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

Kristensen's content would have been equally congenial. Jutland ghosts are not remote historic personages, nor are they vague psychic manifestations. They are very commonly revengeful or arbitrarily malevolent, or doomed to "walk" for their past sins; they often manifest themselves in physical ways, by chasing or attacking people or, at the least, by noise and commotion in the farms. No sophisticated psychic or occult explanations are offered for their existence; Kristensen's informants - and indeed Kristensen himself - accepted them without needing to theorise about them. All this fits well with James's general concept of the revenant (palpably physical, menacing, evil or vengeful, often allied to demons) and his dislike of abstract "quasi-scientific" speculations.

As regards individual motifs, there are of course a great many that are common to British and to Danish lore that ghosts come at dusk, but that candle-light keeps them at bay; the ghost or fiend in the form of a dog; ghosts that enter only when invited; storms at the deaths of evil men; ghosts or demonic animals guarding buried treasure; the revenge of the dead on those who steal from them or maltreat their bodies; witches that turn into hares; the learned black magician, with his satanic pact and his devilish familiars. All these are ideas that James uses, and though one can unhesitatingly say that they are folkloric, they are too widespread to trace to specific sources. The ghosts that creep slowly and stealthily towards their target in "The Mezzotint" and "Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance" recall those in certain West of England legends, and also in Danish ones, who after having been once exorcised are returning home from their place of banishment by the length of one cock's stride, or one hen's feather or one straw, every year (Brown 1979, 26, 32, 33, 36, 62 and 78; Kristensen 1886, 245 and 247; 1897, 151). In Denmark these "cockstride ghosts" are seen as malevolent, whereas the British ones are penitential, which may make Danish influence slightly more likely here.

Other elements, however, are definitely British or Irish. The songs used to such sinister effect in "Oh Whistle ..." and in "Martin's Close" are well-known Scottish and English ones; Ireland is said to be the source for the belief that ash trees are sinister, which runs counter to English ideas(7) ("The Ash Tree"). In "A Warning to the Curious" (1925) James uses the heraldic arms of East Anglia, which show three crowns, as basis for a convincingly "traditional"-looking claim that three crowns buried on the coast guard England from invasion. This is now often taken as a genuine legend, and was told as such by "several Suffolk residents" to the folklorist Enid Porter, who seems to have accepted it as authentic (Porter 1974, 131-2 and 181). One local writer says that a sexton named Eade, living at Blythburgh in the 1950s, "believed implicitly" that the last remaining crown had saved England from a Nazi invasion (Forrest 1961, 134-5). However, no source earlier than James has yet been found. I believe he simply wove his own story round the heraldic crowns according to the "rules of folklore," possibly modelled on the spurious but popular legend of Drake's Drum or on the tale about the head of Bendigeidfran in the Mabinogion. I also suspect that the remark embedded in his story that "it is rather surprising" that the legend "has not made its way into print before" (James 1970, 567) is a sly hint that he himself invented it.