[Book Review] ‘Celtic Weird: Tales of Wicked Folklore and Dark Mythology’

Books & Literature

Nov 8

This review originally appeared in Dead Reckonings and has been reprinted with the permission of the author.

One of the challenges with tackling a collection of Celtic traditions and folklore is that the word, and the world associated with that word, is far broader than might be first imagined. At their height, the various Celtic peoples covered vast swaths of Western and Central Europe yet they were linked largely by speaking an intermingled family of languages rather than any ethnic or cultural ties. Even the modern Celtic nations, which sweep down the west coast of the British Isles and onto the Breton Peninsula, share a group of interrelated languages and distrust of their oft-invasive neighbors far more than any fraternal solidarity. The Celtic tradition of storytelling, shared characters and plots rising and falling depending on the teller’s whim, is more akin to a churning cauldron of narrative than a formal, indexed (some may say less exciting) library. And all this before we’ve even tackled what we mean by Weird…

In his introduction to this anthology, editor Johnny Mains manages to both acknowledge and wave away this challenge by stating, not incorrectly, that “Celtic myths and folklore have always been extremely weird.” This is evidenced by the eerie characters of Celtic tales and their capricious personalities as much as it is by the way those tales ooze and flow between different traditions; similar nations, with the raging sea on one hand and an oppressive neighbor on the other, tend to have similar concerns, after all. Such an approach allows Mains to wield a fairly broad brush that wanders across almost two centuries of storytelling and accepts tales about the Celtic nations (Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany) as well as entries written by natives of those lands. While this may upset purists, I feel it gives a more holistic view of places where—and I speak as an adopted resident of Scotland and a one-time lurker on the Welsh-English threshold—the concept of outsiderdom is more rigidly enforced but also much more fluid than elsewhere.

Robert Aickman’s “The Fetch” is a prime example of what Mains calls these “welcome interlopers.” The story’s soul itself is slight—the narrator’s family are haunted by the carlin, or hag, of Scottish myth whose appearance predicts (perhaps causes) the untimely death of loved ones—but it is Aickman’s “deeply uncanny” writing, as Mains puts it, that lifts the narrative into something much more unsettling. Brodick Leith, Aickman’s narrator, is pushed and pulled by the carlin’s ebbs and flows; between bustling London and dreary Scotland, between the women he loves and the “wraith” of a father he avoids. Aickman works at our sympathies as Leith, unexpectedly, finds a happiness which, equally unexpectedly, falls through his increasingly listless fingers. Yet, through the story, the single common factor of the carlin’s appearances is Leith himself. He glimpses her in the distance or, chillingly, hovering outside upper-floor windows. Aickman, always adding layer after layer, makes us wonder whether the carlin exists to bring death to Brodick’s family or to shield him from a life he finds too difficult.

This brush with death, and the confusion as to whether it is willing or not, reappears in “Shepherd, Show Me…” by Rosalind Wade. Set largely on the grounds of a house known as Lancevearn—one of the type that crouches at the end of the long, winding roads which snake across Cornwall—Wade’s tale tells us of an unwilling glimpse into the strange ways in which people fall into grief, a grief which is mentioned as little in the narrative as it would be in the characters’ strait-laced lives. An oblivious husband, sinister interlopers, a weird link between the present and the past. These are fine but not unusual elements for a chilling tale but what is unusual, and all the more unsettling because of it, is that Wade’s unnamed narrator and unwilling investigator suddenly understands what is happening almost as we, the readers, reach the same conclusion. She stands on a lonely cliff-path “with the wisps of grey mist clinging to the vegetation and the leaden sky above” and terrifies herself with her own realization, the cliff’s crumbling edge only adding to the vertigo that blurs character and reader.

The absolute gem of this anthology, however, has to be “The Green Grave and the Black Grave” by the American-born Irish writer Mary Lavin. To call this a story is to do Lavin’s work a huge disservice; it sits somewhere in a nebulous realm between poem and dream with the sing-song cadences of two Irish fishermen, a father and son who know each other’s ways intimately, transformed into a ritual chant, a hymn to death and sorrow and loss and being lost oneself. Lavin’s choice of words, flowing and fickle, tells us more about the sea—a sea to whom “life or death, it was all one thing in the end”—than any description ever could. We learn how deeply the sea has soaked into the being, into the soul, of these island people by the crests and hollows of their words, by their philosophy as solid as ocean waves. We learn the litany of those men—other fathers, other sons—who are caught “by the green sea grasses and the green sea reeds and the winding stems of the green sea daffodils” as their wives lament their loss “and it would be hard to know by their keening whether it was for their own men or the men of their neighbours they were keening.” “The Green Grave and the Black Grave” is beautiful and bleak and haunting and horrible and deeply, deeply sad in a way only reading it could make you understand.

As with every collection, however, not every tale held here landed as well with me. “The Knight of the Blood-Red Plume” employs a tiring faux-medievalism, replete with sighing maidens and pensive knights, which starts to grate long before its twist is eventually revealed. Edith Wharton’s “Kerfol” depicts a bleak and depressing misogyny which, while realistic and deftly portrayed, saps at the quiet eeriness of its genuinely unique opening scenes. Yet these are a mere couple of tales in a book that falls open far more often on tales I genuinely enjoyed: “Mermaid Beach” and its one-two jab of an ending; the oneiric journey of “The Butterfly’s Wedding”; Eleanor Scott’s out-weirding of M.R. James on the haunted Breton shores of “Celui-Là.” No doubt other readers, too, will prefer some rather than others, as is natural in such a wide-ranging anthology.

I can’t end this review, though, without a mention of Celtic Weird as a quite beautiful thing-in-itself. Its green and gold-embossed cover, with Celtic knot-work writhing and leering from sea to sky, is matched in quality by the finger-feel of the paper. It’s simply a lovely book to hold and browse through, as I no doubt repeatedly shall. An excellent work, created with the enthusiasm and skill we’ve come to expect.

Article written by Dan Pietersen

Daniel Pietersen is the editor of I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales of R. Murray Gilchrist, part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. He is a recurring guest lecturer for “The Last Tuesday Society” and the “Romancing the Gothic” project, where he produces an ongoing series on Haunted Houses and related topics. He has also contributed criticism and reviews to publications like Dead Reckonings, Revenant and Horror Homeroom. Daniel lives in a very old house in a very old town and is slowly becoming very old himself. He occasionally appears on social media as @pietersender.