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
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