Egdon Heath

Egdon Heath is a fictitious heath in Hardy's Wessex, a hamlet of people who cut the furze, or gorse, that grows there. The area is rife with witchcraft and superstition, as in "The Return of the Native" and the short story "The Withered Arm." One basis for Egdon Heath is Studland Heath, an area of moorland between Dorchester and Bournemouth in the county of Dorset, England. In "Thomas Hardy: A Biography" (1982), Hardy expert Michael Millgate suggests the small area of heath beside Hardy's birthplace at Upper Bockhampton as the origin of Egdon Heath. The small heath by Hardy's childhood home is much smaller and uninhabited.

It was created by the author Thomas Hardy and the whole of his novel "The Return of the Native" takes place there. In the preface to the novel, he describes what the location means to him: "It is pleasant to dream that some spot in the extensive tract whose south-western quarter is here described may be the heath of that traditionary King of Wessex - Lear." Egdon Heath also features in "The Mayor of Casterbridge" and the short story "The Withered Arm" (1888). Millgate suggests the moors of "Wuthering Heights" as a close analogy ("Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist", 1971, p. 131).

Hence Egdon Heath is another example (powerfully used in Hardy) of the landscape reflecting the mood and culture of people. In the novel, he says:

quote|"Bees hummed around his" [Clym Yeobright's] "ears with an intimate air, and tugged at the heath and furze-flowers at his side in such numbers as to weigh them down to the sod. The strange amber-coloured butterflies which Egdon produced, and which were never seen elsewhere, quivered in the breath of his lips, alighted upon his bowed back, and sported with the glittering point of his hook as he flourished it up and down. Tribes of emerald-green gasshoppers leaped over his feet, falling awkwardly on their backs, heads, or hips, like unskilful acrobats, as chance might rule; or engaged themselves in noisy flirtations under the fern-fronds with silent ones of homely hue. Huge flies, ignorant of larders and wire-netting, and quite in a savage state, buzzed about him without knowing that he was a man. In and out of the fern-dells snakes glided in their most brilliant blue and yellow guise, it being the season immediately following the shedding of their old skins, when their colours are brightest. Litters of young rabbits came out from their forms to sun themselves upon hillocks, the hot beams blazing through the delicate tissue of each thin-fleshed ear, and firing it to a blood-red transparency in which the veins could be seen."
Book Fourth, Chapter 2

The description of the heath did not sit well with many contemporary critics, who found it exaggerated. Yet Hardy's intention was to treat the heath in an anthropomorphic way, not making it merely reflect the characters' moods but act as a protagonist to them.

Hardy's relationship with the landscape has been examined at length by critics, and Egdon Heath is one of the most frequently cited and best known.

In 1927 the composer Gustav Holst wrote a tone poem for orchestra entitled "Egdon Heath", explicitly in homage to Hardy. He considered the restrained but brooding piece to be one of his best works.

In Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, "Egdon Heath" is the location of a prison.

External links

*gutenberg|no=122|name=The Return of the Native
* [http://www.westcountryheritageproject.co.uk/Egdon_Heath.htm A website] about Studland Heath National Nature Reserve, with information about its history and about recent attempts to restore it.

References

* Lea, Hermann. "Thomas Hardy’s Wessex". London: Macmillan, 1913.