"The Rules of Folklore" in the Ghost Stories of M.R. James

He was fully aware that the literary ghost story, as practised by himself and his admired forerunners Dickens and Le Fanu, was only a recent offshoot from the older custom of oral storytelling, to which he pays tribute in the framing of two of his lesser tales, "An Evening's Entertainment" and "There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard." The former begins:

Nothing is more common form in old-fashioned books than the description of the winter fireside, where the aged grandam narrates to the circle of children that hangs on her lips story after story of ghosts and fairies, and inspires her audience with a pleasing terror. But we are never allowed to know what the stories were. We hear, indeed, of sheeted spectres with saucer eyes, and - still more intriguing - of "Rawhead and Bloody Bones" (an expression which the Oxford Dictionary traces back to 1550), but the context of these striking images eludes us.

Here, then, is a problem which has long obsessed me; but I see no means of solving it finally. The aged grandams are gone, and the collectors of folklore began their work in England too late to save most of the actual stories which the grandams told. Yet such things do not easily die quite out, and imagination, working on scattered hints, may be able to devise a picture of an evening's entertainment ... in some such terms as these ... (James 1970, 588).

The story which follows on from this preamble turns out to be a gruesome fragment of local history, told by a granny to two children, partly so that they should not wake their bad-tempered father from his after-dinner nap, but mainly to warn them against picking blackberries in a certain lane. It is an account of the horrible deaths of two men who had shown a sinister interest in prehistoric burial mounds and heathen worship, how they were refused Christian burial and laid at a crossroads, and how the ruins of their former cottage are still infested with stinging flies - flies that had first been seen thickly clustered on the "great patches of blood" where the corpses had been carried along the lane. James presents this in a convincing pastiche of oral storytelling methods; the grandmother is telling of things that happened "before I was born or thought of," but her information comes from her own father, who had witnessed them, and is bolstered up with topographical details and appeals to current rumours -" They say horses don't like the spot even now, and I've heard there was something of a mist or a light hung about for a long time after, but I don't know the truth of that" (ibid., 600). She herself had once been bitten by one of the "horrid" flies and had had to send for "the wise man over at Bascombe" - "but what it was he bound on my arm and what he said over it he wouldn't tell us" (ibid., 603-4).

The other story to which I have referred, "There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard," takes its title from Shakespeare. In The Winter's Tale (Act 2 scene 1) the queen's young son Mamillius declares that "A sad tale's best for winter: I have one/Of sprites and goblins," and begins "There was a man dwelt by a churchyard ..." As James says: