lost Folk is most important is in its insistence on giving platform to folk practices that have been systematically marginalised—the culture expressed by women, by migrant and diasporic communities, the domestic, the municipal, the quiet, and the difficult to categorise. MacBeth's argument is implicitly anti-survivalist: she insists that folk does not belong to an imagined, halcyon past but is constantly being drawn from everyday lives and communities. The Lost Folk performs what applied folklorists have long argued theoretically: that the canon of British folk culture has been shaped by exclusion as much as by preservation, and that a truly inclusive folkloristics must attend to what has been overlooked as much as to what has been celebrated. Published in 2025, this work is current, but it is also timeless in that it presents an indispensable manifesto for intersectional folkloristics moving forward. In writers such as Sewell and Macbeth, we can see a new, dynamic shape of study forming.

both books can be found at most good bookshops.

Small Press Happening Now!

Democratic, accessible collation and analysis is happening all around us right now. Independent zines and small press endeavours are perhaps the truest way in which folk is currently being preserved. These wonderful publications keep folk among the folk, distributing handcrafted meditations on our heritage and culture widely and economically while giving platform to anyone who might feel a pull to write. Such innovative endeavours are to be highly commended and have personally led me to meeting some truly amazing members of the community. Here are just a few of my favourite small publications:

Unquiet Press: A beautifully crafted monthly intersectional UK folk zine focusing on folk study by all folk and for all folk.

Northern Earth: Andrew Chapman’s endlessly informative journal combining archaeology, folklore, hauntology, psychogeography and hauntology. Northern Earth welcomes a diverse range of writing focusing on how place inspires us.

Hwaet! Zine: A DIY folklore zine that examines the ways in which ancient ideas survive in the modern day, complete with beautiful pen and ink art.

Get Amongst It

To round off this curriculum, I urge you to get amongst it all. It is all well and good to hole up in a library with a teetering tower of books, but the true flavour of folkloristics lives in the land. To really understand how humans experience place, you must…experience place. All that can be found between pages once existed out there, and likely still does. This is something that is all too easy to forget when staring at twelve folders full of notes on fairies, but simply putting your feet on the ground is an integral part of becoming truly acquainted with folklore. Want to ‘get into it?’ then I urge you to get into it. Safe travels!

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N.B. This is a diversion from my usual research based work, but I feel a word on this burgeoning issue is long overdue. Folk has always been political—that is the point.

Over the past decade, an interest in English and Celtic folklore has re-emerged with striking visibility across popular media and contemporary literature. This resurgence is difficult to overlook as a researcher attentive to the ways in which folklore continually renews and reshapes itself. This renewed interest is perhaps most strikingly evidenced by the recent revival of an AHRC funded national folklore survey in England, following decades in which no comparable large-scale documentation of vernacular belief and practice has been undertaken.

The revival in folk interest today can be seen as part of a broader cultural movement toward re-enchantment in response to the rapid progressions of the digital age. These waves of enthusiasm for the practice and preservation of various folk traditions are by no means unprecedented; in fact, renewed cultural interest in our fringe histories at this moment makes perfect sense. We can see a strikingly similar pattern through the years surrounding the formalisation of folklore studies in the early 19th century. Certainly, the sweeping reconfiguration of French identity during the Revolution sent shockwaves across the Channel, spurring Britain to cling more tightly to its own traditions and notions of nationhood. Yet while the nation looked to its past for stability, the Industrial Revolution was already reshaping the countryside, threatening the survival of the traditional tales and practices that once circulated largely untamed within rural communities. Today, a similar dynamic is unfolding in the digital age. Rapid technological change, globalisation, and the loss of community third spaces have left many seeking rootedness in tangible, communal practices.

For someone like me, the rising interest in folk is thrilling. I am genuinely excited by the prospect of preserving this cultural practice and have even been known to literally jump around in excitement when asked to explain an aspect of my research to an interested party.

I am delighted; I am also scared, and increasingly so, I find myself angry.

In recent years, the word ‘patriotism’ has progressively come to evoke uneasy, even unsavoury, feelings for many in Britain. Indeed, I found myself questioning whether to address the term at all, wary that doing so might be interpreted as an expression of prejudice. It is no secret that intolerance is becoming increasingly fashionable across the UK. In the year ending March 2025, 115,990 hate crime offences were recorded across England and Wales, a 2% increase year‑on‑year. Within that, race hate crimes rose by 6% and religious hate crimes by 3%. These statistics might feel abstract, but they are down your street; they are lurking at your bus stop. On my walk home from work each day, I pass a fresh slur scrawled across corner shop shutters, already eight times painted over. Nationalist chauvinism is being dressed in patriotic ‘nostalgia’—outright hatred repackaged to resemble chocolate box villages where white, white scones are eaten by white, white children in white, white socks.

The situation constitutes a vicious feedback loop. The far right have effectively monopolised the discourse on patriotism, shaping it so that expressions of national pride are frequently interpreted as exclusionary or prejudiced. Consequently, these political and cultural agendas advance with minimal opposition, while broader society experiences a form of despondent malaise, unmotivated and uncertain how to engage with the United Kingdom’s cultural heritage without risking misinterpretation or complicity.

At present, folklore itself is at risk. In the pursuit of those mythical ‘traditional English values’ invoked by far-right nationalist rhetoric, folk customs, stories, and practices are frequently drawn into the same narrative frame. Distinct traditions become flattened and homogenised, repackaged as evidence of a singular and static national culture. The result is a sanitised vision of Albion that bears little resemblance to the diverse and evolving traditions from which folklore actually emerges.

Let’s take Morris dancing for example. Late last year, the British National Party (BNP) posted a short article titled ‘Defending British Culture: Why It Matters.’ Among Sunday Roasts and Bonfire Night, a strong advocation for Morris dancing as a singularly British tradition can be found. Despite popular claims of deep antiquity, historical evidence suggests that the practice of Morris emerged in the Early Modern period, with the earliest documented references appearing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries across the courts of mainland Europe. The term ‘morris’ entered the English language via the Flemish mooriske danse. Contemporarily similar terms in other languages include German Moriskentanz, French morisques, Croatian moreška, and moresco, moresca or morisca in Italy and Spain. A cultural compound of folk dance from Northern Europe to the Iberian Peninsular and beyond, Morris dancing is by no means the exclusively English or Celtic tradition it is often assumed to be. In fact, scholars have long conjectured that the name originates from ‘Moorish,’ an archaic term for those of African descent, in reference to the practice’s movements, which have been noted bear strong resemblance to various African ritual dances.

In fact, the writer seems to have tripped over their own argument. For all their anxiety about ‘defending’ or containing tradition, they admit that British heritage ‘is not static; it evolves, incorporating new influences while maintaining a distinct identity.’ In other words, while trying to guard a supposedly pure culture, they accidentally acknowledge that tradition has always been a bit of a cultural smoothie. After all, I’m fairly certain those ‘new influences’ sustaining the tradition’s evolution didn’t exactly materialise out of thin air. Running parallel to any rise in cultural interest are those who seek to co-opt said interest for the advancement of their own ideological positions. This tendency is particularly pronounced in the case of folklore, which, being rooted so strongly in notions of place and locality, can easily be mobilised in support of rigid or exclusionary ideas about cultural boundaries. Time and again, we are seeing rural custom employed in attaching excusatory bells and whistles to prejudice.

It is at this point that I feel it necessary we introduce a new term into the discourse: folkwashing. Much like the more familiar concepts of ‘greenwashing’ or ‘whitewashing,’ folkwashing describes the strategic deployment of folklore to lend legitimacy to a contemporary agenda. In this process, traditions are selectively presented to evoke a sense of ancient cultural authority. The nuance that characterises genuine folkloric practice is flattened, replaced by a curated aesthetic of heritage that appears culturally pure.

While Richard Dorson’s 1950 coinage of ‘fakelore’ holds much the same sentiment, this term focuses largely on the outright fabrication of lore to advance dubious purpose. What we are currently witnessing is the appropriation of pre-existing traditions, tied neatly with a ribbon of wilful ignorance toward the complex histories and diverse evolutions that produced them. In this process we find that, under the guise of conservation, fringe oral and practical customs risk further damage through warped and selective reinterpretation. A dog whistle is still a dog whistle even if it plays ‘Scarborough Fair.’

A brief detour into semiotics may be useful here. Increasingly, the word ‘folklore’ risks functioning as what might be described as an empty signifier: a term broad and malleable enough to be filled with whatever meanings its advocates wish to attach to it. Under this banner, intolerant nationalist rhetoric can advance while appearing culturally benign. Stripped of its historical and scholarly complexity, the word becomes little more than a convenient vessel, into which new parochial connotations are poured. In this sense, ‘folklore’ risks following a similar trajectory to that of ‘patriotism,’ becoming a word that invites at best, embarrassed wincing and at worst, complete avoidance.

Folklore is not a closed practice. ‘Exclusionary folklore’ is a phrase so paradoxical, I am surprised it does not simply implode when written down. Literally interpreted, the word means ‘the learning of the people,’ and this is something I will repeat until those metaphorical cows come home. Learning is movement, is change, is variation. Confine a man to a beige box for a decade, and the only lesson he will be able to teach you concerns the shade of the walls. The bottom line is that folklore desperately needs variety to thrive; the very germ of oral tradition lies in the willingness to share culture with one’s neighbours, and in the corresponding pride found not only in sharing, but in listening.

There is no person on Earth who lacks a connection to folklore. It is fundamentally an experience of place, and I believe you would be hard-pressed to find someone who has not experienced place. Our cultural borders have always been porous, which is precisely why folklore survives in abundance. Traditions germinate and endure through the act of sharing, through the delight of listening, and through the assimilation of others’ experience into a collective store of learning. No one owns folklore, that is the very point. Folklore belongs to the mouth that speaks it for the moment, only to be taken up and carried forward by the next teller. It is its own beast, and an endangered one at that.

To set down a harsh line between you and your neighbour, defined by how much you know about the grindylow is utterly ridiculous, and entirely undermines any claim that you are a marshal of folkloric conservation. By gatekeeping in service of ‘preservation’ you are actively suffocating the custom. You are folkwashing.

If you are concerned only with the symbolic value of the tradition—as a tool to draw lines—rather than the tradition itself. You are folkwashing.

If you divorce the subject from its meaning, disregarding its roots, often deliberately. Your focus is separation: separating motif from history, neighbour from neighbour. You are folkwashing.

The issue is not beyond remedy. The first step is simply recognising folklore as an entity in its own right. Avoid treating folklore as a fixed cultural symbol, instead uphold its essentiality as a vehicle for cultural transmission. Promote festivals and heritage sites that contextualise traditions, and don’t be afraid to question groups and organisations that fail to do so. Approach folk study critically: beyond recording, consider how certain traditions and stories might have functioned socially for different communities. As eminent folklorist Alan Dundes rightly observes:

‘it is not enough to say that folklore is a mirror of culture. We must try to see what it is that folklore reflects.’

I refuse to wash folklore in the homogenous watercolour of an exclusionary false pastoralism. Folklore lives in collaboration and dies with atomistic claim. The survival of custom does not require shared blood, only shared ground. We are beyond privileged to hold such a complex, universal tool for communication and understanding in our hands—do not let it be wasted.

Interesting Resources

National Folklore Survey, click here

Official Statistics: Hate crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2025, click here.

BNP article, ‘Defending British Culture: Why It Matters,’ click here.

Rodney Gallop, ‘The Origins of the Morris Dance’ in Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, click here.

Boss Morris, a renowned all female Morris side championing intersectional folk practice, click here.

Richard Dorson, Folklore and fakelore : essays toward a discipline of folk studies, click here.

Alan Dundes, ‘Structuralism and Folklore’, in Meaning of Folklore: The Analytical Essays of Alan Dundes, ed. by Simon J. Bronner.

Folklore Without Borders, a research network dedicated to developing greater diversity within folklore, click here.

This project survives because of you! Any one time donation to my Ko-Fi below supports my research costs!

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Perhaps changeling tales so dominate the folkloric spotlight as they are quite easily explained in terms of anthropological function. These stories often speak directly to the universal fears that accompany parenthood. If a child were sickly or strangely behaved, the changeling motif offered a folkloric wave of the hand in justifying these complaints. (A full explanation can be found here).

The fairy midwife, though closely connected to this tale type, is far more functionally sticky. We do not often find this motif translated into canonical literature. Perhaps there is less excitement to be had in the more domestic traffic between human and fairy kind but I, as always, beg to differ. For an area so rich, with tales hailing from every corner of the British Isles, it is sorely understudied.

What is a fairy midwife?

The title may imply otherwise, but the job of fairy midwife comes with one notable requirement: you must not, in fact, be a fairy. The majority of tales that concern fae midwifery pivot on the notion that the humanity of the abducted nurse is essential for a safe and healthy birth.

Queen Mab, one of the most frequently referenced female fairies in literature, is often misconstrued as a fairy midwife. In reality, however, her role—alongside her more whimsical pastimes of casual trickery and the matting of children’s hair (yes, really)—is to lure human midwives into the fairy realm to perform the work themselves, rather than undertaking the task directly. This is mentioned as a key facet of her character in Joshua Poole’s 1657 poem English Parnassus:

‘[Mab] trains forth midwives in their slumber/ With five, the holes to number/ And then leads them from their boroughs/ Thorough pondes and water furrowes.’

(see if you can spot the innuendo here).

As one might glean from the rather lengthy motif entry in Stith Thompson’s ever-handy Motif Index of Folk Literature (1932-6), the human midwife in the fairy bedchamber is a central fixture of tales trans-culturally, with origins in over ten countries.

F372.1. F372.1. Fairies take human midwife to attend fairy woman. (Cf. F333.) *Hartland Science 37—92; *Fb "jordemoder"; *BP I 367; Wentz Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (London, 1911) 49f., 54, 131, 140, 175, 182; Tobler 76.—English: Child I 358ff. No. 40, II 505f., III 505f., IV 459a, V 215b, 290b; Scottish: J. G. Campbell Superstitions 147; England, Scotland, Ireland, U.S.: Baughman; Icelandic: Göngu Hrуlfs saga 275ff.; Lappish: Qvigstad FFC LX 44 No. 41; Danish: Feilberg DF V 69ff., Kristensen Danske Sagn I (1892) 330ff., (1928) 210ff.; Breton: Sébillot Incidents s.v. "sage-femme", "fées"; India: Thompson-Balys; Japanese: Ikeda.

Despite the sheer breadth of reference, little research focuses on the particulars of the midwife abduction. Tales of kidnapped women are plentiful, yet the well runs dry when we turn to accounts of women invited into fairyland for a vocational purpose—or who even go of their own accord. I wonder if the topic proves tricky to unpick because the rational reason fairies might need human midwives is, frankly, elusive. But come on guys read that sentence back slowly—rational? reason? fairies? I’ll be surprised if that particular oxymoron hasn’t earned me a three thousand year curse of some foul description. What I mean to say is that the implementation of a human midwife in a fairy birth is not simply because fairy universities do not offer courses in obstetrics; these tales actually tell us far more about the human helpers than their fairy employers.

The tale type

The oldest known example of the fairy midwife tale hails from Gervase of Tilbury, twelfth-century cleric, lawyer and all round font of fairy knowledge. Gervase’s account incorporates several relevant motifs in producing a prototypical ‘complete’ abduction tale. By this, it is meant that the narrative generally includes the abduction of a bride, sexual union between human and fairy, subsequent birth of a fairy child, and the involvement of a human assistant. A rare example of completion in a narrative genre that is so often only fragmentary.

Gervase’s account unfolds in his 1210-14 work Otia Imperialia as a rather rudimentary stringing of various motifs concerning a fae-like race called the Dracae. The remarkable trickle down of this original, however, is well documented in a wide range of Celtic folktales showing very little evolutionary variation from Gervase’s recorded base.

Here is one such version recorded by John Rhys in Celtic Folklore (1901), it was written down in Welsh by the man who originally told it, William Thomas Solomon, and later translated into English.

A long while ago, an old man and his wife from Garth Dorwen were in need of a maid. At the market they encountered a young woman with striking yellow hair named Eilian. Eilian, in need of a position accepted the offer from the couple, glad of a roof over her head. In those times it was customary to spend long winter nights spinning after supper. Eilian, a strange girl, could often be found spinning in a nearby field by moonlight. It was said that on clear nights the Tylwyth Teg could be spied dancing rings around Eilian and playing with her yellow hair. One day in late spring, Eilian’s wheel was at last found abandoned in the field. She had finally escaped with the Tylwyth Teg, to their land deep beneath the earth. Her coveted yellow hair and strange hobby to blame. The field was named Eilian’s field, in hopes she would be found and remains so to this day.

Now, Eilian’s old mistress was a well sought after midwife, her knowledge of herbal remedies reaching villages far and wide. Some time after Eilian’s escape, there came a gentleman to the door one clear night to fetch the old woman to his wife. The midwife and the stranger set off, eventually arriving at a large cairn at Rhos y Cwrt. Beneath the cairn lay a large cave, in which the old woman was introduced to a young lady struggling greatly upon the finest bed the woman had ever seen. In fact, what was ostensibly a dank grotto appeared inside a luxurious palace, full of rich furnishings. The midwife set about delivering the strange babe, finding it unbearable to see the woman suffer any longer.

When the baby was delivered, the husband came forth with a bottle of ointment with which to anoint the child’s eyes; but he entreated the midwife not to touch her own eyes with it. Somehow, after anointing the child, one of the old woman’s eyes happened to itch and she absentmindedly rubbed it with the same fingers she used for the anointment. Immediately, she saw with that eye how the wife lay on a bundle of mouldering rushes in a large, dripping cave. Only a small guttering fire in the corner lit the scene, and the floor was littered with debris. Most shocking of all was that the midwife at once saw the new mother as her missing maid Eilian, slumbering peacefully. At once the nurse awoke with a start in her own farmhouse.

Not long after, the old midwife happened to bump into the mysterious husband at the local market and, anxious for the new babe, inquired as to the health of his family. ‘They are quite well,’ the man replied, ‘but with what eye can you see me?’ The midwife pointed to the formerly anointed eye. ‘Ah, that will not do.’ And he took a bullrush from his coat and put her eye out at once, disappearing for good.

This rather unfortunate tale serves as the basis for many a similar fireside tale told from Sussex to Northumberland with varying severity of outcome, and most interestingly, a broad range of agency displayed by the midwife. In some versions, she is little more than an unwilling instrument, compelled into service and dismissed once her task is complete. In others, however, the narrative grants her greater autonomy. The tale of Cherry of Zennor, for instance, notably expands the agency of the human midwife: rather than merely being abducted and used, she becomes an active participant in the encounter with the fairy world, exercising judgement and initiative within it. Cherry, refusing to accept her compliant role in the narrative, applies the fairy ointment to her own eyes, desiring to see the truth of the strange world around her. This natural curiosity, however, proves fatal and Cherry is cast from the fairy master’s domain, forced to wander the moorland, half-mad forever.

This interference tale complicates the more passive role seen in other variants of the fairy midwife narrative, suggesting a diversion in which the human figure is not solely a victim of fairy interference, but a figure capable of negotiation and influence within the supernatural space, regardless of circumstantial unknowns.

What could it possibly mean?!

So, let’s return to the relative under-examination of these tales. Here, I offer a tentative idea that has been taking shape over the course of my research. Much existing scholarship focuses so heavily on the fairies—precisely because they are so alien to us—that it often overlooks the human element of the narrative. Yet the very otherness of the fairies seems deliberately crafted to illuminate human nature, using their strangeness as a touchstone for stark juxtaposition. Briefly examining a further derivative tale from the Scottish borders might illuminate this story type’s emphasis on human idiosyncrasies.

In this tale, the midwife is asked to stay after the child’s successful delivery to bake some bread for new mother and baby. The midwife obliges, feeling a deep sense of sympathy for the family. After baking, the midwife tosses the excess flour back into the meal chest and prepares to leave. However, upon glancing at the chest she realises that it is somehow full once more. The midwife bakes another batch and once more the same problem arises. This goes on a few more times until the wife calls from the bedroom that the chest will never empty unless she throws the spare flour on the fire. The two women thank each other and the midwife is able to leave the strange realm.

It is clear the potential undoing of these women lies with their tendency towards empathy, something that the fairy counterparts in these tales blatantly lack. The human—and, in particular, female—impulse to provide, the willingness to offer aid, and the anxious inquiries into the well-being of complete strangers often prove these women’s fatal flaw. And yet, this is also their greatest strength. These human midwives possess a knowledge and skill that seems simply absent throughout the otherlands, strongly setting them apart. What’s more is that these narratives differ greatly from traditional fairy abduction narratives, with the midwife often volunteering her skills and never refusing to enter the realm or follow the desperate stranger despite many opportunities to do so.

I am cautiously labelling this subset of abduction narratives ‘superiority tales,’ throughout my research notes. The human protagonist, despite curiosity or error, ultimately occupies a more ethically grounded position. In this sense, fairy midwife tales can be read as subtly affirming a human sense of moral superiority. The supernatural realm may possess power or beauty, but it lacks the moral stability and essential empathy attributed to human society. Thus, the tales function not only as entertaining narratives but also as cultural mechanisms through which communities articulate and defend human ethical norms against the allure of the unknown or the social differences of foreign communities.

These tales are also fascinating in their tendency to position women as negotiators of knowledge and moral order. The midwife occupies a liminal space between the domestic and the supernatural, between life and death. In this role, she is entrusted with intimate knowledge of bodily processes, yet she is also subjected to intense scrutiny and potential punishment for transgressing boundaries she does not fully control. In this way, the tales can also be read through the enduring lens of anxiety over women’s knowledge—knowledge that may be employed when needed, but must be restrained or eliminated once it has served its purpose. Quelle Surprise!

These tales dramatise the delicate negotiation of curiosity and ethical responsibility, revealing a worldview in which knowledge is both coveted and constrained, and where the human claim to moral order is asserted against the seductive ambiguity of the otherworldly. How remarkable that, in these tales, we occasionally and inadvertently cast ourselves as the very same strange or unfamiliar presence we seek to conjure up through fantasy.

Interesting Resources

Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia (1210-14).

John Rhys, Celtic Folklore (1901).

Katharine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (1967).

Joshua Poole, English Parnassus (1657).

Robert Hunt, ‘Cherry of Zennor’ in Popular Romances of the West of England (1865).

Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature (1932-6),

One productive alternative lies in reading Plath through the lens of the occult, a framework that allows for a more complex and less reductive engagement with both her work and her self-fashioning. Plath’s poetry and prose are saturated with arcane imagery that gestures toward a sustained fascination with esoteric systems of meaning. Despite its frequent critical marginalisation, Plath’s engagement with arcane traditions across her short life was substantial. Too substantial in fact to cover comprehensively in a single Substack essay. An excellent work exploring the breadth of Plath’s arcana is Julia Gordon Bramer’s Fixed Stars Govern a Life. A forensic interrogation of the mystic symbols that recur throughout Plath’s writing, this is the book that ultimately readjusted my somewhat ambivalent approach to the poet. As a reformed Tumblr addict and someone very familiar with Plath’s mythic image during my late teens, encountering this idea during my undergraduate years completely captivated me. It was also deeply formative for the kind of research I pursue today—focusing on the ways folkloric and esoteric interests permeate even the most canonical of literary texts.

As some recent strides in my research journey have left me feeling even more sentimental than usual (if that is possible!), I wanted to revive some of my early research that explores the ways in which the tarot might provide foundational inspiration for the original Ariel collection.

Plath’s way to the tarot

It has been long acknowledged that the currents of poetry and occultism run rather close to each other, often intersecting and fusing to produce incantational works that appear to invoke something just out of sight. The use of poetry as a means of channelling unseen energies has a lengthy history and in some cultures poets were (and often still are) considered as having access to magical or divine energies.

Interests in occultism, arcana and hermeticism have long pervaded the literary community. In the most basic sense, ‘poetry’ from the Greek poiesis simply means the act of creation—a conjuring of something from nothing. Poetry and incantation have historically rubbed shoulders constantly, both based in the idea of verbum efficax (‘effective word’), the notion that saying makes it so. In this sense, poetry can be understood as a form of ritualised speech with carefully measured sounds, rhythms, and repetitions producing emotional, or even spiritual effects. Just as an incantation is designed to act upon reality through language, so too does poetry seek to shape perception.

It seems Plath’s husband Ted Hughes was acutely aware of this, claiming in a 1978 recording that poetry was an ideal means of ‘making things happen the way you want them to happen.’ Further writing in his work ‘Strong Feelings’ indicates Hughes perceived poems as ‘power–charms, tools and practical agents in the business of gaining desired ends.’ Later, when asked about his extensive revisions of poem ‘Earth Numb,’ Hughes recalled an incredibly fruitful fishing trip just the day after the final version was complete. It seemed to him, the poem was something of a ‘hunting incantation,’ with his careful adherence to the events of the poem achieving this small fortune.

Though these small acknowledgements hint at Hughes’s unconventional beliefs in practice, they are minor when compared to the depth of his lifelong engagement with occult thought. Long before he began writing poetry himself, Hughes was drawn to the work of W. B. Yeats—not primarily for Yeats’s poetry, but for what Hughes described as his ‘other interests,’ especially folklore and magic. This early encounter sparked a growing fascination with alchemy, hermetic traditions, and occult practice more broadly. That interest was further encouraged by Yeats’s involvement in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an esoteric group associated with several well-known fin-de-siècle figures, including the writer Arthur Machen (an all time favourite who we will be discussing here soon!)

Given that Plath and Hughes began their famous romance at the height of Hughes’s fascination with the occult at Cambridge University, it would be reasonable to conclude that Plath’s interest in such material did not emerge in isolation, but developed in dialogue with Hughes’s esoteric preoccupations. Despite this, Plath’s interest in occult symbolism cannot be understood solely as a product of Hughes’s influence, as her work consistently reshapes esoteric material to serve her own emotional and artistic aims. Certainly, Plath’s engagement with the tarot seems distinctly personal, approaching the cards as a mediative lens through which poetic inspiration could be focused. In a 1958 journal entry, Plath vows to learn the tarot comprehensively and states she must enter

‘mystic and clairvoyant trances to get to know Beacon Hill, Boston, & get its fabric into words’

While definitive evidence is limited, it has been proposed that Plath’s introduction to tarot may have come from her grandmother, Aurelia Greenwood Schober who taught her how to play the Austrian card game of Tarok. Later, Plath owned her own tarot deck. A Marseille pack was given to her by Hughes for her twenty-sixth birthday. She also purchased a copy of The Painted Caravan, by Basil Ivan Rákóczi, a comprehensive guide to the symbolism and meanings of the tarot cards. Plath’s personal copy, now held in the Smith College Library archive, is inscribed ‘Sylvia Plath, London – 1956.’

In a letter to Hughes dated 16 October 1956, Sylvia Plath described her engagement with the book, planning to work methodically through the entire deck, believing that careful concentration and sustained practice would allow the meanings of the cards to ultimately take shape as a coherent system:

‘I began reading my Painted Caravan book; it is my favourite book;…. I meditate on the Fool and the Juggler, staring at the pictures, reading and re–reading the lucid, pleasantly written descriptions of them and their significance. I shall go through the whole book slowly this way, so that I shall come upon the difficulties of setting out the Pack with a basic sense, at least, which will flow and re–cross and blend, I think, by great concentration and much practice.’

It is not a stretch, therefore, to consider the tarot as something of an initiatory device for Plath’s 1965 poetry collection Ariel.

Although Ariel circulated for decades in the form most readers came to know, that version did not reflect Sylvia Plath’s original design. After her death in 1963, the collection was edited and reordered by Ted Hughes prior to its 1965 publication, with several poems removed and others inserted from different manuscripts. This rearrangement significantly altered the tonal and thematic trajectory of the anthology, softening the stark arc Plath had constructed and reshaping its original poetic movement. It was not until 2004 that Ariel: The Restored Edition, introduced by her daughter Frieda Hughes, returned the poems to Plath’s original order.

Here are a few poems I have selected from the original order of Ariel to trace how they might correspond with the arcane structure of the Tarot deck. When we align the system of cards with Plath’s carefully arranged sequence, a striking pattern emergesin that Ariel can be read as a ritualised journey of birth, regeneration and death. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I do not hold much authority on Plath’s inner world (as I doubt many do), but Plath’s mystic leanings certainly deserve more recognition as an endlessly intriguing facet of her creative process.

1. ‘Morning Song’ – The Fool (Major Arcana 0/I)

Opening Ariel, “Morning Song” embodies the Fool’s archetype: the innocence of beginnings and the vulnerability of stepping into a new existence. Plath’s speaker greets the newborn child with both awe and dislocation: ‘Love set you going like a fat gold watch.’ This oscillation between tenderness and alienation mirrors the Fool’s precarious stance at the edge of the cliff, a position full of potential yet exposed to uncertainty.

Structurally, the poem’s shifting rhythms and fragmented stanzas evoke a kind of emotional improvisation, as if the speaker is navigating uncharted territory in real time. The Fool’s connection to spontaneity and openness resonates here: there is no fixed roadmap, only the act of stepping forward and responding to the new, overwhelming presence of life. The recurring motifs of breathing and ‘your bald cry’ suggest both the child’s nascent agency and the speaker’s tentative engagement with creation itself.

From a tarot perspective, the Fool initiates the journey, encountering the world with curious innocence. In Plath’s arcana-informed Ariel, this poem functions as the ceremonial first card, introducing themes of the fragile exhilaration of beginnings. The poem’s tonal tension of intimacy and alienation reflects the duality of the Fool, suggesting the openness to life’s possibilities paired with the uncertainty of stepping forward without guidance.

2. ‘The Couriers’ – The Magician (Major Arcana I)

Following the Fool, ‘The Couriers’ embodies the Magician’s archetype: mastery, intentionality, and the ability to channel energies into tangible effects. In tarot, the Magician represents the conscious use of will, specifically the transformation of raw potential into realised action. Plath’s poem captures this dynamic through meticulous imagery and carefully orchestrated rhythm. The speaker catalogues a unique sonic landscape, and domestic detail as though arranging ritual tools, transforming ordinary perception into something charged with significance.

Lines that describe the precise movement of objects or the flow of day-to-day activities evoke the Magician’s principle of manipulation and focus. Poetry itself becomes an instrument, a means of enacting change, echoing Hughes’s observation that poems can function as ‘power-charms’ or practical tools for bringing desired outcomes into reality. Here, Plath demonstrates the deliberate, almost ceremonial nature of her craft, her words becoming active agents in shaping perception and experience.

The Magician’s position in the tarot follows the Fool, symbolising the first exercise of conscious control. ‘The Couriers’ mirrors this sequence. The speaker moves from the unformed potential of ‘Morning Song’ into deliberate poetic practice. The poem’s rhythmic precision and symbolic layering suggest that Plath was consciously engaging in an alchemical process of poetic creation, converting observation into charged expression.

3. ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ – The Moon (Major Arcana XVIII)

Midway through Ariel, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ resonates with the Moon card, associated with mystery, illusion, and the confrontation with hidden forces. The poem’s stark imagery—silver light, skeletal yews, and a spectral, almost alien speaker—evokes the card’s emphasis on liminality and shadow. The speaker’s gaze is both inward and outward, navigating an unsettling landscape of isolation, and spiritual ambivalence.

The Moon represents emotional flux and the confrontation with what is unseen or only partially understood. In the poem, Plath’s use of enjambment and fragmented syntax creates a disorienting effect, mirroring the Moon’s destabilising influence. Lines like ‘The eyes beside the writing desk / shriek at the sky’ suggest a blending of internal perception with external reality, creating a space in which psychic forces may circulate freely. The Moon is a card of uncertainty, inviting reflection and confrontation with one’s deepest fears.

Placed in the original Ariel order, this poem acts as a necessary mid-journey encounter. It is a moment of reckoning with unconscious forces, testing the speaker’s capacity for insight and resilience. Its placement between poems representing the Fool and Death mirrors the tarot’s narrative arc, wherein the seeker must traverse the uncertain, sometimes treacherous terrain of the psyche before transformation is possible.

Interesting here to further note that the Yew tree holds profound significance within Druidic and broader Celtic cosmology, where it is associated with death, rebirth, immortality, and sacred continuity. Unlike deciduous trees that visibly decay and renew, the yew is evergreen and exceptionally long-lived. A point of curiosity when considering the many arcane threads Ariel appears to be tying.

4. ‘Ariel’ – Death (Major Arcana XIII)

The climactic poem, Ariel, aligns strongly with the Death card, which in tarot signifies transformation, the end of one cycle, and the threshold of rebirth. Plath’s speaker rides ‘the arrow’ of consciousness with urgent velocity, leaving the familiar behind and entering an ecstatic, almost transcendent space. Far from a literal depiction of mortality, the poem depicts a radical shedding of old constraints, be they psychological, emotional, or artistic.

Formally, the poem’s relentless rhythm and imagery of motion—’Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue / Pour of tor and distances’—evoke the dissolution of boundaries, a hallmark of Death’s transformative energy. The poem’s final flight suggests liberation and a transcendence that, in tarot terms, comes from fully confronting mortality and the limitations of selfhood. The speaker’s immersion in elemental forces such as air, speed, and the dissolution of linear time reflects a ritualised passage through the unknown, echoing the tarot’s initiation into a debated higher consciousness.

In the context of the original Ariel, placing this poem after the Fool, the Magician, and the Moon completes an intentional arc which begins with innocence, moving through mastery and confrontation with hidden forces, and culminating in profound transformation. Hughes’s posthumous rearrangement might have disrupted this arc, scattering these cards and masking the deliberate sequence that Plath may have intended. Only in the restored edition does the tarot-inspired narrative emerge clearly, revealing a collection structured as both a poetic and ritual journey.

To conclude

While the mythologised brevity of Plath’s life might render any alternative interpretation of her oeuvre forever conjectural, it is endlessly important to continue revisiting well known canonical works such as these with reference to more nebulous threads of writers’ lives. Not only does this line of inquiry refresh areas of study that at first glance appear exhaustive, but it also makes room for different perspective on the creative lives behind frequently studied works. Dimensions of alternative creative vision that are often overshadowed by condensed narratives of success or tragedy deserve their moment too! A fascinating concept to be sure, and a strong impetus to return to my own deck for some much needed musing.