The Hedge School

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MYTH MAGIC FANTASY & FAERY – ONLINE COURSE

MYTH, MAGIC, FANTASY, AND FAERY : 

The Origins of the Insular Imaginary

This course is an exploration of the mythic origins of British and Irish identity and literature, which explores the languages and mythologies of the various peoples of the British Isles, and the development of the fantastic, imaginary, magical, and weird in literature and popular narrative, through the Medieval Period, to the Romantic and Gothic revival of Medieval sensibilities, the birth of genre literatures of the Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, the use of Myth in Modernist literature, and Twentieth Century literature of the fantastic, the weird, the wonderful, and the horrific. The resurgence of Fantasy as a genre in the Twenty-First Century, and modern approaches to Myth will form the conclusion of the course. 

In approaching Myth, we embark on a quest for the origins of the linguistic and cultural groups whose mixing and interweaving created the literature of the British Isles. These primarily Celtic and Germanic peoples brought with them, rather than a myth of creation, a myth of invasion and discovery of their Island Nations. Successive waves of invaders contributed to the mythological imagination of the Insular Mind, such as Viking and Norman, and traces of the previous inhabitants and their remnants provided a backdrop of ancient, hidden history for each successive incoming population. The Book of Insular History is a Book of Invasions. This historical palimpsest has created an Imaginary in which hidden worlds and lost paradises are paramount, as well as Isles of the Blessed across the Western Sea, the Celtic myth of Tír na nÓg, Hy Brasil, or the New World. Medieval Romance and the Folk Tale tradition created the fantastical imaginary, with its feudal knights and courts, mirrored in the Otherworld of Faery. These elements were rediscovered and revived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with Romanticism, and its dark twin, the Gothic. In this fertile ground were sown the seeds of the modern genres of Fantasy and Horror, and British and Irish literatures abound with Imaginary Worlds, fantastical creatures, magic, myth, and the denizens of Faery. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Fantasy and Myth have come to forefront of popular culture in all media, and are now a mainstay of video games, graphic novels, films and TV series, and a booming literary genre for both young people and adults. This course will interrogate the construction of the Insular Fantastic Imaginary, and its place in British and Irish, and more broadly Anglophone, culture in today’s world. 

THIS COURSE OUTLINE IS GIVEN FOR INDICATIVE PURPOSES : ADDITIONS AND ADJUSTMENTS WILL BE MADE EN COURS DE ROUTE …

MYTH, MAGIC, FANTASY, AND FAERY 

The Origins of the Insular Imaginary

  1. INTRO: The Possibility of an Island. The origin texts: The Song of Amergin and the Book of Conquests. Taliesin. Beowulf. The Book of Invasions. The Early Settlements. 
  • Presentation: the Book of Invasions, the Population Movements, the Pseudohistories. 
  • Texts: Amergin, Taliesin, Beowulf. 
  1. THE ORIGINAL SINS: Fionn and the Fianna, the Mabinogion, the Arthurian Legends. Why is the Love Triangle the Founding Myth? Why Wales, Ireland, England? Where is the Island?
  • Presentation: What is the shape of the National Myth? Where is the Island of Apples? The Land of Heart’s Desire?
  • Texts: Toraiocht Diarmuida agus Grainne, Math fab Mythonwy, Arthur and Guinevere, and the subtexts (Children of Lir, Clainne Uisnigh, Tristan and Iseult)
  1. THE HIDDEN HISTORY: the Folk Tradition: Buile Suibhne, Celtic Christianity, Patrick, The Saving of Civilization, the Viking Age. 
  • The Viking Age and the Population movements. First Age of Exploration. These Islands. The Kingdom of the West. Kerns and Gallowglasses. 
  • Texts: How the Irish Saved Civilization, Hagiographies, Monasticism, peregrinatio pro Christo, Imramma, Macbeth. 
  1. THE ROMANCE OF THE FOREST: The Norman Invasion and its Tales and Lays. Le Morte d’Arthur, Gawain and the Green Knight, Robin Hood, Chaucer, Mystery Plays. 
  • Presentation: The Invasion of the Normans, and the creation of Middle English, and Middle Irish. 
  • Texts: Robin Hood, Gawain, Morte d’Arthur, Canterbury Tales, Mystery Plays, Bayeux Tapestry, Domesday Book. 
  1. THE EMPIRE OF THE UNSEEN: Early Modern. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Milton, the Annals of the Four Masters, the Courts of Poets. 
  • Presentation: the Beginning of the British Empire, Elizabethan Occult Politics and Literature, the Reformation, the Witch Trials. 
  • Texts: The Tempest, Grainne Mhaol, Dr Faustus, the Bardic Schools and the Annals of the Four Masters. 
  1. A MODEST PROPOSAL: Swift, Defoe, Pope, Pastoral, the Odyssey and the Iliad, Fielding. 
  • Presentation: the Mercantile Age, the British Enlightenment. 
  • Texts: Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy. 
  1. THE ROMANTIC AND THE GOTHIC: the Poets, and the Renewal of the Medieval and the Pagan, the Gothic and the Return of the Repressed.  
  • Presentation: Romanticism and its Dark Double the Gothic
  • Texts: the Poets, and the Novels. Selections. Frankenstein, Radcliffe, Lewis, etc. Scott and the Historical Novel. 
  1. THE VICTORIAN: The foundational genre texts. 
  • Presentation: The Victorian Age and the Irish Famine: Empire and Emigration. 
  • Texts: Romance and Realism. The Debate. And the “underground”: Penny Dreadfuls, Newgate Novels, Broadsides, Ballads, etc etc. 
  • Carroll, William Morris, Dunsany, Wells, Lang (literary Fairy Tales), Stevenson, Haggard, Brontës, Victorian London, Dracula, Wilde, Kipling… The Arabian Nights
  1. THE MODERNIST: The Mythical Method and the Celtic Twilight. 
  • Presentation: The Great War and The High Modernist Genesis: Symbolisme and Realism, Axel’s Castle. Eliot, Woolf, Pound, Joyce, Yeats, Millay, Stein, etc. Plus the Flipside: the Irish War of Independence. 
  • Texts: the poems: The Wasteland, Pound’s Translations, A Room of One’s Own, the Celtic Twilight and the War of Independence, Ulysses. Occult Traditions and Orders, The Golden Bough, Theosophy, Golden Dawn. 
  1. HIGH FANTASY AND FAERY STORIES: The Flipside. The Pulps. Fantasy and Science Fiction are invented. Swords and Sorcery. British Fantasy. George MacDonald, Machen, Blackwood, etc. Aradia, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Lolly Willowes. 
  • Presentation: the invention of the modern genres of popular fantastic fiction. 
  • Texts: The Wind in the Willows, The Great God Pan, Peter Pan, The Sword in the Stone, The Lord of the Rings, Gormenghast, Narnia. 
  1. FLOWER POWER AND THE REVOLUTION: from the 60s to Today. The Counter-Culture and Fantasy and Faery. Flower-Power. Neo-Paganism, Environmentalism. 
  • Presentation: the Counter-Culture and the New Wave.  
  • Texts: Elric of Melniboné, The Chronicles of Prydain, The Dark is Rising, Alan Garner, Terry Pratchett, Angela Carter, Alan Moore, 1980s Robin Hood series. 
  1. THE TRIUMPH OF THE MOON: Current State of Play, and Envoi. 
  • Presentation: The Turn of the Millennium, and the Two Towers. 
  • Texts: Lord of the Rings Films, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, YA Fantasy Fiction Boom, Twilight, Paranormal Romance, D&D 5th Edition…. Fae Propaganda Department, Occult Renaissance, Witches of Instagram, Chaos Magick and the Alt Right, Gamergate, Kulturkampf. 
  • The Apocalypse. The Book of Revelations.