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English folklore: everything you wanted to know
00:47:59
Francis Young takes us on a journey through England's folklore – from malicious mermaids on the moors to dangerous demon dogs that stalk the streets
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- [00:02]
Emily Brifford
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Francis Young
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Emily Brifford
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Francis Young
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Emily Brifford
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Francis Young
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Emily Brifford
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- [01:30]
Francis Young
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- [01:50]
Emily Brifford
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. What happens when you step inside a fairy ring? Where did the figure of the Green man come from? And why have so many East Anglians been terrorized by a menacing dog like creature called Black Shuck? In today's Everything youg Wanted to Know podcast, Emily Briffet speaks to folklorist and historian of religion and belief Francis Young to uncover more about the myths and historical traditions of England. From iconic characters such as Robin Hood and King Arthur to fantastical tales of shapeshifters and mermaids. So we are talking all about English folklore today. Now, in the broadest terms, what do we mean when we use the term folklore?
- [02:48]
Francis Young
Well, folklore is a rather fiendishly difficult discipline to define. I suppose my go to definition would be vernacular culture that's transmitted via traditional oral means rather than written means. So in other words, it's kind of the culture of ordinary people that hasn't been written down by the people themselves. And it's a term which only goes back as far as 1846. It was coined by a guy called William Thoms, and prior to that it was often known as popular antiquity, which is also a term I rather like. And perhaps we should revive that alongside folklore to talk about what we mean.
- [03:31]
Emily Brifford
Because today we're talking specifically about English folklore. We need to talk about where it sits in the British Isles. We've had a couple of questions from listeners on Instagram and one from Quidler on X. They've asked about how unique is it from Irish, Welsh, Scottish folklore? Is there anything that's particularly specific to England?
- [03:54]
Francis Young
I think that English folklore doesn't stand out in quite the same way as the folklore of the Celtic nations. So Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Cornwall, of course, that have their own very distinctive traditions that are bound up with their local languages. But in England, it's not so much something entirely distinctive, but it is highly localized and highly regional, and it's very deeply entrenched in place. So I don't think it's true to say there's anything generic about English folklore, but at the same time, it's hard to point to anything that's quite the same as the Mabinogion in Wales, or, you know, the Fenian cycle in Ireland, or the stories of Cuchullain or something like that. It's difficult to find anything that's entirely specific. I mean, perhaps you could point to Robin Hood or someone like that. But again, these kind of trickster, robber heroes, kind of folk heroes, these are people we find throughout Europe. So, yeah, it doesn't quite have the same distinctiveness as the Celtic traditions.
- [05:00]
Emily Brifford
So if it's not quite as distinctive, how well known would you say English folk traditions are internationally?
- [05:07]
Francis Young
I don't think they're that well known. You know, I think there are a few figures who stand out, a few stories that stand out. Obviously, you've got King Arthur, I've already mentioned Robin Hood, you've got Merlin, you've got the stories associated with Stonehenge and things like that. But I think that the reason why English folklore is not very well known internationally or even in England itself, is that there was no massive project in the 19th or 20th centuries to collect English folklore. So almost every country in Europe had some sort of big folklore collecting project during that kind of golden age. Of folklore, which is roughly the century between 1870 and 1970, I would say. And England, it didn't happen, which is interesting that it didn't happen. But yeah, I think it's a reason why we don't know so much about it.
- [05:59]
Emily Brifford
Why wasn't there this folk revival?
- [06:02]
Francis Young
Well, I think the best explanation is that in most countries the folk revival was about establishing identity during that key period of kind of nation formation. So you've got 19th century nationalism, you've got the emphasis after the First World War on the self determination of nations, where nations are defining themselves in terms of their vernacular culture, often because they didn't have much of a written culture. Now England, of course, does have a very strong written culture. So if you want to point to a written culture that defines us, it would be someone like Shakespeare or, you know, the Elizabethan and Stuart literature. And so I think that was always more important than folklore. But I think also because Britain was a nation with an empire, it was a nation which was trying to subjugate others rather than define its own identity. And therefore there was no need or no perceived need to do the kind of thing that was happening in Ireland at the same time, which was trying to define itself as a new nation independent of Britain. So I think that's probably the best explanation.
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Emily Brifford
Now, how far is English folklore actually indigenous to the British Isles? Or inversely, how much is borrowed from other places?
- [07:19]
Francis Young
Well, English folklore is to some extent a composite of the traditions of all the peoples of this island. I would say that it is indigenous in the sense that it is British, but it's not always clearly, definably English. And I think the best example of that would be the King Arthur traditions. Now the King Arthur tradition is the matter of Britain. That's clearly something which is British pan British, if you like, in that the earliest versions of it were probably written down in Brittany. So among those people descended from exiles from Britain during that post Roman period. But then it spreads to Wales, it spreads to Scotland, it spreads to Ireland and it spreads to the Normans who bring it back to England, if you like, or back to that part of Britain that we call England. And so there's this kind of paradox that a lot of our folklore kind of went away and then came back again. But there are other aspects which are, yeah, are certainly native to England insofar as we can trace them directly back to Anglo Saxon traditions. So for example, traditions about elves which we can trace back to the Anglo Saxons. So yeah, it's a mixture really, but I would say that it is distinctively British, but it's not always clearly distinctively English.
- [08:42]
Emily Brifford
I think one of the mystical things about this is that folklore seems to have this really distant past. It seems to be always slightly out of grasp. And yet, as you said, folklore as a term, as something that's only really come about in the last several hundred years, how far does English folklore, I mean, this is quite a general question. How far does it stem from pre Roman roots and how much of it is post Roman roots?
- [09:10]
Francis Young
I think that's a really interesting question. Folklorists used to have a great deal of confidence in the idea that folklore can take us back to the prehistoric era. I don't think there's many folklorists who would agree with that now, or at least not in any kind of simplistic way. But having said that, it is clearly the case that folklore is very often focused on on prehistoric sites. So there's an enormous amount of folklore of landscape that is about places like long barrows, round barrows, henges, megalithic structures of all kinds. Now, that's not to say that the stories that people tell about those monuments actually reflect a prehistoric tradition. I think that would be implausible to say it goes back that far. But it is true that those features of the landscape have always been important to people. And there is therefore this kind of long tradition of trying to make sense of these monuments. And so you've got stories like long Meg and her daughters, women dancing on a Sunday, who get turned into stones, which represents probably a late medieval or an early modern understanding of what these stones are, but is nevertheless linked in with the prehistoric. So there is this sense in which the distant past does persist through the landscape and people make sense of it in every age. But you've also got practices like the deposition of metalwork in bodies of water. And I would say that's probably the single most enduring folkloric or ritual practice in Britain that carries on to this day. You know, people going to any site you care to mention where there's standing water and they throw coins into it. I think there is a direct link with that practice. And these practices we find in the Iron Age of people depositing metalwork in bodies of water, the reasoning behind it may have changed or may have disappeared altogether, but the practice persists.
- [11:16]
Emily Brifford
This perfectly links into a question that we've had from Sister Walberger on X, who asks about what the origin of wishing wells is, and generally just throwing money into pools of water. Could you explain a little bit more about this?
- [11:30]
Francis Young
It Seems that it's something which goes back as far as the Iron Age, which I suppose is what you would expect, given that that's the time when metalwork really becomes significant in Britain, although there are examples, earlier, examples from the Bronze Age as well. But there is this tradition of depositing metalwork in bodies of water, often in a way that the metalwork itself has been ritually damaged and rendered beyond use. And so there are famous examples of this, like, for example, in the Witham river in Lincolnshire, where you've got huge quantities of metal has been recovered from this, much of it damaged. Now, what was going on here? The archaeologists have speculated that water represented a kind of point of access with the other world. And it's a mythological theme that you can perhaps discern in the Arthurian literature, where the lady of the Lake, of course, lifts up Excalibur from out of the surface of the lake and gives it to Arthur this sense that under lakes can be found other worlds. And you've got Welsh stories like the story of llinny van Vaak, where you've got the lady who lives under the lake and takes the cattle under the lake. So perhaps it is to do with ideas of the other world, offerings to the other world, offerings to other world spirits. What's interesting about the River Witham is that that tradition seems to continue into the early Middle Ages, and so it seems to transcend even Christianity and carry on into this period when we perhaps wouldn't expect it to be happening. And then, of course, you've got other bodies of water like wells. And we could talk about wishing wells, where people make deposits. So usually a coin in modern times, and that has a range of different meanings. I mean, the idea of a wishing well is that you throw a coin, perhaps without looking. Often you're not supposed to look where the coin falls, or throw it over your shoulder or something, and then make a wish, which, again, there's a taboo against saying what that wish is. Nobody is supposed to know except you. But often it's much less complicated than that. Often it's just the idea that when you visit a place, you throw a coin into water for no apparent reason. I mean, when you ask people, you know, why are you doing this? They can't usually give an answer. And perhaps that's the point. This is one of the things about ritual behavior. Ritual behavior often does not have a reasoned purpose. It's not something that people can articulate in words what they're doing. It's almost as though it's a basic aspect of being human, that sometimes we will feel an urge to do something without having a reason to do it, or at least not a verbally articulate reason for doing it. So, yeah, the short answer is we don't really know. We don't know why we do this now, and we don't really know why people did it in the past. We just know that we do it.
- [14:23]
Emily Brifford
Speaking of wells, what exactly is well dressing and why does this persist?
- [14:28]
Francis Young
Yeah, well dressing seems to be something that goes back to the late Middle Ages. Well, at the latest, it's something which is associated with holy wells. It's particularly found in Cornwall and Devon, but also in parts of Yorkshire. It's not something which you can find throughout England, but it seems that it was associated with special days in the calendar. If a well was dedicated to a particular saint, then the well dressing would happen on that saint's day. And that's something which still happens in Brittany. Brittany, despite being part of France, is, from a folkloric point of view, part of Britain, if that makes any sense, sort of within the cultural sphere of Britain. And yeah, you kind of see in Brittany there a sort of an unreformed version of that carrying on. Because, of course, Catholicism has never left. Whereas what happens in Cornwall, Devon and Yorkshire seems to be a sort of post Reformation survival of what may have been a Catholic practice. But having said that, although it was a Catholic practice, the Catholics themselves may of course have been Christianizing wells that were far, far earlier. And so you've got this tradition of wells being dedic to saints as a way perhaps of erasing pre Christian traditions that were associated with those wells. So a great example would be Buxton in Yorkshire, where you've got a spring that is dedicated to St. Anne. But of course, that spring goes all the way back to the Romans, probably long before the Romans, to Iron Age people who discovered it. And it seems to have been explicitly Christianized in the 15th century because there were concerns that people were bathing in the well as a practice that the church had no control over. So it's a way of the church kind of taking in those practices that might otherwise be associated with paganism.
- [16:21]
Emily Brifford
We've spoken about the significance of landscape in folkloric tradition. Which county would you say has the most holidays, stories or traditions?
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Francis Young
Oh, it's difficult to say. I mean, Yorkshire is incredibly rich. But then, of course, Yorkshire is a massive county if you're taking together all the different ridings and all the different regions of Yorkshire. So perhaps it's not surprising that we find the most traditions there. I think the Southwest is incredibly rich. You know, Devon and Cornwall. The fact that Cornwall's also got this strong Celtic element which links it in, in a much more powerful way with the other traditions of Britain. I mean, if you're looking for a county in the southeast, I would say Sussex has got really rich traditions as well, and a lot of those have survived the test of time. So, yeah, it's hard to say, but, yeah, there are some counties that perhaps, when you say folklore, they would spring to mind more than others as kind of rich sources of folklore.
- [17:27]
Emily Brifford
It's going to start some competitions now, so Dent stray into that one for too long. But we have had a question from a listener, and this is specifically about the Peak District. Now, when you think of the Peak District, you don't exactly think of it as a seaside location. So why do some people in the Peak District believe mermaids live on the moors?
- [17:50]
Francis Young
Yeah, this is the English tradition of freshwater mermaids. This is actually something which we could define as specifically English. And this is the belief that mermaids primarily live within freshwater lakes, often quite isolated freshwater lakes, sometimes rivers. But they are not the sort of mermaids that you might find in mariners tales. They are not these kind of beautiful and seductive women who hold up mirrors and sing to lure sailors to the rocks. They are not beautiful at all. They're, in fact, extremely ugly, horrifying beings. One of the best known examples would be Jenny Greenteeth, who is associated with the sort of the Northeast. And, yeah, these are kind of. These horrible hags, kind of aquatic hags, who live in bodies of water and lure people in. And I think this is probably a good example of scare law. Scare law is a term we use for stories that are told primarily to children for the very practical purpose of warning them off dangerous activities like going near to bodies of water. And when you think about the moors, you've got a lot of tarns, these kind of tiny little ponds and lakes, but they're actually very, very deep and dangerous because they're kind of glacial remains and you've got these meres that are very, very deep. So it is true of the English landscape that there are a lot of dangerous bodies of water. And you can see why some of these traditions might have developed talking about.
- [19:22]
Emily Brifford
Being summoned into a space by a mythical creature. What happens when you step into a fairy ring?
- [19:28]
Francis Young
Yeah, well, fairy rings are first mentioned in the late Middle Ages. I mean, it's probable that people already had traditions about them before that point. But it's Supposed to be perilous to mess with fairy rings. Certainly, the idea of going into a fairy ring is not traditionally a good idea because it potentially puts you under the power of the fairies. Going there at night is an extremely bad idea because that might mean that you're then drawn into the dance of the fairies that takes place at night. But they have, yes, since the late Middle Ages, been regarded as evidence for the activity of the fairies. And they might also be a reason why we have this idea of fairies as small, because if you want to imagine a group of people dancing around a fairy ring, most fairy rings are not that big. And so therefore, you might imagine people who are smaller than normal. So some folklorists have proposed that that could be the origin of how we got this idea that fairies were small, because fairies originally are the same size as humans, but gradually this idea develops that they are small.
- [20:32]
Emily Brifford
Why is dancing so integral to so many stories and traditions?
- [20:37]
Francis Young
Dancing is really interesting from a folkloric point of view. Looked at in one way, it's significant because the church was always wary of dancing and there were prohibitions against dancing on Sundays even before the Reformation. Actually, that was something that was discouraged. You weren't supposed to dance in Lent. You weren't supposed to dance on Sundays, you weren't supposed to dance at various holy times of the year. Because there's something profane about dancing. There's also something ritualistic about it. And perhaps that's a reason why religious authorities sometimes felt threatened by the idea of dancing. Dance clearly is one of the oldest of human activities. It seems to link in with ancient forms of religiosity, perhaps with shamanism, perhaps with the idea of working yourself into some kind of trance. And so, you know, it has been suggested that dance is fundamental to kind of that original Indo European religion that we can find, you know, across Europe, elements of it that it was. Yeah, a form of fertility. Right. I mean, we can't be absolutely certain, but I think there is this persistent association between dance and kind of abandonment to sensuality.
- [21:55]
Emily Brifford
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- [22:27]
Francis Young
Close your eyes.
- [22:28]
Emily Brifford
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- [22:43]
Francis Young
And breathe.
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Emily Brifford
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [22:51]
Francis Young
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- [22:55]
Emily Brifford
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- [23:34]
Francis Young
Well, one which is very famous is the Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance. And the Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance is well known because it's got elements in it that seem to be very old indeed. So this takes place at Abbots Bromley in Herefordshire. It's a dance which involves a group of men who hold ancient antlers while they dance in form. It is not all that different from the sort of dancers we find throughout England, such as Morris, but it does have this distinctive characteristic of the holding of the antlers. The antlers aren't worn as such, but they're held in front of the dancer's head. And what's remarkable is that testing of these antlers has shown that they are as old as the 11th century and they hang inside Aber Bromley Church. And they're brought out every year for this dance, which could possibly make it one of the earliest attested folkloric rituals that we have. Although of course we don't know for certain that the antlers have always been used in the same way that they are today. And I think sometimes we have to be wary that traditions do evolve over time. They are adapted for the spirit of the age, if you like. And it may well be that they were used previously in former times in a way that was deemed unacceptable and therefore the tradition was altered or updated. And therefore we can't be certain that what we have now is the exact original form that it existed in. But it's unique insofar as specific objects do survive from quite a distant period of time.
- [25:16]
Emily Brifford
I think we need to talk about some characters that have emerged through folkloric tradition. There have been so many that our listeners have sent in and obviously, I know you've mentioned before Robin Hood. Emma McBeath on Facebook wants to know, why is he so embedded in English national legends?
- [25:35]
Francis Young
Well, Robin Hood is a figure who, in the form we would recognise and with the name that we know, emerges only in late medieval ballad tradition. Quite a lot of these really popular figures, like, for example, Mother Shipton the prophetess or old Nixon the astrologer, these are people who. They emerge partly as a result of the popularity of cheap print. So from the late 15th century onwards, you've got the invention of print, you've got Caxton working away in his workshop. Some of these earliest printed sources are actually about this kind of folk figure, I think, because the mass market was there for these sort of popular tales. So, paradoxically, although we might think of Robin Hood as being this paradigmatically medieval figure, and he is a medieval figure, I mean, he comes from the Middle Ages. His popularity only really dates from the early modern period, so mostly from the 16th century. And I think there's also an element in the 16th century, and we see this also in the plays of Shakespeare, of a great deal of nostalgia for a late medieval past. A kind of a simpler world, you know, before printing, when people are just living in these village communities and sharing stories among one another that we see also in the Robin Hood legends. And the preoccupations of the Robin Hood legends are quite distinctively early modern. You know, this is a period when there is a great deal of economic crisis. There are a lot of beggars wandering around, there are a lot of outlaws in the woods, there are people, you know, banding together, trying to foment various kinds of rebellions. You've got a great deal of hostility towards law enforcement. These are more themes of the 15th and 16th centuries than they are themes of, you know, the 12th century, when Robin Hood is notionally set, if you like. So it's a fascinating tradition, but I think in terms of its origins, Robin Hood goes back to long standing traditions of heroic outlaws, you know, like Robin of Risingham, who may have originally not been connected with Sherwood Forest or, you know, had merry men or anything, the things that we think of with Robin Hood, but they have kind of fed into that and the idea of the name Robin as a trickster name, that's got a long pedigree behind it, it is a name specifically associated with trickster figures.
- [28:09]
Emily Brifford
I'm curious, why is that?
- [28:11]
Francis Young
I think partly because it's associated with fairies, because you've got a character called Robin Goodfellow. Robin Goodfellow is a key sort of domestic fairy trickster figure. Exactly why that was. I mean, is it because the bird, the robin was perceived as a trickster bird? I don't think we have a clear answer as to why that is, but for some reason, Robin does have this association.
- [28:33]
Emily Brifford
Okay, let's introduce another figure. Dinah Stanford on Facebook wants us to introduce the Green Man. Who is the Green man and why are we so obsessed with him?
- [28:46]
Francis Young
Well, the Green man is a great example of modern English folklore. He is a figure who is entirely English in origin, insofar as he really only comes from an article that was written for the Folklore Society by Lady Raglan in 1939. Now, what lady Raglan did was a stroke of genius. She came up with a hypothesis that there had once existed a fertility God called the Green man, and put together various bits of genuine English folklore or previous English folklore, to construct this new figure. So, for example, there was a figure known as Jack in the Green, which was when, at May Day celebrations, there was a tradition of a man of the community would deck himself out completely in leaves and lead a dance, probably as some kind of personification of the fertility of May. We also have pubs called the Green Man. There are lots of pubs that, some of them going back, way, way back to the late Middle Ages, at least, that have been known as the Green Man. That probably originally meant a man dressed in green rather than the Green man, that we would think of this sort of face made of leaves. Possibly it referred to Robin Goodfellow or the fairies, because the fairies often wear the colour green. So you've got those elements. And then what Lady Raglan added to that was a theory that when we encounter a particular kind of architectural ornament known as the Foliate Head, which is where there's a portrayal of a face, often with leaves coming out of the mouth and encircling the head, that that which is often found in churches around Britain could be a representation of a singular personality, a singular figure. Now, I think modern folklorists would say that that's highly unlikely. The general consensus is that probably this was a decorative feature. It could possibly have referred to Adam being punished in purgatory with trees growing out of his mouth as a sort of a punishment for eating from the Tree of Knowledge, though no one really knows. Possibly it was just a decorative feature, but I think that the difficulty with the Green man is that Lady Raglan assumed that a singular personality existed. But what I would draw an analogy with is you often go to churches and if you look closely enough, you might see a man pulling his pants down. Now, would we say that the man pulling his pants down is a singular personality and a singular figure with a name? Probably we wouldn't. We would just say, oh, it's the stonemason having a bit of fun. And I think we can probably say the same about the foliate head. It's the stonemason having a bit of fun. It's a kind of a theme, it's a topos. It's something just gets repeated again and again by stonemasons, partly as a way of showing their skill. You know, it's quite difficult to carve a man with a tree coming out of his mouth. So it seems unlikely that Lady Raglan was right about this. But it doesn't really matter, because the thing about folklore is that is that it's happening now. You know, folklore is not just something in the past, it's something which exists in 20th century Britain, in 21st century Britain. And so the Green man is real. He has become real. He has been made real by folklore. And now there is a thriving tradition and thriving ideas about who the Green man was, what his place is within contemporary paganism, for example. So, yeah, the Green man is real, but at the same time invented.
- [32:16]
Emily Brifford
Now we should turn to a slightly more sinister. I daren't say figure, but I'll go with character in English folklore. Who is black shark?
- [32:28]
Francis Young
Well, black shark is a figure who is particularly associated with East Anglia, so with Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex and Cambridgeshire, and traditionally is met as a black dog of monstrous size with huge red eyes as big as saucers, and if you look into them, you may die within a year and a day. According to one tradition, my wife's grandfather actually saw black shark in Suffolk, and in fact, my mother has seen black shark. So there is a thriving tradition of black shark that continues in East Anglia, where I'm from. It's something which people take surprisingly seriously. There is also a modern development where black shuck is sometimes perceived as a big cat, a big black cat, rather than the big black dog, which is actually consistent with the folkloric tradition, because originally, black shuck was not a dog. Black shuck was a shape shifter. And these are figures that we find throughout England. They are beings that can change their shape. Sometimes, for example, in the Midlands, their default shape is that of a horse or a pony. Other times it will be something else. So there are some traditions of shape shifting monkeys. In East Anglia, black shuck tends to take the form of a dog, but doesn't have to take the form of a dog. And it comes from an old English word which is shaka, which means devil, but also an old English word, shugga, which means shaggy, so shaggy devil. But yeah, originally there's no association with dogs, but the dog association by the 19th century seems to be very well established.
- [34:07]
Emily Brifford
Can we see trends in particular folkloric creatures re emerging throughout England? And do they represent specific concerns or ideas of the time?
- [34:19]
Francis Young
Yeah, I think there are shifting fashions in folkloric creatures and there are regional particularities. I mean, for example, in the northwest of England, boggarts are very big. There are lots of boggart holes, places where these fearful creatures are supposed to reside. And nobody quite knows what a boggart is. It's just something which you're supposed to be afraid of. And so that's quite particular to that area. Although occasionally we'll find them elsewhere, but mostly only in the north of England. Fairies too can be quite regionally specific. So some counties have stronger fairy traditions than others. You've got the fairy traditions of Suffolk, for example, that I've written about. But Suffolk is the only county in the east of England that really has fairy traditions. And so it's odd that it's kind of on its own there and the others don't really. You know, you look at Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex, they have no fairy traditions or virtually none. So that's a curiosity. And, you know, likewise, supernatural animals will vary according to region. It seems that the supernatural black dog is found in East Anglia, but also up the east coast in Lincolnshire and into Yorkshire, all of them areas that were associated with Norse occupation during the time of the Danelaw. And one of the forms that Odin sometimes takes is the form of a black dog. So it's possible there that you've got some kind of long lost link with Norse religion that has kind of lingered on. And in other areas, of course, you've got distinctive forms of supernatural creatures. Like you've got the pixies or piskies in Devon, which are only found in Devon and Cornwall. So, yeah, it varies quite a lot. There is quite a lot of regional particularity to the supernatural fauna we're talking.
- [36:02]
Emily Brifford
About pixies, fairies, shapeshifters, black dogs. How has English folklore inspired or perhaps informed the genre of fantasy? Has it?
- [36:16]
Francis Young
Oh, I think very much so. You know, Jrr Tolkien was deeply versed in, in English folklore. He was inspired by his native Warwickshire. The shire is very much Warwickshire. And, yeah, I mean, what he was trying to do in the Lord of the Rings and all his other works is kind of provide a mythology for England that England doesn't have, because one of the factors of English history is that a coherent mythology seems to have been lost. We don't, for example, find among the Anglo Saxon literature more than a few hints of what people actually thought about their foundation legends, their origin legends. You know, you've got a few hints in Beowulf, but that's it. You don't get anything of the quality of the Mabinogion. You don't get anything of the quality of those kind of ancient foundation stories that you get in Ireland that are very, very rich. There isn't something like that. So Tolkien kind of tries to do that. And I think, yeah, you've got elements there that clearly are drawn from Norse mythology, like the dwarves, but at the same time, there are elements where, you know, Tolkien is genuinely trying to recover, for example, what Anglo Saxons may have thought about the elves, who are very, very different, of course, from the fairies of folklore, but might reflect better what Anglo Saxons thought.
- [37:39]
Emily Brifford
Has English folklore been used or abused for more, perhaps insidious reasons?
- [37:47]
Francis Young
Yeah, I think there's always a danger with folklore that because it is so intimately associated with land and with territory and with national identity, that it's something that gets misused by the far right. I think that's something which you can see in many nations. It becomes a kind of an underpinning of a rather toxic nationalism. I'm not convinced that that really has happened very much in England. I think partly because English nationalism tends to be subsumed into British nationalism, and therefore there isn't much of a motivation for that kind of nationalism. Occasionally you'll come across, you know, kind of toxic uses of the figure of King Arthur or something like that. But I don't think that English folklore really lends itself to. To that kind of misuse, partly because it's quite diffuse. It's not been properly collected or surveyed. We don't have these grandiose national mythologies that some other countries lay claim to. So I would say that English folklore generally is quite safe from that sort of misuse.
- [38:55]
Emily Brifford
As we've been talking, we've touched quite a bit on how England's mythos, its traditions, its folklore, is slightly different from elsewhere in the British Isles. But I wonder, as a sort of separate point to that, how Much English folklore. Do you reckon we've actually lost?
- [39:14]
Francis Young
I think we've lost an awful lot. Incalculably, you know, so much. I think partly because there wasn't a sustained attempt to collect it at the same time. Other countries were collecting it in the 19th century, but I think also because so much folklore died out even before the 19th century in terms of moments when a great deal of folklore was lost. I think the Reformation is the first point that you can look at when many practices that had been Catholic, but even before they were Catholic, they were probably pre Christian. So the Catholic Church had kind of taken them in and made it part of popular Catholicism. They were stamped out, many of those practices at the Reformation. Further practices were stamped out during that period of crisis in the middle of the 17th century. When you have the interregnum, you have Puritan rule. That's a period when you've got witch hunting and the demonization, the very active demonization of many folk beliefs that we find at that time. And during the 18th century there's a bit of recovery, but then as industrialization kicks in, huge movements of population, people going to live in cities, you know, often losing their original rural folklore. Making new folklore, to be sure. I mean, folklore is always being made and new. It's not something which is just lost, but the original stories are often lost. And sometimes, for example, come across references in early modern literature to traditions or ideas that we just don't have a reference for because we don't have those stories. Those stories are no longer with us. And you know, Herne the Hunter would be a great example. You know, in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, we just don't know who is this guy? Where did this story come from? And yeah, the 20th century mechanization of agriculture, massive changes in rural life, rural communities no longer engaging in communal activities like harvesting, the second World War, the first World War, you know, mass death, loss of traditions. All of these things I think have had a massive impact that you can see also periods of self conscious revival. So the late 19th century self conscious effort to get folklore back, the 1970s, a great period of self conscious revival, of trying to get folklore back. And I think there's a revival going on at the moment. I think that there's a renewed awareness of the importance of folklore.
- [41:41]
Emily Brifford
I was going to ask, why do you think there is this revival today and what do you think we can do to actually preserve some of these traditions?
- [41:49]
Francis Young
I think one reason for a big surge of interest in folklore today is that people are looking for a connection with the places that they live. I think that people want a connection with England, but one which is not a sort of jingoistic connection. You know, not so much a nationalism, but a form of kind of regional pride, regional identity. I think that that's something which has become increasingly common as people see the need for community and the need for rebuilding community. You know, when we look at the recovery from COVID that's something which clearly is very important to try and rebuild communities locally. But I think also it's partly to do with the decline of other dominant modes of identity, particularly religion. And as that has receded as a dominant mode of people identifying themselves and giving meaning to their lives, folklore has to some extent slipped into the breach. I'm not saying that it is a new religion or anything like that, but I think it does give that sort of sense of a connection with where you live and your region and your identity and your past that has a spiritual element. Not to say that everyone who is interested in folklore actually believes this stuff is true, but it's more of a connection with your ancestors and what mattered to them and the stories that they told. It does have that deeply human element that we could call spiritual if we want to.
- [43:26]
Emily Brifford
And to end on what might be, perhaps a quirky note, might not be. Are there any traditions or stories that have bubbled up in unexpected ways in 21st century culture?
- [43:39]
Francis Young
Yeah, there are some traditions that seem to be new or almost new. One example is love locks. So love locks seem to have appeared as a viral trend in the early years of this century, starting in Paris. People sticking locks on bridges and couples mostly doing this. And this seems to have spread to Britain and is really very popular. Coin trees is another example. This is the idea that you take a coin and you force it into the bark of a tree, only to be done, by the way, to a dead tree. Please don't do this to living trees, because it's not good for them. But that's something which seems to go back in one spot to the 19th century, but has recently spread to happening all over the place. So that's an example and something else which I've noticed when you go to stone circles and megalithic sites, I have started to notice more and more ritual deposits. So people leaving flowers or leaving small objects or small tributes, what archaeologists sometimes now refer to as ritual litter. And 15, 20 years ago, that was, as far as I know, it was unheard of. So I think that there are ways in which people are finding new forms of meaning in the landscape, perhaps again due to the decline of mainstream religion. But there are new forms of ways of connecting with place. Is it religion? Is it folklore? Is it ritual? I mean, we don't really know. But that's one of the things that fascinates me about folklore, is that often we don't fully have an explanation for why people do the things they do.
- [45:17]
Emily Brifford
That was Frances Young, folklorist and a historian of religion and belief, speaking to Emily Brifford. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.