Hag

by Daisy Johnson, Kirsty Logan, Emma Glass, Eimear McBride, Natasha Carthew

Genres: Anthologies; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

'Engaging, modern fables with a feminist tang' Sunday Times

DARK, POTENT AND UNCANNY, HAG BURSTS WITH THE UNTOLD STORIES OF OUR ISLES, CAPTURED IN VOICES AS VARIED AS THEY ARE VIVID.

Here are sisters fighting for the love of the same woman, a pregnant archaeologist unearthing impossible bones and lost children following you home. A panther runs through the forests of England and pixies prey upon violent men.

From the islands of Scotland to the coast of Cornwall, the mountains of Galway to the depths of the Fens, these forgotten folktales howl, cackle and sing their way into the 21st century, wildly reimagined by some of the most exciting women writing in Britain and Ireland today.

'A thoroughly original package that has a hint of Angela Carter' The Times

'Sharp writing and cleverly done' Spectator

Release date: October 8, 2020

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 304

Sample

 

Every British child knows about the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White and Red Riding Hood. But which of them could tell of the malicious cunning of Tom Tit Tot, or the unsettling Small-Toothed Dog, the tragic Great Silkie of Sule Skerry or the lost, alien Green Children of Woolpit?

The hundreds of traditional tales that make up the rich story-hoard of the British Isles are strangely forgotten. Why do they not play a central role in our imagination in the same way as the Grimm tales, or Perrault’s Cinderella, or Hans Christian Andersen’s stories? Our British and Irish folktale heritage slipped away from us during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during those years in which traditional story transitioned from the oral to the printed. While European collectors were busying themselves in capturing, writing down, popularising and sanitising their stories – or, like Hans Christian Andersen, composing brand new stories in a folk idiom – the antiquarian and folklore enthusiasts in these islands were lagging behind. Continental stories were quickly translated into English and adapted to make them suitable for children. They offered clear morals: warnings about the big bad wolves in the forest and the meanness of stepmothers; the hope that help may be forthcoming from unexpected quarters, that little deeds of kindness will be rewarded, and the suspicion that pitfalls will lie ahead when some supernatural creature seems to be promising you something for nothing.

The systematic collection of British folktales only got underway later in the nineteenth century, an activity that was rapidly incorporated into antiquarian study of a rapidly vanishing pre-industrial past. In those years there was a powerful impetus to track down and rescue the indigenous stock of traditional tales before industrialisation and urbanisation caused them to fade away entirely. For, or so it was believed, the old generations of traditional storytellers lay buried deep in quiet country churchyards and their grandchildren had migrated to the city, where they were now devouring cheap novels and penny dreadfuls and the old tales would be lost in the urban noise and bustle. The great county-by-county collection projects got underway in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth, yet, perhaps surprisingly, this work is still going on in the present day. Researchers are still occupied in capturing traditional tales from some of the remoter parts of the British Isles and from the Gypsy, Traveller, Fairground and Roma communities and adding to the lore already archived. And, importantly, at least since the end of the Second World War, the nation’s diverse ethnic minority communities too have begun to share their own stories, ones that may originate and be rooted in locations that range far across the globe, but which share many essential themes – love, loss, value, courage – with their native counterparts. Just as – back in the twelfth century – the Breton figure of the tragic werewolf, cruelly betrayed by his wife and – in the nineteenth century – Bram Stoker’s Eastern European version of the suavely charming vampire have both migrated into and lodged themselves firmly within our story-world, so international figures such as Anansi, Haruman, Coyote, Monkey, the hulda, the fox-woman and the Japanese kappa have found their way across the oceans and into our twenty-first-century consciousness.

Those stories so assiduously collected in the nineteenth century were sometimes taken down in dark, unsettling detail, and were read with alarm, threatening the pieties of Victorian family life and social order. The strange desires, troublingly alluring figures and odd remnants of popular belief, recast as superstition, that many of them preserved could not be made decent for the ordinary reader and they were left in obscurity. Still other tales were sentimentalised or prettified for the nursery. Thus, despite the efforts of popularisers such as Andrew Lang, the editor of the Blue, Lilac and various-coloured Fairy Books, it seems now as if very many of the wonderful stories that constitute the British folktale heritage have been long submerged. Yet their shapes can be glimpsed now and again, here and there, like underwater reefs of glinting beauty and dangerous mystery, lurking just below the surface in the work of many fantasy writers, from Alan Garner and Terry Pratchett to Philip Pullman, from Sylvia Townsend Warner and Susannah Clarke to Ben Aaronovitch. Literary novelists too have found inspiration in our folk-tradition: Max Porter’s recent Lanny, Sarah Hall’s treatment of Mrs Fox, and the many books of Helen Oyeyemi, to name just a few. Indeed, the last fifty years have seen a remarkable upsurge of interest in Britain’s traditional imaginary. Old stories and motifs have been repurposed to underpin much contemporary fiction, built into new worlds where they gleam like a gloriously strange thread that runs through popular and literary writing alike. For we live in deeply unsettling times, when interest in the timeless, the local and the hitherto unseen has been suddenly and extraordinarily renewed. The Covid-19 pandemic, limiting us for so long to walk only in our own locales, brought to many a new appreciation of how spring, nevertheless, was burgeoning all around. People suddenly found themselves reconnecting emotionally with the natural world, joyfully noticing bursting buds, heady scents of blossom and loud, unabashed birdsong in hedgerows, copses, parks and gardens. So too memory and imagination were kindled into fresh and vivid life as people roamed through places underwritten by history and tradition, reminded of fairies, house-elves, river deities, dwarfs, witches and werewolves whose existences cast a sidelong light across the country’s green spaces.

There is, nonetheless, a huge hinterland of unexplored folktale preserved from all across the British Isles, stories that are familiar only to experts, those people who preserve the old stories of their own regions, and enthusiastic amateurs – amateur here in its original sense of one who loves something for its own sake. I came to love many such local tales told to me in my childhood in North Yorkshire: of the helpful, healing Hob, the scary boggart – whom we’ll meet later in this book – and the hideous Black Dog. Later, as a scholar interested in myths, legends and tales of every kind, I sought them out afresh; indeed, my first book-length publication was The Feminist (later reprinted as The Women’s) Companion to Mythology. In recent years I’ve been increasingly intrigued and delighted by the turn towards folklore in English novels and stories. For nowadays, if we think about the patterning of traditional tales at all, it’s probably through the ubiquitous framework of the superhero movie with its endless variations on the familiar plotline, forever pitching the good, if flawed, man against various embodiments of total evil. And, notably, it is men who are usually charged with saving humanity, even if they are sometimes assisted by a feisty female sidekick; it’s a hero pattern that, thanks to theorists such as Joseph Campbell and his influential The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is an all too familiar one. But our traditional tales are neither so simplistic nor so predictable. They give generous space to the subaltern voice: to the powerless, to the poor, to girls and wives, even to animals, all those creatures who need to find ways not only to survive in this difficult world, but to live well in it, despite the dark forces ranged against them. These stories compel, seizing our attention with their strangeness while at the same time speaking clearly to shared themes of human existence. They explore huge questions: of love and loss, and of the conditions under which we do our everyday work and how we might thrive in it. They patrol the shadowy borderlands between life and death and they tease out our hopes and fears for our children. They demand we consider issues such as migration, asking who belongs here, who can make a home here, who can find the strength to begin all over again in a strange new land – and who might have been here for much longer than you think. Folktales pick fights about disability and aging, about women and men, and, crucially, they hold out to us the environments in which we live – our much-loved British countryside – and show how it might slip through our fingers.

Our time-honoured stories grew within different regional cultures across the British Isles that were entirely oral. Thus, their forms tend to be spare and stripped down, freeing different storytellers to expand and elaborate to their listening audiences. Differing nuances and meaning, new details and varying explanations would have been added each time the tales were performed – just as nowadays a good reader aloud will vary her emphasis and intonation, energising and breathing life into the words on the page. Folktales often have very familiar plots – the same narrative patterns recur widely across the British Isles – and so their earlier audiences would always know – or guess – how the tale would end. For them, the intriguing questions would be: how does the story arrive at that end? How will it be told? What sly asides, jokes or judgments will the storyteller bring to the performance? The traditional tales lost some of this intimate dimension when they were captured in print, imprisoned within a cage of words. In a return to those old storytelling practices, Hag, the collection of stories contained in this book, was first conceived as a podcast series. For podcast technology quite beautifully allows the recapture and reproduction of some of those original oral features; there’s an intimate voice speaking directly in your ear, telling the tale just to you, while modern sound-design allows really vivid aural effects to be incorporated into the story’s sound-world.

Disenchantment, the vanishing of the supernatural marvellous from the workaday world, is a defining feature of modernity, or so the sociologist Max Weber argued. The Victorians indeed feared that the coming of the railway, the factories belching out their dark smoke, the greedy cities with their noise and dirt, gobbling up the pastures and woodlands of older England, would drive the fairies and other spirits away – and perhaps extinguish them altogether. With the ascendancy of technology and science, the victory of reason, superstition and foolishness would be banished. Yet, despite the ringing rhetoric of progress and modernisation, many aspects of the non-rational – in particular, religion – survived. The new technology was indeed harnessed to support the hypothesis that unseen things were moving around us; the microscope revealed teeming life in drops of water, and photography purported to capture spirit beings moving in the darkness of the séance. Heroes of old, King Arthur and Sir Galahad stepped forward to serve as symbols for the British Empire and the British officer in global conflicts; during and after the Second World War, writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, turned towards fantasy once again. This turn in some ways looked very much like a nostalgia for what had perhaps never existed, akin to the Victorian mourning for the fairy realm, but in fact medievalist and folkloric fantasy has always been about the present as much as the past. For the world we live in is, of course, not disenchanted at all. Many things move within it that we cannot comprehend satisfactorily through the application of reason nor fit into the logic of our systems and paradigms. Human existence so often calls for exploration through the imagination, through metaphors, images, narratives that give shape to emotions and conditions, to our sense of being and our struggles to survive and thrive. The supernatural and inexplicable, the selkie, the boggart, the mermaid, the Green Children and the fairies return then, tapping into a powerful sense of continuity from past into present and onwards into the future.

For our everyday is not a disenchanted place, however loudly our commuter trains rattle along their tracks or however tall the tower blocks stand in the place where the trees once grew. In her disquieting work ‘Glitches’, the poet Sarah Hesketh has named what is missed when our attention remains directed downwards to our phones on those tedious daily journeys. Beside the train tracks, if we would only turn to look, we could glimpse ‘faces forcing / their way out of the stone, quick bodies etched in gold’; these are ‘the residents of the edgelands made flesh’. The modern world still holds on to its magic, its weirdnesses, and spookiness, if we can attune ourselves to the enchantments that lurk in the quotidian. So these new stories aim to make listeners and readers take their normal daily environment just a little less for granted, urging you to notice, even seek out, the strange and quirky, keeping an eye open for those flashes of the ancient and the otherworldly as you go about your business.

Each of the authors in this collection was given a different traditional tale as a prompt for her re-imagining, stories that stemmed from very different parts of the British Isles. Nevertheless, these localities were places that each writer knows well, often as their current or childhood homes. Those original stories are no longer than a couple of pages at most; some indeed are only a paragraph or a few verses long, but each author spins a brand-new tale out of the raw stuff she was given, sparkling, fresh iterations that transpose these universal themes into contemporary life. Although the source tales deal with topics that are always already modern, always relevant, their traditional trappings can seem old-fashioned and quaint, dulling their urgent voices and blunting their impact. But in this new collection, shorn of their three-legged stools and horses and carts, their shiny gold coins and soldiers’ muskets, they are set directly in dialogue with the modern.

When I was first tasked with choosing a single set of narratives to represent the many different regions of the British Isles, I had a whole treasury of tales to choose from. At that time I didn’t know that the authors who would take up these tales and shape them into new creative works would all be women – some women of colour and queer women – each of whom would bring her own lived insights and experiences to the stories I’d picked out, selected just because I liked them and because I thought them a little different from those more familiar tales that we share with our European cousins. While there are lots of tales about selkie (seal) women, all following much the same pattern, I chose a very short ballad from Shetland that tells of a selkie man and his predatory habits. I’ve always been rather fond of the quite funny Yorkshire tale of the boggart, a kind of low-level poltergeist that is annoying rather than sinister and the phlegmatic resignation of the farmer that it plagues. Finding a story for London – which has urban myths and legends a-plenty, but not traditional folktales as such – was more difficult. London was (and is) a melting pot to which people brought their own tales as they migrated from rural areas, but these weren’t London stories exactly, rooted as they were in the fields, forests and moorlands of the shires. In the end, I found an account of a strange happening in Tavistock Square, an instance of murderous sibling rivalry. Finding a tale from the Midlands also presented a challenge but, as the great cities expanded outwards they incorporated ancient manor houses and their parkland, wild forests and mysterious lakes into their suburbs; some of the wild then is brought into the heart of the new city. Wales has a plethora of stories about the Tylwyth Teg, the Welsh fairies whose activities may help or hinder the humans they encounter and whose rules must be followed to the letter. Mermaids are often glimpsed amid the crashing waves off the Cornish coast and their siren song is heard by fishermen looking for a spectacular catch. In Somerset, the piskies form strong views about human behaviour and how it might affect powerless humans and animals, as well as vexing the piskies themselves. East Anglia is particularly rich in lore: two medieval chronicles yield separate inexplicable accounts of a bright green boy and girl, who materialise one hot August day at the edge of a Suffolk cornfield. Norfolk breeds bold young women and importunate ghosts while Black Shuck, the spectral and terrifying Black Dog, roams freely across both counties.

As the original stories came into being as spoken creations, some of the new tales also have a very marked narrator’s voice. In Eimear McBride’s ‘The Tale of Kathleen’, the teller has strong views about the world in which Kathleen’s tragedy played out, and how that might relate to the Ireland of today. Other stories have narrators who are telling their own tales, stories in which we come to trust – or wonderingly distrust – the experiences they share with us. Daisy Johnson’s disturbing story, ‘A Retelling’, begins self-referentially with the writer’s task, commissioned to retell the tale of the Green Children, but it takes us on a compelling journey into strange, hidden places, bringing the wild and uncanny back into the city. Kirsty Logan’s tale, ‘Between Sea and Sky’, is narrated, in part, by an outsider, a woman who is trying to make a place for herself within a community with a secret, but who ends up harbouring a secret of her own. Many of the other tales are first-person narratives: Emma Glass’s story, ‘The Dampness is Spreading’ and Naomi Booth’s ‘Sour Hall’ all give distinctive voices to speakers who are trying to process trauma, only to find that trauma emerging in ways that speak very clearly to women’s unique experience of childbearing. Pregnancy, miscarriage and birth transform bodies and alter souls, bringing blood, pain and terror, as well as joy. As Liv Little’s ‘The Sisters’ transposes a tale about two brothers duelling for the love of one woman into a searing story of two rivalrous sisters, we hear voices speaking in Caribbean English, bringing rich cadence to that towering fairy-tale figure: the hostile mother ready to banish her own child.

Mahsuda Snaith and Natasha Carthew take different approaches to voice; their third-person narratives relate tales that take place in the distant past – or an apocalyptic very near future. Mahsuda’s ‘The Panther’s Tale’ draws on her own Bengali folk heritage to bring a blaze of vivid jewel-like colour to what was originally just a little anecdote about how a Midlands aristocratic family got their coat of arms and motto. Natasha Carthew’s ‘Droll of the Mermaid’ shares its title with her source story (a ‘droll’ is an entertaining tale in Cornish dialect), and we hear in it both the musicality and muscularity of the narrative voice and the distinctive speech of Lowan and his family.

Two new stories were commissioned from Irenosen Okojie and Imogen Hermes Gowar for this printed version of the Hag collection; they will soon be available as podcasts, for they too have been re-engineered back into the direct and intimate context of the spoken tale. Irenosen was assigned the rousing Norfolk tale of ‘The Dauntless Girl’, who is afraid of nothing – neither the gloomy bone house in the local church at dead of night, nor her master’s persistent dead mother. Dared to fetch a skull out of the ossuary at midnight, the girl succeeds triumphantly, and when approached to deal with a ghost, she declares that this particular service demands an increase in her wages. In her story, ‘Rosheen’, Irenosen takes up the themes of exploitative labour and extraordinary courage; descent into a haunted space of the dead enables this truly undaunted young woman to understand her family’s history. Imogen’s Somerset tale ‘A Holloway’ cleverly transposes the original story’s drunken, tyrannical father and his ponies into a familiar modern context. Told from a young girl’s perspective, a point of view that holds in tension the possibilities of the supernatural with a wrenching realisation of deep-seated fear and trauma, the tale transports us into the heart of Exmoor and its ancient powers, melding a glorious summer landscape with the dynamics of a troubled family.

Many of the stories in Hag are in dialogue with ‘folk-horror’ or the ‘new weird’, a cultural trend that emerged in the 1970s in films such as The Wicker Man and is still being revived today with hit films like 2019’s Midsommar. The past re-emerges into the present – or is revealed never quite to have gone away – violently and disruptively; the contemporary characters do not necessarily understand what they are dealing with or how to combat the forces that have been aroused. But with new understanding comes also hope, closure, determination in the face of trauma and pain. Each Hag story has a woman either at its heart or close to it; women’s friendships and their enmities, their power to give birth and to deal death, to harm and to heal thread their way through the narratives.

Lastly, a word about the title. Hag is a very old word in English; its earliest form, hægtesse, is found in the tenth-century Old English ‘Metrical Charms’ where it invokes a fierce, supernatural female who shoots dangerous disease-bearing missiles at hapless humans. For me, and I think for all the writers featured here, the Hag is a powerful figure indeed. In one early and widespread traditional story, found first in Ireland and then across Great Britain in the medieval period, a knight finds himself in deep trouble. Either he, or his beloved king, will be slain if he cannot discover the answer to the trickiest of all tricky questions (as Sigmund Freud would acknowledge, centuries later): ‘what do women want?’ He searches for a year and a day, interviewing women of every rank; in one poem he is able to compile a whole pamphlet full of all the different answers he has been given. But none seems totally convincing, and he is plunged into despair. Quite by chance he encounters a hag, an ugly, old woman – often with quite monstrous features: bristles, tusks, bleared eyes and a gaping mouth – who tells him that she knows the right answer. And, if he will marry her, she will divulge it. The hag’s answer does indeed satisfy all the women who hear it, and the knight is off the hook – except he must now marry this hideous, elderly and low-born woman. With varying degrees of reluctance, he goes through the ceremony. Once they are in bed together she explains that there’s a choice: he can have her fair by night and foul by day, or vice versa (or, in Chaucer’s version, beautiful and faithless or ugly and faithful). But the knight has learned from the hag’s answer – that what women want is to be given agency to decide things for themselves – and he hands the choice back to her. And she chooses to be lovely all the time – as, of course, you would. The curse placed on her by her stepmother is lifted and she is restored to beauty, and marital happiness with a husband who recognises her selfhood and right to choose her own mode of being.

The Hag that presides over this book is not a victim of stepmotherly enchantment, but she certainly knows a thing or two about the ways in which the world can appear and the hidden forces that pulse below the everyday surface. She knows about transpositions and transformations, about the very old and the sparklingly new. And she offers true insight . . .