Davies, Owen (2007). Popular magic: cunning folk in English history. London: Hambledon Continuum. pp.vii–viii. ISBN 978-1-84725-036-0. a b Mingazova, Liailia; Sulteev, Rustem (2014). "Tatar and English Children's Folklore: Education in Folk Traditions". Western Folklore. 73: 410–431 – via ProQuest.

For the last fifteen years, John Freeman has had his finger firmly on the literary pulse. Until recently, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Granta, and part of the panel that put together their most recent, much discussed, once a decade list, Best of Young British Novelists. He's reviewed thousands of books and profiled some of the world's most influential writers from Doris Lessing to John Updike. These encounters have now been collected in his latest book How To Read A Novelist. Ditmas, E. M. R. (1974). "The Way Legends Grow". Folklore. 85 (4): 244–253. doi: 10.1080/0015587X.1974.9716563. JSTOR 1259622– via JSTOR. Williams, Victoria (2017). Celebrating Life Customs around the World: From Baby Showers to Funerals: Adolescence and Early Adulthood. Vol.2: Adolescence and Early Adulthood". ABC-CLIO. pp.219–221. ISBN 978-1-4408-3659-6.Atherton, Mark (2017). The making of England: a new history of the Anglo-Saxon world. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp.53–58. ISBN 978-1-78672-154-9. OCLC 975999502. Cunning folk was a term used to refer to male and female healers, magicians, conjurers, fortune-tellers, potion-makers, exorcists, or thieves. Such people were respected, feared and sometimes hunted for their breadth of knowledge which was suspected as supernatural. [46] Hutton, Ronald (1996). The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford University Press. pp.218–225.

King Arthur is the legendary king of the Britons, the Once and Future King and True Born King of England. The origins of King Arthur and his exploits are vague due to the many reproductions of his character. The Historia Brittonum and the Annales Cambriae reference many battles of an Arthur, Annales Cambriae also referencing Mordred, a rival, and Merlin, a wise mentor. Although these sources have been used as proof for Arthur's origins, their credibility has been disputed as mythology rather than history. [32] As English folklore has progressed, King Arthur's retellings have been classified into romances such as Malory's Morte Darthur, chronicles such as Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae, and fantasies such as Culhwch ac Olwen (whose author is unknown). [33] Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham (2001). Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Wordsworth Editions Ltd. p.132. ISBN 1-84022-310-3. During the Renaissance, artists captured these customs in the written word; such as Shakespearean plays' reflections of English folklore through their witches, fairies, folk medicine, marriage and funeral customs, superstitions, and religious beliefs. [1]Standing stones are man-made stone structures made to stand up. Some small standing stones can also be arranged in groups to form miniliths. [42] Similar to these geological artefacts are hill figures. These are figures drawn into the countryside by digging into the ground and sometimes filling it in with a mineral of a contrasting colour. Examples are the Cerne Abbas Giant, the Uffington White Horse, and the Long Man of Wilmington and are the focus for folktales and beliefs. [43] The Project Gutenberg eBook of Beowulf: An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem". www.gutenberg.org . Retrieved 2022-01-10. A dwarf is a human-shaped entity that dwells in mountains and in the earth, and is associated with wisdom, smithing, mining, and crafting. The term had only started to be used in the 19th century as a translation for the German, French, and Scandinavian words which describe dwarves. [28]

Bane, Theresa (2013). Encyclopedia of Fairies in World Folklore and Mythology. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. p.219. ISBN 978-0-394-40918-4. Bramwell, Peter (2009). "Herne the Hunter and the Green Man". Pagan Themes in Modern Children's Fiction. Macmillan Publishers. pp.38–83. ISBN 978-0-230-23689-9. Folklorists have developed frameworks such as the Aarne–Thompson-Uther index which categorise folktales first by types of folktales and then by consistent motifs. [20] While these stories and characters have differences according to the region of their origin, these motifs are such that there is a national identity of folktales through which these regions have interacted. [2] We were haunted children of a haunted isle. The more esoteric wing of hippiedom, intent on finding an alternative to the wipe-clean modernism of the sixties, discovered that their great-grandparents had tried exactly the same thing. If there’s one legend that could be said to encapsulate the idea of Britain in ancient times, it has to be the legend of King Arthur. This most famous of British kings was said to have defended the country against Saxon invaders in the 5th and early 6th centuries, and he’s been the subject of numerous stories that have achieved mythical status in Britain. Everyone is familiar with the stories of King Arthur, his wife Guinevere and his Knights of the Round Table, in particular Lancelot, who fell in love with Guinevere and rescued her from the resulting threat of execution by Arthur, leading to war between Lancelot and Arthur. The Round Table is a powerful Arthurian symbol; it was given to Arthur by his father-in- law as a dowry, and it was said to be round to avoid squabbles between the knights over who was most important. Among the most famous tales is Arthur’s search for the Holy Grail – the cup that contained the blood of Christ (a story satirised in Monty Python and the Holy Grail). The magician Merlin is another key figure in the Arthurian legends; Merlin placed a sword in a stone and whomever was able to pull it out would be king. Only Arthur could do it.As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch, sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles,” Collie told a meeting of the Cairngorm Club in 1925. Cornish piskies By his own account, that was what happened to renowned climber, scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society, J Norman Collie, at the end of the 19th century. Years later, he recalled hearing slow, deliberate footsteps – one vast step for every three or four of his own – following him on the mountain. Victorian folklorists set out to rediscover the pre-industrial traditions of Britain and ended up reinventing a lot of them. The flower children reinvented a bit more. Historians, occultists, anthropologists and drop-outs all weaved a vision of a country that was weirder and more entertaining than the motorways and service stations that strung it together.

Tatar, Maria (2010). "Why Fairy Tales Matter: The Performative and the Transformative". Western Folklore. 69: 55–64 – via ProQuest. If this introductory look at Britain’s wealth of fascinating legends has inspired you, you can learn more about British folklore over at Mysterious Britain. If you come on an Oxford Royale Summer Schools course, you can also look forward to visiting some of Britain’s famous landmarks, such as mysterious Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain – said, in one tale, to have been constructed by none other than the magician Merlin of Arthurian legend… What Collie had experienced was a classic case of a brush with the Big Grey Man (Am Fear Liath Mòr) of Ben Macdui, an enduring myth of an extremely large, Sasquatch-like grey figure covered in short hair. Wherever the Grey Man ventures, he is accompanied by a sense of irrational panic and dread.Opie, Iona; Opie, Peter, eds. (1997). The Oxford dictionary of nursery rhymes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-860088-7. LCCN 98140995. OCLC 1302157273. Hutton, Ronald (3 November 2010). "How Pagan Were Medieval English Peasants?". Folklore. 122 (3): 235–249. doi: 10.1080/0015587X.2011.608262. S2CID 162281749– via Taylor & Francis Online. Avery, Gillian (1965). Nineteenth century children: heroes and heroines in English children's stories, 1780-1900. London: Hodder and Stoughton. pp.8–11. ISBN 978-90-5005-492-8. Williamson, Craig; Kramer, Michael P; Lerner, L. Scott (2011). A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-1129-0.