Place-Name Legends: An Onomastic Mythology

Abstract

JUST over thirteen years ago, on 20 March 1963, Professor Mary Williams delivered, at the Annual General Meeting of the Folklore Society, a Presidential Address entitled 'Folklore and Placenames'.' In that enlightening paper she concentrated on place names in the British Isles which have apparently been created by folklore, particularly by belief in supernatural beings, such as giants, spirits, ghosts, and especially the Devil, by religious legends or by the cult of the sun. At the centre of her discussion2 were stories connected with stones, boulders, or stone circles, as for instance 'The Merry Maidens and the Pipers' in Cornwall, 'The Fiddlers and the Maids' in Somerset, or 'The Whispering Knights' in Warwickshire, and 'Long Meg and her Daughter' in Cumberland, all of which are imaginative reinterpretations, on the folk cultural level, of unusual and impressive, sometimes undoubtedly perturbing, geological conditions. In Professor Williams's view, such stories, and the other material she presented to illustrate her talk, serve as persuasive reminders that 'A study of place-names and the folklore which has given rise to them is very valuable for the understanding of the way of life today, for the foundations of the present are laid upon the past.'3 This article, while briefly touching upon some similar aspects of the relationship between folklore and place names, is intended to be complementary to, rather than merely supportive of, Professor Williams's ideas. It takes it for granted that folklore does create place names through the application of facets of popular belief and the localization of migratory legends. It also acknowledges that the names thus brought into being very seldom refer to major geographical features and hardly ever to man-made ones but usually to minor configurations of the landscape, at least in terms of absolute size or importance. Undeniably such relatively minor features must, however, have excited disproportionate local interest and demanded a convincing explanation, but not in the way in which the scientist convinces. From the point of view of folk-narrative, the stories told to satisfy local curiosity in the majority of cases meet the formal criteria normally indicative of the socalled legend. They are comparatively short, mono-episodic, and more often than not centre around only one folk-literary motif; they also satisfy most of the other requirements of this folk-narrative genre, in so far as the supernatural, the other-worldly, the numinous, or at least the extra-ordinary interferes with or breaks into the natural, the this-worldly, the profane, or at least the ordinary, in the locality where people live and love and have their daily, routine, humdrum being, a characteristic which makes such