The April talks (and most of the book groups) were dedicated to folklore, folk music and folk tales from a range of traditions: from Indo-Carribean folklore and horror to British and Irish traditional songs.
This was one of our most popular months with lots of people signing up to and attending the talks. Folklore always has that pull and appeal. We’re all here because we love a bit of Gothic and horror but, for how many of us did that interest start with folklore? Stories told half-laughing or half-serious by friends and family, shared around fires and under blankets. Book rich with illustrations, some delightfully cosy and others creepingly disturbing. I feel like we all have that memory of that one book for children where the illustrations became the stuff of nightmares. For me, some of my delight in macabre tales, tragedy and perpetual gloom came from the folk-songs I delighted in listening to and singing from childhood. Full of cruel faeries, weeping ghosts, tragic lovers, stormy nights and a panoply of almost every kind of death you can imagine. They are still one of my favourite things and if you listen very closely as I drive past you will hear me wailing mournfully in the privacy of my car about my lover being dragged off to sea or my wife returning as a ghost sick to death of me weeping at her grave. You can imagine how delighted I was that we were joined by Lily Bentley for an exploration of bodily transformation in traditional songs in our third talk of the month!
Despite having talks that spoke about completely different eras and places, there were fascinating links between them. Transformation came up as a key theme repeatedly, whether it was the transformation of men to dragons via having their faces ripped off in Norse Sagas or the more mundane decision of travelling musicians to make a harp of the bones and hair of a murdered woman (my idea of what ‘mundane’ is may have been permanently damaged by imbibing too much Gothic too young!) Another theme that came up, introduced in Tyler Sookralli’s first talk of the month on ‘Navigating Horror in Culturally Hybridised Communities’, was the ways in which different beliefs and traditions intertwine in folklore in ways which build up complex layers of meaning ripe for reproduction or rewriting in contemporary retellings (or, in the case of folk music, performances). Tyler looked at how hybridized communities draw from and rework influences from a range of places. Scarlette-Electra LeBlanc explored how a range of folkoric beliefs and traditions about specific wells translates into Gothic and ghostly tales about wells. In Lily Bentley’s talk on folk-music and Natalie Hopwood’s talk on Norse Sagas, we looked at the way similar motifs, images, transformations, and concerns re-echo across various chronicles, gathering meanings (or refusing them) as they go. A slightly less expected theme, perhaps, was the amount of water that ended up seeping into our talks. Water came up in wells (obviously), but also in tales of folkloric restrictions, in seas that swallowed the dead, separated the living, or acted as the abodes of creaturs beyond human ken. I’m no scholar of the sea or of the littoral or of the wet, but I was fascinated by the roles played by seas, rivers, lakes, wells and maybe even the odd pond across our talks this month.
As always, we supported our scholarly explorations of folklore by our book group choices. Some were obvious choices which let us interact with the specific content of the talks. For our week on folksongs, we read and listened to a range of versions. You can too!
Selection of folk songs. You can listen to the playlist here
The Unquiet Grave – read here
Tam Lin – read here (there are A LOT of versions, you don’t have to read them all!)
The Selkie of Sule Skerry – read here
The Cruel Sister – read here
Polly Vaughan – read it here (you have to scroll far down to get to the different versions)
For our study of wells in folklore and ghostly tales, we also got to read through some of the stories discussed in the lecture. A cluster of tales where wells appear in a range of guises, offering curses, surrounded by ghastly undead, or acting as potential spaces of healing and dubious-dealings. You can read them too!
‘The White Flag’ by Sabine-Baring Gould (1904)- Read it here
‘The Wailing Well’ by M R James (1927) – Read it here
‘The Wishing Well’ by E F Benson (1929) – Read it here
We also read a collection of folk-horror by Antonija Mežnarić which comes highly recommended. Mistress of Geese featured 5 stories drawing on Croatian folklore. Brace yourself for some body horror!
Less related to our opening talk of the month, because not drawing exclusively on folklore, we decided to dive into the broader world of Caribbean speculative fiction by reading the Caribbean special edition of Strange Horizons, which you can dip into here
If you missed any of the talks this month, you can catch up (as always) here!
First up was Tyler Sookralli talking Folkoric Frankensteins: Navigating Horror in Culturally Hybridized Communities. The talk explored Indo-Carribean and Métis folklore and writing, looking at the translation into horror today with lots and lots of fascinating reading recommendations.
Our second talk of the month was by Scarlette-Electra LeBlanc on Eerie Tales of Wells and Springs: Changelings, Creatures, and Curses. The talk explored real-folklore and the ways in which folkloric understandings of wells manifest in different gothic or ghostly tales by well-known authors like M R James.
The third talk of the month was on traditional music. Lily Bentley joined us to talk Singing Bones: Bodily Transformation and Body Horror in British and Irish Traditional Songs. You may, or may not, be surprised by how many bones get a little bit vocal in folk music
The final talk of the month, we dived right back in time to talk Norse Sagas with repeat speaker Natalie Hopwood. The talk was called Eyes without a Face: Body Horror, Transformation, and fear in Old Norse Sagas and it really does what it says on the tin so if you’re a bit squeamish, keep a pillow handy! There are no bloody visuals really but there are some very cute dragons! (You may not agree with all of them being cute… the Gothic may have got me again because why do I find the one of a little dragon climbing up a man and eating his face so delightful?)
I hope you have fun diving into some of the watches and reads from this month. Let me know in the comments what your thoughts are and what patterns jumped out to you!
Romancing the Gothic 