Amonrawya - Amon Rawya

well look who it is. my old friend. the conses of my quences.

““What’s new with you?” “Not much. An old friend just turned out to be a murderer.” “Same.””

— Cully and Ben, at some point, probably

“Well, there’s no proof that will happen. You can’t count on things happening tomorrow just because they happened in the past. It’s faulty logic.”

How are we holding up? I’m still crying about Lenore Dove and the gumdrops

The Cailleach | Scottish Folklore

The story of the Cailleach can change drastically depending on what area of Scotland you are in, making her a hard figure to pin down as one thing or another.

In some stories, she transforms each year at Tobar na Cailleach(well of the Cailleach) from an old woman into youth, and the change of seasons depict her cycle from youth into elderly age.

In other stories, the Cailleach is more of a villainous figure, that either stubbornly fights back the forces of spring(and is ultimately overcome by the united forces of the sun, dew, and rain), or the Cailleach holds spring prisoner in the form of a beautiful young woman named Bride. Bride is eventually rescued by a young man named Aengus, and their union brings forth spring.

To again bring on winter, she washes her great plaid in the whirlpool of Corryvreckan, a spectacle that heralds the onset of winter storms.

The Corryvreckan Whirlpool

Thanks to her winter and storm association, it is perhaps no surprise mountains named after her, such as Beinn na Cailleach, often become engulfed in storm-clouds during the winter months.

However, there are also stories that reflect a side of the Cailleach that goes beyond her association with winter.

“-… it is undoubted that the Cailleach is the guardian spirit of a number of animals. ‘The deer have the first claim on her. They are her cattle; she herds and milks them and often gives them protection against the hunter. Swine, wild goats, wild cattle and wolves were also her creatures. In another aspect she was a fishing goddess. “ A Encyclopedia of Fairies by Katharine Briggs (1976)

Sometimes, she is a guardian of sacred wells, demonstrated in Alasdair Alpin MacGregor’s “The Peat-Fire Flame” which recounts a tale where the Cailleach’s failure to cover a spring with a stone results in a catastrophic flood and the forming of Loch Awe.

“But one day, weary with hunting the corries of Cruachan, she fell asleep on the sunny hillside. Not until the third morning did she awaken; and by that time her heritage lay beneath the waters of the loch that since then has been known as Loch Awe.” The Peat-Fire Flame: Folk-Tales and Traditions of the Highlands and Islands by Alasdair Alpin MacGregor (1937)

Othertimes, she is a source of healing, such as at the ancient shrine of Tigh nam Bodach(sometimes also called Tigh na Cailleach), which is associated with the Cailleach, the Bodach (Old Man), and their daughter Nighean(who is not always mentioned).

“The Tigh na Cailleach near Glen Lyon in Perthshire, Scotland”

At the shrine, there are stones known as healing stones, and they are carefully taken care of. Historically, someone had to put them inside on the first day of November, and take them out on the first day of May. As well as that, they were to be give a fresh bed of straw on winter festival days.

“In what is believed to be the oldest uninterrupted pre-Christian ritual in Britain, the water-worn figures from the River Lyon are taken out of their house every May and faced down the glen, and returned every November. The ritual marked the two great Celtic fire festivals of Beltane(Summer) and Samhain (Winter)and the annual migration of Highland cattle on and off the hills.” Highland Perthshire

So who is the Cailleach? She is the changing of seasons, sometimes a protector of sacred wells and animals, and can even be a source of healing. Basically, she is likely the most complicated subject to study from Scottish Folklore.

Further Reading:

The Folk-lore Journal, Volume 6; Volume 21: The Folk-Lore Of Sutherlandshire  by Miss Dempster

The Celtic Review, Vol 5 (1905): Highland Mythology by E. C. Watson

The Peat-Fire Flame: Folk-Tales and Traditions of the Highlands and Islands by Alasdair Alpin MacGregor (1937)

A Encyclopedia of Fairies by Katharine Briggs (1976)

The Folk-Lore of the Isle of Man by A. W. Moore[1891]

Carmina Gadelica, Volume 2, by Alexander Carmicheal, [1900]

Highland Perthshire (website with a blog post)

Historic Audio Recordings

Healing stones at Taigh na Caillich (Track: ID SA1964.72.A24, Date: 1559) “There were healing stones in a house in Gleann na Caillich; the shepherds looked after them. Talk about shepherds in the glen.”

Anecdote regarding Beinn na Caillich and Gleann na Caillich. (Track ID: SA1964.017.B6, Date: 1964) “An old woman and an old man lived in a house in Gleann na Caillich. The shepherd had to put them inside on the first day of November, and take them out on the first day of May. He also had to thatch their house each year.”

Information about St Fillan’s healing stones at Killin. (Track ID: SA1964.71.A5, Date: 1964) There were stones, known as the bodach and cailleach, in a house in Gleann na Caillich in Glen Lyon. Discussion about St Fillan’s stones at Killin. Different stones healed different diseases. The miller was in charge of them. They had to be freshly bedded with straw thrown up by the river on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve. This is still done [in 1964]. The person in charge of St Fillan’s relics was known as An Deòrach and he had a croft in a place called Croit an Deòir.

The ache will go away, eventually. 

That was what the Professor told them, the day they got back. When they tumbled from the wardrobe in a heap of tangled limbs, and found that the world had been torn from under their feet with all the kindness of a serpent. 

They picked themselves off of the floorboards with smiles plastered on child faces, and sat with the Professor in his study drinking cup after cup of tea. 

But the smiles were fake. The tea was like ash on their tongues. And when they went to bed that night, none of them could sleep in beds that were too foreign, in bodies that had not been their own for years. Instead they grouped into one room and sat on the floor and whispered, late into the night. 

When morning came, Mrs. Macready discovered the four of them asleep in Peter and Edmund’s bedroom, tangled in a heap of pillows and blankets with their arms looped across one another. They woke a few moments after her entry and seemed confused, lost even, staring around the room with pale faces, eyes raking over each framed painting on the wall and across every bit of furniture as if it was foreign to them. “Come to breakfast,” Mrs. Macready said as she turned to go, but inside she wondered. 

For the children’s faces had held the same sadness that she saw sometimes in the Professor’s. A yearning, a shock, a numbness, as if their very hearts had been ripped from their chests.

At breakfast Lucy sat huddled between her brothers, wrapped in a shawl that was much too big for her as she warmed her hands around a mug of hot chocolate. Edmund fidgeted in his seat and kept reaching up to his hair as if to feel for something that was no longer there. Susan pushed her food idly around on her plate with her fork and hummed a strange melody under her breath. And Peter folded his hands beneath his chin and stared at the wall with eyes that seemed much too old for his face. 

It chilled Mrs. Macready to see their silence, their strangeness, when only yesterday they had been running all over the house, pounding through the halls, shouting and laughing in the bedrooms. It was as if something, something terrible and mysterious and lengthy, had occurred yesterday, but surely that could not be. 

She remarked upon it to the Professor, but he only smiled sadly at her and shook his head. “They’ll be all right,” he said, but she wasn’t so sure. 

They seemed so lost. 

Lucy disappeared into one of the rooms later that day, a room that Mrs. Macready knew was bare save for an old wardrobe of the professor’s. She couldn’t imagine what the child would want to go in there for, but children were strange and perhaps she was just playing some game. When Lucy came out again a few minutes later, sobbing and stumbling back down the hall with her hair askew, Mrs. Macready tried to console her, but Lucy found no comfort in her arms. “It wasn’t there,” she kept saying, inconsolable, and wouldn’t stop crying until her siblings came and gathered her in their arms and said in soothing voices, “Perhaps we’ll go back someday, Lu.” 

Go back where, Mrs. Macready wondered? She stepped into the room Lucy had been in later on in the evening and looked around, but there was nothing but dust and an empty space where coats used to hang in the wardrobe. The children must have taken them recently and forgotten to return them, not that it really mattered. They were so old and musty and the Professor had probably forgotten them long ago. But what could have made the child cry so? Try as she might, Mrs. Macready could find no answer, and she left the room dissatisfied and covered in dust. 

Lucy and Edmund and Peter and Susan took tea in the Professor’s room again that night, and the next, and the next, and the next. They slept in Peter and Edmund’s room, then Susan and Lucy’s, then Peter and Edmund’s again and so on, swapping every night till Mrs. Macready wondered how they could possibly get any sleep. The floor couldn’t be comfortable, but it was where she found them, morning after morning. 

Each morning they looked sadder than before, and breakfast was silent. Each afternoon Lucy went into the room with the wardrobe, carrying a little lion figurine Edmund had carved her, and came out crying a little while later. And then one day she didn’t, and went wandering in the woods and fields around the Professor’s house instead. She came back with grassy fingers and a scratch on one cheek and a crown of flowers on her head, but she seemed content. Happy, even. Mrs. Macready heard her singing to herself in a language she’d never heard before as Lucy skipped past her in the hall, leaving flower petals on the floor in her wake. Mrs. Macready couldn’t bring herself to tell the child to pick them up, and instead just left them where they were. 

More days and nights went by. One day it was Peter who went into the room with the wardrobe, bringing with him an old cloak of the Professor’s, and he was gone for quite a while. Thirty or forty minutes, Mrs. Macready would guess. When he came out, his shoulders were straighter and his chin lifted higher, but tears were dried upon his cheeks and his eyes were frightening. Noble and fierce, like the eyes of a king. The cloak still hung about his shoulders and made him seem almost like an adult. 

Peter never went into the wardrobe room again, but Susan did, a few weeks later. She took a dried flower crown inside with her and sat in there at least an hour, and when she came out her hair was so elaborately braided that Mrs. Macready wondered where on earth she had learned it. The flower crown was perched atop her head as she went back down the hall, and she walked so gracefully that she seemed to be floating on the air itself. In spite of her red eyes, she smiled, and seemed content to wander the mansion afterwards, reading or sketching or making delicate jewelry out of little pebbles and dried flowers Lucy brought her from the woods. 

More weeks went by. The children still took tea in the Professor’s study on occasion, but not as often as before. Lucy now went on her daily walks outdoors, and sometimes Peter or Susan, or both of them at once, accompanied her. Edmund stayed upstairs for the most part, reading or writing, keeping quiet and looking paler and sadder by the day. 

Finally he, too, went into the wardrobe room. 

He stayed for hours, hours upon hours. He took nothing in save for a wooden sword he had carved from a stick Lucy brought him from outside, and he didn’t come out again. The shadows lengthened across the hall and the sun sank lower in the sky and finally Mrs. Macready made herself speak quietly to Peter as the boy came out of the Professor’s study. “Your brother has been gone for hours,” she told him crisply, but she was privately alarmed, because Peter’s face shifted into panic and he disappeared upstairs without a word. 

Mrs. Macready followed him silently after around thirty minutes and pressed an ear to the door of the wardrobe room. Voices drifted from beyond. Edmund’s and Peter’s, yes, but she could also hear the soft tones of Lucy and Susan. 

“Why did he send us back?” Edmund was saying. It sounded as if he had been crying.  

Mrs. Macready couldn’t catch the answer, but when the siblings trickled out of the room an hour later, Edmund’s wooden sword was missing, and the flower crown Susan had been wearing lately was gone, and Peter no longer had his old cloak, and Lucy wasn’t carrying her lion figurine, and the four of them had clasped hands and sad, but smiling, faces. 

Mrs. Macready slipped into the room once they were gone and opened the wardrobe, and there at the bottom were the sword and the crown and the cloak and the lion. An offering of sorts, almost, or perhaps just items left there for future use, for whenever they next went into the wardrobe room.  

But they never did, and one day they were gone for good, off home, and the mansion was silent again. And it had been a long time since that morning that Mrs. Macready had found them all piled together in one bedroom, but ever since then they hadn’t quite been children, and she wanted to know why.

She climbed the steps again to the floor of the house where the old wardrobe was, and then went into the room and crossed the floor to the opposite wall. 

When she pulled the wardrobe door open, the four items the Pevensie children had left inside of it were missing. 

And just for a moment, it seemed to her that a cool gust of air brushed her face, coming from the darkness beyond where the missing coats used to hang.

This. For the love of goodness you lot need to grow up and chill out. I don't even interact with the fandom because of how much of a shitshow it is out there. Get real. Oh and anyone who harasses actors, writers, producers, etc, or anyone at all involved with a media production because you don't like their choices/don't like them, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

I always say I hate getting into a fandom because of the inevitable discourse. You shippers remain some of the absolute worst part of the fandom. I'm not saying all shippers btw. The shippers who draw art of their favorite couples and “ship” different characters but also respect other people's “ships” cause y'know it's fiction and stuff at the end of the day, y'all are cool people. Just wanna say I love your unproblematic asses. You see the others, please go bite the dust. Why the fuck are you so mean? These people are NOT REAL!!!! The new season of hotd hasn't even started and y'all are already back on your bullshit. Being racist and sending death threats towards the cast and other people in the fandom and just overall being fuckin vile human beings because “your ship doesn't make sense or have chemistry or yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah” STFU!. LEAVE THE ACTORS ALONE, LEAVE THE PRODUCERS AND THE SHOW STAFF ALONE. LEAVE OTHER PEOPLE ALONE!! GO OUTSIDE AND BREATHE THE FRESH AIR, THE SHIT IS NEVER THAT SERIOUS. SEVEN FUCKIN HELLS MAN. Let's use Beth and Harry for an example, the stuff that comes from some of your accounts are absolutely vile and I wish you the fuckin worst. Then y'all love quoting “but they're not following the source material” to justify y'all being racist and nasty towards them. I have some news for you. If you read the books and not just gloss over what you wanna read you'd know that their characters were inevitably endgame had everything went right, there was no such thing as “BROKEBACK WINTERFELL”, as fun as that plot would've been, Jace and Cregan had a brotherly relationship and “Sara Snow” was just Mushroom only account and he wasn't even near or in Winterfell, so it was probably just his “fevered musings” she probably 100% didn't even exist, it was a campaign to slander Rhaenyra and her children and that's canon. Calling Bethany all sorts of vile things cause you're not in the writers room and can't write your headcanons is sick. Sending death threats to Harry is absolutely mental. Seek professional help!! Not just them alone but you get the gist. Please just try to be decent people. You don't have to like something everybody else probably likes but you also don't have to be a CUNT for no apparent reason. IT'S JUST FICTION. LET'S JUST WATCH THE SHITSHOW AND HAVE FUN.

Hello Midsomer Murders fandom!

I have no idea how dead this fandom is on Tumblr but I love scrolling the tag, so I thought this would be the best place to look!

I'm working on a fic project involving Ben Jones, so naturally I'd like to make a character playlist for him. What songs do you think he'd like/would suit his character?

2nd of October: Light / An dàrna latha dhen Dàmhair: Solas

English Translation:

Thorin knew beauty, perfection, could recognise the mark of true craftsmanship with ease. Though still young in the years of Dwarves, he studied at the side of their greatest smiths, deep in the halls of Erebor before the dragon came, and learnt the true meaning of creation.

The forges of Men lacked skill and care; working on them brought him no satisfaction, only a pittance in his hand and scorn on the road. Reaching the Blue Mountains was a relief to his people and to Thorin but they did not relish to live on the charity of others.

Their prince would not forget the glory and honour they came from. They established halls of their own in the west and raised themselves out of ruin, enough that many among Thorin's folk lost all desire to seek for their lost homeland again.

For their sake, and the sake of his siblings, Thorin spoke little of it - choosing to look ahead rather than live looking back. It did not stop the dreams or the memories, nor quell his anger. Never again will we be beggars, turned from the door like animals.

Oft did Thorin go among their smiths, seeking the familiarity of a hammer in the hand and the heat of the fire on his face.

But eyes the light of the Arkenstone had seen could not easily forget its radiance, nor find equal in dull and dusty gems. In his dreams, it lay buried beneath the dragon's paws, forever in the dark within walls once strewn with firelight.

The Arkenstone. The heart of the mountain, they called it. He held its light closely, tightly, and allowed his hope to live on in its glow.

(Sorry this one is shorter, I'm working tonight and don't have a lot of time to translate it!)

Scottish Gaelic Translation:

Bha Thòrin eòlach air àlainneachd, snas. Dh’fhaodadh e ag aithneachadh comharra fhìor cheàirde gu furasta. Ged a bha e òg fhathast ann am beatha nan troichean, dh’ionnsaich e ri taobh na goibhnean as motha a bh’ aca, anns na h-uaimhean ìsle, aosmhoire Erebor mus tàinig an nathair-sgiathach, agus dh’ionnsaich e am fior ciall chruitheachd.

Bha na ceàrdaichean gun sgil is nàistinn. Cha tug e toileachadh dha a bhith ag obair orra idir. Cha d’fhuair e dad ach priobaid na làimh agus tàir bhuapa air an rathad. Nuair a ràinig iad na Beanntan Ghuirm, b’ e faochadh don t-sluaigh aige agus ris fhèin, ach cha robhar measail air a bhith a’ fuirich air carantas.

Cha dhìochuimhneach am prionnsa a’ ghlòir is onaraich a bh’ aca. Thog iad tallachan dhaibh fhèin anns an Iar agus thog iad fhèin a-mach à lom-sgrios. B’ e sin gu leòr dha tòrr dhen t-sluaigh Thòrin a bhith gan caill am miann a bhith a’ sireach an tìr-dhàimh aca a-rithist.

Air an son, agus air a phiuthar is a bhràthair, cha bhruidhinn Thòrin mu dheidhinn gu tric. Choimhead e air adhart seach a bhith beò a’ coimhead air ais. Cha do stad sin na h-aislingean, na chuimhneachain, no chuir mùch air a fhuath. Cha bhith sinn nar dìolachan-dèirce a-riamh a-rithist, feumach air taic mar gun robh beathaichean a bh’ annainn.

Chaidh Thòrin gu tric a-measg na goibhnean aca, a’ sireach cinnt dhen t-òrd na làimh is teas an teine air an t-aodann. Ach cha b’ urrainn sùilean a chunnaic solas an Arkenstone dhìochuimhneachadh an deàrrsaidh no lorg an aon rud ann an leugan luaireanta, ràsanaiche. Anns na aislingean bha i adhlaicte fon smàg an nathair-sgiathach, anns an dorchadas, ann an tallachan a bha air lìonadh aon uair le solas an teine, gu sìorraidh brath.

An Arkenstone. Cridhe na Beinn, chuir iad oirre. Ghlèidh e an solas faisg, gu daingean, agus leig a dhòchas a bhith beò anns a deàrrsadh.

(Duilich gu bheil am fear seo nas beaga, tha mi air a bhith ag obair a-nochd agus cha robh àm gu leòr agam airson eadar-theangachadh a dhèanamh! Bidh mearachdan ann a sheo agus bheir mi sùil a-màireach air haha)