Petrus Gonsalvus, or Pedro Gonzalez, lived at the court of the French king Henri II. Gonsalvus had a condition which today would be diagnosed as hypertrichosis, causing excessive hair growth; his face was almost completely covered in hair. People who met him would have thought immediately of the wild men of  medieval legend. Around age ten, he was brought to court as a kind of curiosity and pet, much like other people with physical differences at the time. This is where he grew up, was educated, and eventually married a woman named Catherine. Most of their children shared Gonsalvus’s diag ..read more

Last month I reviewed "The Story of the Little Merman" by Ethel Reader. This story received a new print edition in 1979, but when it was originally released in 1909, it was part of a volume with a second story, "The Queen of the Gnomes and the True Prince," also illustrated by Frank Cheyne Papé. This one was apparently never re-released, although the 1979 edition of "The Little Merman" still contains Reader's original foreword with references to it. Luckily, I was able to track down a 1909 edition. Having enjoyed "The Little Merman," I was eager to see what the companion story had to offer; ho ..read more

I'm excited to say that Writing in Margins made it onto Feedspot's A while back, I discovered that an author named Ethel Reader had written a gender-swapped retelling of "The Little Mermaid" all the way back in 1909. Well, actually there are a lot of other elements mixed in. The novella begins by introducing the undersea kingdom of the Mer-People. In the kingdom is the Garden of the Red Flowers; a flower blooms and an ethereal, triumphant music plays whenever a Mer-Person gains a soul. The Little Merman, the main character, is drawn to the land from a young age. One day he meets a human Prince ..read more

This review contains spoilers - marked towards the end. by T. Kingfisher, which combined the Sleeping Beauty story with legends of changelings. Not long after reading that one, I picked up a very different changeling tale in The story picks up with Iselia ("Seelie"), a changeling adopted by humans and raised as sisters with her human counterpart Isolde. The two girls live on the road, working as pickpockets after a disaster with Seelie's uncontrollable magic forced them to flee their home. (Where Kingfisher's Toadling is an adult caretaker to her changeling counterpart thanks to time shenaniga ..read more

Illustration by Hugh Thomson, for Highways and Byways in Devon and Cornwall In my list of favorite mermaid books I mentioned a children's novel released in 2022. I was struck by the many less-popular mermaid motifs that the author, Lisa Stringfellow, wove into the story. There is one story in particular that the plot is built around. As Stringfellow explained, “I wanted my main character to have that trope of making a wish on a mermaid's comb.” The book revolves around a young girl who finds a mermaid's comb and has the chance to make a wish, but discovers that there is a steep price and merma ..read more

Over the past year or so, I’ve been on the hunt for mermaid fiction. I’ve been through a lot of lists, and here's my own list of some favorites so far. There are many, many, MANY books on mermaids out there. The books here are ones that particularly stood out as both enjoyable and memorable for me this year. a retelling of The Little Mermaid. Stradling does something I've seen in a few other places by telling the story from the perspective of the other maiden - the human girl who steals the prince's heart. In this version, Magdalena is the prince's childhood friend and the girl he always reall ..read more

From The Green Fairy Book, illustrated by H.J. Ford The story of "The Golden Mermaid" begins with a tree that bears golden apples. This tree grows in the garden of a King who looks forward to the harvest, but the apples begins to go missing just as they ripen. The King, in desperation, orders his two oldest sons to go out and search the world until they find the thief. His third and youngest son begs to be allowed to go too. The King tries to dissuade him, but the prince begs so much that the King relents and sends him off—although with only a lame old horse. On his way through the woods, the ..read more

Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, by Heather Fawcett, is a recently published fantasy romance which plays with many fairy and folktale tropes. The main character is a socially awkward Cambridge professor and "dryadologist" - in this world, faeries are real and well-known, with a thriving field of study surrounding them. Written in diary format, it follows Emily's field research in the remote northern village of Hrafnsvik, where she intends to make her name with an groundbreaking study of some little-known fairy folk. Things soon get  complicated as she deals with dangerous fae curse ..read more

I first saw the news about this book being published a while ago and knew I had to pick it up. by Ryan Lang is an “epic graphic novel retelling” of the Japanese fairytale of Issunboshi, one of the most famous versions of ATU type 700. The publishing and printing were funded through Kickstarter. It took a while to get my hands on a copy, but here we are! This retelling gives Issunboshi a more elaborate backstory. The gods used the , the Heavenly Spear, in the creation of the world. Afterwards, the spear was broken into four parts: the shaft, mount, blade, and spirit. One day an oni came across ..read more

A ladle from Big Lake shows a hybrid animal with the head and paws of a wolf and the dorsal fin of an orca. (Nelson, Plate XXIX) The akhlut, in Inuit legend, is an orca-like creature which can turn into a wolf on land, or a giant wolf, or a hybrid of wolf and orca (with many modern artists taking a crack at visualizing it - see examples ). As pack animals and dangerous hunters, orcas and wolves do have a lot in common. Some users on have done excellent digging to establish that the "akhlut" is a very modernized take on a belief. Akhlut is actually a misnomer; "akh'lut" is the name for the orca ..read more