The Haunting Medieval World of M.R.James
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Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Jannecke, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

These days, the chilling ghost stories of M.R. James are as much a part of our Christmas television viewing as The King's Speech, The Sound of Music, or Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit. But why, I hear you ask, would I be talking about M.R. James and his ghost stories on Gone Medieval? Well, dear listener, I reply, because M.R. James led a double life. He was both a master of supernatural fiction and a distinguished medieval scholar.

In fact, his deep knowledge of medieval texts and artifacts, and his academic career, profoundly shaped his literary output, infusing his tales with an authenticity and depth that set them apart from other works in the genre. But before we dive deep into this seasonal subject, let's have a reminder of the master at work in an extract from his story, Canon Albrecht's Scrapbook. If you are of a nervous disposition, you might want to remove your earbuds for a couple of minutes.

He had taken the crucifix off and laid it on the table when his attention was caught by an object lying on the red cloth just by his left elbow. Two or three ideas of what it might be flitted through his brain with their own incalculable quickness.

A pen wiper? No, no such thing in the house. A rat? No, too black. A large spider? I trust to goodness not, no, good God. A hand, like the hand in the picture. In another infinitesimal flash, he had taken it in. Pale, dusky skin covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength.

Coarse black hairs longer than ever grew on a human hand, nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny and wrinkled. He flew out of his chair with deadly, inconceivable terror clutching at his heart.

The shape whose left hand rested on the table was rising to a standing posture behind his seat. Its right hand crooked above his scalp. There was black and tattered drapery about it. The coarse hair covered it as in the drawing. The lower jaw was thin. What can I call it?

Shallow like a beast's teeth showed behind the black lips. There was no nose. The eyes of a fiery yellow against which the pupils showed black and intense. And the exulting hate and thirst to destroy life which shone there were the most horrifying features in the whole vision.

There was intelligence of a kind in them. Intelligence beyond that of a beast, below that of a man. The feelings which this horror stirred in Deniston were the intensest physical fear and the most profound mental loathing. What did he do? What could he do? He has never been quite certain what words he said.

that he knows, that he spoke, that he grasped blindly at the silver crucifix, that he was conscious of a movement towards him on the part of the demon, and that he screamed with the voice of an animal in hideous pain. Okay, you can come out from behind the couch now.

To find out more about M.R. James, his life as a medievalist, and how that influenced his spooky stories, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Patrick J. Murphy, Associate Professor of English at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He's the author of Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M.R. James, so there's no one better to talk to about this subject. Patrick, welcome to Gone Medieval. What do we know about M.R. James' career as a medieval scholar?

We know a lot. He left behind quite a few books and articles and contributions to medieval studies. He had very wide-ranging interests in medieval studies. So he studied kind of material artifacts at times. He would study things like church architecture or

wall painting or church stained glass but he was also kind of a textual scholar so he was interested in medieval texts and saints lives in particular was a thing that he was interested in and biblical apocrypha he published translations of these texts and and just really a many different miscellaneous medieval texts that he was interested in so he was also kind of a textual scholar and then kind of bridging that a bit too was his um

maybe his most important scholarly contribution were his medieval manuscript catalogs. So he would go kind of institution by institution and go to a particular library at an institution and make a catalog, make a list that would describe the makeup of the book, what the book was like, the dimensions of the book, the size, the script, all of those kind of details of the manuscript, and then the contents of the manuscripts too.

lifelong work was to produce these manuscript catalogs. And he was considered one of the top experts in Europe.

in manuscript studies. But of course, he's very well known in medieval studies for these kinds of contributions. But of course, he's even better known today outside of medieval studies for his ghost stories, which also kind of draw on his medieval expertise. Oh, I mean, absolutely, right? Because I think that one of the things that's really special about M.R. James' stories, and you can feel this even if you aren't a nerdy medievalist like myself who has used his catalogs at point in time,

But you could really get a kind of sense of texture or authenticity that comes through because of his work with medieval things, in my opinion. So, you know, for example, you said that he works with artifacts. There's a very famous M.R. James story called A Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad.

And it has this nice little detail about finding an old whistle in a decrepit church and then ghostly things happen as a result. But it gives this incredible texture. And I mean, do you see other places other than, you know, I've just named one of the most famous ones where that is true? Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, every story is like that. Every story is filled with details that come across as authentic and as real because quite often they are real, right? Like compared to maybe some kind of neo-medieval kind of medievalisms that you would talk about. When I talk about medievalism, of course, I'm talking about kind of like a post-medieval context.

kind of creative kind of response to the Middle Ages. So, you know, Tolkien is the most famous example of this, right? Kind of remaking the medieval materials and remaking them in a creative way. And James was, you know, like Tolkien, he was an expert in all these areas, obviously. So he didn't just make up kind of medieval sounding details. Quite often they would be quite real and authentic.

You mentioned O-Whistle. I mean, a lot of these details, they're kind of mixed up in different ways and recombined in different ways, but they connect back to real medieval artifacts or texts.

It was with some considerable curiosity that he turned it over by the light of the candles. It was of bronze, he now saw, and was shaped very much after the manner of a modern dog whistle. In fact, it was, yes, certainly it was, actually no more nor less than a whistle.

He put it to his lips, but it was quite full of a fine caked-up sand or earth which would not yield to knocking but must be loosened with a knife. Tidy as ever in his habits, Parkins cleared out the earth onto a piece of paper and took the latter to the window to empty it out.

The night was clear and bright as he saw when he opened the casement and he stopped for an instant to look at the sea and note a belated wanderer stationed on the shore in front of the inn. Then he shut the window, a little surprised at the late hours people kept at Burnstow and took his whistle to the light again. Why surely there were marks on it and not merely marks but letters.

A very little rubbing rendered the deeply cut inscription quite legible, but the professor had to confess, after some earnest thought, that the meaning of it was as obscure to him as the writing on the wall to Belshazzar. There were legends both on the front and on the back of the whistle. One read thus, Fla, fur, bisfle. The other, Quis est, iste, qui venit.

I ought to be able to make it out, he thought, but I suppose I am a little rusty in my Latin. When I come to think of it, I don't believe I even know the word for a whistle. The long one does seem simple enough. It ought to mean, who is this who is coming? Well, the best way to find out is evidently to whistle for him. He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet pleased at the note he had elicited.

It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and soft as it was, you somehow felt it must be audible for miles round. It was a sound too that seemed to have the power which many scents possess of forming pictures in the brain.

He saw quite clearly for a moment a vision of a wide, dark expanse at night, with a fresh wind blowing, and in the midst a lonely figure. How employed, he could not tell. Perhaps he would have seen more, had not the picture been broken by the sudden surge of a gust of wind against his casement.

so sudden that it made him look up just in time to see the white glint of a seabird's wings somewhere outside the dark panes.

Something that I recently kind of worked on with O'Whistle again was this connection between O'Whistle, I'll come to you, my lad, and some old English poems from the Exeter book. The Exeter book is a famous 10th century manuscript that, of course, James would be quite familiar with. And it's full of various different kind of mysterious enigmatic texts, including quite literal riddles, but also a text called The Husband's Message.

And I did a little kind of poking around with this recently. What I think I figured out is that perhaps this image of this whistle that's found on the shore is kind of drawing on some of the imagery from these old English poems.

But what's particularly kind of interesting about it is that he's kind of conflating the husband's message, which is this poem about a message that's sent from a husband to a wife, basically saying, you know, please come back to me, right? Like it has a similar kind of message, kind of beckoning message. But he's kind of conflating that with nearby riddles in the excerpt book. And in fact, right around the time that James wrote the story, there was kind of a scholarly debate about whether or not these texts were actually just one text combined. Right?

with the solution of Whistle. They thought that perhaps Riddle 60 and Husam's Message were just one text combined. So oftentimes, in order to understand how James is incorporating this

I think that that is such an interesting point because you really do see scholarly debates crop up in his work. You certainly see also, you know, the way academia works. Yeah.

come along as well. I mean, are there other ways that you see that his stories reflect the kind of changing nature of medieval studies at the beginning of the 20th century? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, James is such an interesting liminal figure with that because he calls himself an antiquary, you know, like in his first books of ghost stories, he says, you know, these are the ghost stories of an antiquary, which even at the time, it was not the sort of thing that medievalists today would call ourselves if you're like, I'm an antiquary. I mean, I do sometimes, you know,

But to call yourself an antiquary even in 1904 would be kind of a throwback kind of identity, right? To an earlier age of maybe a gentleman antiquary is a gentleman of leisure who's studying things in a casual way, maybe studying things in an enthusiastic way, a fanciful way, not in a disciplined way and not in the kind of way that we have always

tended in the academic world to right define ourselves professionally right we're professionals and we don't stray into other fields we don't study all of medieval studies we specialize in one field right like we're a literary scholar or archaeologist or we work in art history or work in a particular discipline but the antiquary was free to kind of roam around the fields and often local fields right it was like where you were it's like what mattered to you was like you

you know, in your backyard, maybe because you owned it or maybe because you're the local antiquary who's interested in local things, right? But the new university professional, which was becoming kind of more of the standard in James' lifetime, you had to have more formal training and you had to have credentials and you had to be peer-reviewed, right? There were institutions that were coming along to say like, you know, this was acceptable work and this is not the work of fanciful amateurs. This is

rigorous, et cetera. Right. So James is so kind of liminal in this, uh, way because I mean, in many ways he's,

a consummate professional. He's at the university, held important university positions. He lived all of his life at universities and also at Eaton as well, but he was a very institutional sort of person, right? And he had training. He had a doctorate. He wasn't completely self-taught, although some of his fields, like manuscript studies, he had to be kind of a bit self-taught. But at the same time, people even at the time kind of thought, well, he's sort of spreading himself a little bit thin, right? He's

studying all of these different miscellaneous subject matters. And he's brilliant. He had a famous memory and a famous capacity, but nevertheless, when it came to things like, for example, like studying his manuscript catalogs, he would, uh,

proceed in a slightly, maybe in a way that people wouldn't do it today, right? Like people might specialize in a particular class of manuscripts or a particular period. They would specialize in a time, right? James was working institution by institution, a very kind of local focus, right? It was like, and he was willing to write descriptions about all these texts, even texts that he wasn't necessarily a complete expert in. And so sometimes some

have criticized the catalogs and said, well, they're a little uneven here. Like they're really brilliant in some other places. Maybe he didn't quite have the professional expertise to be dealing with it. That's something that everybody has to deal with. I mean, including like all of us today, you know, who work in medieval studies have to feel like we're a little amateur now and then, right?

But this was, I think, kind of a heightened sort of atmosphere of these questions about what made it like a real medievalist, a real professional at the time. And I think it cuts both ways. I think he was sort of anxious about professionalism and anxious about amateurism, anxious about antiquarianism. So I wouldn't say like, oh, James is an antiquarian or James was a professional and he was afraid of the antiquaries or something. He was kind of like all of us, sort of like anxious about all the aspects of professional life, the implications of it.

Yeah, he describes himself, I think, at various points as being thoroughly Victorian and as a Victorian, right? So he's got this real...

affinity for an age that he can see is kind of going by the wayside. And, you know, you said it yourself, he's this really institutionalized guy. I always laugh when I read his stories because it's like he is physically incapable of writing about something that isn't a guy who works at Cambridge, who has like, I don't know, gone out to the fens on holiday. Right. So he's always there. It's always him in these stories in one way or another because he sort of writes what he knows.

But, you know, you get these glimpses of him and his life within fictitious works. But would you say that in these stories we could find other looks at the way James was treated by other scholars or treated other scholars of how his academics work out? You know, when do his experiences of academia really crop up?

I mean, it seemed to crop up, like, I think, like you say, in every story. I'm trying to think of a story where that doesn't really happen. I know, right? One of my favorite stories that kind of expresses some of these anxieties is A View from a Hill.

I love a view from a hill. Yes. Yeah. I love that story because it really is kind of like tapping into both sides of the anxiety. Right. It's a story about an academic Fanshawe who's tired of committee work and he's going off on a holiday to have some vacation time with his friend who is a gentleman antiquary who owns his own property and kind of is interested in investigating his own antiquities that he's imagining or actually finding. Right.

and it starts in a very kind of pastoral and beautiful and bucolic scene of them kind of enjoying the day. But then they go up on a little hike up to the hill and Fanshawe borrows a pair of binoculars or field glasses, right? It turns out, I don't know how much I should spoil these stories, but it turns out that these field glasses allow one to look into the past, look into the medieval past. So you can view across the hill and you can see what the old church was like, or you,

You can see what was happening up on the hill where they used to hang people, right? Like you can see the sort of darker, violent

but you could also see the beautiful past of the old churches, right? Ultimately, we learned that these field glasses were made by boiling the bones of dead people with kind of liquid filters in the field glasses so that you can kind of see through the eyes of dead people. At one point, somebody was like, my God, do you want to see through the eyes of dead people? But of course, that's the kind of medievalist dream, right? Like, I would love to see through the eyes of the dead people. ♪

But before Patton left them, he said to Fanshawe, Excuse me, sir, but did I understand as you took out them glasses with you today? I thought you did, and might I ask, did you make use of them at all? Yes, only to look at something in the church. Oh, indeed. You took them into the church, did you, sir? Yes, I did. It was Lambsfield Church. By the way, I left them strapped onto my bicycle, I'm afraid, in the stable yard.

"'No matter for that, sir. I can bring them in first thing tomorrow, and perhaps you'll be so good as to look at them then.' Accordingly, before breakfast, after a tranquil and well-earned sleep, Fanshawe took the glasses into the garden and directed them to a distant hill. He lowered them instantly and looked at top and bottom, worked the screws, tried them again and yet again, shrugged his shoulders and replaced them on the hall table.'

"Pattern," he said, "they're absolutely useless. I can't see a thing. It's as if someone has stuck a black wafer over the lens." "Spoilt my glasses, have you?" said the squire. "Thank you. The only ones I've got." "You try them yourself," said Fanshawe. "I've done nothing to them." So, after breakfast, the squire took them out to the terrace and stood on the steps.

After a few ineffectual attempts, "Lord, how heavy they are!" he said impatiently, and in the same instant dropped them onto the stones, and the lens splintered and the barrel cracked. A little pool of liquid formed on the stone slab. It was inky black, and the odour that rose from it is not to be described. "Filled and sealed, eh?" said the squire. "If I could bring myself to touch it, I dare say we should find the seal."

"'So that's what came of this boiling and distilling, is it? "'Old ghoul, what in the world do you mean? "'Don't you see, my good man? "'Remember what he said to the doctor about looking through dead men's eyes? "'Well, this is another way of it. "'But they didn't like having their bones boiled, I take it. "'And the end of it was, they carried him off whither he would not. "'Well, I'll get a spade, and we'll bury this thing decently.'

And there's a real sense of like, okay, so this is evil and wrong and really undisciplined, like a very bad methodology of boiling the bones. We probably shouldn't do that. But the guy gets like several publications out of it. Yeah. So there's the very last line of the story. Somebody says, you know, like, well, I don't think he made any good use of these glasses at the end. Baxter did because, of course, Baxter comes to a bad end. But.

there is this sense of, you know, the last line of the story is like, well, I don't know. There is that sketch of full maker Abby. There was something about antiquarianism that allowed you to touch the past or connect with the past in a different way than the new professionalism does, right? There's something about these older methods and these older ways of experiencing medieval studies that J.

James is wistful for, longing for, right? So his stories are often that way, that you have this, there's a real tension in the stories, which makes, I think, which makes them so rich and so interesting, among other things. I mean, also, they're very frightening and scary, right? Like, I don't want to overdo the medieval angle because they're also just really good stories. I mean, just a really brilliant writer, James is, you know, he's a masterful stylist and all the different techniques that tell the ghost stories, but...

Of course, as a medievalist, I'm curious about how do those themes of being a medievalist, how do they kind of work their way into the stories? So...

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I think we also at some times see the opposite being true, where he's kind of advocating for the professionalization of academia. And here I'm thinking of casting the runes, which is kind of a different kind of thing.

where, you know, there's this whole plot where someone sends a really terrible paper into an academic journal about medieval manuscripts and everyone says, this is rubbish. It doesn't pass peer review. And so the guy who sent the paper in tries to curse them all. And it's two things, right? It's a very funny thing for us being like, oh, ha ha, what if you got cursed by every single person whose paper you had to reject? But also it's got

this incredible tension. It's like it sets a timer. You really feel a chase scene throughout the entire sense of the thing and it all hinges on

on medieval manuscripts. It's a really incredible piece of writing. But yeah, you see this, I mean, maybe we should have gentleman antiquaries, but also look, there's got to be limits to it. The work actually has to come out. So you see him just kind of wrestling in there. Yeah, absolutely. Because, right, like on the one hand, Carswell is like the worst kind of, not only is he not sort of professionally detached from his material, right? He's also wants to use it practically. Yeah.

There seems to be here a real horror about the practical applications of anything. You know, so, you know, boiling dead men's bones to make binoculars, using medieval magic in order to curse people, finding a whistle and blowing it. You know, so there is these kind of warnings about getting too deep in the weeds. This is really interesting because we see all these people

artifacts or texts crop up. Are there any specific ones that really come to mind when you're thinking about James's fiction? There's so many different ones that you can think about. We've already mentioned a whistle. Kind of a similar one to that is a kind of an interesting use of a

Another medieval Old English text, I think. For example, there's a story called The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, which kind of hinges around the plot about an archdeacon at the cathedral who's gotten his position because he's basically kind of rubbed out his predecessor, who was this older man who was kind of lingering too long. So the archdeacon removes a stair rod on the staircase and the carpet gets wrinkled and his predecessor falls to his death. But then he becomes, as you might expect, he becomes

kind of haunted by his guilt, but also by demonic forces that are out there to kind of punish him. Eventually, we figure out that the demonic forces are associated with this carved wooden statue that comes from an old hanging oak

that was kind of maybe sacred because it was there for executions or used in some kind of pre-Christian kind of way. But at the very end of the story, there's a poem that kind of falls out of the wooden statue. It's a little scrap of paper that has a poem on it.

When I grew in the wood, I was watered with blood. Now in the church I stand, who that touches me with his hand, if a bloody hand he bear, I counsel him to beware, lest he be fetched away, whether by night or day, but chiefly when the wind blows high in the nights of February.

But, you know, if you've read much Old English poetry, you recognize that this is really close to one of the most famous Old English poems, The Dream of the Rude.

which is a religious poem about, with a speaking cross. In the poem, it talks about how I was first made from a tree into a gallows, and then I became the cross on which Christ was crucified. So it's a really sort of curious reversal of that poem and using it in this kind of ghost story kind of context. It's about transformation too, and of course the story also connects this to cathedral history and

The archdeacon is not just a murderer, but he's also a reformer. And he's somebody who wants to come in and kind of clean up shop. Eventually, these kind of reforms, we're told, are going to lead to a Gothic revival in the cathedral where you're going to sweep away all the old, original medieval stuff and put new Gothic revival, 19th century, basically medievalism, right? Essentially faux medieval stuff.

stuff into the cathedral. So that theme of how the medieval past could be adulterated or could be the local meaning of the past could be swept away and could be transformed, right? It's a kind of a ghost story, I think, about maybe fears about the way the past could be converted into

in bad ways as well as good ways, right? Because cathedrals have local meanings, right? You know, the past belongs to the local people. It belongs to the people who live in the cathedral, who live and work in the cathedral, who worship in the cathedral. But it also is kind of appropriated by academics, maybe artists and, you know, modern architects, Gothic revivalists who want to put their own aesthetic stamp on the place, right? So...

And another one of the stories is it says, you know, the last line of the story is to keep that which is committed to thee. This idea of like...

This thing that you've got of the past doesn't necessarily belong to you and you shouldn't try to transform it. That's another example of an artifact. I mean, there are lots of others. So really, the number one thing is just always manuscripts. He keeps coming back to them over and over again. So, for example, here I'm thinking about Canon Albrecht's scrapbook.

Yeah. And that's a really fun one where a scholar gets given a cool collection of manuscripts, but oops, there's also a demon involved with that. And, you know, it just kind of makes me wonder, is this just, you know, a fruitful imagination that is playing with what he knows? Or do we think that M.R. James freaked himself out when he was reading manuscripts sometimes? Well...

There is actually, supposedly there was a legend of a ghost that used to be said to haunt outside of his doors at King's College. So the place where he would, I think we actually talked about that much, but he used to tell his ghost stories typically in the Christmas season, maybe sometimes on Christmas Eve to a group of friends that would gather in his rooms and he would tell.

quite dramatically come out with a manuscript freshly written, it's said. Anyway, I mean, you know, I think James is kind of a master of dramatizing and playing and performing the antiquary, right? So I think he's probably doing that, you know, like, ah, I've got my fresh manuscript with these discoveries. But, you know, I would say that there's more of a sense of that maybe James was anxious about maybe not

literal ghosts. Although I think at times he says, you know, I'm not sure. I think he says at one point, like, I'm willing to weigh the evidence. You know, I really do. But I think that maybe he was anxious about the antiquarian, uh,

process of digging into the past in a too enthusiastic way where you would pull up stuff that maybe shouldn't be pulled up, not necessarily because it's haunted or it's, you know, it's a demon exactly, but because it's worthless because it should be in the dustbin of history. Like that history has, you know, forgotten these things for a reason. And that the antiquary, the figure of the antiquary is somebody who's kind of perversely

over-interested in all of these trivial details, all of these pointless things

facts because the antiquary gets a certain kind of pleasure about it, right? That James is, I think, kind of uncomfortable with that because that's certainly a feeling that he feels, right? Like he certainly has taken so much pleasure in his antiquarian researches and following different lines of thought, right? But at the same time, is that a productive thing, right? Like James was very much somebody who cared about

the national importance of his institutions, right? And there's big debates at the time about like, what's the point of Cambridge is, you know, is the point of Cambridge to have somebody like an old pottering antiquary digging around in texts that if anything might disrupt our sense of the past, right? It might undercut certain ways that we think about the world, right? In case of Apocrypha, right? Like he had a famous kind of talk as this entitled useless knowledge, right?

He says, essentially, you know, like, I can't really justify studying these old apocryphal texts, which are non-canonical and they're against true Christian teaching and true Christian history. But they're so curious and they're so interesting. And maybe they could help our larger understanding of history. But do they really? Or does it just become a kind of endless antiquarian growth? Yeah.

James's productivity, I think, is kind of intertangled with, and I don't want to speculate too much, but it's kind of intertangled with his own identity. The perception that people had of him as being kind of childlike and immature his whole life. People would talk about him that way, which is kind of, it's strange to say, but people would say that, you know, James is just like a child and he's lived a life without a jolt. So that's a kind of famous statement about it. He's lived a life

where he's never really had to deal with the real world. He never went on to grow up. He never went on to have a family. He took on this bachelor identity, which, you know, of course, for a long time at Cambridge, you couldn't get married if you were a fellow in Cambridge. But by James's day, you could have, right? You know, and he did contemplate briefly, I think, marriage. But like, there's that implication of like, why aren't you growing up? Why aren't you becoming...

sexually mature even. There's a little bit of an implication of that. I don't want to, you know, people have speculated about his sexuality. I don't mean to do that. But certainly in his milieu, in his circle of friends, there was a lot of anxiety about questions about same-sex desire. And you kind of see that in some of the stories, you know. Oh, yeah.

I think certainly in O Whistle, there's a lot of like, hmm. The subtext is very strong. O Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad. I mean, it's very strong. And I think when you look at the antiquarian aspects of it, it gets even stronger. But not to stray too much into that, I guess my main point is just that

There's a sense of like, is being an antiquarian kind of manly? Yeah. And also along with that, does it say something about like whether or not you are supporting the empires, right? Like, are you supporting the empire properly? Are you being productive? Or does your work tend to...

Just serve yourself, right? Be your own kind of pleasurable hobby. I think you're bang on here with some of this idea about service, because you definitely see in a lot of his works work.

where this tension comes in about doing antiquarian things or medievalist things is about, well, are you doing it for the public or are you doing it for yourself? Right. Because you certainly we see this interview from the hill where it's like, OK, you've got these binoculars to see into the past. What are you doing with it? Or in a warning to the curious where there's a young man who digs up one of the famous crowns of the kingdom of East Anglia.

And it's cursed. And, you know, and he's being pursued by a terrible ghost that will wreak vengeance on him. But what he was doing with that crown was being like, ha ha, crown. Not, oh, I've got a crown and it's going to a museum or something. So there is this kind of idea there, I think, about the perversion of what you're using it for. Is it for the public? Is it for yourself? Is it for the discipline or is it for just personal gain?

Yeah, A Warning to the Curious is such a fascinating one because, I mean, it's often taken to be a kind of almost like A Warning to the Curious is like James's theme, people will say, right?

Which may be true in many ways in many of his stories. But in this particular story, it's a very curious kind of narrative because so in the story, there's a figure named Paxton who is a young man who's going down to an actual place. It's called Seaburg in the story, but a place called Aldeburgh, which is an actual place where James would go to kind of vacation us on the coast.

It's a great town. I go there a lot myself because I'm a nerd. It's a beautiful place, right? And James would go and he would stay at the White Lion, which is a place there, which is renamed The Bear in the story. But at any rate, he goes down, he gets kind of an inkling through various different kind of clues that he kind of runs into. And

figures out that he thinks that maybe there's this early medieval Anglo-Saxon. I use Anglo-Saxon in scare quotes because it's not really the preferred term in my field anymore for everybody, I should say. There's been a lot of discussion about that. I won't get into that, but just... That's a whole other show, yeah. The early medieval crown is discovered by Paxton. He pulls it out. When I was making the tunnel, of course, it was worse. And if I hadn't been so keen, I should have dropped the whole thing and run.

It was like someone scraping at my back all the time. I thought for a long time it was only soil dropping on me, but as I got nearer the crown, it was unmistakable. And when I actually laid it bare and got my fingers into the ring of it and pulled it out,

There came a sort of cry behind me. Oh, I can't tell you how desolate it was and horribly threatening too. It spoiled all my pleasure in my find. Cut it off that moment. And if I hadn't been the wretched fool I am, I should have put the thing back and left it. But I didn't. The rest of the time was just awful. I had hours to get through before I could decently come back to the hotel.

First, I spent time filling up my tunnel and covering my tracks, and all the while, he was there, trying to thwart me. Sometimes, you know, you see him, and sometimes you don't. Just as he pleases, I think. He's there, but he has some power over your eyes. Well, I wasn't off the spot very long before sunrise, and then I had to get to the junction for Zebra to take the train back.

And though it was daylight fairly soon, I don't know if that made it much better. There were always hedges or gorse bushes or park fences along the road. Some sort of cover, I mean. And I was never easy for a second. And then, when I began to meet people going to work, they always looked behind me very strangely. It might have been that they were surprised at seeing anyone so early.

But I didn't think it was only that. And I don't now. They didn't look exactly at me. And the porter at the train was like that too. And the guard held open the door after I'd got into the carriage, just as he would if there was someone else coming, you know? Oh, you may be very sure it isn't my fancy, he said with a dull sort of laugh.

Then he went on, "And even if I do get it put back, he won't forgive me. I can tell that." And I was so happy a fortnight to go. He dropped into a chair and I believe he began to cry.

By the way, I think that this is a story that kind of echoes, it's kind of like a palimpsest or writing over of the Beowulf narrative, which is the most famous Old English poem, obviously. And it's a story about a thief going into a mound or a barrow and pulling out a treasure and endangering your nation, right? Which is what Paxton's action does, right? It endangers the

the nation because the crown has been put there to protect the nation from invasion, right? That's explicitly told in the story. But if you go to the manuscript of this story, you'll see that originally the story was to be set in the middle of World War I, in the middle of the Great War. Oh. Yeah. So right in the middle of World War I. So...

The implication is that Paxton is perhaps quite literally endangering the nation. I actually found a letter in the archives. Somebody wrote to James and said, oh, when I read your story about the crowns protecting the nation, that would have been something that would have comforted me because during the Great War,

It's what we talked about in Aldeburgh was that this was the spot where we thought the Germans might invade and we had lookouts and things like that. So it was like literally, I mean, the war was a huge thing. If you wanted to say that there was one event in James's life, it would be the Great War. He actually was the vice chancellor of the university. He started in 1913, like right before the war broke out. It was one of his first, basically, he became the vice chancellor and then...

the greatest crisis ever in Cambridge arose where the university was emptied of its undergraduates. And he lost a lot of close friends and people that he mentored. There's really very touching accounts of the sense of loss. It also, by the way, pretty much destroyed the ghost story tradition because Cambridge was emptied. I think maybe the first year they had, they had kind of an abbreviated attempt at a kind of ghost story gathering, but it kind of fell apart until it was resurrected after the war. But

So it was a very traumatic thing, right? And so you would think like, well, here's a ghost story that, you know, should be punishing Paxton for this. Not only is he taking the crown, but what is he doing in like 1917? What is he doing just hanging out a young man, right? Why isn't he at the war? Why isn't he at the front?

But the complication here is that I'm sure, like, if you've read the story, like, well, Paxton's a really sweet kid. Like, he's a really sweet, genuine kid. And the story is really all focused around these two older mentors who are trying to offer him support, trying to give him some kind of help. And they just utterly fail in the end.

Paxton has a kind of glamour, they say, a kind of like magic over his eyes, which forces him to like go run off down this strip of land to his doom where he's, his face is smashed in, right? Face is smashed in by this specter. One of the most gruesome moments. Nothing whatever was visible ahead of us. And we were just turning by common consent to get down and run hopelessly on when we heard what I can only call a laugh.

And if you can understand what I mean by a breathless, a lungless laugh, you have it. But I don't suppose you can. It came from below and swerved away into the mist. That was enough. We bent over the wall. Paxton was there at the bottom. You don't need to be told that he was dead.

His track showed that he had run along the side of the battery, had turned sharp round the corner of it and, small doubt of it, must have dashed straight into the open arms of someone who was waiting there. His mouth was full of sand and stones and his teeth and jaws were broken to bits. I only glanced once at his face.

For a character who's one of the most likable, and yes, he took the crown, but he tried to put it back, right? And they tried to put it back, and it was just a kind of a horrible mistake, and it's just a kind of a confusion, right? And I feel like the story really resonates with a sense of like, you know, James is a mentor for these young men.

And he was probably trying to give them advice. They were going out. I mean, there's literally advice that he would have. People were writing to him saying like, look, I feel like I was a coward at the front and I didn't perform the way I should have. Like war wasn't what I expected. And James was like saying to him, like, no, like nobody would have done any better than you. Right. Like he was, it just doesn't seem to me that this is a story about like,

you know, Paxton was punished for the way he undermined the nation. It's more a story about this sense of like, oh, I wish I could have given a warning to him about this, but like, what would the warning have been? And what could I have said? Right? Like there's this sense of like, what, what could possibly have been done about this?

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See store at ikea-usa.com slash wintersale for complete terms. Restrictions apply. The thing that's really was astonishing about this, when I was writing about this story, I was thinking about all these things and I was, you know, researching James and his efforts in the war and his role in the war. After the war, he was somebody who was really involved in the creation of war memorials. By this time, he was back at Eton and he was on the committees where they designed the war memorials.

involved a lot of boys from Eton who went off and died. I mean, another kind of amazing thing is that at the end of the war, the British government, they sent out these commemorative scrolls

that have a kind of statement about commemorating the sacrifice. And they sent these commemorative scrolls out to the families of everybody who died in the war. Every family of somebody who died in the war got one of these commemorative scrolls. And it was from the king, but it was ghostwritten. Sorry, it's a bad pun, but it was ghostwritten by James. James wrote it. He wrote this text, but nobody knew this until his death. It was actually in the newspaper reported the week after he died that he actually had written this.

this text. So who's called upon is this figure of authority, this figure of, partly I think because he's a medievalist, right? Because you're tapping into the medieval past, right? Which is what this story is doing. And it's tapping into these themes of the nation and Beowulf, right? Our ancient Beowulfian warrior past, right? It's tapping into that, but it's tapping into it in this really

really conflicted way. And the crazy thing is when I went to visit, so I stayed at the white lion, right? Which turned into the bear, bear, bear wolf. Yeah. So I was staying there. I just kind of like wandered out. I decided to kind of like walk along a path that Paxton would take. Cause you can go and you can walk along all the way to the Martello tower. That's where he met his, his doom. And there is a, a war memorial there.

exactly in the pathway. And the War Memorial has that same inscription that James wrote. And this was erected in 1922, about three years before James wrote the story. So James would have been quite aware that Paxton was writing

you know, escaping from this vector along the exact same path that had this warmemore with his own ghostwritten words, which by the way, involves like talking about the path of duty, right? The path of duty that they followed the path of duty and they sacrificed everything, right?

And they never came back because that's the thing in World War I, right? Like the bodies were not sent home. They stayed there. And James would write about that, right? James would, there's other commemorative speeches where he would write about that particular theme about how we never got their bodies back. It's just a very powerful story, I think, of James's medievalism and his ghost story writing, you know, connecting to these themes about war. Yeah.

This is so powerful because it's really him all over. You know, you see him crop up in his stories over and over again, and you see him wrestling with the what does it all mean of academia, of the what does it all mean of the horrors of the Great War. And

you know, not to belabor a pun, but in a way we see him here exercising these ghosts from his life and at the same time giving other people a way in. So it gives you a way to understand the horrors of World War I or at least relate to them if, you know, they are perhaps un-understandable. But I really value his stories still now because they do give us this great bridge between everything

academia and the regular world because it allows people to have a little glimpse at the sort of things that we think about. And granted, this form of academia is gone. It is certainly a bygone world. But these are things that populate our imagination as medievalists. And I think it's so cool how he was able to make this clear to the public.

Yeah. They express the anxieties of his own age, you know, these anxieties of professionalism and antiquarianism, these anxieties about like in Casting the Runes, anxieties about like peer review and anonymous peer review, you know, like that feeling that you're casting runes at someone.

that you don't know, right? And that kind of like invisible kind of sense of malice. These are still things though that are still very much present with us. And maybe, you know, right now the academic world is really going through

Lots of different crises and transitions and people have to rethink about what it means to be an academic. And some of that, I mean, I felt in my own life that, you know, some of these different pressures, maybe they mean that I have to be a little bit more antiquarian in certain ways, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, or I have to rethink about what makes for disciplined or professional work. Was rigor me in these kinds of questions? So they're kind of perennial that way.

It may be that I'm, you know, I'm reading them through the lens of somebody who's lived an academic institutionalized life, right? You know, and maybe in a different kind of institutionalized than James, but absolutely. I mean, I think that that comes across. Like, I think that's part of why the ghost stories are like a little frightening, right? You know, like, I think he, yes, he's a master of all of these kinds of classic stories.

stylistic devices of the ghost story. But I also think that those kinds of anxieties that we've been talking about are kind of part of what makes the stories effective and scary and frightening because you can feel that tension there sometimes, right? You can feel that sense of anxiety, that feel that sense of like, well, studying the past is a dangerous and complicated thing, right? It is. I mean, yeah. And people are not always happy you're doing it.

Yeah, right. And it would be dangerous to be too antiquarian, too focused on local, too error prone. But on the other hand, it would be too dangerous to be too professional in a way that would ignore like the local meanings of places, right? Like the cathedral stories are such a good example of that, like stories that are about how when people come in and they sweep away the present, right?

engagement with the past, right? And the meaning that the past has for the present day, right? That the past is a living, ongoing, growing thing that's connected to the community, just like a cathedral, right? Even if you want to be a professional who says, I just respect the past, right? I'm going to restore the past. That's to kind of strip it away and to make it a kind of impoverished kind of thing. There's so many things like that that I think contribute to the feeling of the stories. And you can kind of feel that.

Maybe I'm a little bit rambling here, but I guess I'm an antiquarian, so I'll ramble. I'll roam the countryside. But another kind of thing that I've thought a little bit about is that one of the sort of things that James does in his stories to create that sense of fear.

is to first kind of set things up as a kind of false image of the past, right? So like, for example, the Gothic revival is like this false image of the past. It's something that's been layered on the past. And then James is able to then, because he set up this false image of the past, he could then kind of scrape it away, remove it, and say, okay, we're going to remove that false image of the past and now reveal the real past, right? And the real vast is...

darker than you thought, scarier than you thought, more disruptive than you thought, right? So it becomes part of the technique. You know, I think James Burroughs' different

parts of his ghost story technique from his experience of the medieval past, right? Like his disembodied voice, right? I was, I grew up in the wood. I was watered with blood or the enigmatic voice of the riddles, right? Like, oh, whistle and I'll come to you when I land, which is like, where is that voice coming from? It's coming from the whistle, right? That's a very kind of like exit a riddle kind of rhetorical strategy, right?

James's ghosts are famously kind of like hairy and fleshy, right? What ghost stories do survive from the middle ages. The ghosts are often like, they're kind of ghostly, but they're also very like real in the flesh too. And that's, so I feel like James does kind of borrow these kinds of these, these very different qualities from the medieval past to enhance this particular style of ghost storytelling. But also there's that kind of,

way in which his medievalism works, right? This kind of like, I'm going to kind of play with a line between real medievalism and false medieval. I'm going to set up something that's clearly false and then reveal that my medievalism, because of course the ghost stories are medievalism, is the real thing, is the authentic thing.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the ultimate academic flourish that, yeah, but I'm the one that got it right. Right, right. But in a very understated way, too. I mean, that's the other thing, too, right? Like the new professional tone would be very cautious, very reticent. That's a big word for James, right? Very kind of reserved, like, well, I don't know. That's very kind of that academic right is supposed to be cautious. We're not supposed to be like Carswell, just throwing stuff out there.

Maybe I've thrown a few things out there, you know, but we're trained to be cautious, right? Like, you know, we have to cite our sources and show our evidence and be very careful in our methods, right? And I think that that kind of reticent tone that's part of the kind of academic language, I think James really effectively uses that in his writing because, you know, as he would say, like, you don't want to be too blatant about the ghost storytelling. You want to be very suggestive.

let it build up slowly. And then at one moment, just, ah, I hit it. James is a big one for reticence, but I'm going to be absolutely blatant. And I'm going to tell our listeners to check out your book if they want to learn more about this. And also just read some M.R. James this Christmas. Treat yourself. Freak yourself out. It's a historical tradition that we can keep alive in a really easy way.

Absolutely. And thank you for that. Patrick, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been such an incredible pleasure. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Thanks to Dr. Patrick Murphy and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you enjoyed this episode, why not check out Matt's recent episode on Tolkien, Middle Earth, and the Middle Ages, or my episodes on Fantastic Beasts of the Middle Ages, or even The Ghosts of Wales.

Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my episode, The Medieval Afterlife, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. Remember, you can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.

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