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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 26, 2020 16:48:57 GMT
If you can get hold of a copy, I'd recommend Scottish Fairy Belief: A History by Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan (2001). It's "academic" (the authors are both historians at Scottish universities) but very readable.
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Post by helrunar on Dec 26, 2020 16:51:24 GMT
That's so cool, Miss Scarlett. I have a cult for Sandy Denny--have pretty much everything she ever breathed over (although I couldn't afford this massive box set that ran to around 19 discs that was issued of her work a few years back, so there may be a few items on that I don't have). Another good one is Bruton Town which she recorded with her band Fotheringay (which existed just for one year, in 1970). The only version on y.t. is this solo one from an early 70s concert recorded by the BBC. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeQiT5ZGiNgH.
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Post by helrunar on Dec 26, 2020 16:56:23 GMT
Thanks for the tip, Dr Strange.
Reading through the material Lady Gregory collected (I wonder if she herself knew shorthand, or had an assistant who knew it), "belief" doesn't seem quite the right word because so much of what is described is simply how people experienced things in their lives.
The story I can't get out of my head is how this one woman who had been taken by Themselves was told that she couldn't touch water again if she wanted to remain in the mortal realm. (And immediately I thought of basic human functions and hygiene and how she must have been preparing food and all sorts of other things--yikes.) Then one day she suddenly needed to wash her hands and forgot, and THEY got her again. There's no explanation or expansion beyond that simple statement--she was washing her hands, and she was GONE. A lot of the ways people would speak of it were quite terse, like this.
H.
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 26, 2020 17:56:38 GMT
Just pulled down my copy of Scottish Fairy Belief and read this paragraph in the concluding chapter -
"While we have been researching this book, we have met many people who have confided belief in fairies. One person told us that he encountered one of the fairfolk near the top of Schiehallion, another that fairies still occupy the 'Picts' Houses' on Skye. We have been assured that fairies intervene in human affairs and they have been cited in explanation of unusual phenomena, including illness. The need to explain, from a 'scientific' or 'rational' perspective, what fairies are and why people believe in them is something that this book has avoided. What is important is that they are real to those who believe in their existence or have experienced the phenomenon first-hand."
My mother (now in her 80s) once told me that her father (who died before I was born) would, in apparently complete seriousness, often claim in his later years to see fairies when out wandering in the hills of rural Caithness. I suspect Charles Bonnet syndrome (or maybe he discovered the local species of magic mushroom long before anyone else up there did) - but who knows?
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Post by Swampirella on Dec 26, 2020 17:57:59 GMT
Another good one is Bruton Town which she recorded with her band Fotheringay (which existed just for one year, in 1970). The only version on y.t. is this solo one from an early 70s concert recorded by the BBC. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeQiT5ZGiNgH. Thanks for this one too, I'll give it a listen.
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Post by ripper on Dec 26, 2020 18:48:13 GMT
Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People by Janet Bord is quite an interesting book as it deals with alleged sightings of fairies in modern times. The Bords, Colin and Janet, wrote a series of books in the 70s, 80s and 90s on paranormal subjects. Another book that might be of general interest by them is The Secret Country: Interpretation of the Folklore of Ancient Sites in the British Isles. Indeed, they seem to have written a number of books on the subjects of fairies and folklore, though my knowledge of this kind of thing is too thin to judge the merits of their writing.
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Post by Swampirella on Dec 26, 2020 19:38:16 GMT
Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People by Janet Bord is quite an interesting book as it deals with alleged sightings of fairies in modern times. The Bords, Colin and Janet, wrote a series of books in the 70s, 80s and 90s on paranormal subjects. Another book that might be of general interest by them is The Secret Country: Interpretation of the Folklore of Ancient Sites in the British Isles. Indeed, they seem to have written a number of books on the subjects of fairies and folklore, though my knowledge of this kind of thing is too thin to judge the merits of their writing. That one's fairly good but personally I prefer these two:
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Dec 26, 2020 19:45:02 GMT
Now they are discussing fairies. How did it come to this?
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Post by helrunar on Dec 26, 2020 20:24:41 GMT
The Fairy Investigation Society is quite active to this day and I doubt that any of their archives have ever been "lost"--the people who document these phenomena seem highly organized. A friend of mine wrote a paper that was published as a chapter in one of their books a couple of years ago. Pretty sure the Bords' book Mysterious Britain, a title enjoying new popularity amongst folks in psychogeography and hauntology circles, has been discussed here elsewhere--and either I myself, or another resident, posted this link sometime in the past year or two: www.artcornwall.org/interviews/Janet_Bord_Colin_Bord_Mysterious_Britain.htmH.
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 27, 2020 0:07:51 GMT
From the wikipedia page for the Fairy Investigation Society - "During its prime, in the 1920s and 1930s, the society organized meetings, lectures, and discussions for collecting evidence of fairy life. With World War II, however, the society's records were largely lost or destroyed. The society was inactive until 1949 when [Capt. Sir Quentin C.A.] Craufurd revived it with the help of Nottingham secretary Marjorie Johnson. Johnson wrote newsletters through the 1950s and helped create a survey of living fairylore, later published [in 2014] as Seeing Fairies. During the late 1950s there were well over a hundred members... According to folklore historian Simon Young, a condition of membership was a genuine belief in fairies. Craufard, for instance, was a pioneer of wireless technology with the Royal Navy who believed he had established communication with marsh elves on the outskirts of London, and that on one occasion they had told him where to dig for treasure. A 1960 newspaper article in the Sunday Pictorial ridiculed Marjorie Johnson, who began to withdraw from her role in the society. The society was only semi-active under her successor Leslie Shepard, based in Blackrock, Dublin, Ireland, finally closing down in the early 1990s. The society was reestablished online by [Simon] Young about 2014. It has an anonymous membership list and no longer requires members to believe in fairies." More from Simon Young (who I strongly suspect is also the author of much of the wikipedia article, though this is a lot more entertaining) - subscribe.forteantimes.com/blog/the-fairy-investigation-society
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 27, 2020 0:31:41 GMT
The Hexham Heads -
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Post by helrunar on Dec 27, 2020 18:35:00 GMT
Thanks, Dr Strange, for the interesting notes about the history of the FIS. The "Hexham Heads" report is intriguing. The story made me think of another well-known forgery of the period that had quite an odd history attached to it: www.thewica.co.uk/coven-of-athoThis article mentions the Dorset Ooser--if you poke around on the internet, you can find a fascinating (albeit typo-ridden) long report some individual compiled about the peculiar object years ago. cheers, Hel
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Post by dem bones on Dec 27, 2020 18:44:45 GMT
For those whose interests encompass fairies, hoaxes, and 'paranormal' panics; Joe Cooper's The Case of the Cottingley Fairies (Pocket, 1990) James Willis cites All Saints Church, Bow Brick Wood as a past fairy stronghold in Mysterious Milton Keynes (JMD Media, 2013) which might explain area's appeal to the Illuminati?
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Post by andydecker on Dec 27, 2020 19:02:21 GMT
These heads are extremly evil.
Never thought to read these words in the article of a normal paper, a quote of an academic. Only in a Guy N. Smith novel.
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Post by Dr Strange on Dec 27, 2020 21:13:36 GMT
Dr Ross gave a detailed account of her paranormal experiences with the Hexham Heads on the mainstream, early-evening BBC news magazine programme Nationwide in 1976 (while digging around on the net, I also learnt that this gets a mention in Scarred For Life, Volume 1: The 1970s - mainly because the BBC included a clip from Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf of a werewolf lunging at the camera, and had to apologize the following evening after complaints from parents saying they had scared the kiddies). Unfortunately, the interview footage now seems to be lost. Still can't remember where I first came across the story, but I think it could have been in a Peter Underwood book a couple of years later.
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