The Sky in Legend and Tradition The Fifteenth Legendary Weekend of The Folklore Society Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th September 2021 The Medieval Hall in Cathedral Close, Salisbury SP1 2EY The flying pigs are knocking on Heaven’s door while thunderbirds circle the Merry Dancers and a woman standing on the moon bends over Endymion. Dragons...
Dr Ceri Houlbrook (University of Hertfordshire), will talk about the Boggart of Boggart Hole Clough, Manchester. The Boggart was living quite happily in its nineteenth-century rural dell. But what happened when its rural dell became a Manchester suburb? Not far from the little snug smoky village of Blakeley, or Blackley, there lies one of the...
Following a recent documentary film portrait of the celebrated American folklorist and ethnologist Henry Glassie, ‘Henry Glassie: Field Work’, the Folklore Society are pleased to host a conversation with Henry himself and Doc Rowe, himself a dedicated field worker in folklore and tradition in the UK. We will host this event via Zoom and there...
Prof. Richard Jenkins (University of Sheffield) asks ‘Who was Mother Shipton? Was she a real person? How did she end up as the theme of a visitor attraction in Knaresborough, Yorkshire?’ This talk will trace the development of ‘Mother Shipton’ as a legendary figure: from the prophetess of seventeenth-century Civil War pamphlets, to the presiding...
Online talk by Dr Paul Cowdell (University of Hertfordshire), Tuesday 8 June 2021, 18:00–19:30 November 23rd is St Clement’s day. The patron saint of blacksmiths, his day was celebrated by processions, dinners, effigies, poetry and appeals for money at village forges and, more rowdily, at dockyard smithies. It also merged with similar celebrations 2 days...
The rescheduled Folklore, Learning and Literacies conference will be online, Friday 21 to Sunday 23 May 2021 Keynote speaker: Prof. Michael Rosen: ‘”Don’t say that!” – how my parents negotiated Yiddish.’ (Friday 21st) In this talk, Michael Rosen explores how his parents who had both come from Yiddish-speaking households, retained many Yiddish phrases and words...
An online talk for The Folklore Society by James H. Grayson (School of East Asian Studies, Sheffield University). A semiotic analysis of postage stamp designs incorporating folkloric themes will explore how governments use postal imagery for political purposes. Stamps are miniature government documents, the semiotic analysis of which reveals different ways in which governments have...
An online talk for The Folklore Society, by David Hopkin (Professor of European Social History, University of Oxford) Soldiers’ storytelling inculcated military values. Recorded by folklorists, their tales influenced literary developments in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Oral storytelling is often associated with ‘Mother Goose’ figures, elderly and female, but when folktale collecting started in the aftermath of...