The Land of the Green Man by Carolyne Larrington IB Tauris, £20 Black Vaughan, still riding the countryside at night with his pack of howling, red-eyed hounds. Jenny Greenteeth, lurking in the weed-choked depths of ponds, on the look-out for heedless children. Fairies, knockers, bogarts and banshees. All find their place in Carolyne Larrington’s scholarly account of the folk traditions of Britain, subtitled A Journey through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles. The book focuses on legends, myths and superstitions, and how these rise out of the landscape to reflect the concerns of our ancestors and the times in which they lived. Universal themes of death and desire, bravery and longing, run throughout, with reflections on how they have been used to explain the inexplicable or give voice to the fears of the day. Examples include a warning about the medieval forest as a malevolent place, disquiet at the pace of the Industrial Revolution and the surprisingly modern appropriation of the Green Man as a symbol of a natural world with which we are in danger of losing touch. Larrington, fellow and tutor in Medieval English at St John’s College, Oxford, proves an adept guide through Britain’s liminal lands, those waste spaces and dreamscapes of childhood where, if you listen carefully enough, you can still hear ancient and familiar voices with their wisdom and warnings. The dead who do not stay where they should but come to pester the living used to function as conundrums, Larrington argues, inviting those left behind to find out what was needed to console them. With the widespread collapse of Christian belief, such pleading often now goes unheeded, and the messages of the dead are ignored. In a country seemingly ever more confused about its identity, In Search of the Green Man provides a valuable reminder of the place from where we have come, and of those who might still whisper to us.