Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

People often assume there aren’t very many English fairy tales.  There are, of course, but they were eclipsed in popularity by the much better-known German and French tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. During the 19th century th...

There are extraordinary numbers of superstitions about shoes - though most are now unfamiliar to us 21st century mortals.  According to Iona Opie and Moira Tatem’s ‘Dictionary of Superstitions’, an old shoe hung up at the fireside was thou...

In another post from the archives, Adèle Geras reflects on one of the best-loved fairy tales of all time and ends with a wonderful poem."Hansel and Gretel"by Adèle GerasIt’s about hunger. It’s about not being able to cope. It’s about mother...

It's summertime... so here from the archives is a wonderfully eerie summer fairy tale by the 19th century Norwegian writer Jonas Lie.  Lie was a contemporary of Ibsen, born 1833 at Hvokksund, not far from Oslo; but he spent much of his childhood...

In ‘A Book of Folk-Lore’ (1913) the Devon folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould recounts three instances in which he and members of his family ‘saw’ pixies or dwarfs. I’ll let you read them: In the year 1838, when I was a small boy of four ye...

A quick post to highlight four lovely reviews of 'Seven Miles of Steel Thistles' (the book) which as many of you will know, is a collection of some of my essays on folk-lore and fairy tales. Do please excuse me as I jump up and down! The most recent...

When I was twelve, my brother and I had a den in an unused outbuilding belonging to the house we lived in. We trod a narrow winding path through a deep bed of green nettles to get to the flaking, rickety door; we whitewashed the walls and found some...