Alastor, the son of an iron-master, has no inclination to follow his father’s trade, preferring to work with wood. He and his musically-talented sister Catrianne leave the foundry to go and live in a town, where Alastor soon begins to specialize in making musical instruments. One day, while delivering an unusual musical instrument to a hamlet high in the mountains, he is thrown by his horse during a storm. Temporarily lame, he is forced to take refuge in a strange cabin in the forest, where the mysterious Melusine lived with her daughter Lucinia. When Alastor returns to the town, he takes Lucinia with him and marries her. They have two children, Handsel and Chanterelle. Everything goes well with the family until disaster strikes, leaving Catrianne in sole charge of the children, obliged to seek shelter first at the iron-master’s foundry and then at the cabin in the mountains, where a great many surprises await them regarding their own identity and the peril overhanging the forest and the world of Faerie, which is under threat of extinction. Perhaps something can be saved, and if it can, the key to its salvation might lie, at least in part, in Catrianne’s music, Handsel’s uniqueness, and Chanterelle’s dreams.

"The present volume contains thirty-five fairy tales by nineteen writers, presented chronologically by author"--Introduction.

It is a mystery story and a detective story about mankind’s primordial quest for peace on earth, which first requires that we understand how peace gets destroyed. And like the thrillers on TV that reveal clues slowly, you will see a crescendo of mysteries that I knew were clues, if I could just figure them out! Those tough experiences were simply what I had to go through to develop the sensitivity to subliminal signals in nature that I never would have been able to pick up if my life had only been happy and easy. Yet the story is peppered with exhilarating moments of transcendence, love, and naivete. Wonderful experiences dotted this life like pecans in cinnamon rolls.

The knights of King Arthur's Round Table - Erec, Lancelot, Yvain, Perceval and Gawain - first appeared in the works of Chrétien de Troyes, who cast into Old French stories told by Welsh and Breton story tellers which had their origin in Celtic myth and legend. Chrétien wrote at a time when faery lore was still taken seriously - some leading families even claimed descent from faery ancestors! So we do well to look again at these early stories, for they were written not so much in terms of mystical quests or examples of military chivalry but records of initiation into Otherworld dynamics. Gareth Knight, an acknowledged expert on spiritual and magical traditions and a student of medieval French, goes to the well spring of Arthurian tradition to unveil these original principles. What is more, he shows how they can be regenerated today. "Opening the faery gates" can have its reward not only in terms of personal satisfaction and spiritual growth but as part of a much needed realignment of our spiritual responsibilities as human beings on planet Earth.

How have fairy tales from around the world changed over the centuries? What do they tell us about different cultures and societies? Spanning the years from 900 to 1500 and traversing geographical borders, from England to France and India to China, this book uniquely examines the tales told, translated, adapted and circulated during the period known as the Middle Ages. Scholars in history, literature and cultural studies explore the development of epic tales of heroes and monsters and enchanted romance narratives. Examining how tales evolved and functioned across different societies during the Middle Ages, this book demonstrates how the plots, themes and motifs used in medieval tales influenced later developments in the genre. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of literature, history and cultural studies, this volume explores themes including: forms of the marvelous, adaptation, gender and sexuality, humans and non-humans, monsters and the monstrous, spaces, socialization, and power. A Cultural History of Fairy Tales (6-volume set) A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity is also available as a part of a 6-volume set, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales, tracing fairy tales from antiquity to the present day, available in print, or within a fully-searchable digital library accessible through institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com). Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Corinne J. Saunders's exploration of the topos of the forest, a familiar and ubiquitous motif in the literature of the middle ages, is a broad study embracing a range of medieval and Elizabethan exts from the twelft to the sixteenth centuries: the roman d'antiquite, Breton lay and courtly romance, the hagiographical tradition of the Vita Merlini and the Queste del Saint Graal, Spenser and Shakespeare. Saunders identifies the forest as a primary romance landscape, as a place of adventure, love, and spiritual vision... offers a pleasurable overview of the narrative function of the forest as a literary landscape. Based on a close comparative and theoretically non-partisan] reading of a broad range of literary texts drawn from the Europeqan canon, Saunders's study explores the continuity and transformation of an important motif in the corpus of medieval literature. MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEWDr CORINNE SAUNDERSteaches in the Department of English at the University of Durham. BLURBEXTRACTED FROM TLS REVIEW] ...An immense tract, not only of medieval literature but of human experience is] engagingly introduced and presented here...Corinne Saunders considers first forests in reality (a reality which keeps breaking through in romance...). She looks also at the classical and biblical models including Virgil, Statius and Nebuchadnezzar...only then does she turn to the non-real and non-Classical, i.e. the medieval and romantic. Here she follows a clear chronological plan from twelfth to fifteenth centuries also covering] the allegorized landscape of Spenser and the lovers' woods of Arden or Athens in Shakespeare. Her text-by-text layout does justice to the variety of possibilities taken up by different authors; the forest as a place where men run mad and turn into animals, a place of voluntary suffering, a focus of significance in the Grail-quests, a lovers' bower; above all and centrally, the place where the knight is tested and defined, even (as with Perceval) created.

Published in two volumes, the purpose of Jersey Folklore & Superstitions is three-fold: To bring all the previously published and any non-published material on Jersey folktales and superstitions together in one publication, to expand on the detail of this material and to place it in context by comparing it with similar or more complete traditions from the Gulf of St. Malo as a whole (Guernsey, Normandy and Brittany) and to consider its functions and origins. To this end they are further compared with traditions from Europe generally, with some examples from further afield and with mythologies worldwide. For Jersey readers this work will give an overview of their oral tradition, its significance and how it relates to the body of such traditions within Europe as a whole. For general readers the use of the Island’s traditions as a template for those elsewhere, the process of comparison with those from other regions and the attempt to outline the broad range of sources from which they are drawn, may give an insight into particular areas of folk tradition generally, such as fairy-lore, indigenous sorcery (witchcraft), domestic superstitions and the roles and origins of spectral animals and other beings. For this purpose, most chapters are broadly divided into four main sections. The Jersey material is presented first, followed by that from Guernsey, Normandy and Brittany, followed by an analysis using examples from further afield and from mythology. Each chapter concludes with a review and summary of this material. Liberal quotations of related ‘ditons’ or sayings in Jèrriais (the Jersey Language) are included with each chapter. The author has four previous publications; Jersey Superstitions in Etching & Poetry (hardcover 1981), An Introduction to Channel Islands’ Pewter (softcover 1993), Jersey Maritime Folklore (M/S format, 1996) and Sunbonnets in the Channel Islands & worldwide (CD-R 2005).