The Folklore Society

04/10/2026

We are very pleased to announce the Shortlist of The Katharine Briggs Award 2026

Tom Clark, Christopher D. Bader and Joseph O. Baker, Paranormal Britain: Belief in the Uncanny in England, Scotland and Wales (Bloomsbury Academic)

Caitlin Blackwell Baines, How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Profile Books)

Davide Ermacora and Simon Young (eds.) The Exeter Companion to Changeling Lore: The West Eurasian and Mediterranean Tradition (University of Exeter Press)

Matt King, A History of Goblins (Palgrave Macmillan)

Rory Waterman, Devils in the Details: On Location with Folk Tales in England’s Forgotten County (Five Leaves Publications)

The winner will be announced on Tuesday 10 November after this year’s Katharine Briggs Lecture, at The Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB, 18:30-20:30

The Katharine Briggs Lecture will be given by Dr Yinka Olusoga (University of Sheffield):

‘Carving, Mining, Weaving and Forging of Identities, Connection and Belonging: A Personal exploration of children’s folklife and why it matters'.

Tickets £10 (£5.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code) from Eventbrite at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-katharine-briggs-memorial-lecture-and-award-2026-tickets-1992420977779?

28/09/2026

'The Seven Sages of Rome' Database

The narrative often referred to in English as 'The Seven Sages of Rome' was one of the most popular, widespread and multilingual storymatters in the premodern world. Appearing in more than thirty languages, ranging from Syriac, Greek, and Persian to Czech, Welsh, and Icelandic, the frame narrative with its accompanying embedded moral tales was a medieval bestseller - but has been understudied in contemporary scholarship.

As part of a recent AHRC/DFG funded project, Jane Bonsall, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews, designed and populated a database which will facilitate multilingual, comparative, and in-depth study of 'The Seven Sages' in all its forms. The Seven Sages Database catalogues all known manuscript and print witnesses of the text, as well as describing different textual and linguistic variations, and includes the details of the embedded stories found in each version (many of which have direct parallels in traditional fables, exempla, and folk narratives).

In this online talk, Jane Bonsall introduces 'The Seven Sages' narrative tradition, outlines the digital tools and knowledge organisation systems implemented in the Database for its study, and focus on the way the Database treats the embedded stories, outlining the way hyperlinks and tags work to highlight the connections and contrasts between them, and how 'The Seven Sages' corpus sits alongside other repositories of traditional tales.

7pm, Tuesday 6 October, £6 non-members, £4 FLS members (with promo code)

Link in bio

[pic: Pontianus, Diocletian and the Seven Wise Masters; Cod. Palm. Germ. 149, Univ. Heidelberg; via Wikimedia Commons]

23/09/2026

Autumn is on our doorstep, and if you're a member of the Society then very soon the latest edition of our journal 'Folklore' will be too!

It's another chunky one, with articles on 'Sillie Wightis' in James VI's 'Daemonologie in Forme of ane Dialogue' (c.1592); Food, Drink, and Consolatory Practices at Irish Wakes and Funerals 1975-2025: An Autoethnographic Exploration; 'Let Me Relate to You Something Similar': Sympathetic Yarning in the Ancient Egyptian 'Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor'; The Wu Bing'an Thought Digital Research Centre: An Intelligent Platform for Exploring Folklore Classics; Whistled Language, Tradition, and Vernacular Culture: The Silbo Gomera (Gomera Whistle) of the Canary Islands; Susan Osborn 'The Witch of Norton' and Witchcraft Beliefs in Nineteenth-Century Suffolk; Is It Okay for Pots to Laugh at Kettles? Slovenian, Estonian, and Belarusian Proverbs about Joking and Laughter; and Between Faith and Medicine: Sacred Healing Practices in Georgian Folk Tradition.

Plus eighteen pages of book reviews!

Happy reading! And if you'd like to find out how to secure your own copy of 'Folkore', visit our website. Link in bio.

12/09/2026

Thank you to everyone who attended the Twentieth Legendary Weekend of the Folklore Society earlier this month.

Strolling through this year's host city, Exeter, a group of us stumbled upon Mermaid Yard, location of the long-gone Mermaid Inn.

One of Exeter's most prominent inns from the 14th to the 19th centuries, the Mermaid had a yard that doubled at various times as a bell foundry and cockfighting arena. The last parts of the building to survive were the cellars, in use as an air raid shelter during the Second World War.

When he saw the sign, Jeremy yelled "STOP!", and we dutifully posed for his camera. Then we carried on to the Samuel Jones, pub of choice for the discerning Legendary Weekender.

Cheers!
🧜🏼‍♀️🍻

[pic: Jeremy Harte]

02/09/2026

Storytelling in the Fens

What stories were told about the Fens in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? In this contentious period, debates raged about the land and its people, variously casting the Fens as barren and thriving, rebellious and browbeaten, superstitious and Godly.

In this online talk, Tabitha Stanmore, historian and winner of the Katharine Briggs Award for her book 'Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic', explores the stories spun about this wetland and considers the impact these tales have had on the Fens today.

7pm, Tuesday 8 September, £6 non-members, £4 FLS members (with promo code)

Link in bio

[pic: Tabitha Stanmore]

31/08/2026

All invited to The Folklore Society Presidential Address 2026
‘The Passion of the Flax, Continued’
By Prof. David Hopkin
Tuesday 15 Sept, 17:30-18:30 online
Tickets are free but we encourage all to select the ‘free ticket with voluntary donation’ option when booking via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-passion-of-the-flax-continued-tickets-1995920447788?

Prof. David Hopkin's Folklore Society Presidential Address 2026 revisits Robert Eisler's 'The Passion of the Flax'

26/08/2026

30 September is the Deadline for submissions for this year's Folklore Society President's Prizes for UK or RoI registered student work on folklore and folkloristics: https://www.folklore-society.com/blog/post/presidents-prizes-for-student-work-2026/

22/08/2026

To celebrate World Folklore Day, here’s a little clip of a fusion of traditions at the recent wedding in Leeds of Josie Canham-Williams and Jasdeep Singh Degun

15/07/2026

Historic Building Mythbusting – Uncovering Folklore, History & Archaeology

Go to any ancient building and there will be interesting, exciting, and romantic stories presented to the visitor. They are commonly believed and widely repeated – but are they really true? These stories include those of secret passages linking ancient buildings, spiral staircases in castles giving advantage to right-handed defenders, ship timbers used in the construction of buildings on land, blocked doors in churches which are thought to keep the Devil out and claims to be the oldest pub in the country.

In this online talk, building archaeologist James Wright explains the development of such myths and investigates the underlying truths behind them. Sometimes the realities hiding behind the stories are even more interesting, romantic, and exciting than the myth itself...

7pm, Tuesday 21 July, £6 non-members, £4 FLS members (with promo code)

Link in bio

01/07/2026

All of your summer reading needs are catered for in the chunky new edition of our journal 'Folklore', hitting subscribers' doormats this week...

Issue 137.2 contains articles on The Soldier's Tale: Part 2; The Minotaur-Maze Problem in Collaborative Digital Horror Storytelling; Nereids in the Ancient Greco-Roman Imagination and an Anomalous Legend; Like Driftwood Taking Root: Folk-Onomastic Origin Legends from the Orkney Islands; Beowulf's Hair Pull: A Tangled History; Su***de and Flowers: The Folklore of the Boy's Grave (Suffolk); The Shape of Morality: Transformed Bodies as Sites of Moral Instruction in Gervase of Tilbury's 'Otia Imperialia' and Gerald of Wales's 'Topographia Hibernica'; The Entangled and Polyphonic Dynamics of Folk Memory: The Legend of Kadamattathu Kathanar; and The Scottish Origins of 'The Cornish Litany'... plus fifteen pages of book reviews!

If you're not a subscriber, visit our website to find out how to become one. Link in bio.