The Little Book Of Lost Hearts: A Christmas Fairy Tale

Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Is he meddling and controlling Little Book of Lost Hearts is a very charming and heart warming novella.

Introducing Fools Castle, a forgotten village about to be remembered. Nothing much happens around here, but that suits Antoinette Ellis perfectly. She wants the cocoon the small Cheshire village provides. When a stranger called Rufus moves into the grim, grey house opposite her cottage, odd things start to happen in Fools Castle. And what secrets lie within that little old book of his, which no one is allowed to look inside? A miracle is long overdue, but the season for miracles is just around the corner Read more Read less. Kindle Cloud Reader Read instantly in your browser.

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Write a customer review. Showing of 3 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. An interesting little story with the perspective of the main character coming through in a realistic way. Nettie lives in a quiet little village, which is exactly what she wants. She's raising her niece who needs stability and a safe environment.

Category: Literature

In the world of a child wonders are as simple as sticks and sheets, leaves and books, boxes and giggles, and the promise in a rainy day. The Seven Wonders of the World of Childhood. We read bedtime stories about Christmas elves and Magical toys and talking animals.

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Every parent who carries on St. The Great Santa Claus Debate. There is such a rush these days to get children sleeping through the night, weaned off the breast, eating solid foods, potty trained, reading independently, and on and on, that we seem to have lost the ability to simply enjoy life as it happens and let our children do the same. A Return to Childhood. Children who love to read…READ! Successful reading means far more than possessing the ability to read. Engaging the hearts of students moves reading success beyond a life skill and turns it into a life style. And graphic novels are too powerful of a tool in our arsenal to be disregarded because of pride or prejudice.

Parenting choices strongly impact the level and type of attachment a child develops and, by extension, the development of a love of learning. Parents fostering a healthy attachment are thus also fostering a life-long love of learning in their children. Non-structured playtime for children functions much like sleep does for adults, giving their brains the time and space they need to move short-term memory to long term learning.

Knost include Whispers Through Time: It was filed under Uncategorized. Get a free blog at WordPress. Modularity Lite by Graph Paper Press. Chesterton Fairy tales and folklore, those purveyors of ancient truths passed from one generation to the next, first through oral tradition, then in gloriously illustrated text, have fallen out of favor off and on throughout the centuries.

The Great Santa Claus Debate There is such a rush these days to get children sleeping through the night, weaned off the breast, eating solid foods, potty trained, reading independently, and on and on, that we seem to have lost the ability to simply enjoy life as it happens and let our children do the same. Raising Bookworms Successful reading means far more than possessing the ability to read.

When human babies are snatched from the cradle, a fairy changeling is left behind. Sometimes this creature is merely a piece of wood enchanted to look like a child; other times it is a sickly fairy baby, or an old and peevish fairy. Some say the fairies are required to pay a blood-tithe to Hell every seven years, and that they steal mortals for this purpose so as not to sacrifice one of their own.

Some fairy lore makes a clear division between good and wicked types of fairies — between those who are friendly to mankind, and those who seek to cause us harm. In Scottish tales, good fairies make up the Seelie Court, which means the Blessed Court, while bad fairies congregate in the Unseelie Court, ruled by the dark queen Nicnivin.

They are often portrayed as amoral beings, rather than as immoral ones, who simply have little comprehension of human notions of right and wrong. The Trooping Fairies, by contrast, are gregarious creatures fond of hunting, feasting, dancing, and holding court. Fairies associated with the earth are the most numerous group.

Earth elementals include those who live in caves, barrows, and deep underground, and who often have a special facility for working with precious metals. Forest fairies are also earth elementals, and are the most numerous type of fairy around the world. Other earth fairies are those who guard standing stones, such as the web—footed Couril of Brittany, and sand fairies in desert environments, such as the Ahl Al-trab found in Arabic lands. Fairies associated with water include all the magical merfolk of the sea, such as the Merrows of Ireland, the Daoine Mara of Scotland, the Mal-de-Mer of Brittany, the Nereides of Greece, and the selkies seal people who haunt the coasts of Scandinavia and the British Isles.

Rivers, lakes, pools, and other fresh water sources are also home to water fairies both gentle and malign, including the nixies and kelpies of English rivers, the Rhinemaidens of Germany, the Kludde of Belgium, the Draks of France, the Laminak of the Basque region, the Hotots of Armenia, the Judi of Macedonia, the Cacce-Halde of Lapland, the sweet-voiced Nakk of Estonia, and the bashful Nokke who appeared only at dusk and dawn in Sweden. Fairies associated with air include the various winged fairies and sylphs that are so numerous in modern picture books, popularized by Tinkerbell and Victorian-era fairy paintings.

Fairies who account for weather phenomena, such as mistral winds, whirlwinds, and storms, are associated with the air element, including the Spriggans of Cornwall, the Vily of Slavonia, the Vintoasele of Serbia and Crotia, the Rusali of Romania, and the mischievous Folletti of Italy.

The most common type of fire fairy is the salamander, an elemental spirit much prized by Renaissance alchemists. The various fairies who guard hearth fires are also associated with this element, such as the Gabija of Lithuania and Natrou-Monsieur of France. The Muzayyara are fiery, seductive fairies in old Egyptian tales; and the Akamu is a particularly dangerous fire fairy found in Japan. Although as the brief list above indicates fairies are known all around the world, nowhere are they quite so varied and populous as they are in the British Isles — which is probably why we find so many of them in English literature.

These ancient stories are filled with fairy-like men and women who wield magic, live in enchanted palaces, forge magical weaponry, and bewitch or beguile innocent mortals — such as the Lady of the Lake who gives Arthur his magical sword, Excalibur. The tales of King Arthur and his court are particular rife with fairy-like beings, especially in the Welsh and Breton traditions — as are the splendid Lays of Marie de France, written for the English court sometime around the 12th century. This sprightly story of King Oberon, Queen Mab, and assorted knights of the fairy court is notable for providing inspiration for the fairy plays of William Shakespeare.

It was in the same century that Bishop Thomas Percy began to collect old British folk ballads, which he published in an influential volume called Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Known as The Ettrick Shepherd, Hogg was a working shepherd for most of his life as well as a writer of popular tales that drew upon old Scottish legends. In addition, Scott gathered around him a group of poets and antiquarians who were likewise interested in preserving the old country tales of a nation that was rapidly urbanizing.

These books are important when looking at English literature and art of the 19th century, for they were avidly read by a wide variety of Victorian writers and artists. At the same time, the magical tales and poems of the folklore-loving German Romantic writers Goethe, Tieck, Novalis, etc. One German story, in particular, captivated Victorian readers: Such stories were particularly appealing to readers who were interested in matters of the occult and in psychic phenomena — which was a substantial segment of the reading public once the spiritualist movement crossed the sea from America and took England by storm.

These various influences came together to create a wide-spread interest in the fairy race that was unprecedented. At no other time in British history have the fairies been so popular among all types of people, from the working class to the aristocracy. These were paintings intended or adults, not children. Fairies enabled Victorian painters to explore the subject of sexuality during the very years when that subject was most repressed in polite society. Paintings of the nude were deemed acceptable so long as those nudes sported fairy wings.

The passion for fairies among Victorian adults must also be viewed in light of the rapid changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, as Britain moved from the rhythms of its rural past toward the mechanized future. With factories and suburban blight transforming huge tracts of English countryside, fairy paintings and stories were rich in nostalgia for a vanishing way of life.

In particular, the art of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — depicting scenes from Romance, legend and myth — promoted a dreamy medievalism and the aesthetics of fine craftsmanship to counter what they saw as a soul-less new world created by modern forms of mass production.

A Fairytale Christmas

Advances in printing methods allowed the production of lavishly illustrated fairy tale books, ostensibly aimed at children but with production values calculated to please adults and the growing breed of book collectors. King and numerous others produced wonderful fairy pictures for these volumes. Jessie King, like William Blake before her, was an artist who passionately believed in the fairies. In the pre-cinema world of the Victorians, theatre, ballet, and opera had greater importance as forms of popular entertainment than they enjoy today — as well as a greater influence on the visual and literary arts.

In the s, the new Romantic ballet as opposed to formal, classical ballet thrilled large audiences in London with productions that dramatized tales of love between mortals and fairy spirits. In theater, fairy plays were staged with stunningly elaborate special effects, each new production striving to be even more spectacular than the last. Fairy music for the harp was composed and performed by charismatic musicians as popular then as pop stars are now, and young women swooned and followed their favorite harpists from concert to concert.

Magical music and dance reached its height in the works of Tchaikovsky, the brilliant Russian composer who took London — indeed, all of Europe — by storm.

A Fairytale Christmas (Cowboy Fairytales, #6) by Lacy Williams

In literature as in art, theater, and ballet the fairies made their presence known, turning up in numerous books written and published during the Victorian era. But one of the major shifts we see in fairy literature from the 19th century onward is that more and more of it was published in books intended for small children. There were two major reasons why this shift occurred, despite the fact that adult fascination with fantasy and fairies had rarely been so high.

Children, according to this earlier view, came into the world in sin and had to be strictly civilized into God-fearing members of society. By Victorian times, this belief was changing to one in which children were inherently innocent, rather than inherently sinful — and childhood became a special Golden Age, a time of fanciful play and exploration before the burdens of adulthood were assumed. But in the 19th century, new European fairy tale collections by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen were proving enormously popular with English children.

Although there were some good fantasy tales of the conventional type, such as the fairy stories of Jean Ingelow and the ghost stories of Mary Louisa Molesworth, many others were forgettable confections full of twinkly fairies with butterfly wings and good little boys and girls who caused no disturbance to the status quo.

Nesbit in her later works , and many other writers created magical tales that were archly critical of Victorian life, promoting the possibility of a better society. The prevalence of utopian fantasy is explained by looking at the context of the culture which produced it — a society in the grip of great upheaval due to rapid industrialization. Fairies flittered across London stages and nested in bucolic scenes on gallery walls, but outside on the city streets it was a long, long way from Never Land, crowded as they were with beggars, cripples, prostitutes many of them children , and with homeless, desperate men and women displaced by the new economy.

While the upper classes charmed themselves with fairy books and dancing nymphs, and clapped to bring Tinkerbell back to life, in the lower classes, both urban and rural, fairies remained a different matter altogether. Here, the delicate winged maidens depicted by painters and ballet dancers were superseded by the fearsome creatures of the still-living oral tradition. Throughout the 19th century, the British newspapers reported cases of fairy sightings, curses, and abductions.

The most famous of these incidents occurred as late as , and riveted newspaper readers all across the British Isles. This was the murder of Bridget Cleary, a spirited young woman in Ireland who was killed by her husband, family, and neighbors because they thought she was a fairy changeling. Bridget Cleary had fallen gravely ill, and the family had consulted a Fairy Doctor.

He claimed that Bridget had been abducted and taken under a fairy hill, and that the sickly creature in her bed was a fairy changeling in disguise. The doctor devised several ordeals designed to make the changeling reveal itself — ordeals that soon grew so extreme that poor Bridget died. Although this was the most flamboyant case of changeling-murder in the Victorian press, sadly it was not the only account of brutal mistreatment of those deemed to be fairies.

Usually the poor victims were children, born with physical deformities or struck by sudden wasting illnesses. The last major fairy encounter reported widely by the British press took place in the tranquil countryside of Yorkshire in — when Elsie Wright, sixteen years old, and Frances Griffith, her ten year old cousin, contrived to take photographs of fairies at play in their Cottingley garden. Championed by Gardner and Conan Doyle, the photos caused an absolute sensation. Only when Elsie and Frances were old ladies did they finally admit that the Cottingley fairies were paper cut-outs held in place by hat-pins.

Despite this admission, their final deathbed statements on the subject were more ambiguous, implying that the fairies, if not the photographs, had been real after all. In her fascinating book Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, Carole G. Silver points out that the Cottingley incident, despite briefly reviving interest in the fairies, was actually one of the factors that ended the Golden Age of fairy art and literature.

And yet, it is interesting to note that one of the most popular art prints of the war era depicted a simple country boy playing a pipe, surrounded by fairies. One could find them if one looked hard enough — in Ireland, for instance, in the fiction of James Stephens and Lord Dunsany; or in Lud-in-the-Mist, the early fantasy classic by English author Hope Mirrlees. But in general, it was not until an Oxford don named J. Tolkien wrote about elves in a place called Middle-Earth that fairies came back to popular art in any numbers.

And then they came with a vengeance. Professor Tolkien was a scholar of folklore, myth, and Old English literature, so when he created the elves of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, he knew what he was doing. This in turn created an enormous interest in all things magical, wondrous, and fey.

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Suddenly there were fairies, dragons, unicorns, mermaids, and wizards everywhere. People started seeking out folklore texts, and teaching themselves to speak Elvish. Back in the s, this was a radical notion. Tolkien dismissed the post-Victorian idea that fantasy was fit only for children, and reached back to an older adult fantasy tradition running from Beowulf to William Morris.

In the mids, another book lured adult readers into the Twilight Realm. But whereas Gnomes depicted cheerful little creatures who had little in common with the dour, clever, metal-working gnomes of the European folk tradition, Faeries was deeply rooted in traditional fairy lore. Here, in all their beautiful, horrible glory were the fairies of old British legends: Lee and Froud had taken inspiration from Victorian Fairy Art and updated the tradition for a new generation. In fiction, the great success of The Lord of the Rings helped to establish an entire new publishing genre of fantasy fiction for adult readers; and as a result, a new generation of writers turned to folklore and myth for inspiration — in North America as well as in England.

John Crowley, for example, in his brilliant novel Little, Big, draws on a host of Victorian ideas about the fairies to create a modern fairy tale set in rural and urban New York. See the Further Reading list below for more fiction recommendations. As a result, he is arguably the best known and most authoritative fairy artist in the world today. Yoshitaka Amano gives a unique interpretation of British and Japanese folklore in his beautiful art collection Fairies, which includes an essay by Kimie Imura expoloring differences between the Western and Eastern traditions.

The revival of interest in Victorian fairy art led to an important traveling exhibition curated by The University of Iowa and the Royal Academy of London in In , Abbaye Daoulas in Brittany presented an extensive exhibition of fairy art, beginning with 12th century manuscripts right up to the present day. I recommend the following related art books: In film, fairies are the subject of two movies inspired by the Cottingley photographs: The fairies have also appeared in pop music, in songs by musicians and bands as diverse as Donovan, Queen, The Waterboys, and Tori Amos. This was a favorite theme of the Victorians, who believed that the fairies were taking their leave of us and that magic would soon vanish from the world forever….

But as far as I can see, the Victorians were dead wrong. The British Isles, and other parts of the world, are still thickly populated by the elfin tribes, if the present abundance of fairies in popular culture is any indication. The fairies play electric bagpipes now. Finally there was no help for it. The family packed to go themselves.

Fairy Tales~The Lost Treasure of ‘Once upon a time…’

But as they drove down the road,. The fairy haunts that cottage and their descendants to this day. So it is with fairies in literature and art. Fairy stories go in and out of fashion. Critics and commentators are always prey to big ideas — the bigger the better, in fact — and so tend to overestimate certain factors in the production and formation of books, preferring to emphasise the influence of some particular social, historical, political, institutional, linguistic or psychological fact or force and to ignore certain others.

Thus we currently have cognitive poetics, ecocriticism, and post-colonial theories all being successfully applied to explain various aspects of our national literatures. But as yet — alas — we have no County Theory of English Lit. This is my big idea. If we were to apply some of the quantatitive methods for analysing literature developed by the great maverick literary theorist Franco Moretti, a map of the UK as a whole adjusted for size according to literary production might produce a hunched, swollen-headed creature with an enormous Scotland, a bulging Northern Ireland, withered limbs, an empty heart, and a vast and protuberant Norfolk.

And yet the literary landscape of this most remote and unassuming of the English counties — just over 2, square miles of agricultural land, rivers, fens, towns and forests — is subtly strange and wild.

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An untiring advocate of the joys and merits of his adopted home county, Bradbury figured Norfolk as a place of writing parsons, farmer-writers and sensitive poets: For me, Norfolk became a place of fantasy, derring-do and detection — a place of mysteries and obscurities. George was raised by his Irish mother and English father in Battersea, London and was educated at an L. Having left school at an early age he pursued several odd jobs before settling on a career in writing. During all that time and possibly to the present day, hardly anyone has read him, most of his work is out of print, and has been barely mentioned in literary histories.

Yet he was no minor poet. His work was passionate, intellectually challenging and highly original. At 22, Barker was a literary phenomenon. Eliot declared him a genius and Yeats thought him the finest poet of his generation. He composed poetry until the day he died. If you like your poets to be wild, irresponsible and dangerous then Barker would make you feel ecstatic! He was a prodigious drinker, womaniser and an habitual user of Methedrine and Benzedrine.

He never owned a home — his sole attempt at property purchase ended when a fraudulent estate agent absconded with his entire savings — and he scarcely had a fixed address. He fathered 15 children by four different women.