Fairies, Witchcraft, and Magic at Prehistoric Sites
The folklore surrounding barrows, stone circles and other prehistoric sites in Britain, Ireland, and Brittany suggests that local inhabitants experienced them as uncanny places where dangerous and powerful beings might be encountered. In Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, hill forts and burial mounds are home to the fairies and best avoided, while in Brittany megaliths are inhabited by korrigans who might invite you to join their revels (don’t accept!). In England and Scotland, several standing stones and dolmens were seen as places where witches gathered or that they built. The Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire have an especially rich tradition of witch folklore, and the modern occultist William Gray developed an elaborate ritual to be performed there. In this talk we’ll, explore the world of fairies, witches, and magic in the folklore of ancient monuments.
Speaker Bio:
Paul Robichaud is a writer and scholar whose interests include modern and medieval literature, mythology, and folklore. He is the author of Stories of the Stones: Imagining Prehistory in Britain, Ireland, and Brittany (Reaktion, 2026) and Pan: the Great God’s Modern Return (Reaktion, 2021). He has contributed articles to Hellebore and published essays on a variety of modern poets, including David Jones, T.S. Eliot, Leonard Cohen, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. His own poems have appeared in print and online magazines in Canada, the US, and the UK. A native of Toronto, he is Professor of English at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut.
Curated & Hosted by
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon
Don’t worry if you can’t make the talk live on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
