Freshwater Mermaids: The Last Ladies of the Lake
High on Kinder Scout in the Peak District sits a small, unassuming tarn known as the Mermaid’s Pool. Victorian locals would trek there at Easter midnight, hoping for a glimpse of its mysterious inhabitant, a benevolent spirit who offered immortality rather than death. Far from being an isolated phenomenon, the Kinder Mermaid belongs to a largely overlooked category in English folklore: the “lake ladies.” This talk recalls the folklore of these rare female water spirits—from Yorkshire to Herefordshire—arguing they form a distinct supernatural cohort separate from murderous “drowners” like Jenny Greenteeth.
Bio
Dr Simon Young is a British folklore historian based in Italy. He is the editor of Exeter New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Legends and teaches history at University of Virginia’s Siena Campus (CET). Over the years he has run courses on the History of Christianity, Italian Food History, Italian Media History, Contemporary Italian History, WW2 in Italy and Italian Renaissance History. He has written extensively on the nineteenth-century supernatural. His book The Boggart (from Exeter University Press) and The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends (from Mississippi University Press) came out in 2022.
Articles listing: https://independent.academia.edu/SimonYoung43
Latest books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boggart-Folklore-History-Placenames-Approaches/dp/1905816901/ref
[Free downloadable source book, click ‘open access]: https://www.exeterpress.co.uk/en/Book/2114/The-Boggart-Sourcebook.html
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene.
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