Wild Edric - and the art of writing

by Pauline Fisk

My whole life has been spent trying to bring together ‘real life’ and the world of fantasy, in particular by finding new and interesting ways of expressing a sense of the magical in my writing. Ever since I was five years old, hunting down fairies in the back alley behind my parents’ house, a sense of more to life than meets the eye has been part of who I am.  When I was a child, life was one big fairy tale.  That was how I felt.  But how to get into that fairy tale?  How to make that fairy tale my life, and make it real and be a part of it? 

It was through stories that I found the way.  I couldn’t write when I was five years old, but I could make up stories and that was what I did, standing at the garden fence, telling them out loud to the big children in the house next door, lined up on their side of the fence asking, ‘What happened next?’   But those stories, made up off the top of my head, were ephemeral.  They were fly-by-nights, whereas words on paper had a strange new durability which I discovered when I learnt to write.   Describing Winnie the Pooh hunting honey made me part of the story.  Adventuring with the Famous Five turned them into a Famous Six.  I made those things my own, and I made them real - and simply by writing about them. 

This is something I’ve been doing ever since.  When, at the end of ‘Mad Dog Moonlight’, I wrote about a river flowing through the stars, I put myself onto that river and sailed away.  When Abren in ‘Sabrina Fludde’ turned to water and flowed down a mountain, I flowed too.  And when hoof-prints beat upon the hill behind my house, I knew that Wild Edric, himself - that glorious superhero of Shropshire legend - was passing in the night.  By writing him into ‘Midnight Blue’, I wasn’t just making him up.  The act of writing brought him to life.

Tolkien defines fairy tales as stories about the adventures of humankind in Faerie, and here amongst the hills, valleys, woods and towns of my home county, Shropshire, Faerie’s all around me.  It’s where I live.  It’s a fabled place.  And I’m twice blessed, because it also exists inside my head.          

The power of imagination is the land called Faerie.  ‘We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce horror.  We may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine, or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold.  In such ‘fantasy’ as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins, Man becomes a sub-creator.’

Tolkien again, who wrote fairy tales for adults to read as a natural branch of literature rather than playing at ‘being children’, or pretending to enjoy them for the sake of the kids.   ‘When we can take green from grass, blue from leaves and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power,’ he wrote.   And what else compares to having that power?  

As a child I was captivated by Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales.  As a  teenager I discovered Alan Garner’s ‘Weirdstone of Brisingamen’.  Starting out in life as a writer myself, I fell head-first into Tolkien, and took some extracting.  Finally I found my own voice and my own way into Faerie.   This was a long process, which is what the word ‘finally’ is all about.  For many years I thought that if I sounded like the writers I admired, Emily Bronte, Dylan Thomas, JRR Tolkien, Graham Greene – whoever the favourite of the moment might be – then I’d be a ‘proper’ writer but, if I sounded like myself, nobody would ever read me.    A book of terrible short stories was published at the age of twenty-three [long since out of print, thank God], its lofty style definitely not mine.   It wasn’t until years later, embarking upon ‘Midnight Blue’ that I developed the confidence as a writer to be myself. 

I’m indebted to that decision.  ‘Midnight Blue’ would never have been written without it.  But it also would never have been written without Charlotte Burne, the first woman president of the Folklore Society, whose ‘Shropshire Folk-Lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings’ introduced me to Wild Edric, whose mysterious presence haunts ‘Midnight Blue’. 

 According to legend, whenever England is in danger, Wild Edric and his knights rise up from their sleep of centuries beneath a rugged range of Shropshire hills called the Stiperstones, and ride out in warning of impending doom. Charlotte Burne recorded conversations with people who claimed he’d been heard and seen before both the Battle of Waterloo and the First World War.  

The history behind the story, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, tells of a local lord who, having refused to submit to the Norman Conquest by raising a rebellion which was decisively defeated, betrayed his people by joining  forces with the Conqueror.  For this dastardly about-face, ‘Wild Edric’, as he became known, was doomed to sleep beneath the Stiperstones with his knights, only ever finding the release of death when England returned to her rightful people.  He sleeps still, and some legends have added the comfort of a fairy wife, the Lady Godda, though others have him meeting and losing her before his days of betrayal and doom. 

Wild Edric’s is a great story and, both as legend and history, he’s alive and well in Shropshire.  After writing him into ‘Midnight Blue’, I attended a history society meeting where local Stiperstones people claimed to have heard him riding by, and one person even claimed direct descent.  And he’s alive and well in my life too. I've talked about him at a weekend I’m running on myths and legends and how to use them in creative writing.  I've even led a walk up to the Devil’s Chair, where he and his knights are supposed to burst out of the ground. 

It’s years now since I wrote ‘Midnight Blue’, but Wild Edric has stayed with me ever since.  My books have included other characters I first came across in Charlotte Burne. including the highwayman Humphrey Kynaston, and the goddess of the River Severn, brought to life in ‘Sabrina Fludde’.  But nowhere have I found a sadder doom than Edric’s, lying beneath cold rocks, unable to die - unable even to be at peace.

The romance of Edric is Arthurian.  He too is meant to sleep until his country is set free.  And the legend of Alderley, which Alan Garner drew on in his book, ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’, calls forth sleeping knights as well.  They’re a universal emblem – and yet they’re a personal emblem too, especially if you’re a writer.

Every writer’s like a sleeping knight beneath a hill, brought to life when he or she has a story to tell, rising in the dark to gallop forth with a laugh, or tears or a chill breeze to broadcast to the waiting world.  When I’m writing, I feel alive. When I’m not, I feel asleep.  It’s as powerful as that.   Maybe the idea of writers as the white-knight guardians of a watching world sounds a bit fanciful to you. But I’d say not.  I’d say what we do matters more than anyone could ever say, and that the idea of an Edric who performs the role of guardian is only there because people want it, just as they want writing, and stories and people like me. 

So I can’t help but identify with Wild Edric.  He and I are two sides of the same coin.  He’s an age-old legend, trying to break free, and I’m a fresh-faced pilgrim at the gate of Faerie, trying to get in.

PAULINE FISK'S first book, ‘Midnight Blue’ won the Smarties Book Prize in 1990. It's the story of a girl called Bonnie who has just found a home with her very young mother, in an inner city block of flats.  Just as it looks as if they can be happy together and build their relationship, her controlling and malevolent grandmother moves in: and Bonnie runs away, finding refuge in a mid-city oasis, a walled garden where a mysterious man called Michael is building a hot air balloon with the help of a strange shadowy boy.  Michael’s aim is to fly to the land beyond the sky:

Beyond the sky.  Not ‘in outer space’ or ‘in another galaxy’, but beyond the sky… as though it were possible to peel away the edge of the blue and pass straight through.

‘Sabrina Fludde’(2001), opens with a body floating down the River Severn, the body of a lost, almost drowned girl whose memory is lost too, who plucks the strange name Abren out of the air for herself...  In fact, the book is full of lost characters with strange names. In the end, Abren has to return to her own source (and that of the river) on the mountain Plynlimon, where a cold and sinister family claim her as their own.  Alone and in terrible danger, she makes her escape down to the sea.  And 'Mad Dog Moonlight' (2009) is another tale of a child seeking his true self and a place to belong.  Pauline's latest book is 'Into the Trees', in which a boy comes to Belize looking for his father and falls in with a group of gap year volunteers.  Living in the trees will change them all. 

Pauline's books are beautifully written, interweaving strands of the real world with airy fibres so fine, they are barely even fantasy – more like mysticism, or elemental forces.  She writes about vast emotional themes of love, anger, insecurity, and the need to belong to people and a place.  They leave a lasting imprint on the mind.

Picture credits

The Wild Hunt Illustration by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine,Wikimedia Commons

Herne the Hunter  Illustration by George Cruikshank, scan by Steven J Plunkett, Wikimedia Commons

"Midnight Blue"

Today I'm celebrating the re-release, as an E-book, of a strange and wonderful YA novel: Pauline Fisk's ‘Midnight Blue', which won the Smarties Book Prize in 1990.  It's the story of a young girl, Bonnie, who is about to begin a new life with her mother away from the influence of her controlling and malevolent grandmother.  But the grandmother finds them and Bonnie runs away, finding refuge in a mid-city oasis, a walled garden in which a mysterious man called Michael is building a hot air balloon with the help of a strange shadowy boy.  Michael’s aim is to fly to the land  'beyond the sky.  Not ‘in outer space’ or ‘in another galaxy’, but beyond the sky… as though it were possible to peel away the edge of the blue and pass straight through.'

Bonnie and the shadow-boy fly without him, '... racing for the top of the sky.  Its warmth welcomed them, turned the dark skin of the fiery balloon midnight blue...  Then the smooth sky puckered into cloth-of-blue and drew aside for them, like curtains parting.'  On 'the other side of the sky' Bonnie wakes in a farmhouse on Highholly Hill, a place of legends where Wild Edric and his fairy wife Godda are said to emerge from the caverns and ride by night.  She is welcomed by a warm-hearted but strangely incurious family, whose daughter Arabella is Bonnie's living image: herself as she might have been in a different, secure life.  But Bonnie struggles with jealousy and hatred. And then her grandmother reappears, a sinister, knowing figure with the power to suck away the essence of a person and leave a simulacrum behind...

If you want to see Highholly Hill, here it is, crowned with 'Wild Edric's Throne' - and it's also in the photo at the head of this blog!  It is in fact the magnificent and brooding hill called Stiperstones, in Shropshire on the Welsh border, and I used it in my own book ‘Dark Angels’ and called it ‘Devil’s Edge.

All the things I love in a book are to be found in 'Midnight Blue' - mystery and magic, a strong sense of place, deep emotional feeling and beautiful writing.  I highly recommend it, and I'm delighted to be able to welcome Pauline herself to the blog, as part of her 'Midnight Blue' tour.

Pauline, can you remember what impulse triggered the writing of this, your first book? What was the kernel, the seed of the idea that became Midnight Blue?

Writing a book has something of the snowball-making process about it. You start with a tiny handful of something scrunched up tight in your brain, then you roll it round and it starts to grow. You roll and roll and finally it becomes so big that it takes on a life of its own and starts rolling away from you. That’s when the writing has to begin.

The heart of my snowball came down to three things. Firstly, I’d long wanted to write a children’s novel featuring balloon-flight, maybe with sky-gypsies or something like that, but the paraphernalia of modern ballooning didn’t sit easily with what I envisaged. Secondly, when I came to live in Shropshire, I discovered a folklorist called Charlotte Burne whose ‘Shropshire Folk-lore’, published in the mid nineteenth century, included the story of a sleeping knight called Wild Edric. Thirdly, whilst our own house had builders in, my family and I were privileged to spend one autumn living in a remote hilltop farmhouse overlooking the Stiperstones and Wild Edric’s haunt, the Devil’s Chair. In the book it became Highholly House. I wanted to honour it as something magnificent which had stood through the centuries, enduring the elements and the passage of time. I was aware, when we moved out, that it would probably never be lived in again.

Many writers, wanting to send their characters into another world, would use some kind of magical talisman or spell. I’m fascinated by your use of the hot air balloon to send your character Bonnie away…it’s physical travel to a physical place, High Holly Hill - yet in some sense unreal too. Where did the image of the hot air balloon and the parting of the sky come from?

The idea of ballooning as a means of escape really came alive for me when I read Jim Woodman’s ‘Flight of Condor I’, describing how he and Julian Nott built, launched and flew a balloon over the desert at Nazca, Peru, powered only by smoke and flames. As soon as I read about their amazing dawn launch, I knew what shape I wanted my novel to take. Yes, a physical trip and, yes, to a physical place. But powered through the air by fire – how magical was that?

As to the sky parting – I suppose I’ve always seen the sky as a sort of stage putting on a show, so to imagine the blue as a set of curtains doesn’t seem that far fetched. There’s more to the sky than space, just as there’s more to life than science - and it’s this ‘more’ that’s always really interested me in my writing life. In ‘Flying for Frankie’ - which also features a balloon flight - my heroine says, ‘We peeled back the edges of our world and found out there was more.’ For her, the ‘more’ is understanding who she is and what her place is in the scheme of things. But for Bonnie, the heroine of ‘Midnight Blue’, ‘more’ is literally more. More Maybelle. More Michael. More Highholly House. More of herself. And more of the dreaded Grandbag too.

One of the things I love about this book is that you don’t seem to feel the need to provide rationales for everything. Much is left unexplained – yet it all feels natural, as if we understand the story on a deep, symbolic level. Did you write the book this way instinctively, or was it consciously planned?

This is something I feel so strongly about that it’s hard to know where to start - or how to keep it short. Yes, instinctively I shy away from explanations. Perhaps, even in struggling to answer you now, I’m doing that. But how many books have been ruined by explanations? Oh, those terrible last chapters where the pieces are put together and the ends are tied up and all the author’s hard work creating a believable alternate reality is suddenly undone!

After all, real life isn’t like that. It very often doesn’t have explanations - at least not ones that are handed on a plate. Especially for children – and it’s children I’m writing for – life just happens. It’s a mystery functioning on a level that goes deeper than mere words.

Take what happens to Bonnie when she arrives in Highholly House. From the adult perspective, the people who’ve taken her in should ask who she is, where she’s from and whom they can phone. But from Bonnie’s perspective, it might be unsettling that they don’t, but she accepts it. Things are happening all the time in her child’s life for which there are no words or explanations. That’s just life.

It would be nice to say that I’ve taken a stand here, refusing to bow to adult requirements for what a story should be. But to be honest it’s happened more naturally than that. I’ve simply put in what I felt Bonnie’s story needed, and left out what I felt might ruin it, hoping that, as she learns to see the world anew, my readers would go through that experience seeing with her eyes.

Bonnie runs away from herself as well as from an intolerable situation, and finds, at the farm on Highholly Hill, the ideal family she might have had in a parallel universe. But she doesn’t belong there. Would you say that Midnight Blue is very much a story about identity?

Who is Bonnie? Nobody knows, least of all herself. Who’s Arabella? She’s not the ‘Arabella-thing’ that steps out of the magic mirror. Who is the shadowboy? Only when he takes on flesh and blood, giving up his magic past, can he begin to feel. Yes, indeed, ‘Midnight Blue’ is a book about identity. What is it that makes us human? When characters in Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ are separated from their daemons, the most awful thing in the world becomes reality – they are no longer truly human. Again, in Ray Bradbury’s wonderful ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’, people stumble home from the fair stripped of their years, their memories and all their experiences. And similarly, in ‘Midnight Blue, when Jake and Arabella stumble into the magic mirror, they emerge with the shape of their humanity still intact, but devoid of life.

The truly terrible thing about Grandbag isn’t her possessiveness. It’s what she wants to possess. And what she wants is just that - life. She’s drained it out of grey, limp Doreen, moved onto Maybelle, tried with Bonnie and now she’s started on Bonnie’s friends on Highholly Hill. And, it’s in fighting for Highholly Hill, at the ultimate cost to herself, that Bonnie finds her place in the world and discovers who she really is.

Though ‘Midnight Blue’ is so mysterious and mystical, it feels real and grounded because of its strong sense of place. First the city which Bonnie flees, and then the dramatic landscape and legends of Shropshire, are essential ingredients of this book and many of your others since. What is it about the Shropshire hills that speaks to you?

Oh, there’s a question! In a sense I’m Bonnie, fleeing the city and finding another, better world among the Shropshire hills. I grew up in London. In fact the flats from which Bonnie flees were ones I used to pass sometimes on the bus. I never felt rooted there, though. Maybe it was because my mother came to England as a refugee from the Channel Islands, fleeing Hitler’s invasion during the Second World War, I don’t know. Certainly she did her best to fit in, but her sense of belonging somewhere else was always there, and perhaps it rubbed off on me.

But why Shropshire? The first time I visited the county, I was driving through on my way to North Wales. The mountains were beautiful, but the horizon enclosed me and made me feel claustrophobic, and the rolling, open greenness of the Shropshire hills felt so much more open and liberating.

I moved here to live in 1972 and have been here ever since. I suppose I was a rootless person looking for roots, and the roots came in family [husband, five children, a series of dogs], and the enjoyment of the Shropshire hills became part of our shared experience.

But it’s my own personal experience too. There’s a great joy that comes from being alone out in the hills. I love the sense of space. I love being able to walk and rarely cross a road or see a soul all day, or see a thing that isn’t beautiful or hear a sound that isn’t made by birds or wind or sheep. And I’ve done this so often that the land feels like my second skin. I know where the finches nest; where the white violets come up in spring; where I just might see otters if I’m lucky, or wild orchids. What speaks to me about the Shropshire hills? It’s the voice of home.

What, for you, is the purpose of fantasy fiction?

Purpose. Hmm. In order to attempt to answer this, I’m going to quote from another of my novels, ‘The Beast of Whixall Moss’. My hero has found, and lost, a fabuous six-headed beast, and he’s in mourning. Then one morning he wakes up and the garden is full of beasts, and they’re all fabulous and this is what he thinks: ‘This was what it meant to have vision. He knew at last. Not striving for things, hoping until hope had gone, as Mum had done, nor grasping for things in a frenzy of desire as he had done. But, amid the ordinary things of life, unasked for and unheralded, this act of sight.’

The key here, more even than those words ‘act of sight’, is the phrase ‘ordinary things of life’. I think that the purpose of fantasy isn’t so much to escape ordinary life as to shine light upon it. Being taken to the edge of human experience allows us to look both ways – out into the unknown and back into what we think we know all too well, but maybe don’t. Tolkien talks about the realm of fairy-story being ‘ wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow sharp as swords.’ But you could say the same things about the world we live in. It’s just that fantasy casts things in a heightened light.

It’s back to what I was saying earlier about the sky as a stage. Fantasy’s like a spotlight which illuminates life. It takes us out of ourselves and brings us back, changed yet scarcely knowing we’ve been away

Thankyou Pauline! 

MIDNIGHT BLUE ASIN NO: B0062F6K10

PRICE: £2.99

BUY THIS BOOK

Or READ A FREE SAMPLE at the author's lovely new website

For a recent review of Midnight Blue, visit The Bookbag
Read Pauline's account of living in the ancient farmhouse on Stiperstones at Reclusive Muse
Discover how she came to be a writer at Book Angel Booktopia
Visit Authors Electric for an account of how Midnight Blue became an E-book

Fairytale Reflections (26) Pauline Fisk

Pauline Fisk is a fantasy writer of rare talent.  Her books take you where few writers even think to go, interweaving strands of the real world with airy fibres so fine and strong, they are barely even fantasy – more like mysticism, or elemental forces.  She writes about vast emotional themes of love, anger, insecurity, and the need to belong to people and a place.  They leave a lasting imprint on the mind.

Her first book, ‘Midnight Blue’, which won the Smarties Book Prize in 1990, is a story about a young girl called Bonnie who has just found a home with her very young mother, in an inner city block of flats.  Just as it looks as if they can be happy together and build their relationship, her controlling, rigid and malevolent grandmother moves in: and Bonnie runs away, finding refuge in a mid-city oasis, a walled garden in which a mysterious man called Michael is building a hot air balloon with the help of a strange shadowy boy.  Michael’s aim is to fly to the land beyond the sky:

Beyond the sky.  Not ‘in outer space’ or ‘in another galaxy’, but beyond the sky… as though it were possible to peel away the edge of the blue and pass straight through.

Bonnie and the shadow-boy seize the balloon and fly without him.

As they rose, the sun rose with them, as if they were racing for the top of the sky.  Its warmth welcomed them, turned the dark skin of the fiery balloon as Michael had named it, midnight blue.  They flew straight up … the sweet, clear music of the lonely pipe, the only sound left in the whole world, drew them on until they prepared to hit the very roof-top of the sky itself. Then the smooth sky puckered into cloth-of-blue and drew aside for them, like curtains parting.

How on earth to follow that?  Well, Bonnie wakes up, apparently after the balloon has crash-landed, in the bedroom of a farmhouse in a place called Highholly Hill, in the welcoming midst of a warm-hearted, but surprisingly incurious  family whose daughter, Arabella, is almost Bonnie’s doppelganger: herself as she might have been in a different, secure life.  Far from relaxing into this idyllic world, Bonnie struggles with jealousy of Arabella, and hatred. And then her grandmother reappears, a sinister, knowing figure with the power to suck away the essence of a person and leave a simulacrum behind.  There’s a lot going on in this book.

(If you want to see Highholly Hill, look at the photo at the head of this blog.  Pauline and I share a love for the magnificent and brooding hill called Stiperstones, in her home county of Shropshire on the Welsh border.  In my book ‘Dark Angels’, I call it ‘Devil’s Edge’.)

Pauline has written many more books since then, and many of them are set in or around Shropshire and the borders of Wales.  ‘Sabrina Fludde’, Bloomsbury 2001, opens with a body floating down the River Severn, the body of a lost, almost drowned girl whose memory is lost too, who plucks the strange name Abren out of the air for herself...  In fact, the book is full of lost characters with strange names – a homeless boy called Phaze II; a speechless and motionless old woman called Sabrina Fludde. In the end, Abren has to return to her own source (and that of the river) on the mountain Plynlimon, where a cold and sinister family who claim her as their own.  Alone and in terrible danger, she must make her escape down to the sea.

Abren listened to the stream murmuring as it flowed into the darkness.  She fancied that she heard something.  A snatch of a new sound carried on the water.  Just a whisper, but growing all the time – and Abren knew what it was!

“You’re fine,” the stream sang sweetly.  “Really.  Fine.  You’re brave and strong and where you should be.  There’s nothing to be frightened of.  Trust me.”

Like 'Midnight Blue', the book is interwoven with legends and folklore.  It’s a gripping and eerie mystery with strongly realised modern settings, which looks at the way old hatreds tend to morph into new rivalries.  When a gang of boys calling themselves the Border Commandoes push Abren off the iron bridge into the river, Phaze II is a shamed and unwilling witness:

Even when he saw the body, Phaze II knew he wouldn’t do a thing.  There it was right under him, waves breaking over it.  And he knew he couldn’t help.  Not with the river in full flood.  Not in the dark, with the water as cold as ice, and waves with jagged edges like hungry white teeth. 

            “I can’t!” he shouted, peeling out of his coat.

            “I won’t!” he shouted, pulling off his boots.

            “NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS!” he shouted – and he jumped.            

Do read these books, they are beautiful, and finely written, and completely unlike anyone else’s.  (Probably only Pauline could write about a girl who is, in some mystical sense, also a river).  And now I’m going to let her tell you all about one of the most enduring legends of Shropshire…

WILD EDRIC (and me) 

My whole life has been spent trying to bring together ‘real life’ and the world of fantasy, in particular by finding new and interesting ways of expressing a sense of the magical in my writing. Ever since I was five years old, hunting down fairies in the back alley behind my parents’ house, a sense of more to life than meets the eye has been part of who I am.  When I was a child, life was one big fairy tale.  That was how I felt.  But how to get into that fairy tale?  How to make that fairy tale my life, and make it real and be a part of it? 

It was through stories that I found the way.  I couldn’t write when I was five years old, but I could make up stories and that was what I did, standing at the garden fence, telling them out loud to the big children in the house next door, lined up on their side of the fence asking, ‘What happened next?’   But those stories, made up off the top of my head, were ephemeral.  They were fly-by-nights, whereas words on paper had a strange new durability which I discovered when I learnt to write.   Describing Winnie the Pooh hunting honey made me part of the story.  Adventuring with the Famous Five turned them into a Famous Six.  I made those things my own, and I made them real - and simply by writing about them. 

This is something I’ve been doing ever since.  When, at the end of ‘Mad Dog Moonlight’, I wrote about a river flowing through the stars, I put myself onto that river and sailed away.  When Abren in ‘Sabrina Fludde’ turned to water and flowed down a mountain, I flowed too.  And when hoof-prints beat upon the hill behind my house, I knew that Wild Edric, himself - that glorious superhero of Shropshire legend - was passing in the night.  By writing him into ‘Midnight Blue’, I wasn’t just making him up.  The act of writing brought him to life.

Tolkien defines fairy tales as stories about the adventures of humankind in Faerie, and here amongst the hills, valleys, woods and towns of my home county, Shropshire, Faerie’s all around me.  It’s where I live.  It’s a fabled place.  And I’m twice blessed, because it also exists inside my head.          

The power of imagination is the land called Faerie.  ‘We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce horror.  We may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine, or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold.  In such ‘fantasy’ as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins, Man becomes a sub-creator.’

Tolkien again, who wrote fairy tales for adults to read as a natural branch of literature rather than playing at ‘being children’, or pretending to enjoy them for the sake of the kids.   ‘When we can take green from grass, blue from leaves and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power,’ he wrote.   And what else compares to having that power?  

As a child I was captivated by Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales.  As a  teenager I discovered Alan Garner’s ‘Weirdstone of Brisingamen’.  Starting out in life as a writer myself, I fell head-first into Tolkien, and took some extracting.  Finally I found my own voice and my own way into Faerie.   This was a long process, which is what the word ‘finally’ is all about.  For many years I thought that if I sounded like the writers I admired, Emily Bronte, Dylan Thomas, JRR Tolkien, Graham Greene – whoever the favourite of the moment might be – then I’d be a ‘proper’ writer but, if I sounded like myself, nobody would ever read me.    A book of terrible short stories was published at the age of twenty-three [long since out of print, thank God], its lofty style definitely not mine.   It wasn’t until years later, embarking upon ‘Midnight Blue’ that I developed the confidence as a writer to be myself. 

I’m indebted to that decision.  ‘Midnight Blue’ would never have been written without it.  But it also would never have been written without Charlotte Burne, the first woman president of the Folklore Society, whose ‘Shropshire Folk-Lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings’ introduced me to Wild Edric, whose mysterious presence haunts ‘Midnight Blue’. 

 According to legend, whenever England is in danger, Wild Edric and his knights rise up from their sleep of centuries beneath a rugged range of Shropshire hills called the Stiperstones, and ride out in warning of impending doom. Charlotte Burne recorded conversations with people who claimed he’d been heard and seen before both the Battle of Waterloo and the First World War.  

The history behind the story, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, tells of a local lord who, having refused to submit to the Norman Conquest by raising a rebellion which was decisively defeated, betrayed his people by joining  forces with the Conqueror.  For this dastardly about-face, ‘Wild Edric’, as he became known, was doomed to sleep beneath the Stiperstones with his knights, only ever finding the release of death when England returned to her rightful people.  He sleeps still, and some legends have added the comfort of a fairy wife, the Lady Godda, though others have him meeting and losing her before his days of betrayal and doom. 

Wild Edric’s is a great story and, both as legend and history, he’s alive and well in Shropshire.  After writing him into ‘Midnight Blue’, I attended a history society meeting where local Stiperstones people claimed to have heard him riding by, and one person even claimed direct descent.  And he’s alive and well in my life too.  Later this year I’ll be talking about him at a weekend I’m running on myths and legends and how to use them in creative writing.  I’ll even lead a walk up to the Devil’s Chair, where he and his knights are meant to burst out of the ground. 

It’s years now since I wrote ‘Midnight Blue’, but Wild Edric has stayed with me ever since.  My books have included other characters I first came across in Charlotte Burne. including the highwayman, Humphrey Kynaston and the goddess of the River Severn, brought to life in ‘Sabrina Fludde’.  But nowhere have I found a sadder doom than Edric’s, lying beneath cold rocks, unable to die - unable even to be at peace.

The romance of Edric is Arthurian.  He too is meant to sleep until his country is set free.  And the legend of Alderley, which Alan Garners drew on in his book, ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’, calls forth sleeping knights as well.  They’re a universal emblem – and yet they’re a personal emblem too, especially if you’re a writer.

Every writer’s like a sleeping knight beneath a hill, brought to life when he or she has a story to tell, rising in the dark to gallop forth with a laugh, or tears or a chill breeze to broadcast to the waiting world.  When I’m writing, I feel alive. When I’m not, I feel asleep.  It’s as powerful as that.   Maybe the idea of writers as the white-knight guardians of a watching world sounds a bit fanciful to you. But I’d say not.  I’d say what we do matters more than anyone could ever say, and that the idea of an Edric who performs the role of guardian is only there because people want it, just as they want writing, and stories and people like me. 

So I can’t help but identify with Wild Edric.  He and I are two sides of the same coin.  He’s an age-old legend, trying to break free, and I’m a fresh-faced pilgrim at the gate of Faerie, trying to get in.  

Wild Edric and me:  copyright Pauline Fisk 2011

Picture credits: Pauline Fisk

The Wild Hunt by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine 1882