New Books in Folklore

Since time immemorial, water has been a major theme in myth, religion and folklore throughout the world. With its 12,000-mile coastline, as well as a plethora of rivers and lochs, Scotland is a particularly rewarding...

The early twenty-first century ushered in a period of change in Bolivia. The country welcomed its first Indigenous president, a new constitution, and a profusion of laws that recognized individual music and dance...

What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest...

Gullah-Geechee Diasporas: Knowledge, Culture, and Black Lowcountry Legacies (University of South Carolina Press, 2026) counters romantic portrayals of Gullah-Geechee culture as a static, geographically isolated remnant...

Names are incredibly powerful things and are a crucial part of the way we see and classify the world around us. Plant names are especially fascinating in this respect. Some are simply descriptive or speak of ancient...

During a robbery on 10 March 1844, 14-year-old servant Mary Doherty was murdered in a farmhouse near Culdaff, Co. Donegal. There was no doubt locally about the perpetrator’s identity, but there was insufficient evidence...

Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in...

In the early twentieth century, a group of white writers, artists, and performers from the cultural hub of Charleston, South Carolina, created and curated a highly sanitized view of slavery. They imagined a once and...

Get It While It’s Hot (LSU Press, 2026) is an innovative collection that examines an increasingly commonplace belief across the U.S. South—that some of the best, most enjoyable food comes from places you would not...

Many people think they know what fairies are, what a fairy looks like, and how a fairy is expected to behave. Dr. Francis Young's Fairies: A History (Polity, 2026) demonstrates that the truth about belief in fairies is...

Stories of the Stones: Imagining Prehistory in Britain, Ireland and Brittany (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Paul Robichaud explores how ancient monuments – standing stones, megaliths and earthworks – have been reimagined...

As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit--especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples...

Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German, and branches spanning the world, from Australia and India to North America...

Deep Cosmopolitanism: Kutiyattam, Dynamic Tradition, and Globalizing Heritage in Kerala, India explores the extraordinary past and present of Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater, the world's oldest continuously performed...

Witchcraft and witches throughout history have long captured the imagination, yet hidden away in archives are records of long forgotten cases. Many of these are tragic, some are unusual – perhaps even inexplicable – but...