Review : Land of Mist And Magic

I continue exploring the world of mythology with Philip Parker's Land of Mist and Magic. This rather lovely coffee-table book presents a fully illustrated guide to a collection of British mythology, legends, heroic fiction, and folklore. 

As a physical product it's hard to find fault with this one. Good, thick pages, extremely high-quality printed images, and a text that's highly readable. It doesn't offer much in the way of outright analysis but it does include some incisive and intelligent commentary. This is absolutely a book you can read for pleasure as well as display as a sort of trophy-book to impressive visitors. Come in, gentle stranger, and marvel at the wondrous books you see before you !

Anyway, the text consists of a series of retellings combining different sources to merge all the major elements together, usually with a short introduction describing the origin and history of the story. They're all written in a simple, present-tense style which is never going to win any literary awards* but it gets the job done; they're imperfect, but more than adequate. The descriptive passages of both the scenery and the emotional state of the characters usually adds something not found in the original, archaic literature. But it can also lack an edge, sometimes missing important details for the sake of brevity.

* In particular, over-use of bland phrases like "will never be forgotten" does feel a bit chatbot. In one extreme case, Parker uses "forgotten" three times in as many sentences, which is getting lazy.

On the other hand, there's an unexpected benefit of being concise : when giving only an extract from a story, the moral lesson becomes so much clearer than when reading the tale in full. Often in the old myths (Celtic, Greek and Norse alike) it's very hard to understand what, if any, lesson the reader is supposed to take from these vast pseudo-histories. It may be more realistic to have a hero falling into cynicism and pettiness, but it makes it much harder to understand which actions are deemed to be "right" if everything a hero does is always undone; everything becomes subsumed in the ever-changing now. Cutting the story off, or into distinct segments to be told separately, makes it so much easier to say, "look, they did this, and they were rewarded" without being bogged down by what happened next.

One example illustrates both points. Pwyll and Rhiannon involves the nobleman Pwyll marrying the mysterious fairy Rhiannon, along with some job-swapping with the fairy king. At his wedding feast he foolishly grants a request to a stranger, which turns out to be Rhiannon's abusive ex... but with some cunning trickery involving an unfillable magic bag, they trap him and beat him up so everything ends happily*.

* It probably needs to be reiterated quite a lot that ancient fairy stories are not much like the modern versions. On the other hand, some stories, like Lady Godiva, are so boring they could only appeal to puritanical Victorians; if it was a modern version, the very least she could do to make it interesting would be to start an OnlyFans account. Get over yourself, Lady G.

In this version, that's all that happens, and the moral that even rash promises must be upheld comes through clearly. In the full telling, as given in Epic Celtic Tales, the story continues and it all gets weird, involving a horse-stealing monster and Rhiannon being framed for eating her children*. The moral theme of the earlier part of the story is lost, but on the other hand, the version given in LOMAM doesn't include Rhiannon sharply chiding her witless husband. This isn't a minor detail – it gives her much more feminist depth and underscores just how stupid the otherwise astute, and seemingly generous, Pwyll, is being at that particular moment.

* What did I just say ?

But restricting the story to only a single episode in the otherwise near-complete history of the pair changes the interpretation completely. Instead of it being an almost random "bunch of stuff that happens" sequence of events, suddenly it has a clear message. I tend to read stories expecting that the main point will only come through in the entire product, that the ending is what gives it meaning. Here is seems that this is not the case, that the reader is expected to consider each part in isolation : it's up to the audience to decide at what point to search for the lessons being told. This is exactly what Plato did when he quoted poets to debate some moral point, rather than considering the full history of Achilles or Odysseus. Still, to have this pointed out explicitly is, for me, very valuable.

Anyway, since the analysis is light with this one, and having covered mythology quite a bit already by this point, I think I'll limit the rest of this post to a short set of the most interesting tales I came across within the pages. It's very much a mixed bag, but some of these were wholly new to me while others put familiar tales in a new light. 

Origins : the origin myths of Britain are certainly interesting if you're a modern-day fruitcake... sorry, Reform voter. They're all explicit in that Britain was founded by foreigners – in the case of Scotland, a bunch of mixed-race (mainly Egyptian) immigrants arriving on a small boat. They are clearly proud of having a foreign origin, albeit ones they could look to for imperial glory (Egypt, Rome, Troy). They wanted the Stone of Scone to have a foreign origin to give it mystical credence, wanted to associate themselves with Brutus even as early as the 7th century. They actively deride the previous "native" inhabitants as savage giants who don't really do much except get killed by the heroes. Even when they give Britain a more glorious path of its own, such as when Arthur conquers the Roman Empire, they have it done by forging respectful alliances with other people and respecting their treaty obligations.

Fuck off Reform. Just fuck right off and stop spouting bollocks about "native Britons".

Though to be fair... they don't always have the Britons, once established, as being a bunch of Guardian-reading hippies. They're extremely racist against the Irish, in one story having Merlin steal the stones for Stonehenge (which is constructed, pointlessly, as a war memorial) after slaughtering their way through the Irish ranks. Just because they weren't anything like modern bigots doesn't mean the people telling these stories were very nice. Likewise, when St Carantoc subdued a dragon, he doesn't let Arthur kill it. Saying that it surrendered to Christian faith, instead it he lets it loose to, err... go off and eat Saxon children instead.

Well, I guess that should scare away the Guardian readers as well as the Reform voters, thus bringing my audience down to pretty much zero. Oh well.

Bladud : A curious tale that, while told in its fullest form by Geoffrey of Monmouth, took centuries to develop. Bladud was a possibly Welsh princeling with a hunger for learning who went to learn at Plato's Academy. Expelled for pursuing forbidden knowledge, he returned to Britain with leprosy and found employment with a kindly swineherd. Thanks to his keen wit and observational skills, he discovered a cure and was able to assume his rightful position as king, building a bathhouse on the healing waters that cured him. But his all-consuming hunger for knowledge was not sated, eventually ending in his death in an attempt to fly.

I rather like this one. Bladud's thirst for knowledge isn't the problem, it's that he lacks wisdom. He's a complex character, wanting to help the people of the kingdom but also foolhardy : he doesn't know when to stop, when to just be grateful for his first miracle rather than greedily seeking a second. He could have ruled well – no external enemies assailed him – but he threw it away on a vanity project rather than making the most of what he had. He knew a great deal, but lacked the self-awareness needed to control his own worst impulses.

Saint David : As my patron saint I feel I have to mention this one, but it seems he was a right cunt. His clifftop birth in a storm, to a mother who was herself a saint, was dramatic enough I suppose. But then he was apparently "so holy that he silenced the Bishop from the womb" when his mother walked into a sermon, and if that doesn't scream "awkward pregnancy" then I don't know what does*. Fair play to him for reviving the dead and healing the sick, but his lifestyle of extreme asceticism for himself and his followers – even the one with magical bees – doesn't appeal. Only eating bread and drinking water, preaching while neck-deep in freezing rivers... no thanks. Never mind that his most famous sermon, where the ground rose beneath him so his words could be heard by the crowd, was against the Pelagian "heresy" of free will. Sorry, Dave, you sound like a dick.

* It would also make her rather less saintly and a lot more interesting.

Folk heroes : A couple of popular figures need to be mentioned because they show just how much the stories have changed. Jack (of the Beanstalk fame) didn't start out as a figure having anything to do with beanstalks of any kind, but he did go around killing assorted giants : the earlier Jack has a much longer and more interesting series of adventures than the later one, though both are the classic "unexpected hero" who did nothing to earn his abilities. Similarly, the modern narrative of Robin Hood has a very fixed storyline, whereas the original has nothing much to do with robbing from the rich and has Robin of unexceptional abilities who brawls with his own men. A cantankerous, petty Robin who's also a bit of a god-botherer certainly puts a different spin on things. He begins his journey to folk hero as a commoner, not one of the gentry who merely sympathises with their plight.

Arthurian stories : A few micro-comments on these. Vortigern, tyrant of Britain during Merlin's infancy, is portrayed here as weak and ineffectual. I much prefer Rutger Hauer's version in which he's a classical... well, tyrant. It's not at all clear how he stayed in power in Parker's description, especially as he's given all the charisma of a diseased hamster. This vision of a past Britain in a state of decay is, however, interesting in itself, given the myriad concerns as to whether the Anglo-Saxon invasion ever happened (or at least to what extent and in what form). For the Greeks and Romans, history seems to have been a tale largely of continuous decline, but the medieval British, it seems to have been much less of a monotonic fall from grace. Perhaps this willingness to believe in a ruinous past says something about the mindset of the authors and why we shouldn't take their more apocalyptic descriptions too literally.

The stories of the Holy Grail also varies considerably from some of the modern Arthurian legends. As mentioned in Dragons, Heroes, Myths and Magic, this appears in the Mabinogion story of Peredur, but once again, setting this part aside as its own complete tale changes the whole interpretation. Peredur encounters the grail – a plate carrying a severed, bleeding head, and nothing at all to do with Jesus or a cup* – in the castle of the Fisher King (so called because he's injured so he fishes rather than hunts), where his failure to ask about it means he can't recover it... but he wasn't even looking for it, nor could he possibly have known what he was supposed to ask. The message is so utterly unclear that it actually becomes oddly satisfying. One day I might even attempt to articulate why.

* Wikipedia says that the Peredur story doesn't contain a grail, but this doesn't ring true. The plate carrying the severed head may not be described as a grail but it carries exactly the same narrative function as in the carbon-copy version Percival, which does supposedly contain a grail. Methinks someone is nit-picking here in the extreme.

There are other points where things verge on the confusing rather than the merely complicated. In the story of St Carantoc Arthur is a mere sub-king rather than the all-conquering perfect Emperor of later elaborations. In some stories there are multiple ladies of the lake, one of whom is decapitated, and multiple Excaliburs that may or may not relate to the one in the stone. Just as in Mark Williams' Celtic Myths That Shaped The Way We Think, Gwain's quest to seek the Green Knight is described as a failure, but what exactly makes it so isn't really stated*. Arthur's death, in some versions, is an almost complete catastrophe, a descent into anarchy and an ending which is simply tragic. In some versions, Arthur's army flee Mordred's host to the land of Lyonesse, which is destroyed in an Atlantis-like flood, a dramatic and absolutely final end to the whole Arthurian saga. At least it provides a clean break for history to resume.

* I find ChatGPT's answer to this very satisfying, however. I might have to re-read the tale in full.

Hereward the Wake : Not to be confused with Hereward the Woke, his liberally-minded cousin. This is a very interesting legend/fiction of one of the few romanticised holdouts against the Normal conquest. The mythologised idea of clinging on to the old ways is rife in Arthurian legend but appears virtually absent following the Norman Conquest... is this because the Normal lifestyles were simply too similar to their Saxon predecessors ? It's hard to mythologise a bygone age of different pottery styles and questionable facial hair choices, maybe. 

Anyway, Hereward is a rebel in East Anglia whose prior adventures include killing giants and man-bears. His tale partially follows the classic narrative structure : an overly-complicated and seemingly unconnected series of events without a clear message. More unusual is that when Hereward goes to reconnoitre the surroundings in disguise, it doesn't work very well. This is extremely refreshing because disguises in these old stories seem to be otherwise of near-perfect efficacy. And when his camp is attacked by a witch in service of the Norman army, they send her in by pushing her atop a tower. It's a very Norse image* that doesn't fit our modern ideas of the Normans as relatively advanced and sophisticated compared to the Saxons. Here is an unexpected, incongruous bit of paganism in an era otherwise familiar to every schoolboy raised on stories of 1066 and all that.

* The witch operating from a tower appears in other Norse sagas and archaeology. ChatGPT suggests that the height affords the witch the liminal space that in other cultures might be represented by forests, water, caves and so on, as well as stemming from a peculiarly Norse requirement for magic to be visible.

Hereward's tale stands out for romanticising a previous era which is usually glossed over as mere regime change. As in Mark Morris, the cultural change throughout the Saxon era was substantial, with the heroes of the local mead halls not being much like the powerful rulers of country-wide kingdoms. It's also unusual in having magical events and creatures but set in a distinct, highly identifiable time and place with real, named people. Even King William gets a look in. He forgives Hereward his rebellion, thus making the whole thing a complete waste of time, making it very much a classic "bunch of stuff that happened" narrative despite its many oddities. Well, maybe in the full text there's a more skillful explanation and some more satisfying moral narrative being told.

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Ronald Hutton and Neil Price, as well as others, describe paganism as essentially amoral, more a world view than a moral doctrine. And I can see the appeal of this, but the most interesting thing about Parker's book is that it strongly challenges this simple view. I think it's fair to say that the morality of Christian stories does come through a lot louder than in the pagan myths, but this doesn't mean it's absent. Certainly the ancient moral beliefs wouldn't find much in common with those any modern religion, even the reinvented strands of paganism, but the stories might not be as inconsistent as they first appear. Perhaps we should be reading them less as epic sagas and more of collections of individual tales, each one with a different but distinct moral aspect. They require more analysis than listening to Jesus droning on about the meek, and they're probably a lot less self-consistent too. But there are morals to be found within – they're not stories purely intended for entertainment nor records of events people believed actually happened. 

I love the glorious weirdness of the whole thing, a dangerous and magical world of unpredictable adventures, strange creatures and supernatural forces around every turn. Their literary sophistication, with themes running and developing across multiple stories which relate back to each other, is clear; these were not written by the chronically bored or insane (well, not all of them, at any rate). If we allow that the moral lessons are being imparted in a very different way to modern sensibilities, just as the stories themselves are told differently, perhaps there's a whole other level of appreciation to be found here.