A Treasury of British Folklore: Maypoles, Mandrakes and Mistletoe
I began writing ‘Maypoles, Mandrakes and Mistletoe: A Treasury of British Folklore’ back in April last year.
I began writing ‘Maypoles, Mandrakes and Mistletoe: A Treasury of British Folklore’ back in April last year.
#FolkloreThursday’s Willow Winsham interviews storyteller Jean Edmiston and her daughter Amanda on their family storytelling tradition, and Jean’s new story, “The King’s Table”.
In the nineteenth century, Lady Charlotte Guest (with a team of Welsh scholars) translated a series of stories from Welsh into English. It was she who gave them the collective title ‘The Mabinogion’.
I first caught the perfume of my wild twin by walking with muddy boots through wet grasses to my scrubby woodland den as a six-year-old. As the trees swirled I caught a scent and started to cry without understanding. I wove a pheasant feather in my hair. I hear it now in the owl court who hoot across the frost grass and moon-touched lawns of my cottage. There’s more than book smarts in that chill delirium. These are not domestic tones, not corralled sounds, but loose as Dartmoor ponies on the hill. They give me ecstasy. Not safety, not contentment, certainly not ease, not peace, but ecstasy. It’s almost painful. Makes me restless.
The first witch of Western literature, Circe lived what appears to be an idyllic, solitary life on the island of Aiaia. She spent her time honing her enviable magic spells, collecting herbs from the thick forest that fringed her land and doting on her magically docile pet lions and wolves.
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