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20 November 2020 15:14![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I've found some really good resources on like, Morris, folk, English Country Dance and so forth - but I'm not sure whether, if, or how to incorporate them just yet.
A lot of what I'm pulling into Fencraft are responses to the land - Tolkien, Syd Barrett, Kenneth Grahame, David Rudkin, Richard Addams, and so forth. Not primary documents like, say, the Mabinogion itself - but people who are seeking the gods and the land and having some kind of ideosyncratic response to it. "pop culture animism".
One take on the Victorian folklorist revival of country practices:
This is one such a response, and perhaps one of the most influential in terms of Murray and folk horror. The idea that simple folk of the countryside have retained their ancient rituals. For sure, that idea was both inaccurate and underpinned by patronising imbalances of power, but that doesn't make it any less influential - or attractive. It's as valid a part of the landweird as any other writer.
(I cannot recommend Triumph of the Moon by Roland Hutton highly enough, on the dodgy history of these folklorists)
Another take:
This kind of trend distances people from spirituality. It's historicity for its own sake, the fetishisation of the old just because they are the old. It distances people from thinking this is a thing they can do in their jeans on the bus, focusing instead on a LARP of an imagined past; and although I like a bit of that, it can create distance as often as it creates immersion. Nothing worse than going to a pagan event where ecstatic dancing is on the menu, and you're in a community hall with six other people and there's no beer and it's dreadfully awkward.
And the imbalances of power (as Alan Moore puts it in a Hellbore issue, you can't be afraid of rural horror without - on some level - being afraid of rural people) persist whenever these ideas survive. We want people to come as they are, having an authentic response - rather than taking comfort in an imagined history.
I think a space built on fantasies of rural people is going to be inherently a little exclusionary to anyone who comes to a meet or a moot who lives in a grotty post-industrial village, and a barrier to them being able to speak their story of the land which is now and of equal power and importance to anything fanciful.
Besides - even though folk horror and traditional witchcraft was a "way in" for me, it's an increasingly small part of where I am now, and I worry its aesthetics are a distraction from keeping a faith alive and vital.
~*~
So I have a linklist, but have put this strand on pause for now, until I can think through the ethics and practicalities and, I guess, what I want to accomplish by any of it.
but what i have found out is if you look up sea shanties or folk songs on youtube, there will be some elderly bloke who doesn't own a ringlight who has filmed himself sat in his living room singing the song, and when you go to his channel you'll find out he's got 2000 videos and every one of them, is a different song, and he has learnt and filmed them all. It's not only useful, but beautiful too.
A lot of what I'm pulling into Fencraft are responses to the land - Tolkien, Syd Barrett, Kenneth Grahame, David Rudkin, Richard Addams, and so forth. Not primary documents like, say, the Mabinogion itself - but people who are seeking the gods and the land and having some kind of ideosyncratic response to it. "pop culture animism".
One take on the Victorian folklorist revival of country practices:
This is one such a response, and perhaps one of the most influential in terms of Murray and folk horror. The idea that simple folk of the countryside have retained their ancient rituals. For sure, that idea was both inaccurate and underpinned by patronising imbalances of power, but that doesn't make it any less influential - or attractive. It's as valid a part of the landweird as any other writer.
(I cannot recommend Triumph of the Moon by Roland Hutton highly enough, on the dodgy history of these folklorists)
Another take:
This kind of trend distances people from spirituality. It's historicity for its own sake, the fetishisation of the old just because they are the old. It distances people from thinking this is a thing they can do in their jeans on the bus, focusing instead on a LARP of an imagined past; and although I like a bit of that, it can create distance as often as it creates immersion. Nothing worse than going to a pagan event where ecstatic dancing is on the menu, and you're in a community hall with six other people and there's no beer and it's dreadfully awkward.
And the imbalances of power (as Alan Moore puts it in a Hellbore issue, you can't be afraid of rural horror without - on some level - being afraid of rural people) persist whenever these ideas survive. We want people to come as they are, having an authentic response - rather than taking comfort in an imagined history.
I think a space built on fantasies of rural people is going to be inherently a little exclusionary to anyone who comes to a meet or a moot who lives in a grotty post-industrial village, and a barrier to them being able to speak their story of the land which is now and of equal power and importance to anything fanciful.
Besides - even though folk horror and traditional witchcraft was a "way in" for me, it's an increasingly small part of where I am now, and I worry its aesthetics are a distraction from keeping a faith alive and vital.
~*~
So I have a linklist, but have put this strand on pause for now, until I can think through the ethics and practicalities and, I guess, what I want to accomplish by any of it.
but what i have found out is if you look up sea shanties or folk songs on youtube, there will be some elderly bloke who doesn't own a ringlight who has filmed himself sat in his living room singing the song, and when you go to his channel you'll find out he's got 2000 videos and every one of them, is a different song, and he has learnt and filmed them all. It's not only useful, but beautiful too.