Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies - 500 AD to the Present

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT FAIRIES

The Scottish soldier and writer John Stedman (1744-1797) had many extraordinary adventures in his life. He fought in the jungles of South America; he supped with poet and visionary William Blake; he had a long and passionate love affair with a slave, Joanna; he got involved in drunken brawls. But for sheer bizarreness nothing comes close to his run in with a supernatural being in the 1790s. Stedman had taken an evening coach going from Hammersmith to the centre of London: Hammersmith is, today, deep within the metropolis, but, in the late eighteenth century, it was mostly green fields. As Stedman was enjoying the ride he heard a strange whistling noise. He looked out of the coach window and was flabbergasted to see ‘a little fellow, about two feet high, dressed in a full suit of regimentals with a gold-laced cocked hat’. Even stranger the small man was strolling along, at about nine miles per hour, or twice the average walking speed of a man! The fast pace was apparently creating the noise Stedman had heard and Stedman stared gobsmacked as this impossible humanoid overtook the stage coach, swinging his cane.¹ Stedman had encountered a fairy, one of this island’s magical folk.

We often think of fairies as inhabiting the wildest landscapes — the west coast of Ireland; the Scottish islands; the Cornish hedgerows… — and there is something to this. Certainly, no country in Western Europe has as many fairy records as Ireland: important studies published through the nineteenth century; vast (and still largely untapped) records of fairy sightings and fairy belief in Irish newspapers in the 1800s; and tens of thousands of pages of folklore with matching index cards heroically collected by the Irish Folklore Commission from 1935. Nor is it just a question of the quantity of documentation: there is also the intensity of fairy belief. In 1838 a Co. Limerick court attempted to prosecute fairies for an illegal meeting, a meeting which had been witnessed by scores of people.² In 1864, in Co. Tipperary, a local witch convinced several dupes that she could bring their dead relatives ‘back from the fairies’.³ In 1895, an Irishman Michael Cleary, from the Clonmel area, burnt his wife (with the partial collusion of the wife’s family) because he believed that she was a fairy who had taken his real wife’s place.⁴ In England there were fairy beliefs but, by the 1800s, they rarely caused men and women to act in such a dramatic fashion.

Indeed, as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressed, fairies were increasingly seen as a ‘Celtic’ phenomenon. A crucial moment in the development of this idea came in 1911, when an American bohemian and mystic Walter Evans Wentz published The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, with Oxford University Press. The Fairy Faith, based on three years of field work in Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, Man, Scotland and Wales, is perhaps the strangest academic book ever published in Britain (which is saying something). As well as proving — to his satisfaction — that fairies exist, Evans Wentz’s Oxford University Press monograph also offered insights into the reality of Atlantis and gave us our single most interesting collection of fairy encounters. Evans Wentz restricted himself to ‘the Celts’ because he believed that they had a special mystic faculty, not given to materialist Anglo-Saxons. His beliefs proved influential, as the Fairy Faith was, in the postwar period, republished in cheap paperback editions. Today the idea that fairies are Celtic has gone mainstream. As the author of the most important fairy study of the last decade concedes: ‘the notion that Wales, Scotland and Ireland have a particular claim on [fairies] is deeply ingrained in the consciousness of the English-speaking world’.⁵

But — as chapters in this book will show — fairies are also sighted throughout Britain and not just in the rugged west and north. They have, up to the present, turned up deep within England and are as English as Shakespeare. Indeed, if you run a fine comb through even the most urbanized of the modern English shires fairies will come tumbling out. In the spirit of Stedman’s experience let’s return to what is certainly the most difficult place to hunt for fairies in Western Europe, the area today covered by Europe’s only world city, London. A fairy tree once stood — and was still feared by locals in the seventeenth century — very close to what is today Crystal Palace.⁶ (Another fairy tree perhaps stood at Windsor Park: at least it did according to Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor.)⁷ Locals in the Greenwich area, meanwhile, take their children to the Fairy Hill Recreation Park, named after a local fairy mound or possibly a Fairy Hall in the area. It could be argued that these are just fossils from before London’s ‘red rust’ crept out into the Home Counties: and that fairies are no longer associated with the patch of concrete that covers the grave of the fairy tree or Greenwich’s moribund fairy hill. But the remarkable thing is that fairies continued to be seen within London itself; not admittedly in the thoroughfares or roads of the centre, but in London’s parks and gardens.

Thus, in the 1880s, a little girl watched scores of tiny fairies flying from water lilies to the trees in Kew Gardens, before her father ordered her away.⁸ In the late 1920s, artist Ivor Innes created the Elfin Oak in Kensington Gardens (today a Grade II listed structure), inspired by the fairies he saw play there and by memories of Peter Pan.⁹ In the years before the Second World War a couple driving by Richmond Park watched a deer cross the road ridden by ‘a little man about three feet high, clad in a jerkin and hose’.¹⁰ A clergyman’s widow had a conversation with a small green fellow in postwar Regent’s Park: the little green man took away a pain in the widow’s foot.¹¹ In 1987, an eighteen year old slept the night on Hampstead Heath and woke to see ‘[a]round 50 to 60 little dryads staring down from the leafy boughs’.¹² There have also been visions in private London gardens: in wartime Harrow one woman watched several glow worms in her allotment resolve themselves into gnomes, ‘some in green coats and hats, some in red coats and hats, others in mauve’.¹³

It is only now possible to retrieve these stories and others like them because of one of the happiest innovations of the last generation — the digitisation of printed works, which are scanned and their texts stored online. The digitisation of millions of pages of British and Irish newspapers and magazines means that many local traditions, beliefs and stories can now be reclaimed from hundred- or two-hundred-year-old pages of ephemera. The digitisation of books in Britain and Ireland, particularly books about parishes, villages and towns, in Google Books and Archive.org, means, likewise, that it is feasible to find scarce and isolated references to folklore in works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when fairies were more commonly sighted. This is transforming the study of the British and Irish supernatural. For those interested in fairylore, particularly, we are living a similar moment to that experienced by Cold War historians in the early 1990s: after decades of having to rely on redacted documents, the archives in the west and the east were simultaneously thrown open.

The work that follows has uncovered a series of human characters whose lives became enmeshed with the fairies, and whose stories would not be known without digitisation. There is Fanny Bradley, a dwarf who was widely said, in the Yorkshire community in which she lived, to have been kidnapped by the fairies of Almscliff Crag as a baby.¹⁴ There are the terrified boys who venture into a Cumbrian fairy cave, taking an eighteenth-century pistol with them to kill any fairies that they might meet.¹⁸ There is Joyce Chadwick who watches pixies, on a holiday in Devon: they change shape in front of her, one even transforming itself into a long furry roll that spins along on the ground.¹⁶ There is Kittie Crowe who tells stories about riding the rails with fairies, hobo style, in the American Midwest.¹⁷ Then, most dramatic of all, there is Roderick, who tells how he was picked up and whisked across the Atlantic from Prince Edward’s Island, Canada, to Ireland by fairies who kept dunking him into the waves as they flew: ‘see here, boys, there may be ghosts or there may not; but if there are none, there are fairies, and they are worse’.¹⁵

If digitisation is one new and rich seam in fairylore, another is contemporary fairy sightings. Fairy experiences continue to this very day, both in England and along the Celtic fringe. However, most folklorists and historians have been unwilling to grapple with new fairy experiences. There is among some, an unspoken rule that anything later than the publication in 1920 of five photographs of fairies taken in Cottingley near Bradford can be ignored. These photographs are to fairy studies what the birth of Christ is to history: there is ‘before’ and ‘after’. The five Cottingley photos were sponsored by Sherlock-Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle (a fairy believer) and had been taken by teenage cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths; Elsie and Frances finally confessed to their fakery in 1983. Over a century since the first photographs were taken, the reluctance to engage with new fairy encounters is slowly changing. In the last years there have been four surveys of fairy experiences (two undertaken by authors in this book). Some chapters report on the latest of these, The Fairy Census, the first published scholarly survey of contemporary fairy sightings. The Fairy Census gathered almost five hundred different fairy experiences from Britain and Ireland and beyond from people who had striking and sometimes life-changing meetings with the ‘little people’ or the not so little people — one record from Scotland has a fifteen-foot fairy standing next to a sycamore….¹⁹ Such experiences may be difficult to unravel for the modern mind, but they are part of the continuing fairy story and modern fairy sightings are, consequently, woven into this book.

The Fairy Census has several particularly striking episodes and patterns. For example, a couple reported an encounter, in the 1990s, with a supernatural being on the edge of Dublin that strongly echoes several (little known) nineteenth-century experiences with an Irish goblin named the Pooka.²¹ There are other intriguing findings, too. How is it possible — to choose one account — that a six-year-old girl in Texas had an experience which recalls the early modern witch’s Sabbath?²² Perhaps, most exciting, though, there is data to chew over for psychologists, psychiatrists and neurologists. Why is it that so many fairy sightings occur while we are in bed? Why do so many children see fairies? Is it significant that several of these children remember being sad when they saw the fey? Why do so many drivers observe fairies, sometimes running along beside their car? Why do people watching television glimpse fairies in their peripheral vision?

Fairies have changed, of course, through history, as, not least, the Fairy Census shows. We have records of British and Irish fairies going back almost to Roman times: there were the elves, gnomes and trolls of Germanic and Celtic Europe in the Middle Ages, then, the child-sized, light-carrying, musical fairies of Shakespeare’s England. And twentieth-century media has influenced popular perceptions of fairies, not least by moving fairies away into the realms of child-lore. Ever since Tinker Bell followed Peter Pan to Hollywood, modern sightings show that Disney’s fairy visions have left their mark and that fairies are often today seen as small winged sylphs, wheeling through the heavens (though Tinker Bell, on the stage, had originally been nothing more than a fairy light and a bike bell). Yet the first fairy wings, for example, appear only at the end of the eighteenth century in paintings and were an invention of a cabal of British artists rather than a feature of traditional folklore. It took seventy more years for fairy wings to be mentioned in fairy tales, then another fifty for the first claims that people had seen fairies with wings. Another example: all our medieval and Elizabethan historical records of fairies describe human- or child-sized beings. There are no butterfly-sized fairies, which we arguably owe instead to the imagination of Elizabethan dramatists and poets.

How can we best define these strange beings that fascinated and sometimes terrified our adult forebears? They are certainly not tiny fluttering winged elves who guard flowers and trees and who live in the deep woods spreading pixy dust and kindness over a desolate world. Human neighbours were so terrified by the fairies’ potency that they referred to these morally ambivalent, unpredictable, havoc-creating beings as ‘the Good People’, or ‘the Gentry’ because the word ‘fairies’ apparently annoyed the fey. The fairies, meanwhile, assaulted and tricked and, in some cases, murdered and kidnapped their way through human populations.

What are (if we dare use the term) fairies then? A simple but efficient definition is that traditional fairies are ‘magical, living, resident humanoids’, who dwell exclusively in Britain, Ireland and in some of the lands that British and Irish migrants settled. ‘Exclusively’ because the continent has its own magical folk, and these have their own characteristics; ‘fée’ (France) and ‘fata’ or ‘fada’ (Southern Europe) or more exotically ‘maitagarri’ (among the Basques) and ‘keijukainen’ (Finland). ‘Magical’ because fairies do not, of course, obey the normal rules of physics. They rush through the air, they appear and disappear, time has no hold on them, and, they can change the environment around them with a wave of their hands. ‘Alive’ in the sense that they are not ghosts. It is true that there are some claims, not least in Irish tradition, that the dead go to live with the fairies, but this is an exceptional view. Fairies are ‘resident’ in that they are tied to places. Sometimes these places are natural: a wood, a hill, a vale… But sometimes these places are human constructions: a bridge, a prehistoric mound, a house or a church. Finally, fairies are ‘humanoids’. The vast majority of descriptions are about beings that look like humans or that are human-like; as noted above they are also usually of adult- or child-size.

After this very general definition we run, though, into problems; the principal of which are regional variations. Indeed, the first rule of the fey is that all fairylore is local: hence the approach adopted for this book. The first clue to these differences are the names that fairies go by in different parts of Britain and Ireland. In Cornwall they are piskeys, in the Channel Islands pouques, in parts of southern and midlands England pharises, in Orkney and Shetland trows, in Ireland (or at least in parts of Ireland) the sídhe…. Nor is this just a question of different labels for the same thing. The fairies in the different areas are also notably different in their habits, characteristics and in their appearance. Take fairies’ relations with humans. A human neighbour would probably survive a run in with fairies in Cornwall. He or she might be led a merry dance, pinched or, worst case scenario, dunked in a marsh. Offending the fairies in the Scottish Highlands or Ireland might end, instead, with deaths in the family.

Of course, there are things that these different fairy tribes hold in common, and there are also parallels with their cousins on the continent. For example, fairies have, in many parts of Britain and Ireland — or at least they did until recent times — the evil habit of stealing babies and replacing them with fairies disguised to look like the stolen child: this is the changeling tradition, referred to often in the pages that follow. There are also similar stories told about fairies in different regions. For instance, the tale of the broken spade — a broken tool is mended and a reward is given — appears in three different chapters in the present volume: Cumbria, Sussex and Worcestershire. But, and this is crucial, there are local variations even within these common traditions. The tale is told one way in Cumbria, where a human mends a fairy’s broken tool, and another way in Worcestershire, where fairies mend humans’ broken tools.

If Magical Folk offers an unashamedly local or regional take on fairylore, often while using exciting new sources, it also brings another valuable thing to the mix: contemporary traditions. It makes the point that fairies are still encountered in our time. In some areas — Ireland and Atlantic Canada stand out — we have fairy traditions dating back generations, beliefs that are still, in some quarters, taken seriously. In other areas — think of fairy money trees in Scotland, underwater gnome villages in Cumbria and pagan rituals at prehistoric stones on the Channel Islands — there are traditions that have only surfaced in the last few years; we might add fairy wings and fairy doors to this list. Some may want to ignore these late traditions as being inauthentic. But the truth is that believed, half believed or enjoyed, they stand as useful examples of modern fairylore: twenty-first-century successors to the elf bolts and fairy flights of our ancestors.

Notes

1 Thomas Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, 3 vols. (London, 1825-1828), III, xiii-xiv.

2 Anon, ‘Pallasgrean Petty Sessions’, Monday’, Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (4 Jan 1838), 4 excerpted from the Limerick Star .

3 Anon, ‘The Tipperary Witch’, The Spectator (1864), 1067-1068; Anon, ‘Witchcraft in Carrick-on-Suir’, Waterford Mail , 12 Sep 1864, 2.

4 Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (London, 2006).

5 Richard Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (Philadelphia, 2017), 5.

6 John Aubrey, Three Prose Works (Fontwell, 1972), 196.

7 5, 5: ‘but till ‘tis one o clock/ Our dance of custom round about the oak/ Of Herne the Hunter, let us not forget.’

8 Marjorie Johnson, Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society (San Antonio, 2014), 128.

9 Elise Innes, The Elfin Oak of Kensington Gardens (London, 1930).

10 Johnson, Seeing Fairies, 35.

11 Katharine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (London, 2002 [1967]), 157.

12 Fairy Census: ‘England (London). Female; 1980s* [‘1990s’]; 21-30; in woodland; with several other people, some of whom shared my experience; 3 am-6 am; two to ten minutes; never or almost never has a supernatural experience.’

13 Johnson, Seeing Fairies, 41.

14 Chapter on Yorkshire.

15 Chapter on Atlantic Canada.

16 Chapter on Devon.

17 Chapter on Irish America.

18 Chapter on Cumbria.

19 The data from almost 500 of these sightings has now been processed and will be released on Simon Young’s academia.eu site in January 2018. For further sightings fairyist.com/survey/ .

20 Fairy Census: ‘England (London). Chapter on Worcestershire.

21 Fairy Census: ‘England (London). ‘Ireland (Co. Dublin). Male; 1990s; 21-30; in open land (fields etc); with one other person who shared my experience; 9 pm-12 am; one to two minutes; never or almost never has supernatural experiences’.

22 ‘US (Texas). Female; 1970s; 0-10; in woodland; on my own; can’t remember time; many hours; regular supernatural experiences.’

FAIRY TRIBES

Channel Islands: The fairies of the Channel Islands include the pouques and the faiteaux. These island fairies are tied to local prehistoric monuments, which they both inhabit and guard. The Guernsey fairies particularly have a violent reputation: they are said to have slaughtered the first human inhabitants of the island in a dimly remembered invasion. The Jersey fairies are believed, meanwhile, to have escaped from human concerns to, of all places, the moon.

Cornwall: Across the Tamar the fairies are known as ‘piskeys’. These fairy vagabonds steal babies, and even cows from human neighbours. There are also, in Cornwall, knockers, the spirits of the tin mines. The fairy miners warn those at work of coming disasters and help them to find rich seams. Knockers followed, in the nineteenth century, the Cornish tin men to the mines of America. There they would become the most famous of all New World fairies.

Cumbria: Like their Scottish cousins to the north, Cumbrian fairies often raise hell. It might be a question of sabotaging a local railway, highway robbery, or shooting, for sport, arrows at human and bovine neighbours. They dwell in the great free-standing rocks that pepper the Lake District; and, occasionally, too, in Cumbrian caves. One man was only saved from being dragged off a horse and into their lairs because he had, in his pocket, some pages from a Bible.

Devon: The pixies of Devon, as the fairies are known there, are typically found in the wilds where they dwell in rocks and caves like the Pixies’ House. They are most famous for their tricks in pixy-leading. They disorient men or women and then take them on a merry dance through moors or woods until their human victims are ready to collapse from exhaustion. The only effective way to break this pixy-spell is to turn your pockets inside out and hope that the pixies will vanish.

Dorset: Fairies, goblins, pixies and poukes…. The fairy folk of Dorset go by many names. Legends tell how a number were driven out of the county by church bells: church bells act as fairy disinfectant. But the survivors get up to numerous tricks including pixy-riding, where they take out a horse in the night and have their fun racing it around the fields. The farmer knows his horse has been roughly used when he finds, in the morning, a sweating, restless steed with ‘elfknots’ woven into its mane.

Ireland: The Irish fairies are known as the sídhe, the ‘people of the mounds’. These powerful spirits kill or maim mortals who transgress their rules: don’t build a house on a fairy track; don’t fall asleep on a fairy fort; don’t throw slops out on passing fairies; don’t cut branches from a fairy tree…. Wily human neighbours, then, often leave small offerings for the sídhe, to keep them contented: including poteen and potatoes. Unusually Irish fairies are described as being of human size.

Isle of Man: There are a whole host of Manx fairies including the Buggane, the Fenodyree, the Glashtyn and the Mauthe Doog. Many accounts describe fairy music on the island including one horseman who heard, while crossing a river, one night, ‘the finest Symphony’ for three quarters of an hour. Manx fairies are clearly very demanding in musical terms. A human fiddler was left ‘bruised and hurt’ after playing tunes that offended the island fairies.

Orkney and Shetland: The trows are the fairy-folk of the northern isles. They trace their descent not to Celtic or Anglo-Saxon ancestors but to the trolls of Scandinavia: they arrived in Orkney and Shetland with the Vikings. They are known as ‘the grey folk’ and live in fairy mounds and have ‘long, dark, bedraggled hair’. Curiously, when seen by women they walk backwards and they are notorious for stealing things left out in the open by human neighbours.

Scotland: Fairies in Scotland are known as: hill folk, siths, fanes, the seelie and unseelie courts and the klippe. They live under aristocratic rulers and the wild landscapes in which they dwell seem to make them fiercer than their English kin. The Scots, sensibly, seek magical charms to keep the fairies away including anything iron, four leafed clovers, and burnt bindweed. Most at risk are human babies, which the Scottish fairies sometimes kidnap, leaving a decrepit fairy in their place.

Sussex: In the South Downs live the pharisees. These Sussex fairies have, as elsewhere in Britain, both helped and plagued their human neighbours. The most famous encounter with these little people came when poet and visionary William Blake, walking in his garden one night, ran into a fairy funeral. ‘I saw a procession of creatures, of the colour and size of green and grey grass-hoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose-leaf.’

Wales: The Welsh fairies are the tylwyth teg (‘the fair family’) or bendith eu mamau (‘their mother’s blessing’). The mortal enemies of the nonconformist clergy, who came to dominate Wales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Welsh fairies are seen dancing at oaks, their favourite trees, but they also sneak into human houses during poor weather. Woe betide the owners if clean water is not left out for them to wash themselves and their young in!

Worcestershire: The most remarkable feature of fairy life in Worcestershire is the frequent presence of fairy lights or will-o’-the-wisps. There is also Poake, the great grandchild of mischievous Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who Shakespeare heard of in his childhood in a neighbouring county, Warwickshire. Worcestershire fairies may also have been the inspiration behind J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits.

Travelling Fairies

Canada: The Atlantic Coast of Canada has more fairies than any other region of North America. A melting pot of the fey from different region of Western Europe are to be found including: elves, lutins, leprechauns, co-pixies, little-johns, dalladadas, hollies, jackies, mickadenies and dawnies. By whatever name they go, their greatest sport is to mislead human victims in the swamps and woods of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Only some stale bread in your pocket will keep them at bay.

Irish America: Relatively few Irish fairies crossed the great water at the time of the Famine as ‘the huddled masses’ of Ireland fled from hunger. Some even blamed the potato famine on the Irish fairies. But occasional migrant fairies from the old country are glimpsed in the New World from Irish taverns in New Hampshire to Irish tenements in Dubuque, while the banshee, of course, continues to warn Irish families of impending deaths in the Americas.

New England: Some intrepid European fairies made their way over to New England. We have records of pixies (probably from Devon) and bogles (from Scotland) in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century. These newcomers, though, had to come to terms with an older resident population of Indian fairies. Take, for example, the fearful Pukwudgy, who can transform himself into a forest animal and who lures travellers into swamps and over the edge of cliffs.

BIOGRAPHIES

Francesca Bihet is a PhD student at the University of Chichester and grew up on island of Jersey. Her area of research covers folklore, fighting and fairies, and explores the changes in the theoretical treatment of fairies by The Folklore Society between 1878 and 1945.

Dr Jenny Butler is based in the Study of Religions Department at University College Cork (UCC) where she teaches on new religious movements and Western esotericism. She received her PhD in folklore and ethnology from UCC. She is a specialist on folk religion and researches traditions about non-ordinary beings, such as fairies. She has carried out ethnographic research in Ireland on beliefs and attitudes about fairies, as well as a comparative ethnographic study of fairylore and legends connected to the landscapes of Ireland, Iceland and Newfoundland.

Laura Coulson studies folklore, mythology and folklore and maintains a blog, faeryfolklorist.blogspot.co.uk.

Jo Hickey-Hall is a Bristol folklorist, researcher and social historian with a long-held interest in the relationship between supernatural experience, local landscape, and oral tradition in rural communities. Born in Jersey and of Irish parentage, she received a masters degree in history from the University of Bristol on sídhe in Medieval Irish literature. Her research project Modern Fairy Sightings collects and preserves contemporary experiences and explores the resistant cultural taboo surrounding disclosure at scarlettofthefae.com.

Jeremy Harte is a researcher into folklore and archaeology, with a particular interest in sacred space and tales of encounters with the supernatural. He graduated from Cambridge University and worked in the archaeological section of the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester before training as a curator. At present he runs the Bourne Hall Museum at Ewell in Surrey. Jeremy has written widely on folklore, industrial archaeology and local history in Dorset. He has written several books and his Explore Fairy Traditions was winner of the Katherine Briggs Folklore Award (2005).

Dr Ceri Houlbrook (

EDITOR

) is an Early-Career Researcher in folklore and history at the University of Hertfordshire. She received a PhD in archaeology from the University of Manchester on the folklore and history of coin-trees in Britain and Ireland (forthcoming as a monograph, The Roots of a Ritual, from Palgrave Macmillan) and co-edited The Materiality of Magic (Oxbow, 2015).

Ronald M. James studied at the Department of Irish Folklore at University College, Dublin, and at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he was adjunct faculty while also serving as the State Historic Preservation Officer. His dozen books on folklore, history, architectural history, and archaeology include his The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation (University of Exeter Press, 2018). In addition, he has served as chairman of the USA National Historic Landmarks Committee.

Pollyanna Jones is a writer based in Redditch whose special interest is local Worcestershire history. She is also more widely interested in folklore traditions of Britain and Ireland, mythology, folk magic, and maintains a blog, pollyanna-jones.co.uk.

Stephen Miller’s research interests are Manx folklore and folk song in general, the historiography of British folkloristics, and the Scottish folklorists, William George Black and the Rev. Walter Gregor. He previously held a post at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and was an occasional lecturer at the University of Vienna.

Peter Muise has degrees in anthropology from Bates College and Brandeis University. He blogs weekly local folklore at newenglandfolklore.blogspot.com from his home near Boston, and makes frequent excursions in search of strange places and unusual stories. He is the author of Legends and Lore of the North Shore (2014) and has appeared on the History Channel’s Mysteries At The Museum.

Mark Norman is a folklore researcher and author based near Dartmoor in Devon. He is widely interested in folklore and tradition, specialising in black-dog folklore, and is the author of Black Dog Folklore (2016), the first academic monograph on the subject. He contributes articles to a wide variety of magazines and websites, is a committee member of The Folklore Society, and the creator and host of thefolklorepodcast.com, a twice-monthly podcast.

Jacqueline Simpson is one of Britain’s leading folklorists. She studied English literature and medieval Icelandic at Bedford College, University of London, and has been, at various times, editor, secretary, and president of The Folklore Society. She was appointed Visiting Professor of Folklore at the Sussex Centre of Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, at the University of Chichester (2010). She has a special interest in local legends — as opposed to international fairy tales — and has published collections of this genre from Iceland, Scandinavia in general, and England. Her books include The Folklore of Discworld (Corgi, 2009) with Terry Pratchett, The Lore of the Land (Penguin, 2005) with Jennifer Westwood, Icelandic Folktales and Legends (Penguin, 1971, 2004), and A Dictionary of English Folklore (OUP, 2000) with Steven Stroud. She lives in West Sussex.

Dr Richard Sugg has lectured on Renaissance literature at the universities of Durham and Cardiff. He has written articles on corpse medicine, cannibalism, vampires, witches, ghosts, poltergeists and mummies for newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, The Lancet, and Der Spiegel. In 2011 he and Tony Robinson made corpse medicines on Saturday night television. He is the author of many books, including Murder After