The Things We Say

I'd like to add a little corollary to that rather long post on bullshit I wrote some years ago.

Bullshit, I contend, is not caring about the essential truth of a statement. This is a slight, but I think important, modification of the more usual principle that bullshit simply means not caring about the truth. Someone can respond with a perfectly truthful statement, but it's context that matters : if their response doesn't address the point you were making (e.g. with whataboutism or other kind of diversionary tactic), then that's still bullshit.

I also came up with a whole taxonomy of different kinds of shitty statements, but I digress.

In keeping with the theme, let me get to the point in a slightly roundabout way. All the crazy political shenanigans of late have made me acutely aware of a lesson I wish Younger Me had realised much earlier. 

That is, there are two main reasons that people say what they say. The first is that it's because they believe what they're saying is genuinely true. They argue with each other because they believe it's an innately good thing to get at the truth, and that disagreement is something that fundamentally needs to be corrected. This doesn't mean they're not open to changing their minds (although this can certainly be the case), just that they're deeply concerned with what's right and wrong. I think this is most people's baseline assumption about most other people, at least in a healthy society.

The second is that they're trying to produce an effect of some kind. We all become familiar with this in different ways : our parents lie to get us to behave, advertisers exaggerate and mislead, politicians... well, they do all kinds of crazy shit. We get fooled because our baseline assumption is still that people are basically honest; we become less naïve when we realise that this doesn't apply in all circumstances; we degenerate into cynicism when we start to behave as though this second reason is the norm rather than the first, when we think that agendas are all there are.

All this is probably obvious. The reason I wish someone had told Younger Me this is because it should be explicit. When you raise what's known subconsciously to full conscious awareness, you can act on it. It's easier to remember, easier to be on guard, easier to avoid the pitfalls both of naivety and cynicism. Learning it implicitly means that the idea will only arise through learned patterns, and so only affect behaviour in rather narrow domains; learning it explicitly means you can choose to analyse behaviour in all circumstances.

How does this tie back in to bullshit ? Very simply. A classical bullshitter uses the second intention, saying things without regard for the truth... but they do, importantly, still care about something. They say what they say because they want to manipulate people. They want them to react in some way, maybe as part of a carefully-determined plan, or maybe in a more vague strategy of simply provoking emotion but still with an ultimate objective in mind.

The corollary I want to propose is that maybe there's a truly deep kind of bullshit. Maybe the kind of nonsense – anger inducing, incoherent, aimless, self-harming verbal diarrhea that vents forth from the Orange One's unshapely orifice – maybe this is simply because there's no plan of any kind whatseover. Maybe the deepest kind of bullshitter is someone who says things for no other reason than it makes themselves feel good for a microsecond. No aim in mind, no master plan of manipulation, nothing but ultra short-term "I like saying this". Literally nothing beyond that.

Now, many people are aware of this already : "however stupid you think his is, he's stupider than that" someone said recently. Indeed, this is a position I've long held myself, there simply being no good alternative for the sheer level of incoherency on display... that, and a healthy respect for Occam's Razor. There's just no need to invoke some master four-dimensional chess when sheer stupidity presents a far more believable explanation.

No, the point of spelling this out is only to make it explicit. When you realise that this is (perhaps) the way some people really are, you can begin to see it as a pattern. You can watch out for it. It can help keep you aware that all of us say things in this way from time to time (who hasn't got carried away and realised instantly that they said something they actually thought was total bollocks ?) and so don't need to treat every such statement in the same way. When you see someone who might commit the odd shitpost here and there but knows where to draw the line, when to be serious and respectful and when to just muck around, you know how to respond.

And when you find someone who essentially always communicates in this way... well, then you can decide for yourself if this is something you approve of. Maybe it is, in some roles. Maybe it's fine for stand-up comedians. But if you think that either a) someone talking completely incoherently really believes in what they say; b) they're doing so because they're actually really clever; and/or c) this person is an extremely powerful politician.... then I don't think we can be friends.

The Scouring

Today, a short look at the The Scouring of the Shire. Surely the most Marmite of all chapters of The Lord of the Rings... I personally hate it. I've read many arguments as to why it's actually the most important section of all, but every time I read it I just think “nope”. Let's begin with a reasonably sensible defence of the chapter I stumbled upon some time ago.

To be fair, there are more than a few reasons why multiple adaptations have forsaken the chapter. For one, it is sort of an anti-climax, taking place well after the principle plot of The Lord Of The Rings is over.

That’s part of it, but more important is that it’s a huge tonal mismatch. We go from epic, literally world-shaping events, to… an impotent wizard messing up people’s gardens. There’s just no way to naturally flow from one to the other in a narratively satisfying way. As Tolkien himself said about Beowulf :

I can see the point of asking for no monsters. I can also see the point of the situation in Beowulf [i.e. all the villains are monsters]. But no point at all in mere reduction of numbers. It would really have been preposterous, if the poet had recounted Beowulf’s rise to fame in a ‘typical’ or ‘commonplace’ war in Frisia, and then ended him with a dragon*. Or if he had told of his cleansing of Heorot, and then brought him to defeat and death in a ‘wild’ or ‘trivial’ Swedish invasion !

Incidentally the truly Norse sagas do stuff like this all the time, and to be fair, they're mostly crap.

Which is exactly the problem. We have the Hobbits go from being key players in the destruction of the last great evil of the world, to having to fight the equivalent of “some Swedish prince”. It’s deeply unsatisfying. The argument is sometimes made that they need to prove themselves, but this makes no sense, because after what they’ve already done, no such activity is necessary.

The way the Shire saves itself is, in part, an opening up. Sam uses one of his gifts from the elves to restore the Shire. Merry and Pippin travel throughout the region and maintain their ties with both men and dwarves. Preservation can mean change. In fact, it may require it. Making the Shire an untouched place carries a stagnant stench. In Tolkien’s books, nothing can be protected forever, and all requires active vigilance and care. In the films, the Shire is already perfect and needs no change at all.

This is well put (the Silmarillion explores in much more detail the moral differences between a healed world versus one perfect from the beginning), but the need to save the Shire is just not apparent. The Hobbits have already fought to preserve it, making them do even more – having people's gardens dug up by some loser wizard after having destroyed Bard-dûr  – doesn’t add anything. It can't, really, because the main task has already been accomplished. It's Done. The ending of Sauron couldn't possibly be any more final; anything that happens next is necessarily a detail.

The argument is also made that it was necessary to show the Hobbits have been changed by their experiences, but this too is abundantly obvious. It's clear to reader and cinema audience alike that the Frodo who comes home is not the Frodo who sets off, nor is Sam, nor even Merry and Pippin to a lesser degree. There's no need to be any more explicit about something which is already very explicit... it would be like asking for more nudity in Game of Thrones.

Finally, another point is that this gives the work an added depth of character realism, but again… it’s a fantasy. It isn’t helpful to try and do this. To my mind the chapter is nothing but a weird and colossal distraction : I can see why it’s there, but it’s not a good bit of writing, even if many of the themes are important. It’s just too much of a clash with the narrative imperative, like trying to set up a creepy graveyard scene only to suddenly fill it with hamsters, or something. But others may disagree.

None of this is intended to criticise the linked article, which I do think is rather good. I take issue with the following, however :

The battle of Helm’s Deep, a slim handful of pages in the novel, takes up 40 minutes in Jackson’s The Two Towers. The necessity of peace and restoration, the hard work they require, are left to the cutting floor, while hour-long scenes of heroic violence take more and more space in each subsequent film. Though the films’ pastoral sequences have warmth and joy to them, they lack the bitter, beautiful edge that Tolkien’s prose grants them. That’s the cost of cutting Return Of The King‘s most crucial chapter: A loss as profound as the one Frodo Baggins suffers by novel’s end.

Yes, battles are exciting, and easier to drum up audience engagement if you've got the budget for it. But the text of the battles is some of Tolkien's most magnificent, and I would reject utterly any notion that the films are in any sense "shallow" by focusing on the spectacle. The stakes in the book are the very highest, practically cosmic in scope, and demand an appropriate and lengthy visual. More importantly, it is precisely the combination of this mythic scale combined with the human-level events (not least of which is Theoden's speech) that give the film tremendous, almost overwhelming emotional depth. Reducing the battles would be the direct equivalent of asking for less monsters in Beowulf : entirely and spectacularly missing the point. The mythic grandeur is exactly where the film most beautifully delivers its most potent message.

Nor do I find anything beautiful or bitter in Scouring; it just feels oddly tacked-on and badly-written. I would note that in the early drafts, Tolkien's "note to self" was that Hobbiton was dominated by a biscuit factory and the returning Hobbits decide to sail away to Greenland, so don't you dare tell me that the man who wrote stuff like this wasn't also capable of writing utter shite as well.

But...

One Quora answer to a question of the politics of Lord of the Rings does offer a better answer :

Sam, the humble gardener, has returned from war. And he does not take shit from anybody. He is appalled by the weakness and complacency of his countrymen. They mindlessly go along with whatever the new rulers suggest… anything to stay out of trouble. And Sam doesn’t play that way. He’s seen some shit. Seen the horrors of war. And he urges his people to resist.

You can read the totalitarian state the Shire is turned into as a far-right nightmare scenario. Or as a far-left nightmare scenario. Either way, it is dark, twisted and bleak. Public [sic; surely "private"] property is taken over by the [abjectly fascist] state, the rivers and fields are polluted and factories pump out black smoke as mighty forests are cut down… and most people just keep their heads down, and don’t resist. That’s Tolkien’s politics in a nutshell — do resist, do fight back, and don’t stand idly by as evil does what evil does best.

This is much more credible. It's not about some vague, unspecified way in which the Hobbits have learned important life lessons, nor about them proving their abundantly-clear newfound abilities (after Shelob, what other horrors can life hold for Sam ?). It's about exactly what those lessons they've learned actually are : to resist oppression, to urge their fellows to defend their idyllic lifestyle when the need arises, to realise that the inevitability of evil is an illusion. It can be defeated even by the small : "help shall oft come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter", as Gandalf says earlier. No-one is truly helpless.

Not, however, that this much changes my mind about the chapter. I can see the point to it, but I still find it badly-executed. For it to have any poignancy would require, I think, some far worse tragedy than trampling a few flower beds, and to avoid the tonal mismatch would require some remaining vestige of the cosmic scale of the threat for the Hobbits to overcome (perhaps if Saruman was left with considerably more power, this might have helped matters). 

Regardless, blending this into the narrative consistently is a virtual impossibility. However important the message might be, there's simply no way of defeating the Enemy and having anything else feel like fighting "some Swedish prince". And again, the Hobbits have already demonstrated this resistance in the face of overwhelming odds, so to now scale things back and give them a challenge manifestly below their abilities proves nothing. 

No, the movie's approach is better by far : show that they're conscious of saving the Shire during the War of the Ring ("courage Merry, courage for our friends") with a very gentle nod to show their changed nature on their return : bittersweet in that Sam is now able to face the altogether difficult challenge of approaching a not-especially-attractive barmaid but that Frodo is truly broken, unable to live in the Shire any more. The theme of Scouring, I accept, is hugely important. But I argue that the movie is not shallow by omitting the chapter, nor does it lack the "bitter and beautiful edge". On the contrary, this is somewhere where the movie is a good deal more subtle and – beware incoming treasonous heresy – greatly improves on the books.

Review : Of Doves And Ravens

Let's get straight on with another Christmas read : Benjamin Stimpson's Of Doves And Ravens. This second bit of Welsh folklore is more specialist than Anne Ross's Folklore of Wales, concentrating on witches, wizards, and to a lesser extent magical practises in general. There's a smattering of other stuff here and there : the occasional ghost, weird creature and so on. But mostly it's about magical people.

This appears to be Stimpson's first book, and good on him. It's a pretty extensive, 300 page compendium of tales from across Wales, organised geographically. While I'm not at all sure I agree with Ross that magical beliefs are inevitably dying out (and even less sure as to whether this would be a good thing or not), I definitely think the stories need to be collected. Many of Stimpson's chosen stories are extremely minor, local legends, some of which are even at the level of rumours and gossip. Without books like this, such things would all too easily be lost forever. Some of them are shite, but some are wonderful. They deserve to be remembered.

As with Ross, Stimpson concentrates on presenting the stories rather than analysing them. But the commentary he does offer is intelligent and it's clear he's done some exhaustive research in compiling all this – it's only a shame there's no kind of conclusion section. The other minor issue is that there's a good deal of repetition in the chosen stories, such as :

• The "crow barn", in which a wizard manages to trap crows in a barn to stop them eating crops. That's it. It's dull as hell, but interminably minor variations of this occur across Wales, despite the fact it's an incredibly boring story. It makes us seem like a bunch of halfwits.
• Outwitting the Devil : typically by promising him half the crops (why does the Devil want vegetables anyway ?) and giving him the bad half, e.g. the tops of potatoes or the roots of wheat; being buried in the wall of a churchyard to avoid being buried inside or out and so cheating the Devil of a soul. That sort of thing.
• Using a magical spell book with imprisoned spirits that are released accidentally. Usually the book is so dangerous that the wizard only uses it once per year, but the reason it's used at all is rarely stated.
• And the title : on the death of a wizard, a dove will come to the body if his soul is pure, a raven if it's to be taken by the Devil. There are variations but this basic motif is found in many stories of wizards who would have lived remarkably similar lives if they were real people.
• Endless variations of the Llyn Y Fan Fach tale of a fairy who emerges from a lake to marry some young boy based on the consistency of his bread. Then he "strikes" her three times so she buggers off, leaving him with three medically-gifted children. It's not a bad story, but we don't need this many retellings of it.

If you're reading it geographically then I suppose this repetition doesn't matter so much, but if you read it straight through then it all becomes a bit tiresome. Many local wizards have an essentially identical story, and it would have been far better to just state the repeated bits in the introductory summary that accompanies each entry. 

This aside, there's little else to find fault with. The individual stories are told as descriptions of what the story says rather than actually as fiction. It's an easy read, all very straightforward and with a wealth of detail, once you get past the repetitive strain of yet another witch who did no worse than stopping the milk from churning. But then, this fits with Stimpson's description of a time when "magic was not considered silly... it was common sense".

I'm going to give this one another solid 7/10. It's a great read, and even in the repetitive bits, some interesting themes emerge.

Wyrd Wales

Alright then, let's get on with summarising my favourite bits. I mean, look, you can either go and watch the news about the actions of real-life monsters in America and Russia... or you can read about the much more fun fictional variety in Wales. Your choice.

The Nuisance Witch

As Stimpson says in the introduction, most typical Welsh witches were essentially normal people, not villainous old crones bent on murder. If they caused problems then they were incredibly petty ones : preventing milk from churning, making cows get a bit lost, stopping carts, that sort of thing. Both male and female magicians were often friendly members of the community and usually fully and unequivocally Christian. Unlike other countries, including our English neighbours, witches weren't seen as demonic or inhuman.

Reading through the individual cases I was reminded of nothing so much as the witches of Discworld :  figures who commanded respect but tinged with genuine fear. You wouldn't cross a witch, but you wouldn't expect her to come after you for no good reason – and you could fully expect any curse they inflicted to be lifted so long as you made a suitable apology. Pissing off the local witch would be a lot like annoying the town mayor : it's a bad idea, but for heaven's sake, he wouldn't be likely to try and eat your children or anything.

And as Keith Thomas pointed out, the only time most witches ever retaliated were when they had been wronged in some way. The fear of the witch was not a fear of their innate malevolence, but a projection of guilt : knowing you should have been more charitable* would lead to a fear of legitimate reprisal. At worse, in most cases you'd have a nuisance witch who'd act out of petty spite, but the chance of them doing anything really bad were extremely low.

* Another common motif is a curse that makes people dance for overcharging customers. One extreme case is that of a male witch who made his host get stuck up a ladder for refusing to share his fruit. It's an odd story, and he comes across as a colossal dick : when someone invites you round for tea, what kind of jerk demands they share things they never promised to share ? "Oh, you won't let me change the TV channel ? Well I guess I'll glue you to your chair then !".

What's weird about many of these cases were that people sincerely believed, incredibly recently, that some among them possessed incredible powers but used them for the most petty gains. One nuisance witch was said to turn into a hare in order to sneak into a field and eat the vegetables, another was said to fly from town to town and teleport into beer cellars for a drink. These would be world-changing, reality-altering powers which people seemed to think, quite genuinely, were being used for utterly minor personal gains.

And when I say recently, I mean extremely recently, exactly as in Anne Ross. While a handful of the tales here are medieval, the majority are 19th century, with plenty even in the early 20th century. Even the more exotic claims could be found in the Victorian era, including stories of rescuing a girl from the fairies and the ritual killing of animals in magical rites. Strictly speaking the latter wouldn't be classed as a sacrifice as the animals – which could include, dramatically, horses – weren't being offered to a deity*, though functionally I suppose it would be basically the same. 

* As Keith Thomas also said, there's almost no evidence of witches engaging in devil worship, with only a single example in the whole book. There's even one story of a witch who was literally ripped apart by the Devil because she spoiled milk – which hardly suggests they were on good terms.

Which isn't something I typically associate with such a modern historical period. It's like finding a lost bunch of Druids but in an era of steam trains and newspapers... I also can't help escape the notion that my forefathers must have been incredibly backward people. Had the Enlightenment just passed rural Wales by ? Were we all isolated shepherds living in the misty valleys, scratching a living off rocks and relying on wizardry for survival ?

Witchcraft

One other common aspect is that witchcraft was seen very much as a learnable skill. When magic practitioners were consulted, very often the advice was for the client (not the wizard) to perform some magical rite, typically something very simple like writing down a charm and placing it in the correct location (see also the healing and cursing wells discussed last time). In one case a witch treated two patients, but only one recovered because the other hadn't heard the incantation, almost as though magic were believed to be a two-way thing.

To be fair to my deplorably uncritical forebears, there were at least some notes of skepticism about the whole thing. There are plenty of stories where the famous local wizard might successfully summon demons or fly fifty miles in a night* but then be totally unable to find their own stolen property. At least they didn't think of magic as being a foolproof solution; they seemed aware that things didn't always work.

* In one particularly pointless case, a wizard flew across the country to deliver a hot mince pie to the King. We're a weird bunch.

Skepticism proper also crops up from time to time. Some visitors write in downright mocking terms about the claims of the local wizardry, with one story in particular deriding an "ancient book" as clearly having been printed with moveable type. One case that stands out to me is when someone pointed out that the reason the oxen weren't moving was not because of a curse but because their harness was demonstrably too small. 

So the Welsh were not entirely stupid, and we have to be given full marks for creativity if nothing else. Even so, it's hard to understand why people went straight for magic as an explanation. Now I love Uncanny, but there are only a few cases where I can honestly say, "yep, that's plainly stupid*, why did you even report this ?" (like the one where the claimed supernatural monster is blatantly just a smelly goat). Yet virtually all the cases here fall into this category, and there are none at all which present anything that sounds even remotely like credible evidence.

* There are, to be sure, only a very few of the opposite extreme where I struggle to see any rational explanation. Most are in a happy, entertaining grey area; I think, if I'm honest, I would like to believe in some supernatural aspect, but equally honestly, I can't say that I actually do.

It's not that I'm surprised to find a lack of evidence for fairies, you understand. No, what I'm getting at is that I'm surprised such beliefs persisted for so long and until so recently without any good supporting data. The demand to have some explanation is extremely strong, and far outweighs the need for it to be correct. If a child went missing, fairies it must be; if the milk won't churn, we'll blame it on a witch and get on with our day.

Even so, I perpetually wonder that people really do seem to think like this. And I continuously fret over the notion that half of all people are stupider than the average, especially when I look at the state of the world today.

Hags and Hounds

Witches in Discworld come from magical stock : some innate ability is required. This notion appears absent from Welsh witches but with a few exceptions. For as well as the formidable but usually well-meaning village witch, there were also other beings of an entirely different order.

Fairies are one such case, being inherently magical and inhabiting a world all of their own. Spirits and demons are another, often of extreme power... and yet, like the Devil himself, usually unbelievably stupid (though presented as though those who outwitted him were absolute geniuses) and easily manipulated creatures. But two stand out as being truly the stuff of horror. As promised last time, I want to look at these in a bit more detail.

My favourite is the gwrach y rhibin, the hag of the mist. Stimpson notes that modern would-be witches are making a mistake when they adopt this term for themselves, because the term is one of insult and true gwrachs are implicitly understood to be inhuman monsters. He charts the evolution of the creature over about a hundred years. The gwrach begins as a mountain hag who comes at dusk to the windows of a house where someone is about to die, naming in a "shrill voice" the the unfortunate person. Then she gains an apron full of stones which dribble along the path behind her as well as wings with which she flies (so being upstairs will no longer save you). Next comes her extreme ugliness, leathery bat-like wings and a "cadaverous appearance", as well as an ability to literally freeze the blood in the veins of those who hear her. She can even change gender and has fire in her eyes, with a screech that can drive men insane.

The gwrach began as a northern mountain legend, related to the torrent spectra and Grey King (both other figures associated with streams and mists, with the streams explaining the trail of stones). But at least one tale, from 1878, reports a gwrach much further south, visiting the far more domestic setting of a pub in Cardiff : and a full-on gwrach too, with teeth like tusks and a gown trailing as she flew through the air.

There are a few other interesting hag figures not directly related to the gwrach. The canthrig bwt was a child-eating hag who dwelt in a cave. She features in varying legends, sometimes killed by a criminal to avoid his penance, sometimes contemporary with – and even asking for assistance from – King Arthur. Sometimes she's a giant. A smaller but intimidating 7-foot swamp-dwelling hag, the Morfa Borth, was supposed to cause disease by blowing on people's faces. 

And then there's the gwyll of Llyn Cwm Llwch, a lake-dwelling Druid priestess seeking 900 victims to secure her immortality. Falling in love with a prince come to retrieve his lover, a princess already in her thrall, the Druidess called on the Devil. A whole host of writhing corpses followed her out of the pool* together with the princess, but she – in a most un-fairytale-like fashion, rejected the prince and chose the Devil instead. The prince seized the gwyll and leapt over the cliff to their deaths. Good luck with that one, Disney.

* This is one of few stories featuring undead bodies of any sort. There are no vampires, no zombies, but arguably one werewolf (if we count them as undead). The latter was a nasty little man turned into a wolf twice for bad behaviour, but the second time the witch died before he could be turned back. He was shot some years later, c.1890.

The last hag I want to mention brings us also to the terrifying cwn annwn, the hell hounds*. These huge dogs also come with the mist, white of coat but sometimes with red ears or covered in gore, with flaming eyes and nostrils. Their howls foretell death, and apparently they had a good make-work plan because they were also feared as dangerous in their own right, being thought to eat sleeping children. Incidentally, this hardly suggests a mere scare-them-straight threat to misbehaving youngsters, because how would this do anything but keep them awake and unruly ?

* Google them and most of the pictures are adorable. Canthrig bwt returns almost nothing, which just goes to show how important it is to have actual books about this stuff. 

The legend gets even stranger, and is worth a full quote (from James Motley, 1848) :

They are guided by the Master, a dark gigantic figure, carrying a long hunting pole at his back, and with a horn slung around his neck... no-one must call to them, for if anyone says, "I join in the hunt", blood will rain, and pieces of dead bodies fall to the earth, which have been torn from the ground by a powerful witch who accompanies the procession. This witch is probably the Mallt y Nos, or "Matilda of the night".

Blimey ! The witch herself seems very similar to the gwarch, and may or may not be the same figure. Later her story was developed into something all of its own, said to be a noble lady who declared she'd not go to heaven if she couldn't hunt there. Now she's condemned to join the Wild Hunt for all eternity, and some say she's a figure of misery, having long since come to regret her casual blasphemy.

... but wait, there's one more ! Not really a hag or a witch, but a fairy. I have to mention Llyn Y Fan Fach because it's so popular and strange. I visited the lake once, in the depths of winter. Smaller pools were frozen and there was a bitter wind up in the mountains; at a frosty sunset, it's a place all too suggestive to the imagination. Anyway, the basic tale (there are others which involve giants and stuff, but this is the principle legend) is that a young lad goes to the lake minding his herds when he spots a beautiful girl emerging with her own cattle. He offers her bread, three times : in goldilocks fashion, it's the wrong consistency until on the third day he gets it right. She promises to marry him, but in true fairy tale Chekhov's Gun fashion, the condition is that he mustn't strike her three times without cause. 

The marriage is by all accounts a happy one, and they have three children who later go on to become great physicians. But here the versions differ. In some, he gets angry and indeed strikes her; in others, he does no more than tap her on the shoulder to get her attention. In all cases he has cause, such as her laughing inappropriately at a funeral*. Nonetheless, three blows are three blows, and she takes all her herds back into the lake and he never sees her again. Like most fairy tales it isn't clear what exactly compels her to do this, but unlike most, she does in fact return, though only to see and tutor her sons. This makes it all the stranger as to why she can't see her husband again, especially in the cases where he's done her no injury (in one, the "blow" is no more damaging or threatening than a pillow fight).

* I mean there's a clear reason for his actions, not that he's justified in the versions where he hits her violently. She herself appears to be morally impeccable.

What does it mean ? Is it supposed to describe the complexities of life, with rules we can't fully understand – a case of making no mistakes but still getting things wrong ? Or is the man a figure who literally can't control himself ? Perhaps the popularity is due to its ambiguity, a useful metaphor that's flexible to many different situations.

Conclusions

In all of these examinations of supernatural beliefs, I keep coming back to two questions : did people really believe all of this, and did those beliefs reflect a moral belief or a world view ?

The answer to the first is relatively straightforward here : largely yes. Most of the stories don't actually go anywhere or make any sort of moral point whatsoever, literally amounting to "the milk wouldn't churn until the witch removed the curse" and suchlike. They feel like very simple tales that do no more than claim the event happened. There's a fundamental honesty about their utter lack of narrative and highly limited entertainment value.

Of course, that doesn't mean everyone believed all of them, and presumably some were things people just straight-up invented to amuse each other. But that they thought people would take them seriously seems clear enough. It would be much harder to decide on the boundaries of what they believed, whether they really thought the gwrach had wings or not for example. But the general principles, the belief in witches, fairies, wizardry and charms and omens of death... that's secure enough. As to why such ideas persisted for so long, I don't care to speculate.

What of the morality ? Here it's more complicated. Some definitely fall firmly into "this is just the way the world works" variety : there's no moral defence against the hounds of hell; writing down a charm wasn't itself deemed a moral or immoral act. That there was seen no issue of the clergy being wizards, or witches usually (though not quite always) being professed Christians who happened to do magic, suggests that for the most part, the supernatural was an inescapable part of life. Nobody gets punished or rewarded for their actions in most of these stories – they might benefit or suffer, but that's not the same thing at all. They might be warnings or encouragements, but they're not moral lessons.

On the other hand, morality does creep in. Share your wealth with your community. Treat the old and the poor with generosity and kindness. Apologise when you give offence. Try to follow the rules and respect the elderly. And from time to time, don't assume your cart broke down because a witch broke it – use your stupid brain and do some proper maintenance every once in a while.

Myths, legends and folklore are too complex to pigeonhole. Morality tales or world view... sometimes they're one or the other, sometimes they're both, and sometimes they're about flying a mince pie to the king. Make of them what you will.

Review : Folklore of Wales

Following on from Sarah Clegg's The Dead of Winter, I couldn't resist picking up another couple of short books on folklore. Both of which I devoured over Christmas, so let's start the New Year with the happy business of witches and whatnot.

The Review Bit

First up, Anne Ross' Folklore of Wales. The only appropriate adjective for this is... well, nice. It has a very distinctive style, an unusual mix of the academic, the readable narrative, and the unbearably twee : for one annual festivity she describes how "the sweet music of the harp would further enhance the happy occasion", without embarrassment. It takes some getting used to, but the clarity and simplicity of the text generally makes up for the often rose-tinted view of the people of the past. And Ross knows when to be lucid and when to be deliberately obscure, when to be literal and when to be quasi-mystical.

As Clegg noted, academics of Ross' generation tended to view the originators of folklore as being simplistic peasants, uncreative and dull, with all their wild beliefs being vestiges of ancient pagan religions rather than their own creations. Ross certainly does fall into this trap quite heavily, rarely acknowledging that largely illiterate people can still be crazily imaginative. She definitely infers too much that weird cults and practices must have been remnants of lost religions proper... but she doesn't lean into this too heavily. We don't get lectured here, with Ross largely concentrating on presenting folkloric beliefs rather than analysing them. Contrary to Clegg's view, it's also clear she loves her subject matter* dearly – on more than one occasion I had to wonder if she was a pagan herself.

* No lectures here on the word "Celtic" either, a word only delivered with lengthy apologies in many recent books. And to be fair, she does sometimes note that some ideas are wholly modern.

So yeah, it's nice. It's a short book but with plenty of illustrations and figures, covering a very wide breadth of all aspects of Welsh folklore. At ~£15 it's pricey for a 150 page paperback, and it would have helped if she didn't keep complaining about the lack of available space* – just add another 50 pages if you want to ! Perhaps the biggest problem is some chapters are rather unstructured, with no clear link between one topic and the next. But it's rare to find any section which is uninteresting, and overall it's well worth a read. A solid 7/10 from me.

* Two other things. She's weirdly horny for cranes (the birds), describing them as though they were near-miraculous and – for some unknown reason – able to run as fast as a horse (hint : they can't). And worryingly, she seems to think that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

Wales, It Is A Silly Place

Right then, here's what I learned about my native country.

Commonly Celtic 

I've previously remarked on the similarities of pagan stories across Europe, but I wasn't aware of just how similar Welsh beliefs are with other traditions in Britain. For example the famous "Scottish" Kelpie also occurs in Welsh folklore as the Ceffl Dwr and appears to be essentially the same type of beastie : a water-dwelling horse, sometimes with shapeshifting abilities, that lures the unwary to their deaths. Good marketing on behalf of the Scots, but a bit unfair on the rest of us. Quit hogging the water horses !

I'll get my own deadly water horse, with blackjack, and hookers...

Fairies also occur throughout Sottish, Irish and Welsh myths in very similar form* : smallish (about three feet tall as a rule, though larger in the older stories), chaotic neutral (capable of both good and evil but primarily concerned with doing their own thing), living underground (though again not always in the earlier Welsh stories, where they seem to inhabit more of a parallel world than an underground kingdom), highly magical, and with a distinctive tendency to manipulate time.

* Although it should be noted that the Irish have specific mythological tales describing their origin. I'm not aware of any comparable Welsh stories, with our fairies just being a thing.

There are also soothsayers who are described almost like shamans, with similar ritualistic performances and a dress code not at all unlike what you'd expect for an ancient wizard (quoting third hand, with similar Scottish practises described elsewhere in the text) :

Whenever he assumed to practise the black art, he put on a most grotesque dress, a cap of sheepskin with a high crown, bearing a plume of pigeon's feathers, and a coat of unusual pattern, with broad hems, and covered with talismanic characters. In his hand he had a whip, the thong of which was made of the skin of an eel and the handle of bone.

He certainly sounds like an intimidating chap if nothing else.

Ross also points out more specific similarities between the Welsh Arthur and the Irish hero Finn MacCool. Both lead warbands (early Arthur is not even a king; later Arthur is an Emperor), both invade the otherworld, both command animals, both fight magical pigs*, and both are said to be sleeping rather than dead. She also notes, albeit a bit more tangentially, the similarity of Arthur and the Welsh for bear (arth), as well as the name of the magician Math (of the Mabinogion) and the Irish word for prophet.

* I know wild boar can be dangerous beasts indeed, but still, my modern notion of the farmyard varieties just doesn't accept them as much more threatening than Peppa Pig.

Not that Arthur is just a Welsh version of an Irish hero or the other way around, however. A final interesting suggestion from Ross (and others) is that the linguistic similarity suggests Arthur was originally a Celtic bear god, though this feels like quite the leap of faith to me. Regardless, the Arthurian traditions throughout the British Isles (and indeed France, as we shall see) all have unique attributes, and the English Arthur is no more the Welsh Arthur than he is secretly Finn MacCool in disguise. Perhaps they had a common point of origin, perhaps not... Arthur's origins and evolution are nothing if not complex*. Perhaps it's all just the result of similar cultures exploring similar themes.

* And Merlin's too. In a variation on the Vortigern tale of needing a child without a father, Ross gives a version where the locals set the far more realistic standards that the father only had sex with the mother once. There are even Welsh accounts where he's not Welsh at all, which is not what I expected from ancient legends.

Of course, the original Arthur was Welsh though. That's just common sense.

Monsters in the mist

Not all supernatural tales are as sophisticated or as pan-Brittanic as Arthur. Some are distinctly Welsh*, with a particular focus here on creatures of the mist. Of these, some are widely mentioned but little described, such as the Grey King who appears to have power to control mountain fog, but whether he's a figure of malevolence or just a personification of natural forces is... ahem... hazy. Sinister might be the best word, rather than outright evil.

* Although not entirely. Ross doesn't do a detailed comparison of everything, so it's possible that some of these are found elsewhere as well.

Far less ambiguous is the torrent spectre, a ghostly giant that dwells in streams and delights in causing deadly floods. Oddly, Ross says nothing of interest at all about giants more generally, which is strange as  they appear to be far more common in Welsh legends and folklore than our more famous dragons. She's also a bit confusing with the afanc, the strange crocodile-beaver water monster than does classic monster things, but according to the story here also seduces local maidens... whereas another version of the same local tale I found online says that the poor girl volunteered herself as bait – a far more heroic interpretation.

Some descriptions of the afanc also have it more straightforwardly as a water-dragon. Of the more familiar land-dwelling dragons, every book on Celtic folklore harps on about the incident under Vortigern's castle which gave rise to the big red one on the flag. Ross, to her great credit, gives another dragon story I'd never heard before. The legend says that snakes who drank women's milk and ate communion bread would be transformed into winged serpents or dragons. She relates one particular tale of a nest of such creatures at Moel Bentyrch, where the locals erected a stone pillar. This was not to commemorate the story but allegedly as an active defence against the monsters : covered with scarlet ribbon (which they supposedly hated) and concealing iron spikes in the hope they'd impale themselves on it.

Other creatures are less surreal and more straightforwardly horrific. My two favourite are the cwm annwn (the hounds of hell) and the gwarch y rhibyn (the hag of the mist). The hounds were ferocious white beasts whose appearance and howls presaged death, but they were also said to bite and even kill people, disappearing into the earth at the spot the grave would be dug. The gwarch was even worse. A banshee-like hideous hag that appeared in the mountain mists to rattle on windows, she evolved in the tellings into an almost Balrog-like monstrosity. More on both of these two when I review the next book.

This is getting much too scary, but fortunately some monsters are altogether weirder. Monstrous water-cats are apparently another widespread concept, of which the Cath Palug is surely both the strangest and the silliest. Arising from yet another magical pig hunted by Arthur, which went around birthing a whole assortment of different creatures before the cat, British stories have this later slain by one of Arthur's knights. Not so the French, however, who have the cat killing Arthur and going on to assume the throne. Which is quite possibly a case of deliberate mockery of a folk hero, and not very nice at all.

Believing in believing ?

All this raises the classic question of whether anyone ever really believed in any of this, or if later people just mistook fiction for documentation. Surely the Cath Palug becoming king was never believed by anyone at all and always understood to be fiction, but what of the rest ?

Here things get more interesting. Ross is explicit that many believed in some of this within living memory, and indeed a few still do – as communities, even, rather than the odd crazy loon. She recalls children around Bala being actively scared of a ghostly pig that would emerge at Halloween (best episode of Peppa ever), but also adults who believed in various lake monsters. There are even eyewitness accounts of fairies well into modern times, and people leaving milk out for them in living memory – enough to demonstrate that people took some of this stuff very seriously indeed. The gwarch also appears to have been a figure of genuine fear, not a story to scare naughty children with.

It wasn't just monsters either. Other supernatural ideas also appear to have been widely believed, especially omens and prophecies. The number of rituals for divination was huge : burning candles to see when the flame went out to check for ill health, or checking which way a rooster crowing at night happened to be looking*, or seeing the future through holes in bones, planting hemp at crossroads, and all manner of other bizarre practises and a myriad of variations on a theme. Basically anything you see on a cheap TV show featuring fortune-telling – yeah, someone did that. There are legions of examples of how such seemingly arbitrary rites were exactly that : a way to make a random decision when there was just no way to make a properly informed choice**. 

* Quite who would be able to get up in time to check this accurately isn't specified.

** In relation to the sheer randomness of it all, two examples I particularly like. First, the notion that eating the flesh of an eagle could allow you to cure shingles (and/or grant prophetic powers) by breathing and spitting on the affected area, an ability than some said would be retained for nine generations. Secondly how snakeskin could be used to cure essentially anything, including granting invulnerability. I mean, you can see how some weird ideas stick around a lot longer than they should, but you'd think people would eventually notice that consuming the ashes of snakeskin wasn't making them invincible.

One of the most eerie beliefs was that of the corpse candle. A traveller sees a blue night wandering the fields at night which goes into a house and into the room of someone who'll be found dead the next morning. Similarly, blue lights represented the soul in other, happier but equally weird circumstances, such as girls letting down a woollen ladder hoping to reveal a future lover. The idea seems to have been that their soul would climb the ladder as a blue light and then reveal themselves. 

There were also wells used for both healing and cursing, or even weather control by dropping in pieces of quartz to cause storms. It's interesting to chart how some wells began as extremely holy places but later became sites of evil used exclusively for cursing, dropping in charms and spells in the hope they'd summon some supernatural power to inflict harm on their targets. Many spells appear to be simple things, not much more than writing down what you wanted to happen and dropping it in the appropriate places. While this began as a pagan practise, the rituals evolved to become fully Christian : a sort of modified prayer would be written, explicitly calling on the power of God or Jesus or whatnot. And Ross notes that some such wells only gained their reputation in the modern era, acknowledging that not all folklore is the end product of centuries of tradition.

Conclusions

Ross does, however, state that we're likely now at the very end of such beliefs. She goes on something of a stock rant about the decline of society, how television is corrupting the young and the instant gratification of big-city living is eroding the value of storytelling and village life. It's not at all convincing, and I'd be willing to bet such laments have been made since the first caveman decided to build a hut.

Are such beliefs changing ? Yes, absolutely. They always do. It's difficult to think that we'll ever return to thinking that standing stones would take themselves down to the nearest lake for a drink, or that eating eagles would grant healing powers – and in some such cases, it's far better to let these ideas die (both for our own well-being and that of the eagles). Presumably, Ross wouldn't have felt so nostalgic had she been a bit more skeptical of the idea that most local customs are truly ancient.

That said, I concede that Ross presents a decent case for a more community-oriented view of the past. Not in the meddling, interfering sense we see in cases of witch hunts, but in the common activities open to all. These days we have essentially Christmas as the only major annual communal event, perhaps also New Year, with the others (Halloween, Easter, a few others) being much lesser. In contrast Ross describes festivals of similar magnitude to Christmas happening throughout the year, even just a century ago. Nowadays we have a great deal more activities available for like-minded people to participate in, but fewer that act for community unification.

Are we losing the sense of magic though ? I'm not so sure. If we accept that folk traditions are, in many cases, not ancient, then it seems to point towards how people think at a fundamental level. Two thousand years of the Christian faith was unable to stop people going from door to door with a horse's skull to engage in a rap-battle with the neighbours... I suspect at any point in history one would witness beliefs changing, some dying out while new ones spring up. As in Hogfather, there is a fixed quantity of belief in the universe. You can't kill crazy : if the gods are dead and we have killed them, then – sorry atheists – some other mad idea will simply emerge to fill the gap.