Nature Folklore

A passionate naturalist explores what it’s really like to be an animal―by living like them How can we ever be sure that we really know the other? To test the limits of our ability to inhabit lives that are not our own, Charles Foster set out to know the ultimate other: the non-humans, the...

‘Impossible to summarise and delightfully absorbing, Hadley’s book is comfortably the most unexpected history book of the year’ Sunday Times A luminous journey through a thousand years of folklore and English history. Hollow Places begins with a Hertfordshire dragon-slayer named Piers...

Iceland, Greenland, Northern Norway, and the Faroe Islands lie on the edges of Western Europe, in an area long portrayed by travelers as remote and exotic - its nature harsh, its people reclusive. Since the middle of the 18th century, however, this marginalized region has gradually become part of modern Europe, a transformation that is narrated in Karen Oslund's Iceland Imagined. This cultural and environmental history sweeps across the dramatic North Atlantic landscape, exploring its unusual geography, saga narratives, language, culture, and politics, and analyzing its emergence as a distinctive and symbolic part of Europe.

Using an infamous deception about a fake mountain range in British Columbia as her jumping-off point, Katie Ives explores the lure of blank spaces on the map and the value of the imagination. In Imaginary Peaks she details the cartographical mystery of the Riesenstein Hoax within the larger context of climbing history and the seemingly endless quest for newly discovered peaks and claims of first ascents. Imaginary Peaks is an evocative, thought-provoking tale, immersed in the literature of exploration, study of maps, and basic human desire.

Forty-eight stories of brave sparrows, wilds winds, and how to live in times of climate change. A prize-winning book by the natural storyteller Georgiana Keable, sharing long experience with children in the forests and snows of Norway. Meet the girl who became a fish, married a bear, and had a tree as her mum and dad. Meet the boy who tried to stop the wind, fetched fire from the center of the earth on the back of a bird, and whose father was the river.

When we turn our attention to the subject of elemental Intelligences or Nature-Spirits, we are confronted by this immediate difficulty, that we are led at the very beginning beyond and behind the world which we know through the channels of the senses. Sense perception does not help us at all in our study of that mysterious realm of life which constitutes the invisible background of physical manifestation. Madame Blavatsky warned us long ago that to describe Nature-Spirits or Elementals as having definite and corporeal form was likely to lead into great error.

A Guardian 'Book of the day' For millennia, elms shaped our landscape and our folklore; then they started dying. For the past century, a deadly pandemic has raged across the world, destroying all in its path and outmanoeuvring scientists' desperate attempts to halt it. Dutch elm disease has...

As children, we are captivated by stories of huge fantastical creatures, such as the wooly mammoth and the pterodactyl. The prevailing wisdom is these species are long extinct, but new evidence uncovered by author Gerald McIsaac casts doubt on these widely held assumptions. McIsaac gathered stories from the elders of the First Nation, those who were formerly referred to as Indians, Native Americans, or Aboriginals.

Ever wondered why we knock on wood, cross our fingers, or avoid black cats? Dive in and learn about fascinating superstitions from all over the world! The Good Luck Book explores the surprising - and sometimes scary - history of the world's most practised superstitions (and plenty more that you...

"A long time ago, when the land was yet wrapped in grand sweeps of forest, when nearby meadows wore nothing but the scent of wildflowers..." So begins the first tale of Spirits of the Wild, an enchanting collection of 60 nature myths from around the world, many of them hundreds - or thousands - of years old. Each myth is charmingly retold by Gary Ferguson, one of the West's best-loved nature writers.

Actress Jodie Foster narrates this classic from the Brothers Grimm. One day, a poor fisherman catches and then frees an enchanted flounder who is able to grant any wish imaginable. A simple man without pretensions, the fisherman would rather leave well enough alone. But his wife's greed forces the fisherman to return to the flounder time after time until it is too late.