Folklore

I had not thought much about spiders until I read Maria Tatar’s Arachnomania; now I can think of little else. I even watched a film mentioned in the book – Eight-Legged Freaks. It was awful, though it did bring home how very scared people can be of spiders, especially large ones. But, as Tatar shows, spiders are also part of human history and culture; and they really are different. I use fly sprays to get rid of insect intruders. I would never now use them against arachnids as well. Tatar was first drawn to spiders by the Covid pandemic which locked us all down. It was then she discovered that the eight-legged freaks offered the possibility of ‘finding a model for survival and creativity in times of seclusion, darkness and gloom’. They are, as we shall see, paragons of survival.

In the realm of magic and imagination, human nature can be better understood than in the world of our everyday lives: ‘The best of our tales do not lie or die.’ It is a bold claim, which the folklorist Jack Zipes explores across continents and class in a series of essays. He guides the reader from the origin of oral storytelling, through medieval writings, to 17th-century literary salons and finally to today’s cinema screens. In the course of this journey, he focuses on the specific genre of the ‘wonder tale’, in which ‘those who are naive and simple are able to succeed because they are untainted and can recognise the wondrous signs... They have not been spoiled by conventionalism, power or rationalism.

To our jaded century, ‘fairy’ carries connotations ranging from the sentimental to the sickly. It conjures childishness, foolishness, insipidity and softness – Tinker Bell, the Tooth Fairy, the Cottingley photographs that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle, cakes, twinkling lights and a certain brand of soap. Francis Young feels that the word should also be applied to countless other traditions of supernatural entities from earliest times on – that fairy stories help us fathom being human. Young has written or worked on many books about religion and folklore, and this is his third specifically on fairies.

This absorbing and wild debut feels at once muzzily folkloric and sharply contemporary. It follows Nell, an artist who lives on a wind-whipped island without ties or commitments – until, that is, a group of women living an even quieter life commission her to make an artwork that will tell their story. The Inions, as they’re known, have come from all over the world to Rathglas, a crumbling old convent overlooking the sea. Naturally, rumours abound about them being a cult or a coven, but really they’re ‘ordinary women wanting a different kind of life’, who have rejected hatred and inequality in favour of seclusion and simplicity.

I would guess that contemporary pagans have a love-hate relationship with Ronald Hutton. With books such as The Triumph of the Moon and Stations of the Sun, scholarly accounts of the history of modern witchcraft and the ritual year in Britain, no one writes more sensitively about their worldview. On the other hand, as an academic, Hutton assiduously seeks to saw off the branch on which many of their fondest assumptions sit. The paradox can be explained. Queens of the Wild returns to one of Hutton’s key themes: the debunking of the idea that pagan practices and beliefs survived intact in Europe from archaic times.