Book Review: The Thorn Key

 For as long as I can remember I have loved poetry. From Mother Goose and schoolyard rhymes to Emily Dickenson and Dylan Thomas, there is just something about the flow and rhythm of poetry that speaks to me. It allows more expression that prose. It speaks in imagery and emotion. And given my similar love of folklore and fairy tales when I saw that Jeana Jorgensen had written a book of poetry inspired by fairy tales, how could I resist?

The Thorn Key by Jeana Jorgensen is a captivating collection of poems that speak as much to our thoroughly modern world as to the distant imagined world of fairy tales. The words weave together monsters and maidens with cars and college loans - and it works, brilliantly, somehow making the fairy tale more relatable and the modern world more magical. It is a book that speaks in metaphor and allegory and blunt directness, keeping the reader captivated and just slightly off balance.

The book's 40 poems are divided into 4 sections by broad themes: Door of Red and White Roses, Door of Swan and Raven Feathers, Door of Gold and Silver Crowns, and Door of Bone and Ice Needles. I also appreciated that the author included an appendix of tale types; a tale type is something used in fairy tale studies to group together stories with similar themes and plots under different names. In this case Jorgensen listed the tale types she used by number and name and with each one listed the poems that fit into it. I liked this because it allowed for some cross referencing to tales I wasn't as familiar with and also helped show the pattern of poems that were connected by theme. I also really liked the afterword, where the author provided context for the poems, some great detail on the way that fairy tale studies intersect modern interpretations of stories, and her own motivation for writing these poems. 

My favourite poem was The Ogre's Heart, which resonated strongly to me of some of my own experiences, putting into beautiful words the cost of strength. I also particularly liked You Can't Just Leave Your Car Keys These Days which made me laugh aloud. But I can't think of any poem I skipped or shrugged away - they are all evocative, they each speak to a little piece of modern experience dressed in silk and sealskin or blood and iron. And perhaps they convey more truth written the way they are than they would in prose, bridging the fantastic and the mundane. 

If you like fairy tales or poetry, or both, or if you are just in the mood for some catharsis then I definitely recommend this book. 

What We Know About Manannán mac Lir in Irish Myth

 What we know about Manannán mac Lir from Irish myth (a partial list):

- He initially appears as a king of Emhain Abhlac (an Otherworldly island) across various stories in the Mythic cycle

- He is incorporated as one of the Tuatha De Danann by the 11th century (the Fenian cycle of myths)

- The Cóir Anmann calls him a god of the sea

- He helps the Tuatha De Danann to go into the sidhe and teaches them how to live there and to pass invisibly to mortals (Lebor Gabala Erenn)

- He assigned the TDD their new homes in the sidhe (Altram Dá Tige Medar)

- He ruled as co-king of the TDD with Bodb Dearg (Altram Dá Tige Medar)

- His father is given as Elloth in the Lebor Gabala Erenn but later as Lir; it is likely that 'mac Lir' was originally an epithet related to his skill on the ocean

- His wife in the Ulster Cycle is Fand, and he appears in Serglige Conchulainn after Fand falls in love with Cu Chulainn to use magic so that the two will forget each other, in order to end the rivalry between Fand and Cu Chulainn's wife Emer.

- His wife according to folklore in Cork is the Cailleach

- Or his wife might be Áine, but alternately she might be his daughter

- other children include Niamh, Cliodhna (maybe), Curcog, and a son named Ilbreac

- Lugh is his foster-son, and in the Oidheadh Chloinne Tuireann several of Manannán's possessions are held by Lugh, including both his horse and his curragh.

- He travels to the human world in order to father Mongan, a figure in the Cycle of Kings

- One of his greatest and most well known treasures is the crane bag, which was made from the skin of Aoife who had been turned into a crane by a romantic rival. This bag held an assortment of magical treasures that belonged to Manannán (Dunaire Finn)

What We Know About Flidais From Irish Mythology

 Things we know about Flidais from Irish mythology:

- her epithet is Foltchaoin "soft haired"

- she has 4 daughters according to the Lebor Gabala Erenn: Arden, Dinand, Bé Chuille, and Bé Teite

- Fand is also her daughter according to the Metrical Dindshenchas

- her son is Nia Segamain according to the Banshenchus which also says her husband's name was Adammair

- same source says that she gave her son power to milk deer as if they were cows:

"Flidaise Foltcháin, that is, Flidais the queen, one of the Tuath Dé Danann, 'tis she was wife of Adammair son of Fer Cuirp; and from her Buar Flidaise ('Flidais's cattle') is said,

Nia Ségamain, that is, ség 'deer' is a máin 'his treasure'; for during his time cows and does were milked in the same way every day, so to him beyond the other monarchs great was the treasure of these things. And it is that Flidais (above-named) who was mother of Nia Ségamain son of Adammair; and in Nia Ségamain's reign those cattle were milked, that is, double cattle, cows and does, were milked in the time of Nia Ségamain, and it was his mother that gave him that fairy power."

- she possesses a magical cow which can feed 300 men in a single milking or an entire army in a week (Táin Bó Cúailgne and Táin Bó Flidais)

- according to the Banshenchus: "Though slender she destroyed young men. She decreed hard close fighting."

- in the Táin Bó Flidais she was the lover of Fergus mac Roich, who otherwise needed 7 women to satisfy him

Image is a statue of Flidais made by Via Hedera circa 2013 (?)

What We Know About Brighid From Mythology

 This is the first in a new series I'm going to be doing sharing information on various deities from Irish mythology, focused on what the mythology itself tells us. This won't include modern beliefs or folklore, but hopefully will help people understand the foundational material we are working with. 

Things we know about the Irish goddess Brighid from mythology:

- her father is the Dagda (LGE & SC)

- she had a son named Ruadán via the half-Fomorian king Bres (CMT)

- she *may* have had three other sons, Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba, with Tuireann (Grey references this as marginalia on a text; see Gray's CMT notes)

- alternately she may have had three [other] sons with Bres: Brian, Luchar, and Uar (IidT)

- she possessed a variety of animals described as 'kings' of their respective species including a ram, boar, and oxen; these animals would cry out when violations occured in Ireland (LGE)

- she invented a whistle to alert at night (CMT)

- she was the first person to caoin/keen in Ireland after her son Ruadán was killed (CMT)

- she was strongly associated with poetry and poets (CMT notes, SC, LGE, IidT)

- she may have been understood as a group of three sisters: a poet, smith, and healer (SC)

Sources:

CMT - Cath Maige Tuired

LGE - Lebor Gabala Erenn

SC - Sanas Cormaic (folk etymologies, so take with a grain of salt. Throw out his claim that her name was 'fiery arrow' completely)

IidT - Imcallam in da Thurad

2024 year in review

As we are wrapping up 2024 I wanted to share what I've been doing this year, work-wise. For people who are interested in making a career of being an author this may give some insight into how that works for me. For everyone else it will just show you what I'm doing as someone for whom this is a primary career. 

Articles
I had three articles published:
“The Good Neighbors: Fairies in an Irish and Scottish Cultural Context” (revised) FIS Newsletter January 2024
“Humans and the World of Fairy” Witch magazine, issue 42, Beltane 2024
“The Otherworld and the Tides of the Year” Pagan Dawn, Beltane 2024, no 231

with an additional one "Fairies in a new Millenia”  coming out in the next issue of Watkins Mind Body Spirit  Magazine
I also wrote 8 guest articles for the Irish Pagan School: 
“Brighid, Saint Brigid, and Bride, What Do we Really Know?” IPS blog, February 2024 https://irishpagan.school/brighid-goddess-saint/
“Irish gods Names Unraveling Folk Etymologies” IPS blog February 2024 https://irishpagan.school/irish-gods-names/
“Medb, Mestruation, and Creation” IPS blog February 2024 https://irishpagan.school/medb-menstruation-creation/
“Myths and Truths of Saint Patrick” IPS blog March 2024 https://irishpagan.school/saint-patrick-myths-and-truths/
“Yeats and Irish Folklore” IPS blog April 2024 https://irishpagan.school/william-butler-yeats/
“Who Is the Irish God of Death?” IPS blog June 2024 https://irishpagan.school/irish-god-death/
“Áine Goddess and Fairy Queen” IPS blog June 2024 https://irishpagan.school/aine-2/
“Tailtiu and the Origins of Lúnasa” IPS blog August 2024 https://irishpagan.school/tailtiu-lunasa/

Academic Papers

I presented one paper this year “Tenants of Hell: Fairies, the Devil, and Folk Belief in Early Modern Scotland” at the Devils and Justified Sinners conference 

Anthologies

I contributed to one anthology which was published this year “Theosophy and the Cottingley Fairies: the reshaping of Fairy belief in the early 20^th century”, Cottingley Fairy Book, 2024, as well as writing two other pieces for books that are still in process. 

Books (nonfiction)

I had four books published this year, two of which were revised or combined older work: 

Fairy: the Otherworld by Many Names 2024

The Fairy Faith for Children, 2024 (revised from a Child’s Eye View of the Fairy Faith)

Moon Books Duets: The Morrigan & Raven Queen 2024
Celtic Fairies in North America, 2024

These represent, mostly, books that were written last year and published this year because there is usually a 12 to 14 month space between my writing it and my publisher releasing it. On that note this year I have written 4 non-fiction books which will release next year or early 2026.

Books (fiction) 

Its been a quiet year for fiction work for me, barring several short stories that were done for a private audience. I did however write one novel Chasing Sunset for my Between the Worlds urban fantasy series. I am currently working on the next book in the series, but am unsure when that will release. 

Finally I spoke at 5 events or conferences, both in person and online:
Mystic South 2024 (Headliner)
Mooncon 2024
Ancestral Pathways conference 2024 (Headliner)
Bewitching the Waters symposium 2024
Fulacht na Morrigna charity event 2024

Recommended Fairy Resources

 I'm asked fairly often to recommend resources for studying or working with fairies, so I've tried to put together a list of my own favourites. This is by no means an exhaustive list but I feel like its thorough and it covers all my preferred go-to options, from books to online material. My own focus is Irish and secondarily Scottish, so the majority of my sources here lean into that, but I cast a wide net.

Books

I'm going to break the book section down into three parts: academic, folklore, and practice. Again this isn't meant to be every possible option, but the main ones I'd recommend, and a solid starting place. A warning though: the academic books are often expensive and sometimes difficult to find.

Academic
Anything by Claude Lecouteux, Simon Young, Katherine Briggs, or Emma Wilby.
Joshua Cutchin's work is good if you are looking for more modern material or crossover with cryptid and UFO beliefs.
Elf Queens and Holy Friars by Richard Firth Green
Scottish Fairy Beliefs by Henderson and Cowan
The Good People edited by Narvaez
The Exeter Companion to Fairies, Nereids, Trolls and Other Social Supernatural Beings edited by Young and Ermacora
Magical Folk edited by Young and Houlbrook
At The Bottom Of The Garden by Diane Purkiss
Strange and Secret Peoples by Carole Silver
The Secret Commonwealth and the Fairy Belief Complex by Brian Walsh
The Supernatural in Early Modern Scotland edited by Goodare and McGill
Elves in Anglo-Saxon England by Alaric Hall

Folklore
Books by Eddie Lenihan
Tales of the Wicklow Hills by Richard Marsh
Away With The Fairies by William Henry
Hildur Queen of the Elves by JM Bedell

Practical
The Fairy Faith in Ireland by Lora O'Brien
Anything by Daniela Simina
Elves, Witches, and Gods by Catherine Heath (Norse)
Welsh Fairies by Mhara Starling

And of course I have a wide range of books myself (as well as blogs, articles, and a youtube channel for variety)

Online Resources:
Videos
Kin Fables by Five Knights Productions is an excellent series of short independent films (fictional) with fairy themes
Dr. Jenny Butler gives a great interview on youtube about Irish Fairy Lore
There's also this short video of a modern fairy encounter that I recommend people watch.
Michael Fortune has a wonderful series of videos on Irish folklore, some of which focus on fairy beliefs. These are must watch in my opinion.
Ronan Kelly's Ireland has an episode 'Pat's East Galway Fairies' that also worth a watch.
You can find a short series of videos by Eddie Lenihan on youtube, as well as several older videos of varying quality, and I suggest watching them all. Lenihan is a well known story teller in Ireland and he has fought in the past to keep a fairy tree from being destroyed for the sake of a road.
There is also an excellent older documentary on the Fairy Faith which touches on beliefs in both Ireland & the UK as well as in Canada.

Fiction and Poetry
Charmingly Antiquated on Tumblr has a great comic about a university taken over by the Fey.
Five Knights Productions also has a graphic novel series titled Kin available online
Rosamund Hodge has an excellent short story online called 'A Guide for Young Ladies Entering the Service of the Fairies'
Lora O'Brien's 'The Fairy Lover' is a fascinating look at the Leannán Sidhe, and 'The Banshee in Italy' is worth a read for certain.
Author Jennifer Lawrence has several excellent pieces online including 'Tam Lin's Garden' and 'Rebuttal: The Faerie Queen's Reply' that represent good, modern takes on the story of Tam Lin

Non-Fiction
Professor Ashliman of the University of Pittsburgh has a very useful site called 'Folktexts' that I recommend people checking out as a solid online non-fiction resource
Another great non-fiction source is the folklore site Duchas.ie. There is a great deal of fairylore to be found there, although in fairness not all has been transcribed into English.
Another good option is Circle Stories on facebook, which doesn't post exclusively about fairies but has some really solid material on the topic interspersed in.
For those with a more British focus Alexander Cummins excellent series 'The Rain Will Make a Door' is a great option. On that subject I'd also recommend John Kruse's British Fairies website.
Beachcombing Bizarre History is a site that often touches on fairies and is very high quality material.

The website Tam Lin Balladry has collected and annotated various versions of the ballad of Tam Lin as well as several other fairy ballads. The notes on the texts are worth checking out alone but the collection of versions is impressive.

Academia.edu has an extensive amount of fairy material - far too much for me to list individually here, but I encourage people to check out articles there by Simon Young, Chris Woodyard, or Sabina Magliocco to start.

For the Norse based folks and for more practical material I'd suggest Seo Helrune

Audio Resources and Music
Bluirni Bealoidis has a great podcast focused on fairies titled 'Fairy Forts in Folk Tradition'
Motherfoclóir has a podcast episode 'Don't F*** with Fairy Forts' that's excellent.
The BBC program 'In Our Time' has an episode titled 'Fairies' that presents a variety of views on the subject
There's a large array of songs that could be recommended, of course, but below I'll offer a selection of some that keep with the more traditional views.
Heather Dale, "The Changeling Child' and 'The Maiden and the Selkie'
Mor Gwyddelig's version of Buain a Rainich is very good and bilingual.
There's also several good versions of Tha Mi Sgith or A Fairy's Love Song.
Coyote Run has a very good take on fairy lore with their song 'Finnean's Dance'
Some of the old ballads can be listened to as well such as 'Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight' and 'Tam Lin'.
I'll end with one of my favorites songs with a fairy theme, Finvarra's 'Kelpie/Cliffs of Moher'

Is It A Fairy?

    Categorizing spirits is always a messy business, and also one that is rarely entirely agreed on. Nonetheless I think its helpful to have some general idea of what qualifies something as a fairy versus something else, especially given how nuanced this subject is. The simplest answer is that when it comes to folklore, generally if the storyteller or person who experienced it calls it a fairy then its a fairy.  However this gets complicated quickly because people experiencing fairies today are often doing so outside of the cultural framework the beliefs come from and this leads to some confusion, where a being is labelled a fairy because the person relating the experience doesn't have any other term available to them, whether or not 'fairy' actually seems to apply.
   So what then makes something a fairy?

   According to the dictionary a fairy is a mythic or folkloric being, human-like in appearance, with magic powers. This definition is not exactly either helpful or precise. If you really want to fully immerse in the subject I'd suggest Katherine Briggs' work or Henderson and Cowan's Scottish Fairy Belief, which tackle the twisting definitions across history and the general qualifications that might apply. Simon Young in his book 'The Boggart' also dives into this, and may be particularly of interest to those curious about the English folk belief side of things. 

    I'm going to give a short list of 'fairy' criteria, then dig a bit deeper into it. These 7 criteria are based on my own observations across decades of studying the subject, and I feel they do a decent job of differentiating a fairy from the wider range of general spirits.

 Basic criteria:
1 Not an angel, demon, or ghost
2 Can have physicality/ interact in a tangible way with the human world and can also be incorporeal
3 Does not lie
4 Preference for dairy products
5 Come from and can travel to a different reality, aka the world of Fairy

6 Can profoundly impact human health/luck/finances
7 May physically steal items/animals/people

   There are other qualities but they overlap too much with other types of spirits to be useful. For example many (not all) fairies are averse to iron, but so are demons and ghosts in folklore. Fairies are sometimes said to interfere with electronic devices, but so do ghosts. Fairies have a kind of magic, called glamour, that can distort human perceptions, but there are other kinds of spirits that can also create illusions or mess with a human's perceptions of reality. So anything like that has been eliminated and the list focuses on things that are either unique to fairies or a hallmark characteristic found ubiquitously across folk belief. 

A more thorough look:

1 Not an angel, demon, or ghost - fairies are often identified by process of elimination as much as anything else. Specific types of spirits are ruled out and what we are left with may be a fairy. This includes categories like angels, demons, and human ghosts. Despite folklore often lumping fairies in with angels or demons they have always been understood as a distinct category of their own as well. Even in early modern Scottish belief where fairies were heavily demonized, they were still seen as a distinct group different from the demons of Hell. In the same way even though humans who died or were thought to have died are often sited among the Good Neighbours, these beings are consdiered fairies rather than human ghosts and display behaviour and qualities aligned with fairies rather than ghosts. 
2 Can have physicality/ interact in a tangible way with the human world and can also be incorporeal - one particular quality found of fairies across folk belief is the idea that they can be physical within the human world or can be insubstantial at their own will. Reverend Robert Kirk discusses this in his 1691 work 'The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies', describing the Good Folk as having bodies like condensed clouds, which the fairies can make appear or disappear. A German folk story related by Jabob Grimm in volume 4 of his Teutonic Mythology tells of an elf woman who entered a home through a knothole, like mist, then became physical enough to marry the man who lived there and give him 4 children before leaving again the way she'd entered. 
3 Does not lie - one significant difference noted for fairies which is at odds with many other kinds of spirits is that fairies are reputed never to tell verbal lies. It is unclear exactly why this is, although Gerald of Wales writing in the 12th century claims fairies have no god but 'worship truth alone and hate falsehoods', so perhaps that is part of why (and also shows how old this idea is). Briggs explains this in her 'A Dictionary of Fairies saying, "Even bad fairies did not lie, they only equivocated.". Fairies can mislead a human easily with semantics and implied meanings, but they don't outright speak untruths. 
4 Preference for dairy products - one thing that seems to be almost universally true is that fairies have a strong preference for dairy products across folk belief. Typically this means milk, cream, or butter. The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries describes a practice of leaving both milk and butter for the fairies: "Whatever milk falls on the ground in milking a cow is taken by the fairies, for fairies need a little milk. Also, after churning, the knife which is run through the butter in drying it must not be scraped clean, for what sticks to it belongs to the fairies. Out of three pounds of butter, for example, an ounce or two would be left for the fairies.". This is one example out of many, but shows the idea of dairy being something fairies especially wanted. Many Irish folk stories discuss fairies stealing milk, even from cows in the field, and interfering with or taking butter. 
5 Come from and can travel to a different reality, aka the world of Fairy - this one is perhaps a bit obvious, but worth mentioning nonetheless. The word fairy was originally a word used to describe a place, the land of Fairy, and the magic of that place, which was later applied to the beings thought to inhabit that world. These beings are believed to have an inborn ability to travel between their world and the human world, which they do for various reasons. Outside the English language speaking cultures in places like Ireland or Wales there were terms in those languages that conveyed a similar concept, a distinct world that these beings came from and could travel to. 
6 Can profoundly impact human health/luck/finances - although fairies are not the only spirits who can impact human lives this way, doing so is one of their main characteristics across folk belief. On the positive side they can heal, give good luck, or bring wealth to a human they favour, while on the negative side they can cause illness, madness, death, bad luck, or financial ruin. If they are a fairy they can do these things, if they can't do these things they aren't a fairy. 
7 May physically steal items/animals/people - a final criteria to note is that fairies have the ability - and are well known to do this - to physically take things or people they want. Whereas other spirits may be able to move an object the fairies will actually take it completely, so that it disappears often to reappear later in an entirely improbable or impossible place. Campbell describes this phenomena in his 'Superstitions of the Highlands And Islands of Scotland:

"The elves are also blamed for lifting with them articles mislaid. These are generally restored as mysteriously and unaccountably as they were taken away. Thus, a woman blamed the elves for taking her thimble. It was placed beside her, and when looked for could not be found. Some time after she was sitting alone on the hillside and found the thimble in her lap. This confirmed her belief in its being the fairies that took it away. In a like mysterious manner a person's bonnet might be whipped off his head, or the pot for supper be lifted off the fire, and left by invisible hands on the middle of the floor."
Additionally the fairies might steal an animal or a person rather than an object. Cows were regular targets of fairy theft, often seeming to sicken and die while they were believed to be taken into the fairy realm. In the same way humans might be outright taken, or might be replaced with a changeling which would obscure the theft. The belief was that the animal or human was literally taken out of the human world and into the world of Fairy.