As an undergraduate, we’d read Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene. The professor explained how the Red Cross Knight represented St. George, the patron saint of England, and his defeat of the dragon represented the triumph of British Protestantism over the presumed errors of ‘superstitious’ Catholicism. Twenty years later I found myself in an Orthodox church … More King Under the Mountain: St. George of England
It’s Good Friday on the Orthodox calendar, and I give you a short poem from Kuno Meyer’s Ancient Irish Poetry. The Crucifixion At the cry of the first bird They began to crucify Thee, O cheek like a swan! It were not right ever to cease lamenting— It was like the parting of day from … More Ancient Irish Poetry: The Crucifixion
In 1887, Lady Wilde published Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. Here is one of those selections,”A Prayer Against The Plague:”Poem? Prayer? Charm? Superstition? I’ll let you decide.
I was about three chapters into V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic when Michael borrowed it from me. It was suspenseful. It was a page-turner. It wasn’t easy to relinquish. I decided that when I returned to it, I would focus on the craft of writing, especially in the first ~50 pages. I would … More Learning Suspense from A DARKER SHADE OF MAGIC
A boisterous red-haired older sister attempts to trap a leprechaun to prove to her skeptical little brother that leprechauns are real. She exuberantly creates Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions to pursue the leprechaun. Characters’ expressions are expertly illustrated. Delightful vocabulary and occasional internal rhyme. Some Fenians might object to the overuse of the four-leafed clover rather than … More Three Ways To Trap A Leprechaun {Book Review}
They don’t look very Christian—those strange faces made of leaves, and those women displaying cartoonishly enlarged genitals on the walls of medieval churches. In his article for First Things, British folklorist and historian Francis Young makes a compelling argument that the odd, seemingly pagan expressions of Christianity that are found throughout Europe have more to do … More Very Strange Expressions of Christianity
“Every night when he says his prayers, he prays for the fairies, that they’ll be saved on the last day”—Eddie Lenihan, contemporary Irish storyteller Read more
In our news-oriented and social media society, uncivil and anti-social events seem to predominate. I recommend The Only Plane in The Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 with a little bit of the armchair historian, but mostly for its catalog of everyday courage and quiet affirmations of dignity which occurred that day. Here are some … More Simple Courage and Everyday Humanity
We’ve all heard stories of near misses: someone reschedules a flight on a hunch or whim and avoids a disaster. We’ve heard stories of ignored intuition: Abraham Lincoln reportedly didn’t want to attend Ford’s Theatre on the night of his assassination. Other tales are rare or nonexistent: what if you listen to your intuition and … More Intuition Found
I’d shelved the book numerous times as a Children’s Librarian. But it took Victor LaValle’s creepy New York modern fairy tale, The Changeling, to get me to open its pages and actually read it. (It looks vaguely familiar; perhaps I had opened it when scouring the shelves for a book to read aloud for storytime … More Outside Over There; OR Goblin Weddings, Changelings, and the Otherworld
