Karen - Wall Flower Studio

The Little House Turns - A Polish Fairy Tale Cecile Walton, ca 1920

The Little House Turns

"Little house, move
On your crooked legs free;
Turn your back to the wood,
And your front door to me."

📖 Book of Polish #Fairytales, ca 1920
#art #faeries #cottagecore

Dulcibella and the Fairies
🎨 Hilda T. Miller (c. 1922)

#Art #FairyTales #Faeries #folklore

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

Percy Billinghurst's illustration in 100 Fables of La Fontaine (London 1899)

A proud heron stands in the water surrounded by a rich choice of fish, but he ignores them. 🐟 In the afternoon he rejects smaller fish as unworthy, preferring to wait for better pickings. But by the evening he is so hungry he settles for a one small, lowly snail. 🐌 #LegendaryWednesday #birds #fable

🎨 Eric Kincaid (1931 - 2023) The ice king's talons are elongated by sharp, jabbing icicles. His face is narrow, his nose a hook and the trees and bone coloured grasses by him skeletal. The landscape is white. He is surrounded by a fantastical beard and robe of green, violet and blue.

King Winter travels to Sweden with the North Wind. An ancient covenant decrees that he shall not spread snow prior to the eleventh lunar cycle of the year. But in his impatience to lock the land in ice, he can arrive early - and blames his mistiming on his clock being frozen
#LegendaryWednesday

Thanks Tan! Lovely illustration to share. ☺️

Four of Europe's most fascinating pre-Christian winter festivals Christmas has become the dominant festival in the Western cultural calendar, but echoes of the pre-Christian past can still be found across the continent.

Christmas has become the dominant festival in the Western cultural calendar, but echoes of the pre-Christian past can still be found across the continent. www.bbc.co.uk/travel/artic... #Folklore

"They saw that the cottage was made of bread and cakes."

- Hansel and Gretel and other stories, ca 1921
✍️ Hans Christian Andersen 🎨 Kay Nielsen
#art #fairytales #witchcore #food 🪄 🍞 🍰

The Fairy Love Boat 🪄 ⛵
🎨 by Hilda Hechle (1886-1939)
#fairytale #art

Female Icons, Ancestral Mothers poster, ca 2008 by Max Dashú - available at: https://veleda.net/posters/

Terrific article on the #Venus figurines, and why they are not actually "Venus" figurines, via Max Dashú.

www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/not...

🎯 Well said.

Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things, 1869 by Sophie Gengembre Anderson (French-born English, 1823–1903)

by Edward Gorey

JFC... Talk about unnatural selection. Very scary.

Sing-song, A nursery rhyme book, by Christina Georgina Rossetti Illustrator: Arthur Hughes, London: MacMillan & Co, ca 1893 Public Domain

Hello December,
The year’s sands nearly run
Speeds on the shortest day,
Curtails the sun;
With its bleak raw wind
Lays the last leaves low,
Brings back nightly frosts,
Brings back the snow. ❄️

✍️ Christina Rossetti, ca 1893
#December #winter #poetry

Snow cupcakes in my garden. ❄️ 🧁
#HelloDecember #snow #Ontario

Serbia: Home to Europe’s First Domestic Cats - COGNIARCHAE Recent research suggests that Serbia, alongside Cyprus, was one of the very first places in Europe to host domesticated cats. Neolithic figurines from the Vinča culture may even represent the oldest d...

Serbia: Possibly Home to Europe’s First Domestic Cats
(Interesting read for fellow feline fans.)
#cats 🐾 🐱
cogniarchae.com/2025/08/12/s...

Cat with Flower Cactus
Dorothea Maetzel-Johansen, 1886-1930
#Caturday

Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.”

We all have an "antilibrary." You know, the stack of yet-unread books we might never read. Here is Umberto Eco's wonderful and counterintuitive take on why that unread stack might be as essential for our inner lives as the read www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/24/u...

View down into chapel with lined with Christmas trees amid the effigy tombs

Tree decorated with mini books and paper decorations made from book pages

Had a mooch to the wonderful Christmas tree festival at St Mary’s church, Warwick. Below 👇 are trees in the Beauchamp chapel.
&
Tree decorated by volunteers at Priory Books, the second-hand book shop at Warwickshire County Record Office.
#FolkloreSunday

The Greene Knight Enters the Hall of Camelot during the Christmas Feast. - English fairy tales, by Rhys, Ernest, 1859-1946; Rhys, Grace Little, 1865-1929 - Illustration ca 1913, Public domain

Holly is a #symbol of death & rebirth in both Pagan & Christian lore. ❄️ In the #Arthurian legend, Gawain (the Oak King of summer) is challenged by & fights the Green Knight, (Holly King), who is armed with a club of holly to represent winter. #FolkloreSunday #Winter #Christmas

So true! Time to read it again. 👍

I remain convinced that no one has tackled Merlin as well as Mary Stewart did with her Crystal Cave / Hollow Hills / Last Enchanter trilogy, published in the 1970s. It remains a classic, and is beautifully written. #BookSky #Arthurian #Merlin

Founding Myths: Princess Scota, Goídel Glas and their Links to the Gaelic People In the mythology and pseudo-history of Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, Princess Scota and her husband Goídel Glas and their followers were the progenitors of the Gaelic people.

Founding Myths: Princess Scota, Goídel Glas and their Links to the Gaelic People

The Elf Ring, by Kate Greenaway, c 1905 (Public domain)

The Middle English term elferingewort ("elf-ring"), is said to be "a ring caused by elves' dancing". Similarly, Scandinavian lore states #fairy rings are burned into the ground by the dancing elves, & we humans might want to avoid them!
🪄 #FairyTales #Folklore #art

White rabbit standing, by Jan Mankes, ca 1910 Public Domain

The legend of the White Hare (Cornish) speaks of the lost spirit of a maiden. With a broken heart & a soul which cannot rest, she appears as a white #hare, invisible to others except her faithless lover, who she follows always, haunting him until he meets his end. 🐇 #FolkloreSunday #folksky

A Brief History of the 'Danse Macabre' Skeletons have been dancing people to their graves since at least 1424.

a light Halloween adjacent read
www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dan...

Yes! 'tis the season.

The Greene Knight Enters the Hall of Camelot during the Christmas Feast. - English fairy tales, by Rhys, Ernest, 1859-1946; Rhys, Grace Little, 1865-1929 - Illustration ca 1913, Public domain

Holly is a #symbol of death & rebirth in both Pagan & Christian lore. ❄️ In the #Arthurian legend, Gawain (the Oak King of summer) is challenged by & fights the Green Knight, (Holly King), who is armed with a club of holly to represent winter. #FolkloreSunday #Winter #Christmas