Archives: Digital Events

Blodeuedd’s Tale – Steph Bradley

Blodeuedd’s Tale

I was born to be an enchantress. Silver threaded Arianrhod herself wove my destiny along with that of her son Lleu Llaw Gyffes.

History remembers me as a temptress, an adulteress, even as an accomplice to murder.

It is time my story was heard. The world needs enchantment like never before.

Will you listen?

In this performance piece storyteller and writer Stephanie Bradley, sometimes known as WynnAlice, tells the tale of the fourth branch of the Mabinogion from the perspective of the Flower Queen who became the Owl.

Bio

Steph Bradley has been performance storytelling since 2009, though she has been creating tales since she was a child. Her reportoire ranges from re-workings of Brythonic myth to modern day folk tales woven from the deeds of the heroes of our times; those birthing a new-old way of being in the world. Based in Devon, she has told tales from Hungary in the east to N Wales in the west, from Cumbria in the north to Cornwall in the South.

Her book ‘Tales of Our Times’ tells the tale of her 2000 mile journey across England, in an old pair of red flip flops, collecting and sharing tales. She is currently writing a trilogy which weaves Brythonic myth and fiction to create an Ecotopia.

www.storyweaving.co.uk/performance/

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Women, Witches and the Wild Hunt – Sarah Lloyd Winder

Women, Witches and the Wild Hunt

The wild hunt raced through the sky, taking its monstrous regiment of women, led by the Lady, to terrorise the world. The witches of the Sabbat rode into the night and the folk traditions bend and weave this story like those classical paintings of beautiful and tempting half-naked women riding and fighting. And back in the real world is a woman, of varying degrees of beauty and youth, who gives you a love potion, a poultice for your boil and is also the local midwife. The chances that she flew on a broomstick with no knickers is fantastical, and the underwear part, probably medieval wishful thinking. But the folklore says that on epiphany, the Lady, with her wild hunt, would visit the chosen hedge witch and woe betide that woman if she has not laid out a feast and entertainment for her surprised guests.

As you talk one word leads to another and if you are not careful you find a story has been made. There is something so essential and comforting about sitting down and being told a story.

Bio

Sarah Lloyd Winder loves to tell stories. She is a professional performance storyteller who seeks out tales from around the world to tell at a variety of venues and situations. These are stories of beauty, horror, comedy, and the way people act. Some are funny, some are sad, but they all take us to the world of the story.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Serpent Stories told by David Heathfield

Serpent Stories told by David Heathfield

After vowing never to reveal his bride’s deadly secret, the young farmhand’s future prosperity would seem certain. World Storyteller David Heathfield tells The Serpent Wife, an old Ukrainian wisdom tale, and other strange Serpent Stories from around the globe.

Bio

World Storyteller David Heathfield is the author of Storytelling With Our Students: Techniques for telling tales from around the world (DELTA Publishing) and a host of articles and chapters on storytelling.

Author of Storytelling With Our Students

David Heathfield’s YouTube channel Storytelling Channel

www.davidheathfield.co.uk

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Let’s Go For a Walk!: Stories and Songs of Walking and Wandering – Pete Castle

Let’s Go For a Walk!: Stories and Songs of Walking and Wandering

Our earliest humanoid ancestors stood up on their hind legs about 3 million years ago and we’ve been walking ever since. About 90,000 years ago we walked out of Africa and spread to every corner of the globe. Many millennia later we domesticated camels and horses so a few select members of society could ride but most of us continued on shanks’s pony until the late 19th century. Now we are urged to leave our cars and walk for the sake of our health and the environment. Walking has become a pleasure and a recreation rather than just a means of moving from one place to another.

In this programme Pete will tell a selection of stories in which walking is the key to everything else which happens. The stories come from Britain, Europe and North America and cover a range of time from the Ancient Greeks to yesterday. He will also include a few traditional songs. He is spoilt for choice with those because they all seem to start “As I walked out one mid-summer morning…” or “As I was a-walking one morning in May…”

It will be a programme including the light and the dark, the serious and the humorous and a bit of the supernatural.

Speaker Bio:

Pete Castle was born in Ashford, Kent in 1947 but has lived in Derbyshire for most of his adult life and considers that home. He trained as a teacher but in 1978 gave that up to pursue a career as a professional folk singer playing folk clubs and festivals, which he has continued to do ever since. A few years into that career he discovered storytelling and was soon described as “a storyteller who sings half his stories”. He has always been willing to restrict himself to either songs or stories if asked but much prefers to do a mixture of the two. He has worked with every type of audience imaginable in a wide variety of venues from clubs to festivals, schools, libraries, in historical sites and many more. He has taught and lectured for local authorities, the WEA, the Workers Music Association and so on. He is one of the few English folk artists to be invited to perform at the Smithsonian Folk Festival in Washington DC.

Since 1999 Pete has edited the storytelling magazine Facts & Fiction. In 2010 he was invited by The History Press to write Derbyshire Folk Tales for their county folk tales series. To his surprise he enjoyed being an author and followed it with Nottinghamshire Folk Tales (2012); Where Dragons Soar, animal folk tales (2016); and most recently Folk Tales of Song and Dance (2021)

Pete has always enjoyed walking and has led many story walks. The open air gives a tale a different ambiance. This programme will hope to bring that atmosphere back to your screen.

Curated and Hosted by

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website http://www.amyhale.me.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Tales from the back of the Apothecary’s Cabinet – Amanda Edmiston

Tales from the back of the Apothecary’s Cabinet

A look into the dark recesses of The Very Curious Herbal!

Many herbal stories shed light on benevolent remedies, but what lurks at the back of the Apothecary’s cabinet?

Join herbal storyteller Amanda Edmiston (Botanica fabula) as we travel back in time and dust off the dark green bottles in this piece, inspired by the work done towards the end of the Scottish witch trials by the first woman to publish a herbal: Elizabeth Blackwell.

It leads participants through a tangled world of fairy tales, folklore, magic, social history and herbal remedies using storytelling techniques to explore tastes, look at traditional remedies and share stories… do you dare join us?

Speaker Bio:

Amanda Edmiston ‘A dyed in the wool storyteller’, former student of herbal medicine: Amanda Edmiston (Botanica Fabula), comes from a long line of storytellers, plant people, writers and artists. 

Over the past twelve years her herbal storytelling has taken her on an incredible journey, she has woven words for Chelsea Physic Garden in London, taken Scottish folklore and regional plant use and legends to the National Museum of Rural Life and the Ashmolean museum in Oxford, created new fairy tales to share the experiences of staff and patients at a The Crichton, a former mental hospital and shared historical secrets concealed within stories at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Glasgow. She has also collected stories and memories of plant use from across rural Scotland with her Kist in Thyme projects.

Amanda’s first book “A Time Traveller’s Herbal” is being published by David and Charles in time for Hallowe’en 2023

For more about Amanda and her work see her website: www.botanicafabula.co.uk

Or follow her stories on social media Facebook Twitter and Instagram

Curated and Hosted by

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website http://www.amyhale.me.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

The Green Children of Woolpit: fairies or lost children? – Zoom talk with John Clark

In this illustrated Zoom lecture, John Clark, formerly curator of the medieval collections at the Museum of London, investigates the story of the two ‘Green Children’ who suddenly appeared ‘as if out of the ground’ in the Suffolk village of Woolpit in the middle of the 12th century.

The story of the Green Children of Woolpit was reported as fact by two medieval historians. It has often been treated as a ‘Suffolk folktale’, and mined for information on medieval beliefs about the nature and appearance of ‘fairy-folk’ and the location of an ‘otherworld’. Medieval historians have not been concerned whether it really happened, but have seen it as a key to understanding the motives of the two chroniclers who recorded it. Other recent researchers have tried to find a core of historical truth – their explanations range from the down-to-earth to the extraterrestrial.

The tale has been popular ever since an English translation of Ralph of Coggeshall’s original Latin account was published by Thomas Keightley in his The Fairy Mythology in 1850. It has been retold many times, from collections of Suffolk folktales and stories for children to modernist poetry, from a village pantomime and school plays to psychedelic rock music. In the 1950s Benjamin Britten planned an opera on the subject, but never completed it. It has inspired modern novelists, who have reworked the story in settings ranging from Ukraine in the 17th century and northern England in the early 19th century, to modern Arizona.

Why is this story so endlessly fascinating? Were the children really strays from a subterranean otherworld where the sun never shone? Why were they green?

John Clark, for many years curator of the medieval collections at the Museum of London, has long been interested in byways of medieval history, and the ‘wondrous events’ that serious medieval chroniclers recorded. He has a forthcoming book on the subject of this lecture in preparation, which has the working title: The Green Children of Woolpit: Strangers in a Strange Land.

Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward 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 folklore-strewn first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you miss the event on the night – the next day we will send you a recording that will be valid for two weeks.

[Image adapted from an illustration in Randolph Caldecott’s 1879 ‘Babes in the Wood’.]

Across Thirteen Rivers and Seven Oceans – Kerima Mohideen

Across Thirteen Rivers and Seven Oceans

A young king, who wants to be a good leader, sets off on a journey to find the wise and beautiful princess who lives beyond the thirteen rivers and seven oceans. His guide, a learned parrot tells stories that help him to see the injustices suffered by the people he rules. Deeply troubled, he is anxious to heal the kingdom. But is he the right person to do it? The parrot invites the princess to tell the most powerful story of all; a true story that opens the king’s eyes to previously unimagined possibilities. But it is the people who have the most important lesson of all to teach him.

This story of a young man’s journey to wisdom and a wise people’s struggle for justice is explored through folktales and true stories from South Asia.

Created and performed by Kerima Mohideen these stories address issues of global heating, climate justice, land rights, gender and inequality

Bio:

Kerima Mohideen is a trained storyteller and educator. She trained at the School of Storytelling at Emerson College where she created her first hour long storytelling performance, If the Trees could Speak which she has performed at meetings about the rights of Indigenous people in India at Amnesty International, the School of Oriental Studies and the Brunei Gallery (SOAS) and also as a standalone performance at the Oxford Storytelling Festival, Beyond the Border, A Bit Crack in Newcastle and several other storytelling clubs. Before training as a storyteller, she worked as an English and Humanities teacher in inner London schools and have many years’ experience creating materials to develop oracy and literacy skills and to raise awareness and stimulate discussion about colonialism, gender and the environment.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

The Norse Myths that Shape The Way We Think – Professor Carolyne Larrington

The Norse Myths that Shape The Way We Think

Professor Carolyne Larrington will talk about her new book – a fresh look at the stories at the heart of Norse mythology, exploring their cultural impact right up to the present day.

The heroes and villains of Norse mythology have endured for centuries, infiltrating art, opera, film, television and books, shape-shifting – like the trickster Loki – to suit the cultures that encountered them. Through careful analysis of the literature and archaeology of the Norse world in her book, Carolyne Larrington takes us deep into the realm described in the Icelandic sagas, from the gloomy halls of Hel to the dazzling heights of Asgard. She expertly examines the myths’ many modern-day reimaginings, revealing the guises that have been worn by the figures of Norse myth, including Marvel’s muscled, golden-haired Thor and George R.R Martin’s White Walkers, who march inexorably southwards, bringing their eternal winter with them.

This sophisticated yet accessible guide explores how these powerful stories have inspired our cultural landscape, from fuelling the creative genius of Wagner to the construction of the Nazi’s nationalist ideology. Larrington’s elegantly written retellings capture the essence of the original myths while also delving into the history of their meanings. The myths continue to speak to such modern concerns as masculinity and environmental disaster – after the inevitable, apocalyptic ragna rök, renewal comes from the roots of Yggdrasill, the World Tree.

Bio:

Professor Carolyne Larrington teaches medieval English literature at St John’s College, Oxford. She studied medieval English language and literature at St Catherine’s College, Oxford and has a DPhil on Old Norse and Old English wisdom poetry. Her research interests range widely. She primarily works in Old Norse-Icelandic and Arthurian literature, but Arthurian literature in particular is a European phenomenon and so she writes about romances composed in Old French, Middle High German, Italian, and Old Icelandic-Norwegian. She has a number of recent publications on the subject, including the popular guide The Norse Myths from 2017.

Carolyne also writes on medievalism and folklore, in 2015 publishing The Land of the Green Man. A BBC Radio 4 series based on this was broadcast in 2015 and can be heard here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06b8vxv . With Dr Fay Hield of the University of Sheffield, she was Co-Investigator on an AHRC-funded research project ‘Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies’. This involves working with creative artists – musicians, poets, painters, photographers – to produce new mediations of tales from British folk traditions about fairies. Also in 2015, Carolyne wrote Winter is Coming: the Medieval World of Game of Thrones, exploring the historical inspiration behind the fantasy phenomenon. You can hear a short talk she gave at the Ashmolean Museum on the book at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjlxMT3Pt1o  Her most recent book on Game of Thrones, All Men Must Die: Power and Passion in Game of Thrones was published in January 2021.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Mythical Monsters of Greenland: The creepy and colourful creatures of the fjords – Maria Kreutzmann

Mythical Monsters of Greenland: The creepy and colourful creatures of the fjords.

As Greenland and the Arctic have gained a greater place on the world map, interest in the Arctic part of the Danish Kingdom is growing, and the presentation of Greenlandic mythical creatures is a taste of some of the things that can be experienced on the world’s largest island. Many of the Greenlandic mythical figures have had to undergo great change over time, to adapt to a modern Greenland that is just now re-discovering itself.

Maria will start with a short history of Greenland, and then talk about her own background and where the interest in monsters began and about the making of the book “Bestiarium Groenlandica – an illustrated handbook and Greenlandic mythical creatures, spirits and animals” as well has her new book “Mythical Monsters of Greenland – a mini-guide to the arctic explorer”, and how monsters are actually caught in modern Greenland – and why a good scare is essential during the long winter months in the Arctic! How have Greenlandic mythical figures survived to the present day, and why are superstitions part of most Greenlanders’ daily lives in a modern world? She will talk about the most famous of Greenlandic mythical creatures such as the Mother of the Sea, the Mountain Walker, the Sun and the Moon and many others, and how the tupilak went from feared vengeance monster to fabulous merchandise.

Bio:

Maria Kreutzmann was born and raised in Greenland, where she spent her childhood chasing monsters in the capital of Nuuk. She has since lived, studied and worked in the United States, England and Denmark, and completed her BAC in Computer Graphic Arts at The Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark in 2012.

She moved back to Greenland in 2017, where she completed her first book “Bestiarium Groenlandica – an illustrated guide to the mythical creatures, spirits and animals of Greenland” which was published by Milik Publishing in 2018. “Mythical Monsters of Greenland – a mini-guide to the arctic explorer” was released through her own company in 2022.

She now works full-time disseminating Greenlandic mythology and culture to curious souls everywhere, through the medium of books, workshops, talks and illustrations produced through her company Glaciem House.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Service magic in the age of the witch hunts – Dr Tabitha Stanmore

Service magic in the age of the witch hunts

In November 1635, a woman named Margery Paule was invited into the house of a Mistress Godfrey of Ely. Godfrey wanted to know whether she was with child and she hoped that Margery, who was well known as a cunning woman, would be able to tell her. However, Margery got more than she bargained for as she settled herself in Godfrey’s front room. Godfrey’s husband Thomas was home, and he wasn’t happy to see Margery. Indeed, he took ‘her by the shoulder and asked her what shee did there you witche, and kicking her once or twice, did fflinge her against the threshold’. Margery fled the house while Thomas yelled threats at her back.

This vignette of violence is what we might expect from England in the seventeenth century, when witch trials were part of the norm. What might surprise us, though, is what happened next. After Margery limped home, bruised and shaken, she resolved to take Thomas Godfrey to court for assault. And her neighbours rallied round: they came forward to testify that although Margery was a skilled fortune-teller, she didn’t deserve Thomas’ ill-treatment.

In a time of religious fervour and heightened fear of witches, how is it that Margery felt empowered enough to prosecute her attacker? Using her case as a starting point, this talk will take us through the murky world of service magic – practical magic performed for a client in return for a fee – in the early modern period. We will see what role service magic played in everyday life and explore how it was treated at the height of the witch hunts. In doing so, we will discover more tolerance – even celebration – of magic than you might expect.

Bio:

Dr Tabitha Stanmore is a historian of medieval and early modern magic. She is a postdoctoral researcher on the Leverhulme Seven County Witch Hunt Project, investigating the so-called Matthew Hopkins trials in 1640s England. He first book, Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service magic in England from the later Middle Ages to the early modern period, was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2022 and Cunning Folk: Life in the era of practical magic will be published with The Bodley Head in 2024.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day