Beatrice Groves – Hits-and-misses, Folk Horror and Shakespearean Pastoral
'Running Grave' First Thoughts
To celebrate Halloween with a delve into the folk horror of The Running Grave, Beatrice Groves, Research Fellow and tutor at Trinity College, Oxford, and author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, has written a Hogwarts Professor Guest Post: ‘Hits-and-misses, Folk Horror and Shakespearean Pastoral: Running Grave first thoughts.’ To find out more about spooky ash henges, dreadful dollies, and magnificent magnolia, join Prof Groves below:
When Rowling ran a competition for Running Grave predictions on Twitter I offered:
Prudence will trigger yarrow-stalk memories from Strike’s time at the Norfolk commune; Rokeby deathbed revelation; Norfolk dialect, Beeston Regis Priory & folktales of hidden tunnels, golden calf & grey spectres; body washed up under Cromer pier; danger on the Lion’s Mouth road.
Someone's been paying attention to my Twitter headers...
And she’s not wrong! But I realised on reading Running Grave that she may have snuck a header-clue past me. I guessed ‘body washed up under Cromer pier’ due to the Cromer Pier header, but – of course – there were two. Having posted an image of the sea front at Cromer on 4 March 2022, after nearly a year without a clue header she then put up one of the promenade on 2 January 2023 (responding to a request from @CormStrikeFan). This header was immediately changed to the I Ching, with Rowling claiming that the second posting was a mistake:
I realised I'd done that one before (or very similar), so thought @CormStrikeFan deserved something NEW!
These Cromer pier headers were the reason – along with the ‘watery death’ intimations of the title – that many of us predicted a drowning on Cromer beach. But, in fact, there were two drownings on Cromer beach, in exactly the same spot – and suddenly I began to wonder if the header-repetition was as unthinking as Rowling implied!
This second death in the same location was in fact a big – probably the biggest - clue pointing to the murderer. The only reason that Daiyu ‘drowned’ in the same place as Wace’s first wife must be that Daiyu’s murderer cared about that first death and wished to place some kind of suspicion/guilt on Wace in connection with either or both deaths. The startling coincidence made it pretty clear that Daiyu had been murdered – and the murderer was willing to take that risk simply in order to make Wace remember, and mourn, and feel afraid. And only one person in the entire cast of characters cared – or even seemed to remember – about Wace’s first wife (or, indeed, knew the precise location of her death).
Despite this oversight, I reckon I got a pretty good strike rate in this tweet – there turned out to be no link between Prudence and yarrow stalks (although the Chinoiserie in her consulting room suggests that she might be conversant with the I Ching) but there were both strong Norfolk accents (Gillian, the Heatons and one girl inside the UHC) and bodies washed up by Cromer Pier. Local folktales of grey spectres influenced the story far beyond my expectation and the danger on the Lion’s mouth road turned out to be the high-point of the entire story!
Lion’s Mouth Road
On 30 March 2023 Rowling changed her header to Lion’s Mouth lane, brilliantly located by CormStrikeFan.
I wrote at the time that the name of the lane connects ‘it with both danger and deliverance – for it is a famous biblical signifier for both. It appears in Psalm 22 (one of the best-known psalms): ‘Save me from the lion's mouth’ (Psalm 22.21). It is also repeated, in a more fully hopeful formulation, in 2 Timothy 4.17: ‘Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me; that by me the preaching might be fully known, and that all the Gentiles might hear: and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.’ This prediction came true far beyond my expectation – the Lion’s Mouth (the address of Chapman’s Farm) is a place of terrible danger for Robin. But it is also the place of her deliverance:
Strike, who’d arrived in Lion’s Mouth at one o’clock that afternoon, was now sitting in the dark in his BMW at the blind spot in Chapman Farm’s perimeter with the car’s headlights off. (The Running Grave p 609)
Like, I suspect, many readers I could not believe that Robin would escape three hundred and twenty pages before the end of the novel, so her successful bid for freedom felt all the more wonderful. She was indeed ‘delivered out of the mouth of the lion:’ the name pointing to both a place of great danger but also spectacular rescue!
Folk Horror
Some other guesses we made were wildly out. During the ‘Strike Agency Camping Trip’ podcast at The Three Broomsticks we guessed ‘no pigs until book ten’ – a joke (based on the goats in Harry Potter and sheep in Ink Black Heart) that was spectacularly off the mark! Pigs had, of course, turned up in a (misleadingly cute) guise on Rowling’s headers and LudicrousMonica – the brilliant winner of Rowling’s twitter-guessing competition! – posted some fascinating information about the farming origin of these glass pig charms:
Pig farms have a bad reputation, however, in popular culture and the moment pigs were mentioned I knew what horror was approaching. I’ve seen Snatch and I’m guessing Rowling has too:
Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs… You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. (Snatch 2000)
The bucolic dystopia of Chapman’s Farm fits in perfectly with Snatch’s ‘be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm,’ and bucolic dystopias, of course, have a particular resonance in English film. The memory of British folk horror films gave me a nasty shudder when we were told Chapman’s Farm has a long tradition of making corn dollies and, in particular, when we come upon them sculpting a giant man out of straw – a scene that has strong resonances with the most famous of all folk horror movies, The Wicker Man (1973). (For some seriously terrifying corn dollies see here.) The corn dolly was used in the context of a murder in Running Grave and this not only fits with its sacrificial folk horror use, but with its older mythic context likewise:
There’s a sacrificial aspect to them; this figure embodies the corn spirit that is then destroyed in order for the crops to be renewed, which is an idea that runs through everything from films like The Wicker Man to lots of contemporary thoughts around folk magic.
As a basic definition they are either a symbol, a figure or a representation of an animal made out of straw work. They’re very much an old harvest custom, because that’s when the straw or the corn was available. It’s a European tradition; there are examples that go back to 7th century Flanders and in Germany there are a lot of records of corn dollies being produced.
The idea is that the spirit of the corn, or the spirit of the harvest, resides in the corn and when the corn is harvested there is no longer a field of corn available. Museum Crush
The use of the corn dolly in Daiyu’s murder - as a stand-in for a murdered child, uncannily used to mimic her in life and then ritually drowned in her place – is perfectly aligned with corn dollies’ sacrificial embodiment of the spirit of the corn.
But a much more ancient Norfolk folk belief also lies behind the mechanics of this murder. For Daiyu’s corpse is disposed of within a circle of wooden posts, which recalls Norfolk’s most famous archaeological find - a 4000-year-old timber circle popularly known as ‘seahenge.’ A second Bronze Age timber circle (also made in 2049 BC) was found nearby and this one was made of ash. (The tree in which the murder weapon is hidden in Running Grave is, of course, an ancient ash, which connects with the ancient folkloric importance of this tree - in particular, of course, the World Ash Yggdrasil.) These seahenges are mortuary monuments, involved in the disposal of dead bodies just like the ring of wooden posts in Chapman Farm:
It is thought timber circles were used by prehistoric cultures to expose their dead to the elements, birds and wild animals - a practice called excarnation. The belief was that allowing the flesh to rot from the bones in the open air would liberate the dead person’s spirit. The archaeologists say the find is unique in Britain, and the best preserved example in Europe. “This is the first time we’ve ever found a timber circle intact in Britain,” said Mark Brennand of the Norfolk Archaeological Unit… What really excited the archaeologists was the discovery of the large inverted oak stump in the centre of the circle. It is thought to have formed a sort of altar on which the bodies would have been placed to decay. “Other circle sites we have looked at had large pits in the centre but we had no idea what caused them because the stump itself had long disappeared,” said Mark Brennand. “Now we know what was there, we can go back and re-evaluate the sites.” Dr Francis Pryor, President of the Council for British Archaeology, believes the symbolism of the upside-down oak tree is very important to understanding the Bronze Age mind. “We often find everyday objects deliberately turned upside down at Bronze Age sites. The inverted oak is a very complex statement. It is the world turned upside down, just as death is an inversion of life. From a ritual point of view it symbolises taking objects out of this world and placing them in the next.” (‘BRONZE AGE OAK WERE FELLED IN APRIL, 2050 BC’)
The ghostly appearance of the Drowned Prophet in the woods marks this area by the ring of posts as, likewise, a liminal space between the world of the living and the Otherworld. Niamh Doherty recalls how Daiyu ‘came back to Chapman Farm in the white dress she drowned in, and appeared in the woods where she used to play’ (p 183). But Daiyu does not come back to the woods because it is the place where she once played, but to haunt the place where she died.
Shakespearean Rituals of Death
I have written before about Shakespeare’s most ghostly play – Hamlet – and its influence on Strike so I was delighted to see some Hamlet quotation about revenge and retribution appearing in Running Grave: ‘And where the offence is let the great axe fall’ (pp 587, 863). This line comes at the end of Act 4 scene 5 where Laertes, outraged at his father’s lack of funeral rites, is promised by Claudius that they will revenge themselves on Hamlet, the true culprit:
Laertes: Let this be so;
His means of death, his obscure funeral--
No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o'er his bones,
No noble rite nor formal ostentation--
Cry to be heard, as 'twere from heaven to earth,
That I must call't in question.
Claudius: So you shall;
And where the offence is let the great axe fall.
Claudius is dodging the point (Hamlet is responsible for Polonius’s death, but the burial was Claudius’s responsibility) but it is interesting that Laertes is almost as disturbed by his father’s obscure burial as by his murder.
Hamlet, in fact, can be read as an extended meditation on maimed funeral rites. The play begins with a mourning period interrupted by a wedding - ‘the funeral baked meats/ Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’ (1.2.179-80) - and Ophelia too is interred with curtailed obsequies and her brother asks angrily:
Must there no more be done?...
I tell thee, churlish priest,
A minist’ring angel shall my sister be
When thou liest howling. (5.1.229-37)
The angel invoked by Laertes is heard again as Hamlet dies - ‘Good night, sweet prince,/ And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ (5.2.311-12) - and here it unmistakably echoes the Latin antiphon sung during the Requiem Mass: In Paradisum deducant te angeli… aeternum habeas requiem (May the angels bear you to paradise, and may you have eternal rest).[1]
This echo of Catholic liturgy suggests that the repeatedly disrupted sacraments of the play engage with the psychic rupture caused by Reformation’s abandonment of traditional mourning practices. The world of the play reflects the world in which it was first performed, and with the destruction of the panoply of Catholicism, rituals become fractured and fragmentary. These distortions seem to brood over Protestantism’s destruction of the comforting and familiar rituals of death, and the hero’s stasis itself can be read as a reflection on the unavailability of official forms of mourning.
Most famously, Hamlet’s father comes from purgatory to request a rather different sacrifice than the masses which were traditionally offered for the repose of souls. Daiyu, likewise, has an unquiet spirit in Running Grave and when Robin remembers how she almost missed Matthew’s mother’s funeral Daiyu ‘manifests’ tilting the stage and revealing the black pool beneath. Mazu admonishes Robin:
‘Daiyu’s very sensitive to certain kinds of wickedness,’ said Mazu, her dark eyes on Robin, who stood tear stained and breathless. ‘She had no funeral herself, and so she’s particularly sensitive about the sanctity of rituals surrounding death’ (The Running Grave p 409).
Daiyu, like the drowned Ophelia and Polonius’s ‘hugger-mugger’ funeral, has had curtailed obsequies. She has a ‘running grave’ in part because it is (putatively) a sea grave but the Dylan Thomas source for the title also suggests that a running grave is one that will not stay put in an ‘otherworld’ of the dead, but which seeps into, infects and infuses into, the life of the living. The Hamlet quote brings with it a world of ghosts that come from purgatory to revenge themselves upon their murderers, providing a symbolic hint that the Drowned Prophet whose ghost haunts this book is – likewise - a murder victim (and, incidentally, like Old Hamlet they were also murdered by their jealous sibling).
Another much more subtle Shakespearean echo also suggests that Daiyu is not the victim of an accidental drowning. When Strike gazes out from Cromer beach his musings take on an unusually vivid and macabre aspect:
Strike gazed out at the measureless mass of water, wondering whether what remained of Daiyu was somewhere out there, her bones long since picked clean, entangled in a broken fishing net, perhaps, her skull rolling gently on the sea bed as the waves tumbled far above. (The Running Grave, p481)
This sea-bed vision is reminiscent of the pictures drawn by Ariel in the Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.
Ariel’s famous and beautiful song (which is, incidentally, the source of the phrase ‘sea change’) seem to have inspired Strike’s sudden and unusually vivid imagining of bones in the undersea landscape. The link, at least, made me additionally confident that Daiyu did not drown – for Ferdinand’s father, likewise, has not drowned and the vivid imaginings of the song are trying to persuade him into a false belief. (Although the echo did strengthen my belief in the red-herring that Daiyu has been saved from the sea and squirrelled away to safety!)
The whole of the pastoral fantasy of Chapman’s Farm is a dystopian monetisation of Shakespeare’s ‘Green World’ - verdant landscapes into which characters both escape and find themselves (the woods in Midsummer Night’s Dream, the forest of Arden in As You Like It and Prospero’s Island itself being the most obvious examples). Shakespeare’s ‘Green World,’ incidentally, is a sufficiently famous, and classic, idea that it even has its own Wikipedia page and would, I suspect, have turned up in Rowling’s school Shakespeare syllabus. Northrop Frye, the critic who invented the term in the 1950s, describes it as “visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from ‘reality,’ but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate.” At Chapman’s Farm Jonathan Wace transforms this Shakespearean bucolic fantasy of sexual freedom and transformative self-realisation into a modern piece of folk-horror.
Magnolia: the suburban tree
Running Grave is by far the most rural of the Strike novels, expanding on the folk motifs and bucolic setting of the Oxfordshire section of Lethal White. Folk horror and rural setting here, as in that novel, are intertwined with the horses continually ploughing Dragon Meadow, corn dollies used in a murder plot and a murder weapon concealed deep in an ancient ash tree. But I’d like to end with that most suburban of trees with which the novel starts: a magnolia tree.
When Strike reaches Lucy’s house we are met with a very odd sentence:
The large magnolia tree in Lucy and Greg’s front garden was, naturally, sporting no flowers on this cool March day. (The Running Grave, p95)
Even given the author’s understandable desire to use trees to remind us of the time of year, this explicit attention (‘sporting’) drawn to non-flowers is a little startling. But I think it is there for a reason. This magnolia tree is reminiscent of Little Whinging in Harry Potter where Magnolia Crescent runs near to Privet Drive and ‘Magnolia Road, like Privet Drive, was full of large, square houses with perfectly manicured lawns, all owned by large, square owners who drove very clean cars similar to Uncle Vernon’s’ (Phoenix, Chap 1). Throughout the Strike novels, likewise, this magnolia tree has functioned as a shorthand for our hero’s dislike of the suburban conformity of his sister’s homelife:
A large magnolia tree stood in the front garden of Lucy’s house in Bromley. Later in the spring it would cover the front lawn in what looked like crumpled tissues; now, in April, it was a frothy cloud of white, its petals waxy as coconut shavings. Strike had only visited this house a few times, because he preferred to meet Lucy away from her home. (Cuckoo’s Calling, p207)
Strike’s aversion to Lucy’s domesticity is symbolised by this tree, so beloved of London’s suburbs, and his mental rejection of Marguerite in Silkworm is his rejection of Lucy’s magnolia-conformity ‘this was the sort of woman she imagined him falling for, and living with for ever in a house with a magnolia tree in the front garden’ (107). The tree has become tainted, in part, by the ubiquity of the paint-colour known as ‘magnolia’ which likewise crops up in suburban homes – both Kathryn Kent’s flat & Robin’s unsatisfactory attempt at domesticity are painted magnolia (‘their magnolia sitting room was far too tiny to accommodate a couple in such a state of fury’ [Career of Evil, 20]). But the name of this insipid paint has led Strike to overlook that, far from being boringly suburban, magnolia trees are rock stars of the arboreal world! They are over 100 million years old and existed before bees.
A flower that existed before bees is something quite difficult to get one’s head around. Something that looks conventional but is in fact extraordinary.
The flowerless magnolia tree is a hint that Strike is about to confront that he has been wronging his sister all this time. We discussed at The Three Broomsticks what Strike might discover via a revelation from Lucy about what has really happened at the Norfolk Commune. Sophia’s hunch was right on the money when she said that Lucy would reveal abuse she suffered there that would transform Strike’s understanding of her. Kathleen left a perspicacious comment about this in the podcast comments – noting the magnolia tree in Cuckoo’s Calling and its promise of ‘crumpled tissues’ later in the season as an ominous sign and that Lucy’s ‘past with Leda, which certainly may have included sexual abuse that Strike didn’t see (more of the “open your eyes” theme).’
Strike needs to recalibrate his relationship to the women in his life – this happened with Joan in Troubled Blood, with Charlotte in Ink Black Heart, and in Running Grave it finally happens with Leda, Lucy and Robin. This early chapter sets the tone for the transformations to follow: Strike is decisively honest with Lucy about Leda and Prudence, and comes to the realisation that Lucy’s response to her traumatic childhood is just as courageous as his own: ‘and for the very first time in their adult lives, it occurred to Strike that his sister’s determination to cling to stability and her notion of normality… was a form of extraordinary courage’ (p 102). I’ve written ‘FINALLY!’ in the margin.
Trees are symbolically important in Strike, just has they are in Harry Potter where every wand wood is carefully calibrated, and I think that Strike may finally have come to the realisation that he needs to resist the easy cliché of the magnolia tree. It was not, perhaps, his most important break-through in this book, but his realisation about Lucy’s courage and his honesty with her in this early chapter was a decisive step towards his honesty towards Robin in the closing pages of the novel.
[1] Peter Baldwin, “Hamlet and In Paradisum,” Shakespeare Quarterly 3 (1952): 279-80.
All of Dr Groves’ on line Rowling scholarship can be found in the Beatrice Groves Pillar Post.
Yay, Beatrice is back! And this post was worth waiting for, so rich in more literary allusion. I am fascinated by a millennia old seahenge, especially the inverted oak tree in the center. I've been wondering about the recurring theme of happiness in Running Grave, till I remembered the Greek word makarios often translated "happy," can also mean "blessed," and in the Sermon on the Mount, this word represents an inversion from those often viewed as cursed to blessed. It's a scandalous inversion enacted by Jesus Christ as he ministers to the "poor in spirit... those who mourn... the meek... those who hunger and thirst for justice [Strike!]... the merciful... the pure in heart... those who work for peace...and those persecuted for doing right." (Mt 5:3-10) I've wondered if the UHC "steps to become pure spirit" and the Sanskrit chant (in English "may everyone everywhere be happy and free") are perverse parallels.
I love your comments on the magnolia! I used to have a saucer magnolia (which did bloom in March in the sunny Central Valley of CA) and currently enjoy collecting their seed pods with my granddaughters.
I've said before in comments about Ink Black Heart that many moderns have no idea how to mourn. If people allow themselves to be guided by folks willing to help them find a ritual meaningful to them, then they too can be happy/blessed knowing there can be, if not exactly comfort, at least a tool to find resolution and the courage to move on. I absolutely love that Strike listened to his gut and stopped to see about the tower that had haunted him as a child, and then was able to sit within that tower to mourn and converse with Charlotte's spirit, let angry tears come and, ultimately, resolve "to admit to himself he should seek something new, as opposed to what was damaging but familiar."
I really like this post. The corn dollies reminded me of the hex sticks that hung in the woods in the Blair Witch Project.