The obscure becomes vivid: Perspectives on the (re)mediation of fairy lore by folklorists, performers and audiences

Tales about fairies are often thought of as the province of children, popularised by moralising fairy tales and Disney films, yet the success of works such as The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and World of Warcraft demonstrate that other tropes that tap into the mythical past hold the power to enthral adult audiences. The Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies research project explored the porosity of this border by inviting thirteen musicians, writers and visual artists to respond to traditional tales about fairies and collaborate to make new works for contemporary audiences. We frame the artists’ interpretations of fairy lore as acts of (re)mediation. Audiences were involved through work-in-progress sharings and focus groups to capture their responses to the developing work. Here we present three distinct perspectives on the project: the folklore academic, the practice-as-research artist and the audience researcher. The thematic choices the artists made with the open-ended creative brief were at times unexpected, exposing the individual journeys artists made to create personal connections with the material. This resulted in work being produced that represented an individual artistic voice. Audience experience was similarly bound up in deeply personal understandings of fairy folklore, requiring modes of marketing presentation to be fully thought-through if this content is to be commercialised for new target markets. This project exposes the process of mediating folkloric material to make it relevant to contemporary concerns and anxieties. The narratives foreground vital themes of individual identity and self-determination; the vivid dramatisation of timeless and enduring truths about human existence still communicates powerfully with contemporary audiences. With attention to the staging of concepts and mediatised (re)presentation, this project has shown that the ancient, academic and obscure has the potential to become immediate, relevant and vivid

E-scooters in Salford : interim report

As part of national trials in the UK, an e-scooter share scheme is being operated by Lime in parts of Salford. Launched in October 2020, it is expected to run for an initial period of twelve months and will contribute towards an evidence base on the potential role of these new vehicles within the transport systems of towns and cities. The trials reflect policy goals at the Greater Manchester level to address congestion and air quality and, in the current context of Covid-19, to provide forms of transport that enable travel while social distancing

Old Icelandic and Old English wisdom poetry Gnomic themes and styles

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D170416 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Mediating medieval(ized) emotion in Game of Thrones

HBO’s Game of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin’s cult book series A Song of Ice and Fire, is currently the world’s most popular television show. It mediates a medieval world – more correctly, a constellation of imagined medieval societies – in a “utilitarian bricolage.” The show focuses, particularly in its final seasons, on the western-style cultures of the continent of Westeros. Here, as many online commentators note, a familiar type of medievalism, “the ‘life is filthy, brutal and short” version,” intimates that the show is “realistic”, clearly setting itself in opposition to the idealized “Merrye Olde Englande version” of many early twentieth-century medievalist imaginings – for example, Tolkien’s Shire. Game of Thrones also offers, in some respects, a highly orientalized version of eastern societies – both Middle and Far Eastern – with its depictions of the Dothraki (a nomadic society of horsemen based on the Mongols) and the slaving cultures at Slavers’ Bay, who owe much to medieval notions of Saracens. The show depicts a range of different emotions within its complex, interweaving storylines; by deploying emotions strongly associated with the medieval period in the popular imagination it claims, at an implicit level, to authenticate the alterity of the realization of Martin’s world created by showrunners David Benioff and Daniel Weiss, foregrounding alternative and challenging aspects of human experience. In so doing, the show elicits powerful emotional reactions both within its fan community and among more casual audiences. The concomitants of “medieval” emotion in the show are frequently shocking, characterized by (often sexual) violence, or explicit nudity and sexual activity (a noted hallmark of HBO programming). “The ‘un-modern’ setting of these films [sc. medieval movies] is used as a licence to project taboo images and actions – particularly around the body and what might be done to it or done with it, or how it might be displayed,” notes Andrew Higson of films set in the medieval past. So, too, with the TV show. Notwithstanding these sensationalizing impulses, other historically attested medieval emotions or emotion-related behaviors are eschewed or downplayed as just too alien and unsympathetic. The world of Game of Thrones instantiates a medievalism that may, at times, be misleading about the past, but also one that both invites and integrates critique of its imagined emotional systems.7 The show opens up larger questions about human feeling as both universal and culturally contingent: questions at the heart of current thinking about emotions and emotion research methodologies

Mediating medieval(ized) emotion in Game of Thrones

HBO’s Game of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin’s cult book series A Song of Ice and Fire, is currently the world’s most popular television show. It mediates a medieval world – more correctly, a constellation of imagined medieval societies – in a “utilitarian bricolage.” The show focuses, particularly in its final seasons, on the western-style cultures of the continent of Westeros. Here, as many online commentators note, a familiar type of medievalism, “the ‘life is filthy, brutal and short” version,” intimates that the show is “realistic”, clearly setting itself in opposition to the idealized “Merrye Olde Englande version” of many early twentieth-century medievalist imaginings – for example, Tolkien’s Shire. Game of Thrones also offers, in some respects, a highly orientalized version of eastern societies – both Middle and Far Eastern – with its depictions of the Dothraki (a nomadic society of horsemen based on the Mongols) and the slaving cultures at Slavers’ Bay, who owe much to medieval notions of Saracens. The show depicts a range of different emotions within its complex, interweaving storylines; by deploying emotions strongly associated with the medieval period in the popular imagination it claims, at an implicit level, to authenticate the alterity of the realization of Martin’s world created by showrunners David Benioff and Daniel Weiss, foregrounding alternative and challenging aspects of human experience. In so doing, the show elicits powerful emotional reactions both within its fan community and among more casual audiences. The concomitants of “medieval” emotion in the show are frequently shocking, characterized by (often sexual) violence, or explicit nudity and sexual activity (a noted hallmark of HBO programming). “The ‘un-modern’ setting of these films [sc. medieval movies] is used as a licence to project taboo images and actions – particularly around the body and what might be done to it or done with it, or how it might be displayed,” notes Andrew Higson of films set in the medieval past. So, too, with the TV show. Notwithstanding these sensationalizing impulses, other historically attested medieval emotions or emotion-related behaviors are eschewed or downplayed as just too alien and unsympathetic. The world of Game of Thrones instantiates a medievalism that may, at times, be misleading about the past, but also one that both invites and integrates critique of its imagined emotional systems.7 The show opens up larger questions about human feeling as both universal and culturally contingent: questions at the heart of current thinking about emotions and emotion research methodologies

Making 'modern fairies': making fairies modern

An AHRC-funded project ‘Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies’ investigated what happened when a number of artists (musicians, writers, filmmakers) were asked to respond to and remediate a curated selection of traditional stories about fairies and loathly ladies. The artists came to the project with a spectrum of different views about fairies, ranging from belief in their existence to absolute scepticism about the supernatural. The works-in-progress they created were performed in a series of experimental shows at The Sage Gateshead theatre in 2019. The artists took up certain themes such as the otherworld, time slippage, fairies and children, but were not attracted by others. Fairy material was reconfigured to reflect contemporary concerns about the natural world and to explore ways in which magical human animal transformation spoke to women’s experience

Making 'modern fairies': making fairies modern

An AHRC-funded project ‘Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies’ investigated what happened when a number of artists (musicians, writers, filmmakers) were asked to respond to and remediate a curated selection of traditional stories about fairies and loathly ladies. The artists came to the project with a spectrum of different views about fairies, ranging from belief in their existence to absolute scepticism about the supernatural. The works-in-progress they created were performed in a series of experimental shows at The Sage Gateshead theatre in 2019. The artists took up certain themes such as the otherworld, time slippage, fairies and children, but were not attracted by others. Fairy material was reconfigured to reflect contemporary concerns about the natural world and to explore ways in which magical human animal transformation spoke to women’s experience