Ecotourism often involves naturalist-guided tours of relatively wild areas, but also visits to small-scale agricultural producers, also called “agritourism.” Sometimes this operates in a B&B fashion. See, for example, the state of Vermont’s guide. But never mind milking cows and picking berries. Suppose you could offer encounters with the Other Crowd? Pat Noone, a Irish …
Everything academic seems to slo-o-o-w down in 2020, so you can still submit a proposal for the “Ill met by moonlight’: Gothic encounters with enchantment and the Faerie realm in literature and culture” conference at the University of Hertfordshire, 8–11 April 2021. We are pleased to announce an extension to the CFP for our ‘”Ill …
Continue reading Call Deadline Extended for Gothic Encounters with Faerie Conference
? Early in the twentieth century, the famous physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), “the father of nuclear physics,” is supposed to have remarked snarkily that all science was either physics or “stamp-collecting.” ((Variations on the saying include “That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting” and “Physics is …
Continue reading A Quick Video Introduction to Fairy Studies
The final article in the “Paganism, art, and fashion” issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies argues that books and television series based on historical witchcraft make it too safe and fail to portray “the genuine strangeness of witches and magic users in all periods and cultures.” It is written by literature …
Continue reading Witchcraft: You’re Not Making It Strange Enough
Readers, I have reworked the blogroll (right-hand column) to create a new “Podcast” category. If you are looking at a single post, the blogroll might not display for you. In that case, click the main blog title or the banner photo at the top to switch to the main page. I had few podcasts mixed …
Continue reading New Pagan, Paranormal Podcasts Added to the Blogroll
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 So what are fairies? How do you research them? Just as important, do you even want to have anything to do with them? Each of those is a book or article-length question, so I will paint with a very broad brush here. Nevertheless, fairies have popped up on this …
Continue reading Pixie Problems, or Working Things Out with the ‘Cousins’ (4)
Magic and Witchery: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of ‘The Triumph of the Moon’ will be published in September by Palgrave Macmillan. I love rolling the word Festschrift around, and if you are not used to it, this is what it means: “In academia, a Festschrift (plural Festschriften) is a book honoring a respected person, especially …
It all started with a fork, an antler-handled serving fork of clean Scandinavian design, part of a spoon & fork set that my parents bought while visiting Norway in the early 1990s and later gave to M. and me at Christmas. We liked them and used them nightly for salads and other dishes. Then after …
Continue reading Pixie Problems, or Working Things Out with the ‘Cousins’ (1)
You have heard that advice, right? Don’t eat the food that the Good Neighbors — or however you want to describe those beings whose reality intersects ours — might offer you, or you might be there with them a very very long time. In Morgan Daimler’s view of the Fairy cities of today, there might …
Continue reading In the Land of Fairy, Don’t Eat the Pentagram Pizza
Krampus likes lots of odd, pointy, and weird things, so let’s go . . . . • Was a genuine 11th-century Norse penny found in Maine dropped by a Norse explorer, or is it part of a long-time hoax? But would “Egil Ketilson” have been carrying money? Where was he going to spend it, Skraeling-Mart? …
Continue reading I’m Here to Fill your Krampus-tide Stocking