The Eel's Tale (2025)

I had become a little disillusioned with the plethora of supposed ways that ‘nature’ might help me learn what it means to be human. The more-than-human seemed to have transformed into something of a commodity, mined for ways to help us learn about ourselves.

I’m guilty of sometimes framing things this way myself.

But then I discovered eels: once a commodity—always resistant to human mastery.

I was drawn into the mystery of this creature that I didn’t even know was a fish.

A fish!

Did you know?

It seemed like an ignorance I should celebrate rather than disavow.

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In December 2025, at a Council meeting that discussed the borough of Swale becoming a ‘district of sanctuary’ for refugees, men in balaclavas heckled and threw objects at councillors from the public gallery. Ten thousand pounds worth of vandalism was caused to the council building and the behaviour was condemned in Parliament. These events took place after the A2, the old Roman Road that runs south of Faversham, had seen swathes of St George’s flags go up, be taken down, and subsequently replaced by Remembrance Day flags, which now hang limp and tattered on lamp posts along the medieval pilgrimage route between Canterbury and London. Historically, Faversham has been a hospitable town to those seeking safety, including Huguenot refugees fleeing Catholic persecution in France in the 17th century, two hundred Belgian families during the First World War and, more recently, unaccompanied child refugees from Syria and other countries devastated by war. Dating back to the 13th century, a wayside hospital called the Maison Dieu sits on this old Roman road and would also have welcomed pilgrims from across the Continent enroute to London after visiting Canterbury. Situated just outside Faversham in Ospringe next to a road called Water Lane, an old fresh water stream used to flow alongside the building from the Kent Downs, into Stone Bridge Pond and out into Faversham Creek.

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I walk through the landscape of the creek frequently, but learning that migrating eels end up in these waters after their 4000 mile journey surprised me. On the surface of things, you wouldn’t know they were here.

I had once seen a heron wrestle something like an eel down its throat but thought nothing of it again until I heard Matthew Hatchwell, the first of three speakers we encounter in The Eel’s Tale, talk about the thousands of eels that made their way up the Creek into the freshwater of Stonebridge Pond.

Thousands!

‘The landscape wouldn’t be the same without eels’ Matthew says.

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Traces of eel’s historical presence are found in place names scattered across the Kentish landscape. Elverland Lane is a few miles south of the A2, not far from the chalk stream’s route, and Elverton—or Ernolton in the Doomsday Book, and Eylwartone in ancient deeds —is an old estate and Manor House in the parish of Stone-next-Faversham. Both derive their name from the word elver, which is itself a variant or corruption of ‘eelfare’, meaning the passage of young eels up a waterway. This suggests that the landscape used to be teaming with elvers during the Spring eel run and, although not so numerous now, the place names signal a hidden and somewhat lost history to be uncovered.

This weaving together of ecology, etymology and topology recalls Stephen in David Rundell’s Penda’s Fen who encounters a road sign that has spelled the village of Pinvin as Pinfin. Initially, the young conservative boy is insistent that the word is spelt incorrectly, holding fast to the lie of semantic determinacy in the same way he clings to national, familial and bodily purity. But later, he realises that the landscape had once been known as Penda's Fen, a marshland named after the last pagan king of Britain. What he thought to be an English and Christian landscape has a more complex and layered past.

Faversham’s marshy landscape offers something similar, as just along from the Maison Dieu there is a flint chapel called ‘Our Lady of Elverton’, which is described by English Heritage as ‘the only Christian building in England to incorporate within its fabric the remains of a 4th century Romano-British pagan mausoleum.’

The eel’s etymology gives name to this layered sacred site, which represents the hybridity of the countryside and its landmarks. Impurity is not purged, but incorporated, attended to, shown curiosity.

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The European Eel, Anguilla anguilla, goes through various life stages and exists in different forms. Starting in the Sargasso Sea as tiny, translucent larvae called leptocephalus, they migrate across the Atlantic, becoming glass eels as they reach the continental shelf of Europe.

Drawn towards fresh water, they then metamorphose into elvers—tiny versions of adult eels—and then yellow eels, named for the colouring of their underbelly.

Eels remain in this stage for the longest period of their lives, anything from five to twenty years (with stories of some eels staying in this form for much longer).

In the final stage, they become known as the silver eel, as their underbellies change colour again, and they migrate back to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce, after which they die.

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From their long-distance migration to their nocturnal activities, they’re not easily seen, hiding under rocks and out of sight during the day. Coupled with their critically endangered status and their withdrawal from most menus, eels have somewhat disappeared from cultural life, despite their once ubiquitous status in diets, commerce and almost every European river.

But the eel population has declined by around 95% and illegal trafficking is now worth billions of pounds.

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Rather than the somewhat startling and otherworldly symbols of the gargoyle, angel, and pagan King, offered to Stephen in Penda’s Fen as guides in his transformation from conservative purist to emergent homosexual, The Eel’s Tale offers a quieter and more ecologically entwined genius loci of ancient and material connection to the landscape. Williams’ film doesn’t show us these evasive creatures. Rather, we see a wooden mannequin of an eel floating like an apparition through different sections of the film and are invited to think about the eel’s figurative resonances with the speakers’ stories.

Are we eels?

Originating as a distinct species around 3.5 million years ago, eels are an ancient presence in the North Kent marshes. In the medieval period, eels made up between 20-50% of all fish in English rivers and were caught using a type of fishing weir known as an eel buck, which the eel swam into as it came up stream and was then trapped. So plentiful were these creatures that they were used as currency across Britain, as detailed in the earliest public survey of land and resources. The Doomsday Book of 1086 records that the parish of Preston-next-Faversham paid rent of 250 eels to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Later, in the Magna Carta, first issued in 1215, it is written that ‘All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast’ so as to allow the unencumbered passage of boats. These will certainly have included eel traps, such as those that can be seen on 17th Century fishing maps of the Swale.

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Alice Oswal touches on the evasive, equivocal nature of this fish in her poem ‘Eel Tail’:

… preliminary, pre-world creatures, cousins of the moon, who love blackness, aloofness, always move under cover of the unmoon and then as soon as you see them gone untranslatable hissed interruptions …

The eel has an ability to slip out of signification, to interrupt the metaphoric, and shock us into an encounter with something beyond language.

They have long defied scientists’ desire to study them, often escaping attempts to contain them and breaking free of electronic GPS-trackers.

Oswald’s description of ‘untranslatable hissed interruptions’ calls to mind Lee Edelman's claim that ‘the efficacy of queerness…lies in its resistance to a Symbolic reality’.

Is this the lesson they offer?

That things exist which are unavailable through a conscious desire to know them?

In Penda’s Fen, Stephen speaks to the ghost of Elgar about the secret, unheard theme within The Enigma Variations, referred to as ‘a dark saying’ hidden within the music.

There is no music in The Eel’s Tale, but a whistle hovers in the background, an undulation that repeats and quivers. This untranslatable noise connects different fragments of the film through shifting sound: an untranslatable counterpoint to the stories being told.

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If anyone were able to help us with how the question—are we eels?—might lean towards over-identification with a non-human critter, then it would be Freud.

Freud, who I learnt studied eels as a nineteen-year-old, before the word psychoanalysis had ever been dreamt up.

I love this fact.

The reason Freud was studying eels? He was searching for their reproductive organs.

You couldn’t make this up.

The inability to locate the testes of the Anguilla anguilla was a scientific mystery that many had tried to solve. It became known as ‘the eel question’ and, in 1876, Freud was sent to Trieste by his professor to investigate.

We know something of his time there because of the letters he wrote to a friend, Eduard Silberstein, about the experience. Explaining the context for his being sent to study eels day in day out, he writes:

*You know the eel. For a long time, only females of the species were known; even Aristotle didn’t know where the males came from and therefore claimed that eels sprang from mud. Throughout the Middle Ages and even in our modern times, there has been a veritable frenzy to find a male eel…[…]…That there are in fact differences between the sexes has to first be proved, and only an anatomist can do so (since the eel is incapable of keeping a diary from which we could draw conclusions regarding its sex)... *

Because the eel couldn’t communicate in writing about its gender, Freud started dissecting them, cutting them open in an attempt to reveal their secrets.

In between his letters about eels, Freud drew little sketches of the fish—perhaps evidence that he was processing something he couldn’t put into writing.

Perhaps the first sketches of psychoanalysis.

Ultimately, Freud was unsuccessful in finding the male sex organs of the eel. As Patrick Svensson writes ‘The way the eel eluded him was especially ironic, given what Freud would eventually focus on’, and claims that the eel ‘came to influence modern psychoanalysis.’

Once you know of this historical context, it’s hard to separate Freud’s investigation into human sexuality and the unconscious from the mystery of the eel’s lifecycle, even if we can’t say for certain what this link is—the eel’s unknown somewhere meeting the human unconscious.

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After watching The Eel’s Tale, I had a dream of a coil of eels moving as one, weaving in and out and around one another, gracefully writhing, while Jesse Ware’s ‘Wildest Moments’ played over the scene and someone with a voice like David Attenborough (but more queeny) spoke lines from the song: ‘Maybe in our wildest moments, we could be the greatest…we could be the worst of all.’

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Williams’ filmic poetics of place-making queers the English pastoral through refusing to present a totalising narrative or essentialist rendering of people, geography and history. Williams draws on the hidden and unseen migratory movement of an endangered species and, instead, offers an associative constellation of echoes and resonances, which emphasises the fluidity of being and knowing. And rather than giving the viewer a merger fantasy of identification with the eel, this apparition becomes a counterpoint to the stories being told, the figurative escaping capture as meaning slips between story and image.

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Dre Spisto is first pictured swimming in a lake, camera half submerged in the water. He speaks of how humans create stories and mythologies around the creature of the eel based on how it moves: its snake-like wriggling makes it easy to assume they are reptiles not fish.

Tom Fort writes of the way the eel’s ‘serpentine form taps into deep-rooted instincts of revulsion’ along with its ‘muted colouring, its snoutiness, its thick coat of viscous slime, and its convulsive writhings when it is removed from its elements into ours’. This common perception equates the eel to ‘a demon of the watery sphere.’

Dre makes the link between his movement through the world, both as an immigrant and in relation to his gender, to the misconceptions and deep-rooted prejudices of society. ‘For most of the time’ he says, ‘people don’t read me the way that I read myself.’ Dre’s relation to his gender identity has changed over time, wanting to present in a more masculine way.

What does it take to meet someone as they are, beyond our own projected ideas?

In relation to the eel, Patrick Svensson reminds us that ‘their metamorphoses are not just superficial adaptations to new life conditions. They’re existential. An eel becomes what it needs to be when the time is right.’

So, too, can we think of human transformations, and welcome all manner of transitions.

We see Dre moving, dancing, throwing his arms around and engaging in an embodied practice out on the marsh. He wears black headphones, adidas joggers and a blue sports bra. In the movement practice he often cries, wanting to allow his emotions and body not to be curtailed or repressed. Dre tells us he noticed that people were afraid of someone crying in public, feeling as though crying must be stopped rather than allowing one’s body to experience the ebb and flow of emotion and water. Alongside his status as an immigrant and a trans person, Dre’s movement practice brings into the public sphere the freedom and fluidity of embodied emotion that is so often disavowed or labelled as abject by wider society.

The Eel’s Tale creates space for those aspects of life that some people deem ‘other’; for them to be encountered and seen as worthy of our attention.

In Penda’s Fen, Stephen rejects the idea of a homogenous and pure notion of nation and starts to understand the hybrid nature of language, identity and history. This culminates in his admission that ‘I am nothing pure…my race is mixed, my sex is mixed, I am woman and man, light and dark…mud and flame’.

One of the most striking images is when Stephen wakes from a homoerotic dream to find a large, gargoyle-like demon sitting on top of him, and later, King Penda tells Stephen that he is a ‘sacred demon of ungovernableness…’ transforming him from a ‘son of England’ to something more ‘impure and dissonant.’

What this metamorphosis will lead to is unknown, but if the landscapes of Penda’s Fen and The Eel’s Tale offer similar opportunities to rethink our relation to stale narratives of nationalism and fixed identity, they also encourage a rethinking of the acceptable. The sacred demon of ungovernableness could surely be a way of describing the eel within.

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Jellied eel. Smoked eel. Eel pies. Eel stew, etc.

Until very recently, Britain was fueled by eels. They were a cheap and nutritious source of protein and, because of this, they became a famous London delicacy.

We put them in our mouths. Chewed their sinuous flesh. Consumed them.

They became part of our bodies.

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Another of the eel’s mysteries is the point at which they decide that it is time to return to the Sargasso Sea to mate and thus transform into their final state.

Lauren Craig stands amongst the reed beds, which sway in the wind. She is surrounded by them, almost enclosed, to suggest a space of safety. We hear her speak of the journey to motherhood, and the way that her body began calling to her: ‘it’s a different part of you that you don’t know is part of your body - a different part of you that grows and you expand into another.’ The bodily transformation of becoming a parent through giving birth is ‘difficult to explain’ Lauren says.

This story echoes another of the eel’s mysteries that scientists have yet to understand: what is the trigger that causes the eels to migrate back to the Sargasso to reproduce, thus transforming into their final state?

Could we say that eels are ‘lived by unknown and uncontrollable forces’ as Freud argues for humans?

The eels leave at all different ages, and from across Europe at different times, but manage to find their way back to mate at the correct moment, in the correct location, at the correct ocean depth. The spawning ground of the European eel, thought to be somewhere in the Sargasso Sea, has never been located in that expanse of water, which is roughly two million square miles and up to seven kilometers deep.

Nor has anyone seen an eel there, nor an eel egg, not even a dead eel.

The eel refuses to give up its secrets.

In a 2010 New Yorker piece on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Amy Davidson references video footage of an eel swimming around the burst pipe, out of which a plume of oil gushes. ‘It is a measure of the grotesquerie of the spill’ she writes ‘that the eel (a pretty repulsive creature) looks very beautiful.’

This description irked one reader, who commented on the article: ‘Oh, is the eel a “pretty repulsive creature?” Time to look in the mirror—you don’t see the eel coming ashore and dumping millions of gallons of toxic black slime on your doorstep, do you? There’s a “repulsive creature” involved here, all right, but it’s not the eel.’

Davidson doubled down, taking the time to publish a response later that day called ‘Eel in the Mirror’ and stating: ‘I do not wish to regard myself, nor yet to be regarded, in that eel-y light.’

Despite my reservations about the proliferation of ways that we should learn from the natural world about our own humanity, this mirror of the eel feels somewhat different, and I am inclined to regard myself in the way Davidson isn’t, in a way Stephen begins to think of himself: the boundaries of self and other, human and non-human, collapsing.

The eel doesn’t reflect a ‘useful’ image, but refracts back to us what I want to call a queer ecological abjection. It confronts us, rather than comforts, with a suggestion of that which refuses easy incorporation into metaphoric discourse and instead invites us to acknowledge some of our own ugliness(es)—yet, at the same time, offering recognition, acceptance, of that which culture-at-large thinks of as repulsive.

The Eel’s Tale is not a film about eels, but instead puts the viewer in relation with the unknowability of the eel. Against the backdrop of anti-immigrant rhetoric and conservative gender politics, Williams offers a lyric engagement with the spirit of the eel, whose migration across national borders and multiple bodily transformations across its life cycle, offers an alternative inheritance for those willing to tune into the queerer ecology at work in our landscapes. The Eel’s Tale gives us a new, hybrid and ‘impure’ version of the North Kent Marshes, one that welcomes difference and highlights the permeability—or ungovernable nature—of the landscape and those within it. Through the queer ecological abjection of the eel, which escapes and resists semantic definition, we start to perceive, perhaps unconsciously at first, as Stephen did in Penda’s Fen, something we all have within us: an impure and hybrid nature—to be embraced, not repressed.

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All the way through this attempt to translate The Eel’s Tale, I have felt on the edge of articulation, not quite succeeding to speak plainly.

The figure of the eel is not a metaphor but a suggestion that in figuration something always escapes, is indeterminate, opens a gap.

The eel slips out of all attempts to define it, offering instead ‘untranslatable hissed interruptions’.

As the final line of the film tells us: ‘they resist our knowing’.

Our ignorance of the other could generate curiosity rather than violence.

The unknowability of the world might help us look within at our own inner darkness, rather than project outwards onto our neighbours.

But what eels teach us is not something tangible that can be learnt, commodified and implemented, but rather that we are all unknowable and mysterious.

This can be uncomfortable, but we must learn to tolerate it in ourselves and others.

Declan Wiffen