Lady Elder Tree

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Lady Elder Tree

No other plant is more associated with witchcraft in parts of northern and western Europe than the elder tree (Sambucus nigra). An Old English Christian canon explicitly forbids its veneration while later tales strongly associate the elder with witches and witchcraft. Yet the plant is also personified as a goddess-like figure who heals and punishes, the Elder Tree Lady. Appeals to the Elder Tree Lady are especially strongly recorded in Denmark and southern Sweden, where one must ritually ask her before removing any part of the plantβ€”or else. Featuring numerous original illustrations by a variety of artists and introduced by scholars John Lindow and Mathias Nordvig, here researchers Joseph S. Hopkins & Rune HjarnΓΈ Rasmussen present and discuss historical references to this incredible plant and its personification alongside poetry, literature, and traditional recipes.

Lady Elder Tree

No other plant is more associated with witchcraft in parts of northern and western Europe than the elder tree (Sambucus nigra). An Old English Christian canon explicitly forbids its veneration while later tales strongly associate the elder with witches and witchcraft. Yet the plant is also personified as a goddess-like figure who heals and punishes, the Elder Tree Lady. Appeals to the Elder Tree Lady are especially strongly recorded in Denmark and southern Sweden, where one must ritually ask her before removing any part of the plantβ€”or else. Featuring numerous original illustrations by a variety of artists and introduced by scholars John Lindow and Mathias Nordvig, here researchers Joseph S. Hopkins & Rune HjarnΓΈ Rasmussen present and discuss historical references to this incredible plant and its personification alongside poetry, literature, and traditional recipes.

  • Hyldyr
    216 pages. 5x7. Perfect binding. Printed in the USA.

    2nd Edition.

 

From the publisher:

"Hyldyr is an independent and experimental publishing house based in Olympia, Washington state, USA. We combine the efforts of academics and artists to produce unique, beautiful, and scholarship-grounded publications.

There’s nothing else like usβ€”by design. Founded in late 2021 with our first publications arriving the summer of 2023, we designed Hyldyr to produce high-quality and extremely unique editions built to withstand scholastic scrutiny, to function as art objects, and to provide our readers with keys to hidden worlds.

We are heavily inspired by the works of English polymath William Morris, do-it-yourself movements, and our evergreen mountainous surroundings. We place a particular emphasis on historical linguistics and folklore studies and all of our publications in some way or another fall within the triangle of art, ecology, and folklore. We believe the world is a vast place full of wonders.

While we design our publications to be as approachable as possible, Hyldyr’s roots are academic: Hyldyr developed out of the web-based resource project Mimisbrunnr.info, itself an evolution of a student-led reading circle originally sponsored by the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Georgia for several years in the 2010s.

Quality and humanity come first at Hyldyr: We never use print-on-demand services, we explicitly forbid the use of generative AI in our publications, we sell our books only to independent bookstores and educational institutions (like museums), and we always aim to go a step beyond traditional publishing houses in everything we do."