The Origin of Semagrams - Part 1

From My Journal at hellsborough.com, I have started to make collections of related posts to make reading easier. This is the first of a two part collection, that you can read online here.

The Origin of Semagrams - Part 1

79.hail-ripperthroat.5.8

The vast majority of my diary writing concerns things that I find and experience in Hellsborough and The Dark Peak, that, after all, it what this whole thing is all about. This journal entry is different. I wanted to talk about an experience before I ever visited Hellsborough.

This experience was long before I started studying for my PhD, I was still an undergraduate and despite having a lifelong love of all things supernatural, and investigating many strange phenomena in Yorkshire and further abroad, I had never found anything that hadn't already been discovered by someone else, usually many times before.

The study of folklore is a strange thing, some would say a pointless thing - why study old wives tales, they say - what is the point, what can you learn - how does it improve our understanding of, well, anything?

To be fair, this is often my more logically orientated brothers and sisters who work in the STEM fields -- that is Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths -- that raise these things. Likewise, those of us in the arts and humanities refer to them as techies and nerds that are sometimes just missing the point in their headlong dive into the pursuits of wealth, prosperity, the future of humanity, and deeds of that like.

Might it be them, I reason, that is missing something by not learning about the achievements of our forefathers and mothers?

I mean a tale maybe a tale, but it had a genesis somewhere, otherwise it wouldn't have gained any traction to begin with, would it?

Think of the modern day meme. Memes can spread incredibly quickly these days via social media. They change as they encounter different cultures, different ages groups, different tribes -- they mutate, take on lives of their own -- is that not exactly like folklore? Are old wives tales, legends and myths not just ancient memes?

Maybe, but why investigate the origin of memes? My logical friends say. And the argument -- discussion -- starts anew.

Sooner or later someone will mention God. It's always a surprise to me how many devotees of evolution; dedicated biologists and geneticists, also commit to having faith in a supreme being.

Isn't God a meme? An old wives tale?

I just can't reconcile the two at all myself, but I guess that's all good, it's all just a part of life's rich tapestry. Possibly I have been influenced by d'divi - Dunlockslyn

As a folklorist I strive to understand the significance of beliefs. To me, folklore means something –- to the tale teller, to the song singer, to the believer -- no story would be re-told unless it continued to have some relevance to its audience.

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All cultures have their own unique folklore -- it is all around us, all of the time, it doesn't have to be about old or antiquated tales. Folklore is natural and necessary, it continues to be created, transmitted and perpetuated anywhere where people need to differentiate between "us" and "them".

It is the lore bit of folklore that interests me the most, since lore I believe follows some law of self-correction -- a feedback mechanism which keeps variations closer to their original form, and therefore closer to what was once the truth.

Although I study folklore, my vocation is (or was) the study of systems, so I likely have more in common with the STEMs than they know. A lot of my interest investigates the functions and processes of systems. My goals are to identify and understand a system's closed signalling loop, in which an action by the system generates a change in the environment, which in turn triggers feedback to the system and initiates a new action.

This approach was first used with mechanistic and biological systems, but is now applied to many cultural and societal systems, I use this approach with folklore. Once you start to look at things this way, you start to move away from seeing things on a traditional linear time scale, and you start to see how folklore maintains itself over many generations and over the eons.

The oral tradition of poems is found across all cultures, and the form of the poem remains remarkably consistent. According to systemic theories, this can be attributed to a closed loop auto-correction built into the system maintenance of oral folklore.

The supernatural is only super to nature because we struggle to observe and form natural theories about it. In searching for the truth in lore, I want to observe the unobservable and find the truth of the supernatural.

My travels have led me far and wide, but eventually this place where I sit now, this liminal heatsink that is Hallamshire, drew me in until I was transfixed. I had come across several legends in this area. One of the most famous is that of the Wantley Dragon.

That story recounts a long drawn out fight between a barbaric and blood thirsty knights templar known as Moore of Moore's Hall. It was said that a crazed Moore, unhappy with the performance of his trusted steed after one battle, did swing his onetoe by the tail and mane until dead, before roasting the poor beast over an open fire and devouring its carcass.

The Dragon meanwhile, is living in a cave up on Wharncliffe crags and terrorising the locals by preying upon their children and livestock, as well as devouring whole trees,
 pillaging forests, and desecrating churches in its endless search to satiate its bottomless hunger.

Desperate to distraction, the Wharncliffe locals seek out the heinous knight Moore and pay him to kill the dragon. The dragon is said to resemble a monstrous winged venomtooth and to kill by squeezing the life from its victims. To this end, Moore has the little mesters of the Dun valley fashion him a suit of armour covered in steel spikes as sharp as razor blades.

The devious knight then waits in a pond for the dragon to come and drink, and when it does, starts a fight with it, dealing it a terrific blow to its undercarriage and then grappling with it until they came to wrestle and the dragon began to squeeze the knight, impaling itself on the sharp spikes of Moore's suit of armour.

Another interesting Hallamshire legend concerns a mythical river beast known as the Loxley Kraken.

This many tentacled beast was believed to live in a place called Hellsborough hole, which according to the legend was at the confluence of the rivers Loxley and Dun, which would place it around the Owlerton area.

My research, and the name Hellsborough hole, cast some doubt on this being the location of the legend, but it is not unusual for such legends to migrate over short distances, and bare in mind that when these stories were first being verbally passed on: First just through chats and whispers and then later through rhymes and songs, the folk who were doing the telling didn't always travel that far.

Consider that the confluence of rivers Loxley and Rivelin, is no more than a mile upstream, and that the name that stuck was the Loxley kraken and not the Dun kraken or the Rivelin kraken. In all likelihood then, the Hellsborough "hole" was the expanse of the river Loxley betwixt its confluences with the Dun and Rivelin, the central point of which more or less, is Hellsborough corner.

You can read a version of the legend here: The Legend of Van Hallam and the Loxley Kraken of Hellsborough Hole

(You'll notice that the hero in this legend is Van Hallam. Obviously if you have visited many other pages on this site, or read any of the Hellsborough Chronicles, you will have come across many encounters between myself and Van Hallam in the present day, which may be confusing. I agree that it is, so I offer these explanations: Van Hallam is a generic term meaning Man of Hallam, or local hero, alternatively, Van Hallam is of a great age, and so it actually is him -- although I have asked on numerous previous occasions and he denies his involvement. Although, he hasn't ever categorically denied it, since he says his memory is sometimes vague. A third explanation would be that someone -- Van or someone else calling themselves Van Hallam travelled a great distance back in time using rockcrust. There are several other explanations, so you'll probably just be better off accepting your confusion).

Previously serialised here, The Legend of Loxley Bottom — The Gabbleratchets of Sophie Hinchcliffe is now available as a free ebook download in ePub and Kindle formats from Hellsborough library.

In other news, Hellsborough Chronicles book one “Dark Peak” is now available on Kindle and paperback.

If you can leave a review of Dark Peak on Amazon, I'd be more than grateful.

Hellsborough Chronicles book two “Darker Peak” is now being worked on — look out for early releases.

Cheers, until next time,

Pip :)