Middle Marches in Mythology

Long before they were recorded in our histories, the Middle Marches have had pride of place in the myths of Europe. From the Western shores of Ireland, across Scotland, Wales and England, over the Channel and into what we now call France and even beyond, the Sidhe (pronounced "she") - the wild and savage faerie-folk of old European myth - lived beneath their magical hills or within their forest thickets and mysterious meadows. Should a man cross the boundary between the worlds, he would find himself in the Middle Marches; the land between the worlds of men and the worlds of faerie.

The stories and myths of the Middle Marches from those early days still survive in places like the Welsh books of the Mabinogion. There we can see the mythical heroes who may be men or maybe gods cross between our own lands and the Middle Marches. Usually we recognise where we are only through changes in the atmosphere of the myth but at times it is given one of several names. Arthur and his knights were still riding round the folklore life of the islands a half-millennium later, now joined by other phantoms of the Middle Marches such as Robin hood.

Farther to the North, the folk of Scandinavia knew their gods and daemons lived in a far-off magical land where the Great Oak, Ygdrassil, grew on a high plateau in the mountains. There, the chief of their gods had built a magnificent feasting hall for the gods and for those men who died a valorous death. Between great Valhalla and the world of men, Odin had built a rainbow bridge across the chasm between the worlds. Within that chasm was the Middle March where lived all the creatures that were neither gods nor men - the dwarves and goblins, the daemons and the devils.

In the mountains of middle Europe, the wilder creatures of the Middle Marches roamed through the minds and hearts of the people yet another five centuries later. Even now, they are not gone and we all know the tales such as Bram Stoker's Dracula - a story he read of in travel brochures about far off Transylvania. If the Middle Marches were not still in our folklore to this very day, what would Christopher Lee have done for a living while he waited to play Saruman in Lord of the Rings?

Even that film bears the stamp of the Marches on its very heart. When Tolkein wrote the first book, he would discuss his work with C. S. Lewis who was, like Tolkein, a very knowledgable mythologist and that knowledge made him carefully choose the name "Middle Earth" specifically to say that his tale happened in the mysterious lands of the Middle Marches.

They are in our blood, born in us or taught to us from the very earliest age. Each and every one of us knows deep in our hearts that there will always be that slight fear that the Middle Marches may reach out and take us. At any time, an unsuspecting person could find they had stepped across an invisible boundary and moved into the world of the weird and unpredictable. Even today, people all over the world are superstitious and wary of the supernatural world they fear may be all around them.

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