Katherine Briggs

I immediately broke the resolution in my last entry because no sooner had I mentioned Katherine Briggs, I was left wanting to read my favourite book of hers, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, a thorough, but not over-long, survey of fairy lore, poetry, and literature of the British Isles. It's a book that I'm very fond of, having come across it in a library sale at school when I was sixteen and I realised that it was the book that I'd always wanted to read but didn't realise existed. (My edition has the word "English" in the title before "Tradition", but it seems customary to eliminate it - perhaps because at least three-quarters of the book investigates Scottish, Welsh, and Irish fairies.)

Anyway, it's a wonderful, wonderful book which I usually end up reading about once every ten months (imagine Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without everything except the footnotes; I realise that this is some readers' idea of hell). Although it was first published in 1967, there is still an academic freshness to it, and it makes a wonderful change from the prettified Edwardian fairies, the Disneyesque inventions, the new-age faeries, and the self-consciously grotesque fairies and goblins that have become so popular in recent fantasy literature. Reading it this time, I came across two interesting things in Briggs' chapter "Giants, Hags and Monsters". The first refers directly to the representation of heroes:

Giant-like qualities cling even to the Arthurian heroes. The early Lancelot poem dwells with particularity on the distortion of Lancelot's appearance when he was in a rage. Arthur and Guinevere are supposed to have sat on the two great rocks at Sewing Shields, and Guinevere said something that annoyed her husband so that he threw a stone at her, which she caught on her comb. The stone can still be seen and weighs several tons...In fact, in folk tradition the characters are like those in the Bayeux Tapestry - the important ones are large and the unimportant ones are little. Often monstrous traits are attached to heroes, who sometimes seem to have changed from gods to heroes and from heroes to giants. (Briggs 65-6)

I'm not sure if I will use this in my own thesis as Briggs' research focuses on the popular or folk whereas at this stage mine is primarily on the official literature. It's an interesting point to encounter in her discussion, however, and has made me think about the physical "largeness" of heroes; I will certainly be encountering that idea again in my study of Fielding's Tom Thumb and The Tragedy of Tragedies. The idea of attaching monstrous traits - one assumes physical traits only - to heroes is particularly intriguing.

Second, in her review of British dragons (or worms - it seems that the cryptozoological difference is slight) in folklore, she retells the story of the Lambton Worm, wherein the Heir of Lambton rides off to fight the dragon "wearing spiked armour, so that it wounded itself when it bit him" (68). Of course, this brings us back to The Dragon of Wantley and Moore's own spiked armour, which I discussed on Sunday. I was fond of my pet theory - that the spikes on Moore's armour, as in the Aphra Behn play, represented the horns of a cuckold - but the occurrence of spiked armour in both stories which otherwise only have the most superficial details in common suggests that it was a standard or recognised characteristic of dragon stories. However, perhaps there is room for both interpretations to exist in the play alongside each other. At times like this, one longs to be able to go back in time and see the play originally performed.