RELIQUIAE No 2

The second issue of Reliquiae is now available to order from Corbel Stone Press. Edited by Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton, this finely designed journal covers the literature of landscape, folklore, ritual and myth. Contents include:

~ Thomas A Clark's collection of poetic aphorisms from the island of Colonsay.
~ Don Domanski's lecture on poetry, sacredness, and 'how each thing holds a mystery'.
~ Two visionary poems of death and darkness from Julia McCarthy.
~ An excerpt from Ronald Johnson's seminal poem of the English landscape, 'The Book of the Green Man'.
~ Peter O'Leary's poetic rendering of two runes from the Kalevala.
~ Three found poems by Autumn Richardson, derived from the journals of Knud Rasmussen.
~ Richard Skelton's interview with his father about life on a Nottinghamshire farm in the 1940s and 1950s.
~ A folkloric and literary survey by Mark Valentine on 'The Last Wolf in England'.
~ A hitherto undocumented ritual performed in rural France, written in French, Occitan and English.
~ Excerpts from the forthcoming Epidote Press book on the writing of Hans Jürgen von der Wense.
~ together with work by Yeats, Edward Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Gilbert White; and accounts of 'green children', the lore of the oak and more.

My own essay on legends of the last wolf in England surveys all the known claims to be the lonely lupine's final lair. It also traces the origin of the often-repeated statement that wolves died out here in the late 15th century, and finds that is not quite what the source says. And it notes a few examples of English werewolf stories that may be linked to 'last wolf' legends.