The Keeper

The Keeper is a tutelary spirit who guards the path to the Landweird. Part protector, part gatekeeper, part teacher; they are generally benevolent (unless tested) and are not themselves cthonic. In our Lore, the Keeper is generally depicted as an unassuming older man with “wizardly” qualities, bound to a certain place.

He is associated with a core myth in Fencraft of how the Old Ways were lost – and will be restored. His story often implies he is the last survivor, and keeper of the memories, the keys and the way back; or that he volunteered for his immortal task to guard the sleepers or the gate. One might imagine the only crewman on a spaceship left awake, whose job it is to wake everybody else up. It is not, exactly, that the Landweird manifests through him, but he holds some secrets about how to connect with it. The most aware of it - capable of standing outside and observing it - where other spirits are fully immersed in it. A meta-understanding, if you will: he knows he’s part of the Landweird, and what that is. He is not the Landweird, but has an important tutelary/unlocking relationship with it – essential for us, who are seeking it.

In the main Landweird post, I speculate also that the Landweird might be trapped or sedated; held against its will; or confused and in pain and in need of soothing and tending. All of these narratives presuppose a person there – to keep it asleep, to guard its prison, or to minister to it. This is the Keeper; and we can equally encounter this spirit as one who has been bound to a task (willingly or unwillingly), held there by a taboo of duty, or who has an ambivalence towards it.

Examples

By Robert Ingpen from The Book Of Things That Never Were. This book terrified me as a child, especially its huge, haunting paintings.

More experimental suggestions could include:

In Middle Earth:

Keepers are usually very old and learned (though not necessarily wise); librarians are telling sign of this figure, as are antiquarians and people in museums, and owners of junk shops. They do not necessarily have cleverness or skill-at-letters but of hoarding – because we conceptualise the Landweird not as a lost glory, but as a jumbled mess, much of it worthless or broken, and it is our task to sort through the clutter. We could cheekily propose that Edward and Tubbs whose Local Shop stands at the entrance to Royston Vasey, who become angry at the idea that anyone should buy anything from them, might be Keepers.

The Keeper often appears in a mentoring role – like Merlin teaching the young Arthur – or is learning in his turn from a power that is greater than him (The term “wizard” often denotes that you are a mortal working under the aegis of certain summoned spirits and demons; in the case of the Keeper, this greater power is the Landweird itself.)

Poachers

I’m currently writing a longer piece on the role of the Poacher/Strange Rural Dude/Fool-Secretkeeper in folk horror and rural weird. The following stories can all potentially be considered with Keepers:

Their poacher’s in the story is generally to be the protagonist’s guide to the weird of the world, although sometimes jumbled or confused in the way of fools; Tarry Dan is explicitly a rememberer; and many of them share characteristics like wandering, knowing old rhymes, or holding a mysterious object with special powers.

The scene of the sleepers, meanwhile, can be found in Brisengamen, Narnia: Magician’s Nephew, Earthfasts the return of Arthur, the waiting for Ragnarok, Warriors at the Edge of Time, and so forth.

Who is not a Keeper?

The Keeper is not merely the guardian of a place. For this, see Guardian of the Green. They are often associated with a place, but they are guardian/keeper of the Landweird. Their primary job is not to protect/keep a location, but protect/keep ancient secrets and the path to the Landweird.

However, as with Tom Bombadil, they can have both aspects simultaneously – one as Guardian of the Green, and the other as Keeper of the Landweird.

I’m toying with the Goblin King (of the Labyrinth) – he certainly gives the implication that he is unwillingly bound. Elrond comes on and off this list, depending on whether I see him as pure Lunar, a Loremaster, or vibe more with his Solar aspect.

What about Bilbo? He starts off as a Wanderer, but ends his life “thin, scraped like butter over too much bread” due to an artifact he guards (and is controlled by).

I’ve gone back and forth on whether the Wanderer, Wizard and Keeper are the same figure. It’s clear they form a kind of triple-figure, a natural narrative; but they’re not inherently linked. In other words, a figure can be a Wizard or Wanderer without inevitably becoming a Keeper; a figure can become a Keeper from a different startpoint (i.e. Penda, a former Sun King or Warror). In short, remember all of these aspects exist as potential themes that you can locate many different spirits in. So the Keeper starts collecting to himself “wizardly” figures as part of his cycle (i.e. Gandalf, Odin, Ged), even when they do not carry the specific role of guarding the Landweird – these can be considered partial, fragmentery, or aspected Keepers; they are only the Keeper when they hold the specific function of guarding a knowledge-hoard, or the way to the Landweird.

Indeed, there is possibly a Keeper/Sun King overlap, for there are many Sun King myths which end with him trapped underground, or bound to a ritual role he cannot escape.

The Keeper occupies a similar position on the map as the Lightbringer, but they form an interesting mystic pair. The Lightbringer looks forward, and the Keeper looks back. The Lightbringer’s light of knowledge and long-sought metaphorical goal is the future, new ideas, the breaking of old bonds and chains, new paths and possibilities, the brilliance of the sky. The Keeper has similar imagery – lanterns, gold-hoards – but he faces into the past and the underground and the dark. His gold is old, tarnished, representing ancient wisdom, and where the Lightbringer is the breaking of old bonds, the Keeper is eternally bound to the things of the past. It’s an interesting mythic pair.

(In the Fencraft stories, I have noted down that it is the Lightbringer, as foster-son to the Winter King, who kills him after he has been bound by the Witch of Winter – bound to age-without-death – it is the Lightbringer who releases his spirit to bring the new year into being, so the future can be born. It’s possible that they are a very important ritual pair indeed; in any case, I am glad to have observed this)

The Keeper is of special importance to seekers of the Landweird both as a clear early-stage mentor figure (especially for those seeking a Lunar/magical path), but also as an ultimate destination: what you can become. This path can be your path. As such, Keepers tend to be more (solar) ancestorly or an “ascended master”, rather than strictly speaking a God. If one was working with, say, Thoth, one would probably assign him to the Lunar rather than necessarily seeing him as a Keeper archetype.

by Jean Pierre Targete. It was weirdly difficult to find images for the Keeper – he isn’t a generic wizard, but a wizardly person with a specific function as the guardian of lost roads and knowledge hoards. So this picture is a very welcome, perfect find – embodying the search for the “hidden gold” of ancient knowledge.

Attributions

The Keeper is Lunar; and usually Lunar in nature but with a Solar aspect presenting.

If you imagine the Village Journey, the Keeper is the psychopomp for adventure – the Lunar point outside of the village where the hero suddenly encounters a guide who introduces her to magic, mystery, her destiny, or the outside. The hero has dared to leave the Village on her own, wandering the uncertain places, but it is an encounter with the Keeper that allows her to fully realise the immensity of the outside and travel further into it. At the same time, these figures are usually human-like and safe, and associated with a physical place (i.e. Solar). For example, in Lord of the Rings both Tom Bombadil’s house and the Last Homely House in Rivendell are both physical stopping points for the seekers which represent security as well as last-gates before the wide world.

As the the Keeper is mortal-adjacent, her cycle might go something like this:

Note that the Wanderer and the Wizard are separate aspects which we’ll discuss separately in another article. And Keepers are generally mortal-ish things with Solar life patterns, so their path is not necessarily a wizardly one – Penda is a Sun King, with a Keeper aspect.

Note that there’s a kind of tension between these figures as wanderers, free to ramble outside the confines of (Solar) societal norms, but at the same time this wandering foreshadows their trapping. This spectrum is set above the Stellar on the Map, as this is indeed what the Keeper is and does – not of the Stellar, but keeper over it, able to tap into it.

Wizards can appear in a Lunar-Stellar aspect, and this is generally seen as negative; a sort of “going too far into the darkness” as one might see in M.R. James or H.P. Lovecraft story, or in the Wizard of Earthsea when Ged tampers with forbidden magics – a place from which it takes daring to go, and great mastery to safely return. So it is possible that some Keepers have become bound to their task, as a result of taking this pathway.

by Robert Ingpen, again. By the gods, this man’s art is a marvel. I’ve chosen this painting because of the way the Keeper holds the map and sword in the foreground, as if he is presenting it to you, and this will permit you to pass him and find the way up the hill to the castle and is wonders.

Tides and Times

As a base-Lunar figure, the Keeper is outside of time and not bound to it. He can appear in any form at any time of the year or the day.

We generally associate the Lunar in the winter, as that is the perfect time to sit indoors with books and do technical, indoorsy magics; and there’s some overlaps with the Winter-King myth (a wizardly-type who ends the story drained and bound).

Still, one can also look to times of year they appear in stories (for any story involving children, this is invariably “the summer holidays”); I’ve always felt that Penda is elemental, of the springtime (Air/Earth) and the fen (Earth/Water); Lord of the Rings contains specific dates.

Morning is a good time, as is night-time; this kind of Lunar generally carrying characteristics of coldness, cool-ness; a briskly windy day, an overcast winter day which is not wet, a night breeze, and so forth. As these figures are generally a kind of mortal, we can look to the solar cycle (i.e. rising, apex, falling); the Fencraft Lunar system is yet to be established.

For their “life story”, assume they are mortal or mortal-ish and thus carry standard daily/annual sun cycles.

Colours and Symbols

The Keeper’s base colour is Lunar – silver or white – and no element. However, he often takes on the elements of particular places and with them their colours. I also associate with him a cluster of non-colours – beiges, greys, creams, scrub-browns – the kinds of background colours you find on robey-rags. Again, I think this is to denote the core Keeper basically does not have an element or a colour relating to a Domain, but more of a neutral factor.

The Keeper’s symbols are intuitive: a book, a key, a staff and cloak, a lantern in the darkness etc. A gateway (the wardrobe, the box of delights).

Metal is Lunar (influencing the Solar-Lunar and Lunar-Stellar), and so a specific Keeper/Wizard thing is silver-as-a-metal being a primary marker, rather than (say) silver as a mood, theme or atmosphere.

Lunar is by definition not-natural, so think about symbols/figures whose source of power & attributions come neither from nature, nor the Landweird or anything Stellar – books, pens, wands, things that have been made by human hands.

It’s possible that these figures are associated with birds of prey (Ged and the Sparrowhawk; various wizards with Owls; Gandalf and the Eagles; Odin and the Crow; the idea that the word “druid” might relate to the word “wren”). Earlier in the cycle, Wanderers are associated with a bird’s ability to travel and see far; Wizards with their wisdom. But at the Keeper stage, birds might represent the part of the Keeper that can leave his trapped body – in visions, or sent out separate from him – as he himself is fixed.

Robert Ingpen – the full Merlin picture, really THE picture which embodies Merlin to me, perhaps the reason I think about Merlin first and foremost not as the wild Sylvestris or the master magician or the devils-child, but as the Keeper in the tree. Also, these are very much Keeper colours, these non-colours which denote he doesn’t have an element or domain; or that associate him with the sense of forgotten treasure, old books, crumbling stone.

A sidenote about the Court of the Crimson King

You know, this isn’t an understanding anyone else shares,

but I’ve always had a sense that the Crimson King himself is trapped or chained at the center of the Court, bound to his Kingship, and that he is asleep and all the other creatures in the court are, in fact, part of his dream – his dreaming is powering the Court; he is not a ruler or commander, but the sacrifice to a necessary, ritual role – someone must always occupy the throne, and when he is weakened and old beyond all memory, a new king will be bound to it, for the Court must survive. I’m pretty sure that’s not…actually what the song is about, I think its my sense of the Landweird coming through it

(and a related idea might be the Flying Dutchman myth as show in the Pirate of the Carribbean series: “The Dutchman must have a captain: part of the ship, part of the crew”; as well as, of course, Fraizer’s Sacrificed God; where being buried alive to let the mushrooms grow is a way of connecting you with all things)

I have an image of the King, like the Emperor of the Tarot, chained rigidly to the throne with a grimace, beard growing, immense in scale as the Firewitch and the Purple Piper dance around his feet, insubstantial as a dream, morphing and laughing in their many colourslike the Masque of the Red Death; and I have another image, underneath it, of a king graven on stone in a barrow, and beneath it a sarcophogus in which the king is chained, like Merlin in the tree, alive but too aged to be aware, his skin papery like old-leaves and his beard like spiderwebs – who is dreaming that he is sat on the throne like the Emperor of the Tarot, sat at the head of a Court he does not control or command. And no one will let him die.

I am pretty sure that only I am certain that this is what the album is about. This is what I mean by the practice of Reading; the more time we spend in imaginative contemplation of fantasy and make-believe, the more space we make for the Landweird to break through.

It may well be that the Landweird is the vivid dreaming of a bound, trapped man (which does not bode well for me, as the Grand Poobah of Fencraft) – or some other process with similar qualities. Like Cadellin guarding the Sleeping Warriors, or Penda sat watch over the Fen, or Merlin, these loremasters who hold the keys to the gate where the gods now dwell, or the last of the old gods who stayed behind as memory-keeper, or psychopomps for returning the dead gods to the land – and that this role may not be wholly comfortable or by choice, a doom they have been bound to, ancient and eternal.

(when I asked my husband how he interpreted the ‘Court of the Crimson King’ song, his idea was that it was about vampires.)

An old black man with a beard stands in front of a barrow. He has a grey cape, holds a staff and has keys at his belt. You can see a little of the inside of the barrow, which is filled with stars. He stands as if guarding it. The weather is overcast.

The Keeper was surprisingly difficult to find pictures for – so I made one. Let me talk you through its images:

He guards the way to the Landweird, conceputalised as a barrow in which the ancient secrets and treasures are buried. But the way is the way of stars and mystery – space is a Stellar element, as is the Landweird.

He bears a staff, as a symbol of wizards power, and the keys to doors that have been locked. He has gold to show he is a Solar face – ameniable to man – and silver to show he is a Lunar creature, of magic and independence. The colous of the painting as a whole are washed out, as white is a key Lunar colour, and the weather has a mood of a breezy but overcast day – where one is very aware of the sky.

The union of blue sky and green land as horizon is the physical landscape of his point on the map – I think that “horizon” is properly the element of the Wanderer rather than the Keeper – but I’ve made reference to it here.

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