Figures on a hillside

‘Who comes must love lone

places,

Where long-forgotten bone

Lies in the old spaces.’

Fans of the work of English fantasy author John Whitbourn won't want to miss the chance to lay their hands on The Ghosts and Scholars Book of Landscape Figures. This is a hand-numbered limited edition hardcover featuring a selection of weird tales involving chalk giants and other ancient entities slumbering in the hills. Mr Whitbourn's contribution may (so he threatens) be his last short story. We must hope that's not so, but collectors will want to snap up their copy just in case. Forget about NFTs and crypto; give it a year or two and these books will be worth more than their weight in Saxon gold.

As for prehistoric (or sometimes more recent) chalk figures -- abiding through the centuries, they evoke a sense of the numinous even in a thoroughgoing materialist like me. They can be variously seen as guardians of the sacred, warnings to intruders, or just marks left by those lived before us to say, "We were here!" In the hands of these skilled writers they lie across the threshold where folk horror and psychogeography meet. I haven't been able to resist using them in my own work, both in the Dragon Warriors scenario "Wayland's Smithy" and, more frivolously, in this letter to the Royal Mythological Society in Mirabilis, the comic I created with Leo Hartas and Martin McKenna.

From Hercules to hermit

Talking of gods, and because I'm always partial to a bit of psychogeography, here's some news about the Cerne Abbas giant and his huge club. To save you reading the whole piece, the chalk outline version is that he began as an effigy of Hercules to rally the troops of Alfred the Great against those pesky Vikings. 

I realize it's fashionable these days to think of Vikings as peaceable multicultural traders, but that wasn't quite how the 9th century Anglo-Saxons thought of them. What's interesting is that Hercules was an ambiguous folk hero to the people of Wessex, who you'd think might have been sniffy about pagan demi-gods. But by the 11th century the local monks decided the big lad was actually their patron saint Eadwold. (Saints back then were obviously a bit more priapic and a bit less pudibund.)

The Giant shows another side of his nature in one of the Royal Mythological Society posts from Mirabilis: Year of Wonders. And if you're looking for a way to work chalk giants into a roleplaying game, take a look at my scenario "Wayland's Smithy" for Legend (the world of Dragon Warriors).