Cinderloo
(Dawley Riots)

Will o' the Wisps

Shropshire Folklore Introduction Contents

Charlotte as good as admits there aren't any in Shropshire - the only example she is able to adduce isn't located anywhere in particular and her informant could only recall having read the account in an old newspaper. And that turned out to be a variant of a Thuringian legend. But, for what it's worth ...

Will, the blacksmith, one day shoed a horse for a traveller who turned out to be St Peter. Before he left, St Peter offered the blacksmith one wish. The man asked to be allowed to live his life over again. In his first life, Will the blacksmith led an evil and debauched life - so far, so good. And the time came for him to die. And Will lived again. He chose to spend his second life refining (i.e. worsening or improving depending upon your viewpoint) all the traits he had acquired in his first.

Eventually he died a second time and arrived at the gates of Hell: but the devil refused to let him in on the grounds that the man has learnt enough evil in two lifetimes to provide a rival.

So Will tried his luck with St. Peter. St. Peter refused Will admittance to Heaven for obvious reasons. Will returned to Hell and begged admittance: the devil again refused but offered him a burning coal to warm him through his eternal wanderings. And now the blacksmith wanders over marshes and mosses holding the glowing coal; thus becoming a will-o'-the-wisp.

As legends go this strikes me as a possible influence on Ouspenki's The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. Pyotr Demianovitch Ouspenski was an early convert to the philosophy of Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.

For a while I prided myself on always finishing a book I'd started - this ended with Ouspenki's The Fourth Way: as the late Dr. Christopher Evans remarks in Cults of Unreason: "...[The Fourth Way]... must be counted as amongst the most obscure and humourless works ever penned by man and if [it] contains ... great insights into the mystery of life, the universe is a far, far duller place than most people believe it to be".

Nonetheless Ivan Osokin is a very readable novel. It's about a young Russian cavalry officer (??) who, through a life of missed opportunities, is contemplating suicide after the failure of a love affair. He wishes for the chance to right his mistakes. And he is granted his wish. And guess what? He does exactly the same again. Initially, knowingly - eventually unconsciously. The book was written with a view to promoting Gurdjieff's philosophy but actually works as a novel - as such, far more effective than his explicit proselytizing on Gurdjieff's behalf.