Put a pin in it

[bloodygranuaile]

I only bought one book in Nova Scotia, which is pretty disciplined for me. The book in question was Witchcraft: Tales, Beliefs, and Superstitions from the Maritimes by Clary Croft, which I bought at a museum gift shop in a historic house in Dartmouth, because that's how I do things (it was not, as far as we were told, a witch's house).

 

This book is not by Helen Creighton, who is apparently the No. 1 Canadian folklorist and the person whose books I should be buying, but Mr. Croft is her student and Witchcraft quotes her stuff extensively, so now I've got more reading material should I decided I need to learn all the Canadian folklore, which I will get right on after learning all the folklore from a bunch of other countries too.

 

The book is short and contains a lot of short tales about random supposed witchings in and around Nova Scotia, PEI, and New Brunswick. Most of the stories are from the 19th century or the earlier 20th century, but some legends go back much longer. People familiar with witch beliefs from any of the six main cultures that settled in the Maritimes or with Native American shamanistic beliefs will see some familiar stuff in the tales collected. A lot of reported instances of witchcraft have to do with people being suspected of hexing their neighbor's cows and other livestock, though mostly cows. Other stories are about people getting mysteriously sick, for a value of "mysteriously" that probably means "We hadn't invented good medical practices yet." Many of the ways of breaking spells fall into a couple of themes, some of which were pretty familiar to me—Bible-related stuff such as quotes or using the physical book as a protective talisman; blocking windows or doors with brooms or iron bars, burning stuff—but other types of cursebreaking that popped up over and over again I hadn't heard of before. Putting needles and pins into things was a big one; Maritime anti-witchcraft lore also seems to have a bit of a thing about using bottles of urine (sometimes from the bewitched human and sometimes from bewitched cows/horses/etc.; on some occasions, from the suspected witch). A widely held belief seems to be that when someone does a counter-spell to break a spell or out a witch, the witch will try to borrow or beg something from the person casting the counter-spell; if the witch is given what they ask for, the charm will be broken.

 

A good number of the stories involve witches who are men; this is not enormously unusual, but it seemed to me like this collection had a higher proportion of male witches than one usually hears about.

 

Overall the book was an interesting look into a bunch of folklore I didn't know anything about, which is just what I wanted from it; it also seems like the kind of thing that will be fun to mine for writing ideas, which is a nice bonus.