The Manufacture of a Myth
Let it not be fondly imagined that the mythopoeic faculty has been superannuated in the countryside by urban encroachment. Half a century ago there lived an old crone in the comely Chiltern village of Turville. She was a herbalist, and turned a dishonest penny by showing visitors her granddaughter whom she had put to continuous sleep from the age of twelve to eighteen by decoctions of herbs gathered at night from the chalk slopes. The spell was only broken by this rural Medea falling downstairs in a thunderstorm and breaking her neck, whereupon the girl woke up and subsequently married. All the villages in the neighbourhood are acquainted with this legend, and there are countless variations of it. I have tried in vain to get at the heart of the mystery. But I have, just heard of a man who once lodged in the cottage where the girl slept on in the magical line of descent from Barbarossa and King Arthur.
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