literature Archives - Bone and Sickle

The White, Old Maid: a Story for Halloween

October 31, 2026 boneandsickle EPISODE, ghost stories, ghosts, gothic literature, Halloween, literature, mystery, New England, storytelling

Curl up by a glowing Jack-o-Lantern and enjoy Mrs. Karswell’s reading of another eerie tale by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Originally titled[…]

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Robert the Devil: Medieval Legend, Gothic Opera

June 6, 2026 boneandsickle chapbooks, demons, Devil, diabolism, EPISODE, folklore, France, ghosts, Gothic, gothic literature, history, horror, legends, literature, medieval, Middle Ages, nuns, opera, Paris Opera, Robert le diable, Robert the Devil, Romanticism, The Monk, theater, Victorian

Robert the Devil is a supernatural medieval legend that inspired a 19th-century French opera, which incorporates key elements from a[…]

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Trolls in Medieval Literature

April 27, 2026 boneandsickle ballads, EPISODE, folk tales, folklore, Germanic, Iceland, legends, literature, medieval, Middle Ages, monsters, Norse, Norse religion, Norway, saints, storytelling, troll-cats, trolls, witchcraft, witches

Trolls, as presented in medieval literature, are vastly different from the creatures we encountered in our last episode’s collection of[…]

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