Late January in Ireland. It has been stormy and grey. Huge, unseasonable, storms raged early in the week, one on the heels of another. Wind speeds not seen here in decades, throwing coal buckets across fences, knocking down trees and cutting power to huge swathes of the country. The Cailleach tucked up tight by her fire as winter rages still. Storms of this intensity, and frequency, are not normal here, but they are the consequence of a rapidly warming Atlantic and are predicted to become common place on lands so wholly unused to them.
They cleared, briefly, for the first night of the full moon, leaving a crystal sky for my boy to show me the constellations he’s learned, bears and warriors and of course that moon. The moon he writes letters to, the moon this month named for his beloved wolves. I wrote last week of Ireland’s wolves, and today I bring you the fiction, as promised. It is of a wolf in the woods, a warrior amongst the trees, his lover by his side. It is of red coats and full moons and fur. It is of rebel Ireland, alive and well and howling at that moon.
Some of you may know that my specialism at university was folklore and fairy tales, I managed to contort both an art masters and a law one into studies of these tales. And so, it is impossible for me to think of wolves without thinking of that infamous fairy tale. Today’s fiction could be seen as a retelling of that oft told story and below is an (edited) excerpt from the chapter which discusses it in my master’s in law dissertation examining Fairy Tales as formative tales for our society and therefore influential narratives in jury decision making.
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