FANTABULOUS FRIDAYS A-Z: F FOR FAERIE WITH HERBIE BRENNAN

Scribble City Central's fourteenth Fantabulous Friday comes from Herbie Brennan, author of the New York Times bestelling The Faerie Wars Chronicles.  Herbie was kind enough to take part in my last series - The Mythic Friday Interviews - and you can read that post in full HERE.

Since then, the last book in Herbie's quintet has come out - The Faeman Quest.  I don't want to put up any spoilers, but suffice to say that things have moved on a generation, and the appalling Lord Hairstreak is up to yet more nefarious tricks.  It's inventive, imaginative - and, as always with Herbie, just a damn good story - probably my favourite of all of them.  Since Herbie is clearly an expert on Fairies/Faeries/the Fae/the Good Folk/the Little People, I wanted to delve a bit further, and take advantage of his wisdom on the subject.  What I was not expecting was the extraordinary true story which follows.  There are more things in heaven and earth....

Herbie Brennan

F is for Faerie

Good Folk of the Wild Places

HB: Faerie.

Note the spelling. Note also that I’m writing this to a brief:

What is it?

What does it look like?

Where it is from?

Where and when did you first come across it?

Those sort of questions; not at all as easy to answer as you would imagine.

What is it? I don’t know.

What does it look like? When I was a child, it was a little figure, inches tall, equipped with wings, that flitted through fields of flowers and spelled its name fairy. When I encountered Shakespeare, it turned into a much bigger and more menacing being, minus wings for the most part, a creature of the forest, but really from another world. It spelled its name faerie. When I read Irish mythology, I discovered it came in several shapes and sizes — leprechauns, sidhe, God alone knows what else. All were so dangerous we called them the ‘Good Folk’ so they wouldn’t get annoyed with us.

Where is it from? Fairyland, I suppose — presumably a parallel reality as postulated in the doctrines of relativity theory and quantum physics.

Where and when did you first come across it? Ah, now things get interesting. About thirteen years ago, I awoke in the night to find a creature standing at the bottom of my bed. It was somewhere between six and seven feet tall, humanoid in form. For some reason I did not feel afraid.

I got out of bed to discover the entire outside wall of my bedroom had become transparent, allowing me to see across a vast sweep of countryside. The creature carried me above hedges and fields and set me down in Castleruddery Stone Circle, a megalithic monument a few miles from my home. I knew the circle well — I once wrote a book on Irish megalithic sites — but now it had a feature I had never seen before: two entrances set in the ground close by one another, each with steps leading downwards.

I took the nearest stairway and found myself in a different world, populated by tall, slender, silver-skinned people I thought of instantly as the sidhe. They were very cold, very distant and they frightened me. I retraced my steps hurriedly and tried the second entrance.

That world was inhabited by the Little People and they were utterly, absolutely delightful — cheerful and merry as children, none standing higher than my waist. I played with them until the entity that carried me here decided to carry me home again.

My wife was awake when I walked back into the bedroom. “I’ve just had the most extraordinary experience,” I said.

“Was it anything to do with that thing at the bottom of the bed?” she asked.

There were a couple more questions in the brief:

What draws you to it? The answer to that one is sort of obvious, wouldn’t you say?

What have you done to make it particularly yours? I wrote Faerie Wars. Or at least I sat at the computer and listened while the thing at the bottom of the bed dictated it to me.

My wife, darling that she is, commissioned a sculpture of the figure which now stands in a liminal space at the bottom of our garden. You can see a picture at www.herbiebrennan.com. 

SCC: I have to admit to being a little...well, probably envious is the right word...of your experience with the thing at the bottom of the bed, Herbie.  My own contact with fairyland is confined to one extremely clear childhood memory of a very small brown person in the hollow of a tree root.  Nothing since, but I live in hope. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, and the sculpture is beautiful.  

Next week: Nicola Morgan, Crabbit Old Bat takes on the Fates.  Be afraid.  In fact, be VERY afraid. 

Mythic Friday Interview: Number 20 - Herbie Brennan

Nicolas Tucker of  The Independent called Herbie Brennan's Faerie Wars, (first book in his Faerie Wars Chronicles), "a crossover title from which few readers of any age would wish to cross back" and I quite agree with him.  If your kids want to move on from Potter, Herbie has created three really excellent characters in Pyrgus Malvae, Henry Atherton and Holly Blue for them to do so with.  Now I want you to brace yourselves here.  If you don't know about him already (and if not, why not?), Herbie Brennan has a CV which might make you reel slightly when you read it in the notes below.  A journalist at eighteen; youngest newspaper editor in Ireland at twenty-four; booksales of over 8 million in fifty countries. I could almost say Blimey! if I used that sort of expression, but in any language it's an impressive record, you'll agree (well, you'd better or I'll be after you with those wolfy fangs of mine!). If that wasn't enough, then just for a little additional awesomeness, Herbie is also an expert on stuff like comparative religion, being a magician (of the Merlin sort, not the rabbits and hats kind), reincarnation, esotericism and quantum physics--things which, with my links to shamanism and wicca, I too find of great interest.  (Well, maybe not the quantum physics, because my brain simply won't cope with the understanding bit.  The spirit is willing, but the little grey cells are holding up placards saying "What?" and "Eh?" and "Come again about Schrödinger's blasted Cat."  If only someone could EXPLAIN (where are you Anne Rooney)...but I digress.)  Back to Herbie.  On the subject of magicianship, he talks a little below about the concept of Pathworking (a technique which has something in common with the shamanic vision quest), and the power of journeys of the imagination when combined with myth.  Having experienced something similar when I worked with the great British mythologists and shamans John and Caitlin Matthews a few years ago, I can attest to that.  Working in that way with myths brings up some extraordinary and exciting paths of the spirit to explore, and it's something I very much want to go back to doing.

I wrote about the Faerie Wars Chronicles over on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure a little while ago when I picked my Five Fabulous Forays into Faerie and said how much I liked them (and how much I couldn't wait for number 5--The Faeman Quest which is coming from Bloomsbury in January).  After that, I thought a bit about whether Herbie would ever consider doing an MFI for me.  To cut a long story short, Reader, he said yes!  (Well, I am VERY persuasive.)  So here we are on the second last Friday of the series, and I'm delighted to welcome Herbie to Scribble City Central, and to share his mythical thoughts and wisdom with you.  Here we go...you are definitely not going to be disappointed.


1. Do you think that the retelling of myths is important or relevant for the children of today? Why should they care about some “dry old stories” which come from ancient or forgotten cultures they might never even have heard of?
Ah, but they’re not just dry old stories — they’re the basic patterns of human existence. They teach everything we need to know about how to lead our lives, what to embrace and what to avoid. Furthermore, myths contain a very special type of magic; and I mean that word literally. Search any myth and you’ll quickly come across what Jung referred to as an archetype, a creature who is certainly a spirit and quite possibly a god, trapped in the web of the story like a djinn in a bottle. Release him or her and they’ll accompany you forever, wandering in the depths of your mind giving you guidance and sharing their wisdom. Important for today’s children? Myths are absolutely vital and much of the mess the world is in today springs from the fact that the West has largely abandoned its myths.
 
2. What age were you when you came across your first myth or myths? Tell us how you felt then about the myths you first discovered. Did you love them or hate them? Did they scare you, excite you—or were you indifferent? What kind of myths were they? Celtic? Greek? Norse? Native American? Or from another culture entirely? Were they in a book you read? Or did you hear them as oral storytelling from someone else?
Can’t remember exactly, but it must have been when I was a child, almost certainly Greek and almost certainly in a book I read.
 
3. Looking back, what is your favourite myth of all time, from any culture? And why would you choose it?
I’ve always been drawn to the Arthurian mythos, the Matter of Britain. When I was a young man I trained for nine years as a magician and much of the work involved imaginal journeys through aspects of the myth — the Grail Castle, for example, or the Isle of Avalon. The process is known as Pathworking and at one stage of my magical career I developed a freeform style of Pathworking that permitted groups to engage on such inner journeys without preconception or guidance. The first group to experiment with the technique went straight to the Lady of the Lake and had an experience of the Eternal Feminine, with profound implications for several group members. These myths are alive and the figures in them are living entities. There is nothing to beat the feeling of excitement that arises when you realize this.
 
4. Who is the mythical hero, heroine or being you most dislike, and what made you feel that way about them?
I can’t say I dislike any of them. Even the mythical baddies have something to teach.
 
5. Is there a mythical beast you are particularly fond of? If so, which one and why?
Well, that would have to be the dragon, wouldn’t it? Even as a boy I was trying to work out how it could breathe fire. (My best guess was flint teeth to strike the spark that would ignite methane belched up from a double stomach.) In later life I was fascinated by the widespread stretch of the dragon myth from China through South America and all across Europe. It proved remarkably tenacious as well. The last reported sighting of a dragon in England wasn’t in the depths of history but during the Victorian era, in St Leonard’s Forest in Sussex. I’m not sure we don’t still have dragons in our skies, except that now we call them UFOs and mistake them for space ships. In mythology, dragons have always been the most magical of creatures, dangerous and helpful by turns, guardians of treasure and, most important of all, the vital element in one or our most important life myths — the need to slay the dragon in order to release the feminine within.
 
6. How have myths had an influence on your writing life, if at all? 
Huge. I wrote a series of gamebooks in the 1980s that were based, in a completely batty way, on the Arthurian mythos. More recently, there are mythic and archetypal elements in all of my Faerie Wars fantasy series. The fourth book, Faerie Lord, is one long mythic epic outlining a quest that culminates with the slaying of the dragon guardian of the hero’s beloved, as arranged by the Trickster archetype. I didn’t even bother to disguise it.
 
7. If you could choose to be the demigod child of any one mythical god or goddess, which one would it be? Which power would you like to inherit from them—and what would you do with it?
I was tempted to say Venus, the Roman goddess of love, then rabbit on sanctimoniously about the power of love, the need to love one another irrespective of race, creed, colour, sexual preference and yada-yada-yada. Then I remembered Julius Caesar was descended from Venus and all he ever did to get famous was kill people. So I think I’ll opt for Merlin instead. His parentage may not have been directly from the gods — Geoffrey of Monmouth insists his father was a demon and his mother was a nun — but he is the premier Western archetype of the magician and I like that. What would I do with his power? Take things as they come, I think.

More about Herbie:
A professional writer whose work has appeared in more than fifty countries, Herbie Brennan is enjoyed by children and adults alike — sales of his 108 published titles already exceed 8 million copies.

His young adult fantasy novel, Faerie Wars, rocketed to international success, achieving best-seller status in more than 20 overseas editions, and was voted No 1 Top Ten Teenage Pick in the United States and listed as a New York Times Best Seller title.

Equally prolific in the adult market, Herbie has a powerful reputation for challenging conventional assumptions. This is reflected in his interests, which range from transpersonal psychology, spirituality, reincarnation and psychical research to comparative religion and quantum physics.
Web site: http://www.herbiebrennan.com/
http://www.faeriewars.com/homepage.asp