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9 - Defined ‘as much by their absence as their iconography’: Reimagining Wolves in Cumbria in Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border
- Edited by Ian Convery, University of Cumbria, Owen T. Nevin, Central Queensland University and University of Cumbria, Erwin van Maanen, Peter Davis, Newcastle University, Karen Lloyd, Lancaster University
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- Book:
- The Wolf
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 10 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 18 July 2023, pp 99-106
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Summary
Along with the snake or serpent, the wolf is one of the most culturally demonised creatures in Western society. Within the Bible and the canons of English literature the wolf is used repeatedly as a symbol of violent predatory destruction but also to suggest vicious cunning. This cultural representation is perhaps most powerfully reinforced in fairy tales and, in particular, by the tale of Little Red Riding Hood which, as Zipes (1993) has shown, became itself an influential cultural myth, being rewritten multiple times in many different contexts. It is notable that even within one of the most radical of these rewritings – in which we see a revisionary empowerment of ‘Red’ entering into a ‘savage marriage ceremony’ with the wolf – the story reaffirms key aspects of wolf mythology: ‘The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh, then nothing else will do … They are grey as famine, they are unkind as plague’ (Carter 1979, 118; 110–11). Given this legacy of wolf demonisation, especially within European cultural contexts, Sarah Hall tackles a doubly controversial topic in her 2015 novel, The Wolf Border: not merely the fraught and divisive question of rewilding within the Lake District National Park, but the reintroduction of one of the most feared of apex predators, an animal which has been ‘hunted with every age's weapon, stone axe, spear, sprung-steel trap, and semi-automatic’ (Hall 2015, 7). In its fictional engagement with a wolf reintroduction programme, Hall's novel must therefore negotiate with powerful myths relating to both the wolf and the ideologically complex landscape of the English Lake District.
Proposals to reintroduce a small pack of wolves in Scotland in 2010 foregrounded the notion of the wolf as an agent of rewilding in a UK context. Hall makes reference to the debates which resulted from these proposals in a 2015 interview, describing studies which suggest ‘Scotland would be good for three wolf packs’ and noting that she would like to see this happen (Hall cited in Vasishta 2015).
6 - Our ‘Great Entail’: Constructing the Cultural Value of the Lake District
- from HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NATURE
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- By Penny Bradshaw, University of Cumbria
- Edited by Ian Convery, Professor of Conservation & Forestry, Centre for Wildlife Conservation, University of Cumbria., Peter Davis, Emeritus Professor of Museology, University of Newcastle
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- Book:
- Changing Perceptions of Nature
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 16 June 2016, pp 63-72
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Summary
It is widely recognised that shifting perceptions of nature and the attributing of value to specific natural landscapes, such as the English Lake District, are processes that are shaped and influenced by various forms of cultural expression. In order to re-examine the complex interactions between cultural activity and our response to natural spaces, this chapter considers a body of written accounts of the Lakes landscape from a period during which its meanings and value were being radically revaluated, and before the deeply influential Wordsworthian construction of place had been fully established.
The Victorian art and social critic, John Ruskin, would outline a seminal concept of natural heritage in his book, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). He writes that:
God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who come after us … as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath.
(Cook and Weddeburn 1903, vol 8, 233)Though a significant milestone in the conceptualisation of nature as heritage, Ruskin's statement is itself shaped by the radical cultural shift in perceptions of nature which had begun to emerge a generation earlier. As Nicholson suggests:
throughout the Middle Ages … we get scarcely a mention of landscape. Indeed the very conception of landscape presumes a detachment, a separation, which people did not then feel … You must be away from it, outside it, to see it at all – no longer a participant but a spectator; no longer a performer, but a looker-on … But with the Industrial Revolution man began to withdraw from the country … It was at this time that the landscape was discovered, for man was so broken away and blocked off from the countryside that he could see it with a new detachment.
(Nicholson 1955, 205–6)This primary moment of rupture between man and the natural world around him generated new perspectives and ideas about nature which we can trace in the art and literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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