A Pied Piper Mystery

Kate Greenaway’s illustration for Robert Browning’s 1888 poem, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pied_Piper2.jpg

hile the Pied Piper of Hamelin is undeniably a fairy tale, it’s uniquely grounded in real-world specifics – the date for one – June 26. That’s the date in 1284 when the town lost a significant portion of its population, a matter treated as fact in the first written allusion to the incidents, the initial […]

A Spot of Easter Violence, Anyone?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frigg_als_Ostara.jpg

Easter customs of old were many and varied but who would have expected so many of them to be nothing short of violent? Some believe Easter is named after the pagan spring festival celebrating Ēostre or Ostara; historically known as the spring equinox, this might explain why the date of Easter is calculated by the cycles of the moon. It falls on the Sunday following the full moon after the first day of spring — nothing Christian about that calculation! One would have thought the dates of Christ’s death and resurrection would have been more definitely commemorated but, no, we stick to celebrating the coming of spring. Compared to this oddity, some of the bizarre customs associated with Easter stop seeming so bizarre. The violence involved in some of them, though, is a little harder to explain…

Margaret Helen James: a forgotten feminist folklorist in Victorian East Anglia

Autumn fields. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

British regional folklorists of the 19th century remain, in many cases, rather obscure figures. Margaret Helen James (1859–1938) deserves particular attention for using her writing about folklore to give a voice to ordinary women and critique a patriarchal society, but until 2017 James was completely forgotten.

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