'The Homestead Westward in the Blue Mountains' by Jonas Lie

Jonas Lie was a contemporary of Ibsen, born 1833 at Hvokksund, not far from Oslo, but spent much of his childhood at Tromsø, inside the Arctic Circle.  He was sent to naval college, but poor eyesight made him unsuited for a life at sea, so he became a lawyer and began to write and publish poems and novels which reflected Norwegian life, folklore and nationalism. A collection of his short stories based on Norwegian and Finnish legends, 'Weird Tales from Northern Seas', was published in English in 1893. This is one of them. Other tales from the same collection can be found here, and here.

There was once a farmer’s son who was off to Moen for the annual manoeuvres. He was to be the drummer, and his way lay right across the mountains. There he could practise his drumming at his ease, and beat his tattoos again and again without making folks laugh – or having a parcel of small boys dangling after him like so many midges.

            Every time he passed a mountain homestead he beat his rat-tat-a-tat to bring the girls out, and they stood and hung about and gaped after him at all the farmhouses.

            It was in the middle of the hottest summer weather. He had been practising his drumming from early in the morning, till he had grown quite sick and tired of it. And now he was toilng up a steep cliff, and had slung his drum over his shoulder and stuck his drumsticks in his bandlolier.

            The sun baked and broiled upon the hills; but in the clefts there was a coolness such as you get by a rushing waterfall. The hills were covered in bilberries all the way up, and he bent down so often to pick whole handfuls that it took him a long time to get to the top.

            Then he came to a hilly slope where the ferns stood high and there were lots of birch bushes. It was so nice and shady there, he thought, and he couldn’t for the life of him resist taking a rest.

            He took off his drum, put his jacket behind his head and his cap over his face, and went off to sleep. 

            But as he lay dozing there, he dreamt that someone was tickling him under the nose with a grassblade. He quickly sat up, and was sure he heard someone laughing and giggling.

            The sun by now had begun to cast oblique shadows, and far down below, towards the valleys, lay the warm steaming vapours, creeping upwards in long drawn-out gossamer bands and ribbons of mist.

            As he reached behind him for his jacket, he saw a snake, which lay and looked at him with such sharp quick eyes. But when he threw a stone at it, it caught its tail in its mouth and rolled away like a wheel.

            Again there was a laughing and sniggering among the bushes.

            And now he heard it coming from some birch trees which stood in such wonderful sunlight, for they were filled with the rain and fine drizzle of a waterfall. The waterdrops glittered and sparkled so that he could hardly see the trees properly.

            But something was moving about in them, and he could swear it looked like a slim pretty girl, laughing and making fun of him, and peeping at him from under her hand because of the sun, and her sleeves were tucked up.

            And a moment later he glimpsed a dark blue blouse moving behind the twigs. He was after it in an instant.

            He ran and ran till he was almost ready to give up, but then glimpsed a dress and a bare shoulder between a gap in the leaves. Off he pelted again as hard as he could, and just as he began to wonder if it was all imagination, he saw her cornered against the green bushes. Her hair had torn loose from her plaits from the speed with which she had flown through the branches, and she looked back at him, pretending to be terribly frightened.

            She was holding his drumsticks! She should pay for that, he thought, and off they ran again, she in front and he behind. But she kept turning around, laughing and jeering at him, and tossing and twisting her head so that it looked as if her long wavy hair were writhing and wriggling and twisting like a serpent’s tail.

            At the top of the hill she stopped by a fence and waved the drumsticks at him, laughing. Now he was determined to catch her, but before he could grab her she was through the fence, and he tumbled after her into the enclosure of a homestead.

            “Randi, and Brandi, and Gyri, and Gunna!’ the girl cried up to the house.

            And four girls came rushing down over the greensward. The last of them had a fine rosy face and heavy golden-red hair, and greeted him graciously with downcast eyes, as if she was quite distressed that they should play such naughty pranks with a strange young man.

            She stood there quite shy and uncertain, poor thing! just like a child who doesn’t know whether to say something or not. She sidled nearer till she was so close her hair almost touched him, and then she opened her blue eyes wide and looked straight at him.

But she had a frightfully sharp look in those eyes of hers.

“Better come with me and you shall have dancing – or are you too tired, lad?” cried a girl with blue-black hair and a wild dark fire in her eyes. She skipped up and down and slapped her rump; she had white teeth and hot breath, and would have dragged him off with her.

“Tie yourself up behind first, black Gyri!” giggled the others, and immediately she let the lad go and wobbled away backwards, twisting her hands behind her back. He couldn’t help staring: she writhed uncomfortably as if she were hiding something behind her and was suddenly so quiet.

But the fine bright girl whom he had chased, the prettiest of them all with the slender waist, began to laugh and tease him again. “Run as you like, you’ll never catch me,” she jibed and jeered, “nor your drumsticks either.” But then her mood shifted right round and she flung herself on the ground, sobbing. She’d followed him all day, she cried, and never had heard any fellow who could beat a rat-tat-a-tat so well, nor ever seen a lad so handsome as he slept. “I kissed you then,” said she, and smiled up at him sadly.

“Beware of the snake’s tongue, lest it bite you! It caresses before it stings,” whispered the shy girl with the golden-red hair, stealing softly up. And all at once the boy remembered the snake on the hillside, as slender and supple as the girl who lay there weeping and mocking at the same time, with the same sharp, cunning eyes.

Now a bent, clumsy little figure stuck her head in between them, and smiled bashfully at him as if she knew and could tell him so much. Her eyes held a deep, inward sparkle and over her face passed a sort of pale golden gleam, like the last sunbeam fading over the hilltop. “At my place,” said she, “you shall hear music such as no-one else has ever heard. You will hear all that sings and laughs and cries in the roots of trees, and in the mountains and in everything that grows, so that you will never care about anything else in the world.”

Then the boy heard a scornful laugh, and up on a rock he saw a tall, strong girl with a gold band in her hair. With powerful arms she lifted a huge wooden horn, threw back her head and blew a blast as strong as the rock on which she stood: it sounded far and wide through the summer evening, and echoes rang to and fro across the hills.

But the pretty girl on the ground stuck her fingers in her ears and mimicked the sound and laughed and jeered. Then she peered up at him through her ash-blond hair and murmured, “If you want me, you’ll have to pull me up.”

“She has a strong grip for a girl,” thought he, as he did so – “But first you’ll have to catch me!” cried she, and raced for the house. 

Suddenly she stopped, crossed her arms and looked straight into his eyes. “Do you like me?” she asked.

He had hold of her now, and couldn’t say no to that. “You’ll have to decide on this, father,” she shouted in the direction of the house. “The boy wants to marry me!” And she dragged him hastily towards the hut door.

There sat a little, grey-clad old fellow with a cap on his head like a milk-can, staring at the livestock on the mountainside. He had a large silver jug in front of him.

“It’s the homestead westward of the Blue Mountains that he’s after, I know,” said the old man, nodding his head with a sly look in his eyes.

“Is it, now?” thought the boy, understanding at last. Aloud he said, “It’s a great offer, I know, but surely too soon to decide. Down our way, the usual thing is to send go-betweens first of all, to see matters properly arranged.”

“You did send two ahead of you, and here they are!” the girl said promptly, and she brandished his two drumsticks.

“And with us, it’s customary to look over the property first, however smart the girl may be,” he added.

Then she shrank into herself and there was a nasty green glitter in her eyes –

“Haven’t you run after me the livelong day, and courted me right down there in the enclosure, where my father could hear and see it all?” cried she.

“Most pretty lasses hold back a bit,” said the boy, seeing that it wasn’t all love in this wooing. Then she bent backwards in a complete circle and shot forward her head and neck, and her eyes glittered. But the old fellow lifted his stick from his knees, and she stood upright again, merry and sportive as ever, with her hands in her silver girdle, and looked in his eyes and laughed, and asked if he was one of those fellows who were afraid of girls?

“If you want me, you might be run right off those legs of yours,” she joked, and skipped and curtseyed, making fun of him again. But behind her he saw her shadow whisking and frisking in circles on the grass like a long, coiling ribbon.

They seemed in a great hurry to get him under their yoke, he thought, but a soldier on his way to the manoeuvres is not to be married off-hand. “I came here for my drumsticks, not looking for a wife, and I’ll thank you to hand them back.”

“Not so fast. Look about you first, young man,” said the old fellow, and as he pointed with his stick the drummer boy saw mountain pastures full of dun cows grazing, with cow-bells clonking and the prettiest of milkmaids carrying bright copper buckets. There was wealth here for sure.

“Maybe this dowry of mine in the Blue Mountains doesn’t seem much to you,” said the girl, sitting down beside him. “But we’ve four such saeter as this, and what I inherit from my mother is twelve times as large.”

But the drummer had seen what he had seen. They were rather too anxious to settle the property upon him, he thought. So he declared that in such a serious matter, he needed a little time for consideration. 

The lass began to cry, and take on, and accused him of trying to fool a poor innocent young thing and pursue her, and drive her out of her wits. She had trusted him, she said, and fell a-howling and rocking with her hair all over her eyes, till at last the drummer began to feel quite sorry for her and almost angry with himself. But when she looked at him with those sharp, glinting eyes, it was as if he saw again the snake under the birch trees down on the hillside when it curled into a hoop and rolled away.

Then she reared up hissing, and a long tail whisked about behind her from underneath her skirts. “You won’t get away from me like that!” she shrieked. “I’ll have you dragged in shame from parish to parish!” And she called her father.

The drummer felt a grip on his jacket. He was lifted right off his legs and chucked into an empty cow-house, and the door was shut behind him.

There he stood and had nothing to look at but an old billy-goat through a crack in the door, who had odd yellow eyes and looked very much like the old fellow, and a sunbeam through a little hole, which crept higher and higher up the blank stable wall till late in the evening, when it went out altogether.

But towards night a voice outside said softly, “Boy! boy!” and in the moonlight he saw a little shadow cross the hole. “Hush! the old man is sleeping outside on the other side of the wall,” it said.

He recognised the voice: it was the golden-red one who had seemed so shy.

“All you need to do is say you know Snake-eyes has had a lover before, or they wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get her off their hands with a dowry. The homestead westward in the Blue Mountains is mine, so tell the old man that it was me, Brandi, you were after all the time. Hush, here he comes,” she whispered, and whisked away.

But a shadow again fell across the little knot-hole in the moonlight, and the duck-necked one peeped in at him. “Boy, are you awake? Snake-eyes will make a fool of you. She’s spiteful, and she stings. But the homestead westward in the Blue Mountains is mine, and when I play there the gates under the high mountains fly open and show the way to the nameless powers of nature. Just say it was I, Randi, you were running after, because you love her songs. Hush, the old man is stirring by the wall!” – and she was gone.

A little afterwards nearly every bit of the hole was darkened, and he recognised the dark one by her voice.

“Boy, boy!” she hissed. “I had to tie my skirts up behind today, so we couldn’t go dancing the Halling-fling. But the homestead in the Blue Mountains is lawfully mine, so tell the old man it was madcap Gyri you were running after today, because you love dancing jigs and hallings.” Then she clapped her hands and was frightened she might have awakened the old man. And she was gone.

But the lad sat inside there and watched the thin summer moon rise, and thought that never in his life had he been in such trouble. And from time to time he heard scraping and snorting against the wall outside, and knew it was the old fellow who lay there and kept watch over him.

“Are you there, boy?” said another voice at the peephole.

It was the sturdy girl who had planted herself so firmly on the rock.

“For three hundred years I have been blowing the langelur here in the summer evenings. Everything you see here is illusion and fairy glamour: many a man has been fooled by it, but I won’t see the other girls married before me. Rather than let one of them have you, I’ll set you free. Now listen! When the sun is hot and high the old man will get frightened and crawl into the shadows. Then’s your chance. Shove the door open hard and run, jump over the fence, and you’ll be rid of us.”

As soon as the sun began to burn, the drummer followed her advice. He cleared the fence in one good bound and fled, and in no time he was down in the valley again. He could hear the horn calling distantly in the mountains. But he slung his drum over his shoulder and set off to the manoeuvres at Moen. And never again did he beat his drum to call out the lasses from the farmsteads, for fear he should find himself westwards in the Blue Mountains before his time.

Picture credit:

Illustration by Laurence Housman

The Pilot’s Ghost Story

St Ives Harbour Fish Market: courtesy of https://www.cornwalls.co.uk

 

Another tale from Robert Hunt’s ‘Popular Romances of the West of England, or The Drolls, Superstitions and Traditions of Old Cornwall’ (third edition, 1896) was told orally to Charles Taylor Stephens, a poet and ‘sometime rural postman from St Ives to Zennor’. Hunt employed Stephens to collect stories from remote villages on the assumption that people would more readily tell tales to the friendly postman than to a stranger. 

C. Taylor Stephens' book of poems

This particular story was told to Stephens by a pilot whose job it was to meet ships and guide them into port. In this tale he guides the sloop Sally from St Ives to Hayle, approximately five miles up the coast.

Robert Hunt often altered stories ‘from the vernacular – in which they were for the most part related – into modern language’, but says of this one, ‘I prefer giving this story in the words in which it was communicated. For its singular character, it is a ghost story well worth preserving.’ 

Here it is, in what is (mostly) the pilot's own words.

 

Just seventeen years since*, I went down on the wharf from my house one night [between] about twelve and one in the morning, to see whether there was any ‘hobble,’* and found a sloop, the Sally of St Ives (the Sally was wrecked at St Ives one Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1862) in the bay, bound for Hayle.

When I got by the White Hart public-house, I saw a man leaning against a post on the wharf – I spoke to him, wished him good morning, and asked him what o’ clock it was, but to no purpose. I was not to be easily frightened, for I didn’t believe in ghosts, and finding I got no answer to my repeated inquiries, I approached close to him and said, ‘Thee’rt a queer sort of fellow, not to speak; I’d speak to the devil, if he were to speak to me. Who art a at all? thee’st needn’t think to frighten me: that thee wasn’t do, if thou wert twice so ugly; who art a at all?’

He turned his great ugly face on me, glared abroad his great eyes, opened his mouth, and it was a mouth sure ’nuff. Then I saw pieces of sea-weed and bits of sticks in his whiskers; the flesh of his face and hands were parboiled, just like a woman’s hands after a good day’s washing. Well, I did not like his looks a bit, and sheered off; but he followed close by my side, and I could hear the water squashing in his shoes every step he took.

Well, I stopped a bit, and thought I would be civil to him, and spoke to him again, but no answer. I then thought I would go to seek for another of our crew, and knock him up to get the vessel, and had got about fifty or sixty yards, when I turned to see if he was following me, but saw him where I left him.

Fearing he would come after me, I ran for my life the few steps that I had to go. But when I got to the door, to my horror there stood the man in the door, grinning horribly. I shook like an aspen leaf; my hat lifted from my head; the sweat boiled out of me. What to do I didn’t know, and in the house there was such a row, as if everybody was breaking up everything. After a bit I went in, for the door was on the latch [ie: not locked] – and called the captain of the boat, and got light, but everything was all right, not had he heard any noise.

We went out aboard of the Sally and I put her into Hayle but I felt ill enough to be in bed. I left the vessel to come home as soon as I could, but it took me four hours to walk two miles, and I had to lie down in the road, and was taken home to St Ives in a cart; as far as the Terrace* from there I was carried home by my brothers and put to bed. Three days afterwards all my hair fell out as if I had had my head shaved. The roots, and about half an inch from the roots, being quite white. I was ill six months, and doctor’s bill was £4, 17s. 6d. for attendance and medicine. So you see I have reason to believe in the existence of spirits as well as Mr Wesley* had. My hair grew again, and twelve months after I had as good a head of dark-brown hair as ever.

 

Notes:

* ‘Just seventeen years since’:  Stephens, to whom it was told, died in 1865, so the events of the story must have occurred by 1848 or earlier.

* ‘hobble’ – dialect word a Cornish glossary says is ‘the share each person received when the vessel was brought in - or perhaps when the catch was sold.’ The sense here seems to be ‘a share of any work to do’?

* ‘The Terrace’ is a street in St Ives with views over the bay.                  

* The preacher John Wesley believed in the existence of ghosts and other spirits.

Jorinda and Joringel: Owls and Flowers

 

There’s a story in The Mabinogion about a girl who is changed into an owl. The magicians Gwydion and Math ap Mathonwy create her out of flowers for Lleu Llaw Gyffes whose mother has cursed him never to have a human wife. They take ‘the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they conjured the fairest and most beautiful maiden that anyone had ever seen. And they baptised her in the way that they did at that time, and named her Blodeuedd.’ 

Deed done, curse circumvented: Blodeuedd is presented to Lleu. Nobody has asked her what she wants, however, and one day when Lleu is away she meets the handsome young man Gronw Pebr. The two fall in love and plot to murder Lleu so that they can be together. At the moment of his death however, Lleu is transformed into an eagle. Math restores him to his human shape, and Gwydion pursues Blodeuedd and transforms her into an owl:

‘[Y]ou will never dare show your face in daylight for fear of all the birds. And all the birds will be hostile towards you. … You shall not lose your name, however, but shall always be called Blodeuwedd.’ Blodeuwedd is ‘owl’ in today’s language. And for that reason the birds hate the owl: and the owl is still called Blodeuwedd.[1]

Commenting on the tale, Sioned Davies explains that the name ‘changes from Blodeuedd (‘flowers’) to Blodeuwedd (‘flower-face’) to reflect the image of the bird.’[2] The white face of the barn owl does in fact look like two huge white daisies crushed together.

Blodeuedd is a girl made from flowers and turned into an owl. In the Grimms’ fairy tale Jorinda and Joringel[3] a girl is turned into a bird by an owl-woman – and released by the touch of a flower. Here’s what happens: In the middle of a dark forest an ancient castle is inhabited by an old woman who turns into a cat or a night-owl by day, assuming her own form only when evening comes. She lures wild birds and beasts to her, and kills and eats them. Further:

If anyone came within one hundred paces of the castle he was obliged to stand still and could not stir from the spot until she bade him be free. But whenever an innocent maiden came within this circle, she changed her into a bird and shut her up in a wickerwork cage, and carried the cage into a room in the castle. She had about seven thousand cages of rare birds in the castle.

A betrothed young couple, Jorinda and Joringel, walk into the forest in order to be alone together. Though Joringel warns his sweetheart that they must take care not to stray close to the castle, everything should be wonderful in this glowing sunset wood – ‘It was a beautiful evening. The sun shone brightly between the trunks of the trees into the dark green of the forest, and the turtledoves sang mournfully upon the beech trees.’ But for some reason the young lovers feel sorrowful – ‘as sad as though they were about to die.’  In this strange mood,

[T]hey looked around them, and were quite at a loss, for they did not know which way they should go home. The sun was still half above the mountain and half under.

Joringel looked through the bushes, and saw the old walls of the castle close at hand. He was horror-stricken and filled with deadly fear. Jorinda was singing:

“My little bird with the necklace red
Sings sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.
He sings that the little dove must soon be dead.
Sings sorrow, sor–  jug, jug, jug.”

The sun has set, Jorinda has been changed into a nightingale, and ‘a screech owl with glowing eyes flew three times round about her, and three times cried ‘to-whoo, to-whoo, to-whoo!’’ Unable to speak or move, Joringel sees the owl fly into a thicket and emerge as a crooked old woman ‘with large red eyes’ who catches the nightingale and takes it away.

Later that evening the enchantress returns later and releases Joringel with the cryptic words, ‘Greet you, Zachiel. If the moon shines on the cage, Zachiel, let him loose at once.’ (Zachiel is probably the angel Zakiel mentioned along with Michael, Gabriel and other angels in a spell for ‘binding the tongue’ in the Syriac ‘Book of Protection’, a compendium of charms and incantations dating in manuscript form from the early 1800s though probably much older.) The old woman refuses to release Jorinda and tells Joringel he will never see his sweetheart again. Joringel goes sadly away, but while working as a shepherd in a nearby village he dreams of a blood-red flower containing a dew-drop as big as a pearl, with which he can open the doors of the castle and the cage. After a nine-day search he finds the flower, returns to the castle and sets Jorinda and all the other maidens free.  

The Grimm brothers took this tale almost verbatim from the deeply Romantic semi-fictional autobiography of Johann Heinrich Jung, 'The Life of Heinrich Stilling', published in 1777.  Writing throughout in the third person, Jung tells how one day, out in the forest gathering firewood, the eleven-year-old Heinrich asks his Aunt Marie for a story. ‘“Tell me, aunt, once more,” said Heinrich, “the tale of Joringel and Jorinde.”’ His aunt is happy to oblige and when she has finished, Heinrich sits ‘as if petrified – his eyes fixed and his mouth half-open. “Aunt!” said he, at length, “it is enough to make one afraid in the night!” “Yes,” said she, “I do not tell these tales at night, otherwise I should be afraid myself.”’[4] 

It’s lovely to have this account of the story actually being told, and to see its effect on child and storyteller. It is placed in this context however, because of what happens next. Having ventured deeper into the woods, Heinrich’s grandfather comes back to tell how he saw a bright light between the trees, “just as when the sun rises in the morning.” Led by the light, he has seen a vision of the brilliant castles and gardens of heaven, and meets his daughter Dora, Heinrich’s dead mother, who tells him he will soon join her in “our eternal habitation.” Thus, the dark forest, failing sunset, ancient castle and evil enchantress of the fairy tale are deliberately contrasted with the brilliant sunrise, shining castles and angelic beings of heaven.

This then is a literary version of a traditional tale, and since the rest of the autobiography is full of poetical and mystical references to doves, nightingales, morning and evening sun, rings, dewdrops and death, I would guess that the moody music of the opening few paragraphs – the sorrowful lovers, setting sun and mourning doves – is Johann Heinrich Jung’s own. Does this make the story less authentic? I don’t see it that way. Tellers of traditional tales have always enriched, altered and embellished them as they see fit, and a story written down will always be different from the same tale told aloud.

What does the story mean? Why are the lovers so sad? Is it because they know they’ll grow old and die, because evening is here and the day nearly over, because their young love may not last and the sun is already half beneath the mountain?  Are they afraid of mortality, the grave – symbolised by the grim stone walls of the castle whose shadow immobilises them, and the old owl-woman whose voice is a lament?

Or is the owl-woman associated with Athena of classical mythology, goddess of wisdom, whose emblem was the owl? Discussing the tale with me, the author Susan Price thought this might be so, writing:

My impression is a little different. For one, the old woman is associated with the owl, which associates her with Athena. She's also a huntress, who seems to prize and cage (or guard) unmarried girls, which associates her with Artemis. Both these goddesses had their darker, Death sides.

            The youngsters are lost in a wood - wode[5] within this wood. The forest has long been associated with the dangers and traps of life, some of them sexual – but mostly, I think, to do with 'losing one's way' or losing one's self. There's also a tradition of the girl about to be married mourning her single life: her happy life at home with her parents. She's about to launch into adult life, with all its responsibility and cares.

The owl-woman snatches her away from all this and fastens her securely in a cage – but doesn't otherwise mistreat her. The old woman also frees the young man without harming him and tells him that if he does the right thing, he can free the girl.
I think the old woman is a kind of marriage counsellor![6]

This is a thought-provoking comment and a good example of the ways in which fairy tales can be differently interpreted. 

Flowers and owls… owls and flowers… a blood-red flower with a pearl-sized drop of dew at its heart.[7] To modern eyes the sexual imagery is clear: betrothed young maidens cannot remain maidens for ever. But what is the owl doing in this tale? What does it symbolise? Wisdom, or death? The ‘wise owl’ entered northern European folklore rather late, via classical education. To ordinary folk it was primarily known as a bird of death. In The Mabinogion the owl is a hated outcast, a bird of ill omen rather than of wisdom, and this is supported by Chaucer’s ‘The oule ek, that of deth the bode bringeth’ [‘the owl too, that brings tidings of death’], Shakespeare’s ‘Whilst the scritch-owle, scritching loud, Puts the wretch that lies in woe, In remembrance of a shrowd’, and Gilbert White’s ‘From this screaming probably arose the common people’s imaginary species of screech-owl, which they superstitiously think attends the windows of dying persons’. Even John Ruskin felt uneasy about owls: ‘Whatever wise people may say of them, I at least have found the owl’s cry always prophetic of mischief to me.’[8] Moreover, in a variant of the tale noted by the brothers Grimm, it is a crow the old woman turns herself into – another bird associated with death.

In Alan Garner’s 1967 novel The Owl Service, which is based on the story of Blodeuedd, the destructive force of the ancient legend is stored in a set of patterned dinner plates hidden in the attic of an old Welsh house. The stylised pattern can be perceived two different ways, as owls or as flowers, and the plates act as a kind of battery or repository of power, with owls as the negative and flowers as the positive poles. In terms of Garner’s book, this alternating current means not only that the emotional pattern of the legend keeps repeating down the centuries, but that his teenage characters switch between positive and negative constructions of the self.

In Jorinda and Joringel, the constrictive power of age is represented by an owl, the liberating power of youth by a flower. Years ago in my early twenties I was walking through London with a friend. We were laughing and chattering, and a middle-aged woman passing by leaned over and said to us in a low voice but with extraordinary venom, ‘One day you’ll be like me.’ As a memento mori it was quite something and we both shivered, but we agreed later that we never would be like her. We would never, ever be that bitter.

That brush with mortality has stayed with me, however, and I have to recognise at least the existence of those dark emotions – envy of youth, anger at old age, fear of death: ‘When [the old woman] saw Joringel coming she was angry, very angry, and scolded, and spat poison and gall at him, but she could not come within two paces of him.’ In the end the old woman is powerless against the vigour and sexual potency of youth. Fairy tales are emotional amplifiers. We look into them as if into old, dimly-silvered mirrors, and see ourselves and the world around us oddly changed. Analysing a fairy tale can be a deeply interesting intellectual exercise, but that is not what the tale itself is for. It exists like music, to work directly on our feelings. Jorinda and Joringel is short and there’s hardly any plot, but it is intense. It takes the dark emotions and transmutes them, leaving us to remember the beauty of the forest, the sadness of the lovers and the strange little song Jorinda sings.

Like age looking wistfully back on a time of flowers.

 

 

This essay with many others is published in my book ‘Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Reflections on Fairy Tales’, available in print or as an e-book from Amazon. (Click this link.) 

 

Footnotes

---

[1] Blodeuwedd does not appear to be a word for ‘owl’ in modern Welsh, however.

[2] The Mabinogion, tr. Sioned Davies, 244

[3] ‘Jorinda and Joringel’, KHM 69, Grimm’s Fairy Tales

[4] The Autobiography of Heinrich Stilling, tr. S Jackson, 22

[5] ‘Wode within this wood’: Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 Sc 1. Wode: adj: ‘mad’, OE. wōd

[6] Susan Price, personal communication.

[7] In The Autobiography of Heinrich Stilling the flower holds not a dew-drop but a real pearl.

[8] Opie, Iona and Tatem, Moira, A Dictionary of Superstitions, 295

 

Picture credit: 

'She turned herself into a cat or a screech-owl': Jorinda and Joringel, by Arthur Rackham/

The Unhappy Love Affair Of Giant Bolster

 

 

This is a tale told in Robert Hunt’s ‘Popular Romances of the West of England, or The Drolls, Superstitions and Traditions of Old Cornwall’. First published in 1865 it went into three editions and was illustrated by George Cruikshank, of whom more below. The third edition begins with a selection of tales about some of the many Cornish giants. This particular one was called Bolster. Like most giants he was a disreputable character, but unlike most giants he fell madly in love with the local St Agnes. He was in fact a sort of giant stalker, but I’m not sure which of the pair I disapprove of most – him, or her.

Bolster must have been a giant of enormous size, since it is stated that he could stand with one foot on St Agnes’ Beacon and the other on Carn Brea; these hills being distant, as the bird flies, six miles. In proof of this, there still exists in the valley running upwards from Chapel Porth, a stone in which may be seen the impression of the giant’s fingers. On one occasion, while enjoying his usual stride from the Beacon to Carn Brea, Bolster felt thirsty and stooped to drink out of the well at Chapel Porth, resting while he did so on the above-mentioned stone.

We hear but little of the wives of our giants, but Bolster had a wife, who was made to labour hard by her tyrannical husband. On the top of St Agnes’ Beacon there yet exist the evidences of the useless labours to which this unfortunate giantess was doomed, in grouped masses of small stones gathered from an estate at the bottom of this hill [which] whenever Bolster was angry with his wife, he compelled her to [...] carry in her apron to the top...

Be this as it may, the giant Bolster fell deeply in love with St Agnes, who is reputed to have been singularly beautiful and a pattern of virtue. The giant allowed the lady no repose. He followed her incessantly, proclaiming his love and filling the air with the tempests of his sighs and groans. St Agnes lectured Bolster in vain on the impropriety of his conduct, he being already a married man. This availed not [and] the persecuted lady, finding there was no release for her while this monster existed, resolved to be rid of him at any cost, and eventually succeeded by the following stratagem.

Agnes appeared at last to be persuaded of the intensity of the giant’s love, but she told him she required one small proof more. There exists at Chapel Porth a hole in the cliff at the end of the valley. If Bolster would fill this hole with his blood, the lady would no longer look coldly on him.

The huge bestrider-of-hills thought it was an easy thing which was asked of him: he could fill many such holes and be none the weaker for loss of blood. Stretching his great arm across the hole, he plunged a knife into a vein, and a torrent of gore rushed forth. Roaring and seething, the blood fell to the bottom, and the giant expected to see the hole filled in a matter of moments. Yet it required much more blood than Bolster had supposed: still, in a short time it must be filled, so he bled on. Hour after hour the blood flowed from the vein, and the hole was not filled. Eventually the giant fainted from exhaustion. The strength of life within his mighty frame enabled him to rally, but he had no power to lift himself from the ground and was unable to staunch the wound he had made. So it was, that after many throes, the giant Bolster died!

In proposing this task, the cunning saint was well aware that the hole opened at the bottom into the sea, and as rapidly as the blood flowed into the hole it was washed away. Thus, the lady got rid of her lover, Mrs Bolster was released, and the district freed from its tyrant. The hole at Chapel Porth still retains the evidence of this tradition, in the red stain which marks the track down which flowed the giant’s blood.

A footnote to this story takes us to an amusing letter written by the artist George Cruikshank to the book’s publisher Mr Hotten. Cross swords with an artist at your peril:

 

                                                                        263 Hampstead Rd, N.W., April 18^th, 1865

Dear Mr. Hotten, – I have received your note, in which you express a doubt as to whether some portion of the public will understand my representation of the giant “Bolster”.

            To all such persons, I would beg them to reflect, that if a giant could stride six miles across a country, he must be twelve miles in height, according to the proportions of the human figure. In order to get a sight of the head of such a giant, the spectator must be distant a mile or two from the figure. This would, by adding half the “stride” and above eleven miles perpendicular, place the spectator about fifteen miles distant from the giant’s head, which head, in proportion to other parts of the body, would be about three-quarters of a mile measuring from the chin to the crown of the head. Now, let anyone calculate, according to the laws of perspective, what size such a head would be at such a distance. To give a little insight into the matter of perspective, let anyone imagine they are looking down a street, fifteen miles long, of large houses, and then calculate what size the last house would be at the farther end of the street; and it must therefore be recollected that every part of such a huge body must lessen in the same way – body and limbs – smaller by degrees, if not beautifully less.

            I selected this subject from my friend Robert Hunt’s work as one of the numerous proofs, which are shown in both the volumes, of the horrible dark ignorance of the Early Ages – a large amount of which ignorance and darkness, I am sorry to find, still remains.

            I hope that these few lines will explain satisfactorily why Giant “Bolster” has been thus displayed by, – Yours truly, George Cruikshank.

PS. – The first time that I put a very large figure in perspective was about forty years back, in illustrating that part of “Paradise Lost” where Milton describes Satan as

                        “Prone on the flood, extended long and large,

                          Lay floating many a rood.”

This I never published, but possibly I may do so one of these days.