Finding Albion

This is not the sort of book that I normally review. However, it does have what I assume to be a picture of the Holy Grail on the cover. Also, in a time when the break-up of the UK is very much on the cards, and someone waving a St. George’s Cross flag is as likely to be a Fascist as a sports fan, issues of how we understand nationalism are very much to the fore.

Finding Albion comes with enthusiastic recommendations from musician Florence Welsh, and former Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, amongst others. Also Zakia Sewell was interviewed on a podcast by Zack Polanski, the current leader of the England & Wales Green Party. The book was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for non-fiction. I’m guessing that it has sold pretty well.

But what, exactly, is a mixed-race BBC DJ doing writing about British folklore? Well, why not? Sewell admits to having had an interest in paganism from an early age. Being far away from most of the Caribbean branch of her family, the only traditions she had to hand were British. And spending summers with the other grandparents in Laugharne in South Wales (once the home of Dylan Thomas) provided a much closer connection to history than living in London.

Sewell admits that it took her a while to come to terms with her interest in British folklore, but having done so she has found comfort in finding correspondences between her family’s Caribbean traditions and those of the land she has made her home. It is a very neo-pagan project that she has embarked on: taking the bits of tradition that she finds useful and comforting, and making something new from then.

Whenever a celebrity writes such a book, I worry about them being guilty of poor research. Sewell appears to have done the work herself, rather than farming it out to interns (or AI as would be done these days), and she is wise enough not to be taken in by people who claim to have ‘discovered’ ancient traditions. Thus she treats Geoffrey of Monmouth, Iolo Morganwg and James Macpherson with the skepticism that they deserve. Silvia Federici, being rather more modern, has slipped through the net, but she’s only mentioned briefly.

Something that surprised me about the book is how few degrees of separation I am away from it. The chapter set in Glastonbury sees Sewell head to the George & Pilgrim to meet with Liz Williams and Trevor. Laugharne is just down the road from me, and that chapter includes input from Angharad Wynne, the storyteller who helps run the Winter Solstice events at Dinefwr that I have written about before. The Scottish chapter is focussed on Findhorn rather than my friends in the Scottish Pagan Federation, but that’s fair enough.

The book is structured around the Celtic yearly cycle, beginning and ending with the Spring Equinox. It includes visits to Oxford for May Day, Notting Hill Carnival for Lammas, and Penzance for Winter Solstice. It starts in Glastonbury, and ends in Stonehenge. Along the way Sewell confronts the ghosts of Britain’s slave-trading past at Samhain in York, and researches the rural working class fight against enclosure near Sherwood Forest.

It would be very easy for such a book to descend into New Age woo-woo, extoling the virtues of the simple life and getting back to nature. But Sewell has mostly dispensed with the rose-tinted spectacles. Her visit to a small offshoot of Findhorn on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides in February put paid to any of that sort of thing.

One of my favourite chapters was the one set in Penzance where Sewell finds local people openly admitting to inventing new ‘traditions’. These might be used to milk the tourists in the summer, but they are also celebrated much more privately in the winter.

You won’t find any political call to action in this book. Nor is there any deep philosophy to be found. Rather Sewell appears to want us all to find our own Albion, one that reflects our own ancestry, and the part of Prydain in which we live. That does, of course, mean that it is Mostly Harmless, but equally it may inspire a whole lot of creativity. I think that William Blake would approve.

Title: Finding Albion
By: Zakia Sewell
Publisher: Hodder Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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