June 12, 2022

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

50 minutes

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 .

Dr. Young has undertaken the biggest folklore survey of its kind, on behalf of the Fairy Investigation Society. A Cambridge-educated historian Dr. Young, 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. Detailing the little-studied and once much-feared boggart is a supernatural being from the north of England. .

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!

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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