Folklore Tapes

Tuesday, 24 September 2013

Theo Brown and the Folklore of Dartmoor.

“But if you decide in middle-life to leave the city and go to live alone at the heart of the moor - because you love it and cannot resist its spell - you soon find that in all those years you have learned little about the essential moor. What has been happening is that she has learned the essentials about you, and has fixed her grappling-irons upon you!”

- Anonymous note, found in the Theo Brown Archive papers.

Theodora Brown (1914 - 1993) was a noted folklorist and wood engraver from Devon, England. An honorary fellow at Exeter University, she wrote extensively for the Folklore Society Journal and published several monographs, of which the most celebrated are Tales of a Dartmoor Village: Some Premilinary Notes on the Folklore of Postbridge and The Fate of the Dead: A Study in Folk Eschatology in the West Country After the Reformation. Her work was wide-ranging in its focus, taking in black dogs, white witches, riddles and folk-medicine, but never strayed far from her home county.

In childhood a young Theo Brown took family holidays around Dartmoor in her parents’ horse-drawn caravan ‘The Loiterer’. The experience was clearly an inspirational one, as Brown returned to Dartmoor frequently through her work and, after the second world war, spent time living itinerantly in a caravan, gathering local lore or traveling to folkloric sites. Brown was an enigmatic character, gifted with a lively sense of humour, a humble dedication to her pursuits, and an insuppressible creative flair. Her exquisite woodcut images, a skill honed during studies at the Westminister School of Art, adorn many of the title pages to her articles and books, whilst her work is in general imaginative and open.

On 19 September 2013, Folklore Tapes founders David Chatton Barker and Ian Humberstone travelled to the Theo Brown Archive at Exeter University to begin research on the most expansive and fully-realised project to date: Theo Brown and the Folklore of Dartmoor. With Theo Brown acting as guide, this multi-disciplinary project will unpick the folklore of seven villages on the moor, rekindling their lore through creative and exploratory recontextualisation. The project will culminate in the production of a box-set edition of seven-inch records, accompanied by a piece of psychic-cinematography, shot on location on the moors, as well as photographs, drawings, and reproductions of Theo Brown’s own ‘lost’ woodcut images recovered from the archive.

Over the next few months this blog will be filled by our work preparing this exciting project. Theo Brown is a true inspiration, and Folklore Tapes owes its existence to her committed endeavours. We hope to honour her memory by this work.

Top picture from Sabine Baring-Gould A Book of Dartmoor. Picture of young Theo Brown from Dorothy and Theo Brown Family holidays Around Dartmoor: From the Logbook of the Loiterer.

Monday, 13 May 2013

An Avian Taxonomy

The magpies call, outside the window: a death rattle inside the skull.

An emissary of death even in avian lore, let alone human. If, as has been reckoned, magpies have the capacity for grief- therefore perhaps the capacity for ritual- might they also possess yet other powers? Enact rites our occluded minds fail to comprehend?

Let alone human. Let alone, human. Let us enter the minds of mags, crows, ‘daws. Transpierce their skulls so their deaths, lives and secrets may rattle the louder inside our own.

The cackle of the jackdaw, betraying runes of rut so unseemly a libertine would blush. With no moral code to transgress, the ‘daw’s perversity knows no bounds. Would you like to know more? This is neither the time nor the place. Oh, just this tidbit then: there is a single erogenous feather about the male ‘daw’s nether quarters. Locating this feather, the female plucks and the male, sprouting female organs, seeds itself purely for pleasure.

By the by. A green-eyed lady, proprietor of a shop brimming over only with woollen things, kept a ‘daw about her person. By day it would perch upon her shoulder, whispering its filthy secrets. Her jumpers a mess of dandruff and dejecta, she would let it its freedom at night, only for it to return ever-faithful in the morning. The green-eyed lady wondered sometimes as to the ‘daw’s twilit whereabouts. She need have feared. Taking woollens from her shop, the jackdaw had secreted these near the scenes of murders far and wide across the land. One day, there was a knock at the green-eyed ladies door...

Crows, shape-shifters all...From egghatch they lay claim to a preternatural grasp of language. Not only of its own kind, nor solely its avian fellows, but of every species it espies. In turn, this gift allows the crow, through incantation, to transmute at will. It thus passes unnoticed among our kind. Look about you: this or that person may be harbouring crow’s wings, and you will never know.

Seven’s the De’il his ane sel’: In the famine months, the magpies gather together in number. This is not, as is often supposed, a prospective meeting for marriage. Rather, it foretells an untimely ushering into the next life of one unfortunate among them. But not before a feast in their honour: the horror being for this unfortunate one, that he or she will be forced to feast upon themselves. The death rattle of magpies in unison: cruel, necrotic call into the hereafter.

Barum ware

Spring 2013