Ceallaigh's Blog

One of my favourite Gáidhlig folksongs was written in Nova Scotia and tells the tale of a rough sea crossing at Christmastime. Julie Fowlis' version is slightly different from the one below, which I've heard and sung along with at milling frolics in the province, but it's beautiful nonetheless. Here are the lyrics to the version I know, and I've linked to Julie Fowlis' version of the song below. 

Here are the folklore-related memes I published to social media in January 2020.

Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about rites of passage with help from scholars Arnold van Gennep, Alan Dundes, and others, discussing rites of passage in fiction, and providing you with storytelling insights related to the topic. Rites of passage are customs underpinned by the beliefs that inform them, much as myths are narratives about the beliefs that inspire them. This understanding of folklore genres as flexible or slippery is an important one, and it's often examined in folklore scholarship. As I move into a second year of genre discussion, I plan to mention these crossovers when I see them so that you can begin to think in multiple ways about the topics I present and bring that thought process to your creative work.

Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. At the summer and winter solstices, I mimic the sun and pause to reflect on my own creative work. In this edition, I'm bringing sea monsters to your holiday season with a discussion of folkloric elements in a poem entitled "Leviathans," published nearly a decade ago in Strange Horizons.