Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

 I will begin with the Green Lady, Perelandra’s unfallen Eve, though the novel has very much the quality, simplicity and large theme of the medieval morality plays (Temptation by the Devil, the Prevention of a New Fall), and characterisation i...

I’ve had a busy summer thus far, and I’ve neglected this blog for a month or two but I will be putting up a new post soon! In the meantime I’ve had lovely news which some of you may already have seen on my facebook and twitter feeds: I’ve bee...

This is the text of a paper I read at the 2011 conference for the centenary of Mervyn Peake's birth, organised by Professor William Gray and Peake expert G. Peter Winnington, at what was then the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, C...

 This Irish tale can be found in Jeremiah Curtin’s ‘Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World’ (1895) and is a version of the widespread tale type 'The Robber Bridegroom'. It was told to Curtin by a man ‘about forty years old’ named...

  The following account is excerpted from 'The Celestial Bear' by Stansbury Hager in the 'Journal of American Folk-Lore', 1900. Vol XII, April-June. He says he was told the story by ‘the Mi’kmaqs of Nova Scotia, as we sat beside the camp-fi...

  Perhaps this is more of a fairytale snippet than a folklore snippet. The picture, which I rather like, is an imaginary reconstruction of Leif Eriksson's first glimpse of 'Vinland' painted by Christian Krohg (1893). The story hasn't anythi...

  Most of the fairy tales we know today we owe to versions collected during the 19th or early 20thcenturies. But although fairy tales were certainly being told during the 16thcentury – along with legends and ballads and the kinds of tale which...