Folklore of Dorset

Folklore of Dorset

Author: Fran Doel

Publisher: History Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780752439891

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Folklore of Dorset explores the rich heritage of the county's traditions, seasonal customs and songs. Included are saints' lore and smugglers, wife sales, wrecking, witchcraft, wise men and West Gallery Music, hill figures, hempseed divination and holy wells, mummers' plays, May garlands and maypoles, Oosers and Oak Apple Day, bonfires and Beating the Bounds.The sources used include the poems and non-fiction of William Barnes, Thomas Hardy, the historian of Dorset John Hutchins, the Victorian and early twentieth-century folklorist John Udal and the Hammmond Brothers' collection of Dorset folksongs. The authors critically engage with the extent to which Hardy and Barnes can be regarded as primary sources for Dorset folklore. There is also considerable original research and use of oral material. Nearly 100 fascinating photographs illustrate the text and there is an appendix of a full mummers' play.


Legends and Customs of Dorset - Including Legends and Superstitions, Witchcraft and Charms, Birth, Death, Marriage Customs, and Local Customs (Folklore History Series)

Legends and Customs of Dorset - Including Legends and Superstitions, Witchcraft and Charms, Birth, Death, Marriage Customs, and Local Customs (Folklore History Series)

Author: John Symonds Udal

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 1528762835

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A captivating volume that’s brimming with traditional Dorsetshire folktales and superstitions. John Symonds Udal provides enthralling insight into the rich history of folktales, legends, and superstitions in Dorset. Detailing many of the county’s traditional customs, including those surrounding birth, marriage, and death, this volume is a fantastic read for those interested in English folklore.


Dorset Folk Tales for Children

Dorset Folk Tales for Children

Author: Tim Laycock

Publisher: The History Press

Published: 2019-08-19

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 0750992832

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Dorset is full of mythical creatures from Britain's most legendary folk tales, including demons, dragons, Jack-o'-lanterns, giants and mermaids. Read on to bring the landscape of the country's rolling hills and Jurassic coast alive, and let author Tim Laycock inspire you to rediscover the county you thought you knew.


Dorset Folk Tales

Dorset Folk Tales

Author: Tim Laycock

Publisher: The History Press

Published: 2011-11-30

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0752478656

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The spectacular and varied landscape of Dorset, with its giants, hill forts, Jurassic coast and ancient buildings is the source and inspiration for many curious stories that have been passed down in families and village communities for generations. This book contains a rich and diverse collection of those ancient legends rooted in the oral tradition. From the absorbing tales of the Old King of Corfe and the Thorncombe Thorn to the intriguing Buttons on a Card and George Pitman and the Dragon, these illustrated stories bring alive the landscape of the county's rolling hills and coastline. Dorset actor, singer and storyteller Tim Laycock has a lifelong interest in the folklore and oral traditions of the county. Many of the stories in this collection have been passed on to him by Dorset residents, and appear here in print for the first time.


Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance

Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance

Author: Jacqueline Dillion

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-09-23

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1137503203

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This book reassesses Hardy’s fiction in the light of his prolonged engagement with the folklore and traditions of rural England. Drawing on wide research, it demonstrates the pivotal role played in the novels by such customs and beliefs as ‘overlooking’, hag-riding, skimmington-riding, sympathetic magic, mumming, bonfire nights, May Day celebrations, Midsummer divination, and the ‘Portland Custom’. This study shows how such traditions were lived out in practice in village life, and how they were represented in written texts – in literature, newspapers, county histories, folklore books, the work of the Folklore Society, archival documents, and letters. It explores tensions between Hardy’s repeated insistence on the authenticity of his accounts and his engagement with contemporary anthropologists and folklorists, and reveals how his efforts to resist their ‘excellently neat’ categories of culture open up wider questions about the nature of belief, progress, and social change.


Folklore Rising

Folklore Rising

Author: Ben Edge

Publisher: Watkins Media Limited

Published: 2024-10-08

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1786789124

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Ben Edge is a rising star of both the art world and the current folk renaissance. This first trade book of Edge's art, featuring over 200 artworks, is a unique insight into his creative process as well as the first mainstream book to explore the amazing and wildly popular folk customs of the British ritual year. 'In his deeply squirrelly, edgy, almost mystic paintings, Ben Edge tries to ask where we all come from and why we tell ourselves the stories we tell ourselves.' – Jerry Saltz 'It's time to rediscover the real and this book tells you where to find it. Indispensable.' – Jarvis Cocker Ben Edge has travelled the length and breadth of Britain recording the weird and wonderful folk customs alive in communities all over the country. In this book, the first trade edition of his art, he shares over 200 paintings and photographs, along with real-life stories, anecdotes and legends. He talks about how connecting with our incredible living folklore helped him recover from depression, and also introduces his idea of folklore activism, suggesting that the current massive resurgence of interest in contemporary folk culture represents ordinary people’s desire to find new ways of envisioning community and caring for and connecting to nature. Readers will be enchanted and inspired by the images and description of: Mass events that are attended by thousands such as the solstices at Stonehenge, the Padstow ‘Obby ‘Oss parade, the Burry Man’s Day and the Straw Bear of Whittlesea. Practices to celebrate the turning wheel of the year, from wassailing to May Day fertility rites to fire festivals to Mumming Plays. The progressive all-female Morris dancing side Boss Morris. The Green Man – how this has become an icon of modern spirituality and eco-consciousness and a personal symbol of mental health recovery to Ben. Standing stones and the mythology surrounding them. Overall the book explores the psyche of British folklore, showing how this has fed into his art and what this means in the context of contemporary life. It's a book about reconnection with nature, each other and the past through art and folklore.


Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition

Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition

Author: Alan G. Smith

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2023-05-04

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1501384015

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Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition takes the uncanny and unsettling fiction of Thomas Hardy as fundamental in examining the lineage of 'Hardyan Folk Horror'. Hardy's novels and his short fiction often delve into a world of folklore and what was, for Hardy the recent past. Hardy's Wessex plays out tensions between the rational and irrational, the pagan and the Christian, the past and the 'enlightened' future. Examining these tensions in Hardy's life and his work provides a foundation for exploring the themes that develop in the latter half of the 20th century and again in the 21st century into a definable genre, folk horror. This study analyses the subduing function of heritage drama via analysis of adaptations of Hardy's work to this financially lucrative film market. This is a market in which the inclusion of the weird and the eerie does not fit with the construction of a past and its function in creating a nostalgia of a safe and idyllic picture of England's rural past. However, there are some lesser-known adaptations from the 1970s that sit alongside the unholy trinity of folk horror: the adaptation for television of the Wessex Tales. From a consideration of the epistemological fissure that characterize Hardy's world, the book draws parallels between then and now and the manifestation of writing on conceptual borders. Through this comparative analysis, Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition posits that we currently exist on a moment of fracture, when tradition sits as a seductive threat.