INTERVIEW / RONALD HUTTON
“Medieval Christians were capable of imagining goddess-like beings that looked thoroughly pagan”
RONALD HUTTON talks to Rhiannon Davies about his new book exploring four female deities who straddled the pagan and Christian worlds in the Middle Ages
On the HistoryExtra podcast
PROFILE
Ronald Hutton is professor of history at the University of Bristol and a leading expert in ancient and medieval paganism and magic. His books include The Witch: A History of Fear, From Ancient Times to the Present (Yale University Press, 2017) and Pagan Britain (Yale University Press, 2014)
Rhiannon Davies: Your new book, Queens of the Wild, explores four goddesses who evolved into hugely popular cultural figures in the Middle Ages. Can you introduce us to them?
Ronald Hutton: First up, there’s the figure of Mother Nature, or Mother Earth, who’s mostly discussed by elite writers in the Middle Ages. Then there’s the exact opposite –a charismatic female figure whom I call the Lady of the Night, who is very much part of the popular imagination or experience. What she does, basically, is scoot around with a retinue of fellow spirits and favoured human beings. Sometimes she and her friends just party; sometimes they visit the houses of particular worthy people and bless them and have a feast there. But they restore all the food and drink that they take.
The third is the Fairy Queen, who is the female monarch of a fairy kingdom. And the final one is the Cailleach, who’s specifically a Gaelic personality – she’s Irish and from the Scottish Highlands and islands and the Isle of Man. The Cailleach is a tremendous spirit of the land and, in Scotland, of winter.
In the book you argue that, although these deities bear all the hallmarks of ancient pagan figures, looks can be deceiving. What exactly do you mean by that?
There’s a strange contradiction with a number of goddess-like figures in medieval culture, and that is that they don’t appear to be inventions of the pagan ancient world. In fact, some of them seem to have been created in the Middle Ages. Yet, at the same time, there’s absolutely nothing Christian about them. So they didn’t fit in to the idea that something either had to be Christian, or it had to be a survival from ancient paganism. This raised the possibility that medieval Christian Europeans were capable of imagining beings that were utterly un-Christian and that looked thoroughly pagan.
So you contend that these goddesses don’t necessarily originate in the ancient world. But were they in any way inspired by ancient deities?
Very much so. A good example of this is Mother Nature. She was inspired originally by figures like the Greek Gaia and the Roman Natura, both goddesses of the Earth. But what’s really interesting about these is they weren’t great goddesses in the ancient world – there were no temples dedicated to them. Instead, they were really literary figures spoken about by philosophers or poets. That’s why Christians felt able to take them on in the Middle Ages and develop them massively into very important figures of the poetic and the theological imagination.
You write that Mother Earth filled a gap in the Christian concept of the cosmos. How exactly did she do that?
There were two gaps that Mother Earth filled rather nicely, and they’re reflected by the two parts of her name. The first is that of a female divinity who is subordinate to God but is still really important. She looks after the natural world, on behalf of the guy who created it. And the other part of it is nature. The medieval church had an enormous number of saints that in many ways fulfilled the functions of the goddesses and gods of the ancient world. But a lot of them didn’t really connect with nature. So in that respect Mother Earth, who was more or less exclusively concerned with the natural world, came in very handy indeed.
Is it fair to say that she is the most respectable of the four goddesses you discuss in your book?
She’s certainly less transgressive than the other three. Having said that, she was still very much a counter-culture goddess – she wasn’t mainstream. In the Middle Ages, she was particularly beloved of people who spanned the boundary between philosophy and poetry.
They really went to town in imagining her beauty, populating her world with palaces and chariots and associations. She trucked on, down through to the 19th century where she was reborn in even greater might in the minds of romantic poets. And today, she’s wound up as the great goddess of modern spiritual feminism.
Let’s take the discussion on to the Fairy Queen. How were fairies thought of in medieval Britain?
As far as we can tell, they were thought of originally as being nuisances. The Anglo-Saxons believed in beings called elves who are mostly recorded as giving people illnesses, especially sudden pains and afflictions. When you look at the records of fairy-like beings described by scholars and chroniclers in the 12th and 13th centuries, there are lots of unrelated stories of non-human beings who give help to humans, have sex with humans and just impinge on the human world, occasionally taking them into the fairy world.
Then you get this big literary theme of beings known as “fays”. These were superhuman equivalents of medieval ladies and gentlemen; in other words, they were exactly like fair ladies and dashing knights but they had magical powers. By around 1200 they had captured the European imagination, especially in romantic literature, all the way from Germany to Ireland. And out of this was born the idea of a fairy kingdom, an organised bunch of fays with a queen and very often a king as well.
What would this Fairy Queen be like?
She’s typically a very glamorous figure, and often really likes humans. And the interesting thing is that, after wandering around in the literature for about 100 years helping out elite human beings, she then got into the popular imagination. By 1500, ordinary people were claiming to have met her and been looked after by her. Many said they’d been taught magic by her, which enabled them to set up as folk magicians or service magicians – healers, and finders of lost property, and removers of curses.
You write that these magical healing powers fed into contemporary anxieties about witchcraft. What impact did these concerns have on people associated with the Fairy Queen?
It got connected to fears about witches when the people in charge of society and the legal system began fearing witches properly. This was in the mid-16th century, when Europe was plunged into the wars of religion, and the Reformation had really heated up into an all-out war between Protestants and Catholics.
A panic swept Europe about a completely new religion of demonic witchcraft, where groups of humans were empowered by Satan to worship him and work destructive, terrible magic, which would wreck human society and Christianity. So at this point people who claimed to have met the queen or king of the fairies and received magical powers from them could very easily be banged up, on the charge of having met the devil in female or male form and being seduced by him.
In the worst-case scenario, these people would be put on trial and often strangled and burned. This was particularly common in Scotland, where the law was much harder on people who spoke to spirits. This was encouraged by King James VI, the ruler of Scotland (and of England from 1603 as King James I). He was convinced that witches tried to kill him personally, and wrote a book on witchcraft.
Do any of the other three goddesses you write about have associations with witchcraft?
One of them has extensive connections to witchcraft, and that’s the one I call the Lady of the Night. In northern Italy and the Alps in particular, the centuries-old belief in her became snatched up by the witch panics. Women, in particular, who claimed to have gone in her retinue were thought of as having worshipped Satan in the Lady’s form.
What sort of people were drawn to the Lady of the Night?
Quite often it was poor women – because they were the ones who often became folk magicians. It was a real career opening for them. And in areas where there was a popular belief in this lady, the claim that you had been out with her and she’d trained you was like a university degree. It qualified you to be a magician, and people took you more seriously.
“Claiming you had been out with the Lady of the Night and she had trained you was like a university degree. It qualified you to be a magician”
How far did belief in her spread throughout Europe?
She first appeared in the Rhineland – that’s now west Germany running into eastern France and the Netherlands – just before 900. And the story then spread outwards, across Germany to France and northern Spain, and right across Italy as far as Sicily.
But at the end of the Middle Ages, this empire of belief broke down into various zones, in which the original idea of a night-roving superhuman female with human and spirit followers splintered apart. She’s a popular figure in Germany and Austria to this day, under her late medieval names of Holda or Holle, and is often seen as a snow spirit and a benevolent visiting spirit. She’s also known as Frau Percht, who’s viewed as a scarier kind of female spirit who goes around punishing naughty children in midwinter.
Which ancient pagan deities can we connect to the Lady of the Night?
The medieval churchmen linked her to Diana, an ancient Roman goddess who was affiliated with the night and witchcraft. Crucially, she’s also the only pagan deity to feature in the New Testament – it is, after all, Diana’s temple at Ephesus that creates a focal point for St Paul and his companion. So she was simply one of the best-known pagan goddesses to Christian medieval churchman.
The Lady can also be traced to various characters in the Icelandic Sagas, with varying degrees of success. In the sagas there’s a tradition of non-human beings called trolls who revel at night, but they weren’t led by a female character. There are also, of course, the Valkyries, female spirits who ride through the sky. But they’re not particularly connected with the night, they don’t have an agreed leader and they don’t sweep up live human beings. They actually pick up the corpses of dead warriors and take them away to be revivified, to fight for Odin.
How did the Lady of the Night fit into the Christian worldview?
She didn’t. Christians tried to cope with her in different ways. At the beginning, when she first appeared in popular tradition, churchmen said believing in her was wrong – the Lady was simply a silly superstition conducted among ignorant people who were deceived by the devil. They needed to stop believing in her and do some penance, perhaps by having only bread and water for a certain number of weeks or months.
That was the tradition for most the Middle Ages. But when belief in her got mixed up with the idea of a demonic conspiracy of devil-worshipping witches, then it was a much bigger problem. People were convicted and tried for going with her, and scores were put to death.
The last feminine figure you focus on is the Cailleach. How far back can we trace her in sources?
In the modern version we can trace her back to the early 20th century, but her component parts go way back further. The modern idea of the Cailleach is that of an immense spirit of the land, a giantess who creates lakes and mountains and prehistoric monuments and, in Scotland, brings in the winter season.
But the component parts of her –I think the most ancient – come from a Celtic belief in hag figures. These are often very powerful, scary, non-human beings who tangle with warrior heroes in medieval tradition and eat them or beat them or else are slain by them.
There’s also a literary figure called the Cailleach Bhearra who got mixed up with them. She’s from a 9th or 10th-century Irish poem, a tearjerker, spoken by a woman who was once royal, powerful and beautiful but is now very old and forsaken. She became quite a popular literary character in medieval Ireland and entered folklore, where she got conflated with the older idea of mountain-building, lake-creating giant hags.
The result was this composite figure who’s found in a lot of different forms in Gaelic folklore by the 19th century. And in the early 20th century, Scottish folklorists created out of this a composite ancient goddess spanning the whole Gaelic world. I think this idea is a modern invention, but modern entities have a life of their own, just like medieval entities.
As well as telling the story of these goddesses, your book explores how historians’ views of pagan beliefs have evolved. How did folklorists perceive paganism in the 19th and 20th centuries?
There was a great willingness to believe that paganism had persisted in most of Europe far into the Christian Middle Ages and maybe into the early modern period. Some argued that paganism had been the religion of the common people, with Christianity as a kind of veneer, believed in only by the elite. Others viewed it as a dual-faith system that permeated all levels of society.
There wasn’t agreement among them as to how paganism actually ended. Some believed it just faded away painlessly; others thought it was wiped out under the name of witchcraft and that the notorious early-modern witch trials were of people who were practitioners of this surviving pagan religion. As it turns out, neither theory was entirely correct – and they were both overturned in the second half of the 20th century.
Why did this school of thought fade so quickly in the later part of the 20th century?
There was an enormous cultural revolution in the late 20th century. Pretty much the entirety of Victorian and Edwardian thought got reviewed in the 70s and 80s, largely because the whole Victorian construct of empire, heavy industry and a strict social code had come apart in the 1960s.
In the 1970s young historians began reviewing the foundations of our beliefs, looking at the evidence again and questioning everything that we had been told about the past. It was an immensely exciting time.
How did that revisionist spirit inform your new book?
Really my role here was twofold. I pointed out the extent of the demolition of these Victorian-Edwardian ideals about pagan survival by stitching together all the different bits of it; and I have proposed where we could go forward from here in recasting our view.
What developments would you like to see in the study of the relationship between paganism and Christianity in the future?
We need a discussion of how far the terminology of Christianity and paganism still works. Perhaps we need to drop these terms altogether when speaking about culture in these periods, unless we’re speaking about things that fit into very specific categories. I think we have to expand the remit of Christianity beyond the apparently Christian, or else we have to find a way of talking about a form of paganism that isn’t opposed to Christianity and yet can be created by Christians as an alternative to it.
Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe
by Ronald Hutton
(Yale University Press, 256 pages, £18.99)
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