Celtic Weird: Tales of Wicked Folklore and Dark Mythology (British Library) - Hardcover

 
9780712354325: Celtic Weird: Tales of Wicked Folklore and Dark Mythology (British Library)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0712354328 ISBN 13: 9780712354325
Verlag: British Library Publishing, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Once I thought I glimpsed her high up in a bush, like dirty rags in a gale. Not that so far there has been any gale, or even any wind. The total silent stillness is one of the worst things.

Yes, it is a battle with strong and unknown forces that I have on my hands.

From the shorelines, hills and towns of ancient lands, tales of twisted creatures, sins against nature and pagan revenants have been passed down from generation to generation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, folklore from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man inspired a new strain of strange short stories, penned by writers of the weird and fantastic including masters of the form such as Arthur Machen, Edith Wharton and Robert Aickman.

In this volume, Johnny Mains dives into the archives to unearth a hoard of twenty-one enthralling tales imbued with elements of Celtic folklore, ranging from the 1820s to the 1980s and including three weird lost gems translated from Gaelic. Together they conjure uncanny visions of eternal forces, beings and traditions, resonating with the beguiling essence of this unique branch of strange fiction.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Johnny Mains is an award-winning editor renowned for recovering lost stories from the archives. His focus for the past few years has been stories by female authors, many of which have been published in the Black Shuck Books anthologies A Suggestion of Ghosts and An Obscurity of Ghosts. Mains has also edited collections of the best contemporary British Horror, and co-edited the Dead Funny anthologies of short stories by contemporary comedians with Robin Ince.

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From the shorelines, hills and crags of ancient lands, tales of twisted creatures, sins against nature and pagan revenants have been passed down from generation to generation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, folklore from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man inspired a new strain of strange short stories, running alongside the Celtic Revival movement of art, craft and poetry.

In this new volume, Johnny Mains dives into the archives of the forgotten to unearth an array of uneasy stories with Celtic folklore at their heart – tales which resonate with our fascination for the traditions and fears of the people that came before.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N
Celtic myths and folklore have always been extremely weird. In Ireland there
is Balor, the Demon King, tyrant leader of the Fomorians. He had one eye,
which could kill you if he opened it and always had to keep that one eye
closed to stop him tripping over all of the dead bodies in his wake. There’s
also the tale of Angelystor, the Welsh spectre who lives under a 3,000-year-
old yew tree and announces the names of those who will soon meet their
doom. The Welsh also have, alongside the Cornish and Bretons, Ankou,
the servant of death and the first child of Adam and Eve who is doomed to
collect the souls of others before he himself can go to the afterlife. The Scots
have the Mester Stoor Worm, a sea serpent who can destroy humans and
animals with its stinking breath. And finally, in the Isle of Man, there is the
Buggane, a massive ogre who couldn’t cross water but sported a large red
mouth and huge tusks.
Many of those myths, told in the oral tradition, were the ancient ances-
tors of the Celtic Revival tradition, where they were rescued and studied and
debated and the concept of Celtic identity became a pulsing, living concept
and the legends, folklore and poetry became forever locked in Celtic DNA.
From there, one would have thought that the languages of the ancient
tribes would have been brought back from the brink and would have flour-
ished and have been a part of everyday culture. Alas, while people may like
to buy stickers and fridge magnets of Celtic crosses, native languages are on
the brink. In 2020 a study concluded that only 10,000 of 50,000 Gaels spoke
Gaelic as an everyday language,*less than 1,000 people speak Cornish,†and
French government policies have given little support to preserving the Breton
tongue—even though there are currently half a million speakers, most of
them are over sixty years of age. In Ireland and Wales the numbers are better,
but it can simply take a few generations of neglect on the behalf of authorities
for those numbers to plummet.
While the languages that form the Celtic traditions may be dying, there
is still a keen interest in the historical study of traditions and folklore.
This volume is a tribute to the many works that have come before it. In
1905, the Celtic Revival was in full swing, with a magazine called the
Celtic Reviewleading the charge, aiming to present a journal which was
‘for the social, religious and literary history not only of the Celtic races
themselves, but also of the many people with whom they came into contact
during the long centuries in which the Celts have influenced so strongly
the Western world’, but it came with the sad understanding that ‘the study
of Celtic literature of the past opens a wide yield of investigation as yet
comparatively untouched’.
But nine years after 1905, there was of course the Great War which culled
many Celtic voices and historians. Traditions that had been given and were
to be passed down to future generations, instantly snuffed out by the cruel
machineries of man, in turn creating their own awful lore. Then the Second
World War compounded an already decimated landscape.
We recover. The stories come back; they always do. Folk tales, myths and
legends are interpreted by different generations in different ways. Sometimes
you can see their influence, other times, maybe only a whisper. And that’s
where research has flourished in the last few decades—with the digitiza-
tion of manuscripts and newspapers and magazines—it has never been a
better time to be a researcher and a book like this is easier to put together
than it was, say, twenty years ago. And there is also the duty to honour
the many ‘locality legends’ books that you can still find in tourist shops
and newsagents to this day. WhileCeltic Weirdis not that kind of book,
I read many of the micro-published Cornish and Scottish legends books,
just to get right in my head what kind of anthology I wanted to do and
how I wanted to go about doing it. The resulting book is a weird hybrid;
stories that are hardwired as they can be into folklore and others that are
distant cousins, but are no less powerful, no less important because they
may have been written by a jobbing author in the 1960s for a popular horror
anthology of the day.
There are also some outsiders hidden within the pages from this book,
stories by non-Celtic authors who were entranced by folklore and myth and
perhaps wanted to make sense of those traditional tales by putting their
own spin on it. The Breton section is the most obvious to point out here,
but all three stories absolutely nail the sense of place and lives lived. The
Scots section also has a very welcome interloper; Robert Aickman, with
his spin on ancient folklore with his masterpiece ‘The Fetch’. It is a con-
ventional and old-fashioned story, but Aickman’s writing turns ‘The Fetch’
into a work that’s deeply uncanny and is one of my personal highlights of
this book. Other tales that have been an honour to include are Katharine
Tynan’s ‘The Death Spancel’, a ‘lost’ work I first came across in 2017 and is
a tale that I really want to see reach a larger audience. It’s also thrilling to
include stories by Nigel Kneale, Edith Wharton and Dorothy K. Haynes,
all authors I read during my teenage horror years and to include them is
also my way of thanking them for the many hours of enjoyment I took
from their words.
It would be remiss of me not to talk about Gaelic and Manx sections
where the writers are all male. With regards to Gaelic literature, women also
transmitted oral stories, but they have yet to come to the fore for a variety of
reasons. Hopefully there will be funding to translate and transcribe stories
in the near future and that anthologies edited by others down the line will
remedy this imbalance. With the Manx tales (apart from the Kneale story the
two others could have been written by females under a pseudonym, but there
is no evidence to suggest...

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Verlag
British Library Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0712354328
ISBN 13 
9780712354325
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
323
Herausgeber
Mains Johnny
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