Middle Marches in Past, Present, Myth and Future

In northern Europe, particularly Austria, Germany, the British Isles and Scandinavia, the Middle Marches have long had a place in mythology and history. Places sane folk fear to tread - lands unlike the safe and predictable familiar world. Lands of lawless bandits, rogues and robbers, witches and ghouls and always of the roads the faerie walk.

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Middle Marches in History

Here in the British Isles, the Middle Marches seem to have first been noted by the Romans, though they had long lived in the folk myths of the islanders themselves... read more >

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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... read more >

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Middle Marches in the Modern World

Even in our modern world, though we try to ignore the Middle Marches, we still carry a heavy load of superstition and irrational fear.. read more >

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We are cartographers of the world beyond the everyday. Beyond control or even understanding, we can lay down some of the invisible boundaries in our daily lives. We are Gatekeepers between the world of the everyday and the Middle Marches.

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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Middle Marches in the Modern World

Even in our modern world, though we try to ignore the Middle Marches, we still carry a heavy load of superstition and irrational fear. Few are now afraid the faeries will come for our children in the middle of the night, or of the goblins steal what we hold most dear, but even now we have not escaped the grip of the Marches. As they were in the past, in the Middle Marches today our laws do not hold and we lose control. We still risk stepping across an invisible boundary into the Middle Marches to a place where we have little or no control.

The astounding, apparently unstoppable, collapse of the world financial systems is surely from the wilder regions of the Middle Marches and has reached into our world, taken control of the economy and somehow made it fall apart under the weight of more debt than there is money in the whole world! As if to prove we have stepped across the boundary, political and economic masterminds have singularly failed to explain the collapse, much less to correct it.

It may not be the faerie magic of ancient folk-tales or the devilish manipulation of our more recent religious descriptions of the Marches, but by our own hands we have made and let loose a monster we simply can't understand, never mind control or destroy. These are the lands of the modern Middle Marches; the creations of human ingenuity and artifice that by some apparently alchemical mystery take on a life of their own and grow beyond the skills of their poor makers.

Creations, structures, systems and developments that operate and make their own decisions and changes too fast for humans to understand, are visions of our future according to proponents such as Ray Kurzweil or Vernor Vinge. They are the first signs of a growing together of human skills and technologies to form what has become known as a Singularity - a hive-like collection of people like you or I living in a culture and society that moves and changes so fast and so far beyond the capability of any human to fully understand that it can be thought of as a living creature in its own right.

This, they say, is the Middle Marches of the modern world. A world in which we are effectively powerless to control our won lives but which we - as a species - built for ourselves. This modern view of the mysterious world beyond our own is perhaps no better a view than the old folk-tales of the medieval fears of our past, but it may be that we have at last begun to understand what makes them such places of fear and strangeness. If nothing else, people such as Kurzweil, Vinge and the members of the World Transhumanist Association, or "h+" as it has become better known, are beginning to map out some of the boundaries that lie between our world and the Singularity - the Middle Marches of the modern world.

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