Rivka

Illustration, 'The Wild Rose Fairy'. A winged fairy wearing a long, pink gown sits among wild roses.

'Love is like the wild rose-briar,
Friendship like the holly-tree—
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms
But which will bloom most constantly?'
~Emily Brontë

🎨Cicely Mary Barker
#BookWormSat

Painting. A young girl sits in a high-backed, ornate armchair, engrossed in a large book. Beside her, on top of a pile of books, a candle burns. A ghostly figure rises from the candle and floats above her. There are other, transparent ghostly figures in the room. A black cat arches its back and hisses at them.

'Wonderland'
by Adelaide Claxton

#PhantomsFriday

Sending my best wishes to you.

A forest under a full, smiling moon. Two small children play on a seesaw with several fairies, who are light, ethereal beings. They are being watched by two more children, some rabbits and a frog. The children wear red caps with white spots, resembling mushrooms.

'Sometimes they found forest fairies dancing and singing in the moonlight and joined in their games.'

'Children of the Forest' by Elsa Beskow
#WyrdWednesday

Illustration by John Bauer: A regal woman in ornate dress, crowned with flowers, reaches toward a shadowy, elongated figure rising from the sea—a haunting, dreamlike encounter between human and otherworldly.

When their ferry sunk on Lake Vättern in 1918, drowning artist John Bauer and his family, they said the Sea King had come to take his wife Ester Ellqvist-Bauer, She had modelled as “Agneta and the Merman” for John in 1911… a dark Scandinavian tale.

#WyrdWednesday #GoldenAgeofIllustration

Illustration of a woman in a tree, emerging from a small teapot. She is wearing a gown decorated with blossoms.

'In the middle of the tree there sat a sweet-looking old woman in a very strange dress. It was green, as green as the leaves of the elder tree, and it was trimmed with big white elder blossoms.'
~The Elder-Tree Mother

🖋️Hans Christian Andersen
🎨Arthur Rackham
#WyrdWednesday

A painting of an owl carrying two fairies. The dresses the fairies wear reflect the fashion of the 1820s. One is seated, the other is standing and holding a wand. There is a full moon top right of the scene, and some clouds at the bottom.

Fairies travelling in style for today's #OwlishMonday
The artist is Amelia Jane Murray (1800-1896)

🍄🌕🍄It was said that if you ran around a Fairy Ring of toadstools nine times on the night of a full moon, you would hear the Fae talking and singing - but if you ran widdershins (anticlockwise) you would fall under their power.
#FolkloreThursday #FolkyFriday #FolkloreSunday

A blackbird is purchased on the ground of a wooded bank near a lake on a misty winter day. Overhead, hazel catkins droop.

“When we see the hazel catkins turn yellow, we know that spring is not far off”

Writer: EL Grant Watson
Artist: CF Tunnicliffe

Victorian painting, 'The Old Hall, Fairies by Moonlight; Spectres & Shades, Brownies and Banshees'. Various spirits, fairies and other creatures gather round an old grey house under a full moon.

'See’st thou yon gray gleaming hall,
Where the deep elm-shadows fall?
Voices that have left the earth
Long ago,
Still are murmuring round its hearth,
Soft and low.'
~Felicia Dorothea Hemans

🎨John Anster Fitzgerald
#PhantomsFriday

Illustration. An owl, sitting in a cosy armchair beside a fire, eating a bowl of soup and a piece of toast.

'Owl at Home' for #OwlishMonday
by Arnold Lobel

Art Nouveau illustration featuring a seated female figure wearing an ornate costume and flower headdress. She is holding a staff with a jester’s head on top. Intricate golden patterns and figures in carnival costume decorate the background. “Febrero” is written at the top. 'CARNAVAL' is spelt out letter by letter across the image, each letter in a decorative ball.

Allegory of the month February
by Gaspar Camps

Wood engraving. Two kittens encounter a magpie beside a large tub of plants.

'The Demon'
by Lionel Lindsay, 1925

#Caturday

Today is Old Wassail and Here's to thee, old apple tree...

Some places have very, very old wassailing customs, though, and we go to the West Country on Old Twelvey to witness such a one in our 11th #winterfolklore tale.

Read it below.

🎨 Arthur Rackham

Every hour is the witching hour. We are as potent at dawn or noon as we are at the suggested 3am. We flourish during the solar alchemy of twilight. We are creatures of the threshold. The turning of time is a powerful engine of magics. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Drawing of Emily Dickinson wrapped in a shawl looking from a window of a wooden slatted building with ivy and shutters. There is a glass on the sill beside her, she wears a little necktie and looks a little cross.

Bonus for #BookWormSat
Emily Dickinson by Edward Gorey for Howard Moss’ book Instant Lives.

Illustration of a woman in the forest.

'I needed not its breathing
To bring such thoughts to me;
But still it whispered lowly,
How dark the woods will be!'
-Emily Brontë

🎨Arthur Rackham
#BookWormSat

Painting. A garden at sunset. Flower bushes, trees, classical statues. A young woman with long, dark brown hair stands at the edge of a pond, gazing down at the water. She wears a long red/orange gown.

'My childhood from my life is parted,
My footstep from the moss which drew
Its fairy circle round: anew
The garden is deserted.'
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

🎨Eugène Grasset
#BookWormSat

Gouache on paper. A woman with long red hair wearing a blue dress. She is partly recoiling and partly reaching out to an apparition appearing beside her between the trees. This figure is thought to be a ghostly double of herself.

'Frozen like a thing of stone
I sit in thy shadow – but not alone.'

🖋️‘A Silent Wood’
🎨'The Haunted Wood'
Art and poem by Elizabeth Siddal
#PhantomsFriday

'Prospero and Ariel', an illustration for Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'. A man with a white beard stands beside a tree. He is wearing a long cloak and holding a large book. He is looking at several fairy-like spirits above him. One of these spirits is larger than the others, and flies above them with arms outstretched.

'Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.'

~William Shakespeare, 'The Tempest'

🎨Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
#bookologythursday

Illustration depicting Alice standing beside the caterpillar, who sits on a mushroom smoking a hookah pipe. The mushroom is as tall as Alice, and is surrounded by grass and large red flowers.

Advice from a Caterpillar for #WyrdWednesday
Illustration by Tove Jansson
'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland', 1966.

Painting of a woman playing the violin in a snow-covered forest.

Winter Music, Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946).

Under a leaden sky, ducks are huddled together on a partially frozen silvery lake surrounded by reeds and bull rushes

‘At the edge of the mere’

Artist: CF Tunnicliffe
(What to Look for in Winter, 1959)

An illustration by Edmund Dulac for Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. It shows a nocturnal scene of a snow-covered town. The ethereal figure of the Snow Queen is shown drifting above the snow-laden rooftops, her form blending with the falling snow. The background features a large, imposing Gothic-style church. The rooftops of the houses below are heavily covered in snow, with warm light glowing from the windows.

Goodnight. ❄️
'Many a winter's night she flies through the streets and peeps in at the windows, and then the ice freezes on the panes into wonderful patterns like flowers.' Illustration from The Snow Queen, Edmund Dulac. From Stories from Hans Andersen, 1911.

Illustration, also known as 'The English Snowdrop'. One of 30 black & white plates from the limited edition of "Elves and Fairies" (1916), depicting a rather forlorn looking snowdrop fairy on a snowy bank with wintry trees and snow topped bushes in the background.

'The First of the Fairies'
Illustration by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite

#snowdrops

Where the Forgotten Garden Lies Asleep' by Georgina M. de L'Aubinieres is a painting of an old house that is seemingly being taken over by its garden. Trees, long grasses, shrubs, flowers, and a sundial.

'I never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there are such things;
That they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings.
I know this house isn't haunted, and I wish it were, I do;
For it wouldn't be so lonely if it had a ghost or two.'
~Joyce Kilmer

🎨G. M. de L'Aubiniere
#BookWormSat

A painting of a park at night, with a large house visible in the background, to the right of the scene. Two people watch from behind a tree, as ghostly figures in 18th century clothing dance and socialise as though attending a ball.

The Haunted Park
by Richard Doyle (1824-1883)

#PhantomsFriday

Black and White portrait photograph of the artist Jessie M.King as a young woman, 1890s.

Art Nouveau artwork in the 'Glasgow Style' depicting a young woman talking to a little fairy in a blossoming tree. The tree is on a small hill or 'mound'. The young woman is kneeling, wearing a long dress with a floral design.

Artist Jessie M. King (1875-1949), the magical 'Glasgow Girl' who met the fairies.

#WyrdWednesday

A richly textured, icy scene in pale blues and greys. A dense winter forest fills the image — evergreens, bare branches and snow-laden trunks — but their curves and shadows subtly combine into the outline of a huge, half-hidden human face, as if the spirit of winter lies sleeping in the landscape itself. Delicate white frost traces the branches in the foreground, while mist and snowfall soften the background trees. The composition feels both natural and enchanted, suggesting a world where the forest is alive with ancient, seasonal magic.

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

(Shelley)

🎨 Wiktor Kriżanowski

#wintersky

Illustration depicting the Snow Queen and Kai from Hans Christian Andersen's story of the same name. The Snow Queen is emerging from a flurry of snowflakes. Text, bottom right reads 'It was the Snow Queen'.

'It was the Snow Queen'
Illustration by Honor C. Appleton