#british folklore

The UK'S Royal Mail captures the four eras of girlhood in its latest stamp release, Myths and Legends.

kelpie

The story of George Hodgson, a farmer who died in 1715 at the age of 94 in the village of Dent in the Lake District, and came back in the form of a black hare preying on sheep. A farmer shot him, and followed him back to his old house. Hence, they dug up his body, drove a brass pole through it, and reburied him in the local church, in which his grave and the pole (actually part of a door hinge, because the stone in question is reused from a house) are still visible [1].

For a long time, I was sceptical of the authenticity of this story, because with the exception of the Gorbals Vampire and the Highgate Vampire, who both postdate gothic literature and its reinvention of the vampire, I haven't heard of any post-medieval vampire stories in Britain. But I've realised the story does make sense within British folklore.

One of the stock powers of witches in Britain was turning into hares, and in a story from Yorkshire, the witch does so in order to drain milk from cattle [2]. Additionally, there are a couple of cases of witches having stakes driven through their heart after death, and in one of them, a male witch from Lincolnshire called Jimmy C-, the purpose was because he remained active after death [3]. And odd features in churches were common origins of folktales, such as the Mordiford Wyvern, a Herefordshire dragon legend based on a now-lost picture in the local church [4]. Hence, Hodgson's story seems like a mix of common folklore motifs, so I'm convinced of its authenticity.

2. The Lyke-Wake Dirge is a Yorkshire funeral song describing the soul's journey after death - first they cross Whinny-Muir (Gorse Bush Moor), then Brig o' Dread (Bridge of Dread), and finally they arrive in Purgatory, with each stage of the journey being dependent on giving food and clothes to the poor during life to cross [5]. The poem's often been speculated to be a Christianised version of pre-Christian Norse afterlife, with Brig o' Dread in particular compared to the Bridge of Gjöll in the Prose Edda [6].

For a long time, I thought this was an overreading of the evidence - after all, "bridge to the land of the dead" is hardly so specific an idea it's impossible for two cultures to independently come up with it. However, in researching this poem I found two medieval Scandinavian texts similar to it - the Icelandic Leizla Rannveiger (Rannvig's Vision) and the Norwegian Draumkvedet (Dream Poem), which both describe Hell as a field of thorns [7]. After that, I looked up the text of the Draumkvedet, and found it has both the field of thorns and the bridge (here called the Gjallar Bridge), and in the ending we're told that crossing them will be easy if in life we give food and clothes to the poor. The strong parallels between two cultures (Yorkshire and Norway) that didn't communicate much after the Viking era as far as I'm aware and the name similarity (Gjallar Bridge - Bridge of Gjöll) have brought me round to believing that the Lyke-Wake Dirge probably does reflect a pagan Norse idea of the afterlife.

Sources

David Castleton, 2021, Church Curiosities: Strange Objects and Bizarre Legends, Shire Publications: Oxford, pp.37-38

Neil Philip, 2022, The Watkins Book of English Folktales, Watkins Media Ltd., pp.266-267

Ethel Rudkin, 1934, “Lincolnshire Folklore, Witches and Devils”, Folklore, volume 45, number 3, pp.249-267

Jacqueline Simpson, 1976, The Folklore of the Welsh Border, Batsford: London, pp.48-49

Vic Gammon, 1988, “Singing and Popular Funeral Practices in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, Folk Music Journal, pp.412-447

F. Sidgwick and Lucy E. Broadwood, 1906, “Note on: Our Saviour Tarried out or the Bitter Withy”, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, pp.300-304

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