The saints and the earth
Danielle Giles on co-existing contradictions between folk and faith
We’ve been walking in the marsh for about three hours now. It doesn’t feel like three hours. Instead, I might have been out here only half an hour, or perhaps an entire day.
It’s December and the fog, which seemed passable and romantic when viewed from an A-road, is so thick that it obscures everything but what lies a few metres ahead of us. We slingshot from signpost to signpost and hope, each time, that we are travelling in the right direction.
We are in the Meres and Mosses, the evocatively named area in the Midlands which is as much marsh as dry land. A sign tells us that the Victorians discovered bog bodies nearby, preserved perfectly for thousands of years, and indeed there is something here that demands respect. I feel it when we turn at a crossroads and I throw out a quick prayer that this is the correct path. I feel it when the fog lifts and the marshland is revealed at last, silvery pools and sharp-edged reeds – a great gratitude aimed at no-one in particular apart from what surrounds me.
It is only when I sit down that evening to write that I feel a jolt of recognition. I am researching early medieval religion, and amongst headless saints and much-suffering martyrs, there are hints of something else, of pre-Christian belief systems. Wicked elves shooting invisible arrows, giants out in the mist. Magic employed by priests that requires intense knowledge of the landscape around them.
And much of it is familiar. The urge to connect to a place, the ability to hold multiple, sometimes conflicting facts at the same time. Just as we might go to church and check our horoscope on the same day, so people a millennia ago warded off evil with magic spells as well as holy prayers. The more I researched Old English prayers, spells and poems, the more I found an inspiration in their ability to exist, sometimes even thrive, in these in-between spaces.
Take the Field-Remedy charm. This was a ritual, first recorded in the 11th century but likely dating earlier than that, aimed at restoring barren fields. It appears to be a lightly-Christianised version of a much older spell and contains many elements that would make a modern local country curate baulk. The priest performing the charm would have needed a deep familiarity with local plants and herbs as he (or others) gathered them for ingredients – a reminder that knowledge of and respect for nature is not limited to any particular belief system. And, among smearing ploughs and clods of earth with herbs (more poultices, Vicar?), it petitions, intriguingly, an ‘earth-mother’, perhaps a reference to a mother-goddess figure.
Another spell, the Nine Herbs Charm, invokes the healing power of Germanic god Woden (or Odin to his Norse fans). That the Christian God and saints could be petitioned alongside mother-goddesses and Woden himself hints at a world in which these beliefs were not in conflict but, instead, sat alongside the other.
This is as true in Old English literature as it is in Old English magic. Take Beowulf, the 10th century blockbuster which has inspired everything from a Ray Winstone film to an episode of Star Trek. Our superhero Beowulf is highly driven by ‘wyrd’, the Germanic concept of a pre-defined fate, but constantly thanks a Christian God for his good fortune. When he dies he is cremated in a distinctly non-Christian manner, but eulogised as much for his selflessness and benevolence as his (less Christian) acts of physical courage.
This recognition of twin cultures, sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, is increasingly picked up in historical literature set in or inspired by the period. Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, set in the tumultuous period following the Norman invasion, features the stubbornly pagan Buccmaster, who dislikes the Christianity of his neighbours almost as much as the Normans he fights against. For Buccmaster, fittingly given his recalcitrant nature, there is no Christianisation, no hybrid belief system. He would deem it tantamount to surrender.
The novels Hild and Menewood by Nicola Griffith take a different approach. These tell the story of Hilda of Whitby, a 7th-century abbess and saint raised in the Northumbrian court. Hilda uses visions, couched in the natural world and incorporating first pagan and then Christian elements, to survive the brutal machinations of the courts she finds herself in. Here, the political ramifications of belief are as important as the spiritual, and both form important parts of the central character’s identity.
Works set in the modern era carry this through. The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley retells Beowulf in Suburban America from the perspective of Grendel’s mother. Impossible miracles abound and the mountain and the mere beneath it speak with a unified, otherworldly voice, the spirit of the landscape. The world of supermarkets and plastic surgeons has never seemed so brittle.
What all of these novels have in common is an intense, specific sense of place. It is no accident that the vast majority of these works occur in or around marshland: The Wake in the ‘fenns’ of Lincolnshire, Hild in the wild, boggy moorlands around Whitby. In Beowulf, Grendel and his mother are ‘border-steppers’ who are as much of the water as they are of the land.
These landscapes are liminal, these landscapes are wasteful. In A Flat Place, Noreen Masud describes them as a place of ‘complete exposure and complete withholding’. They contain malaria, uncertain paths, bog-bodies. In Beowulf they are enemy territory, in The Wake they are refuge. Here, more than anywhere else, it seems possible to take a wrong turning in the fog and find yourself in the company of something ancient and powerful.
We live in dizzying, unmooring times. Many of us are kept separated from nature, even as we are increasingly at its mercy as the climate crisis intensifies. Marshland reminds us that binaries are – have always been – irrelevant. The feeling on my winter trip to the Meres and Mosses, the urge by early medieval Christians to dig their hands deep in soil and bless what they found – all of it is a call to grow comfortable with contradictions and in-between spaces, and to trust in the path through them.
Danielle Giles was born in Germany and grew up in Bristol, where she currently lives. Her short fiction has appeared in Extra Teeth and Dear Damsels, and been shortlisted for various prizes. Her first novel, Mere, was published by Mantle in April 2025
She is currently reading Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White