Storytelling and Making Folklore Accessible with Three Ravens

Storytelling and Making Folklore Accessible with Three Ravens

Author: Icy Sedgwick August 20, 2025 Duration: 1:32:35

I'm talking to Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux from the Three Ravens podcast about the difficulties in defining 'folklore', the importance of storytelling, which of England's 39 historic counties has the best folk tales, why people love ghost stories, and making folklore accessible to wider audiences!

Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux are the brains behind the Three Ravens podcast, and they are a real life couple, based in Sussex. Eleanor was born in Suffolk and grew up in Sussex, and after developing a passion for storytelling and stage performance as a child, become involved in amateur dramatics and completed her BA in English Literature and earned her MA in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama. She also founded the theatre company Rust & Stardust, which tours original work and education projects rooted in English folklore. Martin was born in Somerset and grew up in the developing world, including in Uganda and Papua New Guinea. After leaving school, he completed his BA in English and won National Student Television Awards for comedy and directing. Having been a freelance journalist, radio presenter, and English teacher, he also won the BBC Moo! New Writers Prize in 2009. He gave up teaching after the pandemic to undertake his MA in Romantic and Victorian Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths, and to launch Three Ravens.

Buy their book, The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New tellings of half-forgotten stories from England's 39 Historic Counties: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/12992/9781803999685

Visit the Three Ravens Podcast website: https://www.threeravenspodcast.com/

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Each week, Fabulous Folklore with Icy offers a compact, fifteen-minute dive into the strange and storied shadows of our world’s traditions. Host Icy Sedgwick, a writer steeped in fantasy and Gothic horror, brings a storyteller’s eye to the material, weaving together tales of local legends, deep-rooted superstitions, and ancient myths. The podcast moves beyond simple retellings to consider the cultural soil from which these stories grew-why people believed what they did, how these narratives functioned in society, and the peculiar, often unsettling details that make them endure. You’ll hear about the oddities and occult practices that textbooks often overlook, all delivered with a blend of curiosity and a slight chill. It’s a consistently engaging exploration for anyone fascinated by the weird corners of history and human belief, a weekly reminder that our world is far more mysterious than it seems. Sedgwick’s background ensures the tales are told with both authority and a palpable sense of wonder, making each short episode a perfect gateway into a larger, fabulously folkloric universe. This isn’t just a catalog of curiosities; it’s an invitation to look at the familiar landscapes around us and imagine the layers of story hidden just beneath the surface, all packed into a brief, compelling listen that easily fits into a daily routine.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Fabulous Folklore with Icy
Podcast Episodes
Elizabeth Blackwell: Pioneering Herbalist and Botanical Illustrator [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 19:21
If you’re interested in herbalism or plant lore, chances are that you’ve perused a herbal or two in your time. Culpeper's Complete Herbal: A Compendium of Herbs and Their Uses, Annotated for Modern Herbalists, Healers, a…
Folklore and Storytelling: A Narrative Match Made in Heaven [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:24
Storytelling is something we all do on a daily basis, whether we’re aware of it or not. Maybe we’re telling a funny anecdote about something that happened on the way to work. Perhaps we’re recounting how we first met the…
Revenants on the Redway with Dr Steph Lay [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 59:38
Dr Steph Lay is a folk horror writer, psychologist and researcher, gathering and sharing local stories of the unexplained for a project investigating whether the new city of Milton Keynes might be more haunted than anyon…
Folklore and Cinema: The Trick Films of Georges Méliès [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 26:03
Visionary film director and stage magician Georges Méliès is perhaps the earliest filmmaker who saw the visual potential of folklore. Among others, mermaids, sirens, ghosts, devils, and sorcerers are plentiful in his fil…
Theatre Superstitions: Whistling, the Ghost Light, and Macbeth [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:06
Going to the theatre can often feel like a magical experience. You sit in the dark, watching a story unfold in front of you, with your imagination filling in the gaps between the sets. It’s unsurprising that theatre supe…
Cursed Artworks: Three Haunted Paintings and their Superstitions [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 20:21
Folklore and the arts are almost natural bedfellows. As we saw with the work of Newcastle-based painter Ralph Hedley, artists can capture local traditions for posterity. The Pre-Raphaelites created some of the most endur…
Divination Using Clouds, Flames, Ashes, and Dreams [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 16:52
Studying the shapes of things is a popular means of divination, relying on human pattern recognition abilities. Look at reading tea leaves and coffee grounds, or tasseography, which rely on spotting symbols in the cup. T…
Random Chance Divination: Casting Lots and Throwing Dice [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 17:29
Divination is a beautifully varied practice, with a plethora of tools and practices designed to give insight into situations. Practices like reading tea leaves or tarot cards already appear on this podcast. But what abou…
Pendulum Dowsing: From the Sieve and Shears to Looking for Love [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 19:30
Last week, we looked at the use of dowsing to find treasure or criminals. Like water dowsing, this method requires the use of a rod that twitches in the hands when the target is close. But the other method of dowsing inv…