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Post by ripper on Dec 23, 2020 22:18:11 GMT
The Caverley Hall account seems familiar, though I am not sure where I came across it. I wonder why headless horses, dogs or whatever seem so popular in these kind of stories. What is the significance of the various animals having no heads? Perhaps it represents something, but of what exactly I have no idea.
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 23, 2020 22:29:30 GMT
I wonder why headless horses, dogs or whatever seem so popular in these kind of stories. What is the significance of the various animals having no heads? It gets round the problem of people saying "How do you know it wasn't just an ordinary horse/dog/whatever?".
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Post by jamesdoig on Dec 23, 2020 23:59:35 GMT
I wonder why headless horses, dogs or whatever seem so popular in these kind of stories. What is the significance of the various animals having no heads? It gets round the problem of people saying "How do you know it wasn't just an ordinary horse/dog/whatever?". Or headless horsemen for that matter. This chap is holding his own head.
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 24, 2020 0:30:03 GMT
The modern headless ghost keeps his head in a jar:
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Post by andydecker on Dec 24, 2020 11:43:50 GMT
The Caverley Hall account seems familiar, though I am not sure where I came across it. I wonder why headless horses, dogs or whatever seem so popular in these kind of stories. What is the significance of the various animals having no heads? Perhaps it represents something, but of what exactly I have no idea. You know, at first glance I read Cavendish Hall, a name which stuck to my mind as I have so often re-read Hellboy 1. It was the manor featured in the story. And I thought that was where Mignola stumbled upon the name. I was a bit disappointed when the second glance read Caverley Hall :-)
I also wondered about the thing with the heads. I had to research the headless horseman recently, and I always wondered why the Irving story with the headless Hessian soldier - which apparently was based on German folk tales which were new to me - had such a huge influence on the genre.
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Post by ripper on Dec 26, 2020 12:30:22 GMT
With absolutely no research at all on my part, headless animals, particularly horses and dogs, seem to have been a bit of a motif in accounts from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Again, with no research, in more modern times headless apparitions seem to have become somewhat less frequently reported than in yesteryear. Yes, it could be that reporting a headless apparition could be a way to add credence that it was a supernatural event, but I can't help thinking it is a little more than that. Is lacking a head some kind of symbol of something in folklore? I don't know enough about the subject, but it has always struck me as odd as to the number of various creatures lacking heads that used to crop up in accounts.
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Post by andydecker on Dec 26, 2020 13:00:07 GMT
It is often mentioned in documentaries about the Celts. They had a thing for seperating heads. maybe 50BC there was a zombie apocalypse fogotten by history? If I remember correctly, beheading also was a thing about aristocrats, hanging was only for the unwashed masses or somesuch. So maybe this lives on in the public consciousness of older generations. Don't believe it is a thing for post Millennials.
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Post by helrunar on Dec 26, 2020 14:19:41 GMT
Hi Andreas, This is an interesting short survey on the topic of "the Cult of the Head" amongst the Celts: www.celticheritage.co.uk/articles_headcult.cfmI'd never thought before about the topos of headless spectres--in the US, the headless horseman from Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (and innumerable adaptations and recuperations in popular media) is a favorite. To take up Ripper's intriguing point, I also have the impression that people somehow stopped seeing headless phantoms sometime circa 1900 if not earlier--but they're certainly seen, often in a playful way, in film and media. Steve
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 26, 2020 14:19:59 GMT
Taking the heads of enemies killed in battle was fairly common practice throughout history and across many different cultures. The idea that the Celts had a particular "thing" for collecting heads is actually a pretty recent one, now widely rejected by academics. In Britain, the idea was popularized in the 1960s by Dr Anne Ross, a Scottish archaeologist, historian and folklorist - also involved with the infamous "Hexham Heads", which I first read about somewhere or other as a kid sometime in the 70s, I think. She was the one who (wrongly, probably) identified the heads as "Celtic", and who saw a "werewolf" when she kept the heads at her home.
Here's a lovely little story from the Scottish Highlands -
In the 9th century AD, the Earl of Marr (in Aberdeenshire) was called "Tusk" because he had a huge, protruding, and very sharp front tooth. In 839 AD, Tusk and a local Viking warlord decided to settle their differences in battle, each agreeing to turn up to the fight with only 40 mounted horses. On the day of the battle the Viking cheated on the deal by arriving with two men on each horse, and Tusk and all his men were killed. The Vikings took the heads of the Scots as trophies, with the warlord making sure he had Tusk's among those he tied to his own saddle. However, on the ride back home, Tusk's tooth scratched the Viking's thigh. Dental hygiene being what it was in those days, the wound festered and then turned gangrenous, and the Viking died in agony a few days later.
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Post by helrunar on Dec 26, 2020 14:22:50 GMT
Great story, Dr Strange! In China there is a saying: "A dead wasp can still sting."
cheers, H.
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 26, 2020 14:33:34 GMT
There's a headless horseman in gaelic Scots/Irish folklore called the dullahan. Washington Irving's father was from Orkney (Irving is still a very common surname there) and his mother was Cornish, so he probably heard a lot of Celtic/Scots folktales. Another story from him, "Rip van Winkle" has a motif that is very common in Scottish folklore (the story usually involves someone being "taken away" by the fairies for many years, but which seems like only a few hours for the abductee) - and I seem to remember reading somewhere that there is a specific Orkney version involving a man sleeping for however many years after entering a "trowie knowe" (a prehistoric cairn or burial mound associated with the fairy folk).
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Post by helrunar on Dec 26, 2020 14:55:53 GMT
That's fascinating, Dr Strange.
I've come across a couple of variants of the Rip van Winkle motif in my reading of Lady Gregory's Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland this past season. Another version is that people who had died had really been taken by the Good People and it only seemed as if they had died--so often, they'd been seen again, sometimes years after death.They weren't Undead, but visiting from the Land of Themselves. The "Tam Lin" motif where the "dead" person asked a loved one to grab hold of their body so they did not have to go back occurs as well.
H.
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 26, 2020 15:17:04 GMT
The fairy-folk in Scottish folklore are ambiguous - it's not always clear whether they are supposed to be a completely separate supernatural race, or are actually the ghosts of humans, or are somehow both. Plus their connections with witches. The way the "Rip van Winkle" type stories usually go is that the abductee is drawn to some underground place by hearing fairy music - there he meets the fairy folk, who are having a wild party. The man makes the mistake of eating fairy food and drinking fairy drink, and dances the night away until he finally ends up collapsed in an exhausted but very happy state on the floor. When he wakes up the fairies are gone, and he wonders if it was all a dream. After finding his way back up into the human world he learns that he has been missing for years.
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Post by helrunar on Dec 26, 2020 16:24:22 GMT
Yes, it is the same in the Irish folklore I have read; the distinction between the Sidhe and the Dead is quite blurred. Penguin did a new Scottish folktale/faerytale anthology a few years ago and there was quite a lot in there about how the Good People are a mysterious folk. They are not immortal, but live much longer than we do (on a scale of centuries). Years ago there was a webpage where this person had collected every verse of every known attestation of "Tam Lin"and there were verses about life amongst the Good Folk that were fascinating. Reminiscent of some of the Secret Commonwealth material.
By the way, there's this interesting book by an Eng Lit academic, A D Hope, from the early 70s: A Midsummer Eve's Dream, published in Edinburgh in '71. It starts with the author doing a close read of a poem by one William Dunbar, then goes on to look at loads of obscure sources (I recall the dates mainly ranging from around 1550 through around 1800) to document popular folklore and ideas about the "Faery cult." And yes, there are lots of connections to Witches. Of course in one of the most widely known versions of "Tam Lin" (recorded by my beloved Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention in 1969) it is said that the Faerie Queen "pays a tithe to Hell" which in and of itself seems a curious thing to find in Faery lore--in the older versions of the poem I recall reading, the Queen simply wants to keep Tam with her until he grows too old to be of any use. It's said that at that point, the "withered up" mortal was left in somebody else's bed, usually the next human They were going to abduct for THEIR purpose (in the Lady Gregory material, by far the most common word for the Good People is simply THEM).
Sorry to ramble on. Obviously, it is all a bit of a hobbyhorse for me.
H.
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Post by Swampirella on Dec 26, 2020 16:36:34 GMT
Of course in one of the most widely known versions of "Tam Lin" (recorded by my beloved Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention in 1969) Thanks for mentioning this song a few months ago, Steve! I downloaded it & it's since become one of my favorites.
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