Mercian Charms: from The Lair of the White Worm to Penda’s Fen

<div> This essay traces the unlikely affinities between Bram Stoker’s novel <em>The Lair of the White Worm</em> (1911) and David Rudkin’s television play <em>Penda’s Fen</em> (1974), showing how both involve the mythopoeic reinvention of Anglo-Saxon Mercia as a heartland of visionary change. These texts resist alien beliefs and defend territorial integrity, but also extend a welcome to outsiders or incomers. Stoker and Rudkin turn the storied landscape of ancient Mercia into a crucible of difference, a sinuous entanglement or coiling of hybrid origins and affiliations. Their narratives constitute intense meditations on nation and belonging at different moments of imperial and post-imperial uncertainty in the twentieth century, when the continuity of Englishness as an identity formation is challenged by shifting relationships within and beyond the British and Irish Isles. Whereas <em>The</em> <em>Lair of the White Worm</em> seeks to delimit the transformative power of these middle lands, however, <em>Penda’s Fen</em> unleashes its potential. </div><p></p>