Child Rowland, setting out from Carlisle towards Elfland, comes to a round green hill terraced from top to bottom, walks round it three times widdershins and calls for the door to open. It leads to a long passage, studded like a rough grotto with gems. At the end he finds himself in a vast hall. From the arched vault hung a carbuncle which by magic illuminated the room, and by its light Child Rowland saw his lost sister, and the king of Elfland, whom he slew. The fairy hill in Child Rowland might be a distant memory of chambered tombs such as Maes Howe.
In later years Maes Howe was haunted by something called a hogboy, the Norn version of Norse haugbui, ‘barrow-wight’. Gravemounds in Scandinavia are haunted by these creatures, and rocks or crags by the bergbui; we also hear of alfar who, like the Scots elves and English fairies, could be consulted on magical errands. In Kormaks Saga the witch ordis sends a man in need of healing to ‘a hillock not far from here, in which dwell elves; take the bull which Kormakr slew, and redden the outside of the hill with bull’s blood, and make the elves a feast with the flesh; and you will be healed’. The similarities with British rituals are clear, but the difference lies in the fact that the Norse haugr would contain, and be known to contain, an ancestral burial; there are in fact a great many stories about the hero descending into some howe in search of treasure, and there grappling with the dead man within. Such an animated corpse, or draugr, is a figure of horror and not to be compared with the peaceful and benevolent dead, usually ancestral kings, who responded with good luck and fertility to the living when people venerated their mounds.
Olaf of Geirstad received offerings made on his gravemound, and for that reason was known as an alf – which very much suggests that the dead man was seen as approximating to the world of natural spirits, and that the spirits were not simply an extended group of dead men. In Christian Norway it was forbidden to believe (and therefore evidently was believed) that the landvaettir lived in groves, waterfalls and haugar. The early Icelandic settlers, shortly after landing, made compacts with certain Otherworldly beings living under stones and hills. This cannot have been a cult of the ancestors, for there were as yet no ancestors to cultivate.
It is curious is that the Norse colonists of Orkney and Shetland had been accustomed to bury their dead in gravemounds right up until the introduction of Christianity in the eleventh century, while the Gaelic settlers in the Hebrides came from regions where barrow burial had been virtually unknown for two thousand years. Yet you could not discern any such difference in their fictions, or insights, about haunted mounds. It is enough to persuade me that the folklore of barrows does not derive from memories of their historic role or prehistoric origin, but from something else entirely.
And there ends Hollow Hills. For my earlier project Festial, I did make reference to the Childe Roland story, by walking around the church widdershins three times, holding a video camera on a long pole (yes, really). And I have never used that footage. It was part of the work I did in response to medieval Palm Sunday. That was over two and a half years ago now, and I’m uncertain about how valid it would be to develop at this point, such a long time later. But perhaps it has relevance again now?
The Childe Roland story might be interesting to revisit for Howe, especially as it feels quite Northern with its reference to the King of Elfland. I also like the idea of elves, or ‘barrow-wights’ residing in hills – which, if I understand Jeremy Harte’s argument correctly, might in this country be any hill-like feature in the landscape. A final point to remember is that the magic of hills may equally lie in the experience of them now rather than purely as a sort of repository of ancestral memory.
