Once Upon a Time ...

When I was growing up in rural Lancashire I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandfather, Arthur Hart.  Although his father had moved from Cambridgeshire to Lancashire, my grandfather seemed to have a great deal of knowledge about the area where we lived.  He knew a number of stories, including one that told of a group of hunters who were out on the local moors.  Their hounds soon spotted a hare, which they chased hither and thither.  Eventually, the hare, spotting a hole in the side of a barn, managed to escape through the hole and into the barn, but not before one of the hounds had caught hold, and bitten, one of the hare's legs.  The huntsmen went towards the barn door but, before they could open it, the door opened from the inside and out came a well-known witch, 'Owd Mother Demdike'.  As she walked off, cursing the hunters as she did so, the hunters noticed that blood was coming from a wound in the witch's ankle.

I now know that this is quite a well-known folktale, versions of which have been recorded from all over the country.  But, the addition of 'Owd Mother Demdike' turned it into a local story; Elizabeth Southerns, Demdike's real name, being one of the so-called Pendle Witches, twelve of whom were hanged in 1612 CE.  Demdike herself died in Lancaster Gaol while awaiting trial, but my grandfather was in no doubt that she was a witch - trial or no trial!1

There were two things that fascinated me about this story.  The first was the fact that these events had happened in the region where I lived - this was 'real' history, not the stuff that my teachers were trying to instill in me - and, secondly, I loved the idea that a witch could turn herself into an animal.  Years later I came across the story of Isobel Gowdie, another 17th century witch, this time one from Scotland.  Gowdie left us an incredible 'confession', one apparently not obtained under torture, in which she talked about many of her supernatural powers.  She too had the ability to turn herself into a hare by uttering the following spell.

I sall gae intil a haire,
Wi sorrow and sych and meikle care;
And I sall gae in the Devillis name,
Ay quhill I com hom againe.

If she wished to turn into a cat, then she would utter another similar spell.

I sall gae intil a catt,
Wi sorrow and sych and a black shat;
And I sall gae in the Devillis name,
Ay quhill I com hom againe.

A further rhyme, this time used to turn oneself into a crow, ran as follows.

I sall gae intil a craw,
Wi sorrow and sych and a black thraw;
And I sall gae in the Devillis name,
Ay quhill I com hom againe.

When Gowdie wished to change back into her human form she would then recite this three-lined verse.

Haire, Haire (catt, craw, etc) God send thee caire (back),
I am in a hairis likenes just now,
Bot I sall be in a woman's likenes evin now,

So, where does the idea of 'shape-shifting' come from?  Well, it is certainly a very ancient and wide-spread idea.  Shamans, who could be found in vast areas of the world, from Finland to Siberia, from Turkey to China, were certainly believed to be able to transform themselves into all manner of birds and animals.  The Samoyed people, for example, who live in between the White Sea (to the north of Finland) and the River Khatanga in northern Siberia, believe that Shamans can turn themselves into bears by leaping over fallen trees and uttering specific formulae.2  In a Kachin Turk epic poem, Kara Tygan and Suksgal, from the Abakan region around the Yenisei River in central Siberia, the hero Kara Tygan and his brother-in-law set out upon an epic journey.  For part of their travels they turn themselves into swallows and their horses into swans.  A third shamanic example of shape-shifting comes from a Kazakh prose epic, one in which the hero Shentäi has to seek out a bride who lives behind a circle of fire.  At one point of the story Shentäi is disguised as a beggar by a wise maiden called Synshy Sary Kus (shades of the Odyssey here, where Athena disguised Odysseus at the end of the story).  In another part of the tale Synshy Sary Kus asks Shentäi to turn himself firstly into a blue dove, secondly into a hawk and, finally, into a handsome hero.  This triadic-transformation formula is a common feature of such stories.  One final story comes from another Siberian people, the Buriat of Irkutsk, who believed that their first shaman, Morgon-Kara, was so powerful that he could bring back souls from the dead.  This so annoyed the Lord of the Dead that he complained to the Great God of Heaven, who decided to test the shaman.  The Great God took the soul of a man and placed it into a small glass bottle.  He then covered the opening with his thumb and hid the bottle in his hand.  The man, whose soul had been taken, became ill and so his relatives begged Morgon-Kara to search for the missing soul.  He searched everywhere in the forests and in the waters.  He travelled into the highest mountains and into the land of the dead, but without success.  At last, 'sitting on his drum', he floated up to the highest heavenly realms, where he saw the Great God.  Morgon-Kara noticed that the Great God had something hidden in his hand and so, turning himself into a hornet, he stung the Great God on the forehead.  The shock was such that the Great God opened his hand and the soul escaped.3  And, of course, shamanic beliefs were also taken to the Americas by early Asian settlers.  For an entertaining account of such beliefs, have a look at Tony Hillerman's excellent detective novel The Shape Shifter from 2006.

Nearer home we have the tale of the Welsh hero, Gwion Bach, who found himself in the 'Land under the Waves' (actually at the bottom of Lake Bala in North Wales).  It is quite a long story, but in one part we find Gwion being pursued by a lady called Caridwen, the wife of a giant.

And she went forth after him, running.  And he saw her, and changed himself into a hare and fled.  But she changed herself into a greyhound and turned him.  And he ran towards a river, and became a fish.  And she in the form of an otter-bitch chased him under the water, until he was fain to turn himself into a bird of the air.  She, as a hawk, followed him and gave him no rest in the sky.  And just as she was about to stoop upon him, and he was in fear of death, he espied a heap of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn, and he dropped among the wheat, and turned himself into one of the grains.  Then she transformed herself into a high crested black hen, and went to the wheat and scratched it with her feet, and found him out and swallowed him.  And, as the story says, she bore him nine months, and when she was delivered of him, she could not find it in her heart to kill him, by reason of his beauty.  So she wrapt him in a leathern bag, and cast him into the sea to the mercy of God, on the twenty-ninth day of April.4

Not just for centuries, but for thousands of years the fantasy of this song has haunted the sex-dreams of men and, doubtless, women too.  In Hindu scripture, when the first man pursued the first woman, she thought to hide by changing into a cow, but he became a bull and so cattle were born.  She turned into a mare and he into a stallion, she a jenny and he a jackass, ewe and ram, on and on till all the world was created, down to the ants.  Somewhat later, when Peleus set out to rape Thetis, she transformed herself into fire, water, lion, serpent and ink-squirting cuttlefish before yielding to his determined embrace.  In Latin countries, the metamorphosis fantasy became a pretty, rather insipid ballad, but in Britain it long remained tough and witty.5

The lady stands in her bower door,
As straight as willow wand;
The blacksmith stood a little forebye,
Wi hammer in his hand.

"Weel may ye dress ye, lady fair,
Into your robes o red;
Before the morn at this same time,
I'll gain your maidenhead."

"Awa, awa, ye coal-black smith,
Woud ye do me the wrang
To think to gain my maidenhead,
That I hae kept sae lang!"

Then she has hadden up her hand,
And she sware by the mold,
"I wudna be a blacksmith's wife
For the full o a chest o gold."

"I'd rather I were dead and gone,
And my body laid in grave,
Ere a rusty stock o coal-black smith
My maidenhead shoud have."

But he has hadden up his hand,
And he sware by the mass,
"I'll cause ye be my light leman
For the hauf o that and less."

O bide, lady, bide,
And aye he bade her bide;
The rusty smith your leman shall be,
For a' your muckle pride.

Then she became a turtle dow,
To fly up in the air,
And he became another dow,
And they flew pair and pair.

O bide, lady, bide, etc.

She turnd hersell into an eel,
To swim into yon burn,
And he became a speckled trout,
To gie the eel a turn.

O bide, lady, bide, etc.

Then she became a duck, a duck,
To puddle in a peel,
And he became a rose-kaimd drake,
To gie the duck a dreel.

O bide, lady, bide, etc. 

She turnd hersell into a hare,
To rin upon yon hill,
And he became a gude grey-hound,
And boldly he did fill.

O bide, lady, bide, etc. 

Then she became a gay grey mare,
And stood in yonder slack,
And he became a gilt saddle,
And sat upon her back. 

Was she wae, he held her sae,
And still he bade her bide;
The rusty smith her leman was,
For a' her muckle pride.

Then she became a het girdle,
And he became a cake,
And a' the ways she turnd hersell,
The blacksmith was her make. 

Was she wae, etc.

She turnd hersell into a ship,
To sail out ower the flood;
He ca'ed a nail intill her tail,
And syne the ship she stood.

Was she wae, etc.

Then she became a silken plaid,
And stretchd upon a bed,
And he became a green covering,
And gaind her maidenhead.

Was she wae, etc.

Returning, now, to the time when I was growing up.  My grandfather had a small collection of 78rpm gramophone records, mainly of dance-band recordings.  But there was also one classical 12' disc, a recording of The Swan of Tuonela by Jean Sibelius.  The piece is from his 'Four Legends from the Kalevala for Orchestra', although when I first heard this recording I had no idea what the Kalevala was.  I loved the piece and I would play it over and over, trying in my mind to imagine this graceful bird gliding over the water.  Again, it was to be many years before I discovered the Kalevala, Finland's great saga.  Written in the early 19th century, the Kalevala is an epic poem that had been compiled by the folklorist Elias Lönnrot (9th April 1802 - 19th March 1884) and first published in 1835.  A later edition, from 1849, comprises some fifty stories set out in 22,795 verses.  The title means 'The land of Kaleva'.  Lönnrot was the district health officer of Kainuu, in Finland, who took it upon himself to collect the folktales and oral poetry that he found still being told by the people in that area.  It took him fifteen years to complete his task.

The Kalevala opens with a series of creation myths, before continuing with a range of tales about all manner of heroes and their exploits.  Some of these stories must be extremely old.  In one, for example, we find a character whose story is similar to that of Oedipus in Greek mythology.  But another tale is even older.  This is part of the story of Lemminkäinen, who is asked to shoot the swan of Tuonela (the underground land of the dead).  Before he can complete his task Lemminkäinen is killed and his body dismembered by someone whom he has previously insulted.  Lemminkäinen's mother finds the remains, which she drags out of the river of Tuonela, and then stitches the body parts back together again.  She then asks a bee to firstly fetch honey from the surrounding flowers and grasses, then, secondly, from a cabin on an island in the sea, and, finally, from heaven.  This done, Lemminkäinen's mother uses the honey to bring her son back to life.  In fact, this is but a retelling of an older Egyptian myth, one in which Osiris is killed and dismembered by Seth before being found, reconstituted and revived by Isis.  Interestingly, there is another point of similarity in Elias Lönnrot's version of the tale.  Lemminkäinen is killed by a 'permanent bachelor' called Väinämöinen, and the term 'bachelor' is stressed to indicate a person of irregular sexuality, just like Seth, who was a bisexual rapist.

Of course, as a young boy I had no idea of just what lay beneath the waters of Tuonela as I listened to Sibelius's haunting tune.  Nor did I realize that a possible explanation for one of England's greatest stories, that of King Arthur and the sword in the stone, lay but a few miles away from my home - in the ancient Roman fort at Ribchester.

Over the years, the Arthurian tales have come to be seen as stories based, largely, on various Celtic myths.7  Indeed, some of the characters who make up the stories clearly have Celtic backgrounds.  Guinevere, for example, appears to be based on the Irish Aphrodite figure Finnabar (from the old Irish Findabair or the Welsh Gwenhwyfar).  And we may say that Merlin, or Myrddin, who is mentioned in the oldest known Welsh manuscript, the Black Book of Carmarthen that is dated to c.1250 CE, is also a character from Welsh mythology.  King Arthur's father, Uthar Pendragon, is yet another Welsh addition.  But, over the past thirty or forty years, some scholars had began to look elsewhere, to the East rather than to the West, to see if they could find mention of the stories that make up the Arthurian tales.  Things kicked off in 1978 when C Scott Littleton and Ann C Thomas published a paper, 'The Sarmatian Connection: New Light on the Origin of the Arthurian and Holy Grail Legends', in the Journal of American Folklore (91:512-527).  The Sarmatians, along with the closely related Alans, were a group of people who lived in the steppes of southern Russia, in an area to the north of present day Iran, some two thousand years ago.  But what is the connection between these people, their beliefs, and the Roman fort at Ribchester?

To understand this we have to understand how the Roman Empire grew and sustained itself.  We know that when the Romans conquered an alien people they would often offer them a chance to live, but only if the men agreed to serve in the Roman army, and this is what happened to many Sarmatians.  In the year 175 CE, at the end of the Marcomannian War, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius sent a contingent of 5,500 Sarmatian auxiliary cavalry from Pannonia (modern Hungary) to Britain.  Once in Britain, some were posted to Ribchester.  Others were moved to the north of England, to man Hadrian's Wall.  (It was Roman policy to send captured troops far away from their homelands.) The Sarmatian soldiers were expected to serve for a period of twenty-five years before they were able to retire as full citizens of Rome.  And many retired to the vicus, the area outside the fort at Ribchester, where they settled with their families.  No doubt some of the soldiers married local girls and their different cultures would have led to new ideas being accepted by their descendents. 

One thing that the Sarmatian's brought with them was their belief in a sword cult, the sacred sword being a symbol for the Sarmatian's war-god.  It seems that during their cult ceremonies sacred swords would be repeatedly thrust into and withdrawn from the ground.  Could it be that this ritual lies behind the later 'sword in the stone' motif?  Certainly Littleton and a few others believe this to be the case and they have set out their views in the book From Scythia to Camelot.8  Some of the other ideas have been summarized by the Arthurian writer Geoffrey Ashe, in his book The Discovery of King Arthur:

This is the theory of the Sarmatian Connection, expounded by Helmut Nickel, C Scott Littleton and Anne C Thomas.  They draw attention to a tribe called the Ossetes, who live in a valley in the Caucasus and have a cycle of folktales about heroes known as the Narts.  Several of these tales have Arthurian echoes.  In one a dying warrior's sword has to be thrown into the water, as Excalibur is.  In others much is made of a magic vessel recalling the Grail or the cauldron of Annwn.  The Ossetes are descended from the Sarmatians, a people who were once spread across Eastern Europe.  What is proposed is that the tales of the Narts are ancient Sarmatian mythology.  The same tales were brought to Britain by Sarmatians imported as Roman auxiliary troops in the second century AD.  Their commander was …Lucius Artorius Castur.  The name Artorius, it is urged, could have gone the same way as Caesar and been adopted as a kind of title by successive heads of a Sarmatian community in Britain.  Such a group would have kept its ethnic identity, and one of its leaders could have been an Artorious who fought Saxons.  The ancestral mythology of the Narts, ready-made, would then have flowed into his saga.9

When the Sarmatian Connection was first publicly aired, headline-writers found the phrase 'Narts of the Round Table' irresistible.

If Vargyas is right, at least some vital motifs of our common European ballad derive from imaginings vastly remote from us in time and space, from the anxious dreams of prehistoric herdsmen on the wild steppes between the Tienshan and the Altai mountains of western Mongolia.

Between 1318 and 1325 Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, later Pope Benedict XII at Avignon, carried out an inquisition into the heretic Cathars (who were also known as Albigensians) in a village in the Pyrenees, in what was then the independent Comté de Foix.  Montaillou, the name of the village, comprised some 250 farmers and shepherds, and their families, who became the subject of one of the most detailed and exhaustive inquisitions ever held.  This version of Duncan's story, in which a lizard replaces Duncan's white butterfly, was given to Bishop Fournier by one Phillipe d'Alayrac.  It was, he said, a Cathar exemplum, one which was used by the Cathar Perfects (who were the nearest the Cathars had to priests) to explain the difference between the soul and the spirit:

Once upon a time two Cathar believers found themselves close to a river.  One of them fell asleep.  The other stayed awake, and from the mouth of the sleeper he saw a creature emerge like a lizard.  Suddenly the lizard, using a plank (or was it a straw?) which stretched from one bank to the other, crossed over the river.  On the other bank there was the fleshless skull of an ass.  And the lizard ran in and out of the openings in the skull.  Then it came back over the plank and re-entered the sleeper's mouth.  It did that once or twice.  Seeing which, the man who was awake thought of a trick; he waited until the lizard was on the other side of the river and approaching the ass's skull.  And then he took away the plank!  The lizard left the ass's head and returned to the bank.  But he could not get across!  The plank was gone!  Then the body of the sleeper began to thrash about, but it was unable to wake, despite the efforts of the watcher to arouse it from its sleep.  Finally, the watcher put the plank back across the river.  Then the lizard was able to get back and re-enter the body of the sleeper through the mouth.  The sleeper immediately awoke; and he told his friend the dream he had just had.

"I dreamed", he said, "that I was crossing a river on a plank; then I went into a great palace with many towers and rooms, and when I wanted to come back to the place from which I had set out, there was no plank!  I could not get across: I would have been drowned in the river.  That was why I thrashed out (in my sleep).  Until the plank was put back again and I could return."

The two believers wondered greatly at this adventure, and went and told it to a Perfect, who gave them the key to the mystery: the soul, he told them, remains in a man's body all the time; but a man's spirit or mind goes in and out, just like the lizard which went from the sleeper's mouth to the ass's head and vice versa.15

Mike Yates - 8.11.10
Wiltshire

Notes:

1.  The writer Alan Garner tells how his grandfather told him of a story about Alderley Edge, in Cheshire, when he (Garner) was about 5 years old.  The story, about a king who sleeps in an underground cavern, but who is ready to rise should he be needed by his country, is well-known and is one that I first came across when I first visited the Eilden Hills, in the Scottish Borders, as a teenager.  In this case it is said that the sleeping king is none other than King Arthur, although I suspect that this name could be a Victorian addition to the tale.  Garner's tale contains a number of local place names and, in a fascinating article, Garner shows how he managed to link these all together and, in so doing, found a possible connection to the people who settled in the area in the Bronze Age!  See: Alan Garner, 'Oral History & Applied Archaeology in East Cheshire' in The Voice that Thunders London, 1997, pp.65-79.

2.  Beliefs such as this are discussed in Julian Baldick's book Animal and Shaman.  Ancient Religions of Central Asia I B Tauris, London & New York.  2000. 

3.  The story of Morgon-Kara can be found in Joseph Campbell's excellent book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  First published in 1949, it has been reprinted on a number of occasions.  I would urge anyone interested in myths and folktales to read this book.

4.  'Taliesin', translated by Lady Charlotte Guest in The Mabinogion.  Everyman's Library, No.97, pp.263-4.

5.  A L Lloyd, sleeve notes to the album The Bird in the Bush: Traditional Songs of Love and Lust Topic Records 12T135 (issued 1966).

6.  Cecil Sharp's version of The Two Magicians can be found in volume 1 of Cecil Sharp's Collection of English Folk Songs edited by Maud Karpeles (1974).  Gavin Greig's set appears in volume 2 of the Greig/Duncan Collection (1982) and the Carpenter set can be found in Roy Palmer's Everyman's Book of Ballads (1980).  Austin Wookey's version of the ballad was included on a cassette that accompanied Bob and Jacqueline Patten's Somerset Scrapbook that appeared in 1987 and Duncan Williamson can be heard singing The Lady and the Blacksmith on the CD Travellers' Tales - Volume 1 (Kyloe Records 100.  Issued 2002).

7.  See, for example, Steve Blake & Scott Lloyd's book Pendragon.  The Definitive Account of the Origins of Arthur Rider, London.  2002, for the Celtic connections.

8.  C Scott Littleton & Linda A Malcor From Scythia to Camelot Garland, New York & London.  Revised edition, 2000.

9.  Geoffrey Ashe The Discovery of King Arthur Sutton, Thrupp, Gloucestershire.  2003, p.167.

10.  See C Scott Littleton & Londa A Malcor From Scythia to Camelot Garland, New York & London.  Revised edition, 2000, for the full stories. 

11.  Richard Barber The Holy Grail.  The History of a Legend Penguin Books, 2004.  Alan Lupack The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend Oxford, 2005.

12.  Lajos Vargyas Researches into the medieval History of Folk Ballad, Budapest, 1967, pp.129-165.

13.  A L Lloyd Folk Song in England, Paladin, 1975, p.144.

14.  Available from Veteran Records at www.veteran.co.uk

15.  Emmanuel Le Roy Montaillou.  Cathars and Catholics in a French village, 1294 - 1324 London, 1978, pp.351-52.

16.  Storyteller Duncan Williamson was adamant that his Jack Tales carried meanings that could be of use to the listeners.  He can be heard talking about this - as 'Conversation on Jack Tales' - on the CD Travellers' Tales.  Volume1 (Kyloe Records CD 100.  Issued 2002 and available from www.veteran.co.uk

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