Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites (Tales of the Weird, Band 44) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 071235459X ISBN 13: 9780712354592

Verlag: British Library Publishing, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

There was no sleep for him that night; he fancied he had seen the stone – which, as you know, was a couple of fields away – as large as life, as if it were on watch outside his window. 
 
The standing stones, stone circles, dolmens and burial sites of the British Isles still resonate with mystery of their primeval origins, enthralling our collective consciousness to this day. Rising up in the field of weird fiction, ancient stones and the rituals and dark forces they once witnessed have inspired a wicked branch of the genre by writers devoted to their eerie potential. 
 
Gathered in tribute to these relics of a lost age – and their pagan legacy of blood – are fifteen stories of haunted henges, Druidic vengeance and solid rock alive with bloodlust, by authors including Algernon Blackwood, Lisa Tuttle, Arthur Machen and Nigel Kneale.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katy Soar is a Senior Lecturer in Classical Archaeology at the University of Winchester. Her research interests are Greek archaeology, the resonance of archaeology in culture and the history and reception of archaeology itself. She is a frequent contributor to Hellebore magazine, and co-edited the anthology Strange Relics, published by Handheld Press in 2022.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Assembled here in tribute to these relics of a lost age are accounts of terrifying spirits haunting Stonehenge itself, stories of awful fates for those who impose modernity on the sacred sites and grim tales in which unwitting trespassers into the eternal rites of pagan worship find themselves part of an enduring legacy of blood.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

INTRODUCTION

The first lines of “The Ruin”, an Old English poem of the tenth century CE, describe old stones as “Wrætlic”. Usually translated as “wondrous”, Peter Ackroyd has read the line as “wraith-like”: “wraith-like is this native stone”. While the poem itself discusses the masonry of a crumbling Roman town, the phrase itself is certainly apt for thinking about the megalithic monuments that cover the British Isles. These native stones—stone circles, stone rows, standing stones (or menhirs), and dolmens—are indeed wraith-like, spectral, haunted. Standing for thousands of years within the landscape, their physical presence is evocative but their original purpose is tantalisingly vague. With no written records to inform us as to how and why they were initially built, they become a nexus for stories. And as the examples in this collection show, those stories are—more frequently than not—wraith-like.   
   The stories in this collection reflect many of the popular beliefs and narratives that developed around these stones over the centuries, both about their origin and their purpose. The first piece, an excerpt from the novella Ringstones by Sarban, sets up some of these ideas, neatly encapsulating the divide between “academic” and “popular” opinion—were stone circles temples for sun worship, or were they built by magical beings? The extract, however, ends with an ambiguous statement which highlights the ongoing mysterious nature of these sites.
   Many various historical civilisations and groups were considered as their constructors: Phoenicians, Romans, Danes, Saxons, Egyptians, Chaldeans, even native Americans. But from the seventeenth century in particular, the favoured architects of these monuments were the Druids. Antiquarians such as Hector Boecce, John Aubrey and William Stukeley made the druidical connection to stone monuments, particularly Stonehenge, explicit. Druids were perfect for stone circles—like the stones themselves, they were ambiguous and mysterious, and were considered both as mystical philosopher priests who built stone circles as solar or astronomical temples and as barbarous savages who practised human sacrifices at the sites in honour of their bloodthirsty gods, rendering these sites places of both wonder and horror. While the connection between Druids and stone monuments dissipated within academic circles with advances in archaeological knowledge from the mid nineteenth century, the idea never really faded from the popular imagination.
   Developing alongside the more academic debate regarding the originators of these stone monuments were folkloric and popular traditions regarding their development and purpose. These motifs and themes often reflect (contemporary) fears, tensions or beliefs, to which these stones act as a kind of nexus. Magical, folkloric creatures were often associated with these sites; giants, fairies, witches, and the devil have all been connected to megaliths and stone circles.
   Given the colossal nature of many of the monuments, it is unsurprising that giants were often considered to be behind their construction. In 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae described how Merlin created Stonehenge by moving the Giants’ Ring from Mount Killaraus in Ireland to Salisbury Plain—showing that the fantastical and magical have long been associated with these stones and their construction. He also attributed its original construction in Ireland to giants who brought the stones from Africa to Mount Killaraus. This colossal origin is reflected in the name Geoffrey gave to the structure—the Giant’s Dance.
   Fairies have been associated with barrows since the twelfth century, but some megaliths also have fae connections: stone circles and standing stones were thought to mark the entrance to their realm. For example, the King Stone from the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire is said to mark the entrance to the fairy kingdom beneath the circle. The devil has made a more recent appearance. By the mid eighteenth century, Stukeley reports that the stones in the northern inner circle of Avebury (the Cove) were known as the Devil’s Brand-Irons, and that Stonehenge’s Heel Stone was created when “the devil threw it at the builders”. Many of these traditions which associated megalithic monuments with the devil were originally associated with giants, and only latterly with Old Nick himself, showing how associations change depending on historical and social contexts. And where the devil goes, so too do witches. Stone circles were thought to be sites where witches would meet to practise their infernal rites. Isobel Gowdie, a seventeenth-century Scottish woman accused of witchcraft, noted in her confession that her and other witches would shoot elf-arrows at “the standing-stanes” at Auldern, where the devil would “sit on a blak kist”, presumably the remains of the prehistoric ring-cairn that was once in the centre of the four stones.
   These often-infernal associations could also be used as cautionary tales. The motif of petrification usually viewed stones as the remains of trespassers turned to stone for their digressions, particularly against God and the sabbath. For example, the stones of the Callanish circle in the Outer Hebrides were the petrified bodies of giants who had refused to accept Christianity, while the Nine Ladies in Derbyshire are nine women and a fiddle player who were turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday. This was a particularly prominent folk idea during the seventeenth century, and may in part have been inspired by a campaign against Sunday games and dances which began under Elizabeth I. But this punishment wasn’t just related to Christianity: a petrified witch stands at the centre of Mitchell’s Fold Stone circle, turned into such for milking a magical cow dry, the surrounding stones set up to fence her in.
   The stones were also thought to have a degree of agency. To tamper with or damage these stones was to court ill luck. In 1861 J. T. Blight, a Cornish archaeological artist, reported that the man responsible for pulling down a cromlech near Manyon in Cornwall began to suffer from misfortunes, such as his cattle dying and his crops failing. Many stones are also thought to be able to move by themselves, to turn round, turn over, or dance. Visiting water also seems to be a common theme: Maen Ceti, a Neolithic chambered cairn in West Glamorgan, is said to rise and go to the sea to bathe at Midsummer Eve and All-Hallow’s Eve.
   The stories in this volume range from the 1890s to 2018 and encompass many of these druidical ideas in a variety of forms, often adding a contemporary or individual twist to the traditional motifs. The idea that stone circles and megaliths were built by pagan, often Druid, priests and used for sacrificial rites appears in a number of these stories; sometimes these practices are inadvertently resurrected in the contemporary world, as in the stories by E. F. Benson and Jasper John, or, as those by H. R. Wakefield and Algernon Blackwood show, the protagonist realises too late that the practices never actually ended, or are destined to be played out forever. These ideas about their construction also combine with the folkloric traditions regarding giants, witches and the devil, as in the tales from Stuart Strauss and Frederick Cowles. Academic theory also sought to explain away some of the more magical beliefs regarding ancient sites; later nineteenth-century ideas about fairies often considered them to be an earlier race of “primitive human” who had survived into the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: British Library Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 071235459X
• ISBN 13: 9780712354592
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 238
• Herausgeber: Soar Katy
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Terminal Video; n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com; ; Via Bruno Buozzi, 24/26,; Granarolo dell'Emilia BO,; Italien