Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

A review

Our everyday is not a disenchanted place, however loudly our commuter trains rattle along their tracks or however tall the tower blocks stand in the place where the trees once grew…

This collection was born out of a literary experiment curated by Professor Carolyne Larrington. Eight female authors were provided with a British folktale and asked to write a contemporary retelling with a feminist twist.  In line with the oral tradition they were inspired by, the stories were first produced as podcasts.  Now augmented by two further stories commissioned from Irenosen Okojie and Imogen Hermes Gowar, they are being issued in book form by Virago, the indefatigable publisher of books by women. 

The list of authors involved in this Angela-Carteresque project is a roll-call of some of the finest contemporary writers in the English language.  It is interesting to note how the subject-matter provides a unifying thread among the featured works, despite the variety of styles and approaches.  An appendix at the end presents the folktales upon which the commissioned authors worked their contemporary magic.

Among the best stories are those which let the original material speak for itself, albeit in a changed context.  Natasha Carthew’s The Droll of the Mermaid, based on The Mermaid and the Man of Cury, retains many of the elements of the legend which inspires it and, with its song-like run-on phrases, evokes the cadences of the spoken word. Kirsty Logan returns to her beloved Scottish myths in Between Sea and Sky, an adaptation of the folk song The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry.  I would have expected Imogen Hermes Gowar to write a story about mermaids.  What she comes up with in The Holloway is, instead, a clever contemporary take on a Somerset folktale about a drunken, abusive farmer who gets what he deserves at the hand of the pixies.  In The Sisters, Liv Little gives a queer twist to a London legend (originally) about two brothers who fought a duel in Tavistock Square for the hand and heart of a woman they both loved.

This project has a meta-fictional element to it, and two of the stories take this to a heightened level.  Eimar McBride’s The Tale of Kathleen is a relatively unembellished version of a folktale from Ireland which pits against each other Christian belief and fairie traditions.  What McBride brings to an otherwise “straight” account is a strongly opinionated present-day narrator, who keeps intervening with ironic commentary about the story.  I felt that the strident anti-Catholic rhetoric actually lessened the impact of the original by highlighting and underlining what is more subtly conveyed in the folktale.     More successful, in my opinion, is Daisy Johnson’s A Retelling.  Johnson blurs the distinction between the author and narrator, starting off with an auto-fictional description of the writer’s research about the tale of the Green Children of Woolpit, before things get decidedly uncannier.  I remember reading the story of the Green Children as a little boy, and Johnson’s retelling evoked the same nightmarish, claustrophobic yet strangely thrilling feelings that the tale had first instilled in me many years back.

In her preface, Larrington states that many of the stories “are in dialogue with ‘folk-horror’ or the ‘new weird’”.  Although these terms are notoriously hard to define and classification is difficult, I would struggle to describe this as a “folk horror” collection.  This does not mean that there isn’t terror aplenty in these stories, especially body horror mediating female experiences of trauma associated with pregnancy, childbearing and miscarriage.  In this context, Emma Glass reinvents the Welsh legend of the Fairy Midwife in the disturbing The Dampness is Spreading whereas Naomi Booth’s Sour Hall unexpectedly turns a legend about a pesky boggart into a searing condemnation of male violence and abuse.

Some stories infuse these British tales with a welcome dose of cultural diversity. Irenosen Okojie’s Rosheen is based on the Norfolk tale of The Dauntless Girl, but the eponymous protagonist is Okojie’s creation.  The daughter of a Trinidadian father and an Irish mother, Rosheen leaves Killarney in the 60s to seek her luck on a farm in Norfolk. The horrors she faces there are much darker than the almost comical accounts found in the original and are conveyed in Okojie’s characteristically ultra-weird style (I can’t shake off the image of dangling severed heads). Mahsuda Smith is represented by The Panther’s Tale, which combines an anecdote linked to a Midlands’ aristocratic family’s coat of arms with shapeshifting legends drawn from the author’s Bengali folk heritage. 

Folktales provide commentary on some of our timeless needs, desires and fears.  Hag is ample proof of the fact that, in the right hands, the themes of time-honoured stories can still resonate with readers (and listeners) today. 

Hardcover, 288 pages

Expected publication: October 8th 2020 by Virago