Black Arts and Talismans: Huw Llwyd, the Real Welsh Wizard

Huw Llwyd, the Welsh wizard, has been immortalised in the folklore and fairy tales of Wales, his fantastic exploits told and re-told down the ages.

Huw Llwyd, the Welsh wizard, has been immortalised in the folklore and fairy tales of Wales, his fantastic exploits told and re-told down the ages.

The fairy-tale witch is a compelling, frightening, and reliable stock character in our contemporary society. Mention “witch” and the hag of fairy-tale picture books for children comes to mind far more frequently than any other, more nuanced image.

You’re obviously already interested enough to know what folklore is, right? Yet the more we look at folklore, the less confident we can be about straightforward certainties.

My new book is intended to inspire all the little girls who admire women like Michelle Obama, Lucy Bronze, Malala Yousafzai and Jacqueline Wilson.
Folk Tales for Bold Girls is packed full of my own retellings of folktales from around the world, each one telling the story of a little girl — not a princess or a goddess, but a little girl the same age as the target readership, between 7 and 12 years old.

Scotland is one of the few nations to have chosen a mythological creature rather than a real one as her national animal, and probably the only nation to have chosen an animal that no one believed actually lived there…
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