Some disjointed notes on folklore origins

Various notes to return to later, some more interesting than others, culled from a conversation with zastrugi. She’s Canadian, I’m Australian, and yes, I know I should read more of Jeffrey J. Cohen’s work if I want to take this any farther.

- So, America has an inordinate number of road-related evil folkloric things – the hook man, phantom hitchhikers, etc (cf Supernatural, which exploits these and which started this conversation). Possibly related to the fact that America has an awful lot of roads and quite a culture of interstate/city driving?

- Canada has some of the same but not so many, intercity driving / hitchhiking not being considered so much of a social danger as in America? Tends to be a little more regional in its folklore, eg, stories of pirate/ship ghosts in the east, though for obvious reasons not so much in the landlocked provinces. Places with forests are prone to sasquatch stories.

- Australia has a lot of water-based spirits/bogeys (granted, everywhere does, but more than most places), many of which can be vaguely lumped under ‘bunyip’ - water being a strong focus of rural-based communities, a rare commodity, desirable and necessary and also a danger, don’t-go-near-the-waterhole? We do have a few larger Nessie-type creatures, and there’s a several thousand year old Aboriginal painting in a cave near a Sydney lake that depicts something suspiciously like a Plesiosaur. We don’t get so many humanoid monsters – why? Nor road-based ones, possibly because we don’t do so much intercity driving, our cities being too far apart.

- Those humanoid monsters Aboriginal myth has given rise to are mostly of the old man of the forest type, and mostly focus on grabbing/stealing/victimising children. The figure of the lost/stolen children carried on more strongly than most aboriginal myth patterns into white settlers’ imagination – why this particularly? Fear-stories to prevent children from wandering off? Insofar as there is a difference, I think Aboriginal stories tend to personify, have a certain thing (monster?) being responsible for taking them, whereas European stories it’s the bush itself that eats them up, disorients them and consumes them - the bush itself as something threatening, waiting, hostile? The bush not so foreign and other to aboriginal societies, so they locate the evil on specific things?

- Zastrugi would like to point out that Australia is scary and the landscape is still foreign / dangerous enough to give us enough monsters without needing humanoid demons. Canada has “various legend/stories that are ... liberally told .. about wild animals or the cold killing people, and madness, but it's usually a variation of THE WILDERNESS KILLED THE POOR PERSON (in some horrible way), not so much FOCUSSED EVIL OUT TO GET YOU”.

- We do have phantom big cats in modern folklore, and joke things like drop bears. But we don’t have much. Australia doesn't go so much for the folklore at all, which maybe can be attributed to mostly being settled within the whole modern frame so you don't get so much local background legend building up, and possibly the fact that the humanoid monsters seem less popular in the last century or so – in western society, are human-faced monsters (vampires, werewolves) less prevalent or taken less seriously since Victorian times?

- The type of monster-with-a-human-face doesn’t really work now - now monsters are actually humans, the rapist, the paedophile, the terrorist, the nightly news, no need to make things up. Zastrugi points out “one of my favourite authors (An American who actually DID run away because it was scary there and is now a Canadian, bless Spidey Robinson) wrote before Sept. 11 that soon the only two sins the Western world would recognise would be paedophilia and terrorism, because they're the only two sins that you can allege without proof.”

- Mediaeval maps / travel accounts – the boundaries of the known world are marked with monsters and deformed people, two heads, head beneath their shoulders, ape men, dog-headed people, more and more not-human the farther they get. Distance increases otherness, pushes the unfamiliar farther away and makes it comfortably monstrous, helps to define what is ‘here’ and ‘us’. Cf. Gerald of Wales – you think Wales is foreign and backwards? Wait until you hear about Ireland, with all their shapeshifters and sex with animals! But now we have mapped all the world, and can’t mark HERE BE DRAGONS anywhere. So logically, the boundaries with strange things on them move farther out – aliens, monsters of the mid 20th century, the unknown that defines us in body and mind.

- But now aliens are not so scary because I think collectively we kind of feel like we have control over space/science, which we didn't in the mid 20th century. Now it's the human psyche, back to look at humans again, but the ‘other’ is no longer spatial, it’s internal. Still about the limits of comprehension, but it’s pushed back on what we comprehend of ourselves.

- WWII had a part in it, maybe? Z: “as the realisation slowly began to sink in that normal people can be monsters, too, then go back to being normal people without so much as a pause or recognition that there was anything wrong with who they were being.” me: “yes, without even that disjuncture that you can say that is not a human like you can with a werewolf or a vampire. But also people feeling so comfortable with science and technology and feeling like we all control/understand it on an everyday level, so aliens which were the realm of science aren't so foreign or so potent.”

- Zastrugi speculates that this is why there’s so little actual science fiction, as opposed to fantasy set on a spaceship: “why bother dreaming about the impossible when you've been trained that it'll happen with enough time? Heinlein, though (old sci fi writer) is very good to read, because he actually does do science in it (without being as thick as some of his contemporaries), but he also thinks very much about how all the changes he's postulating would change how people interact with each other”.

- Zastrugi has made sauce to bread something for dinner and has only now realised that “I don't have bread or breadcrumbs. :/”

Havelok the VIKING

In our ME reading group today (which Stephanie has already posted about), one thing struck us as so odd that we exclaimed and giggled over it even before we settled down to the serious business of eating, reading, translating, exclaiming and giggling.

We're reading Havelok[1], and due to perhaps excessive amounts of exclaiming and giggling over the year are less than halfway through. The story so far involves two noble kings (England's and Denmark's), both of whom die leaving their kingdom and baby heirs in the charge of stewards. Anyone could tell these stewards were both going to turn out to be traitorous and evil, because they have very similar names (Godrich and Goddard), indicating that, as the Trinity is mysteriously three in one, these wicked stewards are one man in two bodies. Really. Their plot purpose is identical, and the poet uses the exact same rhetoric to convince us that each is worse than Judas/Satan on several occasions.

The heirs - Havelok in Denmark and Goldeborw in England - are each dispossessed of their kingdom. Evil Danish Earl tries to have Havelok killed, but the man he hires to murder him, a fisherman called Grim, repents when he sees a golden light coming from the boy's mouth, and a golden cross on his shoulder: clear signs of royal heritage, as everyone knows[2]. Grim and his family and new adopted son therefore flee to England, where the boy shows a truly royal appetite and proceeds to apparently bring famine down by eating far too much, so Grim sends him off to Lincoln to earn his living there. He grows up and turns out to be handsome, chaste, mild-mannered (mostly), and of course very strong. When Evil English Earl notices this, he promptly marries Goldeborw off to him, because he had promised the former king to marry her to the "greatest" man in England. He is therefore in a watertight legal situation if he chooses to marry her to the man who is physically strongest, even though he appears to be a lowly peasant and she will therefore be unable to challenge for her inheritance.

Havelok and his new wife flee back to Grim's family, where she laments being given to a peasant. Never fear - the cross shows up again. Jubilation! Suddenly Havelok without explanation digs up all the memories of being a prince's son and shows a remarkable retrospective perspicacity in managing to narrate the events from his infancy from Evil Danish Earl's point of view, and they all set off for Denmark to claim his heritage.

Unfortunately, at this point a folio is missing in the manuscript, meaning that we have 160 lines of unnarrated action. When the text resumes, they appear to have reached Denmark, and Havelok is pretending to be a merchant, bargaining with Non-Evil Danish Earl for the right to conduct trade on his lands. Suddenly, to seal the bargain:

A gold ring drow he forth anon,
An hundred pund was worth þe ston (1632-3)

And this is what befuddled us. Where on earth did the cook's apprentice at Lincoln, or a poor fisherman's family, or a dispossessed princess, find a gold ring whose stone alone was worth a hundred pounds?

Upon further consideration, I have two theories.

1. They finally managed to tear that cross off his shoulder. Goldeborw was getting tired of cuddling up to it, and the angelic voice it emitted was frankly keeping her awake all night, so they melted it down and made a ring out of it.

2. Pirates. Obviously. The missing 160 lines contained pirates. Probably Viking pirates - this is mediaeval Denmark, after all. And who says you can't have a piratical sea battle in only 160 lines? Hamlet did it in fewer! Clearly they battled viking pirates and took all their treasure. In fact, they were probably ninja viking pirates. That would account for the missing folio - they were covering their tracks!

Definitely ninjas.

[1] The Lay of Havelok the Dane. Ed. Skeat, Walter W. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902.
[2] Really. Everyone knows. The cross and the light keep popping up to reveal his true lineage at crucial points in the narrative.