Dr. Ari Berk is a writer, visual artist, folkorist, and mythologist. His publications have included academic studies on myth and ancient cultures, as well as popular works on myth for both children and adults. He is the author of The Runes of Elfland, Goblins!, and Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Letters, all collaborations with artist Brian Froud, and most recently, Coyote Speaks —Wonders of the Native American World, and Giants, first volume in the "Secret Histories" series.

On a recent visit to London, Ari met up with Nikki Gamble to talk about his new book.

Giants is tremendous fun to read, was it fun to write?

I hate to say it because people think you can’t have a good time while you’re working, but it was a ball. It’s just the kind of book I have always wanted to write.

You have another life as a revered Professor of Folklore, does that mean you’re usually talking and writing about folklore with a more serious tone?

I teach mythology, folklore, Native American literature and sometimes medieval literature so, when I’m not writing things like this……I’m actually teaching things like this.

When we finished Giants,  we were discussing the name that we should put on the cover. Templar suggested that we could use the title Professor but I thought that wouldn’t be appropriate. They liked the idea of the Professor persona but I had to consider how my fictional, super hero existence, as somebody who writes on the side, would work alongside my professional life. However, after thinking about it for a while, I realised it was absolutely fine.

For most of the children reading the book the Professor title will mean something very different to the academic professor.

Well, I hope so. When I was younger my hero was Tolkien and he was a professor at Oxford. A couple of years ago I proposed  a course on Tolkien at my University. The course was well received and I thought it should be a regular offering. A few colleagues baulked at the idea. But my argument is that Tolkien was an eminent scholar who’d taken his vast learning about the medieval world and the Anglo-Saxon culture, and turned it into something that made young people more interested.

I’m very interested in the ways teachers, can bring people across that sometimes insurmountable gap from the everyday world into the other world. Giants was an opportunity to play with that idea. To say “Here is something you think of as fantastical and yet, everywhere you look in the world, there’s some evidence, a mountain, a hill, a hole, that might have a giant story attached to it.

Yes, that interface between the two worlds is an interesting one. For instance, I’m looking here at your Order of the Golden Quills. There are a number of people mentioned that I recognise from history and there are others from legend and fiction.

Well the Order of the Quills is an illustrious and ancient Order. It has had some very influential writers and thinkers and I thought it was important to publish the list of names. A reader can at almost any point in this book, including this list, find something to Google and uncover further layers of information.

Some names are more obscure than others.

 Which ones didn’t you recognise?

Murasaki.

She is the author of The Tales of Genji, from Japan, an incredible medieval cycle of court stories. The Order’s documents show that at one time she was very interested in the collecting of stories.

And Grimley Ironshield?

He was a dwarf; not all the past Magisters or Scribes have been of human stock. Grimley was best known for his poetry, but he also had a great interest in scribing in runes and the law of other races around him.

And at the end of the list there is a blank space…

So that anyone who takes up the goals of the Order, to record lore and ask questions about a place, can then put their name on the list and begin their work as a Scribe of the Order.

Writing in this voice must be very different to the voice you use for writing academic papers…

It’s not; it’s completely the same.

I’d love to read your academic papers!

Well, it has to do with tenure. Academics strive to achieve tenure. And when I did, I thought well, now I can let the cat out of the bag and start talking about what I’m really interested in. I can leave a few of the footnotes to the side. I can continue to write scholarly papers, which I occasionally do, but what I really am interested in doing is making scholarly learning available to a broader audience. For example I’ve written for Realms of Fantasy a publication for fantasy stories. They have an ongoing column called Folk Roots, which explores aspects of folklore and myth. I've written detailed articles for them on topics such as the Labyrinth, the lore of runes and the |Wild Hunt, all in a very colloquial reader-freindly tone. 

What is the most treasured book in your vast library, the one that you would rescue from a burning building?

 My favourite changes. You know, you, fall in love with a book and then you fall in love with other books, and then you fall back in love with the first book again. At the moment it would be a facsimile of the Diaries of Dr John Dee, the Elizabethan magician, historian and antiquarian. It contains all of his conversations with the Angelic spirits and his very bizarre ramblings on antiquarianism and the past. He believed that the past pushes its way into the present, which is a fascinating idea. My copy is a limited edition and bound in leather.

 I studied at Oxford for two terms. If you’re researching in the old university library, you put in a request for a book and usually it is brought to your desk - but not always. Sometimes they accidentally pick the book next to it, or something entirely different… That happened to me on a couple of occasions and sometimes the book was so interesting that I started to read that one instead. One time I got a copy of the Ephemeredes of Stardeus; it was a copy that was owned by John Dee. In the margins he kept a little diary. Most the notes were about the every day. For instance, one entry was about his cat which had brought him a mouse. But in one entry he records hearing a voice of a little girl in his house, a ghost named Nadema. He hears her voice crying in the night and it’s just riveting.

So here I was in this amazing 15th Century library reading this bizarre little scribbled hand on the side of the margin, and I thought well that’s what I want to do, record stories about ghosts and the other worlds. Things that make us think about where we are, in time and place.

 At the moment I’m working on a book about John Dee's  son, Arthur Dee.

Why was his son so interesting?

Because we know almost nothing about him and yet it must have been interesting to be him. He grew up to be, sort of, a physician come alchemist, so he was certainly influenced by his father.

Landscape is one of the main themes in your book. Is the research into places mainly book based or do you do a lot of fieldwork?

Well, it’s both. Where possible I start with place. I would call it “Ambient Studies.” I’ve spent a lot of time on Dartmoor, traipsing over the moor and I think have a pretty good sense of rock topography and geography. When I write about giants, stones are important because stones hold memory. We all have that impulse to find that one special rock, and keep it for the rest of our life. Well, why? Because even if we forget whatever else happened, the rock will take us back, to that special moment in time when we found the rock. That idea underpins my mythos about giants and the relationship to the land and place. Some of the far afield places in the book have had to be purely imaginary. But all of them are grounded in what I call my scholarly work.

You write about giants from all around the world. What interests you most, is it the differences in the giants, or is it their similarities?

 That’s a really interesting question because a lot of scholars of mythology like Joseph Campbell, for example, are universalists. Campbell is largely interested in their shared characteristics. I’m interested in those things too, but what I really love is the differences. It’s how a culture colours the subject that makes it interesting to me. So if I say all stories about giants involve them shaping the landscape of wherever they come from, that’s true, by and large, but is that a story you’ll remember? No – there’s nothing in the bare bones to sink your teeth into. But if I have a name for that giant, who happens to be a woman, from Korea, and she is referred to as a revered grandmother, who makes the rivers and gives her name to the river; this is something that might inform your experience of that place, should you go there.

Are there differences between male and female giants, and what they represent?

They share some characteristics. Both are capable of great acts of creativity and terrific malfeasance. But you don’t find, for example, that all giantesses are benevolent and more kindly than their male counterparts. In the Welsh story of Culhwch and Olwen, the young paramour’s aunty is a giant, married to a giant shepherd, and when she embraces one of the hero’s men she nearly pushes the entire squawk out of his bag. It’s a loving act, but also a violent giant act. Giants are ambivalent.

I think, unsurprisingly, giants are like people. So for me it’s about individuals rather than types. The only common thing seems to be some similarity in that giants’ daughters are almost always lovely and desirable. And they’re usually not that big. So maybe giantism runs in the male line more frequently.

When you were putting this book together, did you come across any giant stories you didn’t already know?

Oh, I came across a lot. That’s why I write; it’s an excuse to read obscure books, an opportunity to delve deeper into something that I’m already quite interested in.

 It’s a challenge for the reader to decide where the boundary between age old lore and your imagination lies.

Yes, that’s deliberate. I was very proud of the reviews Brian Froud and I received for The Runes of Elfland. They said things like, “It’s a great collection of Celtic mythology and folktales” and would often cite The Birch Girl, one of the first stories in the book as an example. But that story is not a piece of Celtic mythology; it comes out of my wandering through birch forests and it doesn’t exist anywhere else. I think it’s a great compliment that you can create something that will blend seamlessly with the existing mythic topography.

Does it worry you that in years to come people might not be able to tell the difference?

 Isn’t that what happens? We call it a historical record. In 20 years nobody will care. But I’ll know, should anybody crib any notes for other books about giants, whether they’ve done their own research or if they’ve taken it all from my book. You see, I get to have more fun even after the book is published.

What is  the most impressive giant landscape that you’ve seen?

The  most impressive? Well, I’d have to say, there’s a tor in the middle of Dartmoor with nothing else around it that actually has no story. Somebody made one up, which is mentioned in the Dartmoor Centre but when you hear it; you know that it’s not a full story. When you stand at a right angle to the tor a giant’s head is absolutely visible. I know there must be a story, but no-one’s found it yet. I find that very intriguing.

And what text sources did you find most useful when you were researching the subject?

Katherine Briggs' Dictionary of British Folk Tales , of course. She produced a four  volume series of British Folklore, a compendium of stories like none other. Many of the tales are short but meaty, and strange and wonderful. All the fairy stories run from A to Z, covering themes like black dogs, dragons, giants.

There is one particular book, and I hate to give it away because it’s one of my great sources, Robert Hunt’s  Popular Romances of the West of England . In the nineteenth century Hunt went to Cornwall and Devon, and recorded all kinds of stories about giants, mermaids and ghosts. One of the things I appreciate about the great collectors of the nineteenth century is that they managed to maintain something of the orality in their retellings. I try to write with my ear as much as I can; if I write a story, I want it to sound good when it’s read aloud.

Do you have a favourite giant story?

My favourite one right now? Alright, I’m going to answer with two stories:

The first is a story, well poem, that comes out of the Poetic Edda. It’s about a riddle contest between Odin and the great giant Vafthrúdnir, the eldest of the giants. Odin is never at ease he always has lots of questions. On this occasion he goes off to question a giant. The two of them have an exchange, back and forth, back and forth. What happens in the course of that conversation is that Odin is given a lesson in the topography of the universe. The giant tells him the names of things in the languages of all the secret races. So he tells Odin that every race has its own name for the sun: the elves call the it “ever shining,” but giants call it “big ball”. By the end of this exchange, Odin has learned the secret names of all the important things in the world - the clouds, the sun, the moon, the stars, the trees and forests. I love that story even though the giant is beheaded in the end, which is unfortunately how many giant stories finish. Giants are really misunderstood. They’re usually just trying to be helpful but people are threatened by their size, the gruff voice and the big fists.

Now the other favourite is one I wrote for this book. It’s not even really a story; it’s just a little utterance, so here it is:

The Song of Beginnings as Told by Ainar Rocktorgue

Before sparkle was put upon granite in the Early Days, which are but moments ago tot he eldest Giant Folk, we were part of what we now tend and love: roks, tress, mountains, tors. But the hills - bless each wrinkle and fold of 'em - wanted a voice, so we became their mouths. The mountains wanted to know more of the wandering world, so we became their legs, striding far, but never forgetting our roots, our fathers and mothers of earthfast rock. And at our long days' ending, we shall return to them: to the mountains, to the tors, to the earthlight. We shall return to the arms of our First Families.

It’s very poetic. Sometimes the giants speak a little slowly, some of the speech is stumbly, but I think some of them are quite eloquent and so I wanted to at least have a couple of moments in the book where a giant would tell a poetic story and so that was that moment for me.

Can you tell us something about the Giants' runes?

The are related to the Gothic Alphabet, which we now know, after this study, was in fact derived from the giant’s own runes. It is very much like our own alphabet. It was fun to write because you can pick out a few of the words, when you look at the giant’s inscription.

You are working on Merfolk at the moment. What can we expect to find in that book?

Well, I’m hoping to show that there’s more variation in the merfolk than we normally see and that merfolk are related to the creatures with whom they share the ocean. Hopefully, there will be a lot of regional variation. Merfolk are very magical, always giving or cursing in various ways, depending on their mood or inclination. Their magic is very much tied to the weather and a lot of early weather lore, so there will be a good bit of that in the story. There will be a lot of information about sunken lands, which then are deeded over to merfolk. We will even have translated an actual deed of a village, which was ceded over by the King of England. There will be a bit about relationships between merfolk and humans, which is always a very sketchy business. And of course something on songs and ballads, because merfolk are the subject of a lot of music.

Thank you Ari Berk for talking to Write Away