Larrington: The Land of the Green Man

Carolyne Larrington, The Land of the Green Man: A Journey through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015.

Reviewed by Gayle Fallon (lfallo1@lsu.edu)

In The Land of the Green Man: A Journey through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles, medieval literature scholar Carolyne Larrington explores the intersections of topography and folklore.1 Larrington traces the intimate, complex connections between the land features of Britain and its inhabitants, connections which generate not only ancient explanations for seemingly miraculous phenomena, but long-lived narratives that are ever evolving to suit the needs of contemporary people. The Land of the Green Man also serves as a repository of sorts for various versions of traditional tales; much of the book’s content is comprised of story summaries and retellings, interwoven with Larrington’s own commentary. The imitable, adaptive nature of folkloric narrative necessitates blurred—and often barely perceptible—boundaries between one tale and another, and Larrington identifies and navigates these boundaries skillfully, sometimes adding scholarly research concerning possible historical reasons for similarities among stories and sometimes wisely eliding such clarification. It is clear that the author has little interest in utterly demystifying folktales and the complicated threads which they share. Larrington’s literary analysis, though insightful and informative, never dispels the unsettling poignancy of the tales themselves by overwhelming the stories with close reading annotations or secondary source references—it is enough, in Larrington’s view, to draw networks among various tales and the lands from which they have sprung. This is not to say that Larrington’s reflections are written for a lay audience, but that her decision to combine the tales with concise commentary makes the work’s content appealing to both scholarly and popular audiences. The Land of the Green Man can thus serve as a useful text for academics seeking a reference work and for those readers looking for a thoughtful introduction to the book’s subject matter.

Larrington’s systemization of British Isles folklore is, indeed, embedded firmly in the Isles’ terrain. Despite the rather abstract thematic titles of her six chapters, e.g., “Lust and Love,” and “Gain and Lack,” there is a unifying topographical motif in each of these. For example, in the chapter “The Beast and the Human,” the majority of mythological creatures discussed are associated with water—selkies, mermaids, water-horses, and kelpies. Larrington’s focus on the fluid and frequently liminal spaces between animal and human make the inclusion of werewolves and witch therianthropy in this chapter appropriate. Likewise, in the chapter “The Land Over Time,” land features of great scale, such as mountains, are linked with fantastical creatures of gigantic proportions. Giants and gods erect enormous monuments, clear huge swathes of land, and mold the earth to their liking. They also, at times, dissolve into the landscape itself in order to signify colossal shifts in human philosophy: Larrington points out that the Callanish stones in the Outer Hebrides represent “actual giants who refused to be baptized or to build a church” in response to the missionary efforts of St. Kieran (37). By relating tales not only with other tales, but with unique landscapes, Larrington avoids a reinscription of a kind of Campbellian monomyth. She also seems to refuse to flatten tales into types (as does, say, the Aarne-Thompson classification systems), though she does mention general tale types occasionally and never explicitly discourages such classification. The same fantastical creatures may appear in disparate places, but the land-bound identifiers of each creature matter deeply to Larrington—it is the land that binds them together and works as a complicit co-creator of these narratives, that changes the fear-inspiring fairies of Cornwall to the comparatively kindly fairies of Scotland. Where Campbell would simplify, Larrington multiplies, and her folklore becomes as multifaceted as its originating landscapes.

It is significant that Larrington includes discussion of man-made structures like cities and barrows throughout the book, not as contrastive creations, negatively defined by the green spaces around them, but as human responses to the natural world, responses which become part of the landscape and, consequently, part of human mythology. Farmsteads conjure boggarts who refuse to be separated from human households (even when exasperated farmers attempt to evade the mischief-makers by moving), fairy changelings take the place of baby boys, and the images of Gog and Magog, the guardian giants of the City of London, “remind city-dwellers that there are forces which […] humans cannot control” (29). In this work, human habitations that interrupt and merge with landscapes become the spaces which mobilize the supernatural world. As places where these tales are passed on, the human homes mentioned in Larrington’s book seem to concurrently normalize and exoticize folktales, since it is in the home that we first learn our mythologies, which straddle the division between the familiar (the lighted hearth) and the mythical (the foreboding woods). When storytellers forget to impart stories, the home becomes an alien sphere wholly divorced from the natural world outside of its walls. For instance, Larrington mentions that most people since the early Anglo-Saxon rule of England knew how to assuage the souls of the troubled undead who came back for a visit to the living, and that it is only now that we are starting to omit the religious and social rituals that would let the quick and the dead rest more easily (115). Though Larrington is never alarmist in her work, comments like this one suggest that we are now regularly choosing to ignore a traditional definition of humanity; we refuse to see ourselves as potential members in a cast of supernatural roles which previously delineated the essentially human via the mythical. What’s troubling is that modernity does not always attempt to redefine humanity by building upon previous folklore, thereby denying progeny access to a mode of sussing out a place in the world. The act of acknowledging a mythical presence in human residences—not solely in the untamed reaches of the natural world—fills a human need to view ourselves as part of the earth and its processes.

This acknowledgement simultaneously provides us with the freedom to reshape our tales to fit the confines of contemporary living. To demonstrate this, Larrington seamlessly parallels modern versions of folktales and their earlier counterparts, mentioning works such as Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence alongside ancient oral narratives of the drowned city of Ys. It is the ease with which Larrington creates a diachronic outline of folklore that also makes her occasional modern translations of Old and Middle English texts seem more like updated versions of tales than functionally relayed information for lay readers. Here, there is no search for an “authentic” text, for the original, authoritative story whose exotic age assures modern readers that we understand the world better than our forebears. Larrington periodically mentions the oldest account of a tale, but never implies that modern works influenced by an ancient story are somehow bastardizing or misrepresenting an earlier version. The presentation of folklore as a dynamic, integral part of our modern world makes The Land of the Green Man a collection not of historical superstitions but of living metaphors. As Larrington states in the introduction:

"[T]he legends of our past offer particular kinds of answers—beautiful and mysterious answers […]—to very large questions through a kind of metaphorical thinking, through structures and patterns which, in their stripped-down clarity, show us what’s really important in an unfamiliar light." (9)

At the end of the book, Larrington proves that the “unfamiliar light” of folklore can perpetuate healthy concerns about our modern inability to see landscape and earth within physical (and linguistic) structures; truly, Larrington hints, forgetting folkloric narratives altogether can rob us of the reminders we need to sustain healthy community with natural rhythms and networks. The eponymous Green Man appears in Larrington’s concluding chapter, in which she asserts that our current motif of the Green Man, associated firmly with an oddly positive portrayal of the medieval wodwose (Wild Man) and all things vegetable, has a “short pedigree” as “the protector and guardian of the forests” (227). Rather, it is our dawning ecological consciousness that has inspired a proliferation of Green Man images, such as the land guardian in John Gordon’s novel The Giant under the Snow and the trinitarian Green Man of sculptor Phil Townsend’s Green Man’s Life-Cycle. Larrington sees the Green Man insinuated on a global scale, in Tolkien’s Ents, in sensational rumors of the Yeti of the Himalaya and the Bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest. These new-fashioned giants of nature follow us quite literally into our homes through our literature and television screens, blurring the boundary of the familiar homestead and the wild, as they are wont to do. They remind us of our accountability to both land and the stories rooted there, and function as evidence that folklore follows us into communal spaces and participates in the formation of our relationships with earth and one another.

Gayle Fallon

Louisiana State University 

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1. It should be noted that BBC Radio 4 has recently featured Dr. Larrington in the five-episode series “The Lore of the Land,” which is available here at the time of this article’s publication.

Kennedy and Truitt: Medieval Hackers and Medieval Robots

Kathleen E. Kennedy, Medieval Hackers.  New York: Punctum Books, 2015.

E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature and Art.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Reviewed by Robin Wharton (rwharton3@gsu.edu)

The editors of Medievally Speaking originally referred these books to my attention for individual reviews. As I looked over both volumes, and thought about why the editors matched me with them, I realized a double review addressing the combined relevance of these two books within contemporary media and science and technology studies, as well as medieval and medievalism studies might be more useful—and ultimately more persuasive. As a medievalist who now works primarily in multimodal composition, media studies, and the digital humanities, I see these books as responding to a desperate need for more temporal and cultural breadth in these and related fields. In Medieval Hackers Kathleen Kennedy “considers how the medieval norms of commonness, openness, and freedom of information are still present in our textual culture in the culture of computer hackers” (2). E.R. Truitt, in Medieval Robots, “excavat[es] the complex history of medieval automata,” in order to “begin to understand the interdependence of science, technology, and the imagination in medieval culture and between medieval culture and modernity” (1). Together, these two scholars demonstrate the value of examining current technological issues within a historical context that begins before the eighteenth-century and includes histories of the global East and South.

Medieval Hackers and the Value of Greater Temporal Perspective

Kennedy's Medieval Hackers will be of interest to anyone in medieval studies (or media studies for that matter) who has ever been frustrated by scholarship in which eighteenth- or nineteenth-century practices of reading and cultural production are taken as normative—the starting point from which contemporary practice has “diverged,” or the paradigm that digital modes are “disrupting.” Kennedy carefully guides readers on a tour through two medieval communities of English textual production—one making statutes, and the other bibles—in order to “establish[] the information commons as a deep stratum of our present culture” (30). She builds a persuasive case for viewing the proprietary regulation of information—whether it takes the form of censorship or intellectual property—as the exception rather than the rule in late-medieval England. As Kennedy describes it, over the course of the sixteenth century, “various cultural forces worked together to gate this vigorous textual culture and change it radically” (27). As a result, where, “to control access to texts and textual manipulation was revolutionary” in the Middle Ages, “[t]oday it is normative, and instead, arguing for open access to texts and the right to manipulate them is considered revolutionary (or simply criminal)” (27).

The general historical movement that Kennedy describes—from openness to a closed proprietary system governed by copyright—has been traced before, notably in L. Ray Patterson's 1968 Copyright in Historical Perspective. Further, Kennedy draws the idea of an information commons from the work of legal scholars such as Carol Rose and Mark Rose, who have argued that enclosure of the intellectual commons mirrored that of the physical commons in the transition to modernity. She contributes to existing histories of intellectual property law and fair use or open source activism in two significant ways. First, she overwrites and calls into question the technological determinism that often shapes histories of copyright law, in which intellectual property regulation inevitably results from the invention of the printing press. As she notes in “Homo Hacker? An Epilogue”:

The printing press was a tool of this change, but not an agent of it. If hackers had not already pre-existed to take advantage of the press, a revolution could not have occurred. In geologic terms, we might think of the printing press as one chemical element that had the potential to be acted on in a range of ways, to produce different reactions. I think the revolution was not one of print, but of information technology more broadly construed. (140)

Kennedy's narrative reveals how technology, in this case the printing press, emerges from our desires for texts and our ideas about how texts should be used and what they should be doing in the world. The medieval hacktivism that Kennedy describes in some cases pre-dates the technology that facilitated it. She posits hacking not as a relationship to technology but rather as a relationship to the legal, ideological, and textual building blocks of one's culture. She offers a view of history in which technologies as well as texts are open to interpretation.

Second, and equally important to ongoing discussions in media studies and the digital humanities, in chapter four, “Tyndale and the Joye of Piracy,” Kennedy suggests that hacking is itself neither inherently democratizing or in service of authoritarianism. She details how Tyndale and Joye fought over the customs and conventions their particular community of early modern hackers should follow when translating the bible. That rivalry to an extent provided both exigency and a rhetorical foundation for the “Act for the Advancement of True Religion” in 1543, which severely restricted biblical translation and editing. Kennedy contends, “[t]he squabble between Tyndale and Joye provides a case study of the range of pressures coming to bear on the information commons in the 1530s and 1540s” (115):

In combination, these pressures were powerful enough to lay down a cultural layer over the information commons, and restrict it to a degree never before seen. This activity was profoundly cultural, however. Without the cooperation of government and hackers, and perhaps the new practices associated with humanism, such an occurrence would never have taken place. While these events did not result in modern copyright, or even a modern notion of intellectual property, the foundations for such development were now beginning to be laid, and a new cultural stratum was developing. (115-16)

In her study of these very early examples of hacker culture, Kennedy reminds us hacker communities and open source projects do not remove power relations from the equation altogether. Rather, they substitute alternative power relations for those existing by default under the current regulatory scheme. We cannot presume these alternative power relations are better simply because they are different.

 

Medieval Robots and the Value of Global Scope

In Medieval Robots, E. R. Truitt examines the westernization of technical knowledge during the “missing millenium,” beginning “at the start of the ninth century, with the arrival of the first mechanical automaton in the Latin West, from Baghdad, and conclud[ing] in the middle of the fifteenth century, when mechanical knowledge in Europe allowed for the design and construction of automata within a framework of local, familiar knowledge” (2-3). Within the first chapter, “Rare Devices: Geography and Technology,” Truitt describes how in the medieval Western imagination “automata” and the technical knowledge required to create them were figured as temporally and geographically outside the boundaries of Latin Christendom:

Medieval literary texts, beginning in the twelfth century, often contain automata in a foreign setting, at the courts of Byzantine or Muslim despots, or in the distant pagan classical past. In some instances, the writers gestured toward hydraulic power as the engines of these marvels (echoing, though perhaps inadvertently, the mechanism of Harun al-Rashid's clock); however, pneumatic power, astral science, magic, and hidden human agency were also used to make automata. (27)

As Truitt explains, automata were evidence of both the philosophical learning and technical skill of the cultures that produced them. Medieval writers, however, also viewed them as products of the “more extreme natural variation (in people, animals, plants, and environments) . . . found at the edges of the world” (15) and to some extent in the time before Christianity. During the Middle Ages, as in the present, technology was power, simultaneously dangerous and desirable. In order to acquire that power, however, medieval cultures in Western Europe had to domesticate it first.

Truitt explores that process of domestication in detail in chapters two, “Between Art and Nature: Natura artifex, Neoplatonism, and Literary Automata,” three, “Talking Heads: Astral Science, Divination, and Legends of Medieval Philosophers,” and four, “The Quick and the Dead: Corpses, Memorial Statues, and Automata.” In each of these chapters, the author discusses the complex signifying power of pagan and Islamicate automata in Western literary works, in addition to describing “changes in the technological imagination from the late twelfth century to the early fifteenth century” (98). By excavating their meaning from the medieval texts, Truitt reveals how medieval authors “thought with” inherited stories of medieval robots, using them, as modern writers often do, as a point of entry for “inquiry into the definitions of life, the natural and the artificial” (3). Putting their literary thinking with automata into diachronic perspective, Truitt identifies in the Western medieval cultural imagination a “transition from magical to mechanical” through which “automata increasingly resemble real people and appear as naturalistic hybrids of natural substances and human artifice” (98).

In chapters five, “From Texts to Technology: Mechanical Marvels in Courtly and Public Pageantry,” and six, “The Clockwork Universe: Keeping Sacred and Secular Time,” Truitt considers how automata move from the page into daily life in medieval Europe. These two chapters describe how mechanical craft became the epistemological aperture through which obscure philosophy inherited from pagan and Islamicate sources could be grasped and put into the service of a Christian socio-economic agenda. Increasingly, European accounts include tales of automata produced by Western artisans, and the technical skills by which mechanical marvels can be produced become the demesne of newly powerful domestic craft guilds (138-39). Significantly, considering Kennedy's description of the medieval textual tradition discussed above, Truitt describes a similar transition from open to proprietary technological knowledge that preceded the emergence of controls on literary production:

As craft guilds became more established, they protected the transmission of their knowledge in increasingly aggressive and sophisticated ways. With regard to automata, this resulted in the uncoupling of secret knowledge from morally problematic knowledge; however, automata remained emblematic of esoteric knowledge, just of a different kind. Until the thirteenth century there is evidence of the sharing and exchange of mechanical knowledge. As guilds became more powerful in the fourteenth century, artisans began to view craft processes and inventions as separate from material objects and labor. Craft secrecy—limiting craft knowledge to guild members only—also developed in this period. (139)

In this careful account that considers Byzantine and Islamicate source material alongside literature of the Latin Christian West, Truitt demonstrates what a global perspective can add to our understanding of how knowledge is transmitted across time and geography. Truitt offers a history of technology that originates in the East and only gradually migrates Westward, in a complicated process of artistic enculturation and scientific edification.

Medieval Studies, Media Studies, Medievalism, and Interdisciplinarity

Both of these books contribute to a rich body of scholarship in medieval studies that recovers the European Middle Ages as a period of transition, one marked by intellectual curiosity and relative freedom of expression, as much as religious zealotry, bigotry, and ignorant superstition. Further, they make a persuasive argument that medieval cultural forms and ways of knowing continue to influence how we interact with technology in modernity through the persistence of those forms in our law, art, and literature, as well as the technology itself in some cases. As Kennedy observes, medievalists doing media or science and technology studies offer an alternative and useful perspective:

[M]y method reads the new against the grain of the past more thoroughly than some others because I employ [geologic analogy] as a medievalist, a twenty-first century scholar at the bottom of the trench, looking up and out at the strata, rather than down and in as do modernists practicing media archaeology. Medievalists develop nuanced pictures of the premodern world and desire to reveal connections between that world and the modern, practices that fight the romanticizing tendency in media archaeology. Medievalists grapple expertly with the difficulties (even impossibilities) inherent in attempting a warts-and-all recreation of ancient culture. (5)

Medieval Hackers and Medieval Robots are meticulously researched books, yet they remain accessible to interdisciplinary audiences. Kennedy and Truitt both provide nearly all quotations of primary source material in translation, and offer helpful discussion of different generic forms for the non-medievalist. If their scholarship lacks any of the granularity and depth of historical field that a specialist audience in medieval studies in particular might expect, that is because these two authors strike an elegant balance between grounding their work in the documentary and material record and forging connections between disciplines and sub-fields. A particular strength of Truitt's work is the integration of substantial visual as well as textual evidence drawn from the primary sources.

Even as they replace the flat Dark Ages caricature with a complex, three-dimensional diorama, however, in both cases the description of forms of the past using terms from the present ("hackers" and "robots") risks collapsing one into the other. Very early in the introduction to Medieval Robots, Truitt shifts away from “robots” to “automata” as a name for the “self-moving or self-sustaining manufactured objects” that “mimicked natural forms” (2), and captured the imagination of medieval authors and, much later, artisans. Kennedy, on the other hand, retains the “hackers” moniker throughout, in order to make a point about the continuity of the commons and its centrality to medieval and contemporary forms of cultural production. At times, while reading both books, I found myself wondering if the authors might have done better—as Caroline Walker Bynum does in Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women—to deliberately resist the flattening potential of analogy by eschewing modern terminology whenever possible, no matter how apt. For Kennedy and Truitt are doing intellectual work similar to Bynum's in that they open up the field by recovering the semiotic complexity of medieval epistemologies as a way to get beyond the limiting binaries and ideological assumptions that circumscribe our thinking about current cultural forms. Just as our modern understanding of “anorexia” fails to capture and potentially misrepresents the various ways in which medieval women related to their religious, economic, and political contexts through their bodies and food consumption, so our notions of “hacker” and “robot” fall short as descriptors of medieval phenomena.

Nonetheless, by deliberately embracing anachronism in their terminology, Kennedy and Truitt more clearly announce the immediate relevance of their projects beyond medieval studies. Further, the juxtaposition enacted in both titles between modern technology and the qualifier “medieval” insists on difference, even as it leverages analogy. I did often question whether the implicit analogy between pre-modern and postmodern “hackers” or “robots” or “automatons” was actually useful. To prompt such a reaction, however, may have been precisely what Kennedy and Truitt intended.

Robin Wharton

Georgia State University