When the people at Royal Mail asked the author Neil Gaiman if he would be interested in writing some short stories about the mythical creatures of Britain, you suspect that they knew what they were doing. “They said: ‘We have these stamps but we need to get someone to do the words and we know that you love mythological stuff’,” smiles the 48-year-old with a Blue Peter badge on his jacket lapel.
And indeed he does. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Hampshire-born, US-based author is the world’s “go-to guy” for the fantastical, the success of the animated adaptation of his book Coraline crowning a 25-year career of novels, comics and screenplays.
The stamps, illustrated by the regular Gaiman collaborator David McKean, depict creatures lodged in our collective consciousness — dragons and giants, pixies and fairies, mermaids and unicorns. McKean’s illustrations and Gaiman’s stories should therefore be instantly familiar but somehow are not — or, at least, not quite: although their fairy queen, for instance, is dainty, winged and arboreal, she glows with oddly malign intent, while their mermaid seems closer to being a sea monster than the standard fish-tailed nymph.
“She is so scary,” says Gaiman, examining the stamp. “But, of course, mermaids were always terrifying. With the exception of the Little Mermaid of the Hans Christian Andersen tradition, they would take your soul. And fairies were never things that people embraced — they were unknowable, dangerous, capricious. They could cause real trouble for you.”
Even if Gaiman were making all this up, you would be inclined to believe him. But all his stamp stories, which are published here for the first time, start with long-held British folk beliefs as their original source.
“I felt that, if I was going to do this, I had to get my mythology right,” he says. “Days of research went into the unicorn story and the history of the ‘unicorn horn’ in the Tower of London. Plus there is that relationship throughout Britain between geography and mythology, which is why I loved doing the giants story. When you’re walking on English hills, you may actually be walking on them.”
The result is that each creature is framed squarely in time and place. Gaiman’s tale of the doleful wingless “wyrms” of Britain being displaced by fiery Norse dragons, then seeing out their days in the damp of Wales is especially enchanting, but it is his take on pixies of which he is most proud because it is “resolutely up to date”. “The truth is, stories do so many things, one of which is to explain the world. And the cheerful, minor disasters are best explained by pixies in particular,” he says. “Anyone who has a mobile phone knows they don’t crash without reason at exactly the point where it makes life most problematic to you. I think that has to be pixies.”
Giants
If it were not for the giants, Britain would look very different. In the dawn days they feefifofummed across the land, picking up rocks and throwing them at other giants in friendly rivalry, or alone they would break mountains, crush rocks into causeways, leave henges and stone seats to mark their passing.
The giants were big but not bright. They were outsmarted by clever boys named Jack and fell from beanstalks or were tricked to death. They died, but not all of them are dead.
The remaining giants sleep, lost in deep, slow dreams, covered in earth and trees and wild grass. Some have clouds on their shoulders or long men carved on their sides. We see them from the windows of cars and tell each other that from some angles they look almost like people.
Even giants can only sleep for so long. Do not make too much noise the next time you walk in the hills.
Dragons
The native dragons of the British Isles, called wyrms, had poisonous breath and coiled snake-like around hills. They could not fly or breathe fire. They demanded oxen or maidens. They grew slowly, ate rarely and slept much.
Local species can be fragile: the new dragons, the firedrakes, came south with the Norsemen, crossed the stormy seas with the Saxons, accompanied the Crusaders back from the hot lands in the centre of the world. Nature can be cruel, and soon the wyrms were gone, their bones turned to stone. The new ones spread, alien and invasive, until the time came for them to lay their eggs. Dragons nest on golden treasure, but British gold was hard to find and soon they slipped away, another species that came and flourished and dwindled once again.
A handful of dragons hung on, half- starved in the Welsh wilderness, until time and the wet winters extinguished their fires. They went, like the wolf or the beaver; and they exit from the pages of history, pursued by a cave bear.
Mermaids
She keeps the souls of the drowned in lobster pots that she finds on the seabed.
They sing, the captive souls, and they light her way home beneath the grey Atlantic.
She had sisters once, but long ago they shed their tails and scales and stepped gingerly ashore to live with fishermen in their dry-land cottages. Now she is lonely, and not even the souls of the dead are company.
Walk the sea’s edge in winter and you may see her, too far away, waving to you. Wave back and she will take you down to her world, deep below the waves, and show you cold wonders, and teach you the songs of the merfolk, and the lonely ways beneath the sea.
Pixies
They’ll help you, folk say, unless you thank them: if you leave them gifts or payment they’ll be off into the night, never again to sweep your floor or sew your shoes or stack your CDs into alphabetical order.
But there are some that wouldn’t take a thank-you. Those are the bad hats that sour the milk, vinegar the wine, crash the computer and freeze every mobile phone.
One family had enough. They loaded up their SUV in the middle of the night with all the possessions they could not bear to part with, and drove away with their headlights off. When they reached the village they stopped for petrol.
“Going somewhere?” asked the attendant. From the back of the car, from the cardboard boxes of the last good wine, the ancestral china wrapped in rolled-up duvets, a pixie voice called out, “That’s right, George. We’re flitting.”
The family turned around and went home again. When a pixie has your number, they said, there’s nothing else you can do.
Unicorns
Nobody remembers who sent the first king of Scotland a unicorn. They are long-lived creatures, after all. The kings of Scotland were proud of owning a unicorn and left it to run, tangle-maned and alone, across the stark Highlands, an ivory flash against the heather.
And then James VI got the news from the south and he sent a maiden into the hills. She sat and waited until it came and placed its head in her lap, then she bridled it with a silver bridle and walked it, skittish and straining, to the king.
The royal procession was made all the more exciting by the presence of the fabulous beast at its head. And then they were in London, and the Tower rose before them.
The unicorn was led into its stall. It scented the animal caged across the way and heard it roar before it saw the golden mane, the tawny eyes. The only lion in England was caged in the Tower, beside the only unicorn. The artists placed them on each side of the crown.
Two hundred years later, the unicorn’s horn in the Tower was valued at 20,000 guineas; but now even that is lost to us.
Fairies
It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.
The six mythical creatures stamps, by David McKean, are issued in pairs from today. The two 1st-class stamps (32p) feature the dragon and unicorn, the 62p stamps the giant and pixie, and the new 90p stamps Queen Mab and the mermaid. They are available in a special presentation pack with words, as shown here, by Neil Gaiman.
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