Dunsany fragment: The Injudicious Prayers of Pombo the Idolater
I’ve been saying in various episodes the next Dunsany will be Tale of Pombo the Idolater. The problem with that is that the plot hooks it offers overlap strongly with the Three Literary Men. They seem to have been written as companion pieces, and so I don’t want to bore listeners with the same set…
Read MoreOops: episode 67 transmitted early.
I pressed the wrong button and the episode for August 26 has gone live early. I’ll be putting the notes up closer to the day. I also plan to replace it with an episode on Cornish mermaids. So – accidental extras!
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Faeries of Cornwall : Four More Tribes
This is the first time I’ve done a two part episode. Last week I covered Cornwall’s Small People, who are the faerie tribe with the greatest footprint in Hunt’s Popular romances from the west of England. This week, the other four of Hunt’s tribes. I’d repeat that Hunt’s taxonomy clearly doesn’t include at least two…
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Faeries of Cornwall : Introduction and the Small People
This is the second in series of posts designed to flesh out Cornwall as a setting for Ars Magica troupes. . It uses as its core text Popular romances of the west of England; or, The drolls, traditions, and superstitions of old Cornwall by Robert Hunt. Hunt divides Cornish faeries into five types: small people, spriggans, piskies, buccas…
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Frostiana
Sometimes the Thames freezes over. It was more common in the Eighteenth Century, when temperatures were a little colder than now, and the bridge over the river had pylons more closely placed. People held markets on the frozen river. During the final frost fair in 1814, a book was printed on the ice. I’ve gone through it…
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Dunsany fragments: The probable adventure of three literary men
Let us continue our supposition that the works of Lord Dunsany are the reminisces of a redcap recorded, perhaps, in The Book of Places You Must Not Go. First, the story: the version given in the podcast was released into the public domain through Librivox by Sandra Cullum When the nomads came to El Lola…
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Cornwall : Graveyard of Giants
Announcing a new column for Games From Folktales. Once a month, you’ll get some Cornish material. At the end I hope it’ll assemble into something like a gazetteer you can plug into Heirs to Merlin and the Vanilla Covenant project. For those wanting to play along my source text is Popular romances of the west of England;…
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Proportionality bias and the creation of faerie roles
One of the cognitive fallacies which fuels real-world conspiracy theories is proportionality bias. This suggests that large effects need to have large causes. At the most extreme, Descartes suggested a God was necessary because there were minds, so something greater than a mind need to cause the mind. Hermetic magic says that there needs to…
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