Northumberland Fairies by Icy Sedgwick

You might think of fairies as cute, dainty beings with diaphanous wings that flutter around the garden, granting wishes. Yet among the legends of the north east, fairies are definitely not beings that you'd want to encounter, let alone trust to help you. These fairies might hire humans when they need to, as we see in the legends of human midwives helping their fairy employers, but they have no love lost for our kind!

In this talk, we'll explore the stories of a treacherous fairy queen who likes to ensnare humans with beautiful music and fantastic feasts, a mischievous fairy who might clean your house or completely stop your horse from working depending on her mood, and a fairy child who tried to get her human playmate in trouble with her terrifying mother, among others!

Icy Sedgwick is the host of the Fabulous Folklore podcast, investigating European folklore with a special emphasis on Newcastle and Northumberland. In case she tires of research, former ghost hunter Icy also writes Gothic horror fiction.