Folklore and fairy tales
This is our apple tree, so laden with fruit this year that a massive branch actually cracked in the wind one night and broke off under the weight, as though taking Keats’ lines from Ode to Autumn far too literally – To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core… The lawn is still almost ankle deep in windfalls. What is it about apples? Why are they so…
A guest post by Gwyneth Jones I’ve always been attracted to fairytales. I knew I was a storyteller long before I knew I’d be a writer: I took on my father’s mantle, and told epic bedtime stories to my brother and sister, at an early age, and my father’s stories (also epic, endless episodes from the same saga, about the same characters) were all based on a traditional tale, the one about a girl who…
My husband's Uncle Bill Dilger was a watch and clockmaker-cum-repairer, and his workshop, a small back room in his Victorian Manchester home, was a fairy palace dedicated to Time. You walked through the door and found yourself immersed in a sussuration of soft ticking from walls crowded with clocks - mahogany-cased wall clocks with sober cream faces and slow-swinging brass pendulums; elaborately…
I once read, I think in an essay by C.S. Lewis – that to have weird or unusual protagonists in a fantasy world was gilding the lily. Simply too much icing on a very fancy cake. And then he cited Alice as a good example of an ordinary child to whom strange things happen. I’m not sure he was right. Of course it’s true that many heroes and heroines in classic 20 th century fantasy are ‘ordinary’ –…
This is a post I wrote a few months before my mother died, nine years ago now. It was (and is) a heartfelt one. It's Mothering Sunday in England this weekend, and here is a drawing I made for my junior school teacher a very long time ago. We'd been asked to draw a picture of our kitchens. I don't remember if a portrait of one's mother was also required, but she was there (of course) and so I…
RIVER VOICES As I walked down by the river Close by the sounding sea, Up rose three water maidens Who stretched white arms to me, ‘Come here, you lilting stranger Who whistles as sharp as tin, We’ll give you a bed, a crown for your head, And our hair to wrap you in.’ ‘No thanks, my jacket’s good enough, And my old black tarpaulin.’ Then ups the old green river-man, ‘Come Jerry my boy,’ says he,…
'An Incident at the Battle of Culloden' by David Morier, oil on canvas. This post first appeared on The History Girls blog Scotland, 1749: just four years after the failed Jacobite rising and the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the clans at the Battle of Culloden. Reprisals had been severe; the wearing of kilt and tartan was forbidden; the rising was still fresh and sore in everyone’s minds…
On 26 th December 1662 , twenty-nine year old Samuel Pepys met his friend Mr Battersby, who recommended ‘a new book of Drollery in verse called Hudibras .’ Eager to keep up with the newest thing, Pepys dashed out and bought the first volume for the considerable sum of two shillings and sixpence. But he was disappointed. ‘When I came to read it, it is so silly an abuse of the Presbyter-Knight going…
A book called ‘The Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song’ edited by R.H. Cromek and published 1810, contains this “Account of Billy Blin'" with some entertaining stories. "This is another name for the Scotch Brownies , a class of solitary beings, living in the hollows of trees, and recesses of old ruinous castles. They are described as being small of stature, covered with short curly hair, with…
I am extremely fond of house-spirits, two of which appeared in my first books for children. The three books of my Troll trilogy all feature one of the Scandinavian nisses I first met in Thomas Keightley’s 1828 compendium ‘The Fairy Mythology’. I was charmed by their mischief, vanity, naïvety, essential goodwill and occasional bursts of temper. My Nis has all these characteristics and I love him.…
For more than a decade from the mid 1970s the artist Joan Hassall was a neighbour of my family in the Yorkshire Dales village of Malham. I was twenty in 1976 when she inherited Priory Cottage in the village, and she lived there until her death in 1988 at the age of 82. Joan was a skilled wood engraver who illustrated many, many books ( you can read more about her life here ). I was a bit too young…
A talk I gave for The Folklore Podcast last November, with some additions and revisions for this post. This gruesome photo shows a genuine example of a Hand of Glory, currently in Whitby Museum. Not long ago I was reading John Aubrey’s Brief Lives and came across a reference to one of his other works, a compendium of folklore called (for some reason) The Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme,…
A very long time ago in my late teens, I wrote a book with the rather unimaginative title ‘The Magic Forest’ which was (quite rightly) never published. Although derivative (I was inspired by Walter de la Mare’s strange and wonderful novel ‘The Three Royal Monkeys’) it was nevertheless the closest I’d yet got to finding my own voice; and I’d been writing lengthy narratives ever since nine or ten…
Stories about selkies are ambiguous, evocative, sad. This is largely because of the way seals themselves affect us. Bobbing curiously up around boats, they seem to feel as much interest in us as we feel for them, and there is something human about their round heads and large eyes. Basking on sunlit rocks they are part of our world, yet are also natural inhabitants of an unseen, underwater world in…
In ‘A Book of Folk-Lore’ (1913) the Devon folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould recounts three instances in which he and members of his family ‘saw’ pixies or dwarfs. I’ll let you read them: In the year 1838, when I was a small boy of four years old, we were driving to Montpellier [France] on a hot summer’s day, over the long straight road that traverses a pebble and rubble strewn plain on which grows…
All voyages are voyages of discovery; all voyages are dangerous. Even in these days when cruise liners are thought of as little more than floating hotels, disaster sometimes strikes. Departing on a voyage is already a little death, a farewell to loved ones who may never be seen again, either because of the dangers of the passage or because the travellers mean never to return. To the oppressed and…
This wonderful poem attributed to Finn was translated by Lady Augusta Gregory in Gods and Fighting Men (John Murray, 1904), and is part of the medieval tradition of poetry in praise of spring and summer (in comparison to the harshness of winter). As to the age of the poem, the Fenian Cycle which relates the deeds of Finn mac Cumhaill dates in written form to the 8 th century. The poem follows a…
This is just to give notice that a week today, on Saturday 25th November at 8pm GMT, I'll be giving an online lecture for the wonderful Folklore Podcast about my search for 'Lost Fairy Tales of 16th & 17th Century England and Scotland'. I'll be talking about fairy tales of which we know nothing but the names, others which have survived by the skin of their teeth, and some which can be inferred…
Following my series of posts on 'Enchanted Sleep and Sleepers' (see links: #1 , #2 and #3 ), here is a sort of appendix: three tales from Irish mythology. The Fenian Cycle tells how Finn son of Cumhail once tried to wed a woman of the Sidhe. He was hunting on the mountain Bearnas Mor with his companions of the Fianna, when a great wild pig turned on their hounds and killed most of them. Then…
This tale comes from John Masefield’s collection of sea stories ‘ A Mainsail Haul ’, first published in 1905 when the author was only 26. It's beautiful, although like most tales about selkies it is quite dark and sad. ['Loanings' means 'lanes'.] ‘The seals is pretty when they do be playing,’ said the old woman. ‘Ah, I seen them frisking their tails till you’d think it was rocks with the sea…
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 I’m delighted to welcome for the second time to my blog the author Shveta Thakrar, whose second YA novel The Dream Runners was published by HarperCollins last year. I thoroughly enjoyed her debut novel Star Daughter and this one's even better. Shveta weaves into her YA fantasies all kinds of mystical beings from Hindu…
Probably the best-known enchanted sleeper after the Sleeping Beauty is Rip van Winkle. A lazybones living in the Catskill Mountains, he prefers hunting to hard work. Out with his dog one evening, he helps a strange little fellow to carry a keg up the mountain. They arrive at ‘a hollow, like a small amphitheatre, surrounded by perpendicular precipices, over the brinks of which impending trees shot…
My last post concerned a number of enchanted sleepers, all male, whose lengthy slumbers – however inconvenient – were almost entirely benign, awarded by the gods or God in order to save, enlighten or confer spiritual blessings upon them; and sometimes all three, for even when the sleeper awakes only to die shortly afterwards, he does so in a state of holiness or grace. This time I’m looking at…
1024x768 Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE This is the first of a series of posts on enchanted sleep and sleepers in mythology, legends, the eddas, sagas, fairy tales and folklore. And to begin as as close to the beginning as I can, the earliest tale of an enchanted sleep I know is that of the 7 th or 6 th century BCE philosopher Epimenides, recorded by Diogenes Laertius in his 3 rd…
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Jonas Lie was a contemporary of Ibsen, born 1833 at Hvokksund, not far from Oslo, but spent much of his childhood at Tromsø, inside the Arctic Circle. He was sent to naval college, but poor eyesight made him unsuited for a life at sea, so he became a…