Ariadne's Thread

 A woman must save her lover from becoming the Fairy Queen’s tithe to hell. A schoolboy is challenged by the devil to a battle of riddles. A woman leaves her husband and child to be with her lover, only to discover he is the devil taking her to hell. These are all the plots from traditional folk songs that feature prominently on albums by folk rock bands Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle. The folk rock movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s may not seem like the most obvious place to look for the Weird, but by drawing on what Robert MacFarlane would later call “The English eerie”, the British folk rock bands engaged with a tradition of British Weird that stretches back to the Child Ballads, filters through pioneering Weird fiction writers like M. R. James and Arthur Machen, and has a lingering influence today on books, films and music broadly categorised under the folk horror revival. For this reason, I argue that the classic folk rock albums of this era deserve ...