Twilight of the Godlings
The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings
Francis Young
Cambridge University Press 2023
Hb, 365pp, £30, ISBN 9781009330367
“Didn’t the Faun tell you I was coming?” asks the centurion in Puck of Pook’s Hill.
Two centuries earlier, John Aubrey, like Rudyard Kipling, had identified Robin Goodfellow as a faun; and long before that, cultists in fourth-century Thetford gathered to honour Faunus, spirit of the wood and wild.
So maybe Puck, the
