Lost in the Rabbit Hole Kat Kiefer-Newman

In this episode we wander along the coastlines of many Northern places; these are often stark and lonely places, the people who live there quiet to outsiders, but somehow a tale is always shared around a campfire as the whiskey passes from hand to hand. The tales of of the SEAL PEOPLE, the special magical selkies sometimes called silkies, sometimes thought to be quite different from the seals you normally see tearing apart your fishing nets. Don't run afoul of these beings or you might rue th...

Welcome to another two-part episode of LOST IN THE RABBIT HOLE -- this is PART ONE. In this episode, we cover just some of the variants of The Wild Hunt tales, which come from Europe, but can also be found in some form all over the world. The Wild Hunt is a tale of a pack of spectral beings riding horses, sometimes flying, late at night. Sometimes there are demon dogs, or other packs of animals. These tales are moral tales, with the riders or hunters presaging something really bad -- war, pla...

Welcome to PART TWO, or another two-part episode of LOST IN THE RABBIT HOLE. In this episode, we cover just some of the variants of The Wild Hunt tales, which come from Europe, but can also be found in some form all over the world. The Wild Hunt is a tale of a pack of spectral beings riding horses, sometimes flying, late at night. Sometimes there are demon dogs, or other packs of animals. These tales are moral tales, with the riders or hunters presaging something really bad -- war, plague, di...

This is HUGE! For the month of DECEMBER the LOST IN THE RABBIT HOLE podcast will be a TWO PARTER! Join me as I delve into the variant tales of abandoned children. Hansel and Gretel are only a part of this story.We begin: "Long, long ago, beside one such Winter forest there lived a poor woodcutter with his wife and their two children – a little boy and a little girl. They lived humbly in a house made of wattle and daub, all snug together under their thatch roof. There was a little coop around ...

Are you ready for PART TWO, where we continue the tale of the abandoned children, "Little Brother and Little Sister", aka Hansel and Gretel?"Tale Types: Abandoned ChildrenWhat’s always so fun about these tales is to see how they are often mash-ups of other sorts of tales, but with a core narrative running through. For many of these abandoned children tales, we have three recurrent patterns: the children are lost in some manner in a forest, they meet an ogre, there’s a “show me...

In this episode we are lost in the dark woods, the enchanted forests, and we come upon the sleeping beauty. How many times have we walked through a small grove or copse of trees and been startled from a rattle just off to our right? Was it a little bird, or maybe a squirrel? But when you looked, nothing else moved. Except the shadows; shadows don’t make any noise. Do they? Angela Carter tells us how “The woods enclosed. Like a net, like a cage.” She says, “There is no way through th...