Jeremy Harte:
Luck and Dread: How Household Curiosities Become Ritual Protectors

The old houses of England are full of things that must not be moved, for fear of dreadful consequences. Deprived of its favourite plaything, the ghost will turn sour; the nameless something locked in a bottle will burst free; the fairy charm that protects the house will be broken along with its fragile glass, and the former owner of a skull will return to shrieking life. The nebulous nature of these misfortunes is always much the same, but there is immense variety in the objects that they overshadow. Swords, cups, threads, plates, brooms, stones and human remains jostle for place in the haunted attic. In some cases we see a process of emulation at work, as one family after another demands its own ancestral luck, while elsewhere the choice of object seems to derive from lingering notions of relics. But the sheer diversity of fetishised objects defies classification. This is not a tradition deriving from an origin in popular superstition: rather, it is a set of disparate things and practices, many of them quite mundane in origin, but gradually converging towards a ritualised belief.
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Biography:

PictureJeremy Harte
Jeremy Harte is a researcher into folklore and archaeology, with a particular interest in landscape legends and tales of encounters with the inhabitants of other worlds. His book Explore Fairy Traditions won the Katharine Briggs award of the Folklore Society for 2005, and his other publications include Cuckoo Pounds and Singing Barrows, and The Green Man. He is curator of Bourne Hall Museum in Surrey.