Folklore Fiction
Short Stories creating new tales around folklore and myth
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A boy called Scrat tends the household spirit his family has always kept. When a travelling wizard arrives to break the old arrangement, the house and its protector answer in ways no sorcery can match.
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A nurse returns from wartime France to bury her father in a Shropshire village, where a children’s singing game on the green carries instructions she has been following all her life.
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A crow called Voscur terrorises the hedgerow, tearing apart nests and carrying off chicks. A small sparrow named Sasper watches, learns the crow’s habits, and begins a patient campaign of revenge.
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Five children play a counting game on Bodmin Moor above Minions. When the rhyme turns cruel and one of them dies, the survivors bury what happened. Twenty years later, those old words return.
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A tithe surveyor arrives in an Oxfordshire parish in 1843 to map every field and account for every acre. The older records name a settlement called Slyne Birch, cleared by a local lord four centuries earlier. The dead do not want remembrance. They want someone to finish their paperwork.
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A minor landholder disputes a royal tax demand and is pushed into outlawry. Based on the 1225 Yorkshire pipe rolls entry for Robert Hod. Could this be the origin of Robin Hood?
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A Pictish chief faces an impossible choice when Anglian raiders violate his daughters and threaten his settlement. An origin legend of the carved stones at Dunnicar, told through the bloodline that survived.
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In 1780s Shropshire, a parish midwife watches a man called Odd Man Dodd move between three townships. Three people die. The children learn a rhyme. Nobody asks where the words came from.
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In St Barrow’s, Mistress Grimshaw’s charity opens her purse only for those who beg aloud before the parish. Judith Cox, widowed and cornered, finds a way to make the purse answer the want it knows best.
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Spearhafoc was an eleventh-century monk, artist, and goldsmith, appointed Bishop of London under Edward the Confessor. Before the crown intended for Edward could be completed, Spearhafoc vanished with the king’s gold and jewels.