Fairy Encounters in Medieval England

• 08/10/2024
• 18:00-19:30
• online talk

Fairy Encounters in Medieval England

A Folklore Society Online Talk

by Jeremy Harte

Tuesday 8 October, 18:00 BST

A thousand years ago, the barriers that kept life safe from the other world were thin–too thin. Those who fell asleep in the fields at noon or walked aboard at Midsummer lay open to supernatural caprice. Voices called in lonely places, three cries and each one growing nearer until it appeared–the headless man, the horse on its hindlegs, the green hunter, the tall queen who splits open a skull and removes the wits.

From miracle to chronicle, from saint’s life to preacher’s anecdote, medieval brushes with the supernatural come down to us in first-hand vernacular voices, never quite stifled by the Latin of the clergymen who transcribed them. Encounter narratives make use of folktale and popular theology, but are more than either: they exceed and disturb a tidy conceptual universe of fairies, ghosts, angels and demons. They shed glimmering elf-light on a hitherto unexamined side of medieval life.

Jeremy Harte is inspired by landscape and the otherworldly. Fairy Encounters is his latest book, following Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape and Explore Fairy Traditions. He is curator of Bourne Hall Museum in Surrey.

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Image: J.M.W. Turner, ‘Queen Mab’s Cave’ (detail); photo: Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons