#winterfolklore

[whatthecrowtold]

The Forest of Brocéliande in Brittany, O best beloved, has always been a place of strange paths and shifting shadows. It is said that the air itself hums with enchantments, woven by Morgan le Fay and her allies—the cunning Korrigan. Long ago, in the time of Arthur’s court, a company of knights rode into those woods, seeking lost Merlin by order of their lord.

The Korrigan, the Little People of Brittany, greeted them first, their gleaming eyes betraying no kindness. “Turn back,” they sang, their voices soft as running water, “for Merlin is gone, and this forest is not for you.” But knights are not so easily dissuaded. One, from the West and cunning in the ways of fae, said, “Lead us to him, little sprites, or I will give you cold iron.”

The Korrigan smiled at that. “Follow, then,” they whispered, and vanished into the trees. The knights, blinded by pride, rode onward. They rode through thickets that tore at their cloaks and rode past streams that glittered unnaturally in the moonlight. The path grew narrow, the air colder. The laughter of the Korrigan faded, replaced by the low toll of a bell.

They had stepped into Anaon, the land of the dead, a place between life and eternity. But they were not dead. The enchantments of Brocéliande held them fast, and Morgan le Fay’s cunning ensured they would ride and quest forever.

Now, on the coldest of winter nights, when the snow lies undisturbed and the forests grow silent, their hoofbeats echo faintly. Those who have seen them swear the knights are neither flesh nor bone, but shadows bound by frost, spells, and moonlight, still clad in shadows of mail and fish-scale armour, with the horsehair plumes on top of their spangenhelms waving in the icy wind blowing from the sea and the Beyond.

When they spot you, they might stop and ask for the way. Do not answer them. Look to the ground, say “An holl speredoù mat a veul an Aotrou Doue” thrice. Then they might not take you with them to Anaon.

In Brocéliande, they still say: “Do not follow the laughter of the Korrigan, for it leads only to the land of Anaon. And never answer the call of the knights, for their path belongs to death and dreams, and there is no returning.”

🎨 Pascal Moguérou

[whatthecrowtold]

On a Burns Night just like the one we have today, O best beloved, not so long ago, Alasdair MacCoinnich, gatherer and teller of tales, trudged through the frost-bound countryside. He was off for the annual Burns supper in his village hall, and if he lingered on his way to gather inspiration for another tale or two, who could blame him?

As the moon rose, the hills turned silver, and our Ally paused to catch his breath near the standing stones of Clach na Gréine. A strange light shimmered ahead, blue, and green as sea glass.

And through the frost and shadows, he saw her. The Cailleach Bheur herself dancing in the snow. Her long, white hair streamed like a banner in the wind, but her face was that of a young woman, fierce and radiant. She laughed as she twirled, her staff striking the ground and around her, spirits of frost and hail swirled.

Here was the Cailleach, as the old tales said—growing younger by the day since drinking from the well of youth on the longest night of the year. Ally knew he should flee, but the sight was too wondrous to ignore. Instead, as a chill ran down his spine, he called out, unable to help himself, “Weel done, Beira!”

The music stopped. The spirits turned their hollow eyes to him, and the Cailleach froze mid-step, her staff poised. Slowly, her gaze found him, sharp and ancient despite her youthful face.

“Alasdair MacCoinnich of Cromarty,” she said, her voice cold as a mountain stream. “You’ve seen what was not meant for mortal eyes. What tale will you spin of this?”

So addressed, the teller of tales stammered, clutching his satchel. “A braw one, no doubt, my lady.”

The Cailleach’s laugh rang out, colder than the wind. “If you live to tell it, perhaps. Run, storyteller.”

He did not need telling twice. Like Burns his creation before him, Ally fled, the laughter of frost spirits at his heels.

When he burst into the village hall, cheeks red and breath steaming, the gathered crowd cheered his arrival, whisky glasses raised.

“Tell us a tale, Ally!”

Alasdair laughed nervously, his heart still racing. “Aye, I’ve a tale,” he said, sinking into a chair. “But first, pour me a wee dram of the creature. It’s a long one, and it’ll chill ye to the bone.

🎨 John Bauer

[whatthecrowtold]

When deep Winter holds Hokkaido’s Hidaka Mountains in her icy grip, O best beloved, they say a crane danced in Tokachi that once was a bride.

In the twilight years of the Sengoku period, young Otsuru was promised to Lord Shigekazu, a cruel and ambitious daimyo. She was carried south to his imposing manor as a bride and the lord’s brutality was swift and unrelenting—Otsuru’s days became a blur of misery and came next Winter they buried the bride.

But from frost-encrusted earth, Otsuru’s spirit rose, shimmering as a crane, her snowy feathers streaked with red as if painted by the setting sun. Her soul fled northward, back to Tokachi, where she had once laughed amidst wildflowers.

She did not return to her home in peace.

Villagers began to speak of a mysterious crane who danced in the moonlight near the frozen river banks, her steps weaving sorrowful patterns in the snow. Men who ventured too close found themselves entranced by her grace, her human eyes burning with a promise they could not resist.

“Follow me,” she was said to whisper in a voice like wind through reeds. “Find me in the snow, claim your bride.”

Came Spring and the snows melted, their bodies lay in the mud, their faces still twisted in longing.

Years passed, and her tale became a warning. It was said that only a man who sought not beauty but her heart would find peace in her dance. And so, one bitter January evening, a ronin named Haruto, weary of bloodshed, stood by the river at the edge of the frozen reeds.

The crane appeared, her plumage gleaming in the moonlight. “Why do you come, stranger?” asked she.

“To honour the sorrow in your steps,” he replied, his voice steady.

“Follow me,” said the crane.

They walked until dawn, yet Haruto’s pace never quickened, his eyes never strayed from the crane. As the sun rose, Otsuru paused, her feathers shedding into snowflakes.

“You sought my heart,” she said. “And I have no heart left to give.”

With a final glance, her form dissolved into the wind, leaving behind only the faint imprint of a crane’s dance in the snow.

They say the bride is gone now, but if you want to catch a glimpse of your future love, do not go in Winter and seek not the cranes.

🎨 Kaburaki Kiyokata 鏑木清方 (1878-1972)

[whatthecrowtold]

The huldra, O best beloved, is a forest spirit of the North, known for her beauty, her allure, her odd tail and sometimes her treachery. Those who enter into a pact with a Huldra are well advised to tread warily.

Once, in the time when the beeches of the Vestfold’s Bøkeskogen glimmer with snow and ice under the Winter moon, they say a huldra wanders in search of the heartless. So it was on one such January night that Einar, a woodsman of Fjellby, met her. She emerged from the shadows, her beauty luminous, her cow’s tail flicking beneath a gown of mist.

“You are strong, Einar”, spoke the spirit, “You might even be waterproof, but you are dumb. And, O, so dull. Let me lend you charm, the kind that bends hearts to your will. For a year and a day, all you gain with your new silver tongue will be yours—but I will take half of what you treasure most.”

Einar thought of the miller’s daughter and a smile that never was for him. The woodsman did not even blink.

And in the blink of an eye, once-gruff words now dripped honey, and the miller’s beautiful daughter was his bride before Summer came. Came Winter again Einar’s joy turned into fear.

The night of the pact’s end, the spirit appeared at his door, her eyes frost-bright.

“I’ve come to collect,” said the Huldra. “Half of what you treasure most.”

Einar’s pleas fell on deaf ears. The Huldra beckoned to his wife, she came and took the spirit’s hand.

“My half!” cried the woodsman, “What of my half?”

“Tongue of songbird, heart of magpie and still the head of grouse. Dumb,” said the Huldra.

The air filled with the crack of wood and the scent of sap. In his yard stood a tree, split down the middle. One half was smooth and pale, like a woman’s form; the other was dark, rough bark, weeping golden sap freezing in the cold air.

“Heart of magpie! Charm, not steal!” said the huldra and disappeared with the miller’s daughter in the snow between the beeches.

And so he remains, a ghost among the beeches, while the half-tree, half-wife stands eternal in the snow—a warning to all to have the heart of a songbird when they strike bargains with a forest spirit.

🎨 fuchskautz

[whatthecrowtold]

Today is Candlemas, O best beloved, the very last feast of Christmas tide, when mangers and other decorations are put away everywhere at last, candles are blessed for the year and animals look for their shadows to see if winter is finally over. Or not.

Of old, the date of Candlemas was a liminal time of forecasting the future with various means and on the eve of Candlemas, a witches’ sabbath was held in many places. And on such a veille de la Chandeleur, when the Wars of Religion raged across France, young Jeanne Hervillier walked to the crossroads beyond the city walls of Poitiers. Others were already there, their candles gleaming in the dark. And the black goat was waiting.

The air smelled of wax and smoke as they danced. The goat spoke, its voice low and knowing. One by one, they kissed its hindquarters, their lips cold as they whispered the name of a dying king. The fire blazed higher, swallowing horns, hooves, bones—until nothing remained but ash and silence.

The next morning, Jeanne took a candle with the other Huguenots of Poitiers and walked in the procession towards the old Baptistère Saint-Jean, a holy place already when bishop Hilary preached in the Roman Oppidum Lemonum and a blessing of the light is never wasted. Even when you carry dark thoughts and a curse on your lips.

A summer and a half ago, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, the bells rang in Paris. The King had given the order. A thousand Protestants butchered before dawn, a thousand more before dusk. The Seine ran red, and the streets stank of death for weeks.

The Edict of Nantes was broken, the Huguenot cause drowned in blood, Protestant Poitiers mourned the murdered thousands, the Catholic Guises seemed triumphant. And the witches of Poitou had no love for those.

And now, Charles IX coughs blood in the halls of the Louvre. The preachers call it divine judgement. But Jeanne knows better.

The witches danced on the Eve of Candlemas. The fire burned. The goat was consumed. The ashes were scattered to seal a king’s fate.

Jeanne bought a pancake from a stall by the Baptistère. A traditional symbol of the coming sun of spring on la Chandeleur.

🎨 Abigail Larson

[whatthecrowtold]

Today, O best beloved, on the brown day of Bride, when winter lingers but spring stirs beneath the frost, the serpent wakes.

“The serpent will come from the hole

On the brown Day of Bríde,

Though there should be three feet of snow

On the flat surface of the ground”

They say if it sees its shadow, winter will stretch long and lean. But if the day is grey, it will return beneath the earth, and spring will come swift behind it.

But some shadows should never be seen. Some things should never wake.

At Aberlemno in Angus, where the old Pictish stones stand, there is one carved with a serpent and symbols no one fully understands. Scholars speak of power, of kingship, of boundaries between lands, life and death. But some old folk, the ones whose forbears lived in Forfarshire long, long before all the others who still whisper before the hearth, they say something else.

They say the serpent was buried there, beneath the stone, when the world was younger, when the sea swallowed the land that still remembered the great beasts, before the last hunters fled there from the place the great North Sea drank so long ago.

A serpent slithers like a river, like those rivers in the lost land where the great beasts grazed, it coils like a whirlpool, and then the serpent strikes like a sudden wave.

Those who made it to the high hills that were high hills no longer without a plain, they buried the serpent, the storm-bearer, the flood-bringer under the stones.

They did not carve its name back then. They sealed it in earth and silence.

Much later, the Picts set their stones there and those who remembered had the serpent carved on one of it.

And they came, each year on Imbolc, to see if the fires still burned in the hills where the pylon now stands, and to watch for a sign of the serpent and its shadow.

But fires were not lit for a long time on Imbolc, and no one came to the stones in Angus but tourists. And now the earth shifted.

And deep below, where no breath should linger and nothing should see, the serpent saw its shadow.

And the waves, far off Montrose Beach on the grey horizon, began to rise.

🎨 narianoir89

[whatthecrowtold]

Before the Saxons came West, O best beloved, and raised Offa’s Dyke, before even the Romans carved their roads through the hills to Y Caer, Castle Collen and Newtown, Gwyn ap Nudd led the Wild Hunt across Powys.

They rode with the first frost after Nos Galan Gaeaf, Samhain to the Gaels, and did not rest until winter's final night.

And it was always the Huntsmistress who called them back before the first light of Gŵyl Fair y Canhwyllau. Candlemas.

A domina from the line of Magnus Maximus in Viroconium, a princess from the House of Gwerthrynion, Lady de something or other after Edward the Longchamps and an English title now—names change, duty does not.

On the last night of January, she leaves Llangollen and walks alone into the woods below Castell Dinas Brân. Her black cloak is heavy with frost, her arms filled with rowan boughs, their berries red as spilled blood. Two pale hounds pad at her side, their bells soft in the mist. A breed bred from the Cŵn Annwn long ago. Who better to guide the Hunt home than those who still carry its blood?

At the old clearing, the mistress waits for the Hunt.

First come the hounds of Annwn themselves, white as bone, eyes like embers, breath steaming in the cold. Then the riders, shadow-bound and silent. Last of all, Gwyn ap Nudd, the Lord of the Hunt himself, the shadow in the mist, the storm made otherworldly flesh.

"You stand alone this year, Huntsmistress."

She does not answer. She drives the rowan branches into the earth, forming the old wards.

"It is time."

The hounds howl, the riders stir. The mist thickens—the way to Annwn is opening.

But Gwyn does not move.

"Your mother called me back before you. And her mother before that. But after you—who will do it?"

She does not answer.

The Lord of the Tylwyth Teg nods, turns his huge bone-white charger to the threshold and the door and the Hunt vanishes into Annwn, the Otherworld, their howls swallowed by the night. The forest is silent once more.

But as she turns homeward, his words linger.

Tomorrow, the candles will be lit. But one day, the Hunt will ride unchecked.

And who then will stand at the threshold after Nos Galan Gaeaf?

[whatthecrowtold]

O best beloved, they said it was the greatest marvel of the age—a woman of gears and porcelain, a clockwork dancer with ivory limbs and eyes of painted glass. But what made her move was no mere mechanism.

What danced in theatres from Paris to Vienna and Warsaw, at the High Porte and St Petersburg, the marvel known as Metharme, had indeed received a kiss of life. But not from a kind deity.

It was the Doctor Ambrosisus Wanzenbock. And they had laughed at him at Heidelberg and Göttingen. The fools! But who was laughing now? He had done it, the man of Hermetic arts, binding a Winter Spirit into the automaton’s geared chest. Not even Paracelsus and Agrippa of Nettesheim had dreamed of such a feat!

It was the Maschinenbauer, the engineer, though, who had built her, wound her delicate springs, polished her delicate hands. And he, unlike the Doctor Wanzenbock, had given Metharme her name. Treated her with kindness.

But machines should not think, and spirits should not feel. The Doctor Wanzenbock saw it in the way the Engineer spoke to her, as if she were more than mere artifice, as if she mattered. If it continued, she might awaken, might slip from his control.

So that night, the Doctor commanded the spirit to strangle the Maschinenbauer.

But the Winter Spirit inside the porcelain shell knew. She had been ice and wind, untamed before she was captured—but she had learned something new, something strange and terrible.

Grief.

She turned to her master in spirit, and for the first time, she moved of her own accord.

Her hand, so carefully wound, touched his throat. Frost bloomed where her fingers met skin. Wanzenbock gasped, eyes wide with understanding, with horror. He had forged a perfect creation. And now it had chosen.

By dawn, the workshop was silent. The Summoner lay frozen where he fell, a red ruin where his voice had been. Metharme the Marvel, the automaton, the Winter Spirit, was gone.

They say she was last seen walking into the snow, leaving a trail of red-tinged footprints, vanishing into the cold. Perhaps she sought the wind, the wildness she once knew. Perhaps she was simply too late.

For even winter spirits cannot bring back the dead

🎨 Akira Kusaka