Do you think it's the lack of a developed folk tradition that spurs the imaginations of British writers?

N.G.: We don't know! We can lie, though. We're writers.

S.C.: That's the theory I'm beginning to come up with.

N.G.: It gets really interesting when you start trying to look for English folk tales. You wind up in places like the Appalachians, reading the Jack stories. Except the Jack stories in the Appalachians have no magic. It's all gone. So you think, well, they were telling these stories in England and the king in them would have been a real king, not the rich man at the other end of the road. Reading any book of English folk tales, what you're mostly struck by is the grumblings of the people who in the 19th century went out on the road trying to collect them and discovered that all they had was bits of stuff that had come over from [the Brothers] Grimm or [Charles] Perrault that people had been reading and passing on.

S.C.: There's a bit more than that -- things like Black Annis and the Blue Hag -- but it's very localized. They're not quite tales.

N.G.: They don't turn into stories. They're lovely fragments. It's almost like England has to cope with something big that's been lost. Take Stonehenge: I get irritated when neopagans start talking about the ancient legends of Stonehenge and how far back they go. When I tell them that those legends mostly come from the 1850s, they get really upset. In "Remains of Gentilism and Judaism," which is John Aubrey's book, he went out and found every single thing he could and wrote it down -- everything that was commonly believed about Stonehenge, which was if you chip a rock off Stonehenge and put it in your well, it will keep toads away. That's it. That's everything John Aubrey was able to find in the 1640s.

Why is that?

N.G.: Dunno. But if you're a writer you definitely wind up trying to create stories out of it because it's the raw material of story.

S.C.: I think the stories were there. The Grimms worked quite early on, and I think the people who started collecting English folk tales came a good bit later.

N.G.: It's like squirrels. The gray squirrels came in and they were more efficient than the squirrels that were there before. Grimm's fairy tales, by the time they were honed and put out there, were incredibly efficient.

S.C.: That's true. They were published in Britain and they were read by children everywhere. Maybe they ate up everything that came before.

N.G.: You look at Shakespeare and "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and it's obviously drawing on a body of stuff that is common. We have bits of things, like the Robin Goodfellow song from the same time. It's from the same thing, from a bunch of stories, from a relationship that people had with fairies. You go into Katharine Briggs and you may discover that portunes were these incredibly small old men who ate frogs that they roasted in coals, but you don't really learn any more about them.

Then there's this strange identification, which is I think a particularly English thing, between the idea of faerie and the idea of the dead. Again, it's not the clear-cut thing you have in most countries. There is this weird idea that the land of faerie may be the land of the dead. Perhaps it's where the soul lives.

S.C.: There are stories about people who while walking stumble upon a gang of people dancing. At the point at which they would realize that these are fairies, they would recognize someone they knew who was dead or someone who had been thought to be dead. It could be either. It could be that a live person had been stolen away.

After I read Stephen Greenblatt's book on Shakespeare, "Will in the World," I was struck by the association of the north of England with Catholicism, this old, suppressed religion associated with mysteries and ritual, sometimes practiced secretly. There's a parallel to "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" with the north being associated with the Middle Ages and with magic. It seemed like only the latest iteration of the religious history of England, with one religion supplanting the other and driving it underground.

N.G.: That was occurring in England all the time. It's a very English thing. Everything occurs in layers. And also the old stuff gets pushed to the edges, the north and the west.

S.C.: Or to aristocratic families who are rich enough to stave off any awkward questions.

N.G.: You'd need a hole big enough to hide a few priests in.

S.C.: And whatever it was that had been suppressed would tend to get put on fairies. Somewhere, I think in Aubrey, they asked people what religion the fairies had. At that time England was all Protestant, and they assumed that the fairies were all following the old faith, whereas when England was Catholic, it was assumed they followed what came before that. They were always antiestablishment.

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