Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

 This essay first appeared in issue 19 of Gramarye, Winter 2019 The little village of Malham in the Yorkshire Dales is set in a landscape of stunning natural beauty close to the great curved cliff of Malham Cove and the dramatic gorge of Gordale...

Here is Lord Dunsany speaking beautifully about poetry, in 'The Donellan Lectures' delivered at Trinity College, Dublin, 1943: "Nothing at all separates a poet in China from a poet in Ireland: both feel that beauty is sacred and is the outward and ob...

From goddesses and witch queens, I turn to witches of a more mundane sort, ranging in age from (apparently) sweet old ladies to (apparently) sweet little girls. The examples are all taken either from children's classics or from less well known childr...

If as I suggested in my last post, the ‘wickedness’ of the witch is derived from a male fear and rejection of female power that goes back a very, very long way, Ursula K Le Guin embarked on a long-term exploration of that idea in her Earthsea nov...

Here we are in October with Hallowe'en coming up in only a couple of weeks, and it seems a good time to write a post about witches. (In fact, maybe two posts. Maybe three.)‘Witch’ is not a neutral word. There can be good wizards or bad wizards, i...

This essay was originally published in the 12th issue of Gramarye, Winter 2017 To round off my series of thirty fairytales which feature strong heroines, I'd like to repost an essay  I wrote a couple of years ago about a fairy tale heroine...

This Russian tale from the collection of Aleksander Afanas’iev, translated by Norbert Guterman, brings my series of traditional fairy tales with strong heroines to a close. There are many Vasilisas in Russian fairy tales, and most of them are stron...