What is a charm?

Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about charms with help from scholars Joseph S. Hopkins, Jonathan Roper, and others, discussing the use of charms in storycraft, and providing you with an example and an exercise on the topic.

Folkloric Discussion of Charms

I've situated charms in a wider exploration of folk belief, but scholars also situate them in verbal lore. Jonathan Roper writes that charms are a "force of patterned traditional utterance, a force which, when performed in a certain arena, and sometimes accompanied by gesture and medicine, has been credited with the power to bring about changes in health, fortune, safety and emotional state. So, verbal charms, or what are now commonly known as “spells”, could be defined as traditional verbal forms intended by their effect on supernature to bring about change in the world in which we live" (2003b, 8).

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Greetings! I'm Dr. Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran. I hold B.A. in Celtic Studies from the University of Toronto, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Maine, and a PhD in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. I'm also an author, poet, and musician under the name C.S. MacCath. My long-running Folklore & Fiction project integrates these passions with a focus on folklore scholarship aimed at storytellers, and I bring a deep appreciation of animism, ecology, and folkloristics to my own storytelling. You can find me online at csmaccath.com, folkloreandfiction.com, and linktr.ee/csmaccath.