She discusses that one!

Rough Music: Folk Customz, Transgression & Alternative Britian by Liz Williams

Enjoyed Liz Williams’ lively account of the transgressive aspects of British folk customs past and present. #folklore

Queen of the Hum. An owl with big green-pupilled eyes looking out at the viewer, an electricity pylon behind the owl. Oak leaves and oak flowers surround the owl on their left and right. Linocut, white, black and green, Maria Strutz

3.05 am

Owl eyes
Bat wings
Moon dance
Night things
- Siana Bangura
#OwlishMonday

Hope you enjoy it!

You can read my piece exploring the mythic and folkloric roots of Peter Pan in the new issue of Hellebore!

The Long Neolithic is a fever. It infects all of us stone botherers – whether we are archaeologists or lithic pilgrims. None are free of its symptoms. The call to visit, that palpable feeling ongoing ceremony when you walk into a stone circle. – Dr. K. Brophy #StandingStoneSunday

Small standing stones in field.

At Stanton Drew Stone Circles, Somerset, July 2023. #StandingStoneSunday

Clare and Tess at Stonehenge in the 2009 adaptation.

‘The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway.’ — Thomas Hardy, 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' (1891) #BookWormSat

Thanks, Paul!

Listen now: Dr. Paul Robichaud explores how ancient monuments have been reimagined across the centuries in folklore, literature, art and popular culture with New Books Network

🔉 buff.ly/2eciBPl
📚 buff.ly/40Xse4B

I’ll never forget watching The Wicker Man with my outer Hebridean mum. “I just don’t know where there got all that wicker from”

Hope to visit one day!

Album sleeve above spinning record.

Now listening: Justin Hopper & Sharron Kraus with The Belbury Poly, ‘Chanctonbury Rings’ (Ghost Box, 2019)

Just came out!

Hookland was made by Soviet science fiction and cosmonauts. It was made by pulp novels my mother didn’t want me to read, but that my Aunt Barbara still lent me. Made by countless bad films surreptitiously watched on an old black and white TV. It has been shaped by a refusal to sneer at the work of Stephen King because Salem’s Lot was brilliant when I read it at 11 and still is. In fact, it has been shaped by a refusal to sneer at anything that generated a sense of sublime, awe and terror in childhood – even being forced to perform interpretive dance to Tomita. It has been made by brilliant writers – Aickman, Machen, Jackson – and it has been made by bad ones. It owes large debts to comics, goth, punk and movie soundtracks that is will never repay. Its substitute parents are free public libraries and Radio 4. It comes with a childhood place soaked with fear of ghosts and UFOs, it comes from a place of love for those exact same engines of terror. It comes from a revulsion for how psychogeography has increasingly became an academic and art language that excludes people from their own primal experience of landscape. It comes for a raging dislike of commodity writing about place and nature. It comes from an absolute refusal to allow fascists to easily occupy their cherished grounds of myth and folklore. It comes from the cunning, the ghost soil, the landscape of England as experienced by this broken body for five long decades. It comes from being a Fully-grown Changeling. Fay Godwin, Paul Nash and Dame Laura Knight are always muttering about it with disapproval in the imagined afterlife. Nothing in it is made up, just remembered differently. It was designed to be a permissive space, a common ground where people could explore and find their own hauntings. You all own it, you all make it. You are all marching with the spirits of dead spaceman, wood sprites and a thousand lost childhoods. You are all scuffling up your memories, your own stories as you navigate across th…

Today's answer to What is Hookland?

Cover of "Fairies: A History" by Francis Young

This is far and away the most comprehensive book on fairy phenomenon and belief that I've read. @drfrancisyoung.bsky.social combines his strengths as folklorist and historian to write a book that is respectful toward fairy belief and deeply researched. Enchanting in every sense.

Carnac alignments labelled as Caesar's Camp on de Robien's map of the Morbihan.

According to 18th century Breton antiquarians, local tradition identified the stone alignments at Carnac as the site of Caesar’s camp during his battle with the local Veneti tribe, from which the city of Vannes takes its name. #megaliths #folklore

🎨 Christophe-Paul de Robien (1750s)

Live footage from inside the Bluesky server closet

Crossroads: Folk Horror in the United States

Arrived today! Folk horror, US style.

There is a Hookland dialect word I am most fond of and find inordinately useful – path-doubt. It refers to the uncertainty of looking down the way and not knowing if the folk you can glimpse are flesh and blood or phantom flicker. – #CLNolan #WOTD

Pan (the Piper at the Gates of Dawn) holding his pipes and staring intently at the viewer.

‘The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly stamping his foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the woodside on a summer noon trolling on his pipe until he charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen.’
— R.L. Stevenson, ‘The Pipes of Pan’ #FolkloreThursday

🎨Arthur Rackham

John Mills as Quatermass.

‘Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round
If you lose your hat it will never be found
So pull your britches right up to your chin
And fasten your cloak with a bright new pin
And when you are ready, then we can begin
Huffity, puffity, puff…’ — Nigel Kneale, ‘Quatermass’ (1979) #WyrdWednesday

Album sleeve above spinning record.

Sad to read of the death of Moya Brennan, singer of Clannad. I love their early folk stuff and their soundtrack for ‘Robin of Sherwood’ is pure gold.

Yes, and it undermines what I want my students to learn to do in my classes. Ah, well!

It’s more complicated than it seems, in part because no AI detector is accurate enough to prove AI usage; usually though the limitations of AI generated text are enough to prevent the paper from meeting the assignment requirements.

I'm not sure which are worse, the student papers that are completely AI-generated or the ones where the AI-generated text has been tortured like a prisoner who won't confess to the Inquisition.

My experience as a Canadian teaching at a non-selective US college is that US academia is a rigid status hierarchy. I have a Ph.D. from Toronto and taught at an Ivy League school before taking my current position, not knowing the consequences; the snobbery at national conferences is also palpable.

The original and rarely seen 'Train Landscape' by Eric Ravilious. Later adapted by his wife Tirzah into the image we all know today.

And he knows it!