7 March 2025

NO PASSPORT NEEDED

Jeremy Harte. Fairy Encounters in Medieval England. University of Exeter Press, 2024.


On the first page of this book, the author presents us with what is probably the best definition of 'fairies' I have seen: “the beings who broke into human life [who] were never very forward in identifying themselves”. Of course, it's a pretty good definition of a lot of other characters as well, many of whom have cropped up in the pages of Magonia over the last half-century.

But these are characters who have popped up more than half a millennium ago, and their stories have gone through rather more transnationals and interpretations than an encounter with Bigfoot or a UFO entity in last week's tabloid. And there are quite enough problems with those as well. Reporting and analysing entity encounters in the mediaeval centuries was entirely the job of the Church scholars. Whatever the witnesses may have seen or thought they had seen, the reports we have are more thoroughly edited to support the writer's world view than any UFO abductionist's blockbuster paperback.

Take one of the first cases Jeremy Harte describes. In 1171 a young man called Richard has to walk from Old Sarum (the predecessor to Salisbury) to Marlborough to tell his uncles that their sister, his mother, has died. Halfway across Salisbury Plain he is confronted by three men in white – or should that be Three Men in White, as these things always seem to come in threes. They seem to know a lot about him, even his dreams, and instruct him to return to Sarum and warn the Dean of the cathedral that he must go in procession around the town, otherwise “the greatest storm that ever blew will down his town”.

The tales record that the Dean believed him, and as Old Sarum lasted another 200 years before it was abandoned and replaced by the city of Salisbury, they presumably took the required precautions. Now you don't have to have too fertile an imagination to see here a template for a range of folkloric, paranormal or ufological encounters across the centuries. 

Harte tells other such stories, in a lively vernacular manner; he says specifically that he wants to avoid 'translationese' when transferring the narrative from Latin to English, and he succeeds. “When a spectral hound says Da mihi gladium tuum! I have rendered it as 'Give me the sword, mate!' because – well, how else would a talking dog talk?”

It is this directness that reveals that these stories of encounters with fairies, spirits and other supernatural entities are not 'folk-tales, 'legends' or parables, they are direct accounts of real experiences, recorded more or less contemporaneously with the event. Harte shows that they are largely recounted by educated individuals, and recorded by scholars and clerics: “these sources moved in circles far removed from the tale-spinning of the village soothsayer or the cures of pauper cripples”. They were what the modern paranormal researcher would describe as 'expert witnesses'.


After recounting the stories of fairy encounters, and describing the shifting shapes of the figures that inhabit them, Harte devotes the second half of this book to explaining the stories that are hidden in the landscape and that are revealed in the names of the places where they happened. As in his earlier book, Cloven Country, he warns us that supernatural sounding placenames are not always what they seem. Maps which show a 'Giant's Grave' or a 'Devil's Bridge' are often dealing with “what you might fancy, rather than what is actually there”. The location itself has a character which seems to demand a supernatural name, which is then supplied, together with a ready-made 'local legend'. In Cloven Country Harte describes the 'Devil's Chimney', a dramatic gash in a cliff on the Isle of Wight, a name which can be traced as far back as, er, 1979.

The names he presents are not accompanied by carefully wrought stories, they are raw descriptions of what people believed – because of what they experienced – about these places. Harte describes them as “labels without the luggage”. Were they even 'placenames' as we use the term now, or just descriptions of an area? For instance Harte asks whether the name ælfrucge recorded in 933 on the outskirts of Canterbury was a place actually called 'Elf Ridge' or was it simply “that ridge where the elves were seen”, and everyone would have known exactly where that was.

In an appendix to the book there is a county-by-county list of 900 names of fields, hills, rivers, valleys, wells and other geographical features where the first part of the name represents a supernatural being associated with the locality. Each is a recording of an encounter which was as real as any other element of life. These names are the ur-evidence of the reality of the 'encounter experience', in a realm where life and landscape are inextricably linked to an alternative, hidden world of beings which in the author's words, “break into our society at will”.

This is a densely-written book which covers a huge and complex area of human experience, but the reader is led along by the author's lively style. One does not get lost in the jargon of the specialist. The discussion of the origin of place-names for instance is laid out clearly – you do not need to be a philologist or toponymist to find your way around it. 

The author describes a place which at first seems very remote from our own lives, but the similarities grow as you read on. It is a place we have seen many times before. This book perhaps describes the world of Magonia before you needed a Passport to cross the border.
  • John Rimmer

10 February 2025

A BRAVE ODDITY

Golem (Piotr Szulkin) 1979. Second Run. Blu Ray.

My usual complaint about mainstream SF cinema is its dearth of ideas, whether they been politically satiric, philosophical or genuinely scientific. Very few films hit you with the power of their imaginative speculation to make you think and doubt. 
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31 January 2025

PAGANISM PERSISTING

Robin Douglas and Francis Young. Paganism Persisting. A History of European Paganism Since Antiquity. University of Exeter Press, 2024.


The first question of course, is 'what is Paganism?' The word 'pagan' arose amongst Christians in the fourth century to describe their unconverted neighbours. It was derived from the Latin paganus, which has a number of possible translations, including 'civilian' and 'villager'. It is not clear why this term was used, but it is clear that it was meant to have negative overtones. 
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22 January 2025

STATISTICAL REVIEW

As I wind down Magonia Review, I thought it might be interesting to see what were the reviews that attracted the most readers over the past fifteen years. Of course the older reviews will have had a longer time to attract readers, but some more recent entries feature in the Top Ten as well. I don't really know what it says about the value of the books, the acuity of the reviewers or the tastes of Magonia readers. 
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30 December 2024

THE VERY GREEN PARTY

John Clark. The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England. University of Exeter Press, 2023.


The story of the Green Children, a boy and girl, coloured green and in green clothing, who appeared mysteriously in the Suffolk village of Woolpit some time in the mid twelfth century has been around for centuries, hovering between folklore, fairy-tale, Forteanism, and most recently ufology. 
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3 December 2024

"A PLACE TO LINGER IN STRANGENESS"

Greg Eghigian. After the Flying Saucers Came. A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon. Oxford University Press, 2023.


As I sign off from Magonia, this book seems to have arrived just in time. It is the definitive study of ufology from its exciting birth in the craziness of post WWII euphoria, the dreams of space travel, and the hope of encountering new worlds. But also there came the fears of the Cold War and possible nuclear annihilation, which might be avoided by the promise of new societies and new technologies the saucers might bring. 
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30 November 2024

LA VIE PARISIENNE

Tobias Churton. Aleister Crowley In Paris: Sex, Art, And Magick in the City of Light. Inner Traditions, 2023.

Aleister Crowley, ‘the wickedest man in the world’, a label attached to him by his strait-laced God-fearing mother, remains to this day a magnet for readers with an interest in the esoteric or the occult. Such readers will find in this book a mass of detail about Crowley’s life in Paris from his first glimpse of the city in 1883 until his involuntary removal from France by the French immigration authorities in 1929. 

1 November 2024

SET IN STONE

The Stone Tape (1972) Peter Sasdy (Director) 101 Films – Blu Ray (To be released on 9th December 2024)

Nigel Kneale is a master at fusing the genres of horror and science fiction. He often claimed he wasn’t writing genre TV and film drama but simply good drama. At one level he’s right. Although he does employ generic tropes what’s far more interesting is his engagement with speculative ideas (both paranormal and ‘normal’) and the psychological conflict of characters observed with great empathy, satire and irony.
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15 October 2024

HOLD THE BOILING OIL!


James Wright. Historic Building Mythbusting; Uncovering Folklore, History and Archaeology. History Press, 2024

There's always a hidden tunnel, isn't there? Whenever you are being shown round some old mansion, castle, church or even there will be someone who tells you about the hidden tunnel.
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6 October 2024

A CASE OF DEJA VU

Starve Acre (2023) Dir Daniel Kokotajlo BFI Blu Ray.


At the beginning of Starve Acre a young boy named Owen cannot sleep. When his mother speaks to him he says that the whistling has gone now. The next day, when his parents are resting, under a tree, near a cricket pitch, they’re disturbed by a young girl’s scream followed by the cry of a distressed horse that’s just had one of its eyes injured. The attacker is Owen holding a bloodstained twig.
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