Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies podcast, series two, Episode five, Fairy and other transformations.
Hello, I'm Faye Hield and I Caroline Larrington.
We've been talking a lot about modern fairies in the project and we haven't said so much about Loathly Ladies.
The Loathly Lady was a separate theme in one of the folders in the original series of stories that the artists had.
The Loathly Lady is a hag who is really if she wants to be a beautiful woman,
she encounters the night in the forest and helps him solve a problem that he has.
But the cost of that is he has to marry her. He doesn't really want to marry a hag.
But if he manages to solve a particular question or problem that she puts to him and the problem is making up his mind between two alternatives,
and he needs to have the common sense to give the choice back to her,
then the story can be resolved by her transforming from the hag into the beautiful woman.
That would be an ideal one. So that's the original locally lady story.
But the artists were particularly interested in it and nobody much except for Sarah took it up.
We'll hear some of Sarah's Instagram poetry towards the end of this pulled coast.
But the artist did find the theme of transformation in itself quite fascinating.
Alongside discussing the materials Caroline supplied in the folders, the artists were encouraged to go off and find their own stories,
which touched on the fairy theme like Ben's journey into World War Two.
We heard about in the last episode, this sometimes meant wandering quite far afield,
partly because of Jackie Morris's involvement in the early stages of the project.
At a point where she was really interested in painting animals off the back, the Lost Words project, a thread about selkies began to emerge.
Selkies are both a Scots word for sale and a kind of magical people who live in the sea in selkies skins, but can remove them to become human on land.
In many stories, a man captures the selkie bride by stealing her seal skin and forcing her to remain with him.
But the selkie woman never forgets where she came from. And part of her is always longing to get back to the sea.
If Lucy prattled, so caught on the line. But.
Bray spell. From the fall of.
The silky theme became a point for a lot of discussion within the workshops.
Beginning with Lucy and Terry and then bringing in many of the artists who then went on to make their own selkie works.
Lucy wrote a round for a choir that she directs. That exactly expresses the selkie woman's position.
She's caught between sea and land, between home and her old family and her new family, particularly her children.
And in the round, we can hear the conflicting voices of the husband calling her back and her own voice declaring that she must and she will go.
To. But.
Where do I go for me?
That was in the bay and and singing Lucy's brand,
Nazli made an animation and beautiful sea blue collars of a woman diving and twisting through the waves.
Somersaulting in and out of seal form, never resting in one shape, but always restlessly switching between forms,
suggesting that there may be a way in which the Salkey woman can have both her children and her life on land and to swim with her people in the sea.
Selkies, the animal that is not the magical creatures sing amongst themselves and humans can sing to them.
To Enga talks about singing to the Selkies on Fair one summer and drawing one of the seals into the shore to listen to her,
Mary recalls, when she was just a little girl singing to women, singing in the cell Selkies on a beach near Glassco.
You can hear their stories now as a child and go down to the beach and sing to the SEALs, which we do is sell peace and the lunar surface.
Many of the coastal areas around the north of the UK.
And during the summer, I went back up to fair trial and thought I would try singing in the South Seas again.
So I was up at the north end of the island will be is called the North Haven,
and there were several seals in the B and I started to sing this little melody, which kind of goes like this.
And so on. And I got interest from the SEALs, several, several of them came in closer to the surf and hung a boat and watched for a while.
But there was one young female seal. It was Betty and. We came right on the edge of the water and I waded into the sea.
And maybe they run with each other. She never left us.
She stayed up just the very edge of the sun.
And probably if I went to the other end of the beach, she came and she followed me along there and then followed me back.
And at one point, I was singing a way to this one Salkey and some people that I knew worked from a yacht to move down in the pier,
condemned and with talking to my father, who said.
What's she doing? And my dad, in a very nonchalant, nonchalant fashion, just said, she's just singing in the south.
He's one of my earliest memories is when I was little,
I grew up in Wasco and I used to go into what I was called summer holidays and a Glasgow city, which just emptied a fair fortnight fear.
And it was special changed in Glasgow Central. I remember Gondo New Year all excited Nick on the train.
Good title too. We must be old again at any of these.
And you go coast or say or Denoon if you available. Amy one summer.
I don't know how we'd managed it, but we went to Denoon and it was exciting and it was wonderful.
No busier and was one day we were down the beach and I saw these two ladies and they were singing to Selkies.
I'm terrified the living daylights out of me was a sick person in my.
I must only be in about two or three. And it's a really vivid memory because the wedding dress strangely ended with just two women.
I was half scared that maybe people would choose. Two women singing sent the same peace and singing in the same place, just sit in.
I also wrote two songs which you can hear on my album rap line called The Storm and Swirling Eddies.
They capture different points on the journey.
The moment when the selkie meets the man and when she's weighing up the decision to return to her SEAL people.
All the materials from the different artists fell on the selkie storyline at different points, giving contrasting and conflicting emotional responses.
A show developed from this performed at the Being Human Festival in Sheffield in 2019,
while the artist felt was important, was for the narrative not to become tied down to one fixed set of emotions.
And being a selkie or a contemporary woman involves a lot of shapeshifting and emotional flux.
You can see a short film from that performance on the Modern Faries website.
They research the best known of all the Scottish witches.
Isabelle Gouty, Isabelle used to visit the king and queen of fairy land in an underground mound near her home in northeast Scotland.
And there she would be given good things to eat. You would transform into animals in order to travel to the fairies.
A cat or a crow or a hare face song takes Isabel's own words taken from the transcript of her
trial evidence in which Isabel tells us about her own spell of transformation he had face.
Tell us about how she arrived at the tube in Oxford at the first workshop.
I remember standing and talking with anger about the nature of the different art forms, the visual arts and the linguistic and the musical.
And we were talking about the nature of magic as well and the reality of magic.
And Tao spells are often linguistic. And you.
You have words to a spell. You say a spell, a magic happens. And we were interested to explore how music might tie in with that.
So this links to the ideas in the second episode where we were talking about how music taps into those visceral qualities.
So we looked at a spell, the idea that music and language are linked with musical notes being given letter names.
So there is an inherent link there with musical notes being given, letter names, ABC, E, etc.
And we've toyed with the idea of music following the letters within the spell and if that could actually work or if it would just sound horrendous.
So it went away and Jackie Morris supplied me with this.
The connexion to Goudey spell a real spell came from real confession.
So this is it. We wanted to work with real magic.
And so I wrote out the words of Isabel Gouty and to transform them slightly into my language rather than the thick Scots, which they were.
They were originally written and coloured in all the letters which corresponded
with a note name and then copied those over onto transcript musical transcripts.
And they became the key points of the tune for the song. And so the words as they were being sung shifted slightly.
There's a bit of repetition in the song as it appears now to fit the melody.
But the melody came out of the words and it took a bit of knocking into shape to be musical.
But a lot less than I expected. And even though it is a quite strange tune, I think it is what it's been described as fairly catchy.
And I think it really is magic. The music definitely coming out of the woods yet to hear some of the Hezbollah.
I shall. Going to go into his sorrow and go, I shall go.
To go into his sorrow.
So I go to the devil in the devil's name.
Stay. I come home again. I go to the devil.
Whose name I like. Oh, my God.
I'm going to go into McKerrow when the black is strong.
I shall go to go to the corral with the black crow.
Slave states like, again, I shall go to go.
Jeff Blackshaw. I saw a guy. Name say like a moment.
I shall go in to go in to. With sorrow.
I shall go to go to. OK, I go to.
Inspired by Fay's account in her song of The Journey into the Heart, several wonder what it might be like to be the hair itself taken over,
possessed by the strange and powerful voice that comes from outside the body.
Sarah wrote some words about this and facings them here.
Chico. Lastly, we come to another shapeshifting creature, The Lonely Lady.
The other part of the project title are artists didn't engage with this theme very much,
except for Sarah, who took on the identity of Alison locally, an Instagram poet,
and created some short poems for her persona, putting them up on Instagram,
along with some photos that captured some of the strangeness in the city environment.
Here's Brian reading a couple of Sarah's poems. Alison Luthi speaks.
Tell everyone I am tired of watching the forests burn.
It is time for us to remember. We have always been a species of magic.
Jackie Morris replies. Tell everyone the green man stirs evilness, leaves turn to gold.
He comes. When the artists talked about the shapeshifting elements, all tightly linked to human emotion and analogies for human experience.
These stories seemed to be useful to people in understanding their world and navigating their way through human experience, through their animal lens.
The stories weren't about really transforming into animals,
but rather thinking analogously about what it's like to be another kind of creature
and how that might help you to think differently about your life as a human.
The actuality of turning into a hair is the topic of a new piece of work being developed by Fay Terry.
Sarah Enga for the Alternative Stories podcast series.
So keep an eye on the old social media for links so that when that appears,
we hope you've enjoyed listening to these podcasts about the modern fairies and locally latest project.
Don't forget to take a look at the website where you can find more about our work with illustrations,
films, an interesting blog posts from the artists.
Although the project may be technically over, the modern fairy artists are still taking forward the work they've produced.
So look out for their poems, songs, films, music, animations and artistry, and maybe even a stage show appearing all over the country and beyond.
But for the moment, it's goodbye from us. We're going to leave you with one of Sarah's poems, Common Ending,
which tells us all about the traditional endings of different kinds of folk and ferry stories from across Europe.
And it's read once again by Bryan Monroe. Coleman endings.
And they all lived happily ever after a bell rang and the tale comes to its end and they all lived.
My story ends and the spinach is eaten by the goat and they all live.
This is the end. Run away with it. And they all lived happily. Return my story and feed me bread.
And they all lived. And if they're not dead, they still live happily and they whistle, whistle.
The story is done. And they all lived happily ever snipped snaps.
Now then the story was out and they all lived red reder.
This tale has ended and they. And it was or it was not.
And they all lived. Come in the pumpkin and come out in the square and they all lived lost.
The three apples fell from the sky and they all lived a cat in the bowl put up his tail, their ends, the fairy tale.