Fictional journeys down into the earth are amazingly common in novels and folk tales...
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| Illustration to Verne's novel by Edouard Riou |
The
most famous is probably Jules Verne's 1864 novel Journey to the Centre of the
Earth which has been filmed (badly!) several times. In it professor Otto
Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans descend into the Icelandic
volcano Snæfellsjökull and make their way downwards through the 'volcanic
tubes'. They meet all kinds of weird geology and nature, find a vast
underground ocean with marine and aerial dinosaurs, an ape-man or possibly
man-ape who they avoid because he seems dangerous, and eventually make their
way back to the surface via the Stromboli volcano in Italy. It's good fun but
sheer hokum.
It
was by no means the first story to consider underground worlds though.
Leaving
aside the idea which anyone interested in storytelling will be very aware of –
that the Fairies or The Good Folk live in or under hills or mounds - it is a
common idea in folklore everywhere.
In
my History Press book 'Folk Tales of Derbyshire' I told the story of The
Devil's Arse. Many of you may know the place, the huge cavern at Castleton
which has been used as a shelter and workplace for centuries, probably since
man first came to the area. For a while the tourist industry politely called it
Peak Cavern but the old name is much more attention grabbing! (Victorian
writers politely called it Arx Diabolo or Aunus Plutonis! But what's wrong with
good old Anglo Saxon!)
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| Peverill Castle |
The
story, which goes back at least as far as Gervase of Tilbury, a 13th century monk, tells how a
swineherd of the Lord of Peverill Castle, which sits on the hill above the
cave, lost a prize sow and in his searching wandered into the cave. Thinking,
for some reason, that the sow may have wandered into the depths of the cave
looking for a place to farrow he made his way down into the depths where he
found himself in a glorious, fruitful landscape: “Spread before him was a
fertile valley with happy-looking peasants working in fields of golden wheat.
There were orchards, the trees were laden with ripe fruit, and there was a road
lined with fields of luxuriant vegetables which led to a village of neat
houses…” It was a far cry from the grim, cold, dark Derbyshire evening he'd
left above.
He
would have loved to have stayed but he immediately found the sow and set off to
return it to his master. Later he tried to find his way back to that very
promising land but, somehow, he could not find the way. When he grew old he
told his son all about it and he too tried to find it but with no luck.
Generations of Derbyshire people have searched every little passageway in the
Devil's Arse, and there are plenty of them, but no-one has yet succeeded in
finding their way – or if they have they've not come back and told the rest of
us! Who knows what wonders and treasures, what possibilities, there are down
there!
So
that is the journey to the centre of the earth, or at least a good way down...
but how about back?
I
hadn't considered that there might be stories telling about how those
troglodytes might sometimes, accidentally, find themselves in our world. Then,
recently, I had a stall at a book fair and for the first couple of hours there
were very few people about so I took the opportunity to read some of the tales
in The History Press' Anthology of English Folk Tales. It is a collection of
about 30 stories from the county folk tales series. (The Gypsy Boy from
Nottinghamshire Folk Tales is my contribution.) One tale I read was the Suffolk
tale 'The Green Children' retold by Kirsty Hartsiotis. It's a story I have been
aware of for a long, long time, since before I became a storyteller I would
guess. But reading it again I was grabbed by an idea I hadn't noticed before.
The
Green Children is also ancient being first recorded in the 12th century. It tells how some poachers find two children, a girl of about
10 and a slightly younger boy, huddled in the bottom of a pit in the woods near
the town of Woolpit. The strange thing is that they do not speak any known
language and their skin is green! The poachers take the children to the manor
house at Wikes where Sir Richard takes them in and looks after them. Gradually
they learn to eat human food and to speak English. As they do so they also
begin to lose their green colour. Eventually the boy dies but the girl thrives.
One day she tells Sir Richard and his friends where she came from and how she
came to be there. This is Kirsty's telling:
“My
brother and I were herding our father’s sheep that day. Our land isn’t like
yours, but we do herd and farm like you do. I did this every day, but he was
new to it, being young. One of our lambs got lost, and we set out after it. We
could hear him bleating, so we just kept on going until we were far from our
home. It was coming on for night when we found him, and when we turned to go
back we realised we didn’t know the way. So we just walked and walked, and
then, in the darkness, we both fell, and we plummeted down a long way until we
landed on dry earth and saw a tunnel stretching out. There were strange sounds
all around us, sweet sounds, the like of which we’d never heard before, and
those sounds drew us. We walked towards them. It seemed me that we walked all
night. At last, we saw that there was light ahead, and we ran, hoping we’d be
near our home, but as we came out the light was so bright that we both fell
down in a faint. When we woke up those men were there, and they dragged us out,
and it was so bright and so strange…”
So
it seems that the inhabitants of the underworld tell the same story about
stumbling upon our world as we tell about theirs!
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| Seahenge |
The
Devil's Arse is by no means the only way into this underground world. Another
very famous one is at Rathcroghan in County Roscommon in Ireland. It is an
ancient site with archaeology going back through the Iron, Bronze and Neolithic
ages. As well as human remains the site includes the mysterious cave of
Oweynagat, 'Ireland's Gate to Hell' an entrance into the underworld!
Putting
aside folklore and considering the views of a historian, Francis Pryor, in his
book Britain BC describes Seahenge, an ancient monument on the coast of
Norfolk:
“At
Seahenge a small circle of fifty-five posts surrounded the lower trunk and
roots of a large oak tree... It had been lowered into a pit upside-down so that
the roots protruded above the ground [and the branches were in another world].
Richard Bradley has shown how the Sami... carried out similar rituals with
inverted trees. These rites were connected with their belief in an underworld
that existed upside-down beneath our feet. It is likely that something similar
may have existed in the ideologies of Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain.”
So
perhaps this ancient religion has survived to the present day in these folk
tales—it has been proved that some tales have their origins 5 or 6,000 years
ago. (see my Blog from Feb 2016 CLICK HERE
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