Yuletide Rides and Fresh Exhumations

Despite the trials and tribulations of the pandemic, folk horror-and-spooky-folklore periodical Hellebore continues to put out issues following up the first three issues with a Yuletide special and an Unearthing-themed issue. Let’s see what treats are in store.

Yuletide first. Katy Soar offers The Lord of Misrule, a roving musing on offbeat traditions which bounces from the titular late medieval tradition to Saturnalia (and some odd ideas that James Frazer of The Golden Bough ended up persuading himself of on a shaky reading of rather spurious evidence) to whether Father Christmas is a sacrificial king. Similarly tenuous is John Reppion’s discussion of the pre-Christian celebration of Modranicht and the three mother goddesses apparently venerated during it – an article which boils down to “eh, we can’t know very much about them because not many sources have survived”.

Somewhat more structured is John Callow’s From Ghoul To Godhead, which develops the development of Herne the Hunter from a legend mentioned in passing in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor to a deity venerated by some neopagans, an ethos reflected in the character’s depiction in Robin of Sherwood. Clearly, it’s possible – though Callow doesn’t consider this possibility – that Shakespeare actually invented Herne, devising him as a broad parody of the sort of folk legend played in the context of the play rather than basing him on an existing ghost story – but it’s still interesting to see how a cultural figure can gone from being all but overlooked outside of that sort of passing reference into being a legend that people believe has much greater antiquity than it actually has (especially in its present form).

Verity Holloway’s The Hauntings of Cold Christmas recount not just the ghostly folklore around Cold Christmas Church (so called because of a probably spurious legend about a harsh winter slaying most of the parish’s children in some nebulous bygone year), but also the more tangible hauntings: the dark tourists, folk horror enthusiasts, rowdy youths, and YouTubers making their very own zero-budget ghost-hunting videos who are attracted to the site by its reputation and whose disrespect for it have left it in a horrible state. Here Holloway is able to examine not just the dark side of British rural legends, but the dark side of the folk horror fad itself.

Better Than “The Passage”, But No Wilkie Collins

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

In my continued retreat into the past to escape the appallingly shitty state of the horror genre, I decided to take a tip from Harriet Vane and delve into the work of Sheridan Le Fanu. Uncle Silas, recently dug up by Wordsworth Editions for their Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural range, is often seen as being Le Fanu’s attempt at a sensation novel, an expansion of the short story A Passage In the Secret History of an Irish Countess designed to hop onto the Woman in White gravy train. For his part, Le Fanu seems rather ambivalent about this sort of classification, prefacing the book with an appeal to the reader to regard it as a romance in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott (who is regularly referenced in the text) as opposed to some tawdry and amoral sensation novel, but on the other hand the novel carries all the hallmarks of the form so possibly Le Fanu was subtly implying that the sensation novel tapped into an older and more respected literary tradition so snobs had better stop hatin’.

Transferring the action from the Irish setting of the short story to Derbyshire (because Le Fanu’s publisher thought it’d sell better that way), the novel is rooted in the perceptions and recollections of Maud Ruthyn, the heiress of the ancient Ruthyn family. In the opening chapters of the story it is apparent to us (but not to the teenage Maud) that her rather hermit-like father Austin is dying. An avid follower of Swedenborg, he is comforted by his faith in a life after this one, but has one very great regret: that despite all the power, wealth and influence at his command, he was never able to dispell the aura of controversy and disapproval surrounding his younger brother Silas, who was rumoured to have something to do with the death of a bookmaker he was alegedly indebted to in his home at Bertram-Haugh.