Book Review:

Review of Jeremy Harte's Fairy Encounters in Medieval England: Landscape, Folklore and the Supernatural, University of Exeter Press, 2024. 222 pp.  Hardcover (ISBN: 978-1804130957). Kindle (ASIN: B0CMKLB31C). 

Fairy Encounters in Medieval England: Landscape, Folklore and the Supernatural is a book of dualities, which seems appropriate for a study of incursions of the otherworld into this one. Indeed, Harte acknowledges in the preface that the book is founded on dual premises: “that encounters did happen, and were only afterwards worked up into a story” and that “we can still recover those stories, even though we do not have them as they were told but mediated through clerical renditions” (vii). This project, of course, is relevant to anyone interested in the translation of oral stories into text, or the relationship between medieval lay and clerical culture; the prospect of considering these dynamics through the lens of fairy stories is compelling. Continuing with the dualities, Harte also acknowledges in his preface that his is a book in two halves, one based on the roughly one hundred encounters recorded in the literature (corresponding to the first half of the title), the other on the thousand or so English place names that reference supernatural beings (corresponding to the second half) (ix). Although he does occasionally reference works of literature, Harte’s primary focus is on personal accounts of fairy encounter; similarly, while he does mention comparable encounters from elsewhere in Europe, his main interest is in medieval England.

While the first half of the book, “People” is divided into three sections  (strange meetings, tales of wonder and sorrow, and inconstant shapes), in many ways it reads like a single piece. Harte’s narrative approach is to present the stories of supernatural encounters almost as a running commentary, without divisions based on chronology, geography, or any other historical feature. The accounts are presented largely without authorial interjection or explanation as to their relative significance, and the same story is often repeated in different sections. Certainly, the book is expansive and impressive in its breadth of research, but ultimately, the first part reads as a catalogue of encounters, without analysis of their meaning or significance. This methodology is a deliberate choice on Harte’s part; in the preface he acknowledges that he has “written as if things actually happened as they are said to have happened,” and that his goal was to “describe events in a running paraphrase” (viii). While the amount of evidence presented is impressive, ultimately the book suffers from a lack of scholarly commentary to help the reader process its sheer volume. Even at the end of the first part, there is no summary, no argument, no claim as to the significance of what has just been recounted.

The second half of the book shifts to a focus on places. In the opening paragraph Harte laments the lack of immediacy in reading the tales of supernatural encounter mediated through both the language and theological bias of clerical writers, stating “our knowledge would be so much more direct if it came to us through the vernacular” (73). Fortunately, we do have just such a source: place names, which Harte explains “were originally descriptive statements which through long use became codified into fixed referential labels” (81). Harte masterfully catalogues both the language of place and the terms for supernatural beings, tracing them through the various linguistic traditions of medieval England (Old English, Middle English, Old Norse) and showing how they combine in place names that reflect some sort of interaction between the human and other world at a specific location. This half of the book is comprised of only one chapter, divided into sections by type of place (roads, arable land, pools and streams, etc.). Harte continues his narrative approach of listing examples without much commentary, but this material is better suited to the style, as the reader comes away with a sense of just how much the supernatural has left its mark on the landscape. And not just the landscape of waste places or locations remote from human habitation; as Harte points out, the majority of place names that suggest a supernatural encounter are familiar, cultivated, built—lanes, pastures, bridges—reflecting the extent to which the world of fairy was part of medieval everyday life.

Harte’s two-page afterward is as frustrating as it is brief. He begins by stating “you might expect a conclusion about who the fairies were, why they appeared, and how they came to be part of the medieval world. But it is not as easy as that” (125). While it would be unrealistic to expect a full explanation of all the supernatural encounters covered throughout the book, one would perhaps appreciate some inductive analysis by the author on what he thought they meant. In this too the reader would be disappointed. Harte does suggest some broader patterns, such as how these encounters empowered women and others excluded from the world of clerical authority, but it feels too little too late on the second to last page of the study. The author’s admission that he has “touched on them lightly as they appeared” throughout the book does not compensate for the sense that such patterns and observations might have been foregrounded throughout. Harte attempts to explain his choices as an historian, noting that historical narrative requires causation, “and supernatural events are not caused” (126). But here too he manages to dishearten the reader in the second to last paragraph of the book, suggesting that we “can” write a history of these supernatural encounters, “but only by treating them as the product of human minds,” which would come at the cost of “writing as if we believed that fairies are something which people have just made up”; this would be at odds with the author’s entire purpose, stated in the introduction, to write “a book of things that happened” (126). In the very last paragraph, Harte offers “a way out of this impasse,” with a nod to the practice of anthropology and its preference for “what” and “how” over history’s “why.” However, it seems wrong to suggest an alternative methodology in the last sentences of a book.

For all the frustrations in the way Harte presents his evidence, there is no question that he is a careful and thorough reader of his sources. This precision is made clear in the last section of the book, a corpus of Elfin place names, in which he offers a comprehensive list of English place names containing any medieval word for supernatural beings, listed alphabetically by county. The payoff at the end of the study is this thorough reference guide that gives all the attention to geography and chronology that the rest of the book lacks. It offers concrete evidence for just how pervasive a sense of the supernatural was in medieval England and does so in a way that is sensitive to cultural and linguistic variances. It almost feels as if the preceding 125 pages are meant to serve as an extended introduction to this valuable list of place names rather than as an academic study in their own right.

Despite its shortcomings as a monograph, Fairy Encounters in Medieval England is a solidly researched reference guide for anyone curious as to how Medieval English beliefs about interactions between the otherworld and this one left their mark on the landscape. The accounts related within certainly flesh out the variety of these encounters. Jeremy Harte's painstaking scholarship would make an excellent springboard for further historical contextualizations. 

-27 Feb. 2025