So here is it at last – the fourth and final volume of
Gillian Philip’s YA/adult fantasy series ‘REBEL ANGELS’, which began with the
electrifying ‘FIREBRAND’ and was followed by ‘BLOODSTONE’ and ‘WOLFSBANE’.
If you haven’t read the series yet, what a treat you have in
store as you follow the fortunes – over ben and glen and mountain moor and across
centuries – of Seth MacGregor, exiled leader of a clann of the Scottish Sithe,
and his struggle against their ruthless queen Kate NicNiven, who aims to rip
down the Veil which separates the faerie and mortal worlds, and impose her rule
on all.
At the end of ‘WOLFSBANE’ things were looking tough for
Seth, his lover Finn, and his son Rory, the ‘Bloodstone’ whom Kate NicNiven
needs to fulfil ancient prophecy and tear down the Veil.
Taken together, the four books are a tour-de-force, full of
action and excitement, with a huge cast of characters deftly managed. Seth is a
tough, laconic, sexy, flawed hero who does his best – and his best isn’t always
good enough. Gillian Philip isn’t one of those authors who spares her characters.People die – lots of them.People you like die.Terrible things
happen.There’s love and sex and loss and
grief and bloodshed. Forget 'Game of Thrones'. This is better.
One of the things I’ve loved about this series is its
boldness. FIREBRAND was set in the tough and bloody sixteenth century – you can
find a description of it here.But its
successor, BLOODSTONE, jumped straight to the twenty-first, taking advantage of
the faerie longevity (definitely not immortality) of the main characters, and
resituating them in the no less tough and bloody century we all inhabit today.
Exiled faerie characters, good and bad, live on Glasgow sink estates, or have served as
mercenaries in Iraq
or Afghanistan.
(Well, they’re fighters, they have to do something.) But the faerie world calls.Beyond the magical watergates, which may be
found anywhere from a wild woodland pool to a flooded basement in a condemned
tenement, lies home – no less dangerous but infinitely more beautiful, with its
kelpies, its selkies, its feuds and loyalties and treacheries.
ICEFALL introduces Philip’s most sinister creature yet, a
mummified child oracle – the Darkfall – which even Kate NicNiven must approach
with care. Deep in a cave:-
The breath of the Darkfall was
around her. Kate felt it whisper across her skin. Still she waited, until at
last a faint light sparked, and grew, and threw shadows that she wouldn’t look
at too closely.
The
child had been dead for years. Centuries. The light was cupped in its hands.
Cross-legged in its alcove on the cavern wall, the child lifted its head and
gazed at her with eyeless sockets.It
opened its mouth.
How does it feel?
It's one of those archetypal creations which seem immediately familiar,
as though you’ve always known about them. I believed in the Darkfall to the
marrow of my bones – and sat back to enjoy the ride. ICEFALL lives up to all the promise of the earlier
books. It’s explosive, violent and touching, with an emotionally satisfying ending that gives you, not necessarily everything you've hoped for - but everything you need.
ICEFALL by Gillian Philip will be published by Strident on March 18, 2014
In this fabulous picture, Arthur Rackham depicts the beauty, vastness and terror of the sea as a white storm-goddess. There's a shipwreck behind her, and before her, dwarfed on the strand, is a bedraggled mariner who looks as though he very much ought to flee. She's the embodiment of the terrifying waves we've all been seeing photographed in the news over the last few weeks, like this one from the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25618080
It's at times like these that we're reminded of what our ancestors always knew: the sea is dangerous. We can walk along its edges, we can set out across it in our frail boats; we can even swim and dive in it, but always with a risk. We don't belong there, we can't live there. And so we're fascinated by the animals that do: we tell tales about them. The seals, so like ourselves: warm-blooded breathing mammals - surely they must be magical creatures, to be able to inhabit this place we can't survive in? We follow them in imagination into their strange underwater world. We make myths of mermaids and selkies.
Mermaids and selkies represent the Other – they look like
humans but they aren’t, or perhaps they are only half human.
In all the folklore I’ve read about mermaids, they have no souls,
and sometimes they mourn this and sometimes they don’t care… Hans
Andersen’s little mermaid will disappear
like foam on the sea if she doesn’t win a soul: but when she does gain a
soul,
she stops being a mermaid. She becomes a spirit of the air, a sort of
angelic Christian spirit – and so in either case she ceases to
be, or at least loses her identity...
Most mermaid stories are sad. Some mermaids are actively dangerous. One Greek legend tells of a giant mermaid who rises out of the sea to
demand of passing ships, ‘What news of King Alexander?’ Unless she
receives the response, ‘He lives,
and reigns, and conquers the world!’ she wrecks the ship in her fury.
So mermaids are also a metaphor for the
beauty and danger of the sea, which has the power to wreck ships and
take men’s
lives. There’s a lot going on in mermaid
stories.
All fiction is affected by contemporary concerns. Hans Christian
Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’
was concerned with salvation because he wrote in a highly Christian
century. Nowadays, in our
multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-everything society, I think writing
about
mermaids offers an opportunity to explore issues of trust and
communication
between individuals who may look different from one another, who may
appear to
come from different worlds. What is it
to be ‘human’? How do we define it? How do we recognise similarities
and
reconcile differences? In very different
ways, Liz Kessler’s 'Emily Windsnap' books and Helen Dunmore’s ‘Ingo’
and its
sequels explore these questions, as well as issues of pollution and
climate
change. In 'Ingo', merfolk and humans were once one people, who have
diverged and now live in separate worlds - except that each race still
impacts the other. Liz Kessler's 'Emily Windsnap' is a little girl who
herself bridges the gap: her father is mer, her mother human. To which
world does she belong? Is it always necessary to choose?
And what about the original legends, such as the Cornish
Mermaid of Zennor or the Scottish selkie and kelpie stories? The legends are tremendously inspiring - but
you have to think about them, find out what they are saying to you. I wrote about the selkies, the shape-shifting
seal people, in ‘Troll Mill’, the second part of my trilogy ‘West of the Moon’. The legend is of a fisherman who
sees the selkies dancing on the moonlit beach in the form of lovely women, and
he snatches up one of their discarded sealskins so that the selkie girl can’t
escape into the sea. She has to marry
him and bear his children, but one day she finds where he’s hidden the
sealskin. At once she throws it on,
returns to the sea and abandons him and her human (half-human?) children forever.
For me, this legend seemed to be about the difficulty of
understanding one another, even in a bond as close as marriage – in a sense,
one’s partner is always the Other. It
speaks of the power struggle between couples – and the grief of a failed
partnership – and, very strongly I thought, about the new mother’s plunge into
post-natal depression. And that was how
I used it in my book, though keeping the magic and lyricism. In my short
mermaid book ‘Forsaken’, the human-mer partnership is the other way around,
based on an old Scandinavian ballad about a Mer-king who marries a mortal
woman, and one day she hears the church bells ringing above the sea, and goes
back to the land and leaves him forever.
Rarely in folklore do these stories end happily. But I read the legend, and my spine tingled,
and I wanted to see what would happen if one of the half-mer children went
looking for her mother… Would the ending
be different?
Margo Lanagan, in ‘The Brides of Rollrock Island’ (Australian title 'Sea Hearts') has found
something quite different in the selkie legends (see her post and my review). In her book, the seals are manipulated and
transformed in a way which denies their nature and damages the
wrongdoers. It’s a marvellous book which
will keep me thinking for – I suspect – years.
The beautiful women who step out of the seal carcasses appear, to the
rough island men who have obtained them like mail-order brides, to be the culmination of delight: but they and their sons
must live year in, year out, bearing the guilt of the seal women’s ever-present
mild but steadfast grief.
Franny Billingsley’s ‘The Folk Keeper’ is another story which is concerned with
questions of identity and belonging, a wonderfully
creepy take on the selkie legend. And
Gillian Philip’s ‘Firebrand’ and ‘Bloodstone’ include not only selkies, as
sinister death-omens, but her heroes of the Sithe, the Scottish faeries, ride
kelpies too (water horses from the lochs): sleek and dangerous and
man-eating. Kelpies appear again in Maggie
Stiefvater’s wonderful ‘The Scorpio Races’, an evocative and thrilling story of
racing the savage water horses on a wild Scottish island. Should men take and attempt to tame these
otherworldly creatures? Is it courage or
cruelty? Should they, perhaps, be left
to their own world and their own nature?
These are all strong, wonderfully written books. If you feel like taking a plunge into the perilous
seas of fairyland, do try them! And on Friday, the blog will continue to explore the selkie theme with a guest post from Laura Marjorie Miller.
Carterhaugh, a farm on the Buccleuch Estate, here seen across the Ettrick Water.
As a child I don’t think I was
aware of the story of TAM LIN, one of many mortal men stolen away by
the Queen of the Faeries. I’m not even sure when I first read or heard
such tales; stories of the faery people were simply a kind of background
music that I gradually noticed and that came to fascinate me. Tam Lin
is just one variation on a theme that sometimes has a happy ending, more
often less so: a mortal – more often than not a man – is foolish or
brave or naive enough to go away with the faeries.
There’s
a recurring notion that once involved with the People of Peace, you’re
going to need all your wits, courage and – usually – the help of a
friend to get away. More often than not, even all of those aren’t
enough, and that makes many of the stories melancholy.
Tam Lin is a little
different, and that’s why I’m fond of it. The traditional ballad begins
with a warning not to go to the woods of Carterhaugh, because young Tam
Lin is there – a man who was taken by the Queen of the Faeries, who now
protects their sacred woods, and who will demand a penalty of anyone who
trespasses. Earlier versions are pretty clear about what that penalty
will be... and when young Janet, whose father nominally owns the wood,
dares to go there to pick roses, she comes back not just wildly in love,
but pregnant.
Luckily the love is
mutual, and Tam explains to Janet that the Queen of Elfland saved and
took him when he fell from his horse in these woods. He is her prized
mortal lover, but every seven years the Queen must pay a tithe of souls
to Hell, and he fears that this Halloween, he will be the tithe. Janet
can save him, and free him from the Queen’s thrall, but it will take
huge courage. She must wait in the trees till she sees the faery folk
ride in procession through the woods. She must let the first two horses
pass, but when the third – a milk-white steed – appears, she must pull
him down from it.
The faeries, he warns
her, will be enraged, and now will come the hard part. She has to hold
onto him whatever happens, though they’ll morph him into many hideous
forms to try to make her let go. Sure enough, when she does as he tells
her and pulls him from his horse, he is turned into a snake, a newt, a
bear, a lion, red-hot iron, then burning lead. Through all the
transformations, Janet holds on for dear life, and at the touch of the
burning lead, forewarned by Tam, she tips her burden into the water of
the nearby well. Tam climbs out, returned to his human form and free of
servitude to the Queen. Though the Queens rails about the ‘theft’ of her
dearest mortal, she sullenly admits defeat, and the young couple live,
as they should, happily ever after.
Thomas Rhymer & the Queen of Elphame by Kate Greenaway
The story has many
parallels and similarities in other traditions and tales – Thomas
Rhymer, Cupid & Psyche, Childe Rowland, and even Beauty and the
Beast: with the last, for instance, there’s the forbidden forest and the
rose motif; the threatening inhuman figure with whom the heroine falls
in love; his former identity as a noble young lord; and the fact that
the heroine must go through dangers and horrors to rescue him. (There’s a
theory that Beauty & the Beast is a later bowdlerisation of the Tam
Lin story, leaving out the sex. I’ve always rather liked the Disney
version more than their other ‘fairytales’, not least for its gutsy
heroine, but it’s difficult to imagine it including ravishing among the
roses followed by pregnancy...)
The reversal of
‘traditional’ fairytale roles is one of the most appealing aspects of
Tam Lin. Tam is effectively helpless before the Faery Queen, though
there’s nothing emasculated about him. It’s Janet who must free him, and
she’s willing to undergo torments to do so. The fact that it all ends
happily is unusual for a tale of the Faery Court.
Belief in faeries is
still strong in areas of Scotland, which isn’t wholly surprising. There
are still places wild enough for the barriers between reality and
‘something else’ to seem remarkably, tangibly thin (not least the
haunting Isle of Colonsay, whose former laird MacPhie seems to have had
an unusual number of run-ins with the people of the Otherworld).
Superstitions still exist quite strongly (my mother-in-law’s gardener
swore no good would come of her telling him to cut down a rowan tree,
and blamed the foul deed immediately when the house subsequently burned
down). At a relative’s baptism I remember being quite sure that an aged
aunt’s refusal to drink from a green cup was down to an unwillingness to
offend the faeries. As it turned out the prejudice was an extreme
sectarian one, but I can’t believe the two aren’t linked, somehow and
somewhere in the past.
As for the disappearance
of unfortunate mortals, there are surprisingly recent tales.
Tomnahurich is a hill in the middle of Inverness that’s long been
associated with the Otherworld. A local story tells of two buskers,
dressed in kilts and carrying pipes (all perfectly normal) who seemed so
disoriented and terrified among the traffic that they spent a night in
the police cells. When they were brought before the sheriff next day –
luckily a Gaelic speaker, since they could speak nothing else – they
explained that their panic was down to the world seeming to have changed
a great deal since last night, when they were offered good money to
play at a gathering of lords and ladies beneath Tomnahurich hill.
At a loss, the sheriff
returned them for the time being to the cells, where a minister was
summoned to the disturbed young men. As soon as he began to pray, and
God’s name was mentioned, the young men, their instruments, and their
payment all crumbled to dust.
It’s a fanciful story,
and appears in many forms over the centuries, but in wilder landscapes
it’s not hard to imagine another barely-seen world, repressed (perhaps
temporarily...) by modernity and religion. Maybe that’s why the stories
and their attached superstitions are resilient enough to survive into
the contemporary world.
Or possibly it’s because
the fairy stories are so entangled with religion and superstition and
the beliefs of even more ancient times. The Fairy Hill of Aberfoyle in
Perthshire is believed to house the spirits of the local dead, in a way
that echoes the far older beliefs of those who buried their dead in
chambered cairns. Catherine Czerkawska’s play The Secret Commonwealth is
the tale of Aberfoyle minister Robert Kirk, who wrote a book of the
same title, and whose knowledge was thought to come straight from the
faeries themselves. He’s another one who meddled with them at his own
peril: angry at his betrayal of their secrets, the faeries were said to
have faked his death while abducting him to the Otherworld. He came to
his cousin in a dream, telling him of his captivity and promising to
appear at his own funeral – at which moment the cousin must throw a
knife over his head to free him. Kirk duly appeared – but alas, the
cousin was too gobsmacked to perform the required act, and the minister
was never seen again.
It’s a chilling and
wonderful story, but in Czerkawska’s play it’s used also as a metaphor
for the loss of the ancient beliefs, the gradual withdrawal of an older
tradition before the Christian ascendancy. What’s so fascinating about
the fairy traditions is the way they were not discarded, but woven into
the new beliefs: loathed by the Church, becoming associated with the
devil and necromancy – but never wholly dying out.
Yet that mingling isn’t
all bad. One of the loveliest cross-traditions, and my favourite, is the
one – varying from region to region – that says the faeries are the
rebel angels. Thrown out of Paradise by an angry God, the angels that
fell into the sea became seals and seal people. The ones that were
caught in the sky as they fell became the Merry Dancers, the Northern
Lights. And the ones that fell on land? They became the Faeries.
Gillian Philip writes across genres: ‘anything that comes into my head,
including fantasy, crime, science fiction and horror’. 'Bad Faith' is a Scottish-set dystopia about a society ruled by a tight-minded religious elite, and ‘Crossing the Line’
is a hard-edged thriller with a hint of the supernatural. As
Gabriella Poole she has written the 'Darke Academy' series for Hothouse.
Gillian’s 'Rebel Angels' series ('Firebrand', 'Bloodstone', and - out in August - 'Wolfsbane') have to be some of the best
new fantasies of recent years. Beginning in the 16th century at a time of witch
hunts and burnings, it follows the fortunes of Seth MacGregor, bastard
prince of the Scottish faeries, the Sithe, and an attractive hero in every sense of the word: lover, warrior, and owner of a sinister and beautiful waterhorse from the loch. The books are rooted in the history and folklore of Scotland, and quite
unflinching about the cruelty and hardship of the times. The Sithe are
ruled by a queen, Kate NicNiven, who is volatile, cruel and devious in
the best traditions of fairy queens, and who deliberately stretches the
loyalty of her subjects, Seth and his brother Conan included, almost to
breaking point. There’s a protecting Veil between the land of the Sithe
and the mortal world, and Kate wants to tear it away. And she invokes
the help of some hauntingly unpleasant creatures called the Lammyr…
Picture credits: Carterhaugh: The copyright on this image is owned by Richard Webb and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
Thomas the Rhymer & the Queen of Elphame by Kate Greenaway, d. 1901. Wikimedia Commons. Cleaned up from a scan found at Winterspells
Are 'mermaid books' a genre? There’ve been plenty of mermaid stories published in the last
six to eight years – Helen Dunmore’s ‘Ingo’ series and Liz Kessler’s lovely ‘Emily Windsnap’ titles spring instantly to mind: but they've been too different to be connected or
viewed as a genre – certainly not in the same way that vampire or werewolf
stories have. This is no bad thing. For even though what seems to be a sudden fashion is often no more than a different
way of joining up the dots, I’ve got a feeling that mermaids (and their
underwater kin the selkies and kelpies) offer more various kinds of opportunity
to the writer than the biting of throats and sucking of blood. Subtler, more
lyrical. A different world.
Mermaids and selkies represent the Other – they look like
humans but they aren’t, or perhaps they are only half human.
In all the folklore I’ve read about mermaids, they have no souls,
and sometimes they mourn this and sometimes they don’t care… Hans Andersen’s little mermaid will disappear
like foam on the sea if she doesn’t win a soul: but when she does gain a soul,
she stops being a mermaid. She becomes a spirit of the air, a sort of angelic Christian spirit – and so in either case she ceases to
be, or at least loses her identity... Plus, mermaids and selkies
physically inhabit a place we can’t survive in, the world of the sea: so to
write a book about mermaids is to take the reader on an imaginative journey
into a different world.
Most mermaid stories are sad. Some mermaids are actively dangerous. (One legend tells of a giant mermaid who rises out of the sea to
demand of passing ships, ‘What news of King Alexander?’ Unless she receives the response, ‘He lives, reigns, and conquers the world!’ she wrecks the ship in her fury.) So mermaids are also a metaphor for the
beauty and danger of the sea, which has the power to wreck ships and take lives. There’s a lot going on in mermaid
stories.
For me this sombre illustration by Arthur Rackham suggests the danger of desiring the Other
All fiction is affected by contemporary concerns. Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’
was concerned with salvation because he wrote in a highly Christian
century. Nowadays, in our
multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-everything society, I think writing about
mermaids offers an opportunity to explore issues of trust and communication
between individuals who may look different from one another, who may appear to
come from different worlds. What is it
to be ‘human’? How do we define it? How do we recognise similarities and
reconcile differences? In very different
ways, Liz Kessler’s 'Emily Windsnap' books and Helen Dunmore’s ‘Ingo’ and its
sequels explore these questions, as well as issues of pollution and climate
change. In 'Ingo', merfolk and humans were once one people, who have diverged and now live in separate worlds - except that each race still impacts the other. Liz Kessler's 'Emily Windsnap' is a little girl who herself bridges the gap: her father is mer, her mother human. To which world does she belong? Is it always necessary to choose?
And what about the original legends, such as the Cornish
Mermaid of Zennor or the Scottish selkie and kelpie stories? The legends are tremendously inspiring - but
you have to think about them, find out what they are saying to you. I wrote about the selkies, the shape-shifting
seal people, in ‘Troll Mill’, the second part of my trilogy ‘West of the Moon’. The legend is of a fisherman who
sees the selkies dancing on the moonlit beach in the form of lovely women, and
he snatches up one of their discarded sealskins so that the selkie girl can’t
escape into the sea. She has to marry
him and bear his children, but one day she finds where he’s hidden the
sealskin. At once she throws it on,
returns to the sea and abandons him and her human (half-human?) children forever.
For me, this legend seemed to be about the difficulty of
understanding one another, even in a bond as close as marriage – in a sense,
one’s partner is always the Other. It
speaks of the power struggle between couples – and the grief of a failed
partnership – and, very strongly I thought, about the new mother’s plunge into
post-natal depression. And that was how
I used it in my book, though keeping the magic and lyricism. In my short
mermaid book ‘Forsaken’, the human-mer partnership is the other way around,
based on an old Scandinavian ballad about a Mer-king who marries a mortal
woman, and one day she hears the church bells ringing above the sea, and goes
back to the land and leaves him forever.
Rarely in folklore do these stories end happily. But I read the legend, and my spine tingled,
and I wanted to see what would happen if one of the half-mer children went
looking for her mother… Would the ending
be different?
Margo Lanagan, in ‘The Brides of Rollrock Island’, has found
something quite different in the selkie legends (see her post and my review). In her book, the seals are used, manipulated,
transformed, in a way which denies their nature and damages the
wrongdoers. It’s a marvellous book which
will keep me thinking for – I suspect – years. The beautiful women who step out of the seal carcasses appear, to the
rough island men who have obtained them like mail-order brides, to be the culmination of delight: but they and their sons live with the guilt of the seal women’s ever-present
mild but steadfast grief.
Franny Billingsley’s ‘The Folk Keeper’ is another story which is concerned with
questions of identity and belonging, a wonderfully
creepy take on the selkie legend. And
Gillian Philip’s ‘Firebrand’ and ‘Bloodstone’ include not only selkies, as
sinister death-omens, but her heroes of the Sithe, the Scottish faeries, ride
kelpies too (water horses from the lochs): sleek and dangerous and
man-eating. Kelpies appear again in Maggie
Stiefvater’s wonderful ‘The Scorpio Races’, an evocative and thrilling story of
racing the savage water horses on a wild Scottish island. Should men take and attempt to tame these
otherworldly creatures? Is it courage or
cruelty? Should they, perhaps, be left
to their own world and their own nature?
These are all strong, and wonderfully written books. If you feel like taking a plunge into the perilous
seas of fairyland, do try them!
Gillian Philip’s first YA fantasy, ‘Firebrand’, was one of the best books I read last year. I talked about it in my introduction to Gillian's Fairytale Reflection on Tam Lin. Set in the 16th century at a time of witch hunts and burnings, it followed the fortunes of Seth MacGregor, feral prince of the Sithe, the Scots faeries, charismatic and difficult. The Sithe are ruled by a cruel and devious queen, Kate NicNiven. There’s a protecting Veil between the land of the Sithe and the mortal world, and Kate wants to tear it away. To do so, she invokes the help of some hauntingly unpleasant creatures called the Lammyr – stretching the loyalty of Seth and his beloved brother Conan almost to breaking point. The book is dramatic, beautifully written, and rooted in the folk and faerie lore of Scotland.
Now here at last is the sequel (second in a series of four): ‘Bloodstone’. And - surprising, yet the traditional penalty for those who spend time in Elfland – we find four hundred years have passed. It was a brave move to place Seth and Conan in the 21st century, and it works. Banished from their faerie homeland until they can find the mysterious Bloodstone, they have had to endure long centuries beyond the Veil – parted, except for the occasional illicit foray, from all they hold dear. On one such brief mission, the death of a comrade leaves Seth and Conan guardians of his baby daughter Finn, who is brought up in the human world unaware of her Sithe blood. Then Seth embarks on an ill-fated romance with a mortal woman, earning deep resentment from her young son, Jed. And Kate is still scheming, and the Bloodstone is about to return…
“Bloodstone” is a complex, dramatic and rewarding book – always vivid and fast-moving, but with a lot going on. Rather like her hero Seth, Gillian Philip expects readers to keep up. If your attention does stray, it’s possible to get a little lost, but hey – it’s nice not to be treated like an imbecile. It's also very nice to read a book about faeries in which the plot is not focussed on a romance between impossibly gorgeous doomed teenage lovers.
Four hundred years of exile have taken their toll on the characters. Still sexy and sarcastic, Seth - dressed in jeans and T-shirt, mouth full of modern slang - has become harder, more difficult, more self-torturing. Responsible Conan is loving and honourable, but also weary and explosive. Young Finn is angry too, and so is Jed – and as they all take it out on one another by turns, there are sometimes possibly a few too many warring temperaments. Nevertheless the story swept me along like a river in spate. The first person narration is brilliantly characterised: as here in Seth’s description of young Finn:
“A surly little thing with pale protuberant eyes, she reminded me of a deep-water fish. The older she grew, the more I tended to think of a Moray eel, lurking in darkness, shy and alone, hiding lethal teeth. And let me tell you, you haven’t felt native hatred till you’ve seen it in the eyes of a six-year-old.”
There are all sorts of mysteries lurking in the shadows. I love the savage waterhorses which Conan and Seth both ride, and I love the Selkyr, the seal people, sinister and beautiful and wholly Other. This passage on an abandoned moonlit beach had shivers running down my spine:
The black-bellied waves were fringed with phosphorescence, and against their light was a figure: too tall, too lanky to be Leonora, hunched into a long coat with an upturned collar. The coat that was no coat moved and glistened like a wet pelt. The creature wearing it turned, and I sucked in a cold salty breath.
And it just gets better. I’m looking forward very much to the next in the series.And in one of the best compliments I’ve ever been paid, Gillian has used a verse from my poem ‘Janet Speaks’ as the epigraph to the book:
Oh Queen of Fays -
If I had known of this day's deed -
I would have let your knight, Tam Lin
Ride down to Hell on his milk-white steed.
(You can find the whole poem on the new page in the tabs - and next week I'm beginning a new series.)
Welcome back to Fairytale Reflections! And welcome to my first guest of the year, the Scottish YA author Gillian Philip.
Since Gillian lives in the far north of Scotland (with her husband, nine year old twins, two dogs, two psycho cats and eight nervous fish), she and I haven't actually met, yet - but since I always feel happier the further north I go (and I’ve got my eye on a trip to the Outer Isles one of these days) I feel sure it’s only a matter of time. And I don’t have to tell you all that one of the wonders of the internet is the way it’s possible to make long distance friends – especially friends whose books are as striking and compelling as Gillian’s. She writes across genres: ‘anything that comes into my head, including fantasy, crime, science fiction and horror’. ‘Bad Faith’ is a Scottish-set dystopia about a society ruled by a tight-minded religious elite, and ‘Crossing the Line’ is a hard-edged thriller with a hint of the supernatural. And as Gabriella Poole she has written the 'Darke Academy' series for Hothouse.
Gillian’s latest book, ‘Firebrand’, is a full-blooded plunge into fantasy and has to be one of the best books I read last year. Set in the 16th century at a time of witch hunts and burnings, it follows the fortunes of Seth MacGregor, bastard prince of the Scottish faeries, the Sithe, and an attractive hero in every sense of the word. Here’s a moment when he rides a sinister and beautiful waterhorse from the loch:
Smooth skin under my palm. The opalescent shine of its hide as I drew my hand across its neck and the hairs flattened, then sprang back... The cry of a night bird…
And then insanity.
Nothing else on earth could have moved so fast… When the creature reached the crest of the hill, I saw the whole moor and the hills spread out beneath me, the jagged broken curve of the earth at the horizon. I couldn’t get off the horse. I didn’t want to. Plunging, swerving, it swivelled its head to enjoy my awe and my terror. Its jaws opened in a knowing grin, and the canines flashed again. And then, impossibly, it sprang down the precipitous slope. Straight for the dark water and its lair.
The book is rooted in the history and folklore of Scotland, and is quite unflinching about the cruelty and hardship of the times. The Sithe are ruled by a queen, Kate NicNiven, who is volatile, cruel and devious in the best traditions of fairy queens, and who deliberately stretches the loyalty of her subjects, Seth and his brother Conan included, almost to breaking point. There’s a protecting Veil between the land of the Sithe and the mortal world, and Kate wants to tear it away. And she invokes the help of some hauntingly unpleasant creatures called the Lammyr…
‘Firebrand’ opens with the most dramatic of cliff-hangers, and I’m not sure I breathed till I got to the end, where there was a twist I never saw coming, but which was perfectly satisfying. I want more, so it’s a good thing there are three sequels on the way.
Even for an author, Gillian can boast a pretty wild variety of jobs. She says, ‘I’ve been writing all my life, but have also worked as a record store assistant, theatre usherette, barmaid, sales rep, political assistant, radio presenter, typesetter, and as a singer in an Irish bar in Barbados. I’ve always loved the stories of the Scottish landscape, which shimmers with myth and legend; the old tales seem to go on existing just below the surface, in the cities as well as the wild places.’
I asked her to pick a Scottish tale to tell us about, and she has chosen -
TAM LIN
As a child I don’t think I was aware of the story of TAM LIN, one of many mortal men stolen away by the Queen of the Faeries. I’m not even sure when I first read or heard such tales; stories of the faery people were simply a kind of background music that I gradually noticed and that came to fascinate me. Tam Lin is just one variation on a theme that sometimes has a happy ending, more often less so: a mortal – more often than not a man – is foolish or brave or naive enough to go away with the faeries.
There’s a recurring notion that once involved with the People of Peace, you’re going to need all your wits, courage and – usually – the help of a friend to get away. More often than not, even all of those aren’t enough, and that makes many of the stories melancholy.
Tam Lin is a little different, and that’s why I’m fond of it. The traditional ballad begins with a warning not to go to the woods of Carterhaugh, because young Tam Lin is there – a man who was taken by the Queen of the Faeries, who now protects their sacred woods, and who will demand a penalty of anyone who trespasses. Earlier versions are pretty clear about what that penalty will be... and when young Janet, whose father nominally owns the wood, dares to go there to pick roses, she comes back not just wildly in love, but pregnant.
Luckily the love is mutual, and Tam explains to Janet that the Queen of Elfland saved and took him when he fell from his horse in these woods. He is her prized mortal lover, but every seven years the Queen must pay a tithe of souls to Hell, and he fears that this Halloween, he will be the tithe. Janet can save him, and free him from the Queen’s thrall, but it will take huge courage. She must wait in the trees till she sees the faery folk ride in procession through the woods. She must let the first two horses pass, but when the third – a milk-white steed – appears, she must pull him down from it.
The faeries, he warns her, will be enraged, and now will come the hard part. She has to hold onto him whatever happens, though they’ll morph him into many hideous forms to try to make her let go. Sure enough, when she does as he tells her and pulls him from his horse, he is turned into a snake, a newt, a bear, a lion, red-hot iron, then burning lead. Through all the transformations, Janet holds on for dear life, and at the touch of the burning lead, forewarned by Tam, she tips her burden into the water of the nearby well. Tam climbs out, returned to his human form and free of servitude to the Queen. Though the Queens rails about the ‘theft’ of her dearest mortal, she sullenly admits defeat, and the young couple live, as they should, happily ever after.
The story has many parallels and similarities in other traditions and tales – Thomas Rhymer, Cupid & Psyche, Childe Rowland, and even Beauty and the Beast: with the last, for instance, there’s the forbidden forest and the rose motif; the threatening inhuman figure with whom the heroine falls in love; his former identity as a noble young lord; and the fact that the heroine must go through dangers and horrors to rescue him. (There’s a theory that Beauty & the Beast is a later bowdlerisation of the Tam Lin story, leaving out the sex. I’ve always rather liked the Disney version more than their other ‘fairytales’, not least for its gutsy heroine, but it’s difficult to imagine it including ravishing among the roses followed by pregnancy...)
The reversal of ‘traditional’ fairytale roles is one of the most appealing aspects of Tam Lin. Tam is effectively helpless before the Faery Queen, though there’s nothing emasculated about him. It’s Janet who must free him, and she’s willing to undergo torments to do so. The fact that it all ends happily is unusual for a tale of the Faery Court.
Belief in faeries is still strong in areas of Scotland, which isn’t wholly surprising. There are still places wild enough for the barriers between reality and ‘something else’ to seem remarkably, tangibly thin (not least the haunting Isle of Colonsay, whose former laird MacPhie seems to have had an unusual number of run-ins with the people of the Otherworld). Superstitions still exist quite strongly (my mother-in-law’s gardener swore no good would come of her telling him to cut down a rowan tree, and blamed the foul deed immediately when the house subsequently burned down). At a relative’s baptism I remember being quite sure that an aged aunt’s refusal to drink from a green cup was down to an unwillingness to offend the faeries. As it turned out the prejudice was an extreme sectarian one, but I can’t believe the two aren’t linked, somehow and somewhere in the past.
As for the disappearance of unfortunate mortals, there are surprisingly recent tales. Tomnahurich is a hill in the middle of Inverness that’s long been associated with the Otherworld. A local story tells of two buskers, dressed in kilts and carrying pipes (all perfectly normal) who seemed so disoriented and terrified among the traffic that they spent a night in the police cells. When they were brought before the sheriff next day – luckily a Gaelic speaker, since they could speak nothing else – they explained that their panic was down to the world seeming to have changed a great deal since last night, when they were offered good money to play at a gathering of lords and ladies beneath Tomnahurich hill.
At a loss, the sheriff returned them for the time being to the cells, where a minister was summoned to the disturbed young men. As soon as he began to pray, and God’s name was mentioned, the young men, their instruments, and their payment all crumbled to dust.
It’s a fanciful story, and appears in many forms over the centuries, but in wilder landscapes it’s not hard to imagine another barely-seen world, repressed (perhaps temporarily...) by modernity and religion. Maybe that’s why the stories and their attached superstitions are resilient enough to survive into the contemporary world.
Or possibly it’s because the fairy stories are so entangled with religion and superstition and the beliefs of even more ancient times. The Fairy Hill of Aberfoyle in Perthshire is believed to house the spirits of the local dead, in a way that echoes the far older beliefs of those who buried their dead in chambered cairns. Catherine Czerkawska’s play The Secret Commonwealth is the tale of Aberfoyle minister Robert Kirk, who wrote a book of the same title, and whose knowledge was thought to come straight from the faeries themselves. He’s another one who meddled with them at his own peril: angry at his betrayal of their secrets, the faeries were said to have faked his death while abducting him to the Otherworld. He came to his cousin in a dream, telling him of his captivity and promising to appear at his own funeral – at which moment the cousin must throw a knife over his head to free him. Kirk duly appeared – but alas, the cousin was too gobsmacked to perform the required act, and the minister was never seen again.
It’s a chilling and wonderful story, but in Czerkawska’s play it’s used also as a metaphor for the loss of the ancient beliefs, the gradual withdrawal of an older tradition before the Christian ascendancy. What’s so fascinating about the fairy traditions is the way they were not discarded, but woven into the new beliefs: loathed by the Church, becoming associated with the devil and necromancy – but never wholly dying out.
Yet that mingling isn’t all bad. One of the loveliest cross-traditions, and my favourite, is the one – varying from region to region – that says the faeries are the rebel angels. Thrown out of Paradise by an angry God, the angels that fell into the sea became seals and seal people. The ones that were caught in the sky as they fell became the Merry Dancers, the Northern Lights. And the ones that fell on land? They became the Faeries.
POSTSCRIPT:
Gillian's wonderful post jogged my memory. About twenty years ago I wrote a poem based on Tam Lin. Like Gillian, I loved the ballad, but couldn't help wondering what happened next. Would the Faery Queen really leave the lovers alone? Or would she look for some sort of revenge? I dug out the poem and showed it to Gillian, who agreed that this was just the sort of thing the Queen would do. (I know Kate Nic Niven would!) Here's the poem:
Janet Speaks:
‘Oh Tam Lin –
If I had known of this night’s deed
I would have torn out your two grey eyes
And put back in two eyes of tree.’
So said the faery queen that night on the road
when I quenched my love in the peat pool,
but that was not the end of it.
For winter nights, the Sithe shriek round the house,
calling down the chimney like a black wind
plucking the slates away: ‘Come back, Tam Lin!
You who gave a girl a rose from the briar bush!
The heart’s fire dwindles. Do you remember Elf-hame?
And my love, my love throws back the blanket,
and I grip his arm as I gripped the red-hot iron
in unflinching hands.
‘Tam Lin, can you bear to grow old?
Do you remember the land of young apples?
What have you lost? What have you gained, Tam Lin,
but aches and agues, toothlessness and death?’
howl the voices down the chimney.
They always bring a night of storm, and all
my paternosters cannot turn them away.
‘Come wind, come rain,
beat on this house until the lintels weep,
beat on this house until the candles quiver
and cold draughts whip under the door and blow
over the floor, cross currents of unease.
Let him feel mortal!’
I could bear all this.
Only, my youngest boy came in today,
with a rose in his hand. ‘Who gave you that?’ said I.
‘O mother,’ said he, ‘a lady in the brakes
of Carterhaugh. Her kirtle green as grass,
with silver chains that tinkled as she walked.’
‘Your son shall come with me, Janet,
In yon green hill to dwell.
Your son shall be my knight, Janet,
And he shall serve me well.
‘His eyes shall be of wood, Janet,
Cut from an alder tree,
And you may keep Tam Lin, Janet,
For he’s too old for me.’
It’s a cruel price.
I would rather have died in giving birth to him.
I would rather my love rose and went out to them.
Oh Queen of Fays –
If I had known of this day’s deed,
I would have let your knight, Tam Lin,
ride down to Hell on his milk-white steed.
Picture credits: from 'Tam Lin' by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Charles Mikolaycak
Taken together, the four books are a tour-de-force, full of
action and excitement, with a huge cast of characters deftly managed. Seth is a
tough, laconic, sexy, flawed hero who does his best – and his best isn’t always
good enough. Gillian Philip isn’t one of those authors who spares her characters. People die – lots of them. People you like die. Terrible things
happen. There’s love and sex and loss and
grief and bloodshed. Forget 'Game of Thrones'. This is better. 
