TIME IN FAIRYLAND
In fairyland time passes at a very arbitrary rate. Sometimes a year is really a thousand years, sometimes a night is twenty years, sometimes a few minutes play takes a hundred years or more; but this timeless fairyland is somehow interlocked with mortal time.
🎨Max Pirner, 1888
YEATS & VAMPIRES (1933)
In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the #vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.
SWAN SONG
In the Greek tradition, the #swan is enchanted and is often pictured singing to a lyre. This finds its way into fairy tales alongside its association with love and Venus, which comes from Roman myth. #FairyTaleTuesday🎨 swan & lyre; C14th singing swans
THE WILD SWANS Fairy tale by Hans Andersen, 1838. An evil queen turns her eleven stepsons into #swans and forces them to fly away; they're allowed to become human again by night. A possible influence on Swan Lake #FairyTaleTuesday🎨Anadezhda Illarionova; Marcia Brown
ILLUSTRATED BY JESSIE KING * C•WILHELM KATE GREENAWAY PHIL MAY LITTLEDOM CASTLE •AND* OTHER TALES BY MRS M-H•SPIELMANN HUGH THOMSON # H-FURNISS ROSIE PITMAN WARTHUR RACKHAM # H•RONNER Red cover with gold lettering and design of fairy with crescent moon.
Book Cover of the Day:
This is a fantastic library in a sensational gothic building well worth a visit if you can get there!
"Jewels in the Wash"
🎨 A. Duncan Carse (1875-1938)
#GoldenAgeOfIllustration
LOVE SONG FOR A REVENANT
Softly as brown-eyed Angels rove
I will return to thy alcove,
And glide upon the night to thee,
Treading the shadows silently
'The Revenant' Charles Baudelaire
Image: Abbott Thyer, 1903
THE GREAT MOON HOAX was published in a New York newspaper, August 25, 1835, it claimed the discovery of life & civilization on the Moon and featured an illustration of lunar bat people #baturday #GothicSpring
VAMPIRE TEETH 'The young lady at your right has the sharpest tooth, long thin, pointed like a needle' (Carmilla, 1872). Carmilla is outed as a #vampire by a hunchback mountebank carrying a magic lantern, a boxed salamander, a mandrake & a file for her teeth #mythologymonday
THE DEATH COACH or Cóiste Bodhar is said to appear after a BANSHEE attack. It Looks like a funeral coach drawn by black horses & is driven by a vampiric fairy spirit who collects the soul of the victim, without making a sound (Wentz, 1911) #GothicFolklore
WUTHERING HEIGHTS The 1847 edition of the only novel Emily Bronte published was released under the male alias Ellis Bell as a three-volume set less than two years before she died in 1848, aged just 30. Rarer and more poignant than any #WutheringHeightsMovie - only 250 copies were ever printed.
ST VALENTINE is the holy guardian of lovers but not many people know that after death his skull became a decorated floral relic, one of the most gothic items to be found in a Roman reliquary. Shown here in the Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin #ValentinesDay
GOTHIC #VALENTINES Mary Shelley is rumoured to have kept Percy Shelley's heart in a silken shroud, carrying it with her for years (his remains were in Rome). After she died the heart was found in her desk wrapped in his poems. It's hard to out goth that!
🎨Embalmed hearts
VAMPIRE FAIRY TALE Marusia is in love with a young man who she later sees eating a corpse laid out in the church. Falling victim to the #vampire she's buried at a crossroad & blooms again as a flower. Afanasev, Tales 1855-67 #FairyTaleTuesday
FAIRIES IN A BIRD'S NEST J.A. Fitzgerald (1819-1906) Fairies inhabit a stolen nest; a grotesque being is hatching from an egg. The painting retains its original gothic frame, its uncanny twiggy forms echoing the tangled, forbidden forest #MythologyMonday
ST VALENTINE is the holy guardian of lovers but not many people know that after death his skull became a decorated floral relic, one of the most gothic items to be found in a Roman reliquary. Shown here in the Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin #ValentinesDay
THE GWYLLION The hill fairies of Wales. Thought to be forbidding and malignant. They can visit houses and must be received cordially (if you do not want to risk their mischief). You can read about them in Wirt Sikes, British Goblins, 1880 #FolkloreSunday
SNAPDRAGON SKULLS Did you know snapdragon seed heads resemble tiny skulls? Just found the ones I saved in the autumn. Perfect for #gothicspring #botanicalgothic
THE HOUSE OF STRANGE SECRETS
A gothic mystery set on the English moors and published in the last year of the nineteenth century. This first edition has a wonderful bat motif. Gilt lettering on pictorial cloth (London: Sands & Co.1899). #Booksky
A WERE HEDGEHOG appears in a story recorded by the Brothers Grimm. A farmer's wife gives birth to a hedgehog boy and they give him a nest of straw behind the stove. He later rides off on a cockerel to find his fortune 🎨H.G. Ford 'The Green Fairy Book', 1892 #FairyTaleTuesday
WHITE RABBITS for the first of the month!! Goodbye January hello pre-spring! Fairies ride white rabbits from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' by Edwin Henry Landseer 1847 #February2026 #FolkloreSunday
Ooh! Thank you. I will look this out!
THE VAMPIRE by Rudyard Kipling. A haunting & macabre poem in which a hapless young man is beguiled by a female #vampire who appears in a scarlet shroud. Striking bat motif, limited edition, Boston, 1898.
PSYCHIC VAMPIRE STORY The Parasite is an 1894 novella by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about a psychic #vampire Miss Penelosa, a small pale creature who practices mesmerism & the evil eye & transforms into a monstrous parasite who creeps into her victim’s form.
VAMPIRE GIG Excited to reveal that I have contributed to the programme notes for #CynthiaErivo’s stage version of #Dracula. A new adaptation by Kip Williams at the Noel Coward Theatre from February 7th. Such a cool gig for the new year draculawestend.com
ENCOUNTERING A FAIRY QUEEN Early poets saw MAB as the Queen of the Fae, she is usually pictured in white as if dressed for the bridal. Images by John Bauer, 1907 & Thomas Maybank, 1906 for Michael Drayton's 1627 fairy poem Nymphidia: Or The Court Of Fairy #MythologyMonday
BLAKE'S VAMPIRE ‘The Ghost of a Flea’, a miniature painting by visionary artist and poet William Blake, is an image of vampirism in action; the flea holds a cup for blood drinking and stares eagerly towards it. It was produced in 1819, the same year as Polidori’s Vampyre #FolkloreSunday
You can read this for free via Project Gutenberg www.gutenberg.org/files/1640/1...
LILITH 1895
#Vampire novella by George MacDonald who inspired Tolkien & the Inklings. Mr Vane ventures through a mirror into another world where he encounters the uncanny desires of #vampire Lilith and the satantic shadow that manipulates her. #Booksky
