Cloven Country by Jeremy Harte

Author:Jeremy Harte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Stoodley Pike and Heptonstall.

They say the dove won, after a fierce fight. It is an eerie scene, quite different in character from the earlier stories; the same mysterious conflict ends the parallel cycle about Davies Sirevan, except that his liver and lungs were not pinned onto the church tower but thrown out onto the dunghill.14 Davies was supposed to have been buried at Llanfair Waterdine, where the grave of the real Andrew Davies (d. 1780) has carvings of two birds, so that at first sight the tradition looks like iconotropy, the reworking of a misunderstood picture or sculptural feature to make a good story. But this 1780 grave was simply a lucky coincidence, for a contest between the raven and the dove was the last tale told of Michael Scot, and the same duality of white birds and black can be found further afield in the legends of Icelandic magicians. Herefordshire simply happens to be the furthest penetration southwards of an international motif.

It’s true that funerary art has often provided the visual kernel around which a legend can grow. We have already seen how the emblematic heart on an aristocratic tomb at Tolleshunt Knights was transformed into the grisly relic of a combat with the fiend. The other story told about this effigy, that its owner escaped the attentions of the Devil by being buried neither within the church nor without it, is told of many other local heroes. Since medieval tombs were regularly set in a recess in the wall, there is no shortage of visual prompts for the tradition that someone was buried neither in nor out.

In the magician cycles, this arrangement is presented as a final proof of the cunning man’s cleverness:

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