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Descriptive Formulae in Scottish and Irish Wonder Tales
I've been reading a lot of Irish and Scots fairy tales or wonder tales lately and have been struck, as often before, by the sheer beauty of expression in many of them. I cannot read the original...
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The Unhappy Love Affair Of Giant Bolster
This is a tale told in Robert Hunt’s ‘Popular Romances of the West of England, or The Drolls, Superstitions and Traditions of Old Cornwall’. First published in 1865 it went into three editions and...
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Jorinda and Joringel: Owls and Flowers
There’s a story in TheMabinogion about a girl who is changed into an owl. The magicians Gwydion and Math ap Mathonwy create her out of flowers for Lleu Llaw Gyffes whose mother has cursed him never to...
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The Pilot’s Ghost Story
St Ives Harbour Fish Market: courtesy of https://www.cornwalls.co.uk Another tale from Robert Hunt’s ‘Popular Romances of the West of England, or The Drolls, Superstitions and Traditions of Old...
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'The Homestead Westward in the Blue Mountains' by Jonas Lie
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...
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Enchanted Sleep and Sleepers #1
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...
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Enchanted Sleep and Sleepers #2
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...
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Enchanted Sleep and Sleepers #3
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...
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'Nagas and Garudas, Dreams and Stars', a guest post by Shevta Thakrar
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...
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THE SEAL-MAN by John Masefield
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...
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Spells of Sleep, Enchanted Apple Boughs
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...
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'The Tale of the Three Weird Sisters: Lost Fairy Tales' for the Folklore Podcast
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...
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The Poem of Finn mac Cumhaill
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...
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Perilous Voyages
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...
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The 'Little Dark People'
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...
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Seal songs and legends
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...
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Portals and Paintings
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...
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‘Childe Rowland’ &‘The Gyir Carline’: Lost Fairy Tales of 16th & 17th century...
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...
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The Scottish fairy tale 'Rashie Coat' illustrated by Joan Hassall
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...
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The Billy Blin': the Scottish Brownie
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...
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More about the Billy Blin'
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...
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Samuel Pepys & FOMO
On 26th 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...
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The Ghost that spoke Gaelic
'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...
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River Voices
RIVER VOICES As I walked down by the riverClose by the sounding sea,Up rose three water maidensWho stretched white arms to me, ‘Come here, you lilting stranger Who whistles as...
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The Woman in the Kitchen
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...
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