Jacqueline Simpson

Repentant soul or walking corpse? Debatable apparitions in medieval England

This paper examines two sets of medieval English narratives describing encounters with ghosts, those by William of Newburgh and those in a manuscript from Byland Abbey. Both combine theological elements with non-religious features, some of which can be linked to pre-Christian practices and others to later folklore. But neither the theology nor the folklore is uniform. Furthermore, it is not possible to assign theological attitudes solely to the clergy and/or an educated e´lite, and “folkloric” ideas solely to an underclass. These texts display an ongoing medieval debate in which neither clerics nor the laity spoke with a single voice.

On the Ambiguity of Elves

There is a sharp contrast in how elves are portrayed by three modern fantasy writers—Tolkien, Pratchett and Rowling—yet all three can be justified from traditional lore. Anglo-Saxon and medieval Icelandic evidence shows that elves have always been ambiguous figures, sometimes helpful to humans and sometimes harmful. This is closer to human experience of luck and misfortune than the Christian doctrine of good and evil spirits.

The Local Legend: A Product of Popular Culture

In the study of folktales, both in Britain and internationally, the privileged genre has always been the fairytale, the marchen or ‘Wonder Tale’. These complex, picturesque stories, such as ‘Snow White’ or ‘Cinderella’, have attracted innumerable scholarly collectors and interpreters. There is, however, another kind of oral folk narrative, equally widespread but less glamorous, which has far more to offer to the student of popular rural culture. I refer to the kind of story technically known to English-speaking folklorists as a ‘legend’ (German Sage ). This centres upon some specific place, person or object which really exists or has existed within the knowledge of those telling and hearing the story. It reflects the beliefs, moral judgements and everyday preoccupations of the social group, and is in many cases, though not invariably, told ‘as true’. Its aim is to hand on accounts of significant events alleged to have occurred in a particular community or area and it has no truck with ‘once.upon a time’ and the ‘never-never land’. While the fairytale is long and is told for its entertainment value, the legend is almost always brief, for its normal context is casual conversation, where it is recounted in order to inform, explain, warn or educate. Its style is sober and realistic, for though it may contain supernatural and fantastic elements, these are given maximum plausibility by being brought into close association with the physical localisation of the tale.

The Function of Folklore in ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’

Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are both works in which folkbeliefs are prominent. Unlike those novelists who, while using folklore, carefully dissociate themselves from it by relegating it to secondary, humorous or ignorant characters, the Brontis here make it an essential part of the minds of their heroes and heroines, use it at climactic moments, and link it to their central themes. The degree of belief postulated in the two novels is indeed different; nevertheless they are alike both in the type of lore used and in the functions it fulfills.

“The Weird Sisters Wandering”: Burlesque Witchery in Montgomerie's Flyting

This paper arises from a remark made to me by Priscilla Bawcutt, a specialist on sixteenth-century Scottish poets, that no folklorist had ever discussed a certain section in The Flyting of Montgomerie and Polwart (c. 1580), even though this was full of allusions to folk beliefs. This turned out to be very nearly true. There are eight lines from the opening passage which have been repeatedly cited (Keightley 1850, 351; Murray 1933, 31; Briggs 1959, 24; Briggs 1967, 512; Briggs 1978, 43), but as far as I know the only folklorist who has shown any awareness of the poem as a whole is J.A. Macculloch (Macculloch 1921, 2323), and he only gives it two short paragraphs. The two major books by Katharine Briggs on traditional material in sixteenth-century literature (Briggs 1959; 1962) concern English writers; Scotland is hardly mentioned.

Seeking the Lore of the Land

The Lore of the Land by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson (2005) contains a substantial selection of English local legends. This paper describes the aims and methods of the authors, and highlights some aspects they found of interest: how English legends fit international patterns, how they relate to their locality, how they develop over time, how some have literary origins that can be dated. The local legend is a widespread and significant form of narrative, deserving further study.

Barbarian Rites: The Spiritual World of the Vikings and Germanic Tribes

her mother might have enjoyed baking but had become trapped in the activity, by the quality of what she produced, and the expectation of family and church community. The book is nicely illustrated with family snapshots and has over twenty-two pages of cited references, and there are a mass of recipes for cakes and cookies, which I assume some will enjoy trying. The book is also a reminder to folklorists just what can be achieved with good fieldwork.

Otherworld Adventures in an Icelandic Saga

AMONG the less-known sagas of Iceland is the short ]orsteins saga bwjarmagns,x which is richly varied in material and has affinities with myth, folk-tale, and several works of medieval literature. Among its episodes there is one, the longest, which is derived from myths about Th6r, and it is this episode alone which has hitherto been considered in discussions of the saga. However, the work as a whole is worth examination in its own right, and not merely as a re-handling of older mythological material. Its date cannot be fixed within narrow limits. It belongs to a type (the so-called Lying Sagas) which in the fourteenth century dominated Icelandic writing to the exclusion of the earlier, more realistic types; it survives in forty-eight manuscripts, of which five are vellums from the late fourteenth or the fifteenth centuries. Its

Trolls: An Unnatural History

‘Trolls are everywhere today’, writes Professor Lindow, ‘. . . [the troll is] one of the most powerful and enduring images of otherness in large parts of the world’ (9). It is also a complex one, for the word ‘troll’, which is found (in slightly varying forms) in all four Scandinavian languages, has covered a range of meanings over the centuries, and still does today. Troll can refer to a particular type of supernatural and often dangerous being, but it can also be a vaguer term for ‘enchanted’ or ‘magical’, with the somewhat startling result that, whereas in medieval Icelandic troll taki ϸik means ‘Devil take you’, in modern Swedish Trollfljötan is Mozart’s Zauberflöte (12) and, in modern Norwegian, Gandalf the wizard is the trollmannen (51). On the other hand, Danes adopt the negative meaning of ‘wild, angry trouble-maker’ when they translate Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew as ‘The Taming of the Troll’ (51), even though they have also pioneered a successful commercial breed of cute, perky little ‘troll’ dolls which are totally unthreatening (134–37). As will be seen from these examples, John Lindow draws on a wide variety of media for his evidence. He shows how the image of the huge, ugly troll, which turns to stone in sunlight, is primarily Norwegian and Icelandic, and owes its dominance in Britain and America to George Dasent’s translations of Asbjørnson and Moe’s folktales in Popular Tales from the Norse (1859). Among these tales, ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’ has become hugely popular, so that among Englishspeaking children trolls are now figures of fun, inescapably linked to goats and bridges. However, current slang still reflects the old concept of trolls as lurking threats at the borders of civilized society. Thus in the USA ‘troll’ can mean a homeless person, possibly dossing down under bridges, and often loitering in hospital waiting rooms (139), and both Britain and America speak of disruptive, aggressive Internet ‘trolls’ who plague users of Twitter and similar social media while hiding behind anonymity (140–43). This lively, amusing and well-argued book will be a pleasure to all readers.

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Reflections on Fairy Tales

‘Fairy tales’, writes Katherine Langrish, ‘are emotional amplifiers . . . [They] work as music does, directly on our feelings’ (197). This collection of her essays (plus three poems) illustrates the psychological subtlety and poetic force of her own responses, and will surely guide readers towards similar sensitivity. She can also, on occasion, cast light on relationships of sources and analogues, notably in her discussion of the ballad of ‘The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry’ (158–87), but her main concern is usually with the deeper themes which she perceives as underlying fairy-tale plots—such themes as time, hunger, death, and rebirth. Alongside these, she can provide sudden sharp insights and speculations which even if unprovable will remain memorable and interesting. For example, in an essay on water spirits she wonders whether the fact that a stick plunged into water will appear broken although it is in fact unharmed could have inspired the prehistoric custom of bending or breaking weapons before throwing them into sacred pools (262). She boldly tackles even the apparently distasteful tale of ‘The Juniper Tree’, which ‘acknowledges terrible evil but ends in hope’ and which ‘haunts’ her (145). Of course, one’s own responses may not always match hers; for example, she has never met anyone who likes the tale of ‘Bluebeard’ (198), whereas I enjoyed it as a child—largely, as I recall, for Sister Anne’s recurrent rhyming reply, ‘Je voie l’herbe qui verdoit et la route qui poudroit’ (I see green grass growing, and on the road dust blowing). We are all subjective readers, and I am grateful to Katherine Langrish for showing how fruitful this can be. Her writing throughout is elegant, vivid, and frequently witty; there is much pleasure, as well as much information, to be obtained from Seven Miles of Steel Thistles.