In this book, Jeremy Harte invites us to look past our modern preconceptions concerning the believability of medieval fairy encounters, and past the penmanship of the Latin scholars who often recorded them, to consider accounts of the supernatural as representative of real-world experience. In doing so, he highlights the close relationship between medieval society, landscape, and the otherworldly. Drawing on material from a wide range of spiritual and secular literary sources, as well as a broad survey of English place-names with supernatural inferences, Harte provides an extensive body of evidence in support of this goal.
One noteworthy quality of this work is the tone that Harte adopts throughout. The book contributes effectively to the scholarship of popular belief around fairy encounters, but it also reads like a trade publication. The extensive body of scholarship that supports Harte’s argument is represented in the endnotes but excluded from the main body of the work to allow for a more direct focus on past experience rather than present interpretation. Likewise, Harte’s approach to citing primary source material is noticeably informal. Rather than quoting directly, Harte often adopts a “running paraphrase” (viii). Where translation has been included, he has chosen to do so in “something like a vernacular voice.” Given the weight of evidence that this book touches on, the decision to approach material in this way has contributed significantly to the concision and readability of the work. It has also resulted in a book full of entertaining (and sometimes enjoyably grotesque) accounts of medieval fairy encounters, told in a playful tone that attempts to replicate something approximating a vernacular voice.
The book is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on “People” or, more specifically, their interactions with the supernatural and the various forms that these encounters can take. In chapter one, Harte identifies certain contextual details observed in records of fairy encounters. These include the social status of the encountered individual, the intent of the supernatural entity, the location of the encounter, the story’s relationship to orthodox belief, and the state of wakefulness of the encountered person. In Chapter two, these encounters are broken down by “genre,” focusing in turn on hagiography, miracles, exempla, charms, chronicles, and wonder stories. Here, the question of literary convention is at the forefront. To what extent can real-world experience be extrapolated from the motif-laden literatures that they frequently appear in? In the third chapter, the final section in Part I, Harte addresses the different forms that supernatural entities might adopt, covering gender, size, colour, animal form, and the ability to shapeshift.
Harte introduces a range of evidence across all three chapters, including stories that appear regularly in medieval fairy scholarship--the famous account of the Green Children of Woolpit, Walter Map’s story of King Hurla--as well as lesser-known cases. Part I as a whole raises important concerns regarding the limitations of Harte’s approach, particularly in the acknowledgement that much of the evidence for supernatural encounters has been mediated through third-party clerical voices. For instance, fairy encounters tend to be harmful, but this is in part because dangerous fairies (as opposed to benevolent fairies) are more often recorded in ecclesiastical or devotional sources. While this certainly limits the ability of the book to truly uncover stories of the supernatural told by everyday people, Harte navigates this difficulty well by drawing attention to where sources diverge from orthodox tradition. By highlighting irregularities in the record that must surely stem from public practice and belief rather than scripture and a process of translatio studii, he presents a convincing body of evidence for the diverse range of experiences that constitute an encounter with the supernatural.
Part II contains just one chapter, on “Haunted Landscapes,” but it constitutes by far the largest section of the book. In this chapter, Harte lists examples of medieval English place-names that contain supernatural qualifiers, focusing on what this evidence can tell us about the relationship between landscape and fairy encounters. The chapter accounts for the regularity with which certain supernatural qualifiers (ælf, pūca, þyrs, bugge, etc.) appear in place-names across England, as well as the different geographical contexts in which we find these qualifiers appearing. Harte groups examples based on location, dividing the chapter into sections that link place-names to arable land, roads, marshes and mires, pools and streams, valleys, pits and hollows, wells, and hills and mounds. As in Part I, Harte raises concerns about the reliability of evidence in this section, particularly when it comes to dating the earliest attestations for much of the evidence listed here. Among the nine hundred forms recorded in this book, only four hundred antedate 1550. The grammatical constructions of many later records suggest that they derive from an earlier time, but their validity as evidence relies in large part on their relation to the four hundred sources that can be dated to the medieval period. As Harte notes, there is also a concern when it comes to our ability to unravel this evidence. Without a surviving record, Harte is only able to interpret the origin of supernatural place-names based on the accumulated evidence presented in both parts of this book. Thankfully, this is a task that he handles well. Part II represents a significant contribution to scholarship on medieval fairy belief and a valuable resource for further study on the relationship between landscape and the supernatural. Of particular note is the emphasis that Harte places on proximity to civilisation for many of these attestations. The weight of evidence provided here suggests that, contrary to a modern, post-romantic view of the supernatural, these encounters did not have to take place in far flung wildernesses; they might just as readily occur at the edge of a field boundary or on a road close to town.
The value of Part II is further enhanced by the inclusion of a corpus of “Elfin Place-Names,” which forms part of the supplementary material featured toward the end of the text. Here, all nine hundred forms are included, listed alphabetically in order of county and sorted according to qualifier and then place. The corpus represents a significant undertaking in itself, compiling evidence from a range of different sources “from the eighth century to the publication of large-scale Ordnance Survey maps” (74). In comparison to the rest of the book, the evidence provided here is more obviously presented with a scholarly audience in mind. Along with Part II, this will doubtless prove a useful resource for future study in this field.
Harte succeeds in presenting an argument that looks beyond modern preconceptions and the limitations of the written record to uncover something approximating the lived experiences of individuals encountering the supernatural in medieval England. The weight of evidence here is substantial, and Harte’s approach is informative and engaging. While the difficulties posed by this approach are never sidelined, Harte is able to put forward a convincing argument that showcases fairy encounters in all their variety and complexity. There is plenty to value here for scholars of varying expertise, including folklore and popular belief, literary convention and the supernatural, medieval ecocriticism, spatial humanities, and philology.