Folkore of Wales: The Skeleton Tree, Derwen Ceubren yr Ellyll
Derwen Ceubren yr Ellyll, which means “The Hollow Oak, Haunt of Demons” or “The Blasted Oak of Spirits” was a real tree. Its story is dark and terrifying.
British Legends: Wild Edric, the Wild Hunt and the Bride from the Otherworld
Wild Edric was an Anglo-Saxon earl from Shropshire who was also known as Eadric Salvage, Eadric Silvaticus and Eadric the Wild. Tradition says he was a great huntsman, hunting areas of the Forest of Clun, Stiperstones and the Long Mynd. Although he was a real person many myths and legends became attached to him.
Mark Twain’s Wild West and the Presidential Election of 1872
In a daring act, facing frightful peril, Mark Twain exploited a legend to launch his onstage comic career. With his future as a lecturer on a knife’s edge, Twain decided to open with a worn-out narrative that had seen better days. A disgruntled audience nearly drove him from the stage … until they understood his brilliant manipulation of their own folklore.
Top 5 Feminist Ghosts
Articles about female ghosts are scattered across the Internet, each one more compelling and nightmare-inducing than the last. Stories of lonely, ferocious, and tortured ghosts of women haunt our imaginations across cultures, tapping into our deepest anxieties and fears to make us shiver…and behave.
Here we examine five female ghosts from around the world through a feminist lens. Each of these hair-raising spirits arise from a context just as frightening as the ghosts themselves.
A Year and a Day – My Top 5 Characters from the Mabinogion
The Mabinogion is a mess of misconstrued mythology, a minefield of mistranslation and misinterpretations. It’s also the font of all fantasy, a literary sub-genre that did not have any following before Lady Charlotte Guest presented her loose translation, first published in seven volumes between 1838 and 1845. Much effort was put into making them read as a cohesive, integrated story, which they were not. They were compiled from many traditional tales told in the Welsh language dating right back to the earliest bardic tradition and originate in an ancient culture that spanned pre-Roman Briton and Eire.