Folklore Archives - Page 18 of 18 - The Last Tuesday Society

Magical protection marks in medieval and later buildings – a Zoom talk with Brian Hoggard

In old buildings many subtly carved marks can be found on stone, plaster and timber with a variety of meanings and purposes. There are masons’ marks, carpenter’s marks, merchants marks, shipping marks, historic graffiti (covers a wide range) and then there are protection marks.

In this short presentation Brian Hoggard will explain the differences between those broad categories of marks and then focus on the range of protection marks you might come across in churches and other buildings. These include: Marian marks, Christograms, daisy-wheels and circles, burn marks, shoe outlines, hand outlines, mesh marks and pentagrams. The thinking required to understand them will require the suspension of some of your logic and science knowledge.

Brian Hoggard has been studying history, archaeology and folk beliefs since his teens; his Twitter account enigmatically states that he has been a ‘Researcher of strange things found in walls and under floors since 1999…’ Brian’s undergraduate dissertation focused on folk beliefs and witchcraft, when he noticed there was a huge amount of further work that could be done to explore the archaeology of witchcraft. At that point his research escalated into a major project which has culminated in the publication of Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft (Berghahn 2019).

For more information see: www.apotropaios.co.uk www.berghahnbooks.com/title/HoggardMagical

Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize.

For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Marina Warner on Fairy Tales & From The Beast to The Blonde

In this landmark study of the history and meaning of fairy tales, the celebrated cultural critic Marina Warner looks at storytelling in art and legend – from the prophesying enchantress who lures men to a false paradise, to jolly Mother Goose with her masqueraders in the real world. Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales. Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge romancing.

Warner interprets the history of old wives’ tales from sibyls and the Queen of Sheba to Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Angela Carter. And with fresh new insights she shows us the real-life themes in the famous stories, which, she suggests, are skillful vehicles by which adults have liked to convey advice, warning, and hope – to each other as well as to children.

Marina Warner‘s study of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic (2011) won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2013; in 2015 she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities and was made DBE. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Fellow of the British Academy and President of the Royal Society of Literature.

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The Mythical Creatures of Scandinavian Folklore – Lena Heide-Brennand by Zoom

The Scandinavian Folklore consists of a large number of different creatures- good and evil. The trolls, the Nisse, Huldra and Nøkken all have fascinated and frightened the Scandinavian people throughout centuries and in tonight’s illustrated lecture, Norwegian born lecturer Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand will tell the stories that all Scandinavian children have grown up with since the beginning of time. Prepare yourself for a captivating journey through the deep Scandinavian forests where you will encounter the monstrous, dim-witted, man-eating Trolls, the sly and cheeky Nisse, the seductive, fairy-like Huldra and the most legendary creature of them all: Nøkken, the water spirit who plays enchanted songs on his violin, luring women and children to drowning in the hidden ponds on those magical Scandinavian summer nights.

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

Main Image “Huldra ved Matbrunnen” (Huldra at Matbrunnen) – Theodor Kittelsen, 1892

a recording will be emailed to ticketholders after the event

Folklore and Strange Tales of Cornwall’s Seas – Joan Passey

Cornwall is surrounded on water by three sides, fractured from Devon by the length of the Tamar. No where in Cornwall is further than 17 miles from the sea. Those who weren’t mining were making their living fishing, and throughout history Cornwall’s waters have been important to its status as a global trading port, enabling the export of its world-class ores despite the relative difficulty of accessing much of the county by land. Cornwall has been, and continues to be, shaped by its seas, and this paper explores the importance of the seascape to Cornish culture, identity, and history. In the nineteenth century in particular Cornwall was infamous for its number of shipwrecks, and the seas that gave so generously were alternately imagined as places of death, fear and violence. This tension between Cornwall’s reliance on and fear of its waters led to an abundance of strange tales of maritime disaster, deep sea monsters, and haunted coasts. We will explore the folklore – and folkhorror – of Cornish seas, from biting mermaids to phantom ships gliding across the moors.

Joan Passey Bio

Joan Passey is a lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She completed her PhD on Victorian Gothic Cornwall in 2020 at the University of Exeter and her monograph, Cornish Gothic, is upcoming with University of Wales Press. She has released an anthology, Cornish Horrors: Tales of the Land’s End with the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series and has spoken on BBC Radio 3 about haunted shores and nineteenth-century Cornwall. She has additionally published on Ann Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins, and Shirley Jackson, and is co-founder of the Haunted Shores Network. Please feel free to contact her on [email protected], @JoanPassey or joanpassey.com

Me and My Shadow: Sympathy with the Devil in Folk Tradition – Jeremy Harte

Making friends with the Devil may sound like a high-risk strategy, but the dark one couldend up being good company – at least for a while. Working together, he’d help his partner magician do good deeds, channel rivers and create new highways. It must be true, because you can still see the works of the Devil in the landscape to this day…

Just as often, however, the two unlikely companions would fall into competitive bickering, matching their strength in simple games and their wit in commercial bets – storytellers loved to create new ways in which an ingenious mortal could get one over on his uncanny friend.

How did rural tradition create these rollicking tales of toxic buddies out of the much darker lore of ceremonial magic? Hell threatens anyone who accepts the Devil’s favour, but this terrible threat is always wriggled out of by a trick condition, a clever wife, or a disintegrating strand of sand rope. Even at the very end, when relations are about to turn nasty, the folk magician finds a burial place that will save him from damnation. (Faustus, on the other hand, was not so lucky.)

The folk Devil is an inconsistent character – frightful and wicked, but also silly, combative, vengeful and vain. It seems that Devil lore was transformed by the English peasantry, an eschatologically insubordinate class who listened to everything preached at them by the holy and the learned, but only heard the parts that fitted their world view. This way of seeing things was much less fearsome than that of the occultists, and much more forgiving than that of the Church…

Jeremy Harte is a researcher into folklore and archaeology, with a particular interest in landscape legends and tales of encounters with other worlds. His book Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape will be published by Reaktion at Halloween this year. Previous books include Explore Fairy Traditions, which won the Katharine Briggs award of the Folklore Society, Cuckoo Pounds and Singing Barrows, and The Green Man. In 2006 he was elected to the Committee of the Folklore Society and has subsequently organised the Society’s Legendary Weekends. Since the foundation of the journal Time & Mind, he has been Reviews Editor. He is curator of Bourne Hall Museum in Surrey.