Nina Lyon

A myth is as good as a mile

The medieval historian Carolyne Larrington finds tales of green men and black dogs still flourishing in 21st-century Britain

We live in disenchanted times. We barely do God, most of us don’t do magic and frenzied consumerism occupies our minds more than any local spirit of place. At first glance it looks as though the supernatural folktales of old — those witches and giants who lend their names to pools or hilltop crags in Britain’s remoter spots — are all but lost.

From this premise, the medievalist Carolyne Larrington examines the stories that characterise some of Britain’s place names, and considers how the mythological patterns of fairy brides and rampaging dragons might have shaped the way our ancestors saw both the places they inhabited and the world at large. These supernatural influences are not limited to the past, as any Game of Thrones enthusiast could tell you, and as Larrington herself demonstrates in a sweep of contemporary culture that includes Irvine Welsh, zombie movies and the Harry Potter books.

It is all fertile material, and The Land of the Green Man is rich in stories and ideas, many of which deserve chapters to themselves. But the danger of covering so much ground — of folklore, of the great British landscape, and of ancient myths creeping back into contemporary culture — is that one runs the risk of getting lost. Nor does the book’s format help: chapters and paragraphs are overlong, and dense with information but generally short on narrative shape.

This is really a collection of British folktales, loosely arranged according to theme — lust and love, death and loss, beast and human — rather than an examination of any specific geographic claim for the old myths. And in any case, many of the tales are, in their various retellings, connected to multiple locations, so that the idea of a story bestowing its unique magic on a particular landscape is lost.

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