Where the Map Ends

Sep 28, 2026

The Woman Who Turns Away

A journal account of the Huldra, the hidden forest woman of Norwegian and Swedish tradition, and the herders and hunters who claimed to have loved her.

Sep 22, 2026

The Herds That Answer to No One

A look at Flidais, the Irish goddess who is said to herd and protect the wild deer of the forest, and at the old tale of the cattle raid that carries her name.

Sep 12, 2026

The Laughter on the Ridge

A journal entry on the tengu, the long-nosed mountain spirits of Japan, recorded among the cedars of Mount Kurama where they are said to still watch the paths after dark.

Sep 2, 2026

A journal entry on the bunyip, the water-dwelling being of Aboriginal folklore from the Murray-Darling basin, and how a warning about dangerous water became, in colonial hands, both a cryptid and an insult.

Aug 31, 2026

Pukwudgie Country

An account of the pukwudgie, the small and sharp-tempered woodland spirits of Wampanoag and Algonquian tradition, and the wary respect they still command in the pine barrens of southeastern Massachusetts.

Aug 30, 2026

Where the Whistlers Fly

On the old English belief in the Seven Whistlers, the unseen birds whose calls marked the boundary between the known road and the country beyond it, and on what the blank edges of old maps once meant to those who had to cross them.

Aug 26, 2026

Lykos and the Hollow Wood

A journal entry on Lykos, the guardian wolf said to haunt the last old-growth remnants of the English wildwood, and the folk memory that keeps him there long after real wolves were gone.

Aug 23, 2026

Where the Ink Runs Out

A look at terra incognita, the old cartographer's term for the unmapped edge of the world, and the dragons, monsters and blank spaces that filled it.

Aug 13, 2026

The Giants Beneath the Turf

In the west of Ireland the Fir Bolg are remembered first as an ancient, defeated people, and only later as giants whose bodies became the hills they once held.

Aug 10, 2026

The One Who Sees in Circles

A journey into the mountain country of Sicily and the Peloponnese in search of the Cyclopes — giant shepherds of Greek myth whose single eye may owe less to invention than to a bone in the ground.