Dr Eleanor Baker: Book of Curses and the Power of the Word

00:05 - Julia Golding (Host)
Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. We're taking a slightly different look at things fantasy today, because I'm going to be in conversation with Dr Eleanor Baker, who has written a book with the Bodleian Library called the Book of Curses. So before you dive for cover, perhaps we better introduce Eleanor in her less dark demeanor. Eleanor, tell us a little bit about yourself and, on the good side of what you're going to be talking about, I'm particularly interested if you wanted to talk about your work for the Astrophoria Foundation. So off you go.

00:53 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
Hi, julia, thank you so much for having me here. I'm delighted to be here and, yes, I'll put my best foot forward and try not to be too diabolical and curse-like today. Yeah, so this book Curses ultimately came out of things that I was looking at during my doctorate. So I did my doctorate here at the University of Oxford and what swung my decision to do it here was the complete wealth of medieval manuscripts that the Bodleian Library possesses, and as part of my research I was looking at how people in the later medieval period in England so around 1350 to 1550, how they understood what books were as material objects. So you get these references to books being perceived as holy objects or valuable objects, objects which can heal, objects which can curse, and I was really interested in where those ideas came from and what they were doing, because it's something that is in some ways, not so far away from how we perceive books, in that people often express very strong opinions, for example, as to how you hold your place in a book. There are screams of horror usually when I say that I'm someone who dog-ears the pages of their books, that folds the corner down to keep their place. For some people, that is a cardinal sin of book reading. So I found that that was just an interesting concept that lasted over a long period of time and emphasised both the differences between the medieval period and us, but also the similarities as well.

02:28
And book curses was something that I didn't have a chance to look at particularly closely in the doctorate.

02:33
So I thought, well, now's an excellent time to do so, and since completing the doctorate I have remained in Oxford teaching at various colleges, and one of the roles that I have is as the English subject lead for the relatively new Astrophoria Foundation Year programme, and the aim of that programme is to support students who have had personal disadvantage in their lives. They've been through some kind of difficulty and maybe the initial usual application process to Oxford is not targeted enough to reach them or they don't have enough information at that time to know if it's the right choice for them. And what we provide is essentially a supported programme to get them in the position that they would need to be to study, to not just be able to meet the baseline requirements for studying at university but to actually thrive when they get there. So that's holistic in terms of things like building up their confidence and learning how to prioritise, but also getting to grips with maybe some of the basic methodologies of, in my case, english literature. That would help them fly once they to undergraduate study.

03:43 - Julia Golding (Host)
So if anyone is listening to this who perhaps they themselves are falling into this cohort, or know somebody close to them who does, a very talented person who hasn't had the advantage of, maybe, a private education where they know how the Oxbridge system works, what's the best place for them to go to get more information?

04:04 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
The best place for them to go would be the University of Oxford website into the admissions section, and you can find all the information about what an Astrophoria application requires there.

04:15 - Julia Golding (Host)
Perfect Right. So from the blessing of the Astrophoria Foundation here, let's turn to curses. So, looking through the book, it's a beautifully produced book, as the Bodleian Library books often are. It is done chronologically, so you go from the very oldest curses that you could find to contemporary ones. We're talking about curses about books. Do you want to actually sort of explain the actual scope? Because obviously cursing more generally is a very longstanding human occupation, but we're talking about a particular kind of curse.

04:55 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely, and, julia, you're completely right in that curses are found among the earliest of human writings. Curses have existed as long as writing has, so they're a kind of conceit, a way of imagining the power of the word that is quite familiar to us across different time periods. What I'm focused on in this book is curses which think about what is termed in academic study the material text, and that is what it sounds like. It's literally the thing that words are on. So we start off at the beginning of the book with examples from the ancient Near East, in just before 3000 BCE and, as you say, we finish in the modern era.

05:39
But the initial curses that we're looking at are written on monumental stone stelae, which are stone monuments which are taller than they are broad, and they were being inscribed with a text form called cuneiform, which is formed of little triangles which are kind of pressed into clay or inscribed into stone, and they warn things like whoever defaces this text, whoever scrubs out the name of the king and replaces it with their own, will face the wrath of a multitude of different gods. So there's this warning about not editing the text, not destroying the monument, and this is picked up later on by medieval writers who then go on to write these curses when the technology to develop the book is made. So that condition, that desire to protect the written word and also the material thing that the written word is placed on, is something that we've continued across different time periods, across literary history.

06:48 - Julia Golding (Host)
Of course, when we think of the pre-printing press age, just the huge expense of producing a text, I mean no doubt it costs an awful lot of money to build one of these monumental stelae as well. So, equally, you don't want that defaced. But let's just go to the medieval period, where you've got all the parchment you have to produce and then you've got the monks sitting up painstakingly hand copying everything. You wouldn't have a library of just. We're both sitting in houses full of books. That was incredibly rare. The people who had books were very high status individuals. They would have been individuals, they would have been kings, they would have been bishops, and the idea of somebody coming in and stealing a book would be the equivalent of stealing a jewel. Literally, it's very high status. So you can see why a curse is employed. One of the things that came up again and again in the curses you found in the medieval period was the anathema curse. Do you want to talk a little bit about words that become almost like a magic spell? Curse?

07:56 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely, you've really kind of struck at the heart of medieval curses there. You're completely right to identify that manuscripts made of parchment sheets, later paper sheets, bound in leather, sometimes really richly decorated in and of themselves as well. They might have kind of these elaborate gold settings with jewels literally on the front cover, so they become this form of treasure. But there are also treasuries in a different way, in their kind of word treasuries, because often these books were produced, as you identify, in scriptoria, so the writing rooms of monks and nuns. They were likely to contain theological devotional texts and so the text itself had an importance beyond the book itself. It's something of divine importance. Yeah, so you can absolutely see that there are lots of different layers of value that are kind of compounding together that might make someone want to protect it with a curse, in terms of the different phrases that people come up with.

09:02
Yeah, anathema literally means in Latin first it obtains these connotations of communication, particularly of being removed from the society, of the church, literally being cast out by society as you know it. So the threat of being excommunicated, of being anathema, was really strong. But there's also a sense that anathema has this kind of incantatory quality. In and of itself. It's a Latin word and perhaps a word that, despite people knowing its meaning, has a sort of rhythmic quality to it as well. It's often placed in conjunction with another word, which is sort of a nonsense word in the way that it manifests. It's placed together with another word, anathema maranatha, together with another word anathema maranatha, and together they have this really incantatory quality. The letters are almost scrambled between the two words, and maranatha doesn't actually mean anything. It doesn't directly translate. It's a process of transliteration, so it's moved from a different language with different letter forms into another, and therefore the sense of the word, the meaning, hasn't been translated well either.

10:31 - Julia Golding (Host)
So it's almost got the same sense of abracadabra that this kind of the words themselves hold power, even if that power is not specific and hocus pocus and hocus pocus exactly today it's expecto patronum and so on these use we can see how we have in our western brain, somewhere vaguely latin sounding words, equal magic yeah, absolutely, and in some ways that's reflective of of the differences in literacy rates and who had literacy and which languages were the vernacular.

11:09 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
So the language of the spoken people, the spoken language of the people. So you can imagine, for people whose spoken language was English and who perhaps didn't have the ability to read or write would have gone to church services and heard Latin spoken words like anathema would hold that incantatory quality because they have a general sense of what that word evokes, but not a full conception of its meaning.

11:38 - Julia Golding (Host)
It puts me in mind. What was it? The neck first, that if you were able to save your life, if you had a capital sentence, if you were able to save your life, if you had a capital sentence, if you were able to say a certain amount of church latin to prove you're a person of learning. So it was wow. I think they called it the neck first. It was. It was a very real, powerful word at the time. I don't know if it meant you were then put under church, um, in church court as opposed to. I don't know if it meant you were then put under church, in church court as opposed to secular court, but anyway, I've always stuck in my mind this idea of a neck verse. It's very save yourself, that's so fascinating.

12:12 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
But that connection with kind of judicial processes as well is really interesting in regard to book curses, because we can think as modern readers oh, this is so far away from how we understand books, modern readers, oh, this is so far away from how we understand books. But then if you think of courts of law, where you're asked to swear, often on a, well, you can. At most places you can choose which text you're placing your hand on in order to swear your oath. So in many cases, people choose holy texts. They might choose the Bible, for example, but people are offered the opportunity to choose any text which is of direct relevance to them, which has meaning for them, with the aim that you don't perjure yourself. You have to tell the truth, and the fact that we do that by swearing on books, I think is really significant.

12:59 - Julia Golding (Host)
It's such a fascinating area, so did you come up with a favourite curse it's in such a fascinating area.

13:09 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
so did you come up with a favorite curse? I did so. I thought, particularly as this is a fantasy podcast, I wanted to choose one which has a fantastical element to it, which is a book curse, where the, the narrative voice of the curse, speaks as if it's the book itself, so it's written in the first person and as if the book is speaking. So this is the book curse of Robert of Aldsworth. I'll just read the modern English translation. Robert of Aldsworth had this book written.

13:38
I am for the community, I do not want to be separated. May I therefore be given to one, as I am available to all. Whoever steals me or removes me, he will be cursed. The penalty for that person is anathema. And that is a book curse written at the beginning of a 13th century Bible that once belonged to one, robert of Aldsworth, a monk from Gloucester Cathedral. I think it's really interesting that Robert has taken his understanding of communal monkish living in which you live in close quarters with lots of other people, and has transposed that onto the language used in the book curse, a book who perceives itself as one entity among a community and says I don't want to be removed from my fellow books. I want to remain in the monastery, fellow books, I want to remain in the monastery and it could be referring to other books or it could be referring to the other brothers in the monastery. But the sense that the book itself has a voice and can express its wishes, I think has lots of potential for fantasy in particular.

14:43 - Julia Golding (Host)
Oh, that's wonderful and it's such an imaginative way of writing a curse. I have a favourite because of the local interest, and this one, this curse is from Abingdon and it suggests behaviour to be repeated every year. So this is a book curse, repeated every year by candlelight, the book of the church of St mary's in abingdon. Whoever steals me, let him be anathema. This sentence is repeated every year in the chapter with a book and a candle. So you've got a whole. I went I hope they're still doing it at saint mary's abingdon. Um, it'll be a great. You know, know, once a year you go from Harvest Festival to the Book Curse Sunday.

15:28 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
That sounds like fun. Absolutely, and if they don't do it, I think they should bring it back Absolutely. Yeah, and what I think is interesting about that Book Curse is that it's not quite clear what circumstances it's read under. So as part of the liturgy, the performance of church services, you essentially make your way through the spread, the span of the Bible every year. So you would go through the process of this text every year. It would take you a year to read it, and it's not clear if the curse would just naturally then be read out as part of this annual reading or if it would only be read out in a case of excommunication, which is usually indicated by the extinguishing of a candle flame, the ringing of a bell and slamming a book together. So there's this interesting kind of ambiguity at quite where the book cursing comes in there.

16:27 - Julia Golding (Host)
So you have a specialism in medieval literature. Thinking about many medieval tales are fantastical. Can you think of any magical books or special books within medieval materials that reflect this external world of book curses and culture?

16:49 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
Oh a really interesting question. So what I immediately think of is the propensity for some people especially in longer poems I'm thinking particularly of authors like John Lydgate to fall asleep whilst reading and then have fantastical visions. So there's kind of a connection between proximity to the book and having these great visions. There's one text by the famous author Geoffrey Chaucer called the Parliament of Fowls where somebody is reading and they're getting really frustrated that they don't understand the text and then they have this vision of this otherworldly vision of how the world works and it's just a really fascinating removal from the world of reading. But we have lots of other instances where magical things happen in relation to books. I wonder if I can provide some examples in a different light. So in one text called Book of Marjorie Kemp, which is purported to be one of the first autobiographies that we have in the English language.

18:08
Bridget Jones. Bridget Jones, bridget Jones, yeah, absolutely spawned myriad forms. Um, there's debate as to whether we can actually formally call it an autobiography, because she had what we refer to as manuensis, so she had scribes who she was dictating to, who then supposedly wrote her her thoughts down. Um, and she is saved by a book of hours that she carries in a church when a portion of the church architecture in the roof falls on her during a church service. And it should have been enough to kill her. And I laugh, not because this is a particularly humorous episode, but because Marjorie Kemp is such an agrarious character who is usually overcome with her devotion to Christ in church services, that she starts uncontrollably crying and the people around her, understandably, are very critical of this. A lot of the time she genuinely she makes a nuisance of herself. A lot of the time this portion of the church falls on her. By rights it should have killed her. It was enough stone to really get her.

19:14
But it's implicitly credited in the text that it is her holding of a book of hours looking at the words in the book of hours whilst they were being spoken in the church service that saved her from a horrible death. We also have other interesting connections to the material text, having what we might refer to as thaumaturgic power, so the power to heal or protect. We have these very unusual texts, some of which are on display at the British Library's Medieval Women exhibition, at the moment called birthing gird girdles, which are these long strips of parchment which often have different visual depictions of the crucifixion, and also some devotional works which we think were draped over the uh, the belly of a pregnant woman as she was in labor. Um, it, as a form of protection, is helping helping her deliver the child. And we have other references to similar charms that you could write down on different materials and then burn or eat, and they would have particular properties oh, that's fascinating sort of gas and air for the medieval.

20:23 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I think it's easier. So we're medieval times, clearly a paucity of books. But by the time we get to later Renaissance, so time of Shakespeare onwards we've got the printing press. Books are now more commonly available and I think we can begin to see them cropping up in fantasy much more as a sort of talismanic object. And the first person I thought of in this context was Prospero. And the first person I thought of in this context was Prospero, who very much has to bury his books, doesn't he? In order to turn his back on the world of magic at the end of Tempest.

21:11 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
So Shakespeare is aware of the power of the book and its connection to magicians. Reading spells out of it Absolutely, and I think that sense of the power of the text as a material object, that kind of the significance of the things that are written in it bleeding in to the material object itself and that in its own right having power, I think we see that repeated in fantasy literature in particular, time and time again, for good and for bad. I'm thinking also of the short stories of the late 19th and early 20th century writer, mr James, who often includes these really interesting descriptions of medieval manuscripts, often because he was a medievalist he worked at Cambridge for much of his life as a medieval manuscript cataloger and then goes on in these short stories, which often contain horrific ghosts or uncanny goings-on, he often features books that are doing spooky things, books that are doing spooky things.

22:10 - Julia Golding (Host)
So do you think that curses are actually? The people writing them tended to think of them as like a magical power within the set of the words. Or do you think that it was a psychological social pressure that brought along these bad things? Or just a warning like a law, or all of the above?

22:39 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
I'm going to take the academic coward's way out and say I think there are lots of different things happening at once. It's interesting that you used the word magic there, because I thought initially, when I started researching these curses, I thought, oh, I wonder if they're going to come up in books of esoteric knowledge, of alchemical knowledge, something that was a little bit divergent, a little bit unlicensed, challenging the boundaries of what was appropriate to examine in the world. But many of these curses, particularly in the medieval period, were penned by monks and nuns. They were not perceived as a diabolical force or something outside of the realms of God's power. They would often directly invoke holy characters from the Bible, holy figures, in order to emphasize the efficacy of that curse. So they're often working within preconceived frameworks of how the world works.

23:32
But I think there is something interesting about that for the curse to be effective, presumably the other person has to fear it. There has to be a sense that something bad will happen. I believe this might happen. So I'm going to err on the side of caution and not do it. So all book curses that I've come across have been conditional. If you do this, then this will happen.

23:58
So it requires a triggering of some sort, which, again, I think is probably excellent fodder for fantasy writers. Kind of the idea that something has to happen in order for this to be triggered is really fascinating. But yeah, in terms of how seriously they approach these things, I also think there's a great degree of variation and I think some are more earnestly serious than others. I think it would be a mistake to look particularly at medieval examples and think that they were humorless people who thought that all of these kind of supernatural things were possible because they didn't have an understanding of the real world. I think they had a very nuanced understanding about how ideas regarding ownership and the threats that particular punishments offered, such as excommunication or, more obviously, hanging, burning, drowning all punishments which are offered in book curses, how they come up.

25:02 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, and some of them are. There's one about very graphic, about something about being poked or burned or burnt. I mean it's so over the top. Yes, it clearly is. It's a far it's.

25:17 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
It's it's kind of undoes itself by its own yeah, kind of hyperbolic nature, you see, kind of thing. Yeah, even someone who was living in that period. I think it could be taken two different ways Either that this is an incredibly important object and you really should fear these things happening, or that this is so hyperbolic it's not quite believable, and I think they often straddle that liminal space of being serious but also humorous at the same time.

25:49 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, I think one of the things that made me think about is back in the day when people sent letters. There was a chain letter thing going around when I was young, in the sort of 70s and 80s and you would suddenly get a letter and it would say send this on to five other people. And if you don't do that, you know basically you're bad luck or some kind of threat within it. And even then I remember getting one of these and thinking I just want to throw this away. Maybe I should. Yeah, your lizard brain or your sort of instinct saying is there really going to be some kind of bad luck? It's like walking under a ladder superstition. I didn't send it on because I thought I don't want to pass this on to somebody else Part of you. Why would you? Yeah, why would?

26:45 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
you make the decision to go further, absolutely, and I remember the later iteration of this was you would receive it in email form. Same thing it would be if yeah, if you don't forward it on to five people, then something will happen. It is the, the modern reincarnation of the book curse, except I suspect those letters and those emails perhaps had a more fraudulent attempt in mind than the book cursing themselves. But it's that same logic, isn't it? When you receive something like that, you do think. Is it worth just hedging my bets, just to make sure, just in case you know, because the chance, while it might not happen, the punishments are significant enough to make me think twice about it significant enough to make me think twice about it.

27:34 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, absolutely so. Let's think about curses in fantasy. Um and we can now come right up to date with fantasy I was thinking that, um, where do curses rest, particularly in oxford fantasy? And I and, coming out of your period, I've started thinking about Beowulf and the fact that the last of the third monster is a dragon who is asleep on a treasure, of course, and there's a sense that dragon's treasure itself is cursed and you can trace.

28:08
You've also got the Vulsunga Saga and you can trace. You've also got the Vulsunga Saga, which is the source for Fafnir and Sigurd and all that ring saga stuff. So you can see there's an association with treasure. Your books can slip in there somewhere and desiring it turns you into the dragon. The dragon sickness sickness, and there's an easy step there to the hobbit and smalg and all of that. So clearly there is this power of the cursed object that I could trace from thinking about curses and in that case it's a psychological triggering. You don't need magic for that, you just need to desire it and it turns you into the thing you desire.

29:01 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
Yeah, they operate in that funny space where it's not quite officially functioning as kind of a magic system. It almost ushers itself into being. If you believe hard enough, then it does happen. I think it's interesting that you mentioned tolkien as well, and I was thinking especially with the um, the curse example that I chose.

29:27
Tolkien is someone who also has a a real interest in in the objecthood of things and things that can talk. So I'm thinking, for example, of uh, the, the riddles in the hobbit um which are told between characters, and they bear an uncanny resemblance to the, the riddles of old english literature, as you might expect with tolkien, uh, especially from the exeter book, to the riddles of old English literature, as you might expect with Tolkien, especially from the Exeter book. And these riddles are often about concrete objects, books, swords, vegetables, things like that, and they often end with the phrase say what I am called. And you get this real sense of kind of speaking objects or objects with which have agency in in tolkien's works as well, which I think is is kind of related to that book purse and the idea that the book can create its own curse and harbor its own sickness.

30:23 - Julia Golding (Host)
I guess the same kind of logic with the inscribed rings yes, and it's how you receive the ring is, in a way, defines how it then affects you. Yeah, yeah, um. So if you take it by force, that's very bad. So if you're a golem, um, it's, you're on a downward trajectory where bilbo's in the sort of gray area, because he kind of steals it, but, frodo, he takes it on as a burden, as a inheritance, as something which he does not because he wants it, but because he's been asked. Yeah, um, so he starts with a pure heart and that. So the curse takes much longer to work on him. The Curse of the Ring, the desire for power. It takes a long time to work on him.

31:16
Just going back to curse books, I was thinking of the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Do you remember the bit in the Magician's House have you remember that from reading it as a younger when Lucy is sent upstairs to find the spell that undoes the uh, the duffel pods being invisible. So she, bravely, is sent upstairs by all the guys staying downstairs and she comes across this amazing magical book where she starts turning the pages and she sees all sorts of spells and curses as she reads her way through it and one of them, which is on this through it. And one of them, which is on this borderline, is the one to hear what people think about you. And so she links us in on a conversation between her friend from school and the mean girl of her school on a train, where her friend is basically agreeing that luc Pevensie is a bit of a pill, you know. So she hears bad about herself.

32:27
So it's actually a curse that that spell that friendship. And Aslan, who talks to her later, basically says Don't do that. You have to understand why. She may have said that in those circumstances. It's not what you necessarily think. Don't change your mind, because you've done something wrong, ie eavesdropped. So that is almost like a book of curse, is that one?

32:54
yeah, and that's also an interesting change just before we leave it. It also contains the most wonderful story ever written, which she reads and then forgets when she turns the last page.

33:07 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
Oh, it's a fabulous. Wonderfully, I'm going to have to go back and reread that. I don't remember that at all, but it's interesting, with what you said about reading the spell, to be able to eavesdrop, because that's kind of like a double hidden knowledge, isn't it? She's found this book that she wouldn't ordinarily be reading and she's then able to get this further insight into how people are speaking about her, and it's almost a warning against the dangers of knowing too much yeah, absolutely, and how you get the knowledge is important as well, so it's okay to do something for somebody else.

33:47 - Julia Golding (Host)
They've asked for the spell to be lifted so that they're visible. That's not something for herself, whereas all the spells that may benefit her like um to be incredibly beautiful, you, you realize, would all have a backlash thing in the tail. Yeah, in the tail, absolutely, um, but you, just before we started recording, you were talking to me about, of course, um, deborah harkness. Um, which starts pretty much in the bodleian library where you also were sitting to find all these curses. Yes, I would love to see your readers request. Can I have all?

34:21 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
these curses? Yes, readers request can I have all these books? Yes, absolutely, and I have to admit at this point that I did then listen a lot of the time, while I was writing book curses, to the soundtrack for the adaption of a discovery of witches, to just feel a little bit more like I was diana from the, from the book looking out. But, yeah, deborah harkness's um all souls trilogy, uh, imagines the world in which there are vampires, um, and other other fantastical creatures. I won't give too much, which is, we presume, which is yes, which is significantly yeah, um, and there is a manuscript that's called up by a, uh, a young academic who also turns out to be a witch, called ms ashmole 782, uh, a manuscript of, uh, alchemical, esoteric knowledge which is in fact missing from the bodleian libraries. So this is is kind of a thing, you've been up to.

35:20
yeah, I know, and debor, and Deborah is herself a book historian and a very accomplished academic, so clearly that fed into what she was doing and I know that she herself found a manuscript associated with John Dee as part of her research, so a lot of it. She's excellent at kind of describing the physicality of manuscripts and what they look like, but this particular manuscript you find out by the end of the series is made of the skin of different creatures and is supposed to collectively tell their story and I thought that was interesting. That was an interesting way to figure how books can be a repository of our identities and our sense of belonging and where they come from. That's often represented through their materiality as much as what's written on them.

36:11
Um, people are very attached to their books, understandably, um, and it is a kind of harrowing reflection of a particular book that's called anthropodermic Bibliopogy, which is books made out of human skin or bound in human skin which do exist, sadly, in the world, often attributed to the medieval period, although they're not. The few examples that do exist date from the 17 and early 1800s. Um, and there's been a big kind of scholarly effort to go through and dna test a lot of their skin, hair and they turn out to be the usual animals that are used to make manuscripts. But there's that kind of haunting quality of what if books for people and people will books?

37:01 - Julia Golding (Host)
That does remind me of the Margaret Atwood saying that everything in fantasy has existed somewhere in the world.

37:09 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
Yes, yes, horrifically, yeah, and there was another text that this reminded me of, which I think is on the borderline of kind of historical fantasy fiction, which is Bridget Collins' the Binding, kind of historical fantasy fiction which is Bridget Collins' the Binding, and that narrative imagines, as kind of a parallel, a pseudo 19th century where book binders have the power to seal human memories within books and then you can kind of store them away and the person who had those memories wouldn't have to suffer with them anymore. So people are thinking about the kind of capabilities of books, the powers of books, in really interesting ways in fantasy literature, in particular, I think, and of course, you've got the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

37:53 - Julia Golding (Host)
If you want to nod to, yes, science fiction and and again, another way of using the book which I've seen um is, after the uh, richard, jasper ford, the air affair, where you've got books, the liminal space between books and reality collapses. But you also find that in um, uh, the cornelia funky stories, um, so this idea of the and oh gosh.

38:21 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
Right, and she never ends, yeah.

38:24 - Julia Golding (Host)
So it's definitely a very strong thread. Yes, all of those with the idea of books being a gateway access, like your wardrobe, into these other worlds, not the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That's a lovely standalone example of a wry commentary upon space, which is really big.

38:48 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
Yes, yes, um, you've just made me think as well of, uh, uh, jonathan strange and mr norell, which obviously a text which contains loads of references to magical books, how magical books work, but also, significantly, how they don't, how they cannot possibly capture magic appropriately, how that exists outside of books and actually texts themselves are not the most efficacious means of enacting magic that comes from beyond the text. So I think also the limitations of books to do things, magic books that don't work.

39:26 - Julia Golding (Host)
That would be the kind I'd find, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. So, Eleanor, thank you. It's been a fantastic survey of books and curses through the ages. What are you working on now?

39:38 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
So my interest is now turning almost I think it is fantasy adjacent. I'm really interested in folk horror as a concept Spooky, supernatural goings on especially figured in the British landscape. So I'm looking for more horror stories from the medieval period that are set in the English landscape in particular, because I think they're fascinating.

40:05 - Julia Golding (Host)
Wonderful. Oh, we look forward to hearing about that when, when you complete that particular project, so as a little bit of fun, we're going to now give ourselves the chance to go off into any fantasy world of our choice. Um no, no fantasy world is barred to us. I want to know where you think it'd be the best place to be able to cast a curse over a library or a book, perhaps to keep it to yourself, or maybe to affect those who are using it, so you can channel your inner, you know, anti-hero, if you wish yeah, I think I think the medieval time period in particular it would be particularly, particularly pertinent.

40:50 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
Um, I'm trying to think of literature, I think, actually maybe within the realms of um mallory's text, the mort data Darter. So I'm going to choose the kind of fantasy, pseudo-historical fantasy world of the Mort Darter to cast my curse on medieval England. Maybe I'd curse in particular Merlin's books which he has written, because Merlin's not particularly helpful character at any time. So I think, yes, I'd go back then.

41:19 - Julia Golding (Host)
Wonderful. I think I would choose my favourite fantasy library library, which is garth nix's lirial. So he's written a trilogy I think it's just been picked up by netflix or something. It starts with that called sabriel lirial and then abhorsen very interesting australian writer, but lirial the second of the books has this most wonderful fantasy library, so I would sit there and cast a curse on it so that I could just go and read all the books and enjoy it. Keep it to myself for a bit. That's what I would do. Mind you, I know that there would be a sting in that tale if I did so. Thank you so much, eleanor, and good luck with your folk horror.

42:01 - Eleanor Baker (Guest)
It is my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

42:09 - Speaker 3 (None)
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