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The Katharine Briggs Lecture and Book Award 2025

  • 11/11/2025
  • 18:30
  • Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH

Terry Adrian Gunnell by Art Bicnick

The Folklore Society’s Katharine Briggs Lecture and Book Award 2025 will take place on Tuesday 11 November, 6.30pm, at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH.

Our lecturer this year is Professor Terry Gunnell, Professor Emeritus in Folkloristics at the University of Iceland, who will talk about ‘Returning the Legends to the Landscape and the Storytellers: The ever-increasing benefits of digitalising the North Atlantic Folk Legend Archive’. This lecture will outline the developments that have taken place over the last couple of decades with regard to the Icelandic (and now North Atlantic) on-line Sagnagrunnur database which now includes information on over 12000 legends (including both printed legends and sound recordings) from Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Shetland and Orkney. As will be demonstrated, the digitalisation of this material and its close connection to a mapping programme has enabled a wide range of new possibilities for examining distribution, temporal change, and diversity. Not least, in close association with the ever- increasing digitalisation of original manuscripts (including letters between collectors and editors), this work is helping us bring the legends back to the landscape and the original performance contexts of the stories in question.

Tickets for this events will be on sale soon.

Image: Terry Adrian Gunnell by Art Bicnick