Also known as Why the Sea is Salt or Why is the Sea salty? because of its most famous translation in Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book, “Kvernen som maler på havsens bunn” is a Norwegian folk tale collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in their famous Norske Folkeeventyr. I talked about some of […]
When we talk about witch hunts, the mind usually goes to remote and muddy villages where poor old practitioners, mostly focused on healing with herbs and indulging their neighbours’ tantrums, were fiercely snatched away from their lives and persecuted on someone’s whim. This is of course true, but it’s not the whole truth: some major […]
Well, we all take pandemics badly, but some of us take them worst than others. It’s the case of one Solomon Eagle and we take a look at him today on my Patreon.
Curiously enough, when one thinks about spookiness rarely the mind goes to Ancient Greece. And this, I think, is one of the worst disservices we can do to our ancestors (beside Percy Jackson, I mean): Greek mythology is riddled with monsters, dark creatures lurking in the night, curses and malevolent deities ready to bite you in the ass. Literally, sometimes. So, […]
In Austrian and German folklore, the Drudenmesser is a decorated knife meant to guard off an evil spirit called Drude or Trude. It’s today’s Object of the Day on my Patreon.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief outline on the character of Joan of Navarre, the first English Queen to be accused of witchcraft, who was effectively stripped of all her possessions because her stepson Henry V had spent all the crown’s money trying to conquer France. Her story is closely connected to the […]
Although not the first to be tried for witchcraft, Joan of Navarre has the distinction of being the first English Queen to be found guilty of it. She’s today’s profile on my Patreon.
Marguerite Porete, who was condemned for heresy and burned at the stake on June, 1st 1310, was a medieval Christian mystic who wrote around the concept of agape, the Divine Love, in her book The Mirror of Simple Souls. She’s today’s profile on my Patreon.
For a very small and specific part of the novel, I decided to research the role of a specific kind of dancers in medieval Japan, called shirabyōshi. As it happens, their role and characteristics are highly romanticized (i.e., objectified) by male authors of the time: they’re often portrayed as femmes fatales and seductresses, and this […]
Being set on a Dutch East India Company ship, the story I’m writing has to deal with the appalling crimes perpetrated by this and the other trading companies throughout history. And, since I aim to write a Gothic novel, what’s more fitting than an imprisoned princess? The idea, drawing from literature tropes and aiming to […]