#97 / Dr Simon Young on Wollaton Gnomes, the Fairy census & Boggarts

Dr Simon Young is a British folklore historian based in Italy. He has written extensively on the nineteenth-century supernatural. His book The Boggart (from Exeter University Press) and The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends (from Mississippi University Press) are both out in 2022. He is the editor of Exeter New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Legends . Over the years he has run courses on the History of Christianity, Italian Food History, Italian Media History, Contemporary Italian History, WW2 in Italy and Italian Renaissance History.

Dr. Young has undertaken the biggest folklore survey of its kind, on behalf of the Fairy Investigation Society.

The Society, which had its heyday in the 1920s and 30s, was an eccentric group that organised meetings, lectures, and discussions for collecting evidence of fairy life.

A Cambridge-educated historian Dr. Young, has revived the society for a new fairy census - 60 years on from the last one.

It gathered details of as many fairy sightings from the past century as possible and to measure contemporary attitudes to fairies, the details of which he shares with us in the show.

Simon briefly discusses his new title ‘The Boggart, Folklore, History, Place-names and Dialect. Using long-forgotten sources as well as social media surveys and personal interviews, this ground-breaking book reveals that almost everything we thought we knew about the boggart is wrong.

We discuss the Wollaton Gnomes - a famous sighting that happened in 1979 in Nottingham, England. A small group of children were wandering the park early one evening when much to their surprise they were chased by gnomes in motor cars! Certainly not your typical fairy sighting. The children said there were around 30 cars in all, with 2 gnomes in each car. To that end Simon makes that point that our folklore often begins with children a point we discuss further in the Plus show.

In the Plus section of the show we discuss how children's cultural trends and images can become folkloric figures in their own right and create moral panics. We discuss the nightmare and the interest fairies have in human sexuality. Simon goes into detail how fairy interactions have changed over the last 200 years from more intense, sometimes physical encounters to more sedate sightings. The subject of UFOs and the arguments for and against the fairy analogues come up and we explore some interesting ideas around the men in black and the wider thematic interrelations between the phenomenons. Simon goes on to describe the fairies as ‘social beings’ and how they represent a distorted mirror of our own society which provides a way we can think of ourselves outside the box.
Show notes:

Simon’s academia page: https://independent.academia.edu/SimonYoung43
Boggart & Banshee Podcast: http://www.strangehistory.net/podcast/
Simon’s new Boggart book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boggart-Folklore-History-Placenames-Approaches/dp/1905816901/ref
More on Boggarts: https://folklorethursday.com/folktales/the-boggart-a-study-in-shadows/
The Fairy census: http://www.fairyist.com/survey/
The Wollaton Gnomes: https://faeryfolklorist.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-wollaton-park-gnomes.html
Press articles on Simon’s work:
https://metro.co.uk/2017/12/06/people-sex-outdoors-joined-sexy-fairies-magical-dogging-7136692/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5156475/Fairies-them.html
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/return-of-the-fairy-hunters

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