Fairy Encounters in Medieval England: Landscape, Folklore and the Supernatural

Start date: 21st Oct 2024
End date: 21st Oct 2024
Cloisters, Bishop Otter Campus, University of Chichester, College Lane, Chichester, Bishop Otter Campus
Organiser: The Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction
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Fairy Encounters in Medieval England: Landscape, Folklore and the Supernatural
Jeremy Harte
Monday 21st October 2024, 5:30-6:30 p.m., Cloisters
Bishop Otter Campus, University of Chichester

Whether manifesting as fairies, revenants, local saints or fiends, medieval fairies came in stock types: goblins, lovers, hunters, pygmies, dogs, indescribable shape-shifting objects. Just as they had preferred forms, so they appeared in particular places. The tradition of English supernatural place-names, never before gathered into a corpus, matches the medieval texts to show what places were haunted and why. The dark pools into which otherworldly things were exorcised, the paths on which they led travellers astray, the hills onto which they descended in search of people to command and seduce, and the meadows where they danced – all these can be found on the cognitive map of the peasantry.

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