Drawing on decades of experience as an advisor in the voluntary sector and as a freelance trainer, this author initially focused on legal non-fiction, specifically enforcement law. However, a desire to write novels, spurred by family feedback, led to a new passion for storytelling. Now captivated by the craft, the author is diligently working on numerous new fictional narratives. Their fiction is self-published and readily available through major online retailers.
This is not a book on folklore; its purpose is not to explain why individuals once thought such surprising and curious things. Welsh people in the past encountered beings that they knew to be the tylwyth teg; this book shows those individuals the respect they deserve and takes their accounts seriously. They knew that the faeries existed and they adapted their lives to cope with this fact.
This book offers a series of biographies of some of the most significant and best-known of the faery folk. This Who's Who examines their origins, characters and development, from traditional folklore through to modern literature and the fine arts.
As we shall see, repeatedly- there are aspects of faery existence that still baffle our attempts to interpret and comprehend them, because they fail to adhere to ideas of a fixed nature and predictable behaviours that are encouraged by strict traditional scientific rationalism.
This book is founded squarely upon an acceptance that faeries have a tangible physical reality and that we can describe them medically and biologically, in just the same manner as may be done for any other living being. It is, therefore, to some degree a natural history of faery kind, but it is limited to an examination of their bodies. A text that looks at the actual physicality of fairies- their anatomies, physiologies, even their psychology.
The Isle of Man is full of faery beings. In a concentrated area, it has all the most fascinating supernatural creatures of the British Isles, not just fairies, but various goblins, faery beasts and mermaids. It provides a fascinating case study of the wider wonders of British faery-lore, a kind of microcosm of Britain's faeries.
There is a distinct tendency today to assume that faery kind are friendly and helpful towards us humans. The evidence of over one thousand years experience, preserved in British folk tradition, tells a very different story. British faeries are (like humans) selfish, greedy, violent and cruel. What makes things worse, of course, is the fact that they have magical powers too.
The pixies are the faery folk of the South West of England, by which I mean Cornwall, Devon and the western part of Somerset (essentially Exmoor, the Quantocks and the Blackdown Hills). Beyond this area, moving into northern and eastern Somerset and into Dorset, it is far more common to speak of fairies. Pixies came to wider attention through the work of a handful of authors. Before that, they had been well-known within the south-west, and local people had speculated about their origins over centuries.
This book pulls together everything we know about how things work in Faery. The information is scattered across many narratives, but once it is assembled, we discover we have a detailed picture of their politics and economy. Much of this is entirely independent of human affairs. References from old books and oral traditions as well as the authors personal knowledge combine to make this a comprehensive work.
The goddess of love, Aphrodite - or Venus, or Astarte - she has had many names. She is the goddess of life, fertility and renewal, but she is also the patroness of carnal "a thousand honey secrets thou shalt know" is her promise to the boy Adonis in Shakespeare's poem about the pair. Incredibly, perhaps, he resists this offer- but most of us do not. The enduring role of the goddess in human sex and passion is well known, but how well is she suited for love and sexuality in the modern world? To understand that, we must trace something of her origins, and focus our attention on the way in which more recent writers and artists have imagined her.
It is an article of faith central to fairy belief today that they are beings intimately connected with nature- they are the elemental spirits, even, of water, air and vegetation. In one form or another this view has long existed.