Today I was one of the speakers at St Paul’s Girls School‘s annual history conference, on the subject of ‘The Last Witch-hunt: John Stearne in Ely, 1647′. The talk dealt with the end of Matthew Hopkins’ and John Stearne’s infamous witch-hunt of 1644-47 in the Fenland town of Ely, exploring the reason why the witch-hunt came to an end (beyond Hopkins’ death in August 1647) and why witch-hunting became unfashionable.
Today I contributed a lecture on ‘Bogies, witches and fairies of East Anglia’ to a course for Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, ‘Tales of the Unexpected: Local Histories of English Magic and the Supernatural’. The course will features a live question and answer session with the course tutors on 17 February.
My article ‘Lore of the Land’, exploring the importance of folklore to British national identity, has just been published in the February edition of BBC History Magazine. The article argues that, for all its diversity, Britain’s folklore is a factor that unites the whole island, with figures like Arthur and Merlin shared between the nations of Great Britain. From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Michael Drayton and J. K. Rowling, there has been a tradition of writers weaving legendary narratives for Britain as a whole, making a shared folklore and legendary tradition one of the cornerstones of what it means to be British.
My review of The Fairy Tellers by Nicholas Jubber has just been published in the February 2022 edition of BBC History Magazine. This fascinating book explores the stories of some of the earliest recorded tellers of the world’s most famous fairy tales.
Elizabeth Dearnley (ed.), Fearsome Fairies: Haunting Tales of the Fae (London: British Library Publishing, 2021), hardback, 336pp.
The first ‘proper’ supernatural short story I ever read and enjoyed, when I was perhaps 11 or 12 years old (sadly not included in this collection) was a story about fairies: ‘The Child That Went with the Fairies’ (1870) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. My father had tried to introduce me to the short stories of M. R. James and Arthur Conan Doyle, but to no avail – probably because I was primarily interested in fairies, not ghosts. I collected books of fairy tales, and I was particularly fascinated by Irish folklore – so Le Fanu was a perfect author with whom to begin my journey into classic supernatural literature.
When the British Library first began publishing its ‘Tales of the Weird‘ volumes – themed collections of little known 19th- and 20th-century weird short fiction – my first thought was the earnest hope that they would bring out a volume dedicated to that small (or perhaps not so small?) sub-genre of weird fiction about fairies. As it turns out, the British Library has gone one better and brought out a rather beautifully designed stand-alone volume dedicated to these stories, and edited by Elizabeth Dearnley. Fearsome Fairies is surely a landmark collection dedicated entirely to the weird fairy fiction of the last 150 years, which brings fairies out of the shadows and into the mainstream of the history of weird and supernatural fiction.
Aside from the 12 stories themselves, the book features an expert introduction, background to the authors, and poems and quotations selected by the editor to accompany each story. Dearnley even includes the Cottingley Fairy photographs, emblematic early 20th-century approaches to the fairies, as an appendix. The book features such well-known favourites as Arthur Machen’s weird classic ‘The White People’ (1904), M. R. James’s whimsical ‘After Dark in the Playing Fields’ (1924), and the unavoidable J. M. Barrie, whose portrayal of fairyland has gained him (perhaps undeserved) notoriety as one of those Victorian authors who supposedly turned the fairies ‘twee’. Yet, as Dearnley argues, Barrie’s fairies are still imbued with a subtle menace – and, like all fairies, theirs is a world apart that represents separation from the world of human beings and, ultimately, irrecoverable loss. By the end of Barrie’s ‘Lock-out Time’ (1906), as Peter Pan faces the eternally locked and barred nursery, is the true horror of fairyland really any different from Algernon Blackwood’s much more overtly serious and openly frightening presentation of the Fairy Ride in ‘The Trod’ (1946)? Fairyland is loss, separation and despair concealed by the glamour of magic, like the strikingly memorable portrayal of a fairy lover in Le Fanu’s ‘Laura Silver Bell’ (1872) – who is seen by the eponymous Laura as a handsome gentleman, and by others as a ragged, gaunt, and ill-favoured black-clad stranger.
While the settings of the stories range from New York City to Scotland and Wales, it is Irish themes that predominate – perhaps understandably, given the widespread 20th-century belief that fairy lore was a ‘Celtic’ (and often a specifically Irish) phenomenon. Charlotte Riddell’s ‘The Banshee’s Warning’, Le Fanu’s ‘Laura Silver Bell’ and Margery Lawrence’s ‘The Case of the Leannabh Sidhe’ all draw on Irish folkloric themes. The surprise of Blackwood’s protagonist to find himself hearing of fairies in ‘stolid, matter-of-fact England’, as opposed to Ireland ‘where it would have been natural’ (p. 262) reflects the prejudices of the time. Margery Lawrence’s tale is the longest in the book, and one of the most fascinating. It will be entirely new to most readers, as it was to me, and while its author was interested in Spiritualism, the tale manages to break free from the expectations we may have of trite parlour-room Spiritualist literature to produce a changeling story of depth, fascination and genuinely disturbing terror. As with many of the authors in the collection, Lawrence succeeds in convincing us that the otherworld she presents really might exist.
The fairies of Fearsome Fairies are the otherworlders of our darkest imaginations: seductive, attractive, magical, yet drawing us ultimately into a realm where the soul is lost. The fairies are not mere bogies, monsters of the existential abyss; nor are they ghosts, mere simulacra of the dead: the fairies represent an alternative society. They are social supernatural beings, almost (but not quite) human, and they embody another way of being. A world where there is magic, but where – at the same time – that which is human about us must be laid aside, sacrificed, or surrendered. The fairy other is an object of both longing and terror, often simultaneously. Blackwood captures this distinctive fairy horror in ‘The Trod’ (p. 270):
He had experienced all this before … And even as he realised all this, the strange, eerie sensation vanished and was gone, as though it had never been. It became unseizable, lost beyond recapture. It left him with a sensation of loss, of cold, of isolation, a realisation of homelessness, yet of intense attraction towards a world unrealised.
Dearnley’s collection is certainly not representative of the full range of portrayals of fairies in 19th- and 20th-century literature – it does not include, for example, a specimen of the problematic (not to say racist) literature derived from ‘pygmy theory’ that represented fairies as a race of troglodytes still surviving in remote parts of the country. But that, I suspect, is because the real purpose of this collection is not to explore all literary responses to the fairy theme but rather to present those stories that are most reflective on the nature of that theme. Who are the fairies, and why do they continue to matter? Why would authors in the 19th and 20th centuries have continued to write about them? In this revelatory collection, the editor shows that – even after Disney got hold of Tinkerbell – the finest authors of supernatural, macabre and weird fiction continued to present compelling visions of the fairies and of fairyland throughout the 20th century. And their fairies were very, very scary.
My short book Witchcraft and the Modern Roman Catholic Church has just been published in Cambridge University Press’s Elements Series, as part of a sub-series dedicated to the theme of magic. The book deals with the Catholic church’s relationship with the idea of witchcraft since the Second Vatican Council, both in the developed and the developing world, focussing on official and semi-official responses to witchcraft and belief in witchcraft. It examines the treatment of witchcraft in Vatican documents, the differing views on witchcraft found in the writings of practising Catholic exorcists, and the relationship between Catholicism and witchcraft in the developing world (especially Africa).
The chronological scope of the Element runs from the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s to the present day, and the Element is divided into four main sections. The first of these deals with the historical background to Catholic belief in witchcraft. The second approaches modern Vatican documents, including documents by popes, documents issued in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and liturgy, especially the liturgy of exorcism and norms related to it. The third section deals with attitudes of exorcists throughout the world, drawing on exorcists from around the world and with a variety of perspectives, ranging from virtually denying the possibility of its existence to a position which is quite concerned about the possibility of witchcraft as a form of spiritual evil menacing the faithful.
Finally, the fourth section of the element looks at the issue of witchcraft in the developing world, contrasting some of the attitudes that are expressed centrally in Rome (and indeed in European dioceses) with the approach to witchcraft adopted on the ground in developing countries, where belief in witchcraft remains a major aspect of daily life for many Catholics. This section looks at the approaches adopted by popes when visiting the developing world towards the issue of belief in witchcraft. It approaches the phenomenon of Catholic witch-hunting authorised or partially authorised by the local clergy, and it concludes by looking at the affair of Emmanuel Milingo, the archbishop of Lusaka who in the 1990s was recalled to Rome for his use of exorcism and preaching on witchcraft, and looks at how the events surrounding Milingo crystallised the contrast between the western church and the church in the developing world.
This contrast is a theme that runs through this Element, which is about witchcraft but is also about the asymmetries within the global Catholic church and the way in which an issue like witchcraft, which divides Catholic bishops and clergy in their responses to it, may show the cracks and the conflicts that are latent within the global Catholic church.
You can watch a video abstract for the Element here.
Francis Young 