C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 51

I Found the Town that Isn’t There…

When I had time to stop and stare

I found the town that isn’t there.

It isn’t there again today.

I’m glad that town has stayed away.

 

For my birthday treat my husband took me to St Leonard’s, East Sussex, for the weekend and on Saturday we trundled along the coast to blustery Norman’s Bay. There is nothing there. Well – there is. There’s a static caravan park, where some kids were playing football. There are public conveniences (closed, it’s off-season). There are houses in a linear sweep along the shingle facing the sea, and a converted something-or-other (defence tower?) left over from one of the Wars. It has some nice curtains in it now and a rather pretty balcony area.

Behind this, there are fields. A lot of fields. And lonely farmhouses with their backs to the sea, or tilted side-on. The trees are bent inland, and all the metal is rusting quietly in the way metal does in salt air.

Norman’s Bay apparently never had a train station (understandable) but one day in the nineteenth century a whale beached itself and Londoners excitedly rushed to see it, asking the trains to stop so they could jump off. The pub landlord enterprisingly put down some sleepers to assist them, and this is how Norman’s Bay ended up with a train station. I can’t corroborate this, I think I heard it second-hand from a story posted on a forum or something, but I like it so I’m blogging about it here. It’s as good a reason as any.

Anyway: this is where Pagham-on-Sea is not.

I uploaded my reference video to YouTube, both the original and one with better audio quality (or rather, just louder, normalised audio) and we discussed the geography and geology for a while, got very cold, missed our train and had to wait another hour for the next one.

You have to imagine that a chalk spar from the Weald elevates the land and creates cliffs or bluffs, so the shingled beach is lower down. The town itself is a splodge, not really a grid or anything as well planned as that, with horrible 1960s concrete bits and the usual decaying gentility of the seaside town Georgian bits and some surviving Victorian bits and one Tudor street with its back to the sea that led to the site of a gallows. You couldn’t just hang people in town, it’s Sussex not the Old West, so there’s a whole rationale behind why the gallows was there and which king allowed it to be constructed etc, but that’s probably for another post or a Twitter thread or something.

We debated where the two train stations are – Pagham-on-Sea Parkway, way out on the north-east edge near the new estate, and Pagham-on-Sea Town, which is basically Norman’s Bay station but we moved the train line back a bit. You have to do a bit of geography gymnastics, but it basically works.

Want to know what it’s like? Dive in to the Pagham-on-Sea page.

You can buy the first novel, The Crows, from all the usual places, and the paperback is available from Amazon.

Still curious? Need more background? Try these posts:

Thinking of Moving to Pagham-on-Sea

Love Song to The Crows

Meet the Locals: Mercy

And more!

#AmReading: Echo in a Dark Wind by Julia Withers

“First Contact” Welsh Gothic

Echo in a Dark Wind by Julia Withers (an early pseudonym of American author Jerrold Mandis, Signet Books, 1966), falls into the “first contact” Gothic novel type, whereby an outsider aligned with the primary readership – in this case, a young, sophisticated interior decorator (!!) from New York – encounters the Other in a primitive throwback to wilder, more savage days in a centuries-old Welsh fortress.

This post contains spoilers!

First of all, Angela, our heroine, is modest, kind and generous. She has a humble background, but her lucky break was an astonishingly well-connected High School art teacher who got her into a New York art & design school. Living the Dream. Angela is successful and an Independent Modern Woman, who gradually reveals the obligatory sparky nature of this kind of heroine through verbally challenging churlish Male behaviour.

She has some fun* ideas about British stereotypes (how cute) and is surprised when they don’t quite match up to real life but adjusts quite well.

There are some dodgy perceptions of Welsh history and places where geography becomes erratic. I’m not entirely sure where “Castle Morgan” is.

.

.

*LOL

Pedantic note on naming your Gothic castle: Don’t name your castle after your family, that’s not how it works. It makes you sound insecure, gauche, desperate, trying too hard. Unless that’s the point/joke. Then do it, so your clued-up snooty characters can point this out and snigger. Remember: the place is more important than the people. People come and go, the place is always the same. Unless, of course, you’re Dracula. And then, that sort of is the joke.

In Wales, you might be confused because Welsh puts the adjective last, and so translated literally back into English makes it appear as if “Castle” comes first. It doesn’t.

Ok, moving on, sweeping rapidly by the dodgy concept of geography and history, the fact the fictional earldom is “Penhearst”, a mash-up of Welsh “pen” + Old English “hearst”, which I … I am also going to leave alone for now, and also do you understand what an earldom is and how it differs from a lordship and do you get how hereditary titles work? The answer to this is a resounding “nope” so we’ll just leave that alone too.

No, I lied, hang on.

The M4 (referred to as a “highway”) was built in 1963. They can drive from London to “Castle Morgan” on this motorway. You do not, for the love of all that is holy, go past Offa’s Dyke. You cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot, go via Merthyr Tydfil if the nearest town to “Castle Morgan” is Chepstow. Let me show you why:

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That space in the middle of the totally pointless loop you just did? Those are mountains. That’s why it – you know what, never mind.

“Oh, but the Severn Bridge wasn’t built…” yes it was. The old bridge was built in 1961. And even if you had to go via Gloucester to get to somewhere vaguely near Chepstow there is no way on God’s green earth that could take you via Merthyr Tydfil but there we are.

Ok, I’m fine now.

Gothic Tropes in ECHO IN A DARK WIND

Ominous dreams
A Dark and Stormy Night
Murder
Everyone’s Got Secrets (and one of them genuinely is that there’s Something in the Attic)
Dark Brooding Man [BONUS: Dark Brooding Man who is Haunted by The Past]
Isolated Protagonist
Scary Castle (the traditional variant of Creepy Old House)
Ghost Story / Someone Blames “The Ghost”
She Died On Her Honeymoon / History of Violent Death (accidental or otherwise)
History of Dispossession and Conquest and General Misery
Indolent Aristocracy Who Are Probably Also Broke
Heroine has No Other Women Friends
Attempted Murder of Heroine
Physical Injury / Deformity
Am I Going Mad / Is [This Person] Going Mad
Femme Fatale
Obligatory (but largely unintentional) anachronisms, also known as TOTALLY RAGE-INDUCING GRASP OF HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY
What A Nice Man (hint: he’s usually not)
What A Scary Awful Man (hint: this could go either way, but he’s almost certainly the hero if pitted against the Nice Man as a contrast)
Meet the Locals [BONUS: The Locals Are Not On My Level / Don’t Like Me]
Hero Represents Modernity, Is Pitted Against Representations of The Past

You’re Not In Kansas Anymore, Dorothy

Well, New York, and her name is Angela. But let’s not let that get in the way of a good subheading.

All this “history” and attempt at describing how she gets to “Castle Morgan” is not genre or plot relevant except to set the scene and position Wales as Not America. They have exotic things there, such as relics of feudalism, which contrast sharply with modern (1960s) progressive White American Values. TM.

The point of it all is not to be accurate, so I’m being (deliberately) unfair. No, the point is that this all creates a narrative/atmosphere of dispossession and alienation, where the fictional history of the area is reduced to “Celts” versus Anglo-Saxons versus Normans, and the Welsh are “cattle-raiding” agrarian strangers in their own land.

Moreover, the three “locals” we meet by Chapter 9 (there are only 13 chapters) could win Gothic Bingo all by themselves. They pretty much conform to all the stereotypes you would expect: see my Meet the Locals trope post.

There is the “simple-minded” lad named Holford (why?), the childlike loyal servant, and the large youth whom Angela meets at the river, a mute unable to communicate except through grunting sounds.

This brings us to Megan Hughes, the older, unattractive and surly housekeeper. “Meg” is the first local we meet and seems to have a Cockney accent? I suspect this is because the author thinks there is only one working class accent in the British Isles (or at least, only one they assume their readership recognises) and calling people “mum” is/was the only form of address for people of this class.

All the characters, in fact, are written as English. The Othering is in their non-American-ness, which, in the same way British Gothic tends to Other Europeans, means it’s a sweeping generalisation that lumps all the inhabitants at Castle Morgan into one group, an alien culture, and as we dig into the personalities of these individuals we can see why each of them are Not Like Us.

(N. B. I am effectively dispossessed from my own culture by this novel, which is a very interesting position to be in.)

Isolated Protagonist

The isolation of the protagonist is a key part of building suspense and creating atmosphere. My previous post on Isolation as a Gothic Trope breaks this down further, but in this case, it’s achieved by the following tropes:

The locals are either hostile (Meg Hughes) and/or uncommunicative, people to whom the heroine can demonstrate her kindness and on whom she can bestow generous patronage, or be frightened by.

 

The castle is geographically isolated and sprawling, totally impractical to live in, and enables one to be both totally lost where no one can hear you scream while simultaneously being in “a house full of people”. The decay and desolation of the castle is echoed in the corruption hinted at in the lives of its inhabitants: for David Morgan, a metaphorical corruption of the flesh and mind; for the Trefins, some dodgy dealings going on and some questionable sexual ethics displayed by Leonore; for Trevor, his alcoholism and feckless lifestyle. Again, see my previous post on Corruption as a Gothic Trope for more on this.

 

The only other women are Not Your Allies. In this case, Angela has two to contend with: the unfriendly housekeeper, and Mrs Leonore Trefin, who lives at the castle with her husband Wayne and will be one of the managers when the castle is opened as a hotel. Leonore is vicious, flirtatious and mean, pitting her husband (whose advances Angela has to shake off) against Trevor Morgan, the young, irresponsible playboy who owns it. There is one other woman mentioned, but of course, she’s already dead: the first wife of David and Trevor Morgan’s father, who was killed on her honeymoon.

 

Trevor, bless his drunken heart, is doomed from the beginning – as soon as he’s positioned as naive, affable, irresponsible, alcoholic, feckless and a bit of a man-child. There’s only one fate for men like that, although he doesn’t actually cop it until Chapter 9, which seems remarkably late in the day for the bodies to start dropping, but it lulls you into a false sense of security.

This (eventual) murder comes after three clumsy attempts on Angela’s life, one from a halberd that falls off the wall, grazing her arm, and then from placing a sharp burr under her horse’s saddle so that it goes mad and tries to throw her when she mounts.

Angela is also stalked through the dungeon complex in the dark, which of course includes a fully-kitted-out torture chamber, for some reason. But then she wouldn’t have found the Secret Chamber through a Revolving Wall. I love those. She is then trapped behind the revolving wall by the mysterious stalker, and left in the claustrophobic darkness all alone. (See my previous post on Darkness as a Gothic Trope).

 

The Gothic Hero(es)

Michael Pierce-Bryson is a lawyer, whose name screams English. He is not intended to be Welsh, so that’s a good thing, but his double-barrel name indicates a higher social position and well-to-do background, and makes him a worthy ally/love interest for our spunky sophisticated (as yet unmarried) 60s heroine. He is against the renovation project she has been sent to complete, as it will bankrupt the owners. He is, however, positioned as her ally, not holding her job against her, the one who explains about the family dynamics, the (dodgy) medieval history of the area, and is giving her compliments and cuddles by the end of Chapter 4.

My initial instincts, in order: He’s the bad guy. That’s it. That’s the thought.

David Morgan is Trevor’s brother, suffering from PTSD after horrific experiences as a POW in Malaysia during the Malaysian war. He is reclusive, churlish, filled with hatred and bitterness for humanity, hates the idea of the castle being turned into a hotel, is brusque and blunt, and is temporarily persuaded to show his soft, sensitive side by Angela after she asks him why he doesn’t just kill himself and have done with it. Lovely.

David is described as a caged falcon, proud, and even satanic-looking in the dark when he finds Angela trapped behind the revolving dungeon wall.

My initial instincts, in order: He is the misunderstood hero. Obvs.

Angela, of course, is drawn to Pierce-Bryson, and convinces herself that David either has a split personality or is a paranoid schizophrenic, and despite ruling him out as her would-be assassin once she sees his softer side, rules him right back in after her ordeal in the dungeon and confides her suspicions to calm, outwardly sane, Pierce-Bryson.

Since Angela has already had a run-in with an affable, “normal”-seeming neighbour in New York who only occasionally spouted conspiracy theories, then pushed a man under a subway train because she believed him to be a Russian spy, of course Angela suspects the obviously damaged David to be deranged, rather than the “normal”, affable Pierce-Bryson, who more closely resembles her neighbour in these outward respects and only occasionally remarks how much he is against the project and why it’s a bad idea.

Spoiler Alert: I’m not wrong.

There is a nice twisty complication where the mute boy with giantism (Rhys) returns as a “Lenny” character in Of Mice and Men, with both a history of accidentally injuring one of his boyhood tormentors, and being hidden in the castle as a result. The near-misses Angela has experienced come from Megan, his mother, trying to drive her away so that Rhys will not be found and the authorities not alerted.

Rhys performs the scapegoat function for Trevor’s murder, and then as one of Angela’s allies in the showdown with Michael Pierce-Bryson, the other, of course, being misunderstood David Morgan, also framed for murder along with Rhys.

It’s all rather involved in the final two chapters, and there’s no room for emotional growth or exploration. David kisses her at the end, leaving hatred and bitterness behind (his brother’s only been dead for a couple of days, but let’s gloss over that and get straight to the nice conclusion).

Ultimately, Wales has nothing to add to the novel except to be a setting that represents wildness, ‘backwards’ locals, savagery of landscape and loneliness in general, and that it’s a good place to find castles. Is it Welsh Gothic? Well, kind of.

Overall, a solid 3* out of 5. 

#AmReading: Body Gothic by Xavier Aldana Reyes

CW// strong language, sexual imagery, violence

New year, new post, same glorious Gothic shit…

I got a copy of Body Gothic for Christmas which is another one of the University of Wales Press’s Gothic Literary Studies series. You will see from the eye-watering price that this is a Serious Academic Study on Literary Criticism, which is why it will be treasured.

THE BLURB:

The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D’Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanley Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012)

My husband bought it for me because of the corporeal assimilation and body horror involved in The Crows and the wider Pagham-on-Sea-verse/Paghamverse, where one particular family of eldritch horrors undergo the Changes around ages 18-21. These Changes alter their physical appearance in impossible ways, and I’m never completely going to explain how or why or anything about it. Vague is best as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want readers to be able to wrap their heads around how a skinny 5ft 4 bloke can fit a T-Rex sized thing with coils, mouths and too many eyes inside his body, and I honestly don’t care, because for me, reducing body horror to empirical explanations or things that make any logical sense is not the point of it.

I’ve also done the spectral haunting element in The Crows, and played with a fairly major if low-key theme of disembodiment versus embodiment, but what I am mainly interested in for Thirteenth, a novel that follows on from The Crows but focuses on the eldritch abominations that are the Porter clan, is the body as a site of Gothic horror, the physicality of it, and how that plays into other fears and themes like alienation and loss of control.

I keep forgetting that Horror as a genre was born from Gothic fiction, and that you can talk about films like the Human Centipede, Saw and Hostel franchises as Gothic [filmic] texts. I hoped that reading the ideas that Reyes posits in Body Gothic would help me rethink my own writing and give me some more ideas about how to write this kind of thing. What do I want to do? What am I saying? Why have I included this sort of stuff and what is the purpose of it? Does it have one or is it… just something I like writing about?

I found it really useful and it gave me a lot of things to think about, but also it was just fun to read.

The key things that Reyes writes about are:

Yes, hauntings are cool but the gothic is as much about the body as it is about spectres because…
The body can be centred in the gothic experience – not just a passive observer/vehicle, or something that exists to be haunted.
The body itself can be a site of imprisonment, disassociation and alienation.
The body can be fragmented, permeable, objectified and reduced to its basic components.

The chapters focused on:

Splatterpunk
Body Horror
The New Avant-Pulp (see also: Attack! Books… their manifesto and linked interview is not for the faint of heart)
The Slaughterhouse Novel
Torture Porn
Surgical Horror

Chapter 1: Splatterpunk: Splatterpunk settings are trés Gothic, as are the characters and the tropes, so it’s kind of an updated take on Gothic fiction taken to its graphic extreme. Reyes says the aim of splatterpunk and of body gothic more generally is ‘to recreate and exploit a moment of “meat meeting mind, with the soul as screaming omniscient witness”.’1

Chapter 2: Body Horror: Body horror is loosely defined and covers everything from weird fiction (my jam) to post-millennial torture porn. Reyes discusses possible definitions and how it’s related to the gothic. He covers mutation and re-animation, and classics like The Fly and its remake, and more modern classics like the Human Centipede. I generally refuse to watch these on principle because I just couldn’t cope with the imagery, but I’m interested in the commentary.

Chapter 3: The New Avant-Pulp: Oh my word, I loved this chapter. Attack! books gets a special mention for their amazing fuck you to BritLit (and sanity). Avant-pulp is meant to be a deconstruction of the novel using spare, poetic prose, but which some authors do in obscene and dramatic fashion. Attack! was set up with classic titles like Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty by the late great Stephen Wells [Reader, I bought it] and proposed titles like HUGETITTED SPUNKSUCKING NAZISNAKE SLUTNUNS IN CYBERSPACE I mean, how could that not have been a raging success? Well, it kind of wasn’t, and Attack! folded in 2002, which I think is a huge loss just in general. Anyway, Reyes looks at avant-pulp, the similarities with the 1970s s/exploitation texts (including films) and how the body gets gothicised TO THE MAX (I guess) in this subgenre.

Honestly if I were brave enough I’d just re-write Thirteenth to comply with this manifesto because this is basically what bi/pan/omni/who-honestly-knows-or-cares polyamorous playboy Wes Porter wants his life to be like (except that he’s not an anarchist, he’s a grassroots Tory with a hard-on for Maggie Thatcher, which, if you’ve read Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty, is ironically apt).

Chapter 4: The Slaughterhouse Novel: This is exactly what it sounds like. I was thinking maybe there was more to it, but the texts covered here are mainly post-apocalyptic and are primarily about cannibalism, with the body reduced to meat and the slaughterhouse as a key setting. These kinds of novels often pick up on the inhumane conditions of the meat processing line and the horrors of (usually) American food industry standards, and in reducing people to meat, the novels gothicise capitalism and consumer culture, taking it to its logical extreme.

Chapter 5: Torture Porn: Loved this chapter too: it mainly focuses on the Hostel and Saw franchises, again, none of which I’ve seen, but I love the breakdown and the commentary on what they achieve in terms of centring the body as a site of horror and suspense. Honestly thought this was really insightful and made me want to watch all the films to see how the concepts discussed are handled on screen, even though I know I couldn’t cope with the gore.

Reyes argues here that contemporary horror films, while they might look like a departure from gothic film, might instead ‘be reshaping the gothic mode to suit modern anxieties and contemporary understandings of embodiment’ (Body Gothic, p. 137). This is an insightful observation, and one which leads neatly into his deconstruction of corporeality in Surgical Horror, the final chapter.

Chapter 6: Surgical Horror: The final chapter touches on Gothic classics like Frankenstein and how the anxieties within this text translate into modern-day horror. Surgical reality shows focusing on cosmetic surgery or unusual physical problems are really popular, so it’s not surprising that fictional texts and films focus on this preoccupation and gothicise it and the culture around it. A thematic subset of mad science that particularly attacks the cult of youth and beauty, the modern practitioners of surgical horror have obvious pioneering mentors in Viktor Frankenstein, Herbert West, Dr Jekyll and Dr Moreau.

Reyes argues that these figures ‘help us negotiate a number of frustrations and anxieties about the present, as well as fears of the future, the role of technology and scientific developments and their impact on our lives, religion and many other areas of human existence’ (p. 147). The horror comes from exploiting instinctive human reactions to pain (and seeing others in pain), and by changing the human body into an unrecognisable shape or at least one that challenges ‘normative corporealities’ (p.165).

 Conclusion: The conclusion of the book looks at corporeal readings more broadly, setting this study in the context of previous ones and showing how consideration of the body gothic is experiencing a resurgence within the academic discipline. Reyes contends that the subgenres discussed in the previous chapters need to be ‘read alongside shifts in popular and cultural perceptions of embodiment over the past thirty years’ (p. 169).

Reyes summarises his position on corporeality and the gothic, as laid out in each of the previous chapters, and ends by saying that this study is ‘intended as a stepping stone towards a critical future where the gothic may become inextricable from embodiment, and where a recuperation of the role and relevance of corporeal transgression might breathe new life into an excessive canon that, paradoxically, often ignores the gory and the extreme’ (p. 171).

And that’s all folks!

Since I haven’t seen the films or read the texts I’m not going to give a full chapter-by-chapter breakdown of this one in the way I did with Welsh Gothic, where I gave you additional historical context and supporting personal anecdotes/reflections on each theme covered in Aaron’s chapters, but stay tuned for me to do something similar with Reyes’ book Spanish Gothic, and a collected volume on Bram Stoker!

I’m going to leave you with part of the actual press release for Attack! Books in case you’re not prepared to scar your corneas by clicking the link to the literary interview I’ve linked to twice in this post you cowards:

“Attack! Books are gaudily painted ruffian whores blatantly flourishing the rouged lips of their distended genitalia and giving you the come on. You are aroused to passion. Feverishly fingering the cheap pages, you speed-read the sordid contents, your mind reeling under the savage mental carpet bombing of the fuck-frenzied prose. At last, satiated and weeping, you collapse in a heaving heap. Then you sit down at your computer and start to write. The world must hear of the glory, the frenzy, the dementia and—yes—the love that IS Attack! Books. The pulsating glory that you once thought could only be found in the screaming amplifiers of beautiful and tragically thin young proletarian sex-rock gods thrashing machine-gun fuck rock out of cock-level held and crude-slogan plastered electric guitars has now found its literary equivalent!”

You’re welcome.

1. John Skipp and Craig Spector, ‘On Going Too Far, or Flesh-Eating Fiction: New Hope for the Future’, in John Skipp and Craig Spector (eds), Book of the Dead (London and New York: Bantam Books, 1989), p. 10.

Welsh Gothic Tropes V: The Sin-Eater

Introduction

The Sin-Eater was a Welsh export to America, now so forgotten in Wales and so connected with Appalachia, that most Welsh might now consider it to be an American phenomenon, rather than a part of their own history. The Sin-Eater has their* own chapter in Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic (Chapter 6) and this is the last post of my Welsh Gothic series!

There are three main sections to this long chapter, the last in Aaron’s book, except for her post-Devolution epilogue. She opens with a literary illustration of the practice, then discusses the historical sin-eater in Wales, the sin-eater in Welsh literature, and the sin-eater beyond Wales. I’m going to leave out the last section for this post, but Aaron discusses the mainly American lit in which this figure appears, with particular reference to Native American postcolonial literature.

*I use the singular their in this case because, while the sin-eater was generally male, this was not always the case.

The Sin-Eater in Life

Aaron discusses the sin-eater as a figure, and the debate surrounding whether they were a real aspect of Welsh history or a fabrication of John Aubrey (1626-97), who first recorded the phenomenon. The practice was often not explicitly referred to, and despite the Nonconformist ministers’ vehement denials that any such practice existed, there is evidence that it was not as fictional as they would have liked.

Neither was sin-eating exclusive to Wales: it was also found in the Borders, and the ‘last sin-eater’ in England, who died in 1906, was honoured by a special service in 2010 when his grave at Ratlinghope, Shropshire, was restored. Richard Munslow was a well-established and well-respected farmer in the area, which makes his position unusual.

Sin-eaters were typically scapegoats of their communities, and the practice seems to have come from a popular folk-Christian understanding of the Old Testament practice. If someone died suddenly without having confessed their sins to a priest, the sin-eater was called for, usually a poor person who was paid to eat bread and drink wine/ale over the corpse in a Eucharistic manner, and in doing so ingested the sins of the deceased and took them all upon themselves.

This kind of ritual falls into the realm of Folk-Christianity – that is, practices, rituals, beliefs and symbols relating to Christianity but coming from sources other than the Church or religious leaders – which is often denied or misunderstood. The Yorkshire Post‘s article on Ripon sin-eaters erroneously suggests this practice is ‘pre-Christian’, despite the basis of the ritual being taken from both Leviticus 16 and the New Testament institution of the Lord’s Supper, underpinned by a [Christian] Eschatological theology of substitution.

That the sin-eater appears in the North of England too (and was probably more widespread than we think) is possibly indicative not only of patterns of movement, settlement and contact in the Middle Ages (the Earl of Lincoln settled his North-Welsh lordship with men from Lancashire and Yorkshire), but also of the popularity of the practice in communities where the poorer working classes could be exploited for the purpose, or could gain some kind of status in their communities by performing this role as a public service.

The practice had largely died out by the nineteenth century, and Richard Munslow was not a poor man, nor was he ostracised in his community as other sin-eaters were. It is suggested that he revived the practice after the deaths of his first three children, perhaps as a means of giving reassurance to other grieving families that their loved ones would find peace.

Munslow was probably part of the inspiration for Shropshire novelist Mary Webb’s 1924 novel, Precious Bane, where sin-eating appears. For anyone new to Webb and/or this novel, Eloise Millar critiqued this bestseller in her book blog in 2009, describing Webb as ‘brighter and better than Thomas Hardy‘, although in my opinion that’s not a difficult feat. Sin-eating is mentioned particularly in Chapter 4.

Munslow isn’t mentioned as an example in Aaron’s chapter, as the historical section is concerned with exploring why the knowledge of the practice was denied, and what evidence there is that it actually took place. However, since she did discuss vampire lit with reference to the Borders almost exclusively, I don’t see it as a stretch to include the evidence from Shropshire here, and add it to Aaron’s own argument that the historic practice was not Aubrey’s invention.

I mention the English and Borders examples here to illustrate that the practice was also not as exclusively Welsh as Aaron make it out to be. Even in the third section of the chapter, Aaron treats it as a Welsh export, and focuses mainly on the American context, but doesn’t discuss it in relation to England.

The Sin-Eater in Literature

Hearts of Wales, (1905) by Allen Raine, was almost titled The Sin-Eater instead. This is a historical fiction novel set in the fifteenth century, featuring a sin-eater, Iestyn Mai, who took the role on by choice, rather than being forced into abjection by circumstances or status. Raine’s sin-eater doesn’t even believe in the practice, performing it as a public service to those who do. Iestyn’s penance stems from the realisation he shared in ill-gotten gains from the betrayal of his lord, Owain Glyndwr. The novel, Aaron argues, suggests that ‘the national disgrace of not having been stalwart enough in support of independence movements is at the heat of Wales’. (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 182).

The Forerunner, (1910) by Henry Elwyn Thomas, a Wesleyan minister, represents sin-eating as a relic of Roman Catholicism. This novel is set in the seventeenth century, in the years prior to the English Civil War, and features Nell, granddaughter of Puritan martyr John Penry, who is kidnapped and incarcerated in a convent by her rejected lover, Shôn Jones. Shôn has taken up sin-eating to atone for the sins of his father, none other than the (real life) highwayman, Twm Siôn Cati.

Ifor Owain (1911), also by Henry Elwyn Thomas, is a Welsh-language novel set in the 1640s. Here also sin-eating is depicted as a tradition of Catholicism being slowly eradicated ‘by the light of Protestantism’. His sin-eater in this novel is Arthur Vaughan, who adopted the role to atone for killing the priest who murdered his betrothed (except, of course, he isn’t).

The problem with this interpretation is that if sin-eating was a Roman Catholic survival, it would surely have been known in Ireland, but Aaron’s research has not shown up any such practice in Irish funeral rites. Thomas’s use of it is used to blacken Catholicism in support of Protestantism, but it’s unlikely that this is where the tradition actually stems from.

Ffynon, the Sin-Eater, (1914) by Eleanor Nepean under the pseudonym ‘A Whisper’, critiques the way Welsh Nonconformity ‘supported the sexual double standard, making scapegaots of its women and afflicting them with dread of their own sexuality’. (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p.184). Fynnon/Fynon is a metaphorical sin-eater, however, not a literal one.

Ffynnon Morgan, whose name is spelled with two ‘n’s in the text but one on the title page, is the novel’s heroine. Fynnon is the beautiful daughter of a lay preacher, and the ‘widowed’ mother of a sickly child. A visiting Englishman, Paul Lethbridge, familiar with the stereotype of wanton Welsh women, inquires about her, and is haughtily told that of course she was married or else she would not have a child. Fynnon, however, is not only unmarried, but her father’s intense fury at her pregnancy was the cause of his death. She takes all the blame on herself, and at the novel’s close she is pregnant again by Paul who has since deserted her. Fynnon commits suicide, a victim of the predatory nature of the English tourist, but also of the sexual morality of Welsh Nonconformity which scapegoats and destroys her. She becomes a sin-eater not through physically eating the sins of others over the corpse, but embodies the trope regardless.

The burden of shame is even more pronounced in ‘The sin-eater: a Welsh legend’ (1920), a long narrative poem by Septimus G. Green, where a wrecker called ‘Black Evan’, also known as ‘the human spider’, calls for bread and salt to be placed on his chest as he lies dying. Morgan the sin-eater comes to take on Evan’s sins in exchange for gold, here described as an avaricious marsh-dweller, ‘gaunt, ghastly, lean, miserable and poor’ and ‘the devil’s priest’. Morgan duly takes Evan’s sins for his pay, despite knowing his own brother was one of Evan’s victims. The next morning, Evan’s widow finds Morgan dead on the threshold of their house, ‘scorched as if with heaven’s bolt / His greedy hands still clutching at the gold’, which she retrieves for her own use.

‘The sins of the fathers’, (1939) by Christanna Brand (Mary Christianna Milne Lewis, 1905-97), also reflects the theme of the whole community being abject, not only the sin-eater. Brand was the Malayan-born wife of a Welsh surgeon, and her short story was republished in the Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories in 1964, and filmed in the 1970s as part of the popular US TV Night Gallery series. This did much to bring sin-eating into the popular imagination of the United States. A full review of the TV episode can be found on David Juhl’s wordpress site.

In this tale, the wife of a sin-eater tricks both the desperate mourners of a Welsh village out of their sin-eating, and tricks her own son into inheriting his father’s profession. Who eats the sins of the sin-eater? In this case, it is the starving boy who would rather die than perform the ritual – and as he returns home with the bread and salt secreted about his person, having cheated the community of the rite, his mother takes it from him and lays it upon his own father, who has died while Ianto was out on his behalf. Ianto is trapped into the position (and the only means by which the family can earn a living) by a sense of family duty, but is also saved from death by starvation by his strong-minded mother, with whom the reader is meant to sympathise.

Aaron notes that following World War II the sin-eater was a less common trope in literature in general, resurfacing in the 1960s in the voluntary public-service guise.

The Walk Home (1962) by Glyn Jones is set in nineteenth-century Wales, and his sin-eater, Jethro Coleman, has taken on the role voluntarily as ‘a necessary cleansing and healing act in the service of others’ (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 187). Typical of Jones’s work, which often features a young, unreliable narrator who comes to idolise an older boy or father-figure, the novel’s young narrator, David Rowlands, comes to idolise the man in black, and assists him in his rituals. David witnesses the ghoulish nature of the communities, noticing ‘a lip-licking quality to the mourners: the Sin-Eater was a relish on their Sunday meat, a Sunday extra’. They throw stones at them as they leave after the ritual, and when David returns to Borth later in the tale, he is singled out as ‘the Sin-Eater’s boy’, beaten up and urinated upon.

The community show themselves to be more abject and vicious than the sin-eater, whose self-respect and dignity is a stark contrast to those he serves.

The Sin-Eater, (1971) by Gerry Jones, takes place during the First World War. In a similar way to Fynon, no sin-eating actually takes place, but the main character David James returns to his bleak, impoverished home to discover his pregnant and unmarried sister has committed suicide. He feels as if all the family’s guilt is being laid on his shoulders, and he in turn blames the coldness of their mother, supported by the hellfire-and-damnation preaching of the minister every Sunday. By the end of the novel, their mother is mad, their father is dead (also possibly suicide) and their brother Iorwerth, who had taunted their late sister with her ‘crime’, is discovered to be illegitimate and not their father’s son. The high standards of chapel culture are presented as perversely encouraging falls from grace, but simultaneously then creating too great a burden of guilt and shame for the fallen party to sustain life or reason after falling.

“What in God’s name is it about Wales? What terrible primeval power seems to lurk in this place?” David laments, almost glad to flee to the far less complex horrors of the Trenches (Jones, The Sin-Eater, p. 48).

The Sin-Eater, (1977) by Alice Thomas Ellis also reflects this in her contemporary 1970s-set novel, in a place where the cold chapel culture has lost its grip. Here, though, Welsh families can still be doomed by ‘the slow decline of the patriarchals and what they had stood for’ (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 189). The novel follows the family of Captain Ellis, an irascible, angry man who is not mourned by his children, although his daughter-in-law believes (sardonically) that Captain Ellis had an agreement with his housekeeper Phyllis to consume bread and salt off his dead chest in line wit the old primitive custom.

After the Captain’s death, Phyllis does get angrier and angrier, and when she learns that Michael, one of the Captain’s married sons, has seduced her grandson Gomer, she tampers with the brakes on Michael’s car. Unfortunately, it’s not Michael who drives off in the sabotaged vehicle, and by allowing her anger to consume her, Phyllis brings about the deaths of more than her intended victim and decimates the family.

In this novel, it’s not only the patriarch of the family who is destroyed but also the younger generation, the family’s hope for the future. The burden of guilt for this sin is on Phyllis, the sin-eater, who had also performed the ritual for her late husband. The sin-eater trope here is used to show how each generation inherits the sins of the previous generation, and how this serves to ruin each generation in turn.

Aaron concludes the chapter by looking at the postcolonial literary uses of the trope outside of Wales (primarily in American literature) and how these themes transpose into the abjection of colonial subjects, such as the enforced use of Native Americans as sin-eaters to the White settlers in Sherman Alexie’s The Toughest Indian in the World (2000).

The Sin-Eater Figure is one that over-arches a lot of the main themes Aaron picked out through the course of the book, such as Gothicising Dissent, Welsh subjugation and complicity in abjection, etc., and can be used to personify these themes. It makes this a good post to round off the series!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the Welsh Gothic series of posts… and that you’ve been inspired to check out Aaron’s book for yourself and read all the stuff I’ve not mentioned. I’ll be taking a break over the holidays but will be scheduling more posts on other Gothic themes in the New Year!

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[In the meantime, check out my book The Crows, buy links on my homepage… and check out the previous posts if you missed any! Au revoir xx]

Welsh Gothic Tropes IV: The Cŵn Annwn

Introduction

The Cŵn Annwn, or hounds of Annwn, also (arguably inaccurately) known as Hellhounds, are another key aspect of Welsh Gothic fiction. I haven’t played with these yet in the Paghamverse, but my Fae concept is based on Welsh folklore, so I think it’s only a matter of time. Hell hounds/Fairy hounds are one of the myths around werewolf origins in-verse, though.

This post will link to actual folkore surrounding these creatures, and then look at the fiction discussed by Aaron in Welsh Gothic Chapter 5.

Cŵn Annwn in Welsh Folklore

Firstly, although sometimes known as the hounds of Hell, they are also classed as fairies or fairy hounds. Annwn, the name for the Welsh underworld, was ruled by Arawn, who was at some point usurped as King of the Hunt by another mythological figure, Gwyn ap Nudd.

In the First Branch of the Mabinogion, Pwyll, prince of Dyfed, meets Arawn, king of Annwfn or Annwn, on a hunt. The hounds that bring down Pwyll’s own target, a stag, are white with red ears, not the black dogs with red eyes that mark out hounds of hell in other folklore. These are fairy hounds, and Pwyll wins Arawn’s friendship by defeating his mortal enemy, Hafgan, in combat on Arawn’s behalf.

According to the Folk-lore and Folk-stories of Wales, in-keeping with the Mabinogion‘s description, in some parts of Wales the hounds are described as being white as snow with ears that are rose-coloured inside, and eyes bright as moonbeams. In other parts, they were small and “liver-coloured”, spotted or spangled with red and white, or entirely “flame-coloured”.

A more sinister kind was “black and very ugly with huge red spots”, or “red in body with large black patches, like splashes of ink”. The worst one was blood-red in colour and dripping with gore, with eyes like “balls of liquid fire”. However, the folklore took on a separate life to the original mythological tales, which were only written down in the Middle Ages and Christianised in the process.

The Hunt, as we have seen in the vampire lore post, had some interesting quirks, not least the fact that men doomed to ride with them came back to earth to suck the blood of corpses as well as the living. If anyone tries to join the procession out of curiosity, accident or design, “blood falls in showers like rain, human bodies are torn to pieces, and death soon follows the victim of the nocturnal expedition.” (Folk-lore and Folk-stories of Wales, p. 48)

The hounds themselves were associated with death and the supernatural, being both white and red, but also as avengers of wrongs – Arawn was said to hunt down wrongdoers, not the innocent. Their appearance can be another omen of death, and while they sometimes travel in a pack alone, they are more usually seen with their master, or mistress, as Mallt-y-Nos is also said to hunt with these hounds.

They show up in Gothic literature of the earlier period, mainly as avengers.

The Gothic Texts

Aaron takes up most of this section with examples from the 1780s-1850s, with only a few examples from the 1900s-1970s, with one paragraph at the end dedicated to modern incarnations in World of Warcraft and Dungeons and Dragons.

The examples she uses begin with The Doom of Colyn Dolphyn (1837), by Taliesin Williams (1787-1847). Taliesin was the son of Iolo Morgannwg, and was born in debtors’ prison. The long narrative poem centres on the life and death of Colyn Dolphyn, a fifteenth-century pirate who kidnaps Sir Henry Stradling at sea, demands a ransom, is shipwrecked, and finally captured. The final canto relates his execution, where, on the scaffold, Colyn makes one last plea to ‘the Sire of Sin’ who ruled his life and fierce thunder rolls. He snaps the bonds on his wrists and tries to undo the noose around his neck as the cart rolls away from under him, but a quick-thinking guard chops his hand off and he is hanged.

Enter the hellish hounds accompanied by Mallt-y-Nos, on the hunt for Colyn’s soul, howling audibly and harrying him ‘To regions hopeless, – where alone | Essential Anguish holds her throne.’

‘Cwn Annwn’, a short story that appears in James Motley’s Tales of the Cymry (1848), is another Gothic Hist Fic set in the Middle Ages. This is the tale mentioned in the Cambria Gothica post with an anachronistic Druid, Idris, and is set at a time of Welsh rebellion against the Normans. It opens with a Welsh maidservant running from a pack of hounds set on her by a Norman lord, and ends with said Norman lord being chased by the supernatural Hounds to his death. These hounds are of the blood-red, dripping with gore variety, and chase their victims into Christian hell.

We have to jump all the way to the mid-twentieth century to find Aaron’s next example, a short story in Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes’s anthology, Welsh Tales of Terror (1973). Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes (1919-2001), an English author born in Middlesex, is best known for his ghost stories, and he edited collections of Scottish, Irish and Welsh tales of terror.

In his tale, ‘Lord Dunwilliam and the Cwn Annwn’, another historical tale but this time set in the early nineteenth century, Dunwilliam falls in love with the painfully beautiful Silah Evans, but finds he has a ghostly rival in the form of Annwn, the Otherworldly huntsman. Silah has chosen Arawn over Dunwilliam, who is savagely mauled and killed by the hounds when he tries to take Silah back by force. At the sight of Arawn’s ‘dark, awful, evil, beautiful’ face, he surrenders to ‘a wave of fawning, self-effacing love’, and rises, reanimated as a blood-soaked hound, to join the pack.

That, apart from the references to D&D/WoW, is it for Aaron. I think there is probably more to uncover here, particularly in werewolf fiction and modern folklore-inspired dark fantasy, another guise of the Gothic.

One such modern example is American fantasy, To Carry the Horn, by author Karen Myers. Is it a Gothic fantasy? Well, you can be the judge of that, but the series looks pretty good!

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Murder. Obsession. Quite good pubs. Welcome to Pagham-on-Sea.

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Welsh Gothic Tropes III: The Druid

Introduction

CW// incest and infant death discussed in one short story.

The Druid has had a negative press, or, to quote Aaron, ‘enjoyed a demonic reputation’, since Julius Caesar’s account in De Bello Gallico (c.58-49 BC). Caesar claimed that Druids officiated at human sacrifices and mentions the infamous ‘wicker man’, powerfully re-imagined by Folk Horror cinema in 1973’s cult classic, The Wicker Man (the novel followed hot on the heels of its success in 1978, co-written by the film’s director and scriptwriter, Robin Hardy and Andrew Shaffer, but the 1973 film itself was inspired loosely by the 1967 novel Ritual, set in Cornwall, by actor and novelist David Pinner). 

As a figure in Welsh Gothic fiction, Druids are anachronistic in most of the historical novels in which they appear, particularly Medieval settings, but not to worry. Druids and Druidic practices were revived for new generations, and there are modern practitioners of Druidism.

Ronald Hutton’s book, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids of Britain (2011) is a good, accessible study of how Druids and Druidism have been re-imagined, reinvented and reinterpreted across the centuries, with so little evidence left after the Romans crushed them in the 1stC AD. Hutton explores the evolution of Welsh, Scottish and English attitudes to Druids, focusing particularly on the Romantic period when they dominated visions of Britain’s “Celtic” past.

I don’t actually have any Druids in Pagham-on-Sea [yet], and none are mentioned in The Crows. I do hint at the pre-Christian past of the town, though: Barrow Field has some 5000-year-old burial chambers (long barrows) where, it’s hinted, entities from another dimension may have first been in touch with this world.

Druids in Welsh Gothic Fiction

The Hermit of Snowden (1789), by Eliza Ryves (1750-97), an Irish poet and novelist, features two antiquarians travelling to Wales to look at ‘monuments of Druidical superstition’ and see if ‘the peasants’ of Wales retained Druidic customs and superstitions. Since by 1789 most Welsh villages were swiftly turning Calvinistic Methodist/Presbyterian, this would, in reality, have been supremely unlikely.

One contemporary review of this epistolary novel praised Ryves and her tale:

The Hermit of Snowden; or, Memoirs of Albert and Lavinia, taken from a faithful Copy of the original Manuscript, which was found in the Hermitage, by the late Rev. Dr. L. and Mr.——, in the Year 17**. 8vo. 3s. Walter.

Without pretending to examine the authenticity of the manuscript, or to develope the inconsistencies of a tale so trite as the discovery of a hermitage and the papers containing the story, we can safely say that the tale is written by no common author; is pleasing, and may be useful. It teaches the salutary lesson of guarding against mean suspicion and unreasonable jealousy; the danger of protracting the happiness within reach, lest the unaffected love of a delicate female should be the ill-disguised dictates of interest or ambition. Read it, ye sons of fashion or of fortune, and change your conduct: be happy, if your hearts, depraved by vanity and dissipation, Will permit!

~ Unknown. “1789: The Critical Review on Ryves’s The Hermit of Snowden; or, Memoirs of Albert and Lavinia.” Women Writers in Review, Northeastern University Women Writers Project, 2016-11-16.

This was not the first novel to have a positive, if rustic, spin on the figure of the Druid.

Imogen: A Pastoral Romance, (1784) by William Godwin (1756-1836), the anarchist and atheist philosopher, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley, is set in prehistoric Clwyd. Godwin takes the idea of human sacrifice as certain, but ennobles it in a Classical way – the heroic victim deems his sacrifice necessary for relieving the drought, and is willing to die for the sake of his countrymen.

The pagan community depicted in Imogen lives by the [obviously anachronistic] motto of the French Revolution, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité; liberty, equality, fraternity.

This concept had no basis in historical fact, but came out of Godwin’s own political ideas. He met and spoke with Iolo Morgannwg, the bardic name of Edward Williams (1747-1826), who was part of a radical cultural movement to reinstate what he believed were key elements of Welsh cultural heritage.

Iolo Morgannwg established the Gorsedd of the Bards and the Eisteddfod, a re-imagining of a poetry competition that can be traced back to 1176, and saw Druids as priests of an enlightened religion, not overseers of sacrifice. While the Gorsedd is a product of his imagination, it is nevertheless still a major part of the spectacle of the Eisteddfod today, and its members, although still called Druids, are secularised rather than part of a religious group.

Iolo Morgannwg’s rehabilitation of the Druid figure and Godwin’s reimagining of him as a kind of noble priest-saint (albeit a pagan one) of Antiquity had a long-lasting effect on Welsh Gothic fiction.

Cona, or The Vale of Clwyd (1814) by James Grey (1770-1830) is another example that bears all the hallmarks of Iolo and Godwin’s influence. A Spenserian poem that can be read online in its entirety (hyperlink in its title), it has more Scottish influences despite being set in Wales.

In this poem, set during the Roman Invasion, the Druid Mervyn is a saintly, omniscient figurehead for his people, who does not perform human (or animal) sacrifice but imparts cosmic knowledge and lore directly from the heavens to his disciples.

While Iolo Morgannwg inspired many, there is evidence to suggest that Dr William Price (1800-93) also had a direct influence on Welsh authors imagining Druids and druidic practices. [I’ve had the pleasure of teaching one of Dr Price’s direct descendants, a fact which came up in one of their assignments on ‘Celtic’ identity in the modern world.]

[image error]William Price aged 22 while at medical school (1822) By Alexander Stewart – https://www.artuk.org/discover/artworks/dr-william-price-18001893-162274/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35311106

Something of a prodigy apprenticed to a surgeon aged thirteen, Dr Price aced his medical exams in his early twenties and became known for his radical ideas in the fields of medicine, politics (he was a Republican and a Chartist) and in his personal beliefs. He prescribed vegetarian diets for his patients instead of medicine (and was a vegetarian himself), drank mainly champagne, and eschewed the wearing of socks. He walked the streets of Pontypridd in full druidic regalia, believed in free love and considered marriage a form of enslavement for women. He fathered several illegitimate children with various lovers, and is now most famous as a pioneer for the practice of cremation.

He timed the (public) cremation of his five-month-old son Iesu Grist (Jesus Christ) by his sixteen-year-old housekeeper and mistress, Gwenllian Llewellyn (16 is the age of consent, although Dr Price was 83 at the time), to coincide with the emptying of the chapels on Sunday night. He was acquitted of desecrating a corpse in a sensational trial in Cardiff, successfully arguing that while cremation was not legal in British law, there was no statute which declared it illegal. This set a precedent that almost directly paved the way for the Cardiff Corporation Act, 1894, and the Cremation Act of 1902. When he died, he was himself publicly cremated on a pyre, which gave rise to many ballads and tales in the area.

Unsurprisingly, he is credited with inspiring the ‘Mad Doctor’ figure in a few Gothic tales.

Bertha Thomas (1845-1918) included one such tale in her anthology, Picture Tales from Welsh Hills (1912), called ‘The madness of Winifred Owen’. The tale is a framed narrative, like many of its type. An English tourist meets Winifred Owen, their hostess, and is immediately impressed by her strength of character. Winifred Owen tells them a tale from her youth, where she once chose medically-induced temporary madness to avoid marrying a man she didn’t love, leaving the tourist with an even greater impression of her strength and willpower. Winifred Owen relates how she sought help from an eccentric neighbour, Dr Dathan, a vivisecting scientist reputed to practice black magic, who experimented on her with all the chilling amorality of Arthur Machen’s doctor in The Great God Pan. 

Dr Price is also almost certainly part of the inspiration behind Dylan Thomas’s short story, ‘The Burning Baby’ (1935). This is an intensely disturbing story of incest and assault: the link leads to a short WordPress blog summary. Rhys Rhys, the main character, cremates his daughter’s stillborn child in a stone circle on a hilltop, where a flame catches the tongue of the burning baby and elicits a cry that is echoed by the hillside.

The era of the benign Druid figure was properly over with the publication of Robert Bloch’s ‘The dark isle‘ in American pulp fiction magazine, Weird Tales, in May 1939. ‘The dark isle’ is another re-imagining of the Roman invasion, but this time from the ‘civilising’ Romans’ point of view. Caesar’s portrayal of the Druids in De Bello Gallico is revealed to be a cover-up or whitewash of what they are actually capable of: not only do they burn six wicker men stuffed with screaming Roman legionaries, but they can also turn into blue-taloned monsters after death. They guard a mysterious, poisonous dragon tongue in the heart of an Anglesey cavern, and it’s only by stabbing this tongue with his sword that the Roman protagonist, Vincius, can kill the Druids and the (tongueless, presumably) dragon when it shows up, since it’s not immune to its own toxin for some [plot-necessary] reason.  The Druids are very much in the vein of Lovecraftian priests, and Lovecraft himself acknowledged the influence of our old friend Arthur Machen.

Aaron points out that it’s tempting to look at Bloch’s image of the stabbed dragon’s tongue as a metaphor for the killing of the Welsh language, but this connection is probably not in Bloch’s mind. He anachronistically/erroneously differentiates between the ‘Welsh’ and the ‘Britons’ (the same people group at this time, as ‘Welsh’ is a Saxon word for the Brythonic-speakers who called themselves Britons/British), and has both of them living in fear of the Druids.

In Bloch’s story, the Druids’ mystery returns to life again in a different form, as a ‘great cowled shape’ with ‘no nose or chin: simply a hideous smile and grotesquely sightless eyes’ (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 161).

Demon (1983) by Ivor Watkins is set in contemporary Meirionethshire ‘troubled by [image error]fighter planes practising overhead and an old avenger stirring underground’ (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, p. 161).

Evoking the Drowned Valley trope that began to appear in poetry and prose after the drowning of Capel Celyn, and attacking the chapel culture of the day in the figure of the (female) Nonconformist minister, Elliyn Price-Jones, this novel has as its Horror Monster antagonist a demon undisturbed ‘since Roman Legions marched the breadth of Britannica; undisturbed since Druids carried out their final orgiastic ritual; untouched since the last human sacrifice’ (Demon, p. 206).

The premise owes a great deal to Bloch’s story, ‘The dark isle’, and to the contemporary images of ‘orgiastic’ pagan rituals of human sacrifice as seen in Folk Horror cinema of the 1960s and 70s, embedded in the popular imagination. Here, the shadow of Wales’s ‘nightmare past’ is what lurks to drag the modern civilisation down, and destroy it.

Candlenight (1991) by Phil Rickman is the last text to be discussed in this section. It typifies the themes of in-comers drowning Welsh culture and language, and falls firmly into the same group of texts that Aaron discusses in her chapter on Wales as the Land of the Living Dead (1940s-1997). It reflects the tensions besetting 1980s Wales, with English people buying up houses and land and out-pricing the locals, and the plight of the Welsh language.

Yet the vengeful druidic spirits in the ancient oak trees of Y Groes, the village where English inhabitants die mysterious deaths, are not sympathetically depicted but are the evil antagonists of the tale, in the same way Ivor Watkins paints his titular ‘demon’ as his Horror Monster.

In Rickman’s novel, Y Groes is a zombie town like other examples we’ve looked at, the only place in Wales where everyone is Welsh and Welsh-speaking. Bethan McQueen, a Welsh-language activist, is grieving the loss of her English husband, and unravels the secrets of the village with the help of an American visitor, Berry Morelli. While the tensions of Wales are sympathised with, it is only in rejecting and destroying the trees/Druids that the villagers can be freed of their evil, and moving forwards, at least for Rickman, involves embracing the changes that incomers bring and shedding the shackles of the past and all they represent.

Next time: The Hounds of Annwn!

Folklore and fiction about the hounds of the Welsh Underworld await in the next instalment!

 

 

 

 

Welsh Gothic Tropes II: The Witch

Introduction

In Chapter 5 of Welsh Gothic, Jane Aaron picks four main figures who recur throughout Welsh Gothic fiction: the Witch, the Druid, the Cŵn Annwn, and the Sin-Eater.

This post looks at the figure of the Welsh witch, an ambiguous figure, usually female in fiction but not necessarily in life, part goddess, part demon, but usually representing anarchy and the subversion of social norms.

In my novel, The Crows, one such witch is mentioned as part of the back story to a family curse – Miss Eglantine Pritchard (1901-1999), who moved to Pagham-on-Sea from Wales after the First World War to look after her convalescing brother, Sgt. William Pritchard of the Royal Welsh Regiment. Miss Pritchard lived with her ‘companion’/life partner from their girls’ school, Miss Gwendoline Mostyn-Jenkins (1900-1988), and was the only one in town strong enough and knowledgeable enough to challenge the twisted dark forces channelled by Beverley Wend and her sisters.

I want to [eventually] write some short stories set during the Second World War about Miss Pritchard’s colourful life! Currently playing with a novel idea set in 1943, working title The Wishing Well. Follow #WishingWell on Twitter for updates.

The Crows is released 4 January 2020. Read a free sample on Smashwords, and pre-order at 60% off from Smashwords, Kerri Davidson, Amazon, and all Books2Read outlets. The eBook has three (3) illustrations by artist and graphic novelist Thomas Brown: the paperback version, also released 4 January 2020, has five (5).

Witchcraft in Wales: Historical Context

For an accessible academic study of the history of witchcraft in the British Isles, see Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present, (Yale University Press, 2017). Another recent release on the subject, again in more general terms and with a narrower Modern focus, that is, from the eighteenth century to the present day, is Thomas Waters, Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times, (Yale University Press, 2019).

In Wales, the witch was an ambiguous figure. While she could be a wise woman and/or an avenger of injustice, she could also be evil, cruel, a hate-figure and a scapegoat. The National Museum of Wales has a miniature wax figure in its collections, of the type used to work death by witchcraft. Charms against witchcraft were popularly used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and (male) conjurers, or Dynion Hysbys, were used to discover the identity of a tormenting witch. The dynion hysbys could not only counter witchcraft, but could also heal, be consulted on astrology and tell fortunes, and recover lost property. While these talents might be deemed ‘witchcraft’ elsewhere, they evidently were not in Wales.

Witchcraft was outlawed by the 1563 witchcraft statute, but, despite there being no shortage of candidates for witch trials in Wales (practically every village had its village ‘witch’), in 1588 Cardiff bailiffs received a reprimand for not bringing witches before the bar. This reprimand had limited effect: from 1550-1720 only 42 people were indicted for witchcraft in Wales, and the penalty could just be a fine and a stint in prison.

This figure is a stark contrast to the death toll in England and Lowland Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when around 2,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Britain (hanged in England, burned in Lowland Scotland).

Here, Aaron’s research (2000s-10s, published in 2013) is now outdated. Aaron notes that only three ‘witches’ were killed in Wales, none in the Scottish Highlands, and only four in the whole of Ireland. (Aaron, Welsh Gothic, pp. 139-40). This information is based on Eirlys Gruffydd’s 1988 study, Gwrachod Cymru Ddoe a Heddiw, (Welsh Witches Yesterday and Today/Then and Now) now out of date.

Ronald Hutton’s 2011 article on ‘Witch-hunting in Celtic Societies‘ in the journal Past & Present notes that while Highland trials were few, they did happen, an article which presumably Aaron missed while writing this chapter. Hutton also notes that Wales at this time persecuted thieves rather than witches, indicating that the communities were not harmonious and homogeneous, but that their fault-lines and fears lay elsewhere.

Richard Suggett’s book, Welsh Witches: Narratives of Witchcraft and Magic from 16th and 17th Century Wales (2018), is an updated study on the 20 cases that survive in their fullest form from the Court of Great Sessions in Wales. Most were acquitted, others were imprisoned or fined, and only five were executed (death by hanging, as in England). Suggett is also the author of A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales (2005).

[N. B. As these are academic and not popular press texts, they aren’t cheap!]

Aaron argues this suggests a different attitude in the ‘Celtic’ fringe than elsewhere which cannot be simply attributed to religious difference, as Wales was staunchly Protestant while the Irish peasantry, who also didn’t accuse a large number of women as witches, were largely Roman Catholic. In Wales, this different attitude among the peasantry is also highlighted by the role the (anglicised) Welsh gentry played in the witch trials.

Here are some of their stories, in brief:

In 1594, a healer, Gwen ferch Ellis from Bettws, was persuaded by her friend, Jane Conway, to curse Jane’s sworn enemy, Sir Thomas Mostyn. Gwen was accused by the Bishop of St Asaphs, William Hughes, and following his accusation seven others came forward with other claims, including hastening the death of a sick man by witchcraft, sealing her fate. She was hanged in Denbigh that year.

In 1622, Sir John Bodfael wrote to his father-in-law, Sir John Wynn of Gwydir, complaining that his tenants were plagued by witchcraft. It was as a result of this complaint that three siblings, a brother and two sisters, were arrested and found guilty. They were also hanged.

The pattern in Wales seems to be that the (anglicised) gentry were responsible for these executions, while, unless pressed by their social superiors, the peasantry themselves did not generally accuse people of witchcraft or testify against those indicted. It was social transgression that could get you killed – crossing class boundaries and getting mixed up with the local gentry. These themes pervade Welsh Gothic with or without the figure of the Witch, who retained the Medieval definition of ‘healer’ here, albeit one who could also do harm as well as good.

The Welsh Witch in Fiction

Aaron discusses primordial mother goddess concepts and critiques Robert Graves’ theories in The White Goddess (1948), pointing out their influence on fiction and ideas of the witch. She also points out the word ‘gwiddon‘, translated as ‘witch’, comes from the same root as ‘gwydd-‘, as in gwyddoniaeth, meaning ‘science’. This word contains the concept of knowing, and in Welsh Gothic, the witch is usually a figure who knows many things, and imparts this knowledge.

The Witcheries of Craig Isaf (1805), by William Frederick Williams is a Gothic history set in the Welsh Marches during the reign of William Rufus. The novel divides twin sisters by aligning the oldest with their strict, hierarchy-obsessed aunt, and the youngest, the dispossessed Alice, with an anarchic sorceress of Craig Isaf. Alice ‘summons’ through witchcraft, and then is revealed to be, her own knight in shining armour, in her vow to avenge herself against her father. Her ultimate defeat and suicide gives victory (inevitably) to the Normans, although the narrator’s sympathies lie with this rebellious twin.

‘The Youth of Edward Ellis’, in Tales of Welsh Society and Scenery (1827), by Thomas Richards of Dolgellau but published anonymously, features the witch of Cae Coryn and her dealings with those who come and visit her for blessings and curses. Edward Ellis stays in her hovel and witnesses people coming to her for these things, and while the villagers publicly denounce her as ‘Beelzebub’s imp’, in private they treat her like a goddess, bringing her gifts and respecting her advice.

Gwen Tomos (1894) by Daniel Owen (1836-95) has an avenger witch of the gwiddon type, a knowledgeable woman called Nansi’r Nant, as much an avenger in the matriarchal/anti-patriarchal tradition as she is a skilled herbalist and wise woman. She is an ambiguous and anarchic figure, much like the sorceress in The Witcheries of Craig Isaf.

Garthowen (1900) by Allen Raine is another example of a teacher-witch. Her character, Sarah Spiridion, is well thought of even by the local Nonconformist minister, to whom she expounds and explains things he struggles with, grasping at their meaning immediately with ‘wonderful spiritual insights’.

Father/daughter struggles, like those in The Witcheries of Craig Isaf, also appear in Dylan Thomas’s short story, ‘The school for witches‘, first published in 1936. This story has social transgression as a key theme, with the doctor’s daughter seducing a travelling tinker and drawing him into a wild dance of life that revitilises the decaying community ravaged by disease. The doctor eventually finds life within the dance too, despite his initial resistance to his daughter’s choices and her coven.

Y Wisg Sadan (The Silk Dress, 1939), by Elena Puw Morgan is a historical fiction novel set in the 19thC about a woman, Sara, who returns from London to her village and is immediately suspected of having sold her soul to the Devil while she was in that city. Her sewing is highly respected, and the villagers want to believe her herbal brews are also magical in nature due to her unholy alliance. In fact, she is just skilled and knowledgeable, a gwiddon,and this is her real talent.

Y Dylluan Wen (The White Owl, 1995) by Angharad Jones, is a contemporary novel with Gothic overtones featuring an avenger-witch and lots of PVC. It references the tale of Blodeuwedd, the fourth branch of the Mabinogi and features Eirlys Hughes, who returns to her natal village to exact revenge upon her sadistic school teacher. It was adapted into a Welsh-language film, Tylluan Wen, (White Owl) in 1997.

Gwrach y Gwyllt (Witch of the Wild, 2003), by Bethan Gwanas, is another story with an avenging witch, and features a reincarnated 17thC witch who returns to wreak havoc upon the descendants of those who persecuted her and her sisters.

This is not an exhaustive list, but these are the novels that Jane Aaron picks to illustrate how construction of the Witch can vary across time and within the genre.

Next time: Welsh Gothic Tropes III: The Druid

A look at the Druid in Welsh Gothic fiction! Again, some historical context on the Druid, some books to read if interested, and a discussion of the Druid as he appears in Welsh Gothic fiction from 1780s to 1997!

Advance CW// for some of the texts, in particular Dylan Thomas’s short story The Burning Baby, which features disturbing [incest/infant death] content.

 

 

Welsh Gothic Tropes I: Death Omens

Introduction

One element that recurs throughout Welsh Gothic fiction is … the death omen. Whether it’s a raven being shot and showering the bride-to-be in blood as it plummets down a well (‘The Prediction‘, 1827), or a cow biting off its own teats on a failing farm (Martha, Jac a Sianco, 2004, I kid you not), if someone’s going to die, you’ll know about it.

I’ve played with death omens, especially birds behaving badly, in The Crows – due to be released 4 January 2020. If you like Gothic creepiness, New Weird overtones and paranormal towns where your fate is set in stone, check it out! Now available for pre-order from Kerri Davidson’s Shop, Smashwords (20% available free), Amazon and all Books2Read outlets.

Yet the death omen isn’t given a specific chapter in Aaron’s book. In the second part of Welsh Gothic, Jane Aaron instead looks at select figures that reappear throughout the genre. She only mentions four of them: the Witch, the Druid, the Hounds of Annwn, and the Sin-Eater. She skirts over other elements, like the death omens of Wales, which include corpse-candles and phantom funerals, but these are not dealt with in this section of her book except where they are tied to the four figures under primary discussion. I can fully appreciate why: the book is ambitious enough in its scope without covering absolutely everything, and there’s another monograph and a PhD’s worth of stuff (at least) left to discuss.

To fill this gap very briefly and contextualise the paragraph where she does list some of these elements, I’m starting this next series of posts by looking at death omen folklore, then I’ll get into what Aaron says about the Big Four, and the chapters she dedicates to these.

In this post, I’ll look at Corpse-Candles & Phantom Funerals, and the Deryn Corff or corpse-bird, who calls and flaps or knocks on the windows of those about to die.

Canwyll Corff / Corpse-Candles

The origin for corpse-candles is said to be from the fifth century, as a result of the prayers of St David. St David wanted no Welshman to be unprepared for the day of their death, so that they could prepare their souls. In a vision he was told that the people of Wales would never be unprepared again, and his intercession would result in the Welsh seeing lighted tapers before them when and where death was expected.

Such superstitions were kept alive in Wales despite the strong grip of Nonconformist Christianity, because, as Revd. Edmund Jones said in his 1813 volume, A Relation of Apparitions of Spirits in the County of Monmouth and the Principality of Wales, if men were deny the existence of spirits, they would then deny the existence of God, who is spirit.

Colliers claimed to see these dim, mysterious lights before disasters; at Llanbradach, before one such disaster, men claimed to have seen corpse candles ‘without number’ hovering around the mouth of the pit. They showed up on the open roads too, warning of accidents and dangers yet to come. They also appeared inside homes, as this story indicates:

In the year 1880 [the storyteller’s] brother, a native of Carmarthenshire and captain of a vessel, was away at sea. When at home, he occupied a small room only suitable for one person. One evening, about six o’clock, a dim light was seen in that room by a cousin from a neighbouring farm. The young man asked : “Is Jack come home?” “No,” was the reply. “Then who is in the room ?” he asked, and the answer was that “nobody had been there with a candle.” The circumstance passed unnoticed, until another member of the family, and an inmate of the house, saw a dim glimmer, “like a rushlight or taper,” through the window. Later still the mother one night, going into the room to pull down the blind, turned to go to the door, and over the bed saw a dim hovering light. She went downstairs in considerable agitation, and exclaimed to the members of her family the hope that nothing had befallen Jack. The mail was eagerly waited for, and in the meantime neighbours saw the dim light in Jack’s room. A few weeks later news reached the family that the captain died at Singapore of fever about the time the corpse-candle appeared in his room.

~ Correspondence from “Mr Price” of the USA, featured in p. 180 of Folk-lore and Folk-stories of Wales

One example from Ysbyty Ystwyth, recounted by Mary Thomas (1905-1983), tells of her grandfather’s experiences with corpse candle sightings. The translated transcript of the recording is available via the link. Mary Thomas recounts her grandfather’s experiences of seeing corpse-candles, sometimes that no one else could see, predicting the deaths of his neighbours but also members of his own family.

[INTERVIEWER:] Had your grandfather had any other experiences himself?

[MARY THOMAS:] He’d had many experiences of the corpse candle. My grandmother died when my mother was eight years old, my Uncle David six and Aunty Charlotte a baby, a young girl, twenty-eight years old. She died of the dicâd [tuberculosis], as they called it in those days, [and] there was no cure. And the night before she died he was by her bedside, and he saw a little lighted candle on the bed, and he saw it going out of the house. And then his wife died. And he saw his wife’s corpse candle going out of the house. And she saw it too. She said: ‘Do you see that light going out through the door, Tomos?’ Both she and he saw the light, and she died the next day.

Toili / Phantom Funerals

Phantom funerals were often witnessed on the roads, and in these tales they are also always discerned by the animals of those who see them. Horses in particular are sensitive to the supernatural, and in most accounts they stop first to allow the procession to pass, before their rider or driver sees what they see.

Here is one classic example of the tales, but they could also be funerals warning of the deaths of others, not just of the one who witnessed the scene.

A farmer living in the Vale of Glamorgan had the weird experience of “seeing his own funeral.” He had been to Cowbridge Market, and was returning home just before nightfall, when he saw a procession coming down the lane leading from his own house to the highway. His horse appeared to be witnessing the same scene, for the animal halted at the entrance of the lane to allow the crowd to pass. The farmer gazed spellbound as the mourners approached, because immediately after the coffin came his own wife dressed in the deep mourning of a widow! She was supported by her eldest son. The crowd passed and vanished, and the horse, scared by the scene, rushed up the lane and abruptly halted at the garden gate. Hearing the clatter of the horse’s hoofs, and fearing the animal was riderless, the farmer’s wife and son hastened out, and were thankful to find the husband safe and unhurt. That night the farmer was unusually moody and silent. He could not help thinking of the strange scene he had witnessed. A few weeks later he was seized with a serious illness, from which his family hoped he would soon recover. “I shall never get up again,” he said, and then he related his recent experience. One of the sons who told me this story said everybody present was unspeakably thrilled. Three days later the farmer died.

~Folk-lore and Folk-stories of Wales, p. 185

 

Deryn Corff / Corpse Bird

The Corpse-bird is described as sounding ‘metallic’ in some versions, or at least melancholy and easily distinguishable from a cuckoo. In some parts of Wales it is said to call in Welsh, “Come! Come!” and has no feathers, but rather fur. Some say it has no wings, or has fin-like flappers like a penguin that help it hop from bough to bough.

A Breconshire family always heard this mysterious bird before a death in the family. It had a doleful chirrup, and was quite unlike any other bird. In size and shape it resembled a robin, but its feathers were of a dull ashen grey, and bedraggled, while its eyes were “like balls of fire,” and remarkably restless. It always appeared “in an old apple-tree” quite close to the house, and sometimes remained for weeks almost motionless. When death took place it disappeared.

~ Folk-lore and Folk-stories of Wales, p. 184.

In 1911, it was the most common death omen according to J. Ceredig Davies, who recounted a Pembrokeshire version of the bird:

An old woman in Pembrokeshire, Miss Griffiths, Henllan, near Eglwyswrw, told me this bird is a little grey one and that it came flapping against her own window before the death of her father, and also before the death of each of her three uncles.

I have met with people in almost every district throughout the country who have heard the flappings of this mysterious bird before a death.

~Folk-lore of West and Mid-Wales, Jonathan Ceredig Davies, (Aberystwyth, 1911) p. 207 

It is usually grey in colour, and arrives in the early morning to sit outside the window where a death will take place. It chirps all day with few interruptions. In some places, it is only heard, but rarely seen.

These omens also follow the Welsh around the world:

A few years ago a Corpse Bird appeared in Perth, Western Australia, before the death of a Welsh lady in that city; and this reminds me of a strange incident which happened in Patagonia, 30 years ago, when I was there. Two Welsh gentlemen, Mr. Powell, who was known as “Helaeg,” and Mr. Lewis Jones, a friend of the late Sir Love Jones Parry, M.P., were returning to the Welsh Colony, from Buenos Ayres, in a sailing vessel. When the ship came within a few miles of the mouth of the river Chubut, the captain found it necessary to remain in the open sea that day, as the tide was too low to enter the river over the bar just then. Mr. Jones and Mr. Powell, however, left in a small boat manned by Italian sailors; but when they were within a certain distance of the land the sea was very rough, and a certain bird appeared suddenly on the scene. Mr. Powell pointed out the bird to his friend and said, “Do you see that bird, that’s the Bird of Biam! We shall be drowned this very moment.” Just as he spoke, the boat suddenly turned over, and the unfortunate speaker got drowned on the spot. The other men were saved. Mr. Powell, who, unfortunately, got drowned, was a gifted Welsh Roman Catholic gentleman, who knew about twelve languages, and was a friend of the President of the Argentine Republic.

~ Folk-lore of West and Mid-Wales, J. Ceredig Davies, p. 207

… You cannot outrun your omens, in the same way that you cannot outrun death.

Sleep well.

#AmReading: Post-Devolution Welsh Gothic (1997-2013)

Introduction

Dr Emma Schofield’s doctoral thesis (2014) Independent Wales?: The Impact of Devolution on Welsh Fiction in English is worth a look, covering English-language fiction from 1979 and the first failed Devolution vote, to 1997. The final section and conclusion look beyond the Yes vote, but it is a good companion to the chapter and epilogue Aaron devotes to this time period in Welsh Gothic.

Here, I’ll look at the texts Aaron covers in her Epilogue, then move on next week to posting about the supernatural elements that make their way into Welsh Gothic, following roughly Aaron’s Part II: Things That Go Bump In The Celtic Twilight.

Post-devolution Gothic

Although the Yes vote passed with the narrowest of margins, Welsh Devolution provided Wales with an independent civic identity which differed from England. The measure of autonomy it granted, allowing the Welsh Assembly Government control of both the education system and the health service in Wales, insulating it to some extent from the vagaries of Westminster, and impose the Welsh Language Policy that promotes the use and learning of the Welsh Language across Wales.

There are many criticisms of policies, parties and politics, of course, but post-1997 Welsh authors have been far less concerned with the themes that haunted the Gothic fictions before. Contemporary Welsh Gothic plays with Gothic elements instead, now more able to find the humour in the dark and dangerous, and Welsh-born authors whose work features Gothic elements and settings do not necessarily write about Wales.

There are other things to write about within explorations of identity, like constructions and expressions of sexuality and gender, both key themes of Pembrokeshire-born novelist Sarah Waters.

I am also interested in these constructions within the Gothic, and I’ve got another book in the UWP’s Gothic Literary Studies series, The Queer Uncanny, by Paulina Palmer. This one looks at lesbian, gay and transgender identities in British, American and Caribbean fiction from 1980-2007. I may blog about this too, but we’ll see!

Aaron mentions the Welsh and English language Gothic novels of Dyfed Edwards, but does not go into detail except to highlight his vampire book, Dant at Waed (A Taste [ literally, A Tooth] for Blood, 1996).

[CW// some contemporary fiction discussed below contains sexual abuse and infant death]

Other texts covered in these last pages of her work include:

Aberystwyth Mon Amour (2001) and its sequels, by Malcolm Pryce, a cult detective noir series set in an alternative Aberystwyth, parodying Raymond Chandler’s style and playing with Gothic conventions and the Noir genre in comedic ways.

Darkhenge (2005), a YA novel by Catherine Fisher, of Newport, Gwent, that plays with the Gothic and Welsh mythology.

The Meat Tree (2010), by Gwyneth Lewis, a futuristic Gothic Science Fiction novel engaging with the fourth branch of the Mabinogi and exploring how the corrosive effects of self-obsession can be healed by insights drawn from myth.

Alan Garner had already engaged with these kinds of issues in his own retelling of this particular Welsh myth, The Owl Service (1967). Aaron doesn’t discuss Garner’s classic, a children’s low fantasy novel featuring the English children Alison and her brother Roger, and the Welsh boy Gwyn, son of the local caretaker, and set in Wales, but it also has a lot of Gothic influences. Dimitra Fimi of the University of Glasgow has discussed this book in more detail for The Times Literary Supplement. However, The Owl Service fits into the narratives of Gothicising of Wales, of Welsh myth and history coming to life to take over the living, and the impotence of the Welsh themselves.

Sing Sorrow, Sorrow (2010), a collection of short Welsh Gothic fiction by a selection of authors, edited by Gwen Davies, also includes macabre mock-Gothic styles and elements.

The Gothic is also part of gritty contemporary stories that take hard, uncompromising looks at their communities, and the broken lives of those left behind after the collapse of things that formed and shaped them.

In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl (2000) by Rachel Trezise, looks at the protagonist’s brutal childhood in the Rhondda in the late 1980s; sexually abused by her stepfather, an unemployed collier sinking into alcoholism, and living in the drug- and crime-capital of the Valleys, she is trapped both in the council estate where she lives, and within herself, unable to express herself or tell her own story. Controversial and compelling, it is considered a modern classic and was reviewed by Emma Schofield in 2016 for The Wales Arts Review.

Martha, Jac a Sianco (2004) by Caryl Lewis, winner of Welsh Book of the Year 2015, offers a similarly dark take on rural life, in which the elderly female protagonist envisions herself as entombed alive on the farm where she and her brothers were raised. Her still-born baby, the result of an unreported rape, is buried on its land, and so although the farm is failing, she cannot bear to leave it. She remains despite the omens of doom, and the murder/euthanasia-suicide of her elderly brothers, a ‘ghost of light in the darkness’ of her home [‘fel ysbryd gole yn y tywyllwch’] (p. 190).

Like the post-industrial Welsh valleys, for whom life post-devolution is still marked by unemployment and deprivation in the villages and council estates alike, Welsh farming in the Welsh-language heartlands is also struggling. Aaron discusses a number of novels and short stories that deal with this rural decline, in both Welsh and English.

Aaron notes that Border-crossing novels have remained consistent in their themes, while other novels still look at elements from mythology, the dark waters of the drowned past, and other persistent tropes. She goes through a number of these, too, but I won’t list all of them here.

Overall, Aaron concludes, there are still narratives in which Wales is an underworld, ‘othered’ and exoticised. Wales’s Gothic history, for Aaron, emerged from the trauma of colonisation which found expression in aggressive colonizing acts of its own. Today, the underworld motif may still persist but has lost its virulence. Paradoxically, the genre itself helped to familiarise a wide readership with Wales and the Welsh, creating a sense of familiarity that dispelled the Gothic darkness of the actual place. This is an ongoing process, and one which Aaron hopes her own work – Welsh Gothic – has helped to further.

 

Postscript

It is nearly the end of 2019 and I am sitting in a coffee shop in side Cardiff University’s Student Union building, killing time. On the next table across from me, three nineteen-year-olds are discussing their (English-medium) coursework in fluent Welsh. They break the flow sometimes to read the English questions, seamlessly switching back and fore between the two languages, but Welsh is the language of their conversation, the primary medium of their social interactions and banter as much as it is the language they problem-solve in. This is not the dead language of their forefathers, a weight around their necks. This is the language of their present, evolving, changing, adapting as all living languages do, as they invent slang and abbreviate in written/typed messages, and it has been this way for them at least since they started school, since they embraced it as a natural inheritance and made it their own.

This is normal here, but today, because I’ve been reading Jane Aaron’s Chapter 4 (I am writing this out of sequence) I feel a strange, overwhelming need to cry. True, I am stressed and in the middle of marking, and it’s probably time-of-the-month hormones and house stuff and worries about friends a thousand small things, and I tell myself it’s nothing, but perhaps it isn’t nothing. Perhaps it is the unexpected sense of a surge of life, the reminder of the world that is possible and could be possible for these young people and for all of us.

They leave, chatting, and join the babble of other students in the corridors and the mix of languages, avoiding the actors and small film crew aiming a camera at a small set in the middle of the ground floor thoroughfare with a Welsh language sign in the background. I drink my coffee as Dido’s White Flag plays unhelpfully through the speakers, and get on with my life.