Let Britain's magical, mythical creatures inspire a patriotism untainted by politics

The Guardian

30-03-2025

It is possible to have too much trust in a marriage. The mythic Welsh warrior Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who appears to have been bigger on brawn than brain, once came home to find his wife, the flower-maiden Blodeuwedd, weeping with fear over premonitions of his death. She begged Lleu to prove that he was, as rumoured, invincible.
Lleu, who had clearly not read the story of Delilah, thought it was a good idea to reveal to his wife each of the unlikely and incongruous conditions that would make it possible for a rival to kill him: among other kinks, they required him to be caught outdoors on a riverbank with one foot straddling a thatched cauldron and one on a wriggling goat. Lo and behold, in one year's time Lleu found himself being struck down in exactly that pose by Blodeuwedd and her lover, the hunter Gronw Pebr. The story is still told to explain the peculiar shape of the Stone of Gronw, sitting to this day on the banks of the River Cynfal in Blaenau Ffestiniog.
Blodeuwedd may have been a tricksy wife, but she is one of eight magical creatures celebrated on Royal Mail's collection of stamps, which revive folkloric traditions from regions across the UK. None is fully human: Blodeuwedd herself was reportedly moulded from flowers by two magicians for their friend, Lleu, after a curse doomed him never to find a bride from among his own people.
The subjects of these stamps are all deeply rooted in regional landscape. They include Cornish Piskies (not to be confused with Devonian Pixies); the shapeshifting selkies of Orkney and Shetland (part seal, part woman); and of course, Loch Ness' most famous resident, Nessie. They provide a rare reminder that England has magical creatures to match the smaller home nations. Norfolk is represented by the Black Shuck, the demonic black dog of East Anglia; Lancashire and Yorkshire by the Grindylow, a river monster that drags children into the reeds. They'd deserve attention if only thanks to the lyrical designs by the artist Adam Simpson, packed with mobile storytelling detail in each still image. They are also, in their own quiet way, deeply patriotic.
Patriotism gets a bad rap in modern Britain. The left often struggles to accept that patriotism can be distinguished from nationalist chauvinism, or that there can be any place for it. Liberals of the centre, meanwhile, have a dangerous tendency to vest pride only in institutions that flatter our ideological preferences, forgetting that France, Germany and even Italy make their own claims to have invented Enlightenment values. Secular patriotism – and by that, I mean a patriotism devoid of emotion or aesthetic – can only ever be transactional. If your love of country is conditional upon its strict adherence to the separation of powers, the secret ballot or even the NHS, it will crumble the first time those institutions come under successful attack.
It is almost 20 years since Gordon Brown, as chancellor, staked out this territory as a personal project. Brown had remarkable foresight: in a speech at the 2006 Fabian Society conference, he foresaw the risks that the lack of a confident and coherent British identity posed to the union and Britain's place in Europe. Three years later, Brown commissioned Being British, a collection of essays edited by then-Spectator editor Matthew d'Ancona, and wrote the introduction.
In an accompanying BBC radio programme, he identified the dangers of leaving British patriotism to be defined by the hard right. 'I think everybody wants to be rooted. Everybody wants to feel a sense of belonging,' he told D'Ancona. But when progressives and liberals fail to cater for that need, 'we define ourselves by race or ethnicity – which would be a disaster for a country that has many people with different backgrounds as part of it.' The result, as Brown foresaw, is the anti-immigrant provocation of Tommy Robinson and the racist violence of the Stockport riots.
It is possible to celebrate aspects of Britain that everyone who lives here can share; that are not co-authored by our peers in Europe; that stimulate our senses with a materiality more enduring than the abstract precepts of a civics lecture. (And I'm not talking, like the wretched 'Life in the UK' test, about fish and chips.) A new set of stamps for Royal Mail is not going to transform a nation's self-image, but it should inspire us. What we have in common with each other, and with every other human being who has set foot on these islands, is no more and no less than our experience of place.
Take the selkie. Coastal nations the world over have stories of water-nymphs who come and go from human husbands: the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, a categorisation system used by folklorists to define tale types, classes the selkie myth as a subsection of ATU 400, 'The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife'. (Nothing takes the joy out of fairy stories like reducing them to numbered index cards.) Versions of seal-maiden can be found well beyond the legal boundaries of the UK, in the Faroe Islands and across Scandinavia.
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It enriches rather than diminishes us to recognise that these boundaries are porous; that human imagination comingles and crosses arbitrary lines. But only in the Shetlands is the motif so closely linked to the geographic challenges of the sea-swells in the Ve Skerries. The folklorist Walter Traill Dennison claimed to have found a different selkie tale shaped around the landscape of each Orkney island. The thrill of these stories is the local detail woven into the universal.
Just as regional folklore can build new communities, it can stoke ethnic conflict. Royal Mail's stamps take a provocative risk by locating Fionn mac Cumhaill, the Gaelic giant also known as Finn McCool, in Northern Ireland's Giant's Causeway, thus inveigling him into a set celebrating the United Kingdom. Yet they also do a brilliant job of reminding us that Britain's legends are everywhere you look in our landscape.
You don't have to share any DNA with the previous generations who have told these tales. You just have to follow in their footsteps over the same earth, and tell the same stories.
Kate Maltby writes about theatre, politics and culture