Through myth, fairy tale and legend, powerful women are depicted as dark, cruel and calculating, and they are often naturally associated with winter – a season where all warmth withdraws, and the land is covered with snow and ice, and life is no more than a battle of survival against the elements.
There are many different kinds of shapeshifting and here we look at different examples from Ireland, Wales and Scotland that provide differing glimpses of shapeshifters in action in the myth, folklore, and tradition of these three Celtic nations.
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.
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’.
No plants feature so often in folklore, in so many places, as fig trees. There’s a biological basis to many of these stories.
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