Magick Matters

10.11.2023

“The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary” by Hana Videen

Magick Matters
"The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary" by Hana Videen
"Many of the animals we encounter in everyday life, from the creatures in our fields to those in our fantasies, have remained the same since medieval times - but the words we use, and the ways we describe them, have often changed beyond recognition... Old English was spoken over a thousand years ago, when every animal was a deor. In this glittering Old English bestiary we find deors big and small, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the good, the bad and the downright baffling. From walker-weavers (spiders) and grey-cloaked ones (eagles) to moon-heads and teeth-tyrants (historians still don't know!), we discover a world both familiar and strange: where ants could be monsters and panthers could...>>
View
10.11.2023

“The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English” by Hana Videen

Magick Matters
"The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English" by Hana Videen
"An entertaining and illuminating collection of weird, wonderful, and downright baffling words from the origins of English―and what they reveal about the lives of the earliest English speakers Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English―the language of Beowulf―defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of Britain more than a thousand years ago, it is rich with words that haven’t changed (like word), others that are unrecognizable (such as neorxnawang, or paradise), and some that are mystifying even in translation (gafol-fisc, or tax-fish). In this delightful book, Hana Videen gathers a glorious trove of these...>>
View
10.11.2023

“Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages” by David Keck

Magick Matters
"Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages" by David Keck
"Recently angels have made a remarkable comeback in the popular imagination; their real heyday, however, was the Middle Ages. From the great shrines dedicated to Michael the Archangel at Mont-St-Michel and Monte Garano to the elaborate metaphysical speculations of the great thirteenth-century scholastics, angels dominated the physical, temporal, and intellectual landscape of the medieval West. This book offers a full-scale study of angels and angelology in the Middle Ages. Seeking to discover how and why angels became so important in medieval society, David Keck considers a wide range of fascinating questions such as: Why do angels appear on baptismal fonts? How and why did angels become normative for certain members of the church? How did...>>
View
09.11.2023

“Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories” edited by Mike Ashley

Magick Matters
"Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories" edited by Mike Ashley
"A figure emerges from a painting to pursue a bitter vengeance; the last transmission of a dying man haunts the airwaves, seeking to reveal his murderer; a treasure hunt disturbs an ancient presence in the silence of a lost tomb. From the vaults of the British Library comes a new anthology celebrating the best works of forgotten, never since republished, supernatural fiction from the early XX century. Waiting within are malevolent spirits eager to possess the living and mysterious spectral guardians—a diverse host of phantoms exhumed from the rare pages of literary magazines and newspaper serials to thrill once more."...>>
View