Where did you get your ideas?

It’s the basic question everyone asks, so here are my answers for this project.

Afanc egg seller song
Aside from “Who will buy?” from the musical Oliver! which owes a bit to Cherry Ripe by Robert Herrick, this ditty goes back to the histories of London street cries. The earliest one recorded is in a poem called The London Lickpenny by John Lydgate. I also found inspiration in what my notes say was The Cries of London, but there are so many books of that name I can’t be sure which one.

Basilisk
The basic definitions come from The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville who was borrowing a bit from Pliny. There’s not a great public domain translation of this book. The gold standard was edited and translated by Stephen A. Barney and others and was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. The farming of basilisks is the Schedula diversarum artium by Theophilus Presbyter.

Dragons and Sockburn Worm
The key text for these ideas was Chapter 8 of Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders by William Henderson. The Sockburn Worm is literally the Jabberwock from the poem of the same name by Lewis Carrol. (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Notes_on_the_folk-lore_of_the_northern_counties_of_England_and_the_borders/Chapter_8)

Eala
“The Twa Sisters” is a story found in many areas of Northern Britain. The version I have used here is Ballad 10 in The Child Ballads. They aren’t for children: their collector was Francis Child. My favourite version is sung be Loreena McKennitt on her album The Mask and the Mirror and is on Youtube at https://youtu.be/JsNJuhBfbPg

Fauns
The version of fauns we are dodging comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The version we are moving toward is basically the Piper at the Gates of Dawn from The Wind in the Willows. The Pardia are novel to this book, but based on the pard in the Bodelian Bestiary. Gambrinus’s myth turns up in Annals of Bavaria by Johannes Aventinus. There’s also an English folk song called The Ex-ale-tation of Ale which mentions him.

Grim, King of the Ghosts
Grim originally appears in a song called The Lunatick Lover. My favourite version is https://youtu.be/OWZbwsHhLZ4 Textually that can be traced back to Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, And Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets, (chiefly of the Lyric Kind.) Together With Some Few of Later Date. by Bishop Thomas Percy.
Grim was expanded in an anonymous book called Tales of Terror. Older versions claim to be by “Monk” Lewis, but he wasn’t the author. There’s a free pdf of it at https://books.google.com.au/books?id=MNgIAAAAQAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Art inspirations include Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death and Matthus Merian’s Todten Tanz.

Haid
The haid are just a variant of tiny faerie with a Welsh word for “horde” as their name. They come from a brief note in The Fairy Mythology by Thomas Keightley. (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41006/41006-h/41006-h.htm)

Kenidjack
This demon is lifted whole from Robert Hunt’s Popular Romances of the West of England. (https://archive.org/details/popularromanceso00huntuoft)

Laidly Toad Queen
The Laidly Toad is the villain from “The Laidly Worm of Spindlestone Heugh” which is a story from the English Borders. It was originally said to have been collected from a manuscript written by Duncan Fraser around 1270 by Reverend Robert Lambe, who sent it to Bishop Thomas Percy for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. It wasn’t published there but turned up in various other places: the version I used is from Rhymes of the Northern Bards, edited by John Bell. (https://books.google.com.au/books?id=ilkOAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false) It now seems unlikely Fraser existed and that the work is a more recent forgery, possibly by Lambe himself. I’ve also mixed in a little from a variant called “Kempe Owen”, which was collected in The Child Ballads.

Malkins
We have a heap of folk stories about speaking, social feline spirits. King o’ the Cats. turns up all over the place, but there’s some argument that Beware the Cat by William Baldwin, which is discussed in the Bestiary, predates and is the source for it. It is certainly the earliest recorded use of “greymalkin” to mean a a grey cat. The version of King o’ the Cats I used is a Cumbrian one collected in More English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs. (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/More_English_Fairy_Tales/The_King_o%27_the_Cats)

Milcha
Milcha is a minor character in The Tempest: or The Enchanted Island by John Dryden and William D’Avenant but she becomes more substantial over time. As special effects improve, she’s given more to do. By the time of Shadwell’s “operatic” version, a word which has changed meaning, there was an aerial ballet and she forms a sort of chorus with Ariel. Her wings are linked to her wrists in the drawing to match Ariel’s. His are needed in that position to do a stage trick, making the contents of a table vanish under his wings. It’s not directly linked, but when I was writing this, I listened to Island by Jane Rutter on loop. (https://youtu.be/zLczS-FXVHs)

Unicorn
This chapter’s approach is drawn from the quote in Shakespeare that appears in the text, from Timon of Athens. I tried writing something closer to the folklore in the Physiologus but it read as flat and slut-shaming, so we went another way.

Urban Wisps
Urban wisps are a play on the work of Victor Gruen, an architect on the 1950s. They cause Gruen transfer, a psychological state experienced in soulless shopping malls.

Waelcyrian
The Waelcyrian were bought to my attention by the Hampshire HistBites podcast, and their interview of Dr Eric Lacey. His chapter, ‘Wælcyrian in the Water Meadows: Lantfred’s Furies’, in Early Medieval Winchester: Communities, Authority and Power in an Urban Space, c.800-c.1200 is the key source for this section.

Whale Eater
I’ve been trying to write up this cryptid, the gorramooloch, for various games for years. This version’s original to this book. One plot hook comes from a 19th century song, The Barber’s News or Shields in an Uproar which doesn’t have a dragon in it, as the reported beast is a drunk sailor who has fallen overboard made increasingly deadly by rumour. The Pentamerone, which has a queen give birth after eating a dragon’s heart, is the source of another.