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Seafarers and Sea-Fearing: Nineteenth-Century Maritime Folklore

  • 20/05/2025
  • 19:00-20:30
  • online talk
Oil painting by J.M.W. Turner, c.1810, of a sailing ship foundering in a heavy sea

J.M.W. Turner; via Wikimedia Commons

Seafarers and Sea-Fearing: Nineteenth-Century Maritime Folklore

A Folklore Society Online Talk

by Dr Karl Bell (University of Portsmouth)

Tuesday 20 May, 19:00 BST

Focusing on maritime folklore in the 19th-century Atlantic, this talk considers the ocean as both a natural and supernatural space, one full of signs, omens, and otherworldly encounters. Given the way mariners attempted to navigate nautical misfortune through magic, observances, and a rich body of occupational lore, this talk uses maritime folklore to show how seafaring and a fear of the sea were deeply entwined.

It also considers how 19th-century critics tried to frame a decline in maritime folklore, a supposed result of the period’s transition from sail to steam technologies. Yet maritime folklore continued, adapting and sometimes reviving in response to seafarers’ needs.

The talk concludes with some reflections on how maritime folklore offers us problematic but valuable insights into the marginalised views and concealed lives of 19th-century Atlantic mariners.

Dr Karl Bell is Associate Professor of Cultural and Social History at the University of Portsmouth, and co-director of its Centre for Port Cities and Maritime Cultures. His books include The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures (winner of the Katharine Briggs Award, 2013), The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780-1914, and The Perilous Deep: A Supernatural History of the Atlantic (forthcoming 2025).

Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code: log in to https://folklore-society.com/members-only to get the Promo Code) from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/seafarers-and-sea-fearing-nineteenth-century-maritime-folklore-tickets-1237684149609?

Image: ‘Shipwreck of the Minotaur’, more commonly known as ‘The Wreck of a Transport Ship’ , by J.M.W. Turner (c.1810); via Wikimedia Commons