I’m pleased to see that Arthur Berry’s autobiography, A Three & Sevenpence Halfpenny Man, is now available as an ebook for the Kindle, at a reasonable £2.71.

Ah, at last we have a release date for one of the forthcoming big Tolkien biopic movies. One of them has to be good, we can hope, and respectful to the material.

“Fox Searchlight is releasing Tolkien in cinemas in the UK on 3rd May 2019. Tolkien explores the formative years of the orphaned author as he finds friendship, love and artistic inspiration among a group of fellow outcasts at school. This takes him into the outbreak of the First World War…”

The cast looks good, though the writers have a somewhat worrying leftist slant in their track-record.

Della Hooke on “Water and the Environment in the Anglo-Saxon World”. A talk to the Staffordshire Archaeological & Historical Society in Lichfield, 10th May 2019.

The Word of Teregor (1914) by Guy Ridley (1885-1947) is an early British fantasy novel of sentient trees. The trees converse in moots and are unfriendly to men. One of the trees is called Enteth.

“No one but a real lover of trees could write of them as Mr. Ridley has done.” — review in the Westminster Gazette. “A suggestive and original voice among the babel of modern literature” — review in The Daily Telegraph.

An obvious inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ents, circa 1938, you might think. Though I doubt that would be provable now — and anyway there are more obvious and earlier possibilities. Such as an aside in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (“Who can impress the forest, bid the tree | Unfix his earthbound root?” ‘impress’ = to strongarm a man into armed service in an Army). This might perhaps be Shakespeare’s nod to Taliesin’s magnificent poem “The Battle of the Trees” (Cad Goddeu), in which many types of trees are enchanted into a marching army of trees. Tolkien and his circle had surely found time to notice Taliesin by 1938 — though I imagine that Tolkien would have been professionally wary of seeming to endorse the authenticity of the late Welsh ‘bardic’ songs.

There’s also a prime example from Tolkien’s childhood, the “Attack of the trees” from the famous The Wizard of Oz, here depicted in 1900 by Denslow…

Anyway, the full novel is at the link above.

Some interesting snippets on local words and lore, found during my listing and summarising of all the contents of the North Staffordshire Field Club’s Annual Report and Transactions, 1897:

* The local name for a polecat was a “Fitchet, the last such being known locally… “about the year 1840, when one was caught in a trap at Wootton Park Farm, near Cheadle.” The fur thus being known as ‘fitch’.

* In Shropshire the word “breaking” alludes to the strange phenomena of the meres, namely that a flood of “minute bright green particles” in Autumn turns a lake or mere bright green. The term is a local one… “It is simply a colloquial expression, best known and used in Shropshire where Meres occur more frequently than in our County, and where the phenomenon is well known to the Mere-dwellers. It is also called “middling,” no doubt from a resemblance to the breaking of milk into curd and whey on the introduction of rennet. But the term “Breaking” is said to be derived from an analogous appearance in brewing, when fermentation takes place. … At certain times in each year, generally in autumn, the Shropshire Meres become turbid with these green particles, the water becomes unfit for domestic purposes, and it defies the powers of filtration”. The cause is the natural late-summer ‘flowering’ of microscopic algae, which live for most of the year down in the muds and sediment. (Nothing to do with artificial fertiliser run-off, since there were no such chemicals in the 1890s and especially not on the mere meadows and high moorland). The article has no mention of children’s ‘Jenny Greenteeth’ lore, though the phenomena shines an interesting sidelight on the lore, especially in relation to the breakdown of very large amounts of algae and the consequent stink — suggesting the possibility of flammable vapours and glowing will-o-the-wisps.

* Among their many outings and excursions a trip was made by the Club to “Ludchurch and Swythamley” near Leek. The short report for this makes no mention of Gawain, then seemingly unknown in connection with the locations. But some late local lore is mentioned in passing, that ‘Robin Hood’ once lived in Back Forest.

Readers of my new book Strange Country: Sir Gawain in the moorlands of North Staffordshire will be interested in a newly-found postcard showing a distant view of Redhurst Gorge near Wetton Mill. Possibly 1920s?

One would have to see the original, which I can’t afford to do, but there appear to be limestone fissures opening in the crag above the cave there. If so then this would confirm the reports of cavers, which I noted in my book and on this blog. One can also more clearly see the potential sexual symbolism, re: Gawain, of the bulge containing Old Hannah’s Cave being shaped rather like a pubic mound and cleft.

Update: got a better scan, June 2019…

Philip Emery, who was a North Staffordshire -based writer the last time I looked, has just published his 2018 PhD thesis on the Loughborough University open repository. “Revivifying the Ur-text: a reconstruction of sword-&-sorcery as a literary form” asks if, given this literary genre’s relative neglect in recent decades, it is possible to identify the genre’s core characteristics and then use these “to create a work that realizes the form’s potential to exist as literature”. Firstly he explores the structural development of the Ur-genre as it emerged in the stories of R.E. Howard (influenced by H.P. Lovecraft in terms of the horror elements), then surveys de Camp’s later contributions and distortions to the genre, and generally seeks to identify the “pristine elements” at the core of the genre’s once-flourishing form.

A short humourous article surveys a few of The Mythical Beasts of Birmingham, being: the Wump-Tay; Brummies; the “Boss” Tin; The Abominable Snow Hill Man; and The Wrekin.

In the spirit of Ken Reid’s new artbook Creepy Creations, I can think of a few more suggestions, off the top of my head: the Back-a-rack ‘Em (“Back of Rackhams”); the ‘Bumbler 11’ (No 11 bus); the ‘Cad’ Berry (Cadbury); the Certain Coldfeet (Sutton Coldfield); the Suit-on Pork (Sutton Park); the Jolly Cutter; the Bull Wringer (Bull Ring); the Snot Hill (Snow Hill); the Bag-a-Bush (Beggar’s Bush); the Buzz Tin (“Bostin”); the Lickers (The Lickeys); the dreadful monster-pop band the Broomies (“Brummies”) who play strung sweeping-brooms; the dreadful monster-rock band Dark-Hover and d’ Billz Mudders (“It’s dark over Bill’s Mother’s”); the Soul-In-Hell (Solihull) and the distant Doodley Doodler (Dudley).

There’s also the historically recorded Mine Knockers of the South Staffordshire coalfield.