In anticipation of the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined anthology, to be published with Five Leaves Publishing in early 2025, in which a plethora of exceptional Lincolnshire authors give the county’s folk tales a fresh spin, we’re asking these authors to reflect on the project. This time, we hear from poet Robert Etty.

1. Please introduce yourself and your connection to Lincolnshire.

I was born in a village near Grimsby over 70 years ago, and I now live in a village near Louth. For the vast majority of all those nights, I have slept in Lincolnshire. 

2. How would you describe your writing style?

Most of my poems are concerned with the normal lives, both present and past, of the people, animals, birds, and landscapes of my home county. Elements of my writing style, such as it is, probably stem from the work of writers I have read and admired, in some cases for several decades. I tend to write in quite long sentences carried through regular stanzas of unrhymed lines. I rarely use language which would require a reader to open a dictionary. I try to make my poems accessible and sometimes slightly humorous. Shoestring Press would be able to provide evidence of success or failure. 

3. Could you talk a little about the folk tales you worked with for the anthology: why did you choose them and how did you adapt them?

I chose four folk tales for the anthology. They feature a phantom coach and horses, a hobthrust, a farmhouse in which odd things have happened, and a saint on his way back to York. One reason for my choices of tales was that I know their settings, or somewhere like them. This brought them close to my usual sources of inspiration, and I could picture the scenes and imagine the characters and events there. The next stage was to pick out and link key details in the plots, and then to tweak them a little, and occasionally to make insertions. 

4. If you could ask any author, living or dead, to adapt any piece of Lincolnshire folklore, as you have done with Read’s Island Werewolf, whose adaptation would you most like to read and why?

I should think that the M.R. James version of any of the folk tales would send a shudder down a reader’s spine, and a TV adaptation by the League of Gentlemen would be well worth watching. 

5. Haslet is one of Lincolnshire’s delicacies, a kind of meatloaf with herbs, often made out of pork. Despite the similarity in names, it is far more obscure than its cousin, the Haggis. If the Haslet was a mythical creature, like the Wild Haggis, what kind of creature would it be?

Customers in butchers’ shops used to ask for both haz-let and haze-let, but perhaps the pronunciation has been standardised now. The mythical haslet might be an ambling and dreamy creature, peaceable and shy, and looking like a more tousled, smaller, even less athletic cousin of the donkey, with a sweeter singing voice.