Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

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Her journalism has been featured in The New York Times , the Observer , the Guardian and the Huffington Post . She is the founder of gal-dem, a media company committed to spotlighting the creative talents of people of colour from marginalised genders. My fascination with folktales originally sprung from the hidden mystery in the fog, the twisting path in a dark forest, the never-ending echo of a deep well, the sudden end to footsteps in the snow.

Daisy Johnson starts off this story by telling us that she is asked to do a retelling of The Green Children of Woolpit and then she starts to see this woman who maybe resembles the girl from that original story only now a grownup. DARK, POTENT AND UNCANNY, HAG BURSTS WITH THE UNTOLD STORIES OF OUR ISLES, CAPTURED IN VOICES AS VARIED AS THEY ARE VIVID. When she demands her share of the money, she experiences something stranger, stranger than fiction as they say. Carolyn Larrington, the tales in this collection bring attention not just to great female authors but also to perhaps forgotten gems of British and Irish folklore. We know tales that originated in Germany and Italy but not, with a few exceptions, those associated with our own towns and villages.I just kept getting very annoyed with what I couldn't stop thinking about as ungrammatical sentences (either missing commas, or a sentence that really should have been more than one sentence). Finding out this collection of stories has previously been (at least parts) available as a podcast with stories specially written for a speaking performance, definitely made me interested in the audiobook format of 'Hag'. This is a Feminist reclaiming of British Folktales and is definitely worth a read but just be warned, it'll stay with you. Larrington provides the reader with a lengthy, remarkably insightful and informative introduction which includes the exploration of the title, Hag.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The stories were picked from different parts of the UK and Ireland and gave all managed to capture what the local areas have to offer. I found the framing of this collection to be very enjoyable (retelling traditional folktales) and I liked that "traditional" did not entail "white, male, and hetero.

I also liked the inclusion of the original inspiration for the retellings – it was interesting to see how the author’s used their creativity and explored the themes of those tales. I would rate it five stars if not for the inclusion of Eimear McBride’s The Tale Of Kathleen which is one of the smarmiest, look-how-cleverly-I’m-deconstructing-these-tropes stories I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading.