Folklore and Me Part I

Folklore and Me Part I

As promised, this is the first essay that was set to be included in the Brennan and Riz short story collection ("The Strange Tales of Brennan and Riz" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Tales-Brennan-Riz/dp/1729119190/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1552261025&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=Brennan+and+Riz&dpPl=1&dpID=41eVm795vcL&ref=plSrch), it was cut for space issues but this is the perfect place for it!

Please enjoy! Also don't hesitate to leave a comment below.

Regarding Folklore:

For me, as an author, I find folklore tales (and by extension, myths and legends) endlessly fascinating. For most, the events behind them are lost to history but the resulting stories are rich in characters, giving the unseen spirits their own personalities. They fully lend themselves to the idea that our world lives right next to their vibrant world. I believe our species started learning about our world and our place in it through telling stories. They started as an attempt to explain events like the rising and setting of the sun to what the stars were. Then they became tools of culture, for stories told over roaring fires in cold dark nights. Science eventually took over the role for explaining the natural world but storytelling remains with us, and we’re constantly rediscovering lost tales and simultaneously creating new ones. They may no longer be relevant for explanations but they are eternally useful for explaining human nature.
To this end, I hope we never stop telling stories of all kinds, after all the future generations will need folklore for the current era. We all have stories inside us, we just need courage to let them out.

Girl in the Water:

The seed for this story came from an article I read in a Thornaby related magazine, focusing on the River Tees. The original tales are simply of a spirit that lured people into the water and then drowned them. In fact these tales are quite common around rivers, with several sharing the sprit, so called Jenny Green Teeth. Of course the Water Ghouls, as I called them, represent these spirits more or less, though as far as I’m aware, they don’t have control over water like the Water Ghoul in the story. As the folklore of spirits like Jenny Green Teeth is very thin on the ground and common in a sense, you only have to compare it to the likes of the Kappa legends of Japan. The Kappa is a creature, said to be quite strange looking, being a green humanoid but with webbed hands and feet and having the beak of a bird, and like the erstwhile Green Teeth, lures people to the water where they can be drowned.
The rest of the story formed after several drafts with the spirit, changing from being solely antagonistic to something else. The spirit of the girl took shape at the same time, as did the real nature of Brennan’s employer, and thus, the story’s plot came together, though it still had to be streamlined, as the original version clocked in at 4500 words. The final edits were tough and I had to lose some backstory segments, offering an extended look at what the girl’s story really was, but upon reflection, the story is better without them, as they did drag the pace down too much, and with limited words, I didn’t want to waste anything. It was with the help of Author Tracey Iston, who gave support editing, that the story Being entered in the 2017 Crossing the Tees short story competion helped focus this story, and it was in the subsequent anthology that Girl in the Water, first saw print.

Goblins in the Tunnel:

Two tales came together for this story. The first is the very real tunnels that run under the high street area of Stockton. They were recently in the news again when some renovation work at a place of business near the Stockton Central Library uncovered a hidden street underground that is linked with these century old tunnels. The street was said to have been constructed some odd two hundred years ago, with notches in the walls for candles, larders. There was even room for live stock to be stored before going off to market. This street was intended to be referenced within the story, but it didn’t pan out as the story was being plotted. As for the tunnels themselves, there was said to be access points at many well known Stockton locations, such as the North Eastern pub, which is referenced within the story, the Thomas Sheraton pub and the Georgian Theatre. Although unsubstantiated, there was even rumoured tunnels going under the Tees, being used for smuggling purposes. The other folklore was to do with Stockton Castle, which from documentation from the periods when the castle stood, reveal it to be not much more then a heavily fortified manor house. The stories around it said that Red Caps dwelled in it during the time when it was abandoned, and even some of the time during it’s last occupation. It was destroyed on the orders of Oliver Cromwell, not because of an enemy holding it, but instead because it was past the point of repair, having falling derelict after a short occupation by Scottish forces during the Civil War. It is worth noting though that before the Scots took it, it was a Royalist stronghold. Red Caps appear more frequently in folklore, and I’ve hewn quite close to their appearance. These goblins take their name from the hat they wore on their heads, that was said to be dyed in the blood of their slain enemies. Like hinted at the story, they used to protect treasure hordes. It made sense to tie these two pieces of folklore together for this story.
Writing this story was fun but not without it’s problems. Originally, the cast of characters was bigger, with an added six people being down in the tunnels with Brennan, Riz and Valerie. Four of these were teenagers, in the tunnels on a dare while the other two were a business man and his advisor who were looking to make money on the tunnels. I got very far in the first draft with all these elements, but on successive read through, I realised something wasn’t clicking. The way the dialogue was flowing, having many characters in that situation was holding back the things everyone loved about the Girl in the Water, the interaction between Brennan and Riz. At fist, I got rid of the older gentlemen and kept the teenagers but they went eventually as well. These changes helped the story, and a few other rewrites were also made to certain scenes, making them more flavour full.
This will not be the last time Brennan and co, will see the tunnels, as there is still more to tell, after all, the Red Caps were defending something...

Ghosts on the Moor:

While the Brownie is definitely a creature of folklore, having counterparts in the folklore of other parts of the UK and even some in Europe, the buildings the ghosts inhabit in this story is very real. The buildings were once the hamlet of Pit Top, snug in Barnaby Moor, which itself was on top the Eston Hills. The houses have long since been demolished, leaving only a covered up well hole to mark where it was. They were built to house the workers and their families of a nearby pit, however, the pit was closed down and with no local jobs, the families moved out, to go and find work anew. There was tales though that the houses became deserted for a less mundane reason, that one bad winter, they were cut off by snow. With resources short, everyone perished, but this is obviously not the case as there is a very good documentary from the early 00s which talks about the area, and touches on the sad tale of this little community, in a segment called ‘Lost Village of Pit Top’. The Documentary was called A Century in Stone and even interviews people who used to live there, but moved out once the pit was no more. Eston hills themselves were in the news a few years back as there was a grass roots campaign set up by locals to save the hills from developers. This meant that the hills are actually owned by the community through the Friends of Eston Hills group, who through means of crowd sourcing, were able to get the money together to buy the land before any developers could.
To touch back on Brownies however, these work dogs of the past are indeed goblins who were friendly enough to humans to actually do house work for them, as long as you didn’t give them a gift or other payment to them. This would often act as a way to get rid of them if it was intended or not. Drog is modelled on fairly atypical Brownies in actual folklore, as is his parting message, as seen in the story of the Cauld Lad of Hylton Castle in Sunderland and in the story of Elsdon Moat Hobthrush of Northumberland. If you wanted an example of Brownies in live action media, then simply look at Dobbie the house elf in J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series. Another aspect of Brownies that I hope to touch upon in future is that it’s said if you anger one enough, it was turn into a different type of goblin altogether, that of a malevolent Boggart, a very nasty, spiteful creature indeed.
The story was more straight forward to write, but also quite hard to try and pace. It does offer some nice moments for Brennan and Riz though, and shows that Riz has practical uses as well, even if he doesn’t like it.

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Join me next week when I continue with the folklore behind the stories, till then everyone has a story to share, no better time then now to start sharing it :)