IN 1613, Alice and John West were flogged and set in the pillory in London. The criminal pair had committed a string of frauds; among their victims were a Hammersmith couple who had paid them £120 as a gift for the fairy king and queen (in return for which they were supposed to receive hidden treasure), and a servant girl whose possessions they stole as she sat naked in a garden overnight, with a pot on her knee, having been convinced that the earth that it held would magically turn to gold.
The Wests were able to perpetuate their scams because at least some of the residents of 17th-century London believed in fairies and, above all, in the power of the Fairy Queen. Indeed, she was just one of the goddess-like figures who captured the imaginations of pre-modern Europeans, and who are the subject of Ronald Hutton’s Queens of the Wild.
This rigorous and deeply learned study (the author is a Professor at Bristol University, and the author of several well-regarded books on premodern paganism) offers in-depth studies of four deity-like figures: Mother Earth, the Fairy Queen, the Mistress of the Night, and the Cailleach.
alamyThe wizard Merlin and the fairy queen never met in literature, but do in this 19th-century painting by John Duncan, from the book under review
Besides tracing their history from ancient times to the present day, Hutton tells us about the folklorists who both uncovered these legends and shaped them, to the extent that the Cailleach and the Green Man (the latter is the subject of a substantial epilogue) are essentially 20th-century inventions. Indeed, many studies of these traditions seem to tell us more about the world in which the research was undertaken, and about the beliefs of their authors, than they do about the goddesses themselves.
Fortunately, Hutton does not fall into this trap: his book is rigorously researched, and his approach is unemotional. He firmly rejects the still-popular notions that such figures are evidence for an unbroken pagan tradition, and that popular paganism coexisted with official Christianity at least to the end of the Middle Ages, but has plenty of interesting things to say about the relationship between these “goddesses” and more orthodox religious beliefs and practices.
If the reader is left with many questions about the prevalence of such beliefs, and about their meaning to ordinary people — much of the evidence is literary, or derived from the writings of (and perhaps the imaginations of) disapproving churchmen — this is, nevertheless, an extremely thought-provoking study of a curious and much misunderstood set of beliefs.
Dr Katherine Harvey is Research Fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London.
Queens of the Wild: Pagan goddesses in Christian Europe: An investigation
Ronald Hutton
Yale £18.99
(978-0-300-26101-1)
Church Times Bookshop £17.09