Icy Sedgwick's Blog, page 14

Shapeshifting Witches: From Witch to Hare and Back Again

Perhaps one of the most iconic scenes in Disney’s 1963 classic The Sword & the Stone is the magical duel. Merlin and Madam Mim start having a magical duel, with each changing form to try to best the other. Mim cheats, and Merlin finally defeats her, though this sequence is more inspired by the novel […]

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Shapeshifting Creatures of Folklore: Fairies, Selkies and Ghosts

Shapeshifting is an ancient ability that appears in cultures around the world across the ages. It appears in an array of ‘types’ of shapeshifting. Some creatures can simply shift their form due to a natural ability. Gods often change their form (hello, Zeus), but they can also change the form of others. Look at the […]

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The Folklore of Furniture: Beds, Tables and Chairs

Furniture tells us a lot about a period, people, or place. It’s solid, so it can often be the only tangible artefact left. It often bears the impression of human activity through use, and they tell stories. For example, you can see the botanical cabinet belonging to Mary Eleanor Bowes at Bowes Museum in Barnard […]

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The Christmas Rose: The Myth and Magic of the Black Hellebore

While holly, ivy and mistletoe might be the most obvious Yuletide plants, there is one more that bears a festive name – the Christmas Rose. Only it’s not a rose at all. It’s a hellebore. A black hellebore, to be precise. Black hellebore is actually named for the colour of its roots, not its petals […]

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Conifers and Christmas: The Folklore of Pine, Spruce and Fir Trees

Put ‘christmas trees’ into Google and it returns about 1,350,000,000 results. They’re an intrinsic part of the festivities, yet you actually have three main types of conifers to choose from: pine (Pinus), fir (Abies), and spruce (Picea). Oslo has sent a Norway spruce to London every Christmas since 1947, displayed in Trafalgar Square (Woolf 2020: […]

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The Folklore of Ivy: Christmas, Divinations, and Magic

A range of plants enjoy connections with Christmas, not least due to their status as evergreens. At a time of year when many plants have shed their leaves, these plants offer a welcome burst of colour. Ivy (Hedera helix) is no exception, and even features in Christmas carols such as ‘The Holly and the Ivy’. […]

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Folklore of British Caves: Treasure, Cannibals, and Brownies

There is something deeply primordial about caves, these strange spaces that allow us to move inside the earth. It’s hardly surprising that they’re often considered the entrance to the underworld, or that they become places to hide things. Caves are understandably replete with stories of treasure, lost graves, and hidden booty. Earlier in the week, […]

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Folklore of Tunnels: Hidden Networks and Lost Pipers

Tunnels seem to accrue more folklore than most. Perhaps it’s because we can’t see where they go when we can only see the entrance. Or perhaps we’ve been so primed by fiction to believe tunnels must lead somewhere that we love the idea of a secret world beneath our feet. Some tunnel legends are common […]

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Catacombs Folklore: Ghosts, Vampires & the Holy Grail

The concept of catacombs dates to first-century Rome, where the catacombs provided underground tombs. The Romans didn’t permit burial within the city walls, and while pagans cremated their dead, the Christians had to find other solutions. Jewish communities already used the catacombs and Christian communities adopted them in the 2nd century. They’d fallen out of […]

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Wizard’s Cave or Smuggler’s Cave: Treasure in Tynemouth!

Tynemouth Castle and Priory stands on a lonely promontory intruding into the savage North Sea. Legends tell of underground passages and dungeons below the Castle and Priory site. Among this network lies a cave, often known as Jingling Geordie’s Hole, Jingling Man’s Hole or the Wizard’s Cave. The entrance apparently lay on the north side […]

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