Lore Of The Leaves – til 3rd May

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I’ll begin.

“ In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit….”

And so begins one of the best known and most loved stories of all time, and the one which kick starts a trilogy of childhood book themed exhibitions for 2026. Myths, legends, folklore, fairytales, fables – whatever we want to call them, the stories which we hear, read and tell as children are foundational to how we make sense of the world around us, how we develop imaginations, how we navigate morality and what we become as adults and communities.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien started its life as an evening story told to his children years before that line was written down, and even after putting that line on paper, the book was several years in the making.  The story didn’t come from nowhere but as a result of years of studying myths and legends from many places – most importantly from Old English literature such as Beowulf, folklore gathered by the Brothers Grimm, Norse tales and to some extent the Middle Welsh texts of The Mabinogion, themselves the later written manuscripts of much earlier oral traditions, dates unknown but much speculated.

We are proud of The Mabinogion in Wales, however strange and disparate they may seem, the story of their translations being a story in its own right. From the White Book of Rhydderch put down c.1350 and the Red Book of Hergest c.1385 stem such well known tales as Blodeuwedd – the magical woman made of flowers, made for a man cursed by his mother not to have a human wife, who then becomes adulterous and murderous and is turned into an owl for her actions; the earliest mention of legendary hero King Arthur sets him firmly as a Celtic hero from the Welsh Lands and Y Ddraig Goch, the Red Dragon, which became, and continues to be, the emblem of Welsh resistance and identity. These magical tales are set in real geographical locations across Wales which adds a spark of truth and authenticity to them…

We look back to our childhood for an intangible glimpse of a golden, more innocent time and the stories we loved then take on a heavy lifting role in the flavour of our memories. Stories of daring adventures, impossible journeys, triumph of humility over pride, the re-establishment of good over evil, with characters we can relate to in settings very often green and wooded. Woods, trees, branches, leaves - magical spaces where magical manifestations happen. The land of Elves, where trees come alive, where enchantment happens in glades - the good wood, the evil forest loom large in fantasy literature. The magic of childhood reading where to turn the leaves of a book means embarking on an adventure and to re-read is to go on that journey with old friends.

Words by Jess Jones

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