Mercian Charms: From The Lair of the White Worm to Penda's Fen.

This essay traces the unlikely affinities between Bram Stoker's novel The Lair of the White Worm (1911) and David Rudkin's television play Penda's Fen (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 The Lair of the White Worm seeks to delimit the transformative power of these middle lands, however, Penda's Fen unleashes its potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]