On Tuesday 16th June, I had the pleasure of attending a talk organised by the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy as part of the 2015 Festival of Chichester.
It was given by their visiting professor of folklore, Jacqueline Simpson. If you have had anything to do with British folklore, or indeed the folklore of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, you probably know her name…
Like Terry Pratchett, I was blown away on first reading Tolkien:
It’s got maps! And names!*
I am still in love with his entire lexicon and mythology of Middle Earth, and one of my favourite features was the names he gave places. Now it helps if you are an expert in Anglo-Saxon and all-round-brilliant, but still I aspire to have towns, harbours, moors and rivers that convince. The place is a central character for me.
Map from the Hobbit courtesy of Josh Calvetti (Creative Commons)
As most of my readers will know, I was born and brought up in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Norse words are part of my cultural DNA. Give me tofts and thorpes , skels and scars, and I’m a happy woman. I suppose I could set all my work in the Danelaw – but I might like to branch out.
Now since I write stories with more than a touch of fantasy, I could just make it up. But that seems like selling the reader short. I have to confess a more-than-reasonable dislike for place names made up out of real words with different meanings ‘because they sound good’. Call me a nerd, but I like a bit of toponymic integrity. If it’s set in the Fenland, I want names like Penny Soakey, Toseland St. Agnes and Green Knowe (thank you, L. M. Boston).
The Manor at Hemingford Grey
or ‘Green Knowe’
Image by Richard White (Creative Commons)
One approach I use is to blend existing names: I took Sel (seal) from Selsey and –chester (southern variant for ‘Roman settlement’) from Chichester to create Selchester, my City-on-the-Sea. I still like to be careful about origins (no Pictish elements with those from the Jutes for example – like mixing Aberdeen with Canterbury) but it works.
Another way is to recycle the names of abandoned or lost settlements – those places deserted after the Black Death, or victim to coastal erosion. There are a great deal of powerful story backgrounds here too.
Wharram Percy by Andy Nunn
(Creative Commons)
You can also look up old maps and use the alternative spellings or earlier forms of places. The Domesday Book is brilliant for that, and zoomable old OS cartography is a wonderful time sink, I have to admit. There are cracking books too: Caroline Taggart’s The Book of English Place Names and the splendidly browseable McKie’s Gazetteer ( which gives any number of odd stories).
And if nothing else, all this research will give you a smile when you come across delights such as Wetwang, Triangle, Great Fryup Dale, Booze (with no pub) and Blubberhouses Moor (all in Yorkshire).
* this may be apocryphal – but it’s too good not to use.
One of the better aspects of insomnia is the chance to listen to Radio 4 on the i-player. This week I have been particularly enjoying the Pilgrim series of radio dramas by Sebastian Baczkiewicz. He places English legends in the present day, where the Greyfolk intervene in our Hotblood world in unsettling ways.
It is notable that the contemporary setting makes the eerieness of the traditional tales all the more believable – a kind of corroborative evidence. As a younger reader, I loved much of the work of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper for that sense of it could be happening right here, right now. I still delight in the Narnia Effect of slipping into other worlds, the intersection of the parallel such as Philip Pullman uses. I believe we all like to think we could be the one who notices such things.
What if all the myths and folktales of these islands were true? And what if they were not only true but present now in our world? All the spirits, existing, as they have always existed, in the gaps between tower blocks, in the shadows under bridges, in the corner of our vision…
(from the Pilgrim programme information)
Some writers take another approach: ‘it could have happened’. I think of Pat Walsh and Katherine Langrish with their beautifully depicted historical worlds which also have magic at their core. Some go for an alternative history: Joan Aiken springs to mind and for adults, Susanna Clarke’s ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’. Here in particular, the sheer detail and interweaving of stories gives an internal validity which I find engaging.
But for sheer consistency of a created world, J. R. R. Tolkien takes every laurel wreath going.
I am almost certain that he once said he wanted to bring back fear into the leafy lanes of England at twilight, to create a truly English legendarium (1). He clearly didn’t intend something twee and Disneyfied: I think he would approve of Pilgim’s dark fantasy tone.
(In fairness to Disney, I have never forgotten Sleeping Beauty’s Evil Queen, or the demon in Fantasia -and I think this is due to the confidence with which they are portrayed – true to their legendary European roots.)
It is the conviction that matters. Read this:
Of all the tales told on these islands, few are as strange as that of William Palmer. Cursed, apparently, on the road to Canterbury in the spring of 1185 for denying the presence of the Other World by the King of the Greyfolk or Faerie himself, and compelled to walk from that day to this between the worlds of magic and man.
Which word sticks out like highlighter on an illuminated manuscript? ‘Apparently.’
For a split second, we step out of the writer’s world and look at it, not gaze round inside with wonder and terror.
Don’t do it.
I am not arguing for the po-faced rigidity of the worst of High Fantasy. A light touch such as in the ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ or any of the Discworld novels does not distract from the internal consistency of their creations. You go there with the writer as your rather cheery guide.
Indeed, the best writers take the reader by the hand and go side-by-side with them into the terrors and delights of their own universe: think of David Almond. All writers can achieve this credibility – no matter which filter on the spectrum of realistic to speculative fiction they use. The ‘trick’ is to truly be there yourself.
(1) If you can locate the quotation, I would be inordinately grateful to know.
Hazel and Emily
The afternoon of 3oth June I had the pleasure of seeing The Askew Sisters at St John’s Church as apart of the Chichester Festivities. They were two lively young women who played spirited dance music and sang moving ballads and the like. Delightful – and if you get the chance, do go see them.
But one thing stood out – they sprang from English tradition – and I love it, whether in music or stories.
Now the minute I mention an English tradition, there will be hackles going up. It seems almost impossible to mention without anxiety. Will people think I am a racist? Will I be bracketed along with the tweeness of Evergreen Magazine, Ye Olde Teashoppes and endless reruns of Miss Marple? Will I be seen as an obscure collector of folklore obsessively slotting stories into the Aarne–Thompson classification system?
I hope not.
But what I am speaking up for is best expressed by this:
And we learn to be ashamed before we walk
Of the way we look and the way we talk.
Without our stories and our songs
How will we know where we’ve come from?
Show of Hands 'Roots' - a deeply-felt and much loved song.
We need our traditions – how can you riff on Jack and The Beanstalk if you don’t know the story in the first place? Ms J K Rowling would lose at least half the inhabitants of the Potterverse without our English traditions.
But there’s every need to avoid overzealous exactitude.
The thing I admired about the Askew Sisters was their reinvigoration of the music. Hazel played the melodeon with the heel of her hand at one point to give an otherworldly sound – not textbook, I suspect – but very effective. I loved The Warsaw Village Band’s punky polkas* ( also ChiFest and brilliant live) and what about the Imagined Village’s fantastic ‘Cold Haily Windy Night’ with Sheema Mukherjee on sitar and Johnny Khalsi on drums? The point is that folk music evolves, new elements come in and add life. Having a tradition doesn’t mean it has to be a form of taxidermy.
So where’s the relevance to writing?
Well, it can hardly be shared experience nowadays – not many pirate adventures like Henry Martin now – unless you’re Somali. But shared emotion – that’s where we meet. We may not have a lover on the deck of a sailing ship as in ‘The Turtledove’ or ‘If I were a Blackbird’ – but we know what it is to miss someone.
Writers convey the feelings of characters in situations they have never experienced and readers imagine them. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a ballad or a book – and the English tradition has plenty of passion in it yet.
[*Yes, I know they’re Polish – but the point about reinventing your tradition is still true.]
I’m writing this in Aldea Global Cafe, Tarifa, Spain.
Yesterday, I went riding up towards the mountains through sweet-scented pines and admiring gloriously free-ranging black pigs destined to be jamon. The turf in March is green and lush, full of flowers and herbs.
It was unsurprising that my horse kept eating the grass. It bent its head down, I pulled on the reins. I didn’t want to cascade down its neck into the prickly pear bushes.
My lack of control tells you a lot about my experience as a rider, and also gave me to thinking about imposing my will on the animal.
Today, I managed rather better, pre-empting the horse’s move to grab a quick nosh. For a little while, I experienced a satisfying unity between what I wanted to do and what this large creature’s abilities. Lovely.
At a plateau we stood looking over the sea to Morocco. Miggy, the instructress explained about the scars on the noses of Andalucian horses. These come from the local method of breaking. (Breaking – what a telling word that is.) She spoke of some of the local men having to have stallions – often before they were ready to handle them – hence the cruelty.
I thought back to Martin Clunes’ ‘Horsepower’ series. I had watched fascinated by Monty Roberts’ and Jean Francois Pignon’s natural horsemanship. They both used the animals’ natural traits to manipulate their behaviour in a compassionate way. The animals were not stressed, no force was used (other than personality) and yet they did as they were asked.
On the plane over, I watched Kirsty Young presenting ‘ The British at Work’. It gave a salutary reminder of the dictatorial management in the postwar era – and how much it was resented. I thought also of how much we hated over-strict teachers, the sort who shouted and threw board-rubbers. They ruled through fear because they hadn’t the skills to persuade.
Nonetheless, I get fed up with the cliché of the leader as always an incompetent bully , as though being in charge inevitably leads to domineering behaviour. As a fictional counterpoint, I like to think of Terry Pratchett’s Baron in ‘I Shall Wear Midnight’. He was a man who gained respect because he asked his people to do what they would do anyway. A not-dissimilar technique is used by my MA tutor Greg Mosse.
As I hope Mubarak has learned, in positions of responsibility there are better methods than oppression.
First off, let me not claim any form of originality. It all probably started with my fab friend Dave Cousin’s Festive Fifteen (well worth a look) – which then inspired the lovely Candy Gourlay. She wrote more about the longer term influences on her work – and so did the inspiring Keren David. Another couple of my favourite blogsters took up the baton – Nicky Schmidt and Kathryn Evans ( just because they’re yummy and my friends doesn’t mean I’d link unless they had something worth saying!)
My slant comes from a quotation passed round the British SCBWI yahoo group – courtesy of the aforementioned Candy Gourlay:
In the movie You’ve Got Mail, the Meg Ryan character sums it up beautifully when she explained what her mum, an independent bookseller vs a discounting chain did:
“It wasn’t that she was just selling books, she was helping people become who they were going to be. When you read a book as a child, it becomes part of your identity in a way that no other reading does.”
So I had a good think about ten books that could make me the writer I aspire to be.
What would you like to suffuse from the books you love into the books you write?