Jack Ross's Blog

Danny Robins: Uncanny (2023-25)

A few years ago I wrote a kind of round-up of supernatural TV shows past and present, with particular emphasis on the epically silly 28 Days Haunted. It seems that time has come round again. To quote from the film of Shirley Jackson's classic Haunting of Hill House :

No one will hear you, no one will come, in the dark, in the night.

Each of the shows I'll be talking about below seems to illustrate a different approach to that age-old conundrum - not so much whether or not ghosts exist, as how best to scare the pants off people by suggesting that they do.

One is British, another American, and the third from Latin America.


James Wan: True Haunting (2025- )

This set of TV shows is a bit different from the last lot, though. Each of them is excellent - in its own, idiosyncratic way. And all of them (even Los Espookys) have interesting points to make about the whole subject of paranormal phenomena.


Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega & Fred Armisen: Los Espookys (2019-22)

At this point, though, I'd better go back to the question in my title: Whether or not you can actually prove the existence of ghosts. If your own answer to that is: You can't - because they don't, then that's the end of the conversation. There's no point in indulging in further debates over the meaning of the word "ghost" - discarnate entities of some sort, or direct proof of life after death? You've made up your mind. You're closed to further discussion.

Danny Glover's show Uncanny - based on his award-winning podcast - gets around this one in a rather ingenious way. He's appointed two teams: "Team Sceptic" - represented by psychologist Dr. Ciarán O'Keeffe; and "Team Believer" - represented by Scottish author and (former) psychology lecturer Evelyn Hollow.

The two are careful not to stray from their preset roles: Ciarán to come up with naturalistic explanations of any odd phenomena; Evelyn to contextualise the events and issues under discussion in the larger field of paranormal lore. And while this certainly makes for interesting, fun TV, it does leave to one side what seems to me the most important conceptual issue raised by such discussions:
What would constitute evidence of the existence of ghosts - or, for that matter, of life after death?If Ciaran in "Team Sceptic" is secretly of the opinion that no evidence would ever be enough: that anything can be explained away naturalistically: because it must be - in order to maintain the integrity of the scientific laws of nature, then we have a problem. There's no point in trying to convince him, because he's impervious to any accumulations of data which might eventually constitute proof.

After all, he wouldn't be the first to maintain such certainty:

At the end of the 19th century ... it was generally accepted that all the important laws of physics had been discovered and that, henceforth, research would be concerned with clearing up minor problems and particularly with improvements of method and measurement.

If Ciarán and Evelyn were to have a real debate, though, I think that "Team Sceptic" would have to commit themselves in advance to a statement of what might constitute actual proof in their eyes. That is, admittedly, a huge ask, but it's a necessary one if we're serious about wanting to discuss the question.

"Team Believer" is, of course, in a much safer place conceptually. They can cherrypick evidence and information just as they please. They don't have to believe in the details of any particular case, because their overall openmindedness to the possibility of paranormal phenomena makes any such concessions unimportant. They can be as credulous or as hard-headed as they wish: they're already open to the possibility that the evidence cited could be true.

This is how Samuel Taylor Coleridge summed up the dilemma in an 1818 diary entry, collected in the posthumous Anima Poetae (1895):

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Ay! and what then?

Rodney Ascher, dir.: Room 237 (2012)

A few years ago I wrote a post about the fascinating documentary Room 237 , a compendium of all the crazy theories people had come up with to "explain" Stanley Kubrick's movie The Shining (1980).

It wasn't just that I found most of these readings of the film unconvincing, it was more that it seemed to me that their originators had no idea of the actual rules of argument: the nature of the evidence which could be considered admissible in such discussions.

They would say (for instance) that Jack Torrance was using a German brand of typewriter. Therefore, The Shining was a commentary on the Holocaust. Or else they'd notice a poster in one corner of the Overlook Hotel rec room which vaguely resembled (from some angles) a horned bull. Therefore, the film is based on the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Their readings were, to my mind, a series of non sequiturs and conceptual leaps based on insufficient evidence. As I put it in my post, it's not so much whether or not I agreed or disagreed with these theories, it's more a question of the nature of truth. "There is no truth, only points of view," is a much-quoted (and variously attributed) adage which often comes up in such discussions. I remarked in my post:

The way I prefer to approach the word "truth" is by means of a question: Do you recognise the existence of error? In other words, is a misreading a possibility for you? For instance, if you were to read out a passage in a foreign language unknown to you, and then make guesses at the meaning of some of the words, would this be a legitimate "interpretation" of the passage - or simply a manifestation of ignorance?

The question of whether or not you can understand a foreign language is, I think, a good test of one's relation to truth and "alternate facts" (as they're now notoriously known):

There's a gag I read once in a British magazine about literary receptions abroad, the ones where someone comes up to you and says, "Hello, I your translator am!" So, no, I'm unable to concur with the view that all truths are relative, and all interpretations equal.

My French is not particularly grammatical, and I make a lot of mistakes when I speak it, but I can read a book in French and understand virtually all of it. Even a native speaker of a language has occasional headscratching moments when they can't quite follow a statement in their own tongue. But that doesn't alter the fact that my relation to the French language is different from that of someone who's never studied it at all.


Oliver Sachs: Hallucinations (2012)

So how does this relate to the question of the existence of ghosts? Well, of course it depends on a question I've left in the too-hard basket until now: what exactly is a "ghost"? What do you - or I - mean by the word? Almost all psychologists, para or otherwise, would accept that visual, auditory and even tactile hallucinations happen. Oliver Sachs wrote a fascinating book on the subject, which I would strongly recommend to any interested parties.

There's even - some would claim - a phenomenon called a "mass hallucination", which covers those sights, or sounds, or feelings which are shared by more than one person. Ciarán O'Keeffe, in his discussions of particular cases on Uncanny, tends to supplement this particular grab-all, get-out-of-jail-free-card explanation with other old chestnuts such as urban legends, or curious visual and auditory phenomena such as the Brocken spectre or auditory pareidolia, where "the brain tries to find patterns in ambiguous sounds."

When you put them all together, along with the notorious unreliability of witness evidence - which tends, unfortunately, to increase over time, Team Sceptic would seem to have a pretty impregnable position to defend. "You're lying!" - or, more charitably, "You must be mistaken" - covers most other contingencies.

Which is why I think someone who's taken on the responsibility of espousing this view should have to answer whether any evidence - of any type - could ever convince them of the existence of discarnate entities, or ghosts, or spirits of any kind? As I said above, if the answer is a firm no, then the conversation is pointless. They'll always find an alternative, naturalistic explanation for any event, however puzzling, simply because they must: for the sake of their mental health (or, if you prefer, life lie).


Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Anima Poetae

In the case of Coleridge's flower, for instance - well, clearly it wasn't the same flower. It couldn't be. Coleridge was a notorious blabbermouth, and he'd probably been going on and on about this recurrent dream he'd been having, and some unscrupulous friend - perhaps that inveterate practical joker Charles Lamb - snuck in while he was asleep and put a flower in his hand. Har-de-ha-ha! Case closed. (That's if it ever happened in the first place. Which it probably didn't ...)


Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega, Fred Armisen et al.: Los Espookys (2019-22)

The absurd conundrums of Los Espookys, where a group of friends whose love of horror movies and spooky shit generally has inspired them to form a business faking ghostly phenomena - monsters and mermaids designed to bring back tourists to a deserted beach resort; a fluffy alien who gets asthma attacks whenever he disobeys the authoritarian teacher of a kindergarten class (thus terrifying the other children into obedience) - might seem a little distant from these more serious lines of inquiry.

That's not entirely true, though. The series of abridged editions of classic texts produced in one episode by the functionally illiterate character Tati are hugely, unexpectedly successful. Before long Don Quixote (the Tati edition) and her versions of many other more-praised-than-read books - One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Old Man and the Sea, Moby-Dick - have begun to take over. We see major publishing houses vying for distribution rights, school-children answering questions about Tati's ending for the Quixote ("Tati saw a butterfly on her nose and put down her pen" - "Correct!"). In other words, anything promulgated with sufficient authority has a good chance of being believed.

It's a small step from "that's ridiculous" to "I'm not sure that's exactly what Cervantes had in mind ..." What better metaphor for the present-day industry of the Afterlife, where flimsy assertions about the nature of "moving on to the light," stone tape theory, or EVP (electronic voice phenomena) have become so familiar through constant repetition that we no longer question whether or not there's any real evidence behind them?

if you're actually interested in proof of the existence of discarnate entities - as I regret to say I still am - none of this "common knowledge" is really of any use. However, the various cases discussed in Uncanny - and rather more dramatically reenacted in True Hauntings - are. Solely, however, because they're also accompanied by research and careful questioning of as many actual witnesses as possible.

Whenever the master of macabre fiction, M. R. James, was asked if he actually believed in ghosts:

I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.

It's a pretty cautious answer, but I'm afraid that I may have to echo it. I continue to search for satisfactory evidence, but I have to say that Danny Robins' TV show, in particular, is the one of the best sources I've come across for a very long time.


Hasui Kawase: Snow Valley Climbers on Mt. Shirouma (1935)


•

Danny Robins: Uncanny (2023-25)

Uncanny
(2 Series: 2023-25)
List of Episodes:Series 1 (2023):

Case 1: Miss Howard

Danny Robins asks if a young girl in rural Cambridgeshire was visited by the apparition of an Edwardian school teacher? He also examines a Canadian psychological experiment and a time slip in Liverpool.

Case 2: The Bearpark Poltergeist

Danny investigates Ian's claims that his childhood home in County Durham was plagued by poltergeist activity. He investigates the area's mining history, the science of sleep paralysis and even the mechanics of a flushing toilet.

Case 3: The Oxford Exorcism

The first series concludes with Danny looking into the case of a student house believed to be haunted by a malevolent entity. It is one of the most unsettling cases Danny has ever come across. But could it simply be a shared delusion?

Series 2 (2025):

Case 1: The Haunting of Hollymount Farm

The return of the programme in which Danny Robins investigates real-life stories of seemingly paranormal encounters. Tonight, he meets Liam, who spent his youth terrified by a ghostly child on his family's Hollymount Farm.

Case 2: The Charity Shop Poltergeist

Danny Robins meets Sibyl, the manager of a shop where multiple staff have witnessed the terrifying presence of a man who appeared to be watching their every move. Danny researches the building's past and explores Stone Tape Theory.

Case 3: Shadow Man

In this third case, Danny Robins meets Julian and hears of one of the most frightening cases he's ever investigated - a young man tormented by a towering, terrifying shadow figure.

Case 4: Emily's Room

Danny Robins meets a mother and daughter who believe they were haunted by a sinister figure intent on hurting them. But were the events truly supernatural?

•

Facebook: True Haunting (October, 2025)

True Haunting
(1 Series: 2025)
List of Episodes:Case 1:

Eerie Hall: Part 1

Geneseo college 1984. Avid runner Chris Di Cesare is keen to start his freshman year until strange voices and inexplicable feelings of dread set in.

Eerie Hall: Part 2

As Chris becomes increasingly isolated, a friend urges him to try communicating with the entity that haunts him. But his waking nightmares only worsen.

Eerie Hall: Part 3

Rumors fly after a friend's harrowing encounter. After making an ominous discovery while running with his father, Chris decides to face the force alone.

Case 2:

This House Murdered Me: Part 1

Eager to start fresh, a young family moves into a dreamy Victorian-style mansion. But the fixer-upper soon becomes costly and deeply disturbing.

This House Murdered Me: Part 2

From burning sage to hiring paranormal investigators, April and Matt fight for the house. Can they face its horrifying history and win their home back?

•

Interview: Julio Torres & Ana Fabrega (2022)

Los Espookys
(2 Series: 2019-22)
List of Episodes:Series 1 (2019):

El exorcismo [The Exorcism]:
(with Bernardo Velasco & Julio Torres)

Four friends start a new business based on their shared love of horror.

El espanto de la herencia [The Inheritance Scare]:
(with Ana Fabrega & Julio Torres)

Los Espookys are tasked with scaring five would-be heirs to a millionaire's fortune.

El monstruo marino [The Sea Monster]:
(with Ana Fabrega)

Renaldo creates a new tourist attraction for a seaside town. Tico eyes a new partnership for Los Espookys.

El espejo maldito [The Cursed Mirror]:
(with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Bernardo Velasco, & Julio Torres)

Los Espookys fake an abduction in exchange for work visas. Tico helps co-write a new horror film.

El laboratorio alienigena [The Alien Lab]:
(with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Bernardo Velasco, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

Los Espookys help a high-maintenance researcher bring aliens to life; meanwhile, they remain divided on Bianca's screenplay.

El sueño falso [The Fake Dream]:
(with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

Andrés and Úrsula are left to plan a fake dream for an insomnia patient.

Series 2 (2022):

Los Espiritus en el Cementerio [The Spirits in the Cemetery]:
(with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Bernardo Velasco, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

Los Espookys put their life changes aside to pose as ghosts for an incompetent groundskeeper hoping to get bereaved families off his back.

Bibi's :
(with Bernardo Velasco)Fri, Sep 23, 2022

Andrés searches for a new place to live as Tati's marriage deteriorates. Meanwhile, Los Espookys create a monster named Bibi's.

Las Ruinas [The Ruins]:
(with Fred Armisen, Cassandra Ciangherotti, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

Úrsula assists Mayor Teresa's bid for president, while Los Espookys, joined by Tico, help a professor stage a fake archaeological site.

Las Muchas Caras de un Hombre [One Man's Many Faces]:
(with Yalitza Aparicio)

As the group's paths diverge, Renaldo decides to investigate the death of slain pageant queen Karina, whose ghost continues to haunt him.

El Virus [The Virus]:
(with Greta Titelman)

An actor recruits an increasingly tense Los Espookys to cancel her sitcom, while Ambassador Melanie gets devastating news about a dream job.

El Eclipse [The Eclipse]:
(with Carmen Gloria Bresky)

Los Espookys stage an eclipse during Mayor Teresa's last election speech. Tico helps Andrés. Renaldo seeks closure over Karina's murder.

Cassandra Ciangherotti & Julio Torres in Los Espookys (2020)

Danny Robins: Uncanny (2023-25)

A few years ago I wrote a kind of round-up of supernatural TV shows past and present, with particular emphasis on the epically silly 28 Days Haunted. It seems that time has come round again. To quote from the film of Shirley Jackson's classic Haunting of Hill House :

No one will hear you, no one will come, in the dark, in the night.

Each of the shows I'll be talking about below seems to illustrate a different approach to that age-old conundrum - not so much whether or not ghosts exist, as how best to scare the pants off people by suggesting that they do.

One is British, another American, and the third from Latin America.


James Wan: True Haunting (2025- )

This set of TV shows is a bit different from the last lot, though. Each of them is excellent - in its own, idiosyncratic way. And all of them (even Los Espookys) have interesting points to make about the whole subject of paranormal phenomena.


Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega & Fred Armisen: Los Espookys (2019-22)

At this point, though, I'd better go back to the question in my title: Whether or not you can actually prove the existence of ghosts. If your own answer to that is: You can't - because they don't, then that's the end of the conversation. There's no point in indulging in further debates over the meaning of the word "ghost" - discarnate entities of some sort, or direct proof of life after death? You've made up your mind. You're closed to further discussion.

Danny Glover's show Uncanny - based on his award-winning podcast - gets around this one in a rather ingenious way. He's appointed two teams: "Team Sceptic" - represented by psychologist Dr. Ciarán O'Keeffe; and "Team Believer" - represented by Scottish author and (former) psychology lecturer Evelyn Hollow.

The two are careful not to stray from their preset roles: Ciarán to come up with naturalistic explanations of any odd phenomena; Evelyn to contextualise the events and issues under discussion in the larger field of paranormal lore. And while this certainly makes for interesting, fun TV, it does leave to one side what seems to me the most important conceptual issue raised by such discussions:
What would constitute evidence of the existence of ghosts - or, for that matter, of life after death?If Ciaran in "Team Sceptic" is secretly of the opinion that no evidence would ever be enough: that anything can be explained away naturalistically: because it must be - in order to maintain the integrity of the scientific laws of nature, then we have a problem. There's no point in trying to convince him, because he's impervious to any accumulations of data which might eventually constitute proof.

After all, he wouldn't be the first to maintain such certainty:

At the end of the 19th century ... it was generally accepted that all the important laws of physics had been discovered and that, henceforth, research would be concerned with clearing up minor problems and particularly with improvements of method and measurement.

If Ciarán and Evelyn were to have a real debate, though, I think that "Team Sceptic" would have to commit themselves in advance to a statement of what might constitute actual proof in their eyes. That is, admittedly, a huge ask, but it's a necessary one if we're serious about wanting to discuss the question.

"Team Believer" is, of course, in a much safer place conceptually. They can cherrypick evidence and information just as they please. They don't have to believe in the details of any particular case, because their overall openmindedness to the possibility of paranormal phenomena makes any such concessions unimportant. They can be as credulous or as hard-headed as they wish: they're already open to the possibility that the evidence cited could be true.

This is how Samuel Taylor Coleridge summed up the dilemma in an 1818 diary entry, collected in the posthumous Anima Poetae (1895):

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Ay! and what then?

Rodney Ascher, dir.: Room 237 (2012)

A few years ago I wrote a post about the fascinating documentary Room 237 , a compendium of all the crazy theories people had come up with to "explain" Stanley Kubrick's movie The Shining (1980).

It wasn't just that I found most of these readings of the film unconvincing, it was more that it seemed to me that their originators had no idea of the actual rules of argument: the nature of the evidence which could be considered admissible in such discussions.

They would say (for instance) that Jack Torrance was using a German brand of typewriter. Therefore, The Shining was a commentary on the Holocaust. Or else they'd notice a poster in one corner of the Overlook Hotel rec room which vaguely resembled (from some angles) a horned bull. Therefore, the film is based on the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Their readings were, to my mind, a series of non sequiturs and conceptual leaps based on insufficient evidence. As I put it in my post, it's not so much whether or not I agreed or disagreed with these theories, it's more a question of the nature of truth. "There is no truth, only points of view," is a much-quoted (and variously attributed) adage which often comes up in such discussions. I remarked in my post:

The way I prefer to approach the word "truth" is by means of a question: Do you recognise the existence of error? In other words, is a misreading a possibility for you? For instance, if you were to read out a passage in a foreign language unknown to you, and then make guesses at the meaning of some of the words, would this be a legitimate "interpretation" of the passage - or simply a manifestation of ignorance?

The question of whether or not you can understand a foreign language is, I think, a good test of one's relation to truth and "alternate facts" (as they're now notoriously known):

There's a gag I read once in a British magazine about literary receptions abroad, the ones where someone comes up to you and says, "Hello, I your translator am!" So, no, I'm unable to concur with the view that all truths are relative, and all interpretations equal.

My French is not particularly grammatical, and I make a lot of mistakes when I speak it, but I can read a book in French and understand virtually all of it. Even a native speaker of a language has occasional headscratching moments when they can't quite follow a statement in their own tongue. But that doesn't alter the fact that my relation to the French language is different from that of someone who's never studied it at all.


Oliver Sachs: Hallucinations (2012)

So how does this relate to the question of the existence of ghosts? Well, of course it depends on a question I've left in the too-hard basket until now: what exactly is a "ghost"? What do you - or I - mean by the word? Almost all psychologists, para or otherwise, would accept that visual, auditory and even tactile hallucinations happen. Oliver Sachs wrote a fascinating book on the subject, which I would strongly recommend to any interested parties.

There's even - some would claim - a phenomenon called a "mass hallucination", which covers those sights, or sounds, or feelings which are shared by more than one person. Ciarán O'Keeffe, in his discussions of particular cases on Uncanny, tends to supplement this particular grab-all, get-out-of-jail-free-card explanation with other old chestnuts such as urban legends, or curious visual and auditory phenomena such as the Brocken spectre or auditory pareidolia, where "the brain tries to find patterns in ambiguous sounds."

When you put them all together, along with the notorious unreliability of witness evidence - which tends, unfortunately, to increase over time, Team Sceptic would seem to have a pretty impregnable position to defend. "You're lying!" - or, more charitably, "You must be mistaken" - covers most other contingencies.

Which is why I think someone who's taken on the responsibility of espousing this view should have to answer whether any evidence - of any type - could ever convince them of the existence of discarnate entities, or ghosts, or spirits of any kind? As I said above, if the answer is a firm no, then the conversation is pointless. They'll always find an alternative, naturalistic explanation for any event, however puzzling, simply because they must: for the sake of their mental health (or, if you prefer, life lie).


Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Anima Poetae

In the case of Coleridge's flower, for instance - well, clearly it wasn't the same flower. It couldn't be. Coleridge was a notorious blabbermouth, and he'd probably been going on and on about this recurrent dream he'd been having, and some unscrupulous friend - perhaps that inveterate practical joker Charles Lamb - snuck in while he was asleep and put a flower in his hand. Har-de-ha-ha! Case closed. (That's if it ever happened in the first place. Which it probably didn't ...)


Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega, Fred Armisen et al.: Los Espookys (2019-22)

The absurd conundrums of Los Espookys, where a group of friends whose love of horror movies and spooky shit generally has inspired them to form a business faking ghostly phenomena - monsters and mermaids designed to bring back tourists to a deserted beach resort; a fluffy alien who gets asthma attacks whenever he disobeys the authoritarian teacher of a kindergarten class (thus terrifying the other children into obedience) - might seem a little distant from these more serious lines of inquiry.

That's not entirely true, though. The series of abridged editions of classic texts produced in one episode by the functionally illiterate character Tati are hugely, unexpectedly successful. Before long Don Quixote (the Tati edition) and her versions of many other more-praised-than-read books - One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Old Man and the Sea, Moby-Dick - have begun to take over. We see major publishing houses vying for distribution rights, school-children answering questions about Tati's ending for the Quixote ("Tati saw a butterfly on her nose and put down her pen" - "Correct!"). In other words, anything promulgated with sufficient authority has a good chance of being believed.

It's a small step from "that's ridiculous" to "I'm not sure that's exactly what Cervantes had in mind ..." What better metaphor for the present-day industry of the Afterlife, where flimsy assertions about the nature of "moving on to the light," stone tape theory, or EVP (electronic voice phenomena) have become so familiar through constant repetition that we no longer question whether or not there's any real evidence behind them?

if you're actually interested in proof of the existence of discarnate entities - as I regret to say I still am - none of this "common knowledge" is really of any use. However, the various cases discussed in Uncanny - and rather more dramatically reenacted in True Hauntings - are. Solely, however, because they're also accompanied by research and careful questioning of as many actual witnesses as possible.

Whenever the master of macabre fiction, M. R. James, was asked if he actually believed in ghosts:

I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.

It's a pretty cautious answer, but I'm afraid that I may have to echo it. I continue to search for satisfactory evidence, but I have to say that Danny Robins' TV show, in particular, is the one of the best sources I've come across for a very long time.


Hasui Kawase: Snow Valley Climbers on Mt. Shirouma (1935)


•

Danny Robins: Uncanny (2023-25)

Uncanny
(2 Series: 2023-25)
List of Episodes:Series 1 (2023):

Case 1: Miss Howard

Danny Robins asks if a young girl in rural Cambridgeshire was visited by the apparition of an Edwardian school teacher? He also examines a Canadian psychological experiment and a time slip in Liverpool.

Case 2: The Bearpark Poltergeist

Danny investigates Ian's claims that his childhood home in County Durham was plagued by poltergeist activity. He investigates the area's mining history, the science of sleep paralysis and even the mechanics of a flushing toilet.

Case 3: The Oxford Exorcism

The first series concludes with Danny looking into the case of a student house believed to be haunted by a malevolent entity. It is one of the most unsettling cases Danny has ever come across. But could it simply be a shared delusion?

Series 2 (2025):

Case 1: The Haunting of Hollymount Farm

The return of the programme in which Danny Robins investigates real-life stories of seemingly paranormal encounters. Tonight, he meets Liam, who spent his youth terrified by a ghostly child on his family's Hollymount Farm.

Case 2: The Charity Shop Poltergeist

Danny Robins meets Sibyl, the manager of a shop where multiple staff have witnessed the terrifying presence of a man who appeared to be watching their every move. Danny researches the building's past and explores Stone Tape Theory.

Case 3: Shadow Man

In this third case, Danny Robins meets Julian and hears of one of the most frightening cases he's ever investigated - a young man tormented by a towering, terrifying shadow figure.

Case 4: Emily's Room

Danny Robins meets a mother and daughter who believe they were haunted by a sinister figure intent on hurting them. But were the events truly supernatural?

•

Facebook: True Haunting (October, 2025)

True Haunting
(1 Series: 2025)
List of Episodes:Case 1:

Eerie Hall: Part 1

Geneseo college 1984. Avid runner Chris Di Cesare is keen to start his freshman year until strange voices and inexplicable feelings of dread set in.

Eerie Hall: Part 2

As Chris becomes increasingly isolated, a friend urges him to try communicating with the entity that haunts him. But his waking nightmares only worsen.

Eerie Hall: Part 3

Rumors fly after a friend's harrowing encounter. After making an ominous discovery while running with his father, Chris decides to face the force alone.

Case 2:

This House Murdered Me: Part 1

Eager to start fresh, a young family moves into a dreamy Victorian-style mansion. But the fixer-upper soon becomes costly and deeply disturbing.

This House Murdered Me: Part 2

From burning sage to hiring paranormal investigators, April and Matt fight for the house. Can they face its horrifying history and win their home back?

•

Interview: Julio Torres & Ana Fabrega (2022)

Los Espookys
(2 Series: 2019-22)
List of Episodes:Series 1 (2019):

El exorcismo [The Exorcism]:
(with Bernardo Velasco & Julio Torres)

Four friends start a new business based on their shared love of horror.

El espanto de la herencia [The Inheritance Scare]:
(with Ana Fabrega & Julio Torres)

Los Espookys are tasked with scaring five would-be heirs to a millionaire's fortune.

El monstruo marino [The Sea Monster]:
(with Ana Fabrega)

Renaldo creates a new tourist attraction for a seaside town. Tico eyes a new partnership for Los Espookys.

El espejo maldito [The Cursed Mirror]:
(with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Bernardo Velasco, & Julio Torres)

Los Espookys fake an abduction in exchange for work visas. Tico helps co-write a new horror film.

El laboratorio alienigena [The Alien Lab]:
(with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Bernardo Velasco, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

Los Espookys help a high-maintenance researcher bring aliens to life; meanwhile, they remain divided on Bianca's screenplay.

El sueño falso [The Fake Dream]:
(with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

Andrés and Úrsula are left to plan a fake dream for an insomnia patient.

Series 2 (2022):

Los Espiritus en el Cementerio [The Spirits in the Cemetery]:
(with Cassandra Ciangherotti, Bernardo Velasco, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

Los Espookys put their life changes aside to pose as ghosts for an incompetent groundskeeper hoping to get bereaved families off his back.

Bibi's :
(with Bernardo Velasco)Fri, Sep 23, 2022

Andrés searches for a new place to live as Tati's marriage deteriorates. Meanwhile, Los Espookys create a monster named Bibi's.

Las Ruinas [The Ruins]:
(with Fred Armisen, Cassandra Ciangherotti, Ana Fabrega, & Julio Torres)

Úrsula assists Mayor Teresa's bid for president, while Los Espookys, joined by Tico, help a professor stage a fake archaeological site.

Las Muchas Caras de un Hombre [One Man's Many Faces]:
(with Yalitza Aparicio)

As the group's paths diverge, Renaldo decides to investigate the death of slain pageant queen Karina, whose ghost continues to haunt him.

El Virus [The Virus]:
(with Greta Titelman)

An actor recruits an increasingly tense Los Espookys to cancel her sitcom, while Ambassador Melanie gets devastating news about a dream job.

El Eclipse [The Eclipse]:
(with Carmen Gloria Bresky)

Los Espookys stage an eclipse during Mayor Teresa's last election speech. Tico helps Andrés. Renaldo seeks closure over Karina's murder.

Cassandra Ciangherotti & Julio Torres in Los Espookys (2020)

John Updike: Memories of the Ford Administration (1992)

Alf Clayton, a struggling history professor at Wayward Junior College in New Hampshire, receives a request ... to provide his memories and impressions of the Presidential administration of Gerald Ford. Clayton has spent several years unsuccessfully attempting to write a new biography of President James Buchanan and the two projects intertwine as Clayton's mind shifts between them ... - Wikipedia: Memories of the Ford Administration

I have to begin by admitting that I didn't know Professor Paul Edwards (1926-1992) particularly well. He was one of the Academics in the Edinburgh English Department when I first arrived there in 1986. Judging from those dates above, He must have been 60 at the time, and I have to say that he looked it. I haven't been able to locate a photo of him online, so you'll have to envisage a rather red-faced, overweight, Rabelaisian figure, holding court in his large office upstairs in the David Hume Tower, which housed all of us Hamanities misfits.

So why am I writing about him?


Eyrbyggja Saga. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards (1973)

One reason is because I knew his name pretty well long before I ever got there - though the picture of him in my mind's eye was nothing like the reality. You see, I'd already developed into a bit of an Icelandic Saga-ophile (if there is such a term) over my undergraduate years, partly as a result of having studied Old Norse for a year under the learned tutelage of Professor Forrest Scott of Auckland University.


Hermann Pálsson (1921-2002)

Here's a list of the translations and books Edwards and his collaborator, Icelandic scholar Hermann Pálsson, composed on the subject, starting with Gautrek's Saga in 1968, and concluding with Vikings in Russia in 1989:


Paul Edwards & Hermann Pálsson, trans. Gautrek's Saga (1968)
[with Hermann Pálsson] Gautrek's Saga, and Other Medieval Tales (1968)[with Hermann Pálsson] Arrow-Odd: A Medieval Novel (1970)[with Hermann Pálsson] Legendary Fiction in Medieval Iceland (1970)[with Hermann Pálsson] Hrolf Gautreksson: A Viking romance (1972)[with Hermann Pálsson] The Book of Settlements; Landnámabók (1972)[with Hermann Pálsson] Eyrbyggja Saga (1973)[with Hermann Pálsson] Egil's Saga by Snorri Sturluson (1976)[with Hermann Pálsson] Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney (1978)[with Hermann Pálsson] Göngu-Hrólfs Saga (1980)[with Hermann Pálsson] Seven Viking Romances (1985)[with Hermann Pálsson] Knytlinga Saga: The History of the Kings of Denmark (1986)[with Hermann Pálsson] Magnus' Saga: The Life of St Magnus, Earl of Orkney, 1075–1116 (1987)[with Hermann Pálsson] Vikings in Russia: Yngvar's saga and Eymund's saga (1989)
Vikings in Russia: Yngvar's Saga & Eymund's Saga. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards (1989)

I managed to meet Hermann Pálsson, too, shortly after I first got to Edinburgh. We'd concentrated on one of the shorter sagas, Hrafnkel's Saga , in my year of Old Norse at the University of Auckland, and Pálsson had written a critical monograph about it - as well as translating it for the Penguin Classics (along with some shorter works, including the thoroughly charming story of "Auðun from the West Fjords," whose best friend was a Polar Bear ...)


Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Icelandic Stories. Trans. Hermann Pálsson (1971)

I believe it was Mark Twain who put it best:

There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment:to tell him you have read one of his books;to tell him you have read all of his books;to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book.No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart.

I can't claim to have gone much beyond first base on that list with Pálsson, but he certainly seemed impressed that I'd read his 1966 monograph Siðfræði Hrafnkels sögu (1966 - published in English as Art and Ethics in Hrafnkel's Saga in 1971).

The classic account of that saga is to be found in Sigurður Nordal's 1949 book Hrafnkels Saga Freysgoða: A Study (translated into English in 1958). Nordal's exhaustive analysis of the local names and kinship systems in the region where the saga is set demonstrated beyond doubt that it had to be regarded as historical fiction, despite the presence of a few genuine place-names and people.

Nordal's book constituted the final nail in the coffin of the then still-current view that the so-called "Family Sagas" were nothing more than careful records of actual deeds and events in medieval Iceland. That may be true - to some extent - of some of them, but certainly not of this tale of the priest of Frey, Hrafnkel's Saga. Pálsson's 1966 account of the saga builds on Nordal's pioneering work to flesh out the complex connections between pure invention and fact in this early piece of prose fiction.

Anyway, Hermann and I had a nice little chat about it all. He seemed astonished to meet an English student who could actually read in a foreign language, and was interested in the Sagas. That was certainly not the norm among my fellow post-graduates.


Eyrbyggja Saga. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards (1973)

Forrest Scott, my Icelandic teacher in Auckland, was positively obsessed with Eyrbyggja Saga , the rather episodic tale of the People of Eyri (which includes one of the best ghost stories I've ever read). Not content with the original manuscript sources preserved in Iceland, he'd spent a great deal of time in Copenhagen, looking through all the older paper copies of the text preserved in the National Library there.

At the time I was rather surprised that his long-awaited edition of the poem never seemed to get any closer to completion - even after his retirement from the everyday duties of the English Department. Now, having retired myself from teaching at Massey University a couple of years ago, I think I understand him a little better. Books get harder, not easier, to complete as the years go by. The need to update and reformat all the work you've already done becomes more and more of an insuperable obstacle, and instead you decide to scribble a short article (or, for that matter, a blogpost) on some more easily circumscribed subject ...

Edwards and Pálsson's fluent and fast-moving Penguin Classics translation provided us students with a convenient crib to set alongside our own rough versions of episodes from the Eyrbyggja Saga, translated from the drafts of Prof. Scott's projected edition.


Magnús Sigursteinsson [Magnus Magnusson] (2007)

Penguin Books began their series of translations of the sagas under the aegis of Edinburgh-raised Icelander (and future TV personality) Magnus Magnusson - in collaboration, of course, with the ubiquitous Hermann Pálsson. These included:Njal’s Saga (1973)Njal’s Saga. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Magnus Magnusson. 1960. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. The Vinland Sagas (1965)The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America – Grænlendinga Saga & Eirik’s Saga. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Magnus Magnusson. 1965. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. King Harald’s Saga (1966)King Harald’s Saga: Harald Hardradi of Norway – from Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Magnus Magnusson. 1966. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Laxdaela Saga (1969)Laxdaela Saga. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Magnus Magnusson. 1969. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Presumably Magnusson got too busy with his BBC broadcasting duties after that, so Hermann Pálsson thought he'd have a go on his own - hence the appearance of Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Icelandic Stories with him as sole translator.


Snorri Sturluson: Egil's Saga. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards (1976)

Pálsson must have concluded that the task of transforming the stark, implication-laden prose of the Sagas into idiomatic English prose was one which required a native-speaking collaborator, though, because a positive stream of sagas issued from the team of Pálsson & Edwards from 1972 onwards, many (not all) of them reprinted as Penguin Classics.


Gongu-Hrolfs Saga. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards (1980)

Paul Edwards had studied Icelandic in his youth, and his genial, informal approach to the subject - I remember him remarking to me once that he'd just completed an article on "spewing in Old Norse sagas" - definitely brought a breath of fresh air to the Penguin series.

I mentioned above his "holding court in his large office." You'll have to try and imagine a battered old wooden table, with him at the head, a set of glasses and a flask of (dreadful) red wine at his elbow, serving out drinks to all and sundry. There were loud guests and silent ones. I was one of the latter. But he was infinitely kind to me - even before I gradually revealed my respect for him and his work, and my love of the Sagas themselves.

More to the point, he offered me (and others) invaluable, non-pompous advice about how to navigate the strange cross-currents of Academic life, and particularly the crises of faith which tend to beset those working on large postgraduate dissertations.

I guess it was all so welcome because he did so strongly resemble Sir John Falstaff - with all of us cast as his tavern companions. A Falstaff without any of the malice and mendacity, though: just the ready with and the endless desire for fun and good company. I wish I could go back and listen to him discourse just one more time.


Paul Edwards, ed. Equiano's Travels (1967)

The truth of the matter is, however, that those of you who've already heard of "Professor Paul Edwards" will probably be wondering why I'm concentrating so much on the Icelandic Sagas. His main claim to fame is undoubtedly the book above. It's just the tip of the iceberg of his work on African literature, mind you. He was, in fact, the go-to guy for such matters for most UK universities at the time. Wikipedia, as usual, provides us with a few useful facts and dates to get us started:

After completing his education he worked in West Africa for nine years, teaching literature in Ghana and Sierra Leone. The demand of his African students for African literature propelled his encounter with Equiano.

Daniel Orme; Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797)

Encouraged by Chinua Achebe, and helped by the historian of Sierra Leone Christopher Fyfe, in 1967 Edwards published an abridged edition of Equiano's autobiographical Narrative in Heinemann's African Writers Series, under the title Equiano's Travels. He subsequently published a facsimile version of the Narrative, and another edited version under the title The Life of Olaudah Equiano.

He was, in fact, at the time that I met him, Professor of English and African Literature at Edinburgh. I guess if you're shocked at my description of him serving out red wine to students in his office on a regular basis you'll have to take my word for it that we did things differently then.

It was quite a shock to me when I got back to New Zealand to readjust to our rather puritan ways. In Edinburgh, all business and all social gatherings were conducted in the pub. Professors seldom stood their rounds, admittedly, but they were happy enough to have drinks bought for them by indigent students trying to curry favour.

It may not be anything to skite about, but you couldn't walk for more than a few yards down any street in Edinburgh without running into a bar. The city was awash with booze. I remember my first impression of it as I approached my hall of residence in a taxi was seeing a drunk throwing up in a gutter. "Auld Reekie" certainly lived up to its name.

Certainly my friends and I always gathered in pubs. You could sit in the corner for hours debating the meaning of existence, and you could even get a snack there if you were sick of the Student Union pizzas. Halcyon days.

It is a bit vexing that I can't locate a picture of Paul Edwards. I suppose that his legacy is really two-fold. On the one hand, there's the beautiful edition of the Sagas published by the Folio Society around the turn of the millennium, which includes a few of his translations alongside all the ones by Pálsson and Magnusson:


Magnus Magnusson: The Icelandic Sagas (2000 & 2002)

Magnusson, Magnus, ed. The Icelandic Sagas. Vol. 1 of 2. Illustrated by Simon Noyes. 1999. London: The Folio Society, 2000.Au∂un’s Saga, trans. Hermann Pálsson (1971)Grænlendiga Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson (1965)Eirík’s Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson (1965)The Tale of Thorstein Stangarhögg (Staff-Struck), trans. Hermann Pálsson (1971)Egil’s Saga, trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards (1976)Hrafnkel’s Saga, trans. Hermann Pálsson (1971)Eyrbyggja Saga, trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards (1972)Vopnfir∂inga Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson (1999)Bandamanna Saga, trans. Hermann Pálsson (1975)Gunnlaug’s Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson (1999)The Tale of Thi∂randi and Thórhall, trans. Magnus Magnusson (1999)Njál’s Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson (1960)
Magnusson, Magnus, ed. The Icelandic Sagas. Vol. 2 of 2. Illustrated by John Vernon Lord. London: The Folio Society, 2002.Ívarr’s Tale, trans. Magnus Magnusson (1999)Gísli’s Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson (1999)Ölkofri’s Tale, trans. Magnus Magnusson (1999)Laxdæla Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson (1969)Gunnarr Thi∂randabani’s Tale, trans. Alan Boucher (1981)Fóstbrœ∂ra Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson (1999)Hrei∂arr’s Tale, trans. Magnus Magnusson (1999)Vatnsdæla Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson (1999)Hænsa-Thórir’s Saga, trans. Hermann Pálsson (1975)Grettir’s Saga, trans. Denton Fox & Hermann Pálsson (1974)

The Icelandic Sagas. Illustrated by Simon Noyes & John Vernon Lord (2000 & 2002)

On the other hand there's the memorial volume Romanticism and Wild Places: Essays In Memory of Paul Edwards , ed. Paul Hullah (Edinburgh: Quadriga, 1998). I can't find an image of that online, either. Perhaps, instead, I can conclude with a (partial) list of his own works. They at least are, I'm positive, going to live on.


Paul Edwards, ed.: Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1989)


•

(2020)

Paul Geoffrey Edwards
(1926-1992)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Books:

[with Hermann Pálsson) Legendary Fiction in Medieval Iceland (1970)[with James Walvin] Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade (1983)
Essays:

"Black writers of the 18th and 19th centuries." In The Black Presence in English Literature. Ed. David Dabydeen (1985): 50–67."Three West African Writers of the 1780s." In The Slave's Narrative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates (1985)
Edited:

West African Narrative: An Anthology for Schools (1963)Modern African Narrative: An Anthology (1966)Through African Eyes (1966)Equiano's Travels: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African by Olaudah Equiano. African Writers Series 10 (1967)Equiano’s Travels: His Autobiography. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African. 1789. Ed. Paul Edwards. 1967. London: Heinemann, 1982. A Ballad Book for Africa (1968)Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African. African Classics (1990)[with David Dabydeen) Black Writers in Britain: 1760–1830 (1991)[with Polly Rewt) The letters of Ignatius Sancho by Ignatius Sancho (1994)
Translated:

[with Hermann Pálsson] Gautrek's Saga, and Other Medieval Tales (1968)[with Hermann Pálsson] Arrow-Odd: A Medieval Novel (1970)[with Hermann Pálsson] Legendary Fiction in Medieval Iceland (1970)[with Hermann Pálsson] Hrolf Gautreksson: A Viking romance (1972)Hrolf Gautrekkson: A Viking Romance. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards. New Saga Library 1. Edinburgh: Southgate, 1972. [with Hermann Pálsson] The Book of Settlements; Landnámabók (1972)[with Hermann Pálsson] Eyrbyggja Saga (1973)Eyrbyggja Saga. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards. New Saga Library 2. Edinburgh: Southgate, 1973. [with Hermann Pálsson] Egil's Saga by Snorri Sturluson (1976)Egil’s Saga. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. [with Hermann Pálsson] Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney (1978)Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards. 1978. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. [with Hermann Pálsson] Göngu-Hrólfs Saga (1980)[with Hermann Pálsson] Seven Viking Romances (1985)Seven Viking Romances. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. [with Hermann Pálsson] Knytlinga Saga: The History of the Kings of Denmark (1986)[with Hermann Pálsson] Magnus' Saga: The Life of St Magnus, Earl of Orkney, 1075–1116 (1987)[with Hermann Pálsson] Vikings in Russia: Yngvar's saga and Eymund's saga (1989)[with Hermann Pálsson] "Egil’s Saga" (1976) & "Eyrbyggja Saga" (1972). In The Icelandic Sagas. Vol. 1 of 2. Ed. Magnus Magnusson. Illustrated by Simon Noyes. 1999. London: The Folio Society, 2000. 67-246 & 275-384.

Vidar Hreinsson: The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (1997)

Further Reading on the Sagas:

Blake, N. F. ed. The Saga of the Jomsvikings: Jómsvíkinga Saga. Nelson’s Icelandic texts, ed. Sigurður Nordal & G. Turville-Petre. London: Nelson, 1962.Dasent, George. M., trans. The Saga of Burnt Njal: From the Icelandic of Njal’s Saga. Everyman’s Library. London & New York: J. M. Dent & E. P. Dutton, n.d.Hight, George Ainslie., trans. The Saga of Grettir the Strong: A Story of the Eleventh Century. Everyman’s Library 699. 1914. London & New York: J. M. Dent & E. P. Dutton, 1929.Hreinsson, Viðar, ed. The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (including 49 Stories). General Editor: Viðar Hreinsson, Editorial Team: Robert Cook, Terry Gunnell, Keneva Kunz & Bernard Scudder. Introduction by Robert Kellogg. 5 vols. Iceland: Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd., 1997.Vinland / Warriors and PoetsForewordBy the President of IcelandBy the Icelandic Minister of Education, Culture and ScienceBy the Former Director of the Manuscript Institute of IcelandPrefaceCreditsPublisher's AcknowledgmentsIntroductionVinland and GreenlandEirik the Red's SagaThe Saga of the GreenlandersWarriors and PoetsEgil's SagaKormak's SagaThe Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome PoetThe Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal PeopleThe Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-TongueTales of PoetsThe Tale of Arnor, the Poet of EarlsEinar Skulason's TaleThe Tale of Mani the PoetThe Tale of Ottar the BlackThe Tale of Sarcastic HalliStuf's TaleThe Tale of Thorarin Short-CloakThe Tale of Thorleif, the Earl's PoetAnecdotesThe Tale of Audun from the West FjordsThe Tale of Brand the GenerousHreidar's TaleThe Tale of the Story-Wise IcelanderIvar Ingimundarson's TaleThorarin Nefjolfsson's TaleThe Tale of Thorstein from the East FjordsThe Tale of Thorstein the CuriousThe Tale of Thorstein ShiverThe Tale of Thorvard Crow's-Beak
Outlaws / Warriors and PoetsOutlaws and Nature SpiritsGisli Sursson's SagaThe Saga of Grettir the StrongThe Saga of Hord and the People of HolmBard's SagaWarriors and PoetsKiller-Glum's SagaThe Tale of Ogmund BashThe Tale of Thorvald TasaldiThe Saga of the Sworn BrothersThormod's TaleThe Tale of Thorarin the OverbearingViglund's SagaTales of the SupernaturalThe Tale of the Cairn-DwellerThe Tale of the Mountain-DwellerStar-Oddi's DreamThe Tale of Thidrandi and ThorhallThe Tale of Thorhall Knapp
Epic / Champions and RoguesAn EpicNjal's SagaChampions and RoguesThe Saga of Finnbogi the MightyThe Saga of the People of FloiThe Saga of the People of KjalarnesJokul Buason's TaleGold-Thorir's SagaThe Saga of Thord MenaceThe Saga of Ref the SlyThe Saga of Gunnar, the Fool of KeldugnupTales of Champions and AdventuresGisl Illugason's TaleThe Tale of Gold-Asa's ThordHrafn Gudrunarson's TaleOrm Storolfsson's TaleThorgrim Hallason's Tale
Regional FeudsRegional FeudsThe Saga of the People of VatnsdalThe Saga of the Slayings on the HeathValla-Ljot's SagaThe Saga of the People of SvarfadardalThe Saga of the People of LjosavatnThe Saga of the People of Reykjadal and of Killer-SkutaThe Saga of Thorstein the WhiteThe Saga of the People of VopnafjordThe Tale of Thorstein Staff-StruckThe Tale of Thorstein Bull's LegThe Saga of Droplaug's SonsThe Saga of the People of FljotsdalThe Tale of Gunnar, the Slayer of ThidrandiBrandkrossi's TaleThorstein Sidu-Hallsson's SagaThorstein Sidu-Hallsson's TaleThorstein Sidu-Hallsson's DreamEgil Sidu-Hallsson's Tale
Epic / Wealth and PowerAn EpicThe Saga of the People of LaxardalBolli Bollason's TaleWealth and PowerThe Saga of the People of EyriThe Tale of Halldor Snorrason IThe Tale of Halldor Snorrason IIOlkofri's SagaHen-Thorir's SagaThe Saga of Hrafnkel Frey's GodiThe Saga of the ConfederatesOdd Ofeigsson's TaleThe Saga of Havard of IsafjordReligion and Conflict in Iceland and GreenlandThe Tale of Hromund the LameThe Tale of Svadi and Arnor Crone's-NoseThe Tale of Thorvald the Far-TravelledThe Tale of Thorsein Tent-PitcherThe Tale of the GreenlandersReference SectionMaps and TablesIllustrations and DiagramsGlossaryCross-Reference Index of CharactersContents of Volumes I-V Johnston, George, trans. The Saga of Gisli. Ed. Peter Foote. 1963. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent, 1984.Jones, Gwyn, trans. Eirik the Red and other Icelandic Sagas. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 1980.Turville-Petre, G. Origins of Icelandic Literature. 1953. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.
•

Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney. Trans. Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards (1978)


•

Sin City Tow (2024)

If you roll the dice and park your car illegally in Sin City, odds are you're going to lose that bet.

That's the motto for the new US Reality TV series Sin City Tow, set in Las Vegas, and starring a variety of tow-truck drivers, gamblers, and other eccentrics of every stripe.

"What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas - sometimes that means your car," quips the owner of one of the two competing businesses, Ashley's Towing, at the heart of the story - such as it is.

This is the latest reality show to audition for a place in my affections since the unfortunate demise of Ice Road Truckers (11 series: 2007-17) after the tragic death of series regular Darrell Ward. I followed that one up with the Canadian show Heavy Rescue: 401 (7 series: 2016-23) which plumbed not dissimilar territory: the adventures - and misadventures - of hardworking truckers in North America's frozen wastes.


Heavy Rescue: 401 (2016-23)

Alas, much though I'm enjoying Sin City Tow, I'm not sure that it will ever reach a second series, given the largely negative commentary it's been getting online - mainly from disgruntled car-owners who've had their vehicles towed, I suspect. Still, 85% of viewers are listed as having "enjoyed" it on Google, so there's some hope left.

I guess what I like most about it is what various of the other commentators dislike: the melodramatic heightening of fairly trivial events, and the narrative shaping that all this raw footage has undergone. The drivers themselves are not really a particularly likeable crew, but then, a dose of that good old Repo Man spirit is no doubt a sine qua non in their profession:


Repo Man (1984)

"See, an ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations."

Let's look at a few of those IMDb User Reviews, then:

... With reality TV shows, there is always the question of possible staging. I must say I do not believe Sin City Tow is guilty of this.

The reason being in the considered opinion of a person who has watched many and varied such series (me) is the following. The people in the confrontations are usually blanked out, their faces that is. With staged scenes, the "actors" are in on it, being paid for their performances, ergo no blanking out. So this is why I believe things are on the up and up.

... There is something to give pause. Are the towing companies seizing vehicles for the sake of making a buck rather than keeping parking in Vegas orderly and under control? Sometimes this does seem that this might be the case ...

The contention that the towing companies might simply be out to make a profit rather than nobly crusading to clean up the unruly streets of Las Vegas is a disturbing one. Next they'll be claiming that the casinos don't stay open simply to redistribute wealth to the starving masses, but rather to pile up profits for their corporate owners!

The point about the blanked-out faces is interesting. Given we see so many cameramen hovering around randomly in most of the scenes, I must confess it hadn''t occurred to me that anyone might have gone to the trouble of staging it that way. Hand-held camera blurring and shakiness is one thing, but surely any kind of fakery would come out looking a bit more polished?

The next commentator clearly doesn't agree, though (given the title of their review):

Dime a dozen fake reality TV show.

Have a friend that is a tow operator, so I caught some episodes of this while at their place.

Immediately obvious that this is another one of those "reality" shows which grew in popularity in the early-mid 2000's. And by reality I mean a show in which they stage a bunch of unbelievable scenarios for the tow truck drivers and employees, most of which consist of the drivers and agitators taking turns on upping each other's poor acting skills.

Other than the poor acting, there are also endless laughable confrontations and "Only in Vegas!" moments throughout. How laughable you ask? On their Halloween themed episode a driver stumbles upon an allegedly real Satanic ritual site, with a dead pig strung up and mutilated.

I won't claim there's 0 entertainment to be found in shows like this, but please do yourself a favor and don't recommend them to friends, unless you want them snickering behind your back because you believe that they're real.

That last paragraph sounds like a real cri-de-coeur to me. I fear that this writer has had the experience of recommending such a show to friends, only to hear them chortling behind his back. I feel his pain. I've heard more than a few such snorting noises myself from people who refuse to believe that a self-styled "uppity intellectual" such as I could actually be serious about my passion for Ice Road Truckers (and its ilk).


Lisa Kelly (2011)

In fact, when we were playing one of those silly "who-would-you-most-like-to-have-lunch-with" games, it took me quite a while to explain why Ice Road trucker Lisa Kelly would be my ideal choice. There'd be so much to talk about!


Shawn (2024)

Please don't give these scammers any recognition. I can't speak for the practices of all the tow truck companies, but Ashley's Towing, run by Shawn Davis, is wreaking havoc on the local residents of Las Vegas. It might be entertaining when it's a drunk guy on the strip, but when they illegally tow private home owners' and apartment renters' vehicles from right in front of their homes, it's not funny at all. No one calls these in, the tow trucks prowl the subdivisions and complexes at night for easy prey. They then extort these innocent victims for hundreds of dollars to release their vehicles from the private impound lots. After contacting the police and attorneys, it becomes evident that the scam Ashley's Towing is running is minor enough to fly under the radar of both our criminal and civil justice systems. Even though if you add up all the victims and hundreds of dollars, it's grounds for a class action lawsuit.

Before you support this nonsensical show, think about the honest people who rely on their cars either for work or to get to work, walking out their front door to realize their vehicle is gone. Then imagine them realizing they might lose their job if they don't have their vehicle. Or imagine the folks who can't afford to pay the several-hundred-dollar impound fee but need their vehicle to support their family.

I got my car towed once. I had a date in the centre of town with the lady who would eventually become my wife, and I couldn't find a park anywhere. I eventually took a chance on some reserved spaces outside an apartment complex, hoping that I'd get back before the tenants did. Alas, I miscalculated. Much of the rest of the night was spent ringing the police, then a taxi, then paying an exorbitant fee at a tow yard. I gambled and lost, and was appropriately punished.

If you live in an apartment anywhere - not just Las Vegas - and fail to pay the prescribed fee for your parking, or to display the parking permit correctly, you'll probably get towed. It's hard to see this as grounds for a "class action lawsuit", as the commentator above threatens. Good luck with that, is all I can say.


•

All the world’s a stageAnd all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances;And one man in his time plays many parts- Shakespeare, As You Like It, II: vii.

Here are a few of the principal actors in the comedy:


Jeremy

I'd have to concede that there is something a little disconcerting about the glee with which drivers such as Jeremy (above) pounce on their victims. But then, he did spend most of his formative years pouring concrete for a living, so I imagine he feels that this new lifestyle of his is something of a rest cure. He's unabashedly out for the cash.


"Pineapple"

The rather unfortunately nicknamed "Pineapple", from American Samoa, is more of a dispassionate technician. He tows away big rigs which have outstayed their welcome at truck stops, which requires a great deal of skill and expertise. He's not interested in confrontation, but - given he towers above most of the drivers who take him on - he won't back away from it either.

NB: It was he who, in their Halloween themed episode "stumbled upon an allegedly real Satanic ritual site, with a dead pig strung up and mutilated" in the back of a truck, as one of the commentators above mentioned. I'd like to think it was staged by the producers for a gag, but given the things they find in some of the other cars they tow, it's hard to be sure.


Elmer

Elmer, by contrast, is rather more of a tragic figure. Things never quite go his way. He finds a rich crop of cars, and then is forced to abandon them by an order from home base. He's deputed to shepherd through cars at the weekly auction of abandoned vehicles - an unpaid gig - instead of being out on the streets collecting towing fees. The cars he does tow end up getting damaged, or have to be left behind for one reason or another. He attracts bad luck, despite all his desperate efforts to get ahead.

And yes, there's more than a hint of the commedia dell'arte about the exaggerated clashes of temperament and style in these various knights of the road - and when you throw in the excessive and disproportionate rage displayed by some of the punters coming to the yard to pick up their cars, you begin to verge on Jacobean Revenge Tragedy. "You have to get off sometime," as one woman mouths to the receptionist asking to see the ID and registration she's failed to bring with her. "I'll be waiting."

One thing all of them have in common is a terror of the cops. The mere threat of calling the police is enough to make the most belligerent hoodlum back off from threatening the driver who's just impounded their car. I gather that there's a policy in the US that every call-out of this kind must conclude with an arrest - it's just a question of who ends up in handcuffs. And then there's the added fillip of possibly getting shot if you show any signs of reaching for a weapon (or even looking as if that might be on your mind).


Elvis gets towed

The obvious reading of this programme, then, is as a barometer of American life at its most grotesque and self-parodic. And certainly, in times such as these, it's hard to avoid the feeling that things have deteriorated considerably since Hunter S. Thompson made his own journey to the heart of darkness of the American Dream in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972).


Ralph Steadman: Cover of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972)

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid ot the pain of being a man."- Dr. Johnson

Thompson's existential despair has been replaced by a more banal wasteland of parking lots and cheap housing units: the darkness on the edge of town (in Springsteen's phrase) has been traded in for six-lane highways petering out in arid nowhere. These towies seem, at times, as futile and hapless as Wall-E robots, trying vainly to clean up an endlessly spreading (and self-renewing) stain on the landscape.

Can we - as a species - survive much more of this? I guess that remains to be seen. After all, as Ian Wedde put it in his great ecological anthem "Pathway to the Sea":

... we know, don’t we, citizen, that there’s nowhere to defect to, & thatliving in the universe doesn’t leave youany place to chuck stuff off of.

•

The owners of the Tow Truck Company preparing a car for auction

•

William Blake: Hamlet and his Father's Ghost (1806)

I remember that when we marked exams in the Auckland University English Department, we tutors were always instructed not to leave any comments - especially nasty ones - on the papers. Instead, we circulated a few stapled sheets for any thoughts we had beyond the bare grade.

The reason for this (I was told) was because there'd been a big fuss a few years before when a student made a formal request to see their script and found it covered with sarcastic marginalia.

Human nature being what it is, these comment-bundles tended to become the academic equivalent of a gag reel. They were carefully collected and burned at the end of each examination season.

Among the quotable quotes one of my colleagues recorded from our Stage 1 Shakespeare exam one year was the following remark about Hamlet: "The question is: is it a Protestant ghost or a Catholic ghost?"

He apparently thought it very risible to have to ascertain the spectre's doctrinal preferences before you decided whether or not you should pay any attention to its advice. It did sound rather funny - as stated - but I suspected at once that this phrase must have come from one of my tutorial students. It was I who had been stressing the differing views on the afterlife held by various Christian sects.


John Gilbert: Hamlet in the Presence of His Father's Ghost (1858-60)

Put simply, is Hamlet's deceased father now located in Purgatory, or in Hell? If the former, his intentions must presumably be good; if the latter, the question is far more equivocal.

When the ghost speaks of the "sulf’rous and tormenting flames" to which he is condemned by day, that sounds very much like hellfire.

However, the rest of his statement would imply otherwise:

I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
And for the day confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.

Ludovico Carracci: Purgatory (1610)

It's hard to read that line about his "foul crimes" being "burnt and purged away" as anything other than a reference to Purgatory. That is, after all, the place where such cleansing occurs. And Purgatory:

is a belief in Catholic theology. It is a passing intermediate state after physical death for purifying or purging a soul. A common analogy is dross being removed from gold in a furnace.

But how old is this doctrine? The idea of praying for the dead appears to have been part of Judeo-Christian practice for a very long time indeed. However:

At the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, when the Catholic Church defined, for the first time, its teaching on purgatory, the Eastern Orthodox Church did not adopt the doctrine. The council made no mention of purgatory as a third place or as containing fire ...

Subsequent papal pronouncements have clarified that "the term does not indicate a place, but a condition of existence."

As for the various Protestant churches, opinions vary according to denomination:

The Church of England, mother church of the Anglican Communion, officially denounces what it calls "the Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory", but the Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, and elements of the Anglican, Lutheran, and Methodist traditions hold that for some there is cleansing after death and pray for the dead, knowing it to be efficacious. The Reformed Churches teach that the departed are delivered from their sins through the process of glorification.

In other words, you pays your money and you makes your choice.


The Harrowing of Hell (1503)

Returning to Hamlet, though: despite its generally gloomy demeanour, the prince seems convinced by the end of this first encounter that it is "an honest ghost." That was not his initial reaction, though:

Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee.

There is indeed something very "questionable" about this apparition. It certainly claims to come from Purgatory, but ought we to believe it?


William Shakespeare: The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke (1603)

It's thought that Hamlet was written sometime between 1599 and 1601, in the latter years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. It was first published in 1603. The date of composition can be ascertained (to some extent) by some references in the text to the newly-formed company of boy players at Blackfriars theatre, as well as verbal echoes of some of Shakespeare's earlier plays.

This was definitely a time of great political uncertainty. Shakespeare himself only narrowly avoided trouble when his acting company put on a special performance of the play Richard II - which depicts the deposition of a monarch - for the supporters of the Earl of Essex, who mounted an abortive coup against the Queen in early 1601.

It seems a little unlikely, then, that Shakespeare would have been actively promulgating the "Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory" in such troublous times, even if he was (as some suspect) a secret Catholic.


Saxo Grammaticus: Gesta Danorum (1514)

Denmark has, of course, been staunchly Protestant since the 1520s, when the Reformation first reached Scandinavia. But that doesn't really help us either way, since Shakespeare's knowledge of the country was probably hazy, and since the actual "events" on which the play is based (as reported in the 13th-century "Life of Amleth" by Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, at any rate) took place in the legendary past of the country.

So we're left with that question: Was this ghost more likely to be regarded as a "spirit of health" or as a "goblin damned" by contemporary playgoers?

The question was definitively resolved - in his own judgement, at any rate - by Professor Ken Larsen of Auckland University. Or so he informed us in the first year tutorials I attended as a callow undergraduate.

Larsen told us that he'd read a book on thaumaturgy from the 1590s which gave a series of clear indications whether or not you could trust a spirit to tell you the truth or not (I'm sorry to say that I don't recall its title).

I was argumentative even in those days, and suggested that even if that was so, it didn't necessarily follow that Shakespeare himself was of the same opinion as the author of the self-help guide to necromancy Larsen was citing as evidence.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"I mean that nowadays lots of people write lots of books about spirits and the supernatural, but just because they're contemporary with us doesn't mean that we agree with them, or that we're even aware of their conclusions. Even in a smaller cultural circle, 1590s London, there could be room for a number of views on the subject."

"What do you mean?" he repeated.

"I mean even though this book gives one clear opinion, Shakespeare may have been unaware of it, or even actively disagreed with it."

"I don't know what you're saying. Are you saying that it's a waste of time to try to gauge contemporary opinion on the subject?"

"No, not at all. I'm just saying that this book can be cited as valuable evidence, but it doesn't necessarily prove that that was what Shakespeare had in mind."

"I don't see what else I can do except what I'm doing. I've told you what the book said. You seem to be disputing that. I don't see what else I can say to make it clearer."

It was all rather frightening. The other students were glaring at me. My point seemed to me so obvious that it was hard to believe he couldn't understand it. Naturally he didn't expect any mere freshman to dispute his learned views - "What, I say? My foot my tutor?", as Prospero puts it when Miranda dares to question him similarly in The Tempest. But it was more than that. He didn't seem willing to concede the simple axiom that evidence (however interesting and relevant) isn't ipso facto conclusive proof.

I got a B+ from him on my essay - the only mark below the A's I received in my whole undergraduate career, I think.

But, as you can tell from my - no doubt somewhat biassed - account of our conversation, I still agree with myself. Larsen was a devotee of theological hairsplitting. He was always pointing out arcane doctrinal points in sixteenth and seventeenth century texts (as I discovered a few years later when I benefitted from his instruction on Spenser and other esoterically inclined poets). But he did seem, nevertheless, to lack what Keats called "negative capability": the ability to remain in doubt on a variety of thorny issues.


Jack Thorne: The Motive and the Cue (2023)

Recently, watching a cinematically projected version of Jack Thorne's stage-play The Motive and the Cue , which records:

the history behind the 1964 Broadway modern-dress production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet starring Richard Burton in a production directed by Sir John Gielgud.

I came across yet another interpretation of Hamlet's father's ghost. Could it be, as Gielgud suggests to his turbulent star, that Hamlet simply didn't like his father? That the real reason for his apparent dilatoriness and indecision throughout the play is because he'd been bullied and belittled by him all his life, and is therefore reluctant - however subliminally - to continue this state of subordination even after the old man's death?

This is, admittedly, meant more as a guide to Burton's brilliantly moody (by all accounts) performance as the melancholy Dane than as a serious theory about the play. But even taken out of context it does help to explain the Oedipal struggle so many have sensed at the root of the drama.


John Gilbert: The Ghost, Gertrude & Hamlet (1867)

The ghost does, after all, reappear. In Act 3, scene 4, just when Hamlet seems to be making progress in explaining and even justifying his odd behaviour to his mother, Queen Gertrude, the ghost suddenly walks in and starts to chide his son for tardiness in exacting revenge:

Do not forget. This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But look, amazement on thy mother sits.
O, step between her and her fighting soul.
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
Speak to her, Hamlet.

This is, at that particular moment, distinctly unhelpful advice. Gertrude can neither hear nor see the spirit, and her son's reaction to it persuades her - once and for all - that he's as crazy as a bedbug: "Alas, he’s mad."

So, once again, is this simply an act of tactlessness on the part of the impatient ghost - or is it deliberate sabotage? Is he a malign spirit, stirring up trouble for purposes of personal vengeance - or is he a genuine messenger from beyond, sent to purge all that's "rotten" in the state of Denmark.

Does he come from Purgatory, as a blessed (albeit somewhat erring) spirit - or from Hell, as a damned soul? To a strict Protestant, only the second alternative is really theologically possible. A Catholic could more easily entertain the first theory, though further proof would be necessary to confirm it.

An Anglo-Catholic, in the 1590s, could well be in doubt on such a matter. It's important to stress that Anglicanism is not, strictly speaking, a Protestant denomination. It's always existed in a complex and uneasy negotiation between the two extremes of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. That's still the case now, and it was certainly the case then.

Hamlet is not generally listed among the Shakespearean Problem Plays. As conceived by critic F. S. Boas in 1896, these are:

All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. Some critics include other plays that were not enumerated by Boas, most commonly The Winter's Tale, Timon of Athens, and The Merchant of Venice.

However, Boas did adds that Hamlet links Shakespeare's problem-plays to his unambiguous tragedies.

The term itself (borrowed from Ibsen) was meant to denote plays "uneasily situated between the comic and the tragic." That's not really the case with Hamlet, which has all the hallmarks of Shakespearean tragedy (a fatally flawed hero, a tragic dilemma, and the curtain coming down on a stage full of corpses). But the play is profoundly problematic, all the same.


Laurence Olivier, dir.: Hamlet (1948)

The other great tragedies all exemplify a clear flaw in their protagonists: jealousy in Othello; ambition in Macbeth; pride in King Lear. But what's the moral deficiency in Hamlet? Laurence Olivier's film referred to it as "the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind."


T. S. Eliot: The Sacred Wood (1920)

T. S. Eliot's notorious 1919 essay "Hamlet and His Problems" called the play an "artistic failure" because the character's emotion does not accord with the external machinery of the play. It fails (he claims) to find an adequate "objective correlative" — a set of external objects or situations which could evoke that specific emotion in the audience.


C. S. Lewis: Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem? (1942)

C. S. Lewis, in his riposte "Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem?" creates an amusing thought experiment to explain his own reactions to the play:

Let us suppose that a picture which you have not seen is being talked about. The first thing you gather from the vast majority of the speakers ... is that this picture is undoubtedly a very great work. The next thing you discover is that hardly any two people in the room agree as to what it is a picture of. Most of them find something curious about the pose, and perhaps even the anatomy, of the central figure. One explains it by saying that it is a picture of the raising of Lazarus, and that the painter has cleverly managed to represent the uncertain gait of a body just recovering from the stiffness of death. Another, taking the central figure to be Bacchus returning from the conquest of India, says that it reels because it is drunk. A third, to whom it is self-evident that he has seen a picture of the death of Nelson, asks with some temper whether you expect a man to look quite normal just after he has been mortally wounded. A fourth maintains that such crudely representational canons of criticism will never penetrate so profound a work, and that the peculiarities of the central figure really reflect the content of the painter’s subconsciousness. Hardly have you had time to digest these opinions when you run into another group of critics who denounce as a pseudo-problem what the first group has been discussing. According to this second group there is nothing odd about the central figure. A more natural and self-explanatory pose they never saw and they cannot imagine what all the pother is about. At long last you discover — isolated in a corner of the room, somewhat frowned upon by the rest of the company, and including few reputable connoisseurs in its ranks — a little knot of men who are whispering that the picture is a villainous daub and that the mystery of the central figure merely results from the fact that it is out of drawing.

It's not unreasonable to suppose, Lewis goes on, that "our first reaction would be to accept, at least provisionally," the last of these views. However:

‘Most certainly,’ says Mr. Eliot, ‘an artistic failure.’ But is it ‘most certain’? Let me return for a moment to my analogy of the picture. In that dream there was one experiment we did not make. We didn’t walk into the next room and look at it for ourselves. Supposing we had done so. Suppose that at the first glance all the cogent arguments of the unfavourable critics had died on our lips, or echoed in our ears as idle babble. Suppose that looking on the picture we had found ourselves caught up into an unforgettable intensity of life and had come back from the room where it hung haunted for ever with the sense of vast dignities and strange sorrows and teased ‘with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls’ — would not this have reversed our judgement and compelled us, in the teeth of a priori probability, to maintain that on one point at least the orthodox critics were in the right? ‘Most certainly an artistic failure.’ All argument is for that conclusion — until you read or see Hamlet again. And when you do, you are left saying that if this is failure, then failure is better than success. We want more of these ‘bad’ plays. From our first childish reading of the ghost scenes down to those golden minutes which we stole from marking examination papers on Hamlet to read a few pages of Hamlet itself, have we ever known the day or the hour when its enchantment failed? That castle is part of our own world. The affection we feel for the Prince, and, through him, for Horatio, is like a friendship in real life ... When we want that taste, no other book will do instead. It may turn out in the end that the thing is not a complete success. This compelling quality in it may coexist with some radical defect. But I doubt if we shall ever be able to say ... that it is ‘most certainly’ a failure. Even if the proposition that it has failed were at last admitted for true, I can think of few critical truths which most of us would utter with less certainty, and with a more divided mind.

Lewis is, I hope you'll agree, quite right. Hamlet is a magnificent play - almost the magnificent play. It's the mountain peak all others aspire to. "If this is failure, then failure is better than success," as he so eloquently puts it.

I don't have a solution to the problem of the ghost in Hamlet. But I don't think that this is because I haven't looked hard enough - or am just too dumb to find it. I'm fairly sure that the point of the ghost in Hamlet is that we're being forced to remain in doubt about it.

It seems that the murder the ghost is so anxious Hamlet should revenge did indeed take place as described: Hamlet's uncle's actions at various points in the drama reveal as much. It also seems that the posthumous fate it describes for itself: "Doomed for a certain term to walk the night / And for the day confined to fast in fires" does indeed closely resemble the contemporary understanding of Purgatory. So it may well have been intended to be regarded by Shakespeare's immediate audience as "a spirit of health" rather than as "a goblin damned."


William Salter Herrick: Hamlet in the Queen’s Chamber (1857)

But it's impossible to be sure. Its second appearance is so unhelpful that it inevitably gives rise to doubts. Which leads us to go back and think again. Doesn't it make sense for Hamlet to question its bona fides, given the stark doctrine of pagan revenge this ghost is preaching?

It would indeed be nice if we could solve just this one little vexed point in the play, as Ken Larsen thought he had done. But to claim that is to miss the point. The reason Hamlet remains alive for us is because it defies easy analysis. It may be a "failure" if you measure it against the inexorable certainties of Oedipus Rex - but not if you see it as the root of all things modern in literature: uneasy, equivocal characters; unresolvable dilemmas; action as the root of harm as well as good.

The problems with Hamlet, then, are like so many of the other problems that beset us. As Dr. Johnson said, when asked to resolve the question of the existence of ghosts: "all argument is against it; but all belief is for it". There's definitely a ghost in Hamlet, and we're told that it's a role Shakespeare liked to reserve for himself, but who or what that ghost is, and whether or not it's seeking relief from damnation or purgation is beyond final construing. Perhaps that's the real significance of Hamlet's famous remark:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

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King James I: Dæmonologie (1597)

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Design: John Denny

Jan Kemp. Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems 1968–2024. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-3-00-083163-8. Kronberg im Taunus, Germany: Tranzlit, 2025. 172 pp.

I've just this morning received my co-author's copies of this, Jan Kemp's latest collection - a selection I made last year from her poetry to date. And here we both are on the back cover: snapped at an unguarded moment in the Senior Common Room of Auckland Uni during Jan's latest visit to New Zealand.


Jan Kemp: Dancing Heart (2025)

Blurb:

Jan Kemp MNZM & Dr Jack Ross first worked together 20 years ago creating the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2004). Since then Jan has published three poetry collections, Dante’s Heaven (Puriri Press, 2007) which became Dante Down Under (English/German) (2017), and Black Ice & the Love Planet (English/German) (2020), both from Tranzlit & Tripstones (Puriri Press, 2020), as well as the two memoirs Raiment (Massey University Press, 2022) and To see a World (Tranzlit, 2023). She lives with her husband Dieter Riemenschneider in Kronberg im Taunus, Germany, where she sings in a choir, presents poetry & music performances and walks in its parks.

Jack, too, has published three poetry collections since 2004: To Terezín (Massey University, 2007); A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014 (HeadworX, 2014), and The Oceanic Feeling (Salt & Greyboy Press, 2020); as well as Celanie (Pania Press, 2012), a collaboration with artist Emma Smith, which includes a translation of Paul Celan’s poems to his wife Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. He was also managing editor of Poetry NZ (now Poetry Aotearoa) from 2014 to 2020. He lives in Mairangi Bay, on Auckland’s North Shore, with his wife, crafter, curator and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd.

None of that tells you very much about the book itself, though. I've written some comments on Jan's previous collection, Tripstones, here. That, too, was a selection from already published poems, but it was meant as a short, limited-edition sampler from her longtime publisher Puriri Press rather than a genuine attempt to do justice to the scope and scale of her work to date.

Jan's nine poetry collections to date contain, by my estimate, 355 poems, composed over a period of roughly fifty years. All of them could all be fitted in one book, I suppose, but it would have to be a pretty massive tome. We therefore decided, when discussing the idea of a collected / selected edition of her poetry, to compromise on presenting a set of new, unpublished poems alongside a selection from her earlier books.

As I say in my introduction to Dancing Heart:

Each one of these books is a thing of beauty. They speak to the typefaces and design features of a particular epoch: the ampersands and back-slashes of the 1970s, the florid exuberance of the early 2000s.

Here's a gallery of covers to make the point:

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Jan Kemp: Against the Softness of Woman (1976)


Jan Kemp: Diamonds and Gravel (1979)


Jan Kemp: The Other Hemisphere (1991)


Jan Kemp: The Sky’s Enormous Jug (2001)


Jan Kemp: Only One Angel (2001)


Jan Kemp: Dante’s Heaven (2006)


Jan Kemp: Voicetracks (2012)


Jan Kemp: Tripstones (2020)


Jan Kemp: Black ice & the love planet (2020)


•

As I go on to say in my introduction:

I suppose if I had to play favourites, it would have to be for the meticulously designed and produced volumes created by John Denny at the Puriri Press in Auckland. The Sky’s Enormous Jug, with its delicate hand-binding and sumptuous illustrations, is a particular pleasure to leaf through. Dante’s Heaven, too, is a wonderful piece of book-art.

I'm very happy to report that John Denny has come out of retirement to design this new collection as a special favour to Jan.

What else? If you'd like to preview the table of contents and find out more information about the book, please go here. If you'd like to read my introduction in full, you can go here. There's a sample poem, "Christmas Lily", available here at Newsroom.

And if you're interested in ordering a copy, this is the address to write to:

Available:

Tranzlit
Bahnhofstrasse 16a
61476 Kronberg im Taunus
Germany
www.tranzlit.de
E: jantranzlit@gmail.com

RRP: $NZ35 [incl. postage & packing]

I hope you'll have as much fun reading the book as we did in putting it together. It involved digitising, collating, and selecting from all of Jan's books - a task we've both had to work hard on over the past year - but it was definitely worth it. As I say in my introduction:

As I look at my set of her books to date, including all nine of her poetry collections, published between 1976 and 2020, they seem like a time capsule of New Zealand writing over the past five decades.

In the end, though:

if it’s to live, your work does have to end up belonging to others.
Jan has understood this, and her lifetime of poetry writing, reading, performing and teaching has – in my view at least – resulted in a truly wonderful body of work, which I believe richly deserves to catch fire in the minds of new readers as well as the memories of already established fans.

Jan Kemp: Raiment: A Memoir (2022)



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Jan Kemp (2012)

Janet Mary Riemenschneider-Kemp MNZM
(1949- )

Books I own are marked in bold:

Poetry collections:

Against the Softness of Woman (1976)Against the Softness of Woman. Dunedin: Caveman Press, 1976. Diamonds and Gravel (1979)Diamonds and Gravel. Wellington: Hampson Hunt, 1979. The Other Hemisphere (1991)The Other Hemisphere. 1991. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1992. The Sky’s Enormous Jug – love poems old and new (2001)The Sky’s Enormous Jug – love poems old and new. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2001. Only One Angel (2001)Only One Angel. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001. Dante’s Heaven (2006)Dante’s Heaven. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2006.Dante Down Under / Gedichte aus Aotearoa/Neuseeland. 2006. Trans. Dieter Riemenschneider. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2017.Dante's Heaven / Il Cielo di Dante. 2006. Trans. Aldo Magagnino. Poggio Imperiale: Edizioni del Poggio, 2017. Voicetracks: Poems 2002-2012 (2012)Voicetracks: Poems 2002-2012. Auckland: Puriri Press / Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2012. Tripstones: A Selection of Poems (2020)Tripstones: A Selection of Poems. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2020. Black Ice & the Love Planet (2020)Black Ice & the Love Planet: Poems 2012-2019 / Glatteis & der Planet der Liebe: Gedichte 2012-2019. Trans. Susanne Opfermann & Helmecht Brienig. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2020.Black Ice & the Love Planet: Poems 2012-2019 / Ghiaccio Nero & il Pianeta dell'Amore: Poesie 2012-2019. Trans. Aldo Magagnino. Poggio Imperiale: Edizioni del Poggio, 2021. Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems. Ed. Jack Ross (2025)Dancing Heart: New and Selected Poems 1968–2024. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-3-00-083163-8. Kronberg im Taunus, Germany: Tranzlit, 2025.
Chapbooks & Features:

[Contributor] The Young New Zealand Poets. Ed. Arthur Baysting. Auckland: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973.[Contributor] Private Gardens: An Anthology of New Zealand Women Poets. Ed. Riemke Ensing. Afterword by Vincent O'Sullivan. Dunedin: Caveman Publications Ltd., 1977.[Featured Poet] Climate 29: A Journal of New Zealand and Australian Writing (Autumn 1979). Ed. Alistair Paterson. Auckland, 1979.Ice Breaker Poems. Drawings by Anthony Stones. Auckland: Coal-Black Press, 1980.Five Poems. Singapore: National Museum Art Gallery, 1988.Nine Poems from Le Château de Lavigny. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2007.Jennet's poem: wild love. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2012.[Featured Poet] Poetry NZ 48 (2014). Ed. Nicholas Reid. Auckland: Puriri Press / Palm Springs, California: Brick Row, March 2014.
Prose:

Spirals of Breath: Short Stories & Novellas. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2020.Raiment. Memoirs, 1. Auckland: Massey University Press, 2022.To See a World. Memoirs, 2. Kronberg im Taunus: Tranzlit, 2024.
Edited:

[with Jonathan Lamb & Alan Smythe] New Zealand Poets Read Their Work. 3 LPs. Auckland: Waiata Records, 1974.[with Jack Ross] Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance [with 2 CDs]. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006.[with Jack Ross] Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance [with 2 CDs]. Auckland: Auckland University Press,, 2007. [with Jack Ross] New New Zealand Poets in Performance [with 2 CDs]. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008).[with Dieter Riemenschneider] Wildes Licht: Poems / Gedichte aus Aotearoa Neuseeland (English-German). Kronberg: Tranzlit, 2010.


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Jan Kemp: To See a World: A Memoir (2024)

Tim Severin: The Jason Voyage (1985)

Tim Severin. The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece. Drawings by Tróndur Patursson. Photographs by John Egan, Seth Mortimer and Tom Skudra. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1985.

The other day I picked up a rather handsome secondhand copy of Tim Severin's book The Jason Voyage for a trifling sum. I wasn't actually planning on reading it right away, but somehow it grabbed my attention and diverted me from all the other odds and ends - biographies, short story collections, graphic novels - I'm working my way through at the moment.

I remember seeing a documentary about the making of Severin's replica twenty-oar Bronze Age galley the Argo some years ago, and it was interesting to compare that to the rather more contextual approach to the myth he takes here.


Apollonius of Rhodes: Argonautica (2014)

Apollonius of Rhodes. The Voyage of Argo. Trans. E. V. Rieu. 1959. Rev. ed. 1972. Introduction by Lawrence Norfolk. Illustrations by Daniel Egnéus. London: The Folio Society, 2014.

After a while I thought I should check on the critical response to some of Severin's more audacious claims about the original voyage of the Argonauts, and found the following review on the Goodreads site, contributed by a certain Koen Crolla (29/10/2020):

... Tim Severin spent much of the '70s and '80s and other people's money recreating some historic boat journeys; in this case, that of Jason and the Argonauts, from Iolcus (now Volos in Greece) to Colchis (now Georgia)...
The book covers everything from the construction of the replica Argo in Greece to their successful arrival in Poti, (Soviet) Georgia, and, in the epilogue, their engine-powered return, but Severin is neither a classicist nor an archaeologist, so many of the more interesting detail [sic.] are skipped over: you'll find plenty of anecdotes illustrating the boat-builder's personality, for example, but few details regarding the construction of the ship itself, and none at all regarding the archaeological basis of the design.
During the journey itself, too, Severin's thoughts on the Argonautica range far beyond what conscientious euhemerism will actually allow, with every coincidence becoming a confirmation of the definite historical fact of Jason and everything he encounters. It doesn't help that Severin's knowledge of Bronze Age Greece is rudimentary at best and tainted by Gimbutasian nonsense ... but some of the blame surely falls on two archaeologists (Vasiliki Adrimi in Greece and Othar Lordkipanidze in (Soviet) Georgia) for filling this gullible oaf's head with nonsense.
Still, things are such that even dodgy experimental archaeology often yields useful results, and if you ignore everything Severin writes about landmarks that are definitely 100% the locations mentioned in the Argonautica, there's still actual information left about the feasibility of crossing the open sea and rough currents in a crappy galley, even with doughy and/or middle-aged rowers — even if Severin is enough of a narcissist that large swathes of his account are clearly unreliable. (At least National Geographic took a lot of pictures.)
And though the write-up is kind of a lost opportunity, it's still decent entertainment; I would have liked to have been one of the crew.

Tim Severin: Rowers in the Bosphorus (1985)

How surprising that they didn't think to invite Mr. (or is it Dr?) Crolla to accompany them! His lively good humour would have left the whole crew in stitches, I'm sure - especially that little side-swipe at the "doughy and/or middle-aged rowers" Severin enlisted to help him. Not according to the photos he included of their sinewy bodies toiling at the oars - talk about "sitting well in order smite / The sounding furrows" (Tennyson, "Ulysses") ...

There were a couple of other points of interest in Koen Crolla's review, though. First of all, there was that intriguing word "euhemerism," which I must confess was new to me. Not any more, though:


Euhemerus of Sicily (fl. 4th century BCE)

Euhemerism :

is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages. Euhemerism supposes that historical accounts become myths as they are exaggerated in the retelling, accumulating elaborations and alterations that reflect cultural mores. It was named after the Greek mythographer Euhemerus ... In the more recent literature of myth ... euhemerism is termed the "historical theory" of mythology.

Tim Severin: The Jason Voyage (map)

Well, there you go. You learn something new every day. That really is a perfect description of Severin's diegetic method. Nary a rock or a headland can be glimpsed without his pointing out how perfectly it matches Apollonius's description in the Argonautica : an epic poem composed in the 3rd century BCE, roughly a thousand years after the actual events of the original voyage are supposed to have taken place.

I was also intrigued by Crolla's side-reference to "Gimbutasian nonsense." Again, this was not an adjective familiar to me, but I presume it refers to Marija Gimbutas:

a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.

Marija Gimbutienė: Lithuanian postage stamp (2021)

The "Kurgan hypothesis" turns out, on investigation, to be a fairly well-regarded theory about the origins of the proto-Indo-European (or "Aryan", as they used to be called) languages in an area north of the Black Sea. What I think Crollas must be referring to, though, is her later work:

Gimbutas gained fame and notoriety in the English-speaking world with her last three English-language books: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974); The Language of the Goddess (1989) ... and the last of the three, The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), which, based on her documented archaeological findings, presented an overview of her conclusions about Neolithic cultures across Europe: housing patterns, social structure, art, religion, and the nature of literacy.
The Goddess trilogy articulated what Gimbutas saw as the differences between the Old European system, which she considered goddess- and woman-centered (gynocentric), and the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal ("androcratic") culture which supplanted it. According to her interpretations, gynocentric (or matristic) societies were peaceful, honored women, and espoused economic equality. The androcratic, or male-dominated, Kurgan peoples, on the other hand, invaded Europe and imposed upon its natives the hierarchical rule of male warriors.

Aha! The penny drops. I'm certainly familiar with all the ideological battles over whether or not there ever was an ancient, peaceful woman-centred culture in Europe which was supplanted by the incursion of violent, male-dominated, warrior tribes. Once again, one point up to Crolla, though his reference to Severin as a "gullible oaf" still seems a little uncalled for.


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Tim Severin: The Ulysses Voyage (1987)

Tim Severin. The Ulysses Voyage: Sea Search for the Odyssey. Drawings by Will Stoney. Photographs by Kevin Fleming, with Nazem Choufeh and Rick Williams. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1987.

It isn't really the voyage of the Argonauts that's the problem, though. It's the Odyssey.

After rowing his painstakingly constructed galley through the Aegean and across into the Black Sea to reenact the Argonautica, the second part of Severin's master-plan clicked into action. Now he would attempt to sail the same boat from Troy, on the coast of Asia Minor, to the island of Ithaka, in order to chart the much-vexed Odysseus's difficult ten-year journey home.

Here's one of the standard interpretations of this voyage:


The Route of Odysseus

And here's Tim Severin's own route from Troy all the way to the Ionian sea, as navigated (for the most part) by his own Trojan-war-era galley:


Tim Severin: The Ulysses Voyage (map 1)

And here's an overview of his blueprint for the entire voyage:


Tim Severin: The Ulysses Voyage (map 2)

Both versions agree on a side-trip to North Africa, and a long haul back from there. The difference, however, is that the earlier version has Odysseus's 12-ship flotilla blown all the way down the coast to Tunisia, whereas Severin calculates that the ships must have battened down and furled their sails and thus made landfall far further east, in Libya.

Severin therefore postulates a much shorter trip back to Greece, followed by some cruising around the island of Crete, whereas the other theory has Odysseus landing in Sicily, followed by excursions to the Balearic islands - possibly even as far as the Pillars of Hercules!


Odysseus consulting the shade of Tiresias

Which of these two routes sounds more plausible to you: the one Severin actually sailed in his own boat, or the one dreamed up by desk-bound scholars measuring distances on the map?

Here are a few of the problems I foresee arising from any attempt to answer this question:It presupposes that there was once a person called Odysseus / Ulysses It assumes that he took part in the Trojan War And also that there was an actual, historical "Trojan war" It also takes for granted that legitimate, topographically precise details of his journey home can be gleaned from the Odyssey , a poem probably written around the 8th or 7th century BCE, about a war which took place at least 4-500 years earlier, around the 12th or 13th century BCE There are further assumptions built into it about the poet we refer to as "Homer", who may (or may not) have been the "author" - whatever precisely we mean by that, in a predominantly oral Bardic culture - of both the Odyssey as well as the Iliad And isn't it just a little bit problematic that the one fact all accounts of Homer agree on is that he was blind? Could he really have been the keen yachtsman and ocean swimmer postulated at certain points in Severin's narrative? Do I need to go on? Without wanting to be a spoilsport about it, I feel that we need at least a few plausible answers to the questions above before we start debating if an obscure Cretan folktale about three-eyed cannibals may have given rise to the story of the Cyclops, or whether or not the Straits of Messina are too wide to have been the abode of Scylla and Charybdis.


Robert Graves: Homer's Daughter (1955)

Such speculations can be a lot of fun, mind you. I'm a big fan of Robert Graves' historical novels, one of which resuscitates Samuel Butler's hypothesis - from The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) - that the real maker of the Odyssey was a Sicilian woman, who employed well-known landmarks from her own island for most of its more famous incidents.

Graves has her casting herself as Nausicaä, while her hometown is forced to play double duty as both Phaeacia and Ithaka. The whole concludes with a massacre, just like the Odyssey itself.


Robert Graves: The Golden Fleece (1944)

And then there's his earlier novel The Golden Fleece [retitled "Hercules, My Shipmate" for the US market], which turns the whole quest into a "Gimbutasian" struggle between Goddess worshippers and savage Apollonian invaders.

Or, as one of the more positive commentators on Goodreads puts it:

The Golden Fleece is an encyclopedic novel of all things Greek and pre-Greek. Graves incorporates or refers to many myths and legends, from the cosmogony through the trade war between Troy and Greece and the Twelve Labors of Hercules. And from various cultures, including Pelasgian, Cretan, Thracian, Colchian, Taurean, Albanian, Amazonian, Troglodyte, and of course Greek, he works into his novel many interesting customs, about fertility orgies, weddings, births, funerals, and ghosts; prayers, sacrifices, omens, dreams, and mystery cults; boar hunting, barley growing, trading, and ship building, sailing, and rowing; feasting, singing, dancing, story telling, and clothes wearing; boxing, murdering, warring, and treaty negotiating; and more. It all feels vivid, authentic, and strange.

In other words, there's no harm at all in reimagining and reinterpreting these old myths, as long as it's in the interests of sharpening our responses to the stories themselves - as well as the consummate works of literary art in which they've been preserved.

However, it's important to bear in mind that Apollonius of Rhodes was a scholar and librarian at the Library of Alexandria when he composed the Argonautica. Homer was - well, nobody really knows, but probably a Bard and performer of his own poems, in a possibly pre-literate culture. They were, in other words, completely different poets, from widely separate eras of Ancient Greek culture, who lived 500 years apart.


Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte d'Arthur (1485)

Try transposing these dates onto Le Morte d'Arthur, Malory's version of the Arthurian legends, published by William Caxton as one of the first printed books in English. The five and a half centuries between Malory and us should give you some idea of the actual distance in time between Homer and Apollonius.

If you extend the metaphor, and go back 1,000 years from Malory, you'll find yourself in the approximate era of the real King Arthur (if there ever was such a person). That gives you some idea of the gap between Apollonius and his own heroes, Jason's Argonauts.

Homer, by contrast, lived only 500-odd years later than his subject-matter, the siege of Troy (and its myriad dire consequences). Malory certainly could (and has been) used as a kind of guidebook to Arthurian Britain, but the more precise and "euhemeristic" these educed details become, the more absurd the whole project seems.


Geoffrey Ashe: The Traveller's Guide to Arthurian Britain (1997)

It'd be lovely to go back in a time machine and check out the facts for ourselves - though it might be a bit difficult to square the border region referred to in Hittite records as Taruisa (Troy?) or Wilusa (Greek "Wilios" or "Ilios") with the Troy of our imaginations.

Enterprises such as Severin's are certainly not futile. There is, however, little doubt that he tends to take an ahistorical, over-literal approach to both the textual and topographical details of the folktales that inspired his journeys. Whether or not this assists us in interpreting these myths, and the poems that embody them, is more debatable.


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Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis [C. P. Cavafy] (1863-1933)

An alternative approach can be found in the work of the modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, who set out instead to remind us of the deep metaphorical significance of these legends for all of us - but particularly those who still inhabit those ancient lands today. Here's his great poem "Ithaka" (along with my own attempt at a version for contemporary travellers):


C. P. Cavafy: Ithaka (1911)

IthakaBefore you set out for Ithakapray for a long itineraryfull of protracted stopovers.Customs officials, Interpol,the zombie Police Chief – not a problem:as long as you keep your shit together,staple a smile to your fat face,they won’t be able to finger you.Customs officials, Interpol,the paparazzi, will look right through you– unless you invite them up for a drink,unless they’re already inside your head.Pray for a long itinerary:landing for the umpteenth timeon the tarmac of a third-world airportat fiery psychedelic dawn;haggling in the duty-freesfor coral necklaces and pearls,designer scents & silks & shades,as many marques as you can handle; visiting every provincial town,sampling every drug & kick …Never forget about Ithaka:getting there is your destiny;no need to rush – it’ll still be waitingno matter how many years you take.By the time you touch down you’ll be bone-tired,happy with what you snapped in transit,just a few daytrips left to do.Ithaka shouted you the trip,you’d never have travelled without her.She’s got fuck-all to show you now.Dirt-poor, dingy … she’s up front.It’s over now; you’ve seen so muchthere’s no need to tell you what Ithaka means.(30/8-12/10/04)
Korina Cassianou: Odysseus of Ithaka (2011)


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Marc Fennell: Stuff the British Stole (2022-24)

Stuff the British Stole , for those of you who haven't yet come across it, is a "television documentary series which premiered in 2022", but which has only just arrived on Netflix NZ:

A co-production of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the series is hosted by Australian journalist Marc Fennell, and delves into various controversies around historically and culturally significant objects that were taken by the United Kingdom during its colonial era, and have been the subject of demands for their repatriation back to their homelands.

I guess the point of view it promulgates could be summed up more or less as follows:
Geographic Enigma: Europe According To Ireland (2025)

As one respondent on Facebook, where I found this gem, remarked: "A bit tough on the Welsh!"

In other words, everyone hates the English. I think I'm okay with that. In the second episode of the series, concentrating on the evil King Edward the First's brutal theft of the Stone of Destiny from Scotland, I found myself chanting "They can take my life, but they'll never take my freedom!", and even repeating (with tears in my eyes) Braveheart 's celebrated account of the Battle of Bannockburn: "They fought like warrior poets; they fought like Scotsmen ..."

So you can see which side of these various controversies I'm likely to espouse. Which is odd, really, as the Australian side of my genealogy leads back to England and the Vale of the White Horse after a couple of generations. It's only the New Zealand side which is so proud of its descent from Gaelic-speaking Mackenzies, Macleans, and Macleods in the Scottish Highlands (as well, of course, as those penny-pinching Rosses of Dingwall).

Be that as it may, I'm happy to report that Marc Fennell embodies the finest traditions of iconoclastic Aussie journalism. He's brash, vulgar, and sniggers at all the wrong moments. If he's a little prone to over-simplify immensely complex issues, one would have to say in his defence that at least he's prepared to drag them out into the harsh light of day for scrutiny.


William Dalrymple & Anita Anand: Koh-i-noor (2017)

Take the first episode of his TV show, for instance. It deals with the vexed subject of the Koh-i-noor diamond, the "Mountain of Light." Should it still be sitting in the Tower of London, stuck in the Queen Mom's crown? Probably not. Certainly the circumstances of its acquisition - extorted from a 10 (or possibly 11: opinions differ on that)-year-old child, the Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Duleep Singh, after the annexation of the Punjab by the British East India Company in 1849 - were a little less than edifying.


Franz Xaver Winterhalter: Duleep Singh (1838–1893)

Even at the time this was seen as pretty reprehensible, and Queen Victoria herself apparently felt uneasy about being presented with the jewel by the choleric Governor-General of India, Lord Dalhousie. Was it really his to give, she wondered? She didn't give it back, though. But neither did she wear it, at least until the young Duleep Singh, who'd become a favourite at her court, "regifted" it to her, moments after he was allowed to hold it one more time whilst posing for a portrait in 1854.

Among the many complicating aspects of this sorry saga - acknowledged in passing by Marc Fennell, but spelt out in detail in William Dalrymple & Anita Anand's excellent book on the subject - is the fact that the Sikh empire straddled modern-day India and Pakistan, giving both governments a pretext for demanding the jewel back. Then there are the many descendants of Duleep Singh and his relatives, each of whom has a claim.

And then there's the fact that Duleep's father, the so-called "Lion of the Punjab", Ranjit Singh, himself stole (or "acquired forceably", as he might have preferred to put it) the diamond from Shah Shujah, the erstwhile ruler of the Durrani Empire. The Durranis, in their turn, acquired it from the Afsharid dynasty of Iran, who looted it from the Mughal treasury in Delhi during their invasion of India in 1739. Troubled times.


Iranian ruler Nadir Shah on the Peacock Throne after his conquest of Delhi

After that it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the Koh-i-noor from various other fabled gems in Indian history. It is, however, known to have formed part of the famous Peacock throne of the Mughal emperors.

"Quis?" - to whom? - as Lord Marchmain puts it in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited , when trying to determine to which of his variously unsatisfactory children he should leave the family estate.

The Sikhs have a claim, the Afghans have a claim, the Iranians have a claim, the descendants of the Mughals have a claim, as do the ancient rulers of Hindustan. Even the God Krishna could be said to have a claim. It all makes for riveting TV, that's for sure.


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George Healy: Abraham Lincoln (1867)

As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings [= MAGAs] get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.- Abraham Lincoln

As usual, Abe Lincoln hits the nail on the head. It's not the fact that British colonial officials were a pack of thieves which is surprising, it's the degree of hypocrisy with which they attempted to disguise their depredations.

All conquerors are light-fingered by nature. I think we can take that as read. How else are you supposed to demonstrate how victorious you've been except with a pile of swag? The whole concept of the Roman Triumph is based around it. The idea of the "spoils of war" has even been carefully legislated in international law.

But just think for a moment how many indignant denunciations you've read of Napoleon's art thefts in Italy and Germany, and how blatantly they served to swell the holdings of the Louvre.


George Clooney, dir.: The Monuments Men (2014)

And then there are those wicked Nazis. There's a whole movie about Goering and the other "collectors" in the Third Reich who did their best to get down on the best of Europe's paintings and sculptures. How vulgar of them! How nouveau riche ...

The contrast with the thieving British colonial proconsuls and administrators, who had to arrange things to make it seem as if they'd somehow stumbled on the valuable artefacts they accumulated with such assiduity, is quite telling. Take, for instance, the notorious remark made by the founder of British India, Robert Clive, about his own restraint after defeating the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies in 1757:

Consider the situation in which the victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy, its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!

Rather than being chided for what he took, he expected to be congratulated for what he didn't take (not a lot, by all accounts).


Fred Barnard: Mr. Pecksniff contemplating his bust (1872)

No wonder Charles Dickens was inspired to create the character Pecksniff to satirise this curious trait in the British character, in possibly the most scathing - and, interestingly, worst-selling - of all his novels, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844).

Steal by all means, but don't pretend you're doing anything but that. The principle was perhaps best summed up in the words of another great British hypocrite, David Cameron (or, if you prefer, Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton - though he's probably better known as the unwitting architect of Brexit), when he was asked to return the Koh-i-noor to India:

During a 2010 visit to India, the British prime minister, David Cameron, told local media that the diamond would stay in Britain. “If you say yes to one [request], you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty,” Cameron said. “I’m afraid it’s going to have to stay put.”

The circular nature of this reasoning appears to have eluded him.

In any case, here are the various episodes of this thought-provoking series available to us so far:


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"They came, they saw, they looted"
Marc Fennell: Stuff the British Stole (2022-24)

The British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Those objects are housed in museums and galleries across the world. We peel back the true histories behind those objects - and meet those who want them back.

Series 1 (2022):
Jewel of Denial

At the heart of the Crown Jewels is the tragedy of a 10-year-old Sikh boy ripped from his mother and kingdom.

Stoned

Underneath the late Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation throne was a sacred stone that was stolen from Scottish kings. One Christmas night, a group of Glasgow students decided to steal it back.

Chipped

Scattered across Australia are fragments of a mysterious ancient mosaic found in Palestine. Putting the pieces together, reveals how the British Empire shaped the modern Middle East.

Shadow Boxer

In the wake of an epic rebellion by Chinese martial artists against foreign military forces a golden warrior statue is looted by British colonial forces. But how on earth did it end up in Australia?

The Crow Flies

Sign a deal with Queen Victoria or face disease and devastation? That was a choice facing one of Canada’s proudest leaders. But did the British forces then literally steal the shirt from his back?

The Return

In an unmarked grave in Liverpool lies the mystery of one of Western Australia’s greatest resistance fighters. This is the story of a courageous and inventive team that found a way to bring him home.

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Series 2 (2024):
Australia's Mummy?

Marc Fennell travels to the Pyramids of Giza, down the Nile and to the very heart of the British Empire to uncover the truth of how the ancient Egyptian mummified remains of a child ended up in Australia's oldest university.

Parthenon Sculptures

Stephen Fry joins Marc Fennell on a gripping adventure, from the pinnacle of the Acropolis to a secluded robotics lab high in the Tuscan mountains, to a shipwreck under the Aegean Sea.

Operation Legacy

From the bustling streets of Nairobi to a secluded royal retreat in the Kenyan mountains, Marc Fennell is on the hunt for secret documents that reveal a brutal history of war and a crumbling empire.

World's Largest Diamond

Marc Fennell delves into South Africa's first diamond mine and the opulent realms of London to uncover the intriguing tale of how the largest gem-quality diamond ultimately reached the hands of the British royal family.

The Mystery Sphinx

For years, visitors to the British Museum have been puzzled by an exhibit: a sphinx that looks almost identical to those from Egypt. Marc Fennell discovers the wild story of theft and the secrets of a breathtaking island.

Irish Giant

Marc Fennell unpicks the twisting history of Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant. It is a story of betrayal, exploitation, and the brutal reality of the medical industry.

Great Rubber Heist

Rubber is everywhere now, but it wasn't always this way. Marc Fennell explores the Amazon jungle to help unravel an elaborate botanical heist that changed the world.

The Girl & The Doll

In 2022, a tattered black doll was sent from Britain to the First Nations people of Lutruwita (Tasmania), carrying with it a devastating story of a stolen child. Marc Fennell unravels a story of heartbreak and injustice.

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Marc Fennell: Stuff the British Stole (2020-23)

Before the TV series, Stuff the British Stole started as a podcast in 2020. A very few - Tipu's Tiger, the Elgin Marbles - of the recordings listed below overlap with the TV documentaries, but not many. I suppose it goes to show how many such stolen objects there are to choose from!

Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today those objects are housed in genteel institutions across the UK and the world. They usually come with polite plaques. This is a series about the not-so-polite history behind those objects.

Series 1 (2020):

22/11/2020: A Tiger and a Scream

How a toy tiger became the symbol of a struggle between India and its former British colonisers.

29/11/2020: Blood Art

What if your doorstop was evidence of brutal mass murder and wholesale theft?

6/12/2020: Best.Named.Dog.Ever

Don’t let their fluffy hair and judging eyes fool you, Pekingese dogs are hiding a secret. Their history encompasses torture, hubris, war, and some very long sleeves. Most importantly these dogs — well, one in particular — may hold the key to understanding the sometimes vexed relationship China has with the West.

13/12/2020: The Headhunters

The arrival of Europeans in NZ kicked off a trade in Mokomokai — tattooed heads but these colonial souvenirs have their own complex history.

20/12/2020: Shots Fired

The Gweagal shield is just one of the things James Cook and his shipmates took from the local people when they landed in Botany Bay. Why has it become the most contentious?

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Have you ever wandered around a museum and thought “How on Earth did all of this stuff get here?” You’re not alone.
Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today those objects are housed in genteel institutions across the UK and the world. They usually come with polite plaques.
This podcast tells the stories about the not-so-polite history behind those looted objects.
In Season Two, Walkley award-winning host Marc Fennell will take you to a temple, a tree, a lab, a paradise island, a crime scene and a stage. You’ll uncover abductions, scandals and a murder investigation.
Season two of Stuff the British Stole is co-produced with CBC Podcasts.

Series 2 (2021):

20/10/2021: The Abductions

A war. A ransom. And a stunning recovery mission.
Five elaborately carved panels were buried in a New Zealand swamp to protect it from a war.
Then 150 years later, they’re acquired by a British collector before being sold to a Swiss-Bolivian collector in Geneva.
And their long journey home began when a kidnap ransom payment had to be made.
This is the remarkable story of the Motunui Epa.

27/10/2021: Losing Your Marbles

They’ve seen wars, the bottom of the ocean and even - bizarrely - been part of a boxing match.
The story of how the Parthenon Marbles actually ended up in London’s British Museum is a wild tale featuring bribes, court cases and some extremely dodgy deals.
There’s been a centuries-long campaign to get them back to their homeland. Now, a team of Greek-Australians have decided that the time for diplomacy is over and a new tactic is required.

3/11/2021: Cup Runneth

In County Cork, Ireland, there’s a tree that locals call the Chalice Tree. Local lore says it’s where British Redcoats disrupted a secret Catholic mass, killed two priests and took a sacred chalice.
Now that chalice sits in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.
But what happened in the intervening 200 years is now being pieced together by two Irish families: the O’Keeffes and the McAulliffe’s.

10/11/2021: Not Your Venus

Sarah 'Saartjie' Baartman was taken to the UK by a British doctor. But did she know what she was signing up for?
Stage-named 'The Hottentot Venus', Sarah was paraded around freak shows in London and Paris.
During her life and even after her death, she was objectified, mistreated and abused.
More than 200 years after her death, her life story reveals confronting truths about the treatment of black female bodies and how much has, and hasn’t, changed.

17/11/2021: Strange Fowle

It’s become a symbol for extinction; the dodo is a semi-mythical creature which most of us know only through Alice in Wonderland.
But one particular dodo was the victim of a crime – murder.
Its skull now sits in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. And it holds the clues to a thrilling mystery which illustrates a little-known colonial legacy.

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Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today the Empire's loot sits in museums, galleries, private collections and burial sites with polite plaques. But its history is often messier than the plaques suggest.
In each episode of this global smash hit podcast, Walkley award-winning journalist, author and genetic potluck, Marc Fennell, takes you on the wild, evocative, sometimes funny, often tragic adventure of how these stolen treasures got to where they live today. These objects will ultimately help us see the modern world — and ourselves — in a different light.
This is a co-production of the ABC and CBC Podcasts.

Series 3 (2023):

28/06/2023: The Head in the Library

In an old country town high school library there is a glass case that displays something highly unusual and, for some, confronting.
Inside that glass case is a mummified head and according to its plaque, it was donated to Grafton High School in 1915.
Now, over 100 years later, questions are being raised about where it really came from and whether it really belongs there.

5/07/2023: Bottles in the Basement

Deep in the cellars of one of England’s grandest country homes, covered in dirt and cobwebs, lay dozens of bottles of ancient rum.
Their discovery set off a frenzy among collectors vying to own the oldest rum in the world.
But where did they come from and who produced them? Sealed inside was the story of an enslaved people in one of the first overseas colonies of the British Empire - Barbados.

12/07/2023: The Unfinished Prince

There's a body buried in the grounds of Windsor Castle whose real home is thousands of miles away. Since 2007, there have been calls for Prince Alamayu’s remains to be returned to Ethiopia.
But how exactly did this young royal end up alone in England, and buried at Windsor Castle? To answer that we have to go back to 1868 to hear the message the British wanted to send that still reverberates to this day.
If this episode has raised any issues for you, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

19/07/2023: Zero Marks The Spot

It’s round. It has a hole in it. It symbolises nothing and yet it is the possibility of something... meet zero.
The zero we know and love today is the foundation of our modern world. And we have India to thank for it; in particular one special Indian birch bark book — the Bakhshali manuscript.
This is the story of how these fragile pages travelled to Oxford University and what their future looks like.

26/7/2023: The Fever Tree Hunt

Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds.
As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent and beyond, they encountered a formidable adversary — malaria.
There was a cure — the bark of the Andean cinchona tree. The only problem? The Dutch and the French were also looking to corner the market in cinchona. And the trees themselves were under threat.
Grab a gin and tonic and come with us to hear how a botanical empire took off — and gave birth to a quintessential cocktail.

2/8/2023: The Girl Called Pocahontas

How do you uncover the true life of a woman whose existence is wrapped in myth, propaganda and a famous animated children’s movie?
This is the true story of Matoaka - a young Powhatan girl who you probably know as Pocahontas. This is the mystery of a child, a hidden history and a stolen story.
Audio courtesy of Missing Matoaka.

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Marc Fennell: No One Saw it Coming (2025)

William Mayne: Low Tide (1993)

William Mayne's Low Tide interested me a lot when I first read it in the 1990s. It's set in New Zealand - which always tends to pique the interest of locals such as myself, and while I'm not sure that he does a great job of reproducing our manners and mores, the story itself is an arresting one. This is how Google Books describes it:

Set in New Zealand at the turn of the century, this exhilarating story of survival and adventure finds Charlie Snelling, his sister, and his Māori best friend swept up in a giant green tidal wave that carries them up high in the mountains to the old wild man called Koroua. What must they do to survive and find the way home?

Spoiler alert: They do eventually make their way down to the shore, only to find their town completely deserted and filled with sand and silt. But there's something just a little bit ... off about it. It looks similar, but not exactly the same.

To make a long story short, it turns out that there are two virtually identical towns set on different inlets. The one they live in was built after the other one was abandoned for various safety reasons. The new town was constructed on precisely the same model as the old one, though, which explains that strange moment of déjà vu when they stumbled into the latter by mistake, and found all their friends gone and the buildings half-buried by the tsunami.

It's a typically tricksy and laconically narrated William Mayne story: quite demanding even for its intended audience of older children, but also satisfactory in that he doesn't talk down to his readers.


William Mayne (1928-2010)

He looks harmless enough in the picture above, doesn't he? Almost like an old basset hound, with those two white sidelocks for ears. However:

In 2004, Mayne was charged with eleven counts of indecent assaults of "young girl fans" aged between eight and sixteen. At trial one victim gave evidence of events some forty years in the past. According to The Guardian, the prosecutor said Mayne had "treated young visitors as adults". He was described in the courtroom as "the greatest living writer of children's books in English". Mayne had pleaded guilty to the charges, but his solicitor said he had done so while under huge stress and would try to clear his name. On conviction, Mayne was imprisoned for two and a half years and was placed on the sex offenders register for life. According to The Guardian, "Mayne's books were largely deliberately removed from shelves from 2004 onwards", as a result of his conviction. - Wikipedia: William Mayne

It's rather like Low Tide: two towns, side by side on almost identical inlets, one full of bustle and life, the other completely deserted and left to the mercy of wind and weather. The first is his stellar reputation before the scandal; the second his status as a cancelled individual afterwards.

Trying to reread William Mayne now forces you to shift from that lively village of swift empathetic insights and strange, sometimes supernatural, fun, to the other town: the one where you have to hang your head in shame and watch armfuls of books being plucked from the shelves before being sent off to the nearest landfill for composting.

As for Mayne himself, he was "found dead at his home in Thornton Rust, North Yorkshire, on the morning of 24 March 2010." There were, we're informed, no suspicious circumstances; in other words, no reason to suspect suicide or foul play.


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William Mayne: All the King's Men (1982)

I think that the first book I ever read by William Mayne was All the King's Men. It's a very odd book indeed, a collection of three longish short stories. The first, title story concerns the doings of a group of dwarfs who feel oppressed by the lack of respect they've been receiving at court as the "King's Men." They run away from the palace, but are soon daunted by bad weather and lack of food and shelter.

Unlike the hero of Edgar Allan Poe's grand guignol classic "Hop-Frog," Mayne's protagonists are quite pleased to be found and brought back to their comfortable berths - albeit with a token slap on the wrist for their presumption.

The mockery they have to deal with is certainly real, but they are nevertheless forced to accept it and make do at the end. The story gripped me at the time because of Mayne's obvious empathy with his characters and sympathy for their dilemma. Like Jack London's equally moving "Told in the Drooling Ward," it's never really left my mind since.

It convinced me, among other things, that Mayne was a man of strange understandings and considerable delicacy of mind: another reason that the news of his conviction for indecent assault hit us all so hard.

About a year ago I wrote a piece, "Must We Burn Alice Munro?", about this same dilemma of whether or not we can continue in good conscience to read authors who've been outed in such a way. Can I, for instance, keep on enjoying Neil Gaiman's work after all the allegations of sexual misconduct which have surfaced recently?


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Neil Gaiman: The Sandman (2025)

Clearly no simple, off-the-cuff answer to so loaded a question can be expected to apply to every situation. I was forced instead to conclude my piece with a series of further questions:

Did Dickens lose any readers over the revelation of his cruel, public rejection of his wife in order to pursue an affair with the young actress Nelly Ternan? Nelly, it seems, had little choice in the matter - neither did Mrs. Dickens. His saccharine morality showed its pinchbeck quality once and for all in his later life. And yet we continue to pore over the complexities of his last fictions, full of young heroines sacrificing themselves for self-pitying older men.

In other words, while "there may be a few temporary blips in sales ... more readers are drawn to turbulent, demon-ridden souls such as Dostoyevsky and Dickens than they are to the sanity and order of better-balanced authors."

Maybe it shouldn't be so - but it is. Whatever (for instance) your opinion of J. K. Rowling's views on tne inviolability of gender roles, Harry Potter remains a fixture on our shelves and our streaming services.


Neil Gaiman (2013)

The interesting thing about Gaiman, in particular, is that these details about his private life have given me a number of new insights into his work. He sounds like a pretty sick bastard to me - in particular, if the accusations about his conduct with a young New Zealand nanny are accurate: "Call me Master" indeed! But then so is Dream, the protagonist of his Sandman stories, both as he appears in the the late 80s / early 90s comics and in the more recent 2022-25 TV series.

Dream (or Morpheus, as I suppose we should call him) sends a woman who rejects him to hell for ten thousand years as revenge for her presumption. Another of his ex-lovers, the muse Calliope, is repeatedly raped by a young writer in order to help him gain inspiration. She remarks, when Dream eventually decides to save her from this fate, that he must have changed over the past century or so. The older version would have refused to help her on principle.

The more closely you look, the more obvious it is that Gaiman has been half-condemning, half-defending his own sexual peccadilloes throughout his whole career. The disguise, now, seems as paper-thin as Dickens' series of late novels defending the idea of young women becoming enamoured of older men.

Whether or not Gaiman manages to extricate himself from his present difficulties concerns only him and his publicist, I would say. But, if anything, his work has become more interesting now it's revealed to have been so profoundly personal all along. I find I can continue to read it - mainly because Gaiman the writer is superior to Gaiman the man. The ugly face of libertinism, its callous cruelty, is shown in his fiction - not, I think, because Gaiman is a lying hypocrite, but because the logic of the story and the reality of his characters forces him to do so.


Neil Gaiman: A Game of You (1991)


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William Mayne: A Game of Dark (1971)

There's an interesting attempt to summarise the case against Mayne in John Clute's Encyclopedia of SF:

Soon after [the success of his "pared to the bone and fantasticated" later work], Mayne's life and work were tragically darkened – a tragedy first and foremost for his victims – when he was charged with child abuse in 2004 and imprisoned for two and one half years. His oeuvre went out of print, his books were removed from libraries, which was expectable; but his name was also conspicuously cancelled from the influential 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up (2009) edited by Julia Ecclestone, an erasure with grave implications. His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again.

As usual with this most fascinatingly layered of reference works, there's a lot going on in this short paragraph. There's a (parenthetical) acknowledgment that Mayne's abuse was "a tragedy first and foremost for his victims," but the burden of the piece seems, nevertheless, to be on the cost to him and his oeuvre. That last sentence sounds far more heartfelt: "His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again."

There's also a sideswipe at Julia "Ecclestone" (a misprint for Eccleshare), and her decision to "cancel" Mayne so conspicuously "from the influential 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up (2009)", which the authors of the entry describe as "an erasure with grave implications."

Interestingly enough, this same Julia Eccleshare wrote the Guardian obituary for Mayne roughly a year after the publication of 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up. Like most such long and well-considered assessments, it shows signs of having been written long before the eruption of the scandal, then recast in a hurry with a eye to those details:

William Mayne, who has died aged 82, was one of the most highly regarded writers of the postwar "golden age" of children's literature. His output was huge – well over 100 titles, encompassing novels and latterly picture books, rich in a sense of place and feel for the magical, and beautifully written. He wrote several books a year in a career that spanned more than half a century and won him the Carnegie medal and the Guardian children's fiction prize.

That first paragraph could have been written at any time; the next one, however, shows signs of having been hastily supplemented with new details to undermine any notion of a Mayne "comeback":

Although never widely popular and sometimes thought of as inaccessible for his young readers, his distinctive, allusive and spare writing had considerable influence and, despite being sometimes out of fashion, his books were often thought due for a comeback. That was never to happen. Instead, Mayne's books were largely deliberately removed from shelves from 2004 onwards following his conviction and prison sentence for indecent assault on children.

William Mayne: A Swarm in May (1955)

The rest of the obituary runs through his career more or less chronologically, from his early choir school stories, "based on his own experiences as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral from 1937 until 1942, the only part of his education he valued," to the more fantastic and supernatural themes he explored from the mid-1960s onwards.


William Mayne: Chorister's Cake (1956)

Numerous encomia are quoted along the way:

A Swarm in May was hailed as a "minor masterpiece ... one of the 20th-century's best children's books" by Frank Eyre in British Children's Books in the Twentieth Century (1971).
... Mayne also received great praise for Choristers' Cake. A review in the Times Literary Supplement highlighted the already clearly recognisable qualities of Mayne's writing while also pointing out the difficulties:

Its virtuosity and verbal richness, as well as the undoubted oddness of many of its characters, put it beyond the range of the average reader. But for the child who can meet its demands it will be a deep and memorable experience. In insight, in gaiety, in exuberance of idea and language, it is in a class apart. Mr Mayne is certainly the most interesting, as the most unpredictable, figure in children's books today.

William Mayne: Cathedral Wednesday (1960)

He's also described as "a master – the master in contemporary English writing for children – of setting". At length, though, the scandal must be faced again:

In 2004, Mayne was convicted of 11 charges of sexual abuse with young girls and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and placed on the sex offenders' register for life. It was a death knell for his books, but it did not stop Mayne from writing and he was still doing so at the time of his death. Print on demand had recently helped Mayne, with reprints of some of his titles due to become available on Faber Finds.

How different is the tone of that "It was a death knell for his books" from the SF Encyclopedia's "His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again" ...

Eccleshare's obituary concludes as follows:

The son of a doctor, Mayne was born in Hull and lived in the Yorkshire Dales for most of his life. He was famously reclusive. When asked if he would be interviewed for a children's books magazine, Mayne replied: "I am sure this sort of thing never works. I shall go nowhere to accomplish it and I'm sure others would find it unrewarding to come here. I have not sensed the lack of my not appearing in your neologies ... but if you find it necessary to molest my ancient solitary peace for the sake of your new, maddening piece, I am prepared to tolerate for a short time some person guaranteed not to be strident."

While the obituary as a whole was presumably composed for The Guardian's file of pre-cooked celebrity obituaries sometime before 2004, the choice of this particular quotation for its last paragraph does sound a bit pointed: the term "molest", in particular, seems a strange one for Mayne to have chosen, and given that it was a series of young fans and visitors "guaranteed not to be strident" he was eventually convicted of abusing, the irony is probably intentional.

Clearly the omission of Mayne from Julia Eccleshare's 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up wasn't accidental.


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William Mayne: Earthfasts (1966)

Which leaves us where, exactly? This is certainly not the piece I would like to write about William Mayne, teasing out the subtleties and constant spirit of experiment to be found in his fiction, old and new. As Julia Eccleshare puts it:

in general in Mayne's books, the characters are quiet and gentle. There are no heroics. If there is power, it usually lies within the land and its past; it can temporarily be used by humans passing through. This absence of heroes and the lack of major dramatic focus, combined with increasing obliqueness, caused Mayne to become less popular with children by the mid-1960s as his slower-paced stories failed to chime with the expectations of his readers. But, even before then, Mayne was always admired more by adults than children.

Different children have different expectations. I, too, found Mayne's books and elliptical dialogue difficult to follow at times, but for me that was a refreshing change from the "chosen one" action-hero fantasies which were the norm even then.

Nor did Mayne seem to have a distinct ideological axe to grind:

A recurrent theme of Mayne's stories was how children could see and accept magic and magical explanations, while the adults around them create rational stories to explain the same outcome. There was no sentimentality around Mayne's sense of children's belief. Instead he simply posited that children are as at home with unreality as reality, while adults take a different view. Mayne somehow seemed able to take both views himself, perhaps because he described his writing by saying: "All I am doing is looking at things now and showing them to myself when young."

He may have been - was, in fact - a flawed, childish man, but that is one of the reasons he was able to write so well from a child's perspective, without sentimentality, as Eccleshare admits above.

That trait of being able to take two views at once is crucial to understanding and appreciating his books. They're not action-packed - the land is more of an actor than the characters most of the time, as Eccleshare reminds us.

Like her, I doubt that there'll ever be a full-fledged Mayne revival. He never really was a bestseller, and his books were "always admired more by adults than children." I gather, though, that he's already finding his way back to a quiet vogue as a concocter of subtle and psychologically acute supernatural stories.

If the Weird Tales community can forgive H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard their multiple personal and stylistic transgressions, I can't foresee William Mayne having too much trouble.


BBC: Earthfasts (1994)


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William Mayne

William James Carter Mayne
(1928-2010)
Novels:

Follow the Footprints (1953)Follow the Footprints. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes. 1953. Oxford Children’s Library. London: Oxford University Press, 1958. The World Upside Down (1954)The World Upside Down. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes. London: Geoffrey Cumberlege / Oxford University Press, 1954. Choir School Series (1955-1963)A Swarm in May (1955)A Swarm in May. Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. 1955. Oxford Children’s Library. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Choristers' Cake (1956)Chorister’s Cake. Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. 1956. London: Oxford University Press, 1960. Cathedral Wednesday (1960)Cathedral Wednesday. 1960. Leicester: Brockhampton Press, 1972. Words and Music (1963) The Member for the Marsh (1956)The Member for the Marsh. Illustrated by Lynton Lamb. 1956. London: The Children’s Book Club, 1956. The Blue Boat (1957)A Grass Rope (1957)Underground Alley (1958)[as 'Dynely James'] The Gobbling Billy (1959)[with Dick Caesar] The Gobbling Billy. 1959. Knight Books. Leicester: Brockhampton, 1969. The Rolling Season (1960)The Changeling (1961)The Glass Ball. Illustrated by Janet Duchesne (1961)The Twelve Dancers (1962)The Twelve Dancers. Illustrated by Lynton Lamb. 1962. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964. Sand (1962)Sand. Illustrated by Margery Gill. 1964. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Plot Night (1963)The Changeling (1963)A Parcel of Trees (1963)A Parcel of Trees. Illustrated by Margery Gill. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Underground Alley (1963)Whistling Rufus (1964)No More School (1965)No More School. Illustrated by Peter Warner. 1965. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Pig in the Middle (1965) Earthfasts Series (1966-2000)Earthfasts (1966)Earthfasts. 1966. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Cradlefasts (1995)Candlefasts (2000)Candlefasts. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2000. The Battlefield (1967)The Battlefield. Illustrated by Mary Russon. 1967. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. The Old Zion (1967)Over the Hills and Far Away [aka 'The Hill Road']. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska (1968)The House on Fairmount (1968)The Hill Road (1969)Ravensgill (1970)Ravensgill. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970. A Game of Dark (1971)A Game of Dark. 1971. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Royal Harry (1971)The Incline (1972)[as 'Martin Cobalt'] The Swallows [aka 'The Pool of Swallows'] (1972) Skiffy Series (1972-1982)Skiffy (1972)Skiffy. Illustrated by Nicholas Fisk. 1972. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. Skiffy and the Twin Planets (1982) The Jersey Shore (1973)A Year and a Day. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska (1976)It (1977)It. 1977. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. Max's Dream. Illustrated by Laszlo Acs (1977)While the Bells Ring. Illustrated by Janet Rawlins (1979)The Patchwork Cat. Illustrated by Nicola Bayley (1981) Winter Quarters (1982)Winter Quarters. Illustrated by Margery Gill. 1982. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Salt River Times. Illustrated by Elizabeth Honey (1982)Salt River Times. Illustrated by Elizabeth Honey. 1980. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. The Mouldy. Illustrated by Nicola Bayley (1983) Hob Series (1984-1997)The Blue Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)The Green Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)The Red Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)The Yellow Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)The Book of Hob Stories. [Omnibus]. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1991)Hob and the Goblins. Illustrated by Norman Messenger (1993)Hob and the Peddler. Illustrated by Norman Messenger (1997) Drift (1985)Gideon Ahoy! (1987)Gideon Ahoy! Illustrated by Chris Molan. 1987. Plus Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. Kelpie (1987)Kelpie. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987. Tiger’s Railway (1987)Tiger’s Railway. Illustrated by Juan Wijngaard. London: Walker Books, 1987. Antar and the Eagles (1989)Antar and the Eagles. London: Walker Books, 1989. The Farm that Ran out of Names (1990)The Farm that Ran out of Names. 1990. A Red Fox Book. London: Random Century Children’s Books, 1991. The Men of the House. Illustrated by Michaela Stewart (1990) Low Tide (1992)Low Tide. 1992. A Red Fox Book. London: Random Century Children’s Books, 1993. Oh Grandmama. Illustrated by Maureen Bradley (1993)Cuddy (1994)Bells on her Toes. Illustrated by Maureen Bradley (1994) Fairy Tales of London Town Series (1995-1996)The Fairy Tales of London Town: Upon Paul's Steeple. Illustrated by Peter Melnyczuk (1995)The Fairy Tales of London Town: See-Saw Sacradown. Illustrated by Peter Melnyczuk (1996) Lady Muck. Illustrated by Jonathan Heale (1997)Midnight Fair (1997)Captain Ming and the Mermaid (1999)Imogen and the Ark (1999)The Worm in the Well (2002)The Worm in the Well. Hodder Silver Series. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2002. The Animal Garden (2003)Emily Goes To Market. Illustrated by Sophy Williams (2004)Jubilee's Pups (2004)Every Dog (2009)
Short Stories:

All the King's Men (1982)All the King's MenBoy to IslandStony Ray All the King’s Men. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982. A Small Pudding for Wee Gowry; and Other Stories of Underground Creatures. Illustrated by Martin Cottam (1983)The Blemyah Stories. Illustrated by Juan Wijngaard (1987)The Second Hand Horse (1990)The Second Hand Horse and Other Stories. 1990. Mammoth. London: Mandarin Books, 1992. The Fox Gate and Other Stories. Illustrated by William Geldart (1996)
Edited:

Book of Kings (1964)[with Eleanor Farjeon] The Hamish Hamilton Book of Kings. Illustrated by Victor Ambrus. London: Hamish Hamilton Children's Books Ltd., 1964. Book of Queens (1965)[with Eleanor Farjeon] The Hamish Hamilton Book of Queens. Illustrated by Victor Ambrus. London: Hamish Hamilton Children's Books Ltd., 1965. Book of Heroes (1967)A Book of Heroes. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska. 1967. Puffin Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Book of Giants (1968)A Book of Giants. Illustrated by Raymond Briggs. 1968. Puffin Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

William Mayne (16 March 1928 - 24 March 2010)


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Dr John Dee (1527-1609)

When local poet James Norcliffe published the collection Letters to Dr Dee in 1993, he thought it necessary to add the following explanatory note about his title:

Despite the oriental sounding name, the Dee I write to in these sequences is not Van Gulik's Chinese Magistrate of the Tang Dynasty, but John Dee, the Elizabethan magus. Dee was a man who straddled the medieval and modern worlds, a true alchemist of the crystal ball gazing type, a searcher of the philosopher's stone, the astrologer for Elizabeth I; and yet probably the foremost mathematician of his day, the man whose navigational assistance helped Frobisher in his search for the North-West Passage. Dee was reported to have had the largest personal library of any contemporary European at his home in Mortlake. I had been reading about this odd combination of mystic and rational man and I found it interesting to address my notes to him.

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura: James Norcliffe (1946- )

James Norcliffe. Letters to Dr Dee. Hazard Poets. Christchurch: Hazard Press, 1993.

I'm not sure if Norcliffe would run into the same difficulties with name recognition now as he did then. I've already had my say on the subject of "Van Gulik's Chinese Magistrate of the Tang Dynasty," Judge Dee, so I thought this might be the moment to extend the same courtesy to Dr John Dee, Norcliffe's "Elizabethan magus."

Or rather, what interests me here is not so much Dr Dee himself, fascinating - albeit distinctly dodgy - figure though he undoubtedly was, but the various roles he's been allotted in popular culture since his death in penury, a forgotten man, in 1609 (or was it toward the end of 1608? Nobody seems to be quite sure).


Peter French: John Dee (1972)

Peter French. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus. 1972. New York: Dorset Press, 1989.

One of the most vital building blocks in Dee's posthumous reputation is the book above, which I was fortunate enough to find a second-hand copy of the other day (though I'd known of its existence for many years). It's referred to repeatedly in the later works of Frances Yates, undoubtedly one of the most influential modern historians of the Hermetic and esoteric strains in Renaissance thought.


Frances Yates: Theatre of the World (1969)

Frances Yates. Theatre of the World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.

The last paper Yates gave in her lifetime was on, in fact, on John Dee, and he played an increasingly important (some would say deleterious) role in her thinking from the 1970s onwards. In brief, her contention was that his acknowledged skill as a mathematician and scientist should not be overshadowed by his popular reputation as a kind of Doctor Faustus, consorting with demons and spirits for dubious ends.


Frances Yates: The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979)

Frances Yates. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. 1979. Ark Paperbacks. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

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Méric Casaubon: A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits (1659)

Meric Casaubon. A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits. 1659. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing LLC, n.d.

The tone of the earlier writing about Dr Dee was largely set by the book above, Méric Casaubon's rather sensationalist tome recording the experiments Dee performed with his personal medium Edward Kelley, a dubious con-man who persuaded Dee that he could not only establish contact with spirits, but that this knowledge could be used to achieve the Philosopher's Stone.


Dr John Dee and Edward Kelly call up a spirit (1825)

The two scholars did a kind of European tour through the lands of the Holy Roman Empire in the mid-1580s, during which:

They had audiences with Emperor Rudolf II in Prague Castle and King Stephen Báthory of Poland, whom they attempted to convince of the importance of angelic communication.

They were suspected, however - probably justifiably - as passing on information to Queen Elizabeth's spymaster Francis Walsingham at the same time as pursuing their alchemical researches, which may explain some of the suspicion with which they were treated.

In 1587, at a spiritual conference in Bohemia, Kelley told Dee that the angel Uriel had ordered the men to share all their possessions, including their wives ... The order for wife-sharing caused Dee anguish, but he apparently did not doubt it was genuine and they apparently shared wives. However, Dee broke off the conferences immediately afterwards. He returned to England in 1589, while Kelley went on to be the alchemist to Emperor Rudolf II.

Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612)

Kelley eventually fell from grace when he failed, despite all his grandiose promises to the Emperor, to produce gold from base metal. He died trying to escape from prison sometime around 1597-98.

Dee, too, had a rather unfortunate time of it in his later years:

Dee returned to Mortlake after six years abroad to find his home vandalised, his library ruined and many of his prized books and instruments stolen. Furthermore, he found that increasing criticism of occult practices had made England still less hospitable to his magical practices and natural philosophy.

The accession of the rabid witchhunter and demonologist King James to the throne in 1603 was not good news for Dee. While Elizabeth had continued to back her old astrologer and adviser to some extent, even when he fell from favour everywhere else, James did not feel similarly inclined.

Dee was, it seems, forced to sell off most of the remainder of his once awe-inspiring library to provide for daily necessities for himself and his daughter Katherine.


John Dee memorial plaque (Mortlake, 2013)


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Colin Wilson: The Occult (1971)

Colin Wilson. The Occult: A History. 1971. Occult Trilogy #1. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

For a spirited (if somewhat sensationalist) account of all these doings, you could do worse than read the relevant section in Colin Wilson's bestselling page-turner The Occult. Nobody ever accused Wilson of not knowing a good story when he ran across it, and much of the subsequent palaver about Doctor Dee is probably based on the information included in his book.


Benjamin Woolley: The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee (2001)

Benjamin Woolley. The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee. 2001. A Flamingo Book. London: HarperCollins, 2002.

If, however, you'd like to read something a bit more reliable about the life and times of this extraordinary man, the book above might be a better place to go. If you'd like even more detail than that, however, I'd recommend a perusal of his surviving diaries.


Edward Fenton, ed.: The Diaries of John Dee (1998)

Edward Fenton, ed. The Diaries of John Dee. Charlbury, Oxfordshire: Day Books, 1998.

There's an edition of Halliwell's nineteenth-century edition of Dee's private diary available online, also well worth a look:
James Halliwell: The Private Diary of Dr John Dee (1842)

The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, and the Catalogue of His Library of Manuscripts. Ed James Orchard Halliwell. London: Printed for the camden Society, 1842.

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Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus (1594)

Dee's credibility problems began pretty early. Already, in his own lifetime, he was popularly regarded as a sinister occultist, and there are many reasons to suppose that Doctor Faustus in Marlowe's play is at least partly based on him and his jaunts with Edward Kelley - his Mephistopheles - around Central Europe.

Elizabeth appointed Dee Warden of the sternly Protestant Christ's College, Manchester in 1595, shortly after the first performances of Marlowe's masterpiece, and it's tempting to conjecture that this may be one of the reasons "he could not exert much control over its fellows, who despised or cheated him."


William Shakespeare: The Tempest (1610-11)

Was the magician Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, in Shakespeare's penultimate play The Tempest similarly based on Dee? The answer is probably yes. The latter had, after all, recently died, which made him fair game for an enterprising playwright. And, after all, what other models for a old-school Renaissance Magus were to be found in Jacobean Britain?

After that the trail went cold for a bit until the appearance of Méric Casaubon's immensely damaging account of Dee's séances with Edward Kelley (mentioned above) in 1659. This may not have been Casaubon's intention, but it did mean that Dee was now considered just one more name on a long list of credulous alchemists and occultists (Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Ficino, Cagliostro) whose ideas had been swept into oblivion by the new experimental science of the Enlightenment.

Dee was, accordingly, the obvious suspect to have formerly owned the famously indecipherable Voynich manuscript:


The Voynich Manuscript (c. 15th century)

Dee has often been associated with the Voynich manuscript. Wilfrid Michael Voynich, who bought the manuscript in 1912, suggested that Dee may have owned it and sold it to Rudolph II. Dee's contacts with Rudolph were less extensive than had been thought, however, and Dee's diaries show no evidence of a sale.

Similarly, H. P. Lovecraft felt no qualms about dubbing him translator of the English version of his imaginary forbidden tome, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred's Kitab al-Azif, or Necronomicon :


Dr. John Dee, trans.: The Necronomicon (1596)

It wasn't until later in the twentieth century that scholars began to pay him serious attention again. But the appearance of various studies of his influence on the English Renaissance by by Frances Yates and her successors was, unfortunately, accompanied by some rather less flattering portrayals.


Sandman fandom wiki: John Dee

The character John Dee (aka Doctor Destiny), for instance, appeared in the first, 1988-1989 story-arc of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman as a psychopathic killer, the son of Aleister Crowley-like Magus Roderick Burgess and his absconding lover Ethel Cripps. At the end of his rampage in the comic he's returned to a cell in Arkham Asylum.


Sandman fandom wiki: David Thewliss as John Dee (Netflix, 2022)

Neil Gaiman. The Sandman Library I: Preludes & Nocturnes. [Issues #1–8, 1988–1989]. 1991. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 1995.

Peter Ackroyd's contribution to this thriving sub-genre is not really much better. His House of Dr Dee lacks the dramatic energy and interest of previous efforts such as Hawksmoor (1985) or Chatterton (1987). It's almost as if he expects the famous house at Mortlake to supply the plotting for him. Even Wikipedia is hard put to it to sum up the point of it all:

The novel is a mix of the two men's stories as Palmer continues to find out more about the doctor. As the investigation continues, it is revealed that both men are similar in that they are both selfish and would rather be left to themselves.

A little like their author, one is tempted to add.


Peter Ackroyd: The House of Dr Dee (1993)

I won't go into all the other movies, fictions and video games inspired by - or including - Dr Dee. Some of the brighter spots are John Crowley's four-volume novel-sequence Ægypt (1987-2007); Michael Scott's six-volume fantasy series The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel (2007-12); and Phil Rickman's The Bones of Avalon (2010), where Dee plays an undercover secret agent turned detective.

You can find a more comprehensive list here.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the bunch to date is Blur-alumnus Damon Albarn's 2011 opera Dr Dee:
Damon Albarn: Dr Dee: An English Opera (2011)

There was once an Englishman so influential that he defined how we measure years, so quintessential that he lives on in Shakespeare’s words; yet so shrouded in mystery that he’s fallen from the very pages of history itself.
That man was Dr Dee – astrologer, courtier, alchemist, and spy.

The opera was originally conceived as a collaboration with comics-maestro (and self-styled modern Magus) Alan Moore, who initially suggested this choice of subject. The collaboration soon broke down, but Albarn persevered with the project.

Not having seen it, I can't comment further, but:

The Guardian gave the Manchester production four stars, saying that it "reaches to the heart of the tragedy of an overreaching intellect destroyed by a deal with a second-rate Mephistopheles". The Independent also awarded four stars, saying that the production was "mostly a triumph ... Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph gave the same star-rating, describing the opera as "fresh, original and heartfelt". The NME described it as "visually sumptuous and musically haunting".

Mind you, there's a rather amusing rant on a blog called The Renaissance Mathematicus entitled "Mythologizing John Dee" which sets out to unpack all the half-truths and false assumptions in the blurb above, sent out by the Manchester Festival.

Let’s take a look at how many of the facts ... are correct. John Dee did not define how we measure the years. He was consulted by the court on the possibility of introducing the Gregorian Calendar into England ... Far from being so shrouded in mystery that he’s fallen from the pages of history I can think of no other minor figure from the Elizabethan Age, and let us not fool ourselves in comparison to many others Dee in a very minor figure, who is so present in the pages of history. In not just British but European literature Dee is THE Renaissance Magus, minor and major figure in novels, films and theatre.
The list, astrologer, courtier, alchemist and spy, leaves out his principle [sic. - for "principal"] occupation: mathematician. Dee was one of the leading mathematical practitioners of the age known and respected throughout Europe. Also calling him a courtier is not strictly correct as although he was often consulted by the court as an expert on a wide range of topics he never succeeded in his aim of receiving an official appointment at court, Elizabeth and her advisors preferring to keep him at arms [sic] length ...
Lastly we turn to his supposed inspiration of Shakespeare and Marlow [sic]. The claim that he was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero is a rather dubious supposition with no proven basis in fact. This claim seems to have been fuelled by Peter Greenaway basing his Prospero, in the film Prospero’s Books, at least partially on Dee.

Peter Greenaway, dir. : Prospero’s Books (1991)

Peter Greenaway. Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1991.

It's somehow comforting to know that Dr Dee can still rouse such passions after all these years! (And no doubt few of my own blogposts are free from typos, either ...) Is that true about Prospero’s Books, though? Did it really suggest the Dee-as-Prospero theory? It may have popularised it, but it certainly didn't start it:

In an analysis of The Tempest, Frances Yates writes: “It is inevitable and unavoidable in thinking of Prospero to bring in the name of John Dee, the great mathematical magus of whom Shakespeare must have known, the teacher of Philip Sidney, and deeply in the confidence of Queen Elizabeth I."

Yates's book Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach was first published in 1975, long before Greenaway's film.

Another blogger sums up the present situation as follows:

It is popular to run to the historical visage of the famous physician, astrologer, and scrier, John Dee, as a probable influence whenever the stereotype of the bearded, crystal gazing, and be-robed wizard appears in literature or mythology. Dee has been suggested for Soloman of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Prospero of the Tempest, Faust of the Faust legends, and many other similar wizard-like personages over the centuries.

Why can't we just give the poor guy a rest? "You were silly like us," as Auden said of W. B. Yeats, another inveterate Occultist:

ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
[In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming] - H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928)

"In his house at Mortlake dead Dee waits dreaming." All he ever wanted, apparently, was just to read his books in peace and quiet, whilst conferring with angels or spirits from time to time by means of his Enochian tablets ...


John Dee: Enochian tablets