Fairy Folklore: Come Away, O Human Child
To be led astray, Peter Pan style, by a fairy – ‘pixie led’ – is an old fear from isolated communities where weather and terrain seemed to judge and punish.
Prison or Prophecy? The Woman in the Tower
For many, the Woman in the Tower is a symbol of female oppression and repression, a highly negative image charged with a history of daughters denied their freedom. So, let’s take a look at some Women in Tower stories from different times and places, and see what symbolism we can find within them.
Georgian Folklore: The Prince Who Befriended the Beasts
This is a story collected in Michael Berman’s book Georgia Through its Folktales. The book explores the shamanic possibilities held within folk tales.
A Pied Piper Mystery
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 […]
The Power of Storytelling: Diverse tales and the “refugee crisis”
In recent years, in conjunction with the steadfast advance of far-right nationalistic ideologies, the so-called ‘’refugee crisis’’ has been repeatedly distorted through an outpouring of negative narratives surrounding migrants and migration, which hit the headlines on a daily basis across various mediatic channels worldwide.