So welcome, everybody, to the second day of the magic and the sense of place conference.
It's a real delight to have you all here and to welcome our next group of panellists.
I'm sticking to the title Making a Place.
Caroline Tully is lecturer, tutor and Honorary Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
She is also associate editor of the ever wonderful Pomegranate, the International Journal of Pagan Studies and a well-known,
unjustly celebrated figure in witchcraft studies, both for her work on archaeology and her work on modern paganism.
And I'm really happy to launch this session and ask Caroline to kick us off.
Good morning, everyone. Although I'm coming to you from the evening in the middle of winter, not from the Warren jury territory.
The the traditional owners of the southern part of Victoria.
In Australia where I live. Fair, fair.
I love culture for Wilderness is a contemporary American pagan religion that celebrates humans erotic union with nature.
It was the brainchild of artist Frederick Adams,
who had a vision of the goddess or a goddess in 1956 and subsequently devoted himself
to the divine in feminine form as a maiden goddess of the wilderness called Core I.
Fred Adams described Fair Feria as a paradise or fellowship for the loving celebration of wilderness mysteries with fairy style,
courtly elegance, refinement and grace, which aims to unite ecology, art, history, mythology and liturgy.
This paper will focus on the relationship between humans and nature in fair, fair and thought and practice,
particularly in regard to praise and the anthropomorphised action of nature envisioned as a young female body.
It will also look at fare areas, planned activities such as the construction of hinges or fairy rings,
circular structures aligned with local topography and the position of celestial
phenomena and used as seasonal and astronomical calendars where in ritual,
magic and fairy enchantment are employed through the establishment of paradoxical sanctuaries.
It's envisioned that humans will be able to both live in peace with each other and in harmony with nature.
Humans will function as stewards of the earth and in accordance with fair,
fair and believes that wilderness is the supreme value of religion and life will ensure that wilderness flourishes.
Fair Feria differs from most neo pagan groups, however, in promoting as supreme deity, not the great mother goddess,
but a daughter goddess envisioned as the youngest member of a holy family consisting of a father, mother, son and daughter.
So this heavenly nymphet goddess who represents all of nature is seen as a saviour of core,
etc. She's the magic maid, and her form is pubescent because,
as Adams explains, the heart of nature is not merely nourishing and life sparing, but also erotic, flirtatious and arousing of passion.
All ancient cosmos, ionic sites, temples and shrines were intended to function as enormous accumulators, senders,
receivers and even feed flow regulators of those synthetic energies, which, with the carefully guarded concerns of the sacred mysteries, goes.
This is the basic thinking behind fair various hinges.
As Jakobson explains, by spending time in the ring, watching stars, planets and the rising and setting times of the sun,
a moon, we become part of the sacred story ourselves, and we find ourselves at home once more on earth.
According to Adams. In a sense, the Magic Henge works on a principle similar to a listening device aimed into outer space to catch the
faint signals from distant stars and to enlarge them so they can be understood on their variants.
Understand fairies to be spirits of the landscape.
And the purpose of fairy enchantment is to form relationships with the spirits or animate aspects of the landscape,
and to demonstrate goodwill towards them and willingness to help them.
They then look for what they term will do charms natural objects that are interpreted as
gifts from the fairies which are taken back to their hinges and can be crafted into objects.
And these charms and these action is understood as forming a reciprocal relationship
with the spirits of wild places located along these directional alignments.
I have to agree with Joe Carson, who assures us that starting with one's own backyard or local park,
any small portion of this dream which you can realise is a step towards bringing more beauty into the world.
Let me now turn to Steve for his paper.
Steve Gladwin is a poet, workshop writer, performer, storyteller, musician, confidence builder and teacher based in Wales and also a novelist.
I discovered to my delight today, so very much looking forward to the stories he's going to tell us.
Good morning and lovely to be invited to be here to do this.
And I hope you enjoy what I'm going to talk about.
Talking I'm going to give this called these woods a lovely dark and deep but it's subtitle might be on the duality of Forest, Woods and Grove.
The theme of the conference that I'm going to be specifically addressing is How does the idea of magic originate from the
interpretation of space at the time that the Brothers Grimm and the women who provided so much fuel for a classic live?
They were wolves and bears, bull, savage dogs and feral cats.
There were certainly witches, however, you chose to interpret them, along with the whole race of malevolence that forms the human race.
But there was one other ingredient which those who inhabited every part of this landscape,
especially the dense pack forests which covered huge stretches of northern Europe, we're used to having to accept.
And that was darkness, the darkness, the real darkness, which could only be held away purely by candlelight added to the terror.
And educated them by scaring them so silly they wouldn't dare try to go out in the dark or off the beaten path.
This is what happens here, too. Two familiar friends completely out of their comfort zone.
Now, hour or two later, they lost all count of time.
They pulled up spirited, weary and hopelessly at sea and sat down on a fallen tree trunk to recover their breath and consider what was to be done.
They were ageing with fatigue and bruised with tumbles. They'd fallen into several holes and got wet through.
The snow was getting so deep they could hardly drag their little legs through it.
And the trees were thicker and more like each other than ever.
There seemed to be no end to this road and no beginning and no difference in it.
And worst of all, no way out. It is one of the lesser definitions of the term liminal again.
Feelings of unease created by a physical, liminal space or considerable change.
My personal favourites of these writers are things that go bump in the Woods original black
quote as the man himself describes in his short memoir of early childhood episodes before 30.
He was schooled at a religious community in the heart of the Alps.
What he almost definitely felt is memorably and chillingly described in the form of his famous Dr. John silent stories secret worship,
where it's relocated to the Black Forest, and in what is surely one of the earliest examples of the school, which is a gateway to [INAUDIBLE].
A lot of people may have many thoughts about that.
In the beginning, the character Harris Blackwood's version of his younger self relates to fellow traveller Dr. John.
The silence, the fervent closeness of the school atmosphere, very smell of the thing came back to him.
The daily sauerkraut, the watery chocolate.
On Sundays, the flavour of the stringy meat served twice a week, at which I guess some of he smiled to think again of the half rations.
That was a punishment for speaking English. The very odour of the milk bottles, the hot, sweet aroma that rose,
the soaking pleasant bread at the 6:00 breakfast come back to him poignantly
when he saw the huge freezers with the hundred boys in that school uniform,
all eating sleepily in silence, loping down the course, bread and scolding milk in terror of the bell that were perfectly cut them short.
And at the far end where the master sat, he saw the narrow slit windows with the vistas of enticing the Autumn Frist build.
Thank you. Thank you very much. I think we've all been on a journey.
Joining us, Elizabeth Gala and Dr. Tim Campbell Green.
Elizabeth grew up in Cheshire, surrounded by folklore and folktales.
She's an award winning author of two novels. A collection of rewritten folk tales Lost and Found will be published in September.
She is co-presenting with Dr. Tim Campbell BREAM, who is a professional archaeologist and has been for over 25 years.
But a love of old things and a naturally inquisitive nature has meant a fascination in the past has always been with him.
Could we now shift from Elizabeth and Tim?
Thank you. Thanks. The story that Tim and I are sharing is a story of forests and place and limnology.
It is centred around Blacktown Trust, the education arts charity that my parents set up and that Tim and I both honey involved in.
And it is in itself its own folktale because it's a story of a house that moved.
And this is a story that started 50 years ago now, as we know from folklore and folktale motif.
Things on the outside are very rarely what they seem on the inside.
Yes, it's a 17th century timber framed building from the early 17th century, but certainly by its framing, it seems to be about that period.
It's a wonderful thing for it was dismantled and then remodelled elsewhere.
This doorway and these beams, which is a hidden liminal space within another liminal space.
It's a house that travelled across a boundary, so it went from Staffordshire into Cheshire, into the back garden of the house of my parents living.
My father in Ghana wrote many of his books in that place and his most recent novel, Trick Walker, is actually set in the medicine house.
But also for me personally, the blessings and the boundaries of this site fed into my own creative work and actually really fuelled
by the work that Tim and I have been doing together and the conversations that we've had in this place.
And a lot of what we're going to be exploring is this idea of how objects contain stories,
how landscape contains stories, and how much for this me links back to this site in Blacktown, but for now.
Let's return to the house. And let's strip away the skin.
It's a wonderful thing to look at. Very practical with the materials they had.
But it is also a very strange boundary point. This is an inserted chimney.
17th century, at least at first glance. But it's out at some stage, a second floor put in,
and the chimney has been inserted as well as a freestanding chimney that runs from the ground all the way to the roof.
One of the things that my parents were really clear about to the workmen during that process of deconstruction,
if they ever found anything hidden in the beams to stop and give a shout.
And as a result, we have a wonderful list of the caches that were found hidden in these boundary points of the chimney.
It is the ultimate liminal space, and as a liminal space, it has been inhabited and looked after.
We're harking back to yesterday with Chris Guston's conversation about these so-called app tripping,
not very protective, at least at our best understanding.
Our best interpretation at the moment is protecting against what they see as a good question.
They are usually found in liminal spaces, as pointed out, which is doorways, windows and in particular chimneys.
There is very much fear surrounded by chimneys. It's permeable.
You can't close off a chimney. It's always open and as such it needs to be protected against, well, essentially.
Witches, witchcraft, mal. It is the evil doing that can enter your house and demonology.
Yeah. This is a great example of how we can actually see this belief being manifested in text.
And what I find really interesting about this, again, this is something Tim and I could unpack for hours,
but but the fact that this was the James of first demonology, this was 1597.
So and if you think about in terms of Shakespeare referring back to Stephen Macbeth was published in 1623.
So this was not only a belief that was held, but a belief that needed to be acted out in some way.
And I find that really fascinating. And as James, the first notes that if wind can get in, then so can evil.
Here we see it as someone trying to get through the door and. No, listen, I've talked about this isn't where they.
Yeah, this is a very different interpretation that when we first looked at this and discussed it,
Tim saw this character as someone trying to get in to help.
And I saw it as the figure of the watching storyteller, the person that observes and creates the tale.
And this takes me on to another woodcut.
Now this is an illustration from the lost and found folk tales.
And I'm just going to read a tiny bit to you to put this in context.
The story Tibby is a farmer's wife, and in a moment of inattention, something happens to her child.
She leaves the child alone by the chimney in the cradle and comes back and has this child that will not settle and will not sleep and howls.
And her neighbour is a tailor called Old Wooley and he comes over to try and help.
Old Woolly ended his pack and took out a bunch of hops and barley, a fresh egg and a silver needle.
Then he turned and looked at to be directly, you get yourself the other side of that strong door, go lock it tight and whatever you see or hear,
don't move an inch until the sap is swallowed to be did as she was told, and she pressed her cheek to the rough wood and set her eye to the keyhole.
She watched as old Willie pierced the eggshell with the needle and set his mouth to it.
He sucked until his cheeks were full and spat into the hearth.
Then he cracked the blown out clean into. He took water from the jug and poured it into the half that had no hole.
He crushed the hops and barley between the finger and thumb and placed them in the water.
He set the frail flag in the ashes of the fire and waited.
There, crawling along the lip of the cradle came of withered hand, peeking out behind it, small squinting eyes as black as coal.
And Tim's going to explain the significance of the chimney in terms of trick walker the chimneys.
This is where Joe Coppock is his hiding place. It's a space.
Well, he can fill in the family detail. Well, I can. It's always been a hiding place.
I'm the youngest of five siblings and we're quite stretched. So I think all of us hit up there at some point.
And the collection of essays about my father's work, First Light,
I talk about how I hid out there as a child and listened to storytellers in the chimney below.
True story. This is Joe's hiding place inside.
And in fact, again, although lots of stuff happens in this room for Joe and indeed The Changeling,
when we looked up here, we found protective marks, so they would actually possibly have stood a chance.
And the funny thing is that neither my father I talked when we were writing, we don't really talk about it afterwards.
We do. But I didn't know the tree could walk who was sat there.
And he didn't know that I'd given Phoebe that image to work with.
Here are some protected treasures. These issues that were found not actually in the old man's house, as far as I know, but I could be correct on that.
Oh, no, these are from Total. These are from Total, the other house on the other side and bludgeoned.
But nonetheless, they are significant. They are truly wonderful little tiny children's shoes.
They are part of the tradition that is quite apparent of hiding shoes, particularly around, say, these liminal points, doorways,
windows and in particular chimneys and roof spaces, it seems,
is likely that these shoes were deposited in total when it too had a second floor inserted.
The history of total is it's a very interesting subject, but it's changed as part of the great rebuild in the 17th century,
a second floor spot in the site, the old mansion house was moved to the garden in the place where my parents lived.
But there's also another older house there called Total, which is not actually Wind in the Willows, it's told.
It's just it all the time. The old hall and the two houses sit side by side.
But just in case you thought that Tim and I had just veered off into the willows by accident,
you seems to be a tradition of hiding shoes in inaccessible places.
This is not simply disposal of unwanted shoes they usually deposited in single as in not a pair.
It is one from each pair and sometimes also in family group.
So you get two adults and some children.
We don't fully understand why it is what Ronald puts describes as an historical practice that's nobody's talking about it.
Nobody writes about it at the time.
The best guess is that perhaps the shoes have come to represent the person that was, and I don't know if anyone else is on someone else's shoe.
It's someone else's old issue. It's a very weird sensation because that shoe has moulded itself to their thought.
It isn't part of your foot. And the idea is perhaps that if you by hiding this, the shoe represents the person and any ill will,
any witchcraft in badness can go to the shoe rather than the person itself.
To me, again, with my folklore head on and my daughter had is an element of one foot in this world and another foot in another world.
With that in mind, this is the end of my changing story. The changing child has been dispatched up the chimney by the tailor.
It's not pretty. And in our world everything seems to be all right.
From that day on to be and her husband face the trials of life together,
standing side by side in all matters to be counted her blessings daily under the tailor's quite instruction.
She set a pair of pins crosswise beneath her son's pillow every night on her son's insistence, they always slept with a stout poker at the bedside.
As for old Willie, he left the farm that night, whistling full of plans of how he might stitch together his newfound fortunes.
The next morning, his pack was discovered by the side of the road stuffed to bursting with lamb's wool and strong, tanned leather.
But the good tailor was never seen again. Echoing backed yesterday.
This was an onion that was found in the body, my pub in Rockwell Green, Somerset, in a chimney,
and the names that were wrapped around the onion were names of individuals who were part of the temperance movement.
Again, we don't know whether this was an echo of a ritual belief inverted.
But as I said at the time, I was just really struck by the amount of pins, how many pins you need to spare.
And I mean, clearly, ritual is a word we throw around in localities, but it's clearly done with intent and purpose.
Let's go to another shoe. I'm coming at it from the.
Claw point of view. This is an illustration for my retelling of the Black of Norway story, which I called Blackpool's Pride.
I think it's one of my favourite stories and it's a love trial and it's full of ritual.
And this is the youngest sister of three sisters, and the other two were taken away by a prince in a golden carriage.
The other prince in a silver carriage, the younger sister gets a great big black ball and goes off into an enchanted adventure that covers many,
many different boundaries in the heart of it.
She gets separated from her husband and she finds herself in another world, and she's taken in by a blacksmith.
And as her apprentice piece she makes after seven years of serving.
She makes an iron shoe. And this enables her to traverse the landscape.
And I'm just going to read a tiny bit of that.
Then as her seventh year rolled around, she set to the making of her own metal.
She fashioned iron, so heel, toe and tongue and marry them together into her apprentice piece.
For me as a child. This absolute treasure that was found in the beams in black two always was that I knew it.
Absolutely always was. And Tim, you can just quickly explain what it actually is.
Yeah, it's a it's a solid, startled spirit, but it's for a woman riding a horse.
It's it's quite a beautiful thing. It's probably 16th century and may have been made as a token of love.
As you can see, it's decorated with hearts around it. It is it's a wonderful object.
This is the landscape of the track to Blacktown.
And it's another echo. Tim, you can explain the trick will occur here.
Yeah, it's it's the track down which Joe got the walks which Neil referenced yesterday with a catalogue of fields he walks walk through.
But just to the right there is the bog which in armour and he's awakened and then sleeps without giving too much away.
Here is the map of Blacktown. And it is a place full of boundaries and full of crossroads.
Yeah, I mean, it sits on top of a Bronze Age burial mount. We're right in the centre of Bronze Age cemetery.
The old mansion house sits at the junction of, I think, five trucks.
So it is a liminal space beyond liminal space. Just to conclude, going back to the final folktale motif,
this idea of crossing these boundaries into other worlds and returning home and returning home changed.
And the house is also a place that changes with time and light and the stories that are told in it.
So here's that same chimney at twilight and actually where the light is falling here from that being,
you can't quite see it, but there's a seat that comes out here. And Tim, you can give us the final tree.
Could Walker reveal about that is where Cedric Walker sits and converses with Joe Copper?
Yes. I just want to conclude by saying if you've enjoyed what you've heard, if you're interested in exploring either of the books,
you can actually order the poetry coke lost and found from the and trust website.
A significant amount of the sale price of the books will go back into the charity of the black interest and will enable us to continue digging about.
We also have a YouTube channel which if you just Google the Black and Trust official channel, you'll find us there.
And there's all sorts of bits and pieces of interviews with my father, more of Tim and myself holding forth and unpacking treasures.
So please do go and check that out. And we will be doing a few tools and a few special events over the summer.
So if you want to see an actual physical three dimensions and explore those boundaries in those liminal places, please do get in touch.
Thank you. Thank you.
What a fantastic presentation. Absolutely wonderful.
I think I need to double superlatives on that note.
It's a real pleasure to be able to introduce the next speakers.
Gwendoline Knight is a fantastic young academic,
currently postdoctoral fellow at the Department of History and Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Stockholm.
Has published an extraordinary article which I recommend with a special enthusiasm after this morning's sessions.
It's called The Night is Dark and Full of Terrors,
and it's in a collection majestically entitled to darkness, depression and descent in Anglo-Saxon England.
And if that doesn't intrigue you, I don't know what will.
She's also working on a project entitled Before the Witch Trials Witchcraft as a Legal Concept in Medieval Scandinavia.
She's very kindly recorded her talk and her images for us.
So today I'm going to be talking about zombie magic, and it's very much magic in inverted commas, between primary and secondary worlds.
Spelling of Saw Me that I have adopted now is one that can reflect an
acknowledgement that talking about some communities requires a consciousness of the
fact that you Soviet communities are not monolithic and it also signals and
inclusiveness towards precisely these minorities and minorities and so forth.
On these and on the north, Sami itself is really the biggest lobby language group.
And so almost any of the studies that are done, most of the speakers are on this course,
wants to be inclusive and not just engage with it to the exclusion of others on languages.
Time for my talk today. I'm going to start by describing some of the stereotypes of this on me in Saga literature,
and it will be talking primarily about the Icelandic circumstance, authors of Icelanders.
But these are stereotypes that also appear in other genres.
For example, the from the other side, which are often more kind of adventure tales,
or as the Icelandic saga are usually seen as a bit more anchored in the Icelanders, looking back at a more accessible past.
However, as we shall see, the stereotypes are remarkably consistent across these genres, despite their contrasts in scholarship.
And then I'll talk a little bit about story worlds, primary and secondary worlds before moving on to these main analytical thrust
of my presentation and talking about how we can use this concepts of primary
secondary worlds to kind of think possibly a little bit differently about
stereotypes of magic and why this is an important and interesting thing to do.
The stereotypes of the Sami in the literature are remarkably strong, that they're remarkably consistent and solving very wrong, in fact,
has taken to calling this the Sami motif cluster because there is a sort of group of attributes that appear so consistently,
and these are patterns that are frequently associated with othering and race making.
So that is giving it a centralised quality and sort of using this as a method of differentiation between groups of people.
There's a geographical association with the North.
So in comparison with, for example, Norway, then this becomes far north in association with hunting and archery forest animals and winter weather.
And skiing is also very strong taxation, trade, marriage, resources for associations with Sami individuals in soccer literature.
And finally, one of the perhaps strongest associations is with magic, the supernatural, supernatural creatures, shape shifting, soul projection.
It depends a little bit on your interpretation of the particular saga that the association
with Magic and indeed with Powerful Magic is really one of the strongest patterns
that we see is that Elsa Mandell has observed that when Sami people and their world and
the relation between the Sami and the Nordic peoples is described in Old Norse texts,
the parallels into patterns in the mythic world are sometimes striking.
And. And this is one. Didn't see.
When the scholars write about the representation of this ennui in Old Norse texts is that by talking about the association of so many
people with supernatural creatures and events is sort of start to talk about the Saami as a feature of a kind of Norse mythological world.
Losing beat aside as a kind of this aspect of connection to people is this isn't exactly a case of, for example,
shapeshifters in general or Tesla or other supernatural creatures that when we have the references to to many individuals,
there is still a conceptual connection to a basis in human people.
And this is perhaps even more important to keep in mind when we're talking about the Saami,
even when we're talking about another group of people who often are in this in the middle zone,
the term being a reference for actual human people, but also for more supernatural people, supernatural characters.
Our story worlds are unique to particular stories and their process of creation between the story maker and the audience.
So in order for a story world to succeed in the the secondary world that is created by the story maker needs to have you buy into it.
You need to believe it while you were there. You need to feel like you're inside it to a certain degree.
And thus it's as Wolf says, it's not surprising that secondary worlds will in many ways resemble the primary world,
not only because it's the source of material,
but also because it gives you this familiarity that lets you relate to the secondary world and especially to characters and their emotions,
because you have a way of understanding them.
And so, of course, there are different ways of nesting that worlds within each other to a certain degree,
because we all sort of have our own conceptions of how the world works, and we're all sort of universes of little story worlds walking around.
And so whenever somebody tells a story or, you know, you're in a story and someone relates something that happened to them in the past,
that's embedding a little over a small story world inside of the larger story world,
but in the sense of much more and much more simple or comparatively, where when I refer to the primary world,
I'm referring to the real world and historical world and the secondary world is.
The world of the particular saga.
And so one one thing that we can observe is that the sagas themselves are and they're multilayered entities in how they construct their world.
And in particular that because they all draw upon and because many of the Eastland Dickinson could draw upon similar reference,
they all sort of take part in a and so they all sort of draw upon a conceptual world.
They create almost a kind of a kind of saga verse.
And for this, there are certain certain anchors within this.
And in a common world between the sagas and.
That's.
Would you let people in the audience know that when they are, so to speak, participating in this in this world building in the secondary world,
and that they are that they are in a familiar world, that part of the world building has sort of already been completed for them.
And. So this is this is quite similar to the observations you're about to have observed with regard to sunny representations in soccer literature.
And so due to the multi-layered nature of the sagas, their historical and ethnographic traits always consist of a selected reality,
which is filtered through traditional knowledge and mythical narrative.
For instance, the characters in the sagas transformed into textual representations types representing different things in different contexts,
supporting the author's aspirations as the sagas were written.
It's very much true depictions of this on the soccer literature and so in in this way.
Particular representations of so many people they can do the way that the stereotype is,
is changed and can at once signal both how a particular saga fits into a it fits into the saga, her, so to speak.
But also any changes or differences can communicate to the saga audience and particular preoccupations or aspirations of that particular saga.
Author Hoping that Gwendoline can hear me, thanking her for that powerful and morally charged presentation.
Now let's turn to Sophie Page, professor of history at University College London and author of many fantastic works,
including Magic in the Cloister, Pious Motives, Illicit Interests and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe.
Editor of two collections The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain and the Routledge History of Medieval Magic.
She's also edited astrology in medieval manuscripts and magic in medieval manuscripts.
And she's working on a book on nature and magic in medieval Europe.
But what I mostly experienced and disconnects beautifully to the presentations this morning, perhaps particularly Liz Gardner's presentation,
was her curation of the Spellbound exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum entitled Spellbound Magic Ritual and Witchcraft.
I'm going to talk about ideas of magic and place from my own area of expertise medieval than magic.
By this category, I simply mean anything that survives in the written record from a set of rituals to have a vision of God that took three years for
a person to complete to a simple recipe that recommends consuming a quite tongue in honey to understand the language of birds.
And I'll also be looking at some objects that are part of this ritual magic tradition.
I focus on late medieval Europe, a time and place in which Greco-Roman, Jewish,
Arabic and Christian magic circulated widely in texts in Latin and various European vernaculars,
following the translating movement of Arabic and Greek scientific, philosophical and medical texts into Latin in the 12th and 13th centuries.
This is a period in which religion, magic and science are particularly entangled.
We see monks using condemned magical rituals to try to increase their soul,
salvation and natural magic being established by Bishop of Paris as a scientific category to describe extraordinary properties in nature.
So first, I'm going to discuss the role of space and place in medieval magic generally.
Secondly, I'm going to look at magic rituals to recreate ideal interspecies relationships lost after the fall.
And to conclude, I will discuss magic animals and the Anthropocene,
the Christian sense of a world filled with millions of invisible spirits and astrology,
or more specifically, astral magic, in which spirits are thought to inhabit the planetary heavens.
Take on the nature of these planets and descend from the planets to Earth.
Practitioners of astral magic use the ideas of celestial and terrestrial
correspondences to choose the best places and natural objects for their rituals.
For example, if you wanted to influence a river or a whale,
you could perform a ritual when one of the zodiac signs linked to water was in a powerful position in the heavens.
This is a recommendation from the medieval magic text called the Pick a tricks at first sight learned
magic that was about engaging with angels or demons seems disassociated from a sense of place.
The necromancer or summoner of evil spirits might need to choose an isolated placed to practice
his transgressive art without anxiety and a remote mountain place is sometimes recommended.
But the primary concern is to create a ritual space in which he is protected from demons.
They thought that demons were influenced by particular planets or too dangerous for the operator to engage with.
The mirror on the right is intended to cool down and really trap within it the spirit Floren, who is usually described as a fallen angel.
The two objects here are both inscribed versions of the psyche Lem Day or SEAL of Gold,
a magical image that first appears in a 13th century magic text.
The Sworn Book of Honorius. Its main medieval use in rituals seems to have been to achieve the vision of gold,
but it is also said to give whoever wears it power over all spirits.
One version to redeem a soul from purgatory so its ritual deposit may be related to anxiety about the souls.
Passage through the afterlife or in the case of embedding it in a brick which forms part of a castle.
Perhaps the connection to protection from harmful spirits.
In my second case, study for medieval learned magic and a sense of place.
I want to talk about animals, and I'm particularly going to focus on magic and the pursuit of ideal interspecies relationships.
This longing for natural utopias was a response to living with scarcity and environmental degradation,
but also a vision of living harmoniously with animals that flourished alongside medieval efforts at sustainability,
resource management and conservation. But whatever the goals,
the experiment of appealing to plants and animals vividly acknowledges them as interacting players rather than inert and timeless resources.
So examples of magic and the pursuit of ideal interspecies relationships.
My first is the Liberace Alice, a 13th century compilation of magic texts with Jewish and Arabic origins in which the Angel Rat SEAL is
said to have taken pity on Adam's post flap Syrian weakness and gives him a book of occult knowledge,
which is this book, The Liberace Alice. The deeper at Cialis claims that through its magical operations the practitioner can recover Adam's pre-nup,
salary and power over nature, including the ability to have grace over beasts.
Other operations will enable the practitioner to protect his own animals, bind any animal to him, make any animal come to him.
And dry dragons.
Power over animals in this magic texts consists not only in dominance, but also in knowledge of the natural world and the ability to interpret it.
There are rituals to understand birds, beasts, thunder and the winds.
In the pick a trick.
Animals are receptive to the right rituals because they are predisposed to receive sensations harmonious with their individual natures,
and because their forms are influenced by the powers of the celestial bodies and spirits.
Planets rule over particular animals, so wearing stones inscribed with images of the planets inclines animals to be well disposed to the wearer.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most important planets in this respect are Mars and Venus,
representing respectively the activities of domination and love.
The Ring of Mars specifically appeases elephants, lions and vultures.
While the Ring of Venus acts on flying animals, forests, creatures, cocks, locusts and birds with pussy feathers.
The personification of plants and medieval ritual texts emerged from an ancient medico magical tradition of addressing plants,
but also gained currency from the respectability of the goddess.
Tellus for nature a view of plants as allies in the cosmological struggle of good and evil,
and the influence of the Aristotelian theory of vegetative souls.
In the early Middle Ages, a pair of prayers to the goddess Earth and to all plants became widely diffused in the herbal tradition,
with copies surviving from the sixth to the 13th century.
The speech of humans could initiate a friendly or violent encounter when it was part
of a magic ritual that brought the plant or animal under the practitioner spell.
In the representation of the ENCHANTER and the ASP,
we have a story in which an animal refuses to beguile successfully in the period covered by this paper, the 11th to 15th century.
There were considerable manmade changes to the ecosystems of Europe through deforestation and urbanisation
and the hunting to extinction of some species and the introduction of others into new habitats.
Some medieval observers expressed anxiety about this new relationship with nature.
The 12th century cleric John of Salisbury complained that English rulers were abusing their hunting rights,
throwing what he calls an encircling net around the whole universe,
treating the natural world as their personal property rather than a gift from God to everyone.
An earlier paper by Michael Ostlund, suggested that a healthy relationship with nature exists where there is fear.
And I think this is an interesting idea to think about in late medieval Europe,
where there was a shift from fear of large predators who were going extinct across Europe to fear of the devil.
It is still a transformative stage in this shift.
So the devil is often said to take the form of a wolf and werewolf, a culturally prominent from romances to witchcraft trials.
The historian Jack Lakoff has argued that the wilderness of medieval Europe moves from lived experience into the imagination.
And this is also an idea worth thinking about. The marvel filled forests of medieval romances with their green knights, magical horses and fountains,
wild men and friendly lions, a nostalgic portraits and an era of deforestation and might also be a warning for us today.
A final thought.
The kinds of magic that focus on positive interspecies relationships that I have been discussing emerge not just from a culture of nostalgia,
but also from proximity.
The lived experience of companion animals and the training care and understanding of valuable working animals like dogs, horses and hawks.
In late medieval Europe, many people's livelihoods depended on the animals welfare and as a consequence,
close bonds and shared purpose arose between them.
Animals were also important in the belief system because they were considered part of God's good creation.
Positive animal behaviours were thought to provide good models for humans to follow,
while negative animal habits were thought to warn against spiritual danger.
But in Christianity, because animals were part of God's good creation, animals could only act as symbols of evil.
They could never act as agents of evil. I wish to contrast this medieval context with the modern.
This is how historian Erika Funches put it. Animals are just enchanted when they are turned into machines for the production of stuff.
And this contrasts to the medieval sense of proximity.
To conclude, then.
Medieval people lived in close proximity to animals and assigned important meanings to them, creating connections that our modern world has lost.
Well, thank you very much. But we now turn to Karen and Alex, Karen Mahoney and Alex Akerlof, both tarot owners.
I've been a devotee of their work for a very long time now.
They work under the heading Bob Rock. Bob Rock Studio.
But when we recommend the fantastic paradox.
Thank you very much. We're going to be talking about signs, moments in divination and councilman say,
and particularly we're going to be talking about that in respect to the tarot card.
And the Tower of Prague was a very early text that we made.
It's actually the first proper project that we did together. We did start the studio in Prague.
Alex and I actually met in Prague, started the studio in 2002, and then moved it eventually to Southwest Island in 2016.
We're known for design that has houses symbolic, decorative and sometimes magical imagery.
We're going to be talking about magic in an urban landscape, very much an urban landscape, because Prague is an odd place, there's no doubt.
And and things seem to happen in Prague. Odd signs, omens, experiences and so on.
Some people seem to be part and parcel of living in Prague.
I've put up here a quote from a wonderful conversation I had with a museum guide in Prague.
She was showing us from a baroque palace, as you do in Prague, and she mentioned that one of the rooms was haunted.
So I said, Oh, that's interesting. Have you ever seen the ghosts?
And she looked at me like I was silly.
And she said, You're asking if I've seen ghosts?
And I said, Yes. She said, Well, of course I see them.
I've seen old time conversations like that. So.
Terribly unusual in Prague. I want to just tell you a story about one of my experiences,
because I think it's very much a flavour of of how these things seem to manifested in Prague.
And I want to take you back to this is 2001, the spring of 2001.
And I've been going backwards and forwards to Prague quite a lot. I was running a design studio in London,
but I had a team of software engineers in Prague at the time and I was also doing a bit of teaching for George Soros in Prague.
So I was going backwards and forwards and increasingly I realised that I didn't want to leave Prague.
Every time I had to do that and had to get back to London, I felt miserable and I had been thinking,
should I just pack up everything in London and pack up my life amidst Prague?
It's a huge decision. So one beautiful day I was walking up the street.
This street, it's called Evans. It means the Gap.
It's one of my favourite streets in Prague.
Pilgrim Pride walk up, evolves and it rises above the valley of Prague because the park on the left, these wonderful house on the right.
So it's walking up. It's old man's pavement on the left hand side.
And I stopped and I thought, I absolutely have to stop dithering.
I've got to make a decision. And I thought, right, I made that decision now.
And it was very conscious. I'm deciding that I'm moving to Prague.
And 2 seconds later I kid you not.
2 seconds later, a huge cheer arose from the valet behind me.
Enormous cheering and sounds of jubilation. And then as I stood there, somewhat stunned.
Windows started opening all up and down the street. People started waving and cheering.
There was huge happiness. And I stood there thinking.
Goodness. Seems a bit of an overreaction to my decision to move here, but thanks very much.
I hadn't noticed when I was walking up there it had been very quiet, much quieter than usual.
I had vaguely wondered why. But it wasn't until about 2 hours later that I realised that the moment I made my
decision was also the moment the Czech Republic won the World Ice Hockey Championship.
This is what the cheering came about, but it was a significant event.
Was it just a very bizarre coincidence? I don't know.
But the things that happen in Prague seem to often have that sense of sort of slightly tongue in cheek humour.
And if we see Prague is something sentence some people do.
We can come back to that. Prague is definitely a significant city with a great deal of black humour to her.
Prague is known as the magic city of all the urban places I know.
It seems to have the most extraordinary concentration of mythology and belief about it.
I had to pull out a wonderful quote from Angela maria, recalling how Magic Prague is his book.
And it's terribly purple prose. It's terribly over the top, and I kind of love it.
And it's a kind of a human to Prague, almost. And he describes Prague.
Prague is always, always female, by the way. He says she slyly works her way into the soul with spells and enigmas to which she alone holds the key.
Prague does not release anyone she has taken hold of.
Prague is associated with a whole lot of things in magic and blessed alchemy, of course, because of Emperor Rudolf,
the second who brought alchemists in from all over Europe to practice and to try and find the Philosopher's Stone.
He was very much interested not only in gold, but also in everlasting life.
So there was a real concentration of alchemists.
Astrology and astronomy.
The two, of course, being not so very clearly differentiated.
Kepler, who worked in Prague, did a very famous chart for Duke von Stein,
a very famous astrological chart, which is often quoted as the chart that shows that astrology works.
It's associated with prophecy. Prague has a very interesting creation myth.
The myth is that it was created by Boucher, who was from a Celtic tribe, and she was a prophetess and a singer.
And she is supposed to have foreseen that Prague should be built in a particular place,
and then it should be called Prague, which is threshold like a doorway.
So it's very other.
People talk about liminal space since Prague was the threshold is very much a liminal space and is believed to have been from its very inception.
We have werewolves. Perhaps less profound, but there are one or two great werewolf medicine.
Prague, believe it or not. Ghosts and spirits everywhere.
Rock has a flaming turkey. It has a ghost flaming turkey.
It's, of course, associated with the Golem Rabbi Labs Amaral, who created the Golem in Prague.
Like many medieval cities, you can actually.
See on some of the tours. There are spells written to deter demons from burning down the tower.
It's got some association with witchcraft.
You may have come across a terrible kind of Victorian potboiler, the book by Maureen Crawford called The Witch of Prague.
But it was very popular in its time and the sentence around the witch living in the centre of Prague.
Interestingly, the myths are developing all the time, so Prague has become very associated with some plants.
And as far as we can tell, although this association of vampires in Greater Bohemia goes way back,
this very close tie with vampires in Prague that you can see in an awful lot of films and novels over the last 20 years.
It almost seems if you're going to have a vampire film or a vampire novel now, it needs to be some reference to Prague.
And that's become more and more noticeable in the last 20 years.
So the link between Prague and vampires is a developing one and something which you can actually see practically growing over the years.
This one is a practical guide, some breaking down for us, which is a terribly useful experience.
Again, having talked about Prague and its reputation to magic on many levels.
I want to talk about the terror of Prague. Why did we do it?
It's a really good question. I think looking back, I'm slightly embarrassed, looking back at how arrogant we were or how French we were.
We sort of thought if we don't do a tower of Prague, somebody else will do it.
And we were upset, convinced we do it better. As I say, I look back and think, Oh, we spent a year doing it together.
We went all over Prague. We photographed all sorts of apartment artwork over Prague, and we made this stack of images.
And of course, a lot of those places that we were photographing already had legends attached to them.
It was actually very interesting because we knew some of the legends and others who didn't.
We're even now sometimes being told about so the tour of Prague as the writing touch took place.
The aim of the day was to try and reflect both the magic in Prague, but also the ferocity of our work.
So we went from medieval right through to mobile.
This is Wenceslaus on his upside down horse, and that's the modern sculptures I did, turning Prague's famous for its doors on swans of doors.
Since the red line is a door sign it's he's supposed to have of course alchemical associations.
Really fantastic. Thank you very much.
We have a further session on getting lost. Ronald Hutton would be chairing that one because I'm one of the presenters.
We're going to kick off with Alexandra Paddock and Diane Perkins, both from Cable College, Oxford.
Diane has made an enormous impact with her books upon witchcraft, beliefs, fairy traditions and the construction of masculinity.
Her work is united by a keen sense of the importance of gender, and its epicentre is in the early modern period.
But she stands by her all territory from the ancient to the modern.
Teamed with her also from cable is Dr. Paddock, who teaches and researches medieval literature and children's literature.
She is currently leading the Oxford English Faculty Public Engagement Project for ten minute book club and works on medieval animal texts,
particularly the physiologists, the bestiary tradition.
Her current book project is On Land, Space and the Master of Animals in medieval literature.
I am delighted to welcome them both to speak on sinking into a place for bodies Grendel and the Green Chapel.
Thank you very much for that. Thank you very much.
And chuckling, you know, diary, there is a refrain.
What you don't understand. You can make mean anything. Landscapes are full of mysteries, ruins, gravestones, paths.
And sometimes the land is literally part water going down deep, destroying and preserving.
The people who lived here before us knew this. But what did they make of it?
And what did we make of their actions? Analysis of both bodies falls into two categories.
The first interprets the bodies as the results of execution or punishment, sometimes extended to the idea of cleansing of deviant or disabled people.
So the bulk burial is a form of deviant burial. This idea is supported by Tacitus, the finding of deformed bodies.
Some of the Fenland folklore collected by Balfour, especially the myth of yellowy brown and to an extent,
the story of the eighth century spent goose, like all of which we plan to discuss.
The second theory interprets the body as sacrifices,
in particular as a sacrifice that keeps on giving by the continued presence and visibility of the body in the landscape.
This fits with the known fact that butter was deposited in bogs for later retrieval,
so that bogs were known to be the places where decomposition and decay were prevented,
and also by some of the rich deposits in plankton and other bulk science,
which has been compared to tomb deposits and which may be similar in purpose.
Bronze Age Lopez deliberately sunk into the fen landscape it must farm and Cambridgeshire
seemed to have been undergoing a process of storage to keep them malleable for the winter,
suggesting local understanding of the preserving power of the books.
Further supporting evidence arguably comes from the forensic reconstruction of the methods of killing the individuals later buried in the book,
especially when that involves several methods of killing strangulation accompanied by stabbing,
for example, a practice that has been detected in written accounts of sacrifice.
But both these ideas have in common is the notion of box is different from other land and also different from water,
and a consciousness of the visibility and routine ability of the body so that consciousness can be seen as fluctuating.
In this paper, we want to suggest a third possibility between these extremes,
and that is regeneration that the body deposited in the book was understood not only as preserved,
but potentially to be transformed unlike anything that could be altered.
This could go in two directions towards redemption and improvement or to real disastrous monstrosity.
We will use both Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, specifically its Green Chapel,
to make suggestions about the dance between those two kinds of regeneration and also as
a way to talk about the different ways of remaining visible or hiding in plain sight.
A lot of what he will say will sound uncertain in part it because it is about uncertainty,
about the stirring up of that which can't be made fully certain and definite.
Whatever both bodies were, they were anomalous. They remained troublingly, present in the landscape without becoming visible in it.
Moreover, time itself brings further uncertainties as interpretations are made on one another.
What we see in both Beowulf and Gwyn in the Green Knight is the interpretation of landscape by
leaked comments by those who arrive and find visible signs that cannot be fully understood or read.
It is these anomalies and oddities with which we hope to deal in this paper.
So we begin with what sinks. Both bodies are human remains discovered in peat bogs.
They are often characterised by mummification, the soft tissue preservation of cadavers and the unique chemical environment of peat wetlands.
Though this definition is often expanded to include skeletal remains or bodies
are almost exclusively human and well known in sites across northwest Europe,
particularly, although not exclusively from Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.
The discoveries comprise men, women and sometimes children, and are usually named after the discovery of the Tolland Man from Skye,
a woman group man meant to be one Lindow man adding a woman knew to tell,
for example, that both bodies normally represented deliberate burials is usually accepted, especially where there is evidence of a violent death.
But the motivations for the deaths and barriers attested by the presence of both bodies remains unsettled.
For the purposes of this paper, the settling of this question is not necessary.
The unsettling nature of both bodies for those who encounter them throughout history as a corporeal manifestation of a past long gone is our focus.
Karin Sanders study of the modern afterlives of book bodies parallels books with haunted houses, using Anthony Butler's words to locate in the book.
That mingling of mental projection and spatial characteristics associated with the uncanny and quite.
For Beowulf, for example, we suggest the fens and misty slopes evoked in the dwellings of the Grendel camp.
Outside appearance are a really powerful in this poem, precisely because for the early English, just as for us,
both bodies would likely have been mythologised an uncanny and illegible motif just as much as they were seen as
a genuine presence in any pink rich landscape in a story box like a creepy old house are likely to be haunted.
This literary ness is important, not least because of past critical attempts to connect both bodies with elaborated histories
of suppressed pagan vegetation gods which we are not going to be suggesting here.
The deposit something the idea of deposition might be shared, but how and what was offered was done locally.
Many blogs continue to receive offerings well into the Roman era, whether under the rule of conquerors or not.
Indeed, in many areas this marks a vigorous period of deposition.
So to deposit something or someone in a bog is analogous to what Jacques Derrida claims for ashes and cinders at once.
Fragile and resilient.
And the better paradigm, he writes for what I call the trace, something that erases itself totally, radically while presenting itself.
Most of them were standalone deposits in their own right, things given up out of life to be placed beyond the human grip, as flinching puts it.
So was pushing an object or a body into a bog, a way of permanently containing or imprisoning it,
permanently preserving it, or placing it in a kind of interpretive holding pattern awaiting a final decision.
Certainly we are not going to rush to judgement and in Burke's impressive mythology of a phrase,
dairy kind, even as Tacitus gently wants us to do that,
because it is not obvious that the particular richness and fertility of the landscape and of bogs and mosses is analogous to a grain producing field.
Indeed, the difference is more likely to have been felt than the similarity.
To put something into a bog is in some respects the opposite of burying ash in a field.
You know, it will never straightforwardly be next year's crop.
Rather, the bog appears to have been a place of otherness and a place to put other otherness.
For example, chariot deposits might, as Melanie Giles suggests,
show what she describes as an explicit interest in foreignness to the effect that links with many distant
places are emphasised that components spill out from the immediacy of local connections to exotic places,
which may have been perceived as not just spatially but temporally distant, beyond a mythic horizon to another world of ancestors and spirits.
This small crew might lead us to think about the extent to which bog deposits might have been part of the ugliness of the past.
Specifically the Mesolithic and Neolithic past, as seen by successive subsequent generations, spawning a wary fascination.
If I can so turn that that becomes visible in both Beowulf and much later in Gwen the Green Knight.
The heart of those interpretations is demonisation and Sarah Samples.
Research shows that the Anglo-Saxons used known burial sites as places of execution in literature,
as well as several executions cemeteries being focussed on round and long barrows.
This brings us to the nature of the bog bodies themselves.
An unusual number of bog bodies suffered from physical deformities.
And after the conversation resulting from Ronald's paper yesterday, we've decided not to show images of them as part of our PowerPoint.
Some of these deformities were fairly minor, like a cauliflower ear or a curved spine or disease joints.
Other abnormalities were much more pronounced. A survey of bog body research turns up a dwarf, a giant and a man with an extra set of sons.
Were these people a problem or were they special?
A clue might lie in a particular case described by Miranda, all touchscreen,
who writes of the potentially induced deformity of the wind to be a child when to be one.
The former went to be a girl who had been deliberately undernourished, to grow stunted and interrupted,
making them unusually slow to alter the manner of a fairy changeling.
In the Graeco-roman world,
disability was not usually sympathetically treated but regarded as an unfortunate deviation from the gold standard of human perfection.
But the survival to adulthood of those people suffered with, for example, idiopathic scoliosis,
as it body did suggest, toleration at used unusual bodies can be marks of the sacred.
We have a slide here for you which shows you some sacred body types that were deposited in cause.
In both these cases, the left hand figures were deposited in a salt marsh in Yorkshire and the right hand to go was deposited in the Somerset levels.
You will notice the gender. I don't want to say deformity.
I want to say gender queerness, but I want to say a more lavish kind of delineation of a hard to decide gender nature.
The risk of figures on the left side of the boat, the most dominant features are shining eyes, but they also have removable penises.
The right hand figure from the Somerset levels appears to have both fully mature female breasts and also penis.
Should we simply lump these gendered figures and gendered figures in with other physical
abnormalities that confer a mix of magical capability and uncomfortable sacredness?
Well, should we see these beings as endowed with precisely the kind of regenerative changeability,
the removable penises that might be associated with the richness of the bog as a hunting and fouling ground and a fishing ground to.
Interestingly, none of the boat people seem to be babies.
The abnormal children were kept alive, stabbed, closed and given shelter by their kin and neighbours,
even though they probably represented an economic burden to a small community.
Miranda all touchscreen suggests a relationship to a find in Roman Verulamium
Nelson's organs were a cremation was surrounded by a ditch enclosure and dead.
The remains of three women were interred, all of whom had suffered from conditions affecting their mobility.
Were they placed as guardian companions to the dead chieftain?
These individuals therefore attracted mixed feelings,
fear and also or but perhaps also some sense that that fear and awe might be shared by incoming marauding militias and attitudes.
Those mixed feelings also describe human relationships with oddities in landscape, which, like disability, may restrict movement.
One thing that the police make clear is the mistreatment they suffered in death, which was very extreme and also highly varied.
The Harold's skull woman was killed with a carrot.
The Edo girl was strangled with her own girdle. The Tolland man was hound.
The co-housing boy, a teenager from northern Germany, was hogtied before his death.
The Linda gribble and co-housing bodies will have their throats cut.
The window B child, now identified as a teenage boy, was drowned and his arm was hacked off as well.
The borrowed Muslim woman was stopped, her face crushed and her right leg broke.
The old man was hit with a barrage of blows, most likely from an axe enough to sever his head and touch his body in halls.
Is it the case that if no deformity was present before deformity was induced, before the body was consigned to the bog?
When I talk about me, it rises.
So I want to introduce Giffnock, who is an eighth century saint, attested in many sources of England, although interestingly not in Bede.
And amongst those we have the Latin Beta and two old English poems in the Exeter Book.
And this is a saint who is commanded by God to take up Hermitage in a chimaera or hill in the crowland fen,
where he is then tormented by demons, all of whom have been hopefully see just here, kind of hybrid bodies.
Dislike A, which is the first of the two poems in the book The Centres on Vicious Struggle in this place that is designated as a battle.
So it's a word that can be translated as mountain hill, cliffs, burrow or boundary marker.
Stephanie Clarke has noted that most readings of this poem hinge on how that Babel
is defined precisely because it is absolute central city to the poems imagery.
So Lawrence Schick, for example, was the first to suggest that may all be understood as a binary,
and Cohen two store explicitly interprets the borough as an emblematic of a pagan past.
Eleanor Hall points out that whilst in the V2, he stuck to his struggles with demons incidental to his arithmetical vision,
integral and English like a the impetus is as an aggressor on a defiant,
divinely inspired mission to rid remote places of demons and to build a home in them.
So can you talk a specifically explains how he seeks to destroy the repose of the demons that he identifies as living in these mountains.
And just an aside for the image, this is exactly on his way.
This is him being tormented by the demons that he finds in this quite elaborate helminths.
The demons themselves actually complain of the destruction of their places of recuperation.
So I'm going to read C modern English text. But for those who are interested, I've kept the old English here for pride.
He broke my arms in the waist where they enduring wretched adversaries could have previously spend
time after torments when they accursed came weary from wandering to rest for passing periods of time.
They enjoyed peace, which was permitted to them for a little while.
That hidden place stood in the source of the Lord, idle and uninhabited, far from the law of hereditary land, it awaited the claim of a better shot.
So the language designating the habitation of the demons is actually remarkably similar to that which designates the habitation of Grendel later.
But clearly this is disputed territory. The word absolute Richter for you tells us this.
The burial mound and its place on the Causeway Peninsula of Crowland, which is likely named for Crewe or Barrow,
is beyond the legal territories of question control, i.e. it's an own colonised space.
In the terms of this poem, as well as the language of colonisation, however, due to its intrusion, it seems to be with the mindset of an exterminator.
He specifically identifies these bales as a place of demonic regeneration and seeks
to destroy them as a way of crystallising the landscape effectively once and for all.
U.S. Occupation of the Barrow, even after his death, suggesting a deliberate attempt to overlay the demonic possession of the space,
placing himself as a better shepherd and perhaps to inherit its restorative power as a place of repose for himself.
I'm going to compare Grendel next.
So identity in Beowulf, the slightly later poem we're looking at here or there, not by much,
and debate over how we should approach it is deeply intertwined with its editing and interpretation, as John Niles explains.
Anyone delving into the annals of scholarship will find examples of the mythic fallacy or what Walter Jong has called the myth of the myths.
This is the conviction that primal stories underlie features of a literary text and give this text is chief significance and value.
Whether this source is located in the remote past or the unchanging human psyche.
Is that the Beowulf poet themselves might be interested in mythic fallacies, however,
is not part of Neil's, is fulsome account of mythology and veil of scholarship.
By exploring the emphasis on Grendel's weapon existence in the poem, we hope to identify a vague horror of the waterlogged landscape.
Grendel and his dwelling place are entangled, whether by nature, choice or compulsion.
To such an extent. It is almost as though the fen itself rises against the towering bright herald,
and is a space that must be as Beowulf explicitly promises cleansed in ways that are highly resident with those a desire.
Grendel and his mother referred to as me are stubborn and are also strongly associated with the sun unscathed.
So they are walkers of this borderland. A contemporary tax makes sense, too.
As part of a litany of prescriptive statements of natural order, such as a salmon must live in a stream, a door must be on a hall.
Also tells us a Cirrus must live in a fend alone, or we could translate this as unique in the land.
So Grendel too is referred to as a serious by Beowulf.
Within Beowulf seeks quite like totally a meeting or a sense of thing with this.
And actually it's a term we don't have a clear definition for.
Grendel is both a monster and sometimes a man like warrior, but always a phantom dweller.
He's explicitly identified with the fan, especially in his moments of terror during the fight with Beowulf.
So he fled on foot, too. So he flees to retreat.
He wants to and flee on and defend yourself.
So he fled beneath the fence. Looks like Greece, like demons.
We are given an insight into the resting space of Randall and the place from which he draws comfort and energy.
Crossgar describes the home as the Grand Oak, in which the poem also explicitly tells us is an exiled wilderness.
As a result of that ancient almost times that derivation from came.
And that's the longer quotation we have here. They occupy a hidden land.
Wolfe Straps, Wendy Headlands, a perilous fen passage Fenella Where a mountain stream goes down below the dock of the headlands.
A river goes down below the earth. This dark float on the frozen.
Beneath us, which refers literally to the mirror beneath a cliff in which Bear was later finds Gwendolyn.
His mother also draws attention to the geographically liminal territory they hold.
It's both liquid and earthen. This boundary holding between wet and dry is also emphasised through poetic variation at different points.
And so at the beginning we're told that Grendel is a sea flame.
Maurice killed then under Festen, he occupied the morass wetland and the fastness,
whilst in the darkness was the darkness emphasised throughout the poem for Grendel's activities,
as well as also for his mother and for the dragon later on.
It does have an easy theological interpretation aligning them with evil.
It may have a simpler one. The darkness of the wetland and their underwater habitation.
The idea here is that which is beneath the surface may develop not so much a taste for darkness, but actually an aversion to light.
And I think that this fits with the suffering that we're told that Grendel experiences the brightness and the noise of the hole.
Apparent analogues to Beowulf include Grotesque Saga and the Scandinavian motif
of a hero entering a burial mound and overcoming its revenant inhabitant.
To Alaric, who identifies this narrative and such a and analyses a particularly Christian spin on this motif
in which the spiritual struggle with burial among demons is depicted as superior to a mushroom.
Although actually, if we go back, we can actually see that he is being given a flail with which to fight off the demon.
So it's not a completely spiritual struggle.
Here in Beowulf, the mirror is usually seen as the version of Bear Wolf's entry into the world of The Revenant to the Dragons.
But perhaps. However, whilst Hall observes that,
it is plausible that stories of heroes making their reputation by entering their
romance and fighting their inhabitants were traditional in Anglo-Saxon England,
and that this is deliberately taking up and redeploying the motif.
We could further suggest that if Grendel himself represents a disturbed and emergent bog inhabitant,
that he's reversing this motif instead by attacking and breaking open the hero's habitation or kind of ascendant Malin Space.
We could say Bear Wolf's murderous foray into mere might redress this balance between dark and light.
It is a hollow vengeance on an already mobilised Revenant Droga, not a pre-emptive and heroic aggression.
Ultimately, this is a poem full of dark burials, including that of the dragon's burrow, which will not stay down.
The landscape of broken sen was not entirely dark.
Rather, the darkness could sometimes be harnessed,
and the rituals of the two men from the East Anglian standards illustrates something of the regenerative power of landscapes.
The toad man gathered his powers by catching a life toad and either skinning
it alive or pegging it to an angel until the end studied in its bones clean.
Note that both these methods involve a kind of stripping and accelerated decomposition.
After either method, the birds were carried by the toad man in his pocket until they were perfectly dry.
Then at midnight on a night of full moon, he had to go down to a stream in the sand lands and throw in the bones,
which was sent to scream horribly as he did so, emphasising the otherwise buried aspect of the rite which is the toads pretty horrible suffered.
One of the bones would then detach itself from the rest and the point will start to move upstream.
This was the bone that had to be rescued by the toad man who now had its magical power.
Now, ordinarily, toads are associated with witchcraft and poison, and yet the toad man right is surprisingly old and also surprisingly literary.
It's described by Reginald Scott in his discovery of witchcraft.
It's also described in Pliny's history of the natural world, in which Kenney describes it as repelling the attacks of dogs to the actual fenland toad.
Then, however, the boom conferred the ability to master horses and for Reginald Scotch, it was a love from all of those involved cooling and calming.
The point here is that these toad tales might not be place related, but might arise from the underlying principle.
The toads, the cold and these cold qualities might be felt to calm wild animals,
provided the toad is somehow both dead and not both consigned to the third lot.
What the toad man right does illustrate is the connection between the near and the cold and dubbed in
the Toad Men a kind of re-emergence regeneration emerges that could even be described as renewal,
if not resurrection. What comes out of the water of the fence?
Balfour's collection of folktales show us the drowned moon and the white of bone, the same colour, and both capable of surviving in the water.
Yet in order to obtain redemption, the toad must not only die from the dye consumed by predators like a body on the gallows, his flesh is harrowed.
And for Grendel too, we have seen that the bog could be a prison.
A probable later interpretation of the idea of neutralising evil by such imprisonment
emerges clearly in my favourite fairy folk tale ever the tale of Yellow Brown,
a tale that emanates from the Lincolnshire cause and was first retold to Mary Flotilla Balfour.
Jan Brown is freed unwisely after a third man called Tom the Oracle.
Tom is walking at night in a dark spinney that may be haunted, where he hears a kind of sobbing in the darkness that truly becomes words.
And the words are, Oh, the great big stone o the stone on top.
And Tom duly finds a huge flat stone, a stranger's table.
He thinks this is actually a bit of a warning because the strangers are the locals, the fairies, and it's not a good idea to move to Essex.
Nevertheless, he's heartbroken by the Wales and cries and in trepidation he lifts the stone and underneath is a creature the size of the baby,
with long shining hair and black eyes and along the edge and brown skin.
And the creature preternaturally knows his name.
He offers Tom a kind of wish. And Tom, because he is lazy, asks that all his work be done for him.
Creature promises to do it, but reminds Tom never to thank him a very standard injunction from very helpless the mysterious creature.
Not only does Tom's work for him,
but also does the work of all the other farmhands showing his malicious nature and earning their anger and also suspicion.
With the result that Tom is no longer able to work, he's actually sacked as well.
He's unable to take up tools or complete any task.
And it's at that point that the furious Tom calls up Hilary Brown with the.
Words come out of the earth. She therefore adds that she will thank Jim Gallery Brown to leave him alone from now on.
Of course, he has just said the facial word. Thank you. And now the creature turns against him, dancing and crying, harm and bad luck.
And Larry Brown, you've let out chill self from under the stone.
What is genuinely disturbing is that Tom appears to have obeyed the general so-called rule,
this kindness to the helpless and willingness to intervene on behalf of the weak.
But here, such in deterrence is really a form of arrogance.
Yale, Larry Brown emerges from the fence like a bald buddy once pinned in place and won't head oddly released.
There's an obvious analogy with which bottles, fragments of which had been found in the Thames River by mud logs, a double oblivion, a double burial.
Some of the language in the tale of Larry Brown connects Hillary with the judge and the grave.
He refers to the earth as mule, mould or earth, and also tells us that moon is specifically a word for grave clods.
This may be a red herring, however, clearly Hillary Brown is not happy at all.
Comfortable in the US. The stone on top of him is what makes him cry up.
What is he? I suggest he is the inexorable consequence of choice.
And in this he strongly resembles the Green Knight. Both are ferociously creatures of their word, keeping their promises in horrifying fashion.
Might this tell us something about the function of deposits when we talk of the intersection between certainty and uncertainty,
when we talk of the reception of markers that previous civilisations have left on the landscape.
We speak of the Green Chapel. It has not often been noted that the Green Chapel is described by Gawain as a burrow and a tucked away uses two terms,
both of which could be thus translated. One is raw and the other is burger, and both mean a particular kind of shell well understood to be tombs.
And what's really interesting here is that from the moment where Gawain sees what turns out to be the Green Chapel,
we are very much in his head, and we see it all from his point of view.
Despite the comfortable conclusion that she reaches that it's nothing but an old cave and the colloquial bravado of his novice,
Dwayne soon embarks on a supernatural explanation.
She says At this place about midnight, the devil might tell his Martians now.
Gosh, she says. Scary stuff, supernatural stuff is here.
This oratory is ugly with hubs overgrown.
And then he goes on to conclude that he feels in all his senses that this is a chapel of mistrust.
So he's embarking on a highly specific interpretation of the burrow.
I'm going to be a little bit summery here, but I'm going to reference the fact that Anglo Saxon sources tell us that such places could
be used by magic users to access the powers that were supposedly buried within the burrow,
which, as the story of quick such tells us, were interpreted as gateways to [INAUDIBLE] and homes of the pre-Christian damned.
We also note, and it's obviously scary,
that any place that creates the kind of fear that Gwen's experiencing is likely to be interpreted as a place of power as well.
What's interesting, though, is that Queen is comprehensively well, nearly comprehensively.
Admittedly, his journey has always been part of the malign, deceptive, magical tangle narrative crafted by than the.
But nevertheless, the green shuffle is nothing like what she thinks it is.
The Green Knight is not Galloway Brown. Just as the green girl that Queen has wrongly pilfered doesn't save Gwen's life,
but condemns him as a thief that has broken his word and must face the consequences.
The poem wants to debunks the very thinking that Dwayne indulges in on his arrival at the chapel, but only partly.
In fairness to good, his interpretation might be based on the landscape,
but he's just passed through a landscape full of exactly the kind of monstrosity that
may have been visible and manageable only through the visible invisible of bog burial.
Moreover, the Green Knight is at least partly the work of witches, though,
but it is noteworthy that content in emerges is to terrify rather than to kill.
The plan is to frighten Guinevere to death, rather than to poison or behead her.
It seems we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Just as a bog is neither land nor water. So it is possible that it was understood as a place where the dead were not alive but motile and motivated.
The most alarming of all the legends of the Lincolnshire cause is arguably the tale of Tom,
a sceptic who refuses to guard himself against the creatures that stalk the bog with the potter peck symbols.
As a result of his bravado, perhaps uncomfortably close to the hero codes of both Belle Wilson,
Gwen is choked to death by a severed dead hand, almost dying of fright.
The end intended for Guinevere by Morgan. When the flesh refuses normal decay.
Death is defined in a manner that might lead to a kind of backlash.
A just punishment for those who think they can either ignore or control the abnormal can draw on its powers without consequence.
The motile dead may even act as a warning to presumptive claimants to apparent wilderness space for Oscar Gorsuch and maybe even his court.
Perhaps the only certainty is that all these stories are about a fear the death is not the end,
and that the dead continue to hold stakes and interests in the world of the living.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you both very much.
I'm delighted to introduce to be. Sabina is one of the world's leading folklorists and as such has made an impact on a range of other disciplines.
With her paper on crafting and complement fairy gardens in North America.
Sabina, thank you so much for that generous introduction.
Ronald. In the last two decades, a form of yard art known as fairy gardens has proliferated in North America and other parts of the developed world.
Fairy gardens are typically assemblages of miniature plants, furniture and objects,
including figurines representing fairies, gnomes and other than human creatures.
They're typically constructed in public, facing outdoor areas such as front gardens and parkways in urban and suburban neighbourhoods,
thus occupying a liminal space between private and public areas.
Like other forms of yard art, such as holiday light displays and decorations, they are intended to attract public attention.
These assemblages often combine mass produced and handcrafted items into
meaningful shapes that communicate with viewers and invite audience interaction.
I analyse this form of material culture through an anthropological and folkloric
lens as a strategic use of expressive culture that communicates specific values.
In addition to reflecting gender roles, stereotypes and conveying subtle messages about race associated with a particular form of nostalgia,
fairy gardens aim to craft a sense of an enchanted landscape animated by beings with personhood and agency.
In that sense, fairy gardens are part of the way some communities respond to climate, grief,
environmental degradation and collapse by creating landscapes of longing in which magic permeates the sense of place.
My first encounter with a fairy garden was a garden shop in Cambria, a small artist's colony on the central California coast.
In the early 2000, the shop, then known as Hearts Eased.
It's now been renamed Spellbound,
was located in an old house that opened out onto a large back garden where some of the shop's merchandise was displayed among a profusion of fragrant,
blooming plants. One corner had been set up as a diorama,
an enchanted forest peopled with figurines of fairies depicted as winged children interacting with tiny plastic animals.
Miniature outdoor furniture fashioned from twigs and resin mushrooms and other twee paraphernalia.
The whole was illuminated by tiny electric lights that twinkled in the gloaming.
Since the shop sold some of the figurines and accoutrements,
the dioramas served as inspiration for what customers could create if they bought the featured product.
It also attracted the attention of customers,
small children and eventually had to be enclosed to prevent them from playing with the figurines and spoiling the display.
During the pandemic lockdown, I began to take long walks in my neighbourhood on the west side of Vancouver.
I discovered that several neighbours had created fairy landscapes in their front yards and
parkways since I was researching contemporary narratives about fairies and environmental justice.
I was intrigued by the fairy garden phenomenon and began to investigate it.
I took photos of the fairy gardens I visited, noted common features, researched the sourcing of fairy garden materials online,
and sought to interview makers to better understand their inspiration and motivation in creating the displays.
Because of pandemic restrictions on in-person research, the interview phase of the project is still ongoing.
I will concentrate on the typology and structure of fairy gardens, their history as a form of yard ornamentation and their cultural meaning.
Fairy gardens come in a variety of forms that range from collections of miniature
plants and containers for which the term fairy refers only to their small size,
to miniature outdoor landscapes that appear to provide a place for fairies to live.
Two assemblages of fairy themed figurines and related objects showing fairies engaged in everyday activities.
I will concentrate on the latter two types of assemblages, which make reference either directly or indirectly to fairies.
The first type of fairy garden contains no representations of fairies at all.
Instead, it alludes to their presence by providing evidence of their existence,
or perhaps invites them to populate the landscape through the presence of miniature abodes.
These might be doors and windows and tree trunks.
Many gardens within gardens that include bridges, wishing wells, patio furniture and bird baths fashioned to look like flowers,
or sometimes entire houses in which fairies might be imagined to live.
These miniatures are a combination of homemade and mass produced items.
A number of garden shops and websites sell pre-made miniatures for this purpose,
but there is a lively folk group of DIYers who share videos and instructions for making fairy miniatures on social media.
Many fairy gardens of this type are quite modest.
One might feature a fairy door and a tree and a small garden in front of a fairy door that echoes in miniature form.
The property occupants own front garden. More elaborate instances of this type of installation can be found in local parks.
The Enchanted Fairy Door Trail in Motors and woods on Salt Spring Island, one of the Gulf Islands.
Just a short ferry ride west of Vancouver proper is one such installation.
The installation was created by local artist Roger Brunt, who makes fairy doors and sells them throughout North America.
A way to, quote, honour the little people.
In his words, the trail creates a sense of enchantment, especially for children, as well as highlighting Mr. Brandt's artwork.
Similar installations of fairy doors can be found throughout North America and beyond, including in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
Two community gardens in Portland, Oregon. In Ann Arbour, Michigan.
Putnam, Connecticut, and as far away as Dublin, Ireland, and Wayward Woods in Somerset.
Another example of this type of assemblage in the Vancouver area can be found in Redwood Park in the suburb of Surrey.
This public park, originally donated to the city of Surrey by twin brothers who owned the land,
features what is variously called the Fairy Forest or Fairy Kingdom,
an assemblage of brightly painted bird and doll houses arranged in the trees along a wooded path.
The houses are painted by volunteers, including children and local preschools and kindergartens, and donated to the park for this feature.
As in the case of the Enchanted Fairy Door Trail, children and families are the target audience for the fairy forest.
The brightly painted houses create a feeling of surprise and enchantment as they appear nestled in the redwood forest.
They spark the imagination, inspiring narratives about the beings who might live in them and their lives in the woods.
These displays are largely intended as art to be noticed, but occasionally inspire interaction.
Some viewers leave notes, wishes and small gifts for the fairies near these houses and near the fairy doors.
Fairy doors and houses are not without controversy,
although their creators may wish to inspire us to imagine an enchanted landscape in hopes of connecting more closely with nature.
Some environmentalists have criticised them for the damage they cause to the environment.
Doors and houses are often nailed or glued to trees, injuring them and exposing them to disease, causing agents.
The materials used to make them may degrade and release toxins into the environment that harm plants and animals or fail to break down altogether.
Fairy offerings create litter and may introduce non-native elements into the ecosystem.
Thus, what may spring from an environmental impulse to reinvent the world turns out to have rather negative environmental consequences.
A second type of fairy garden takes things a step further from those in which fairies
are imagined denizens by placing physical representations of fairies among the objects.
Fairies are typically represented in two ways as childlike winged beings,
often female presenting and as garden gnomes, male presenting bearded dwarves with conical hats.
These fairy escapes are often much more elaborate than fairy doors and houses, even when located on private property.
Fairy figurines combine with repurposed everyday objects, discarded toys, handmade creations,
water features, plastic shrubbery and other objects to create a bricolage in which meaning is.
And textual emerging from the juxtaposition of items and extensive examples stretches along the parkway for an entire block on Vancouver's West Side.
Here, fairy children and gnomes repose among real and artificial plants.
They form extended, diverse families that live in houses.
They farm and perform other labours. They interact with animals, both actual and imaginary.
This garden was created by children and parents from several houses along the street, and a sign acknowledges their contributions.
The assemblage is clearly interactive, inviting passers by to add new elements and contribute chalk drawings.
But discouraging, touching the displays,
stealing elements and allowing dogs to relieve themselves in fairyland through the use of strategically placed signage.
Like other folk assemblages such as the preserve,
be documented among Italian immigrants in New York by folklorist Joseph Shara
and the Yard Art of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles studied by Amy Kitchener.
These fairy gardens are sites of festive ludic disruption,
combining divergent elements from a variety of sources into extravagant dioramas that suggest a coherent narrative.
There is something of the carnivalesque to these assemblages.
They feature a combination of the twee and the grotesque coexisting in happy juxtaposition.
They create a sense of community through invitations to interaction.
Although that process is not without complexity in terms of what sorts of interactions elicit and which ones are policed by the creators,
it is now time to turn our attention to the history, meaning and interpretation of contemporary fairy gardens.
What can we glean about the significance of these displays and their relationship to magic and a sense of place?
In order to do this. I will first examine them in their historical context.
We might begin by asking what exactly fairies are doing in urban and suburban gardens and parks.
In folklore, fairies are liminal beings who exist in a world that parallels and overlaps with the human material realm.
The category includes very diverse creatures who can appear humanoid but behave in ways that mark them as supernatural.
They can appear and disappear. It will change their appearance, kidnap humans into their realm, transform objects such as coins into dried leaves,
manipulate time, and bestow either gifts or punishments on humankind.
While some are friendly towards humans, others are not, and many are downright dangerous.
Nearly every human culture has narratives about such beings that the fairies that serve as a
basis for fairy gardens are drawn predominantly from European and European derived folklore.
Or perhaps I should say they are derived from Victorian and Edwardian literature based on that folklore.
For the twee beings in today's fairy gardens, their little resemblance to the mighty share of Irish oral and literary tradition.
The dangerous, unseemly host of Scottish lore, seductive Italian fat or Greek exotica.
Instead, they are drawn from representations in illustrated children's books of the 19th
and 20th centuries in which they were depicted as delicate winged children,
or, in the case of gnomes, as small bearded men wearing conical hats.
In fact, fairy gardens would not have been thinkable were it not for Victorian and Edwardian children's literature,
which accomplished three major shifts in Western cultural understandings of these beings.
First, it miniaturised them,
a trend which started in Tudor times and was already well underway by the time Shakespeare wrote a midsummer Night's Dream in 1595.
Victorian and Edwardian literature merely bolstered this process by providing visual
icons of miniaturised fairies through the medium of children's book illustrations.
The second shift, which was part of this process, was the Association of Fairies with Children.
Part of a larger European trend that relegated folk narrative in general to the nursery
where it was intended as part of a moral and sometimes nationalistic education.
It was cemented by folklorists, beginning with a Grimm brothers kindled on Houseman, published in 1812,
and including Andrew Lange, whose series of coloured fairy books featured Tales of Magic.
It culminated in the illustrations of early 20th century author Sicily Mary Barker,
who used children from her sister's kindergarten classes as models for her flower fairy books.
She dressed the children in winged costumes and posed them with common plants and flowers.
And these are the direct inspiration for many of the resin figurines that are popularly sold for fairy gardens today.
The third and final piece of the transformation of fairies, without which fairy gardens would never have come to be, is their association with nature.
Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Fairies became popularly understood as nature spirits, while in previous centuries, fairies might be found in natural places such as woods and fields.
They were not understood as spirits of nature as such.
That began to change in romantic literature of the mid-19th century,
which affirmed even more strongly the association between fairies and the unspoiled countryside.
The object of its nostalgia and longing. In one strain of romantic literature,
fairies came to be portrayed as antithetical to the destruction of the rural landscape wrought by industrialisation and urbanisation.
The association of Fairies with the forces of nature was strengthened in the early 20th
century by the influence of theosophy philosophies associated fairies with divas,
a concept appropriated from Hindu cosmology referring to a type of lesser.
There were divas associated with different elements, and plants were each said to have a diva without whom that plant would not grow or thrive.
This idea gained greater currency through the magic of Findhorn,
an intentional community in northern Scotland where plants attained extraordinary size and vigour despite the harsh climate.
You can't grow anything up there, actually,
allegedly through the residents relationships with divas and nature spirits dedicated to the fertility and productivity of the garden.
By the end of the 20th century,
a number of popular children's books and films reproduced this representation of fairies as nature spirits associated with gardens and plants.
All three of these transformations in the ways fairies are popularly understood miniaturisation,
their association with children, and their reinterpretation as nature spirits led to the concept of fairies as tiny,
childlike beings living in a garden, helping plants grow, essentially to the representation of fairies we find in fairy gardens today.
Gardens are liminal spaces. They stand at the threshold between interior and exterior, private and public, built and unbuilt spaces.
As such, they have always partaken in that quality of luminosity, which makes them sites where the ordinary can be disrupted.
Where humans can encounter the extraordinary. Where magic and enchantment take place.
Today's urban and suburban Vancouverites are hardly the first to think of peopling their gardens with figures of enchantment.
Contemporary fairy gardens actually have their roots in a long tradition of garden
ornamentation going back to the elite gardens of classical and Renaissance Italy.
We know little about vernacular gardening traditions in antiquity,
but the gardens of wealthy, powerful Romans, such as the Emperor Hadrian's Villa Adriana,
survived the collapse of the Empire and were rediscovered in the Renaissance by early landscape
designers who took them as inspiration for the magnificent gardens of elite potentates like the Medici,
the Orsini and the Dexter's elite.
Romans populated their gardens with representations of deities and mythological creatures such as nymphs and centres,
presumably to create a sense of enchantment for visitors by reminding them of the omnipresence of supernatural beings.
This aesthetic was reproduced in the gardens of powerful Renaissance families, albeit by then,
Christianity was the dominant religion and classical goddess gods and mythological figures were no longer considered real.
Nonetheless, the appearance of these figures in the garden was still connected to the idea of enchantment.
The notion of the garden as both a refuge from the city and a place of adventure.
Wonder and encounter with magic blossomed in Italian garden design during the period between the 1450s and the 1550s.
But while the early Renaissance Gardens emphasised geometry, symmetry, harmony and humans imposition of order upon nature,
those in the later Renaissance sought to disrupt the equilibrium of their predecessors in favour of the element of surprise.
For example, the Sacro Bosco at Walmarts or created by Pierfrancesco Orsini, featured sculptures inspired by the fantasy literature of its day.
Dante Petrarch and the epic poem Orlando Furioso that seemed to emerge from natural stone formations.
The design of Italian Renaissance gardens influenced the development of garden design throughout Europe in subsequent centuries.
Cultural historian Gordon Campbell argues that the lowly garden gnome is a successor of these earlier fantastical garden figures.
While the modern garden gnome originated in Germany in the 1800s,
the earliest record of such a figure is that of a dwarf riding a tortoise from the Boboli Gardens of the Medici in 16th century Florence.
Thereafter, figures of dwarves known in Italian as Gobbi began to adorn elite gardens all over Europe.
In German tradition, dwarves were part of the realm of folkloric beings whom we might classify as fairy like.
They were said to work underground mining,
minerals and precious stones and were generally neutral or benevolent towards humans as long as they were respected.
The 19th century saw a resurgence in interest in them with the publication of the Grimm Brothers collection of folktales in 1812 and from about 1840,
reproduced in ceramic form for use as garden statuary in Germany.
They looked very much as they do in fairy gardens today.
Small bearded figures with conical hats often portrayed with working tools such as shovels, wheelbarrows and pickaxes.
Originally, these tools were associated with mining. In today's representations, they have come to be associated with farming.
Appropriately enough, for beings now thought to be connected to the vitality of plants.
While first popular in the gardens of wealthy landowners.
After Walt Disney's animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 1939 transform them into cutesy,
childlike figures, they became déclassé and lost popularity among the elite.
They did not disappear altogether. However, since being rediscovered in Will Horrigan and report clips,
Gnome books of the 1970s may have developed a following and reappeared as decorations in middle and working class gardens.
We can easily see how fairy gardens are examples of hetero topi as they bring together widely divergent objects and representations,
creating miniature dioramas in which these juxtapositions acquire meaning through relationship or proximity.
Susan Stuart suggests that miniaturisation often embodies nostalgia for an imagined past or the idealisation of a cultural or class other,
the exotic, the peasant in a frozen, timeless form.
This nostalgia is clearly on display in fairy gardens.
The fairy garden celebrates a romantic representation of a rural past.
The doors and furniture are rustic but charming, with features that border on the twee like tiny spotted mushroom ornamentation.
The denizens of fairy gardens likewise exemplify traditional gender roles.
Female appearing fairies are often shown in a nurturing capacity with flowers and small animals,
while gnomes appear with mining and farming tools performing stereotypically male tasks.
And despite their hetero topic character,
fairy gardens seldom reflect the kind of racial and ethnic diversity characteristic of post-colonial Western societies today.
The fairy world is frozen in a romantic pre-colonial pre-industrial past,
a fantasy world in which the climate crisis is also non-existent and fairies continue to enchant a pristine environment.
As in the present year, studied by Joseph Shara,
Fairy Gardens embody both builders and audiences visions for their immediate lives and the world at large,
guiding them in turn in their interpretation of past and present events and their imagination of a hopeful future.
Fairy gardens, therefore, seem to express a vision of nature as magical and filled with enchantment still pristine enough for fairies to inhabit.
Even if that particular slice of nature is located in a city or suburb or in an urban park.
This vision is projected both into a romantically imagined past as well as into the future,
expressing a hope for a different relationship with nature in which its inherent magic is recognised and respected.
Thank you. Thank you, Sabina, for a second.
Superb paper on succession with a breathtaking cultural range.
I am delighted at the moment now to call upon our last contributor this afternoon to introduce a different perspective into the field.
That is Flora Cottingham. Flora Markham on the screen.
Flora is an artist and a printmaker.
She is part of the persona of English Nexus.
Having read English there, and I am delighted now to call upon her to take us into her world.
Thank you very much for that introduction, and thank you very much to Diane for inviting me to take part in this wonderful discussion.
My work is intricately entangled with landscape.
My interaction with the outside world and with the world inside my head is expressed in my work,
which usually takes the form of action or listen to Murphy.
So I'm going to start by talking about my etchings, which mostly are made from a combination of memory and images from literature.
For example, this one here was born out of reading. Asked by T.S. Eliot, and particularly from the line where the grey light meets the green air.
The technique of matching has a very special atmosphere which adds a kind of
nostalgia and a cloak of unreality to the image that I'm trying to bring into being.
So for me, it's ideal for this because the technique of etching involves writing and so forth.
This is a plane. When I am engaged in this process, it is a very sculptural and meditative process.
So I may begin with my image of the place and then massage and stroke it into being the thing that I imagined.
So this image here is called All Shall Be Well and and I am scraping away the darks to create light touches in the image.
The subject of it is a face emerging from the river.
It's an image based on a beach. Certain story to me, and linked a dream that I emerged from waters with my face in my hands.
And it's a kind of lustful washing, a kind of healing power expressed in the landscape.
Here is the image on its way to completion, being brushed with nitric acid to bring out some subtle tones.
I would just like to mention as well, it's interesting, I usually use copper plates and by doing ferric chloride,
which is a very dark brown yellow colour and perhaps reminiscent of the transformative waters of a book.
So the plate goes in and emerges, transformed. I need to explain this concept of where I live, my place.
I grew up in Sussex and lived in Oxford after going to university there to my English degree, and after that I moved to Wales.
I see the West as largely coated with moss and with moss comes the impression that
ancient legends cling more tightly or maybe protected by dampness in the kind of uncanny,
boggy atmosphere. I live in a little village tucked under the precisely hills on the edge of a large book when buried in bulk.
It has a little forest, the bog mountains rising up behind.
In fact, it's a magical land. It could have been drawn by pulling beams in the illustrations to the Narnia books.
My lane is unofficially called Fairy Lane and seems like a garden place because of the gentle moss grazing wind sculpted trees.
In war, it seems as if it has been.
It's too much. Talk to the audience and lauds an enchanted oneness.
Having lived in Oxford and only visited Wales for a week every year, filled a sketchbook, and since then between these visits yearned to go back.
Suddenly I was here all times. I imagined I would be like the mice from hedge in my hawthorn encrusted past lack of thought on my part,
which is that I am English person living in Wales.
We were talking earlier to Owen Sound and the buying of the place didn't bring owning of the place.
I'm thinking of Ireland. Garner's subtle matter of owning and being owned, and I became increasingly conscious that I wasn't Ulster Land.
I wasn't a native of the land. I want to add that I've been treated with wonderful respect and welcoming kindness by all local Welsh people.
But this mean no uneasiness in myself.
I think, as my work is concerned, with an intimate connection with landscape and emotion within it.
It made me uneasy to feel in any small part, that I was perhaps an intruder, invader or a colonialist.
So I found this increasingly hard to work with until a transformative residency.
When I went to the village of Chris in North Wales to stay there for a whole month,
mixed in a mysterious woods with light on the trunks like fairy houses,
perhaps strange streams with hidden mossy sculptures and chains, weird rippling green face with industrial relics.
It seemed as if there were a lot of hidden stories here.
So I began to make drawings, imagining what these could be.
I took rubbings of the floorboards and used them as the constellations in my new, unfamiliar skies.
And I listened to music to bring on a sense of otherworldly tales.
I particularly listen to the two songs, much to read and also Between Saplings, which I find useful bringing on the good atmosphere.
And as I began to draw these online stories, we just started to emerge.
And when I came out of the residency and back to Aberystwyth School of Art, which is where I was doing my M.A. in fine art at the time,
I began to work on litho stones, big lithographic stones to bring these images into a hole.
So I'd like to say something about the lithographic stone, which is an incredibly magical medium.
The image is drawn on the stone and the greasy drawings is it sinks into the stone and into the brain of the stone.
And as you stated that when you stone again, your drawing magically rises up out of the stone and you can print it many times.
So to work on the stone, it's sort of like a screening process is how I can best describe how it feels.
It's like working on a magic glass or looking into a crystal ball.
It's like an eggshell. It has this slight roughness.
So I started drawing at the bottom and gradually the image built itself out of my imagination as I worked on this strange and magical surface.
Gradually, this mythical things began, but I did a series of six lithographs.
The first is a pretty standard view of the town, of course,
the place of Mr. Smoking chimneys with its catalogued dark forest, sinisterly perched on top.
They split by river and it's just a very, very elemental place.
So the second one is called mythos, which is water, spirits and for horses, a strange procession, people bearing pitchforks and torches.
So suggestion of a kind of sinister right that happens in the town at night.
I started to try and sense what might be going on in the hidden parts of the town.
So there was a very weedy riverbed, which is the second image here, which is called shapeshifters.
So here we have powerful women dressed in their animal skins turning into different creatures, crossing zones.
There's water eating fish. It's a very mythical scene, and above it is the village with its smoking chimneys going about its business.
The next image is called spells, and it refers to the fairy tale, The Wild Swans.
So it's looking at the bottom gallop and bringing them back is to me, the chance to fix a spell on her Prince brothers who have turned into swans.
So she has to weave them a shirt each out of nettle flax. And above it is the city with its sweeping skyline.
So the chorus is always there, but it's increasingly retreating into the background.
And this third set is about magical enablement, I think game thinking of spells and much more power.
This one on the left is a woman out of goose grass. So it's a yearning spell.
And I think a bit of the cabinet might start creeping in here with stories all day when there is a closeness
to the Scots nettles I to wish one into being next and now I see an expression of magical ability.
The village has disappeared and it's perhaps me riding the magical beast,
unable to travel in this strange realm with the imagination of a realm of power and control over one's environment.
I then started to use the characteristics of the lighter stone,
which is that you can add soup to it and print more images on top of what already printed.
I've answered the cruel of the man trying to create the woman out across by printing my own body onto the stone.
So hands on my face, breast and stomach printed on the stone, obscuring the original image.
I don't know if it's something to say that you can't enter your own picture, or that may be you always inescapably do and you want.
The next image is an expression of being in the weeds, being part of the plant spell.
So it's immersion. It's a sinking into a place of power.
So this this figure close to weeds, is, again, rising up in a shamanistic fashion.
And I have printed it again on top of a different lithograph from the same series.
This is she wearing the torch that is being fitted official image from a lot of its ink plant.
Magic for me is a very strong and powerful way.
So long was making its lithographs. I also constructed a sculpture out of Crisscross, which is a bit like it.
It's very pleasing to use. Or you do. Covered in red spots, but occupational hazard.
And the second image shows how I have worked with this to give the sense of the way it immerses you into another world.
I see you standing on the ground.
It's like being wasted in a different world.
So this image of a sort of crisscrossed mermaid sitting on the bed in a state of dreams and imaginative transportation,
I think I would define it as a shift when you're perhaps reading a book.
So the next phase of my talk is talking about the childhood in the undergrowth,
obviously reminiscent of Laurie Lee and being him being sent down from Mexico used cars to.
Undergrowth, fires in his head and the terror that descended upon him.
But I never have had the feeling I grew up wading through long grasses and spotting the stones,
feeling as if I belonged there in the South Downs among the corn.
I remember watching strike snails in the dying cow power systems and the smell of the damper.
So to me, it's a very powerful image, a feeling of absolute belonging to it.
I really wish I didn't return to this state in through my work.
I hope to get there, even though perhaps I can't manage it in reality.
So in this image I am holding, the goose crossed walks on either side of me as an adult to remember the power they held and the protective power.
I also see the undergrowth always as a kind of portal into a different world.
As I was talking about before. So often I like to trace as a building or a symbolic entrance.
So this image is of a overgrown gate post in a churchyard in Wales which seized
my attention with its multiplicity of different plants growing out of it.
And that led to this action, which I called the Green Chapel, because it to me,
this is a meeting with the intensity of natural growth and the subtly enclosing this of
of everything that grows around us and the way it can hold us and also transport us.
If we just look closely enough.
If you kneel down so you have free rein, this place is open to anybody who will notice it.
A screenshot from my photographs on my phone.
The first two images show me about my business taking pictures of small pieces of moss.
And the third is where lockdown began and also a lot of torrential rain, which I am doing at the sites.
So lockdown began and also Aberystwyth School of Art closed down where I was doing my work.
So this was the start of a retreat and a drawing in a bit like the Corris residency, I was forced to work with what I immediately had around me,
so instead of taking photographs of micro landscapes, working from those, I began to look into small fragments of my work.
So what I've been doing is looking inside my own images and looking for places where I can enter
in is the phrase I would use to turn them into something that I couldn't inhabit imaginatively.
So here I've picked a little thumbnail. I've started to think about what story could be put in there.
I have the elements like starting to draw fire and I'll be, I guess,
hot on shooting like silhouette suggested by the wind like forms to the left of
the original image and sense of human bones suggested and shadowy presences.
I have started work on my copper sheen plate painting in these forms and adding the fairy hands as well.
Here is the first stage of the etching, and when you make the match in this way,
you can also scrape into these running democracy in the east flow with the light ground and to the bottom.
I noticed a face coming into being, which I hadn't planned, but obviously it was destined to be the so the original, the second, the last image.
This is the final work which is called the bone gate, which shows a liminal fence of bones.
So on the other side of the gate is the realm of double yakka with its sparks and
hands and and legged trees and hand like it's hot bones and spirits lounging about.
So I have started to create my own fairy tales out of almost random,
not imaginative looks to next set in the series was based on the ghosts of stranded Knoll,
which famously came down from the mountains during lockdown because there was nobody about in the streets and started roaming through the town,
eating people's flowerbeds and even entering their houses.
Saying this to me was a very powerful symbol of the wildness entering the civilised world when the civilised world retreats because I live in Wales.
If you leave your garden gate open, the sheep will be in and you're going to lose a little fruit trees.
So it has this atmosphere of dismay and destruction.
The entry of the wild is where you might lose all your carefully tended crops.
So I made this drawings based on that. And here is the final etching called Kindling.
Carrie. My budget shrinks slightly every day to make the fire with and welcoming or just encountering these wild goats.
Elemental creatures. Thank you very much indeed, Flora, for such a rich list since he was presentation.
It's been a real pleasure and privilege to chair a session like this.
Thank you all very much. Thank you very much to Ronald for stepping in at the last minute and chairing that session.
I'm enormously grateful to you very much to all our speakers and to all attendees for your participation and for making that journey with us.