An storytelling project focusing on region and culture specific folklore from around the world, complete with immersive narrative, lush music...and a dark edge. Experience traditional tales re-imagined and placed in original contexts.

Overview

Each series of the podcast focuses on a specific region of the world. Each episode consists of a brief introduction and usually four stories, carefully researched and then retold, remaining true to the original tales while also adding detail for a modern audience. All of this with ambient music for an immersive AND educational experience!

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Lore Britannia

Resources, Inspirations & Approaches, Further Reading & Viewing

Episode 1: Fey Worlds

Inspirations & Approaches

Etymology, the mysterious case of James Worson and the film ‘Absentia’ - all inspired me to hone in on and underscore themes such as loss, the hollow unknowing attached to this loss and the terror of disappearance and abduction......

Episode 2: Watery Worlds

Inspirations & Approaches

Until my early twenties, I was so terrified of water that I couldn’t be in the deep end of a swimming pool without a sense of panic and dread. I had had a near drowning experience and so large bodies of water were, for me, hostile domains of weird, slimy and alien creatures...

Episode 3: Prehistoric Sites

Inspirations & Approaches

The sense of mystery and ancientness and spiritual ‘otherness’ evoked by prehistoric sites - my interest in this was sparked by two sources….

Episode 4: Demon Dogs

The baying of hounds, blacker than night, on the desolate wilds of Dartmoor; the stag-horned hunter who serves as an omen of national tragedy; suffering in the notorious Newgate prison manifested in the form of a giant black dog...well, these are potent images, certainly. No storyteller could resist.

Episode 5: Land of the Dead, Part 1

To the Romans, Britain was a remote island, in the stream of the Ocean which surrounded the known world, a haunted and mysterious place where life and death, human and divine, were interchangeable. To them, the island itself was almost a myth…

Episode 6: Land of the Dead, Part 2

From the castle haunts of witch hares and rabbit haunted groves in England to fey goat maidens in Scotland and horse-mounted portents of death in Ireland, we will explore stories from that parallel dimension, the land of dead.

Folklorica Slavica

Resources, Inspirations & Approaches, Further Reading & Viewing

Episode 1: Baba Yaga & Crone Kin

Variously a mythical wise woman, a witch, a forest spirit or a leader of others in the spirit realm, Baba Yaga’s legacy of lore comes from mixed cultural groups within Eastern Europe and as such a fantastic and horrifying collection of motifs have assembled around the character.

Episode 2: Primeval Forest Spirits

From the last bastion of primeval woodland straddling Poland and Belarus to mountain-top pine forests in the Czech Republic, from swampish realms in aforementioned Polska to Serbian forests ringing with shrill hunting cries... 

Episode 3: Harvest Demon & Wolf Shepherd

Lady death mowing down a victim with her scythe. A demon of the harvest fields in the shape of a mourning widow. Is it any wonder that folklore symbolically conflates death and the harvest in such potent images when the harvest was the very heart and pulse of the agricultural communities of the ‘folk’?

Episode 4: Unclean Spirits

In lore across the Slavic world, from the northern Slavs of Poland and Russia to their southern kin in Croatia and Slovenia, there are the so-called ‘unclean’ spirits of forest and field, home and bathhouse. And the more domestic of these unclean spirits - those of the home and bathhouse - is our focus in this episode. Now, we will meet these mysterious beings, in whom mingles the earthly and angelic, in whom dwell the deep powers of ancestral longing, order and homeliness. 

Episode 5: Unquiet Dead & Unquiet Waters

From the glacier-covered Russian island of Novaya Zemlya to the coniferous forests and fecund lake basins of Poland; from the great heights of the Ukrainian Carpathians to the dark waters of the Slovakian Danube, you will hear tales of water-bound beings who are dangerous to mere frail humans.

Episode 6: Soviet Urban Myths

From vampire dolls to nuclear freaks, this episode will look at urban legends told fairly widely in the Soviet Union from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Folklorica Nordica

Welcome to Series 3: Folklorica Nordica. We will journey into subterranean and spiritual realms - through the folklore of the Nordic world. We will encounter the shamans, the subterranean beings, the wise-folk and healers, and the trolls and giants of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Finland. In these northern lands, we will encounter a fascinating body of tales retold to evoke not only the original magic of the stories but also the beautiful and mysterious regions they come from.

Episode 1: Soul Journeys

In folklore across the Nordic world, the human soul or ‘hug’ is a force to be reckoned with and is intimately connected with the body. Indeed, if a person were to be somehow separated from their hug, perhaps through magic, they were said to have been ‘hugstjalet’ or ‘hug-stolen - a folk explanation for people who showed abnormal behaviour and psychological disorders. The soul, or ‘hug’, is a source of power and manipulation of the hug is the source of all magic.  The hug could free itself of the body for various periods of time and could live a life outside the body.

Episode 4: Forest Visions

Dark northern forests of ambiguous shadow and sinister presence. Ancient churchyards with secrets beneath searching feet. Inhuman beings of terrifying power made even more powerful during the spiritually potent winter season….these are all elements of the Swedish tradition of Arsgang, or the Year Walk, in which an individual completes a kind of divination journey through night-shrouded woodland. Through forest, field and churchyard the year walker journeys, hoping to gain insight into the future, to know their own fate as well as the fate of their village, to have some knowledge of those issues of life and death: war, crop-destroying weather or fire, disease, significant deaths.

Episode 2: Tales from Finland

In this special guest episode, London storyteller Sarah Liisa Wilkinson tells stories from the Kalevala, a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology. From frozen wilderness to the very land of the dead, hear two tales of brave women who venture into hostile territory.

Episode 5: Trolls of the Northland

Called jätte (yett-uh) in Swedish, troll or jutul (yoo-tool) in Norwegian, trolls and giants are prominent in fables and in etiological legends explaining the origin of many huge rock formations, lakes and the so-called giants potholes. The Norwegian word ‘jutul’ stems from the Old Norse Jotunn, which denotes a race of giants in opposition to man and gods. Massive, self-centred and able to gouge and shape hardy landscapes, they are not without a powerful nemesis: the sun. From the pine-laden mountains and prosperous farms of the Vågå region in Norway to imperial Copenhagen, from the jagged-peaks and moss-laden cliffs of Iceland’s West-fjords to the immense vertical sea cliffs of the Faroe Islands, we will hear tales of earth-sculpting colossal beings.

Episode 3: Mountain, Forest & Moor

The hulder-folk, sometimes referred to as the hidden-folk or subterraneans, are preternatural beings that populate wild areas and are given to enticement and abduction. While thought to live beneath the ground, they are often sighted, heard and experienced in forests, mountains and moors.  

Episode 6: Summer Wilds

From Norway’s verdant mountain pastures where lonely dairymaids tend the seter, or summer farm, to the shadowed forests of Sweden and Denmark, we will encounter the strange beings of the summer wilds. This episode will focus on folktales whose backdrop is the summer season, when the lush reproductive potency of the world is obvious and abundant. Across the Nordic world, Midsummer is celebrated with huge bonfires, and traditionally, was believed to be rich with magical properties. Agrarian Finns, for example, celebrated Midsummer by adorning rooms with flowers, green branches and twigs. According to Finnish folk belief, Midsummer was abundant with väki, a term referring to the inherent power of all things. Midsummer was believed to be charged with curative väki, arising from the fecundity of nature at the height of summer.

Folklorica Baltica

Welcome to Series 4, where we will traverse the lesser-known landscape of the folklore of the Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Listen to tales of a landscape full of spirits and beings, from amber-laden beaches to dark forests, from otherworldly lakes to mysterious underworlds.

Episode 1: The Wood of Tontla

With forests covering about 50% of the country’s territory, woodlands in folk tradition are magically potent, a spiritual source where one can find spirits called forest ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers,’ the woodland-protecting Metsik spirit, sacred groves, branches lovingly decorated with ribbons and healing springs.

Episode 2: The Night People & The Time of Souls

It is November in an Estonian village and it is the Time of Souls, when dead ancestors return and roam, visiting homes and enjoying the pleasures of life in the sauna. In this time of extended night, there are forces afoot, and not just those of deceased ancestors.

Episode 3: Goddaughter of the Rock Maidens

The name of the story lit up my imagination, as did the brief outline of a plot in W.F Kirby’s 1895 English translation of famous Estonian tales. In just a few sentences, I sensed a powerful narrative: nature spirits and underworlds; a young girl tutored by powerful female fey-folk and enchantments and serpent kings. 

Episode 4: Eglė, Queen of the Serpents

In this episode’s panorama of ancient woodland, northern seas and shamanic underworlds, the world-traversing magic of the grass snake clashes with the bone-deep force of ancestral longing and family drama.

Episode 5: The Washerwoman & The Lake Spirts

Now, we journey to the great halls of the Lithuanian nobility and the great northern forests of this Baltic nation, to meet a washerwoman of great spirit, whose patrons are full of earth magicks.

Episode 6: The Sea Queen & The Fisherman

Amber was forged and dispersed by great movements and forces of nature, global climate and massive ancient glaciers. In today’s story, the heavens themselves will move the hearts of men with omens and destroy them with great fury.