By Annabel Brodersen
Interweaving literature, art and history, Amy Jeffs’ Storyland (2021) and Wild (2022) reimagine medieval literature through the ethereal, elemental lens of folklore. Jeffs’ mythologies are guided by fire-embodying deities, forgotten peace-weavers and shape-shifting mortals, all grounded within the elusive British landscape: land that keeps secrets of exile and yearning close to its wild heart.
Storyland
Jeffs weaves into mythological tapestries with a striking voice, calling for a communion between humanity and nature, the medieval and the modern day. Mapping the legendary formation of England, Scotland and Wales from pre-history to the Norman Conquest, Jeffs’ Storyland is inspired by the history of Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, and Layamon’s Brut. It is also rooted in the mythological landscapes of Stonehenge, Tintagel, and the River Humber, Thames and Severn. Arthurian myth is re-embodied through the source material, as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Life of Merlin and The History of the Kings of Britain inform Jeffs’ chapters on ‘The Deception at Tintagel’ and ‘The Death of Merlin’. Jeffs reimagines the Norse legendary figures ‘Weland the Smith’ and Woden, inspired by Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People and The Poetic Edda. Integrating academic research with creative reinterpretation, Jeffs elevates the meaning of her writing through art.
Storyland opens with a mythological map of Britain inside the front cover, where medieval cartography positions the human protagonists in time and space. Legendary characters transcend their human mortality through their longevity in the mythological imagination while, like ethereal spirits, they are contained within landscapes which can still be visited today. Jeffs expands the creative mythologies with anecdotal commentary from her own visits to historic sites, supported by academic research. These commentaries actively encourage the reader to be present in the physical landscapes as well as the imaginative landscapes within the books. Focalising the importance of storytelling and human community in Storyland, Jeffs concludes:
‘Today we live in an age in which ash trees do not spring up from our walking sticks, threats to our existence cannot be buried in mountains, and we cannot escape on wings. But perhaps there is still a place for prophecy. Learning, debating and growing, we will tell each other stories into the night. Our lives will encircle the sun, setting and rising, setting and rising.’ (p. 335)
Wild
While Storyland is illustrated with intricate relief linocut prints, Jeffs experiments with original wood engravings in Wild to reflect the natural landscape and isolated human characters within them. Carving lino-cut prints and wood engravings with her hands, Jeffs appreciates that the physical production of art and literature is a human labour of love.
In Wild, Jeffs expands her creative scope to imagine stories surrounding medieval archaeological artefacts, specifically the Franks Casket and the Sutton Hoo ship burial. Imagining the journey of the Franks Casket from its whale-bone origins to the hands of its human owner, ‘The Mountain on my Back’ is an especially poignant interpretation. Here, the whale-voiced casket speaks to its owner Etheldreda in a dream, calling to return to the ‘abyss’ of the sea. (p. 92) Jeffs references the Old English Exeter Book poem ‘The Whale’ as inspiration for the reinterpretation. I am reminded of ‘The Dream of the Rood’, where the cross of the Christian crucifixion speaks of its transformation from tree to crucifix, through the combined medieval dream vision structure and the prosopopoeia of an object speaking. Jeffs weaves this structural form into the short story with creative originality and stylistic flare, while centring the importance of the casket as the key to Etheldreda’s freedom.
Jeffs’ ‘The Lament of Hos’ is a striking reimagining of ‘The Wife’s Lament’: a moving, stark condemnation of the violence enacted against the female speaker before her isolation. Inspired by the Old English elegy, the Franks Casket and ‘the presence of victims of execution in prehistoric barrows’ (from research by Sarah Semple and Andrew Reynolds, p. 38), Jeffs imagines the female speaker as a haunting presence, betrayed by her lover and condemned to burial in a barrow. This interpretation uses the theory that the ‘eorðscræfe’ (l. 28) is a grave, rather than an earthen cave for the living. Jeffs’ narrative shifts from the female speaker enclosed in the barrow, to moving into a landscape where she is reminded of her lover and the violence enacted towards her, and ultimately ends with her curse that demands justice.
Structured as a compilation rather than a chronology, Wild weaves mythological fragments into the form of a medieval manuscript: Jeffs’ lino-cut prints and wood engravings are scribal illustrations which elevate the overall reading experience. Jeffs’ creative reinterpretations introduce medieval literature (beyond the apparent canon of Beowulf or Chaucer) to public audiences, while providing a new critical interpretation of connections between medieval texts and artefacts for academic audiences. In her ‘Prologue’ to Wild, Jeffs reveals her wide-reaching intended audience:
‘I hope the stories’ accessibility will encourage the greatest number of readers towards the wonders of the primary sources, while keeping those sources alive in our culture by means of creative reinterpretation’ (p. 4).
Reimagining medieval literature preserves these mythologies in the public imagination, so that they can spark the imagination of readers for years to come.
To be inspired by medieval mythologies, read Wild and Storyland at the English Faculty Library! Both novels are available to borrow here:
book! Okay, that’s a bit reductionist perhaps, as Art of the Grimoire is definitely a work of academic rigour. However, it is made accessible (and aesthetic) through the use of full-colour pictures with bitesize, but no less-detailed, accompanying explanations. Owen Davies takes you across time, geography, and genre with his clever use of material; this is a great introduction the magic across history or a refresher if you’re simply tired of reading (The horror! The horror!) and want something easier to digest. From yokai to the Necronomicon and even Coptic magic, this is a delight to the senses – get some knowledge whilst feeding the aesthete within you.
Clocking in at over 700 pages, this may not be the lightest read but it certainly is worth it. Set in a post-climate change world (sounds familiar), a haze has settled across the town of Praiseworthy, Australia, bringing with it the reckoning of a myriad of intergenerational traumas affecting the Aboriginal inhabitants of the community and Australia at large. Each character stands not only on their own, but also as metaphors to critique and satirise the various ways in which society refuses to acknowledge the Aboriginal people as the original custodians of the land. Marrying together personal and historical, oral tradition and prose, this is a brilliant piece of mythic realism that’s not to be missed if you’re interested in the ongoing settler-colonialism within Australia, or ecocriticism in general.
but if not then here’s the tea. Margery was the brains behind The Booke of Margery Kempe written in the 1430s, widely considered to be the first autobiography, which details her pilgrimages and encounters with the divine throughout her life. Julian is a similarly religious figure from the same time period, although she chose to express her faith by devoting herself to life as an anchoress after she received visions from God – becoming her Revelations of Divine Love. The two met in real life according the Margery, with her seeking council from Julian, an encounter that this book hinges on. Rather than dismissing their divine visions as mental illness, MacKenzie treats them with compassion and tells us their stories in their own words, providing insight into the treatment of female mystics during the period in an accessible form.
time it’s coming from Australia, with thanks to Evelyn Araluen (Bundjalung). Her debut collection (and what a debut!) features a mix of stanzaic poetry, free verse, and prose, tackling everything from decolonisaton, to Australiana, and even the pandemic. Rather than divorcing herself from some of these difficult to navigate situations, Araluen acknowledges her own inevitable entanglement in them resulting in a deeply personal collection. Some highlights to get you started include: ‘The Inevitable Pandemic Poem’, ‘Bad Taxidermy’, and ‘The Trope Speaks’. There is grief and rage laced into the poems, but also moments of sentimentality and affection, and through it all a deep love for her community.
again to magic and witchcraft. True to his word, Hutton doesn’t just focus on Europe and the witch trials that took place there, instead, he takes us on a detailed ethnographic survey all the way back to Mesopotamia and its demonology, to Coptic magic (for the second time!), finishing on Britain and its Celtic folklore as well. This is a thorough cross-cultural examination of witchcraft, and perhaps not for the faint-hearted, however it is an undeniably interesting area and a great counterpart to Art of the Grimoire if that interested you as well.
definitely been worth the wait. Set primarily during the 18th century trial of Roger Tichborne (or a butcher from Wapping depending on who you ask), we follow Eliza Touchet, cousin to then-famous novelist William Ainsworth as she grapples with their past and her future. Two thirds through, the narrator switches to Bogle, Roger Tichborne’s page and supporter – a black man born to enslaved people in Jamaica. Smith explores the hypocrisy of the characters, and no one is spared – Eliza is an abolitionist, but her annuity is paid through her husband’s money made from slavery; Bogle wonders if the respectability he has had to change himself for makes him a fraud. An immersive read, and one that will get you thinking.
collection of short stories on hauntings. She doesn’t simply cover your classic haunted houses (although you will certainly find some in there), additionally, she looks to how new technology can equally be a hotbed for ghostly activity and what this might look like. Interspersed between the short stories are various anecdotes personal to Winterson, considering how she might haunt once she dies, her own experiences with ghosts, and how the future of hauntings might look. A great spooky selection, which simultaneously deals with grief and healing – if you’re a fan of works by M.R. James and his ilk then it’s not to be missed.
city) was never abandoned, and instead became a flourishing (if gritty) city run by Takouma (what Native Americans are called in the novel). Set in the 1920s, a murder has been committed and it is up to our protagonist, Joe Barrow, to solve it before rioting from the Ku Klux Klan ruins the relative peace of Cahokia and tears the city apart. If you’re a fan of world-building, then you might enjoy this novel, particularly as it comes equipped with two maps of Cahokia to help visualise Barrow and his colleagues’ journey.
permeates the narrative. The book follows the friendship of Fabienne and Agnès, from their childhood living in post-World War II France into adulthood, as narrated by Agnès herself. The two form something of a partnership: Fabienne creates fantastical, disturbing stories which she tells Agnès to write down, and eventually publish. Agnès becomes the face for the book upon Fabienne’s insistence and leaves Fabienne behind – physically at least. One cannot survive without the other, this is a story of friendship, obsession, and exploitation.