Quotes About Folklore

It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.

I really like mugwort. It's a witch plant and a purifier of energy. It's considered to be very important and powerful in the Celtic and Scandinavian tradition.

Witches are made out of things like mushrooms and twigs. Everybody knows that.

Raw parsley makes me gag. It's the same for my mum and my sister. Which is funny because apparently parsley was used to suffocate witches, back in the day.

Witches were really scary to me as a kid.

Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories.

What I've always loved about faeries is the way that they, unlike so many other supernatural creatures, are not human and have never been human. They have different customs and different taboos, and woe to anyone who breaks them.

I just want to be entertained. The stories that have aged the best are the ones where the wolf eats grandma, or the woman is going to bake children in an oven, or the bear is going to eat the girl for eating the porridge. There are lessons in there, but they're deeply engrained and hidden.

I used to wonder, when my grandmother would tell me what the wolf said to the jackal, how these animals can talk. And, she would say, 'in my stories, animals talk. Shut up and listen.'

Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.

My mom has a tape from when I was, like, 2 years old, talking with my grandma, telling her a story that's really elaborate about werewolves and wolves.

They do not merely collect texts; they must also gather data about the context and the informant and, above all, write an analysis of the items based upon the course readings and lecture material on folklore theory and method.

In Russia, they have Rusalkis, and they have Selkies in Scotland, and in Fiji, you have a special mention of it. The first earliest mermaid mentioned in history books was Atargartis in Assyria, a thousand B.C... In Africa, you have Mami Wata.

Popular Western notions about fairies have been increasingly sanitized by since Victorian times, before which they were among the most feared of supernatural entities. In earlier times, even the good-natured fairies were believed to use their supernatural powers against people more than for help, and people went out of their way to avoid them or, if they absolutely couldn't, at least placate them.

Mussoorie has its woman in white. Late at night, she can be seen sitting on the parapet wall on the winding road up to the hill-station. Don't stop to offer her a lift. She will fix you with her evil eye and ruin your holiday. The

a gang of unpredictable ruffians by day who turned to enthralling storytellers after dark. "I would sometimes join them, and listen for a great part of the night to some of the finest fairy tales and most romantic legends it has ever been my fortune to hear.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Jeremiah Curtin, an Irish-American who had learned Irish, traveled throughout the Irish-speaking enclaves in Connacht and discovered hundreds of previously unrecorded stories. He recorded them in their original language and greatly advanced the study of Irish folklore.

in 1935 the Irish government created the Irish Folklore Commission. In the following decades, Irish-speaking collectors scoured the countryside to record stories of saints, heroes, and spirits. Currently, more than a million and a half pages of folklore reside in the commission's collection which, since 1971, has been continued on by the Folklore Department at University College Dublin.

The Irish mingled their Christianity with folk beliefs in fairies and changelings.

Had she believed all that? Old Pilar's folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn't quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. But still able to send messages, if only such messages could be recognized and deciphered. People need such stories, Pilar said once, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.

Calling a piece of short fiction a "tale" removes it at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days, as it evokes the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale, and the long-ago teller of tales.

I have a better internal and intuitive understanding of folklore and myth than science and technology, so in that way fantasy is easier.

Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained.

There were all sorts of myths and legends surrounding the lake. I mean, we're Indians, and we like to make up shit about lakes, you know?