Katherine Keenum

When I saw the animal in last week's press coverage of Breathtaking new paintings found at Pompeii, my first thought was, "It's a dog." My second was, "No, it's a lion." And lion it is. Not only that, but the mural solves a scholarly question.

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Website alert: In my current fantasy novella, I have reached a point where I need to describe a votive figurine, so I went on line to look at images for inspiration. What did I find? Fidelma Massey! Her Shrine for the Mother of Birds doesn't fit my narrative; but, wow! do I admire her sculptures. If you like this sort of thing, do explore her website.

My husband found this jawbone back in the woods and took me to see it. So many possibilities! A prompt for a naturalist's lecture (it's a deer's jawbone). A witch's comb. A treasure for a boy's collection of feathers and bones. Ditto for a girl (with a magical twist and broken eggshells to boot). A patteran. Or that pattern of jawbone, pinecone, straw and twig—a spell laid, an artist's composition, a talisman with runes. What's your fancy?

In the week or so between Thanksgiving and Saint Nicholas Day, I try to keep Christmas frenzy at bay (with, of course, the minor cheating, like starting an Advent calendar). An annual rereading of Greer Gilman's Moonwise is a good compromise: mythic, ritual, and seasonal. So is literal walking in November woods. Yesterday, under a gray sky, I was on a hillside floored with fallen leaves and realized I was walking "in 'tCloudwood."

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Magic alert: The most magical thing I've seen in a long time—the promotional trailer for Wild Folk Tales from the Stones by Jackie Morris and Tamsin Abbott. Whole worlds of inspiration about friendship, age, place, workspace, art, and myth in this five-minute video, plus word of a must-have book.

I don't need to write a blog post about what fantasy I read as a child and how it affected me because Theodora Goss's post, Deep Magic, does it for us both. I discovered her work through a narrative poem, "The Dragons" in The Book of Dragons (2020), in which a lawyer is rescued from a life of tedium by a clutch of baby dragons left on her porch. Now I'm reading Goss's Snow White Learns Witchcraft, twists on traditional fairy tales (love the idea of the princess who herself turns into a frog when she kisses one). Coming next? The Collected Enchantments. My advice? Dive in anywhere.

Website alerts: Oh, my! Two things I love already, Narnia and book sculptures. And now, voilà: Instructions for making your own sculpture of Lucy's first visit to the lamppost, complete with PDF's of some of the elements. I'm not a crafter, but, I might just make up a story about someone who is.
 
For those who want to take such things to a professional level, moreover, Su Blackwell has a new book out, Into the Dark Woods, which comes with an booklet of instructions for making the sort of talismans she included to illustrate her retold fairy tales. Well worth mooning over.

This topiary llama has always made me smile, but, whoa! The antlers transform it into something spookily magic, especially when the winter sun is caught in a circle of their prongs and tree branches. I had to stop the car and take an amateur photograph. Such poignance here in the Anthropocene to be carried into the deep resonances of myth from an earlier age!

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Blog post alert: A report from the History Blog that the world's oldest preserved woven fabric was made of bast from oak trees rather than from linen or wool somehow deepens a mythic connection between women and trees.  I don't yet know what to do with it, but surely something!

Image at National Gallery, London

Blog post alert: Alert, alert! Ancient ghost discovered on Assyrian exorcist's cuneiform tablet! That it was found it at all is marvellous. That there were magicians and exorcists with libraries 3,500 years ago –well, how's that for inspiring historical fantasy?