...but to tie that back to Bert though, if you compare those books to Bert's 'Folk Song In England', what's clear is that Bert could really write. 'Folk song in England' has a sharp and literate prose style and is a truly inspiring tome: you come away from it buzzing with ideas (which I can't say about Fakesong and Imagined Village). Writing was his bread-and-butter and it shows.

I also think that some of the things Bert is bashed with are overstated: if you read 'Folk song in England' scrupulously, his 'pagan' stuff is a lot more speculative than he's given credit for. When I read it, I thought it was just funny that a rather stuffy ageing bookish man should should be lustily speculating about pagan fertility origins: it never occurred to me that he could possibly be saying all that stuff was Historical Fact.

There's a middle ground: a recognition that we're talking about songs here, not historical documents. Songs are art, they're not people. I did an English Lit Degree and I read a lot of poetry, so I accordingly tend to think of folk songs much the same way I do poems. To me, a song like 'Herrings Heads' quite simply IS a magic spell. To me, that's completely indisputable when you read the words: herrings heads become universally plastic, cosmic fleshy Lego. It's irrelevant what that song was historically. Bert was definitely on the side of the poets, simple as that.