Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape

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My guest for this episode is folklorist and author Jeremy Harte, who joined me to talk about his new book Cloven Country: The Devil in the English Landscape.

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape - Goodreads

Popular tales, Harte suggests, might imply something off about the conjurer-parson, but certainly there are tales of these same individuals advising and aiding Cornish wrestlers in their very physical confrontations with the Devil – providing prayers, papers and materials to enable victory over him. There's a spectrum to the stories, though. While most have a relatively happy ending, some are chilling, even as we know better. Scared yet? Get a dog: there was a long-standing tradition that a spayed bitch kept in the house would ward off ghosts and other presences of the night. Because she was a female and yet could not bear pups, she was a living contradiction, a little uncanny, however loyal she might be--and so a natural guardian for boundaries between one world and another.But the Devil is a frequent, if not constant, presence. He's the one who tells me to hurry, that I could save time by pulling my sweatshirt off as I'm running up the stairs, and I hear him chortle as I rearrange my nose. He says things like Have another drink and Nobody's watching and Do it! Do it! Do it! That's the Devil as stinker, but the Devil rides a spectrum. The Rolling Stones knew he popped up at big events, always getting Man to do his dirty work. After all, it was you and me. Even now, you can't see him sitting behind Putin, but he's there. There's also the Faustian Devil, when Man signs away his soul. That's as dark as life gets. Come for the telling of folktales; stay for the workings of folklore. Cloven Country is testament to Harte's deep personal and learned knowledge of the folklore of England. He’s seemingly read everything and been everywhere – and given the book is illustrated from his collection, clearly also bought the postcard. His writing style is wry and frequently aphoristic. Harte is one of Britain's most eminent folklorists."

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape|Paperback Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape|Paperback

Royal Mail industrial action taking place in 2023 may have an impact on delivery times to all destinations both within the UK and internationally. These delays are out of our control.By 1700, Harte argues, landscape stories were being reworked to include the Devil to “replace older heroes” as “part of a structured forgetting” (p. 52f.). Sometimes the process becomes circular. An invented use of the Devil - whether early modern or later romantic - becomes so embedded in a community that a later folklorist hears the tale, ascribes it to a canon and assumes a great past (though folklorists have got wise to this now).