Folklore meets True Crime: The Folklore of Poisonous Plants Used in Murder
Banish the notion that anything natural must be good for you – 2/3 of plants are dangerous to humans. Thankfully, it’s often parts of the plants we rarely encounter, like the bulbs, or their berries are too unpleasant for us to eat in vast quantities. Yet aconite, belladonna, and hellebore show up in fiction, myth, and unfortunately fact as plants often employed as murder weapons. Look at hellebore, used to poison enemy water supplies in the ancient world, or poison hemlock, used in the execution of Socrates.
This talk will explore the folklore of those poisonous plants employed in murder, both fictional and real, with the emphasis on the plant lore rather than the gory details.
Speaker Bio:
Dr Icy Sedgwick is the host of the Fabulous Folklore podcast, investigating the fascinating world of European folklore with a focus on the British Isles, and the author of Rebel Folklore, Ghostlore, Bring Me Love, and Fate or Fortune. She is fascinated by plant lore, ghost stories, lost gods, and divination. Former ghost hunter Icy also holds a PhD in Film Studies after examining the representation of haunted houses in contemporary Hollywood cinema. https://www.icysedgwick.com
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
