The joy of research

[julesjones]

Writing is intermittent at the moment (because of Stuff that's higher on the priority list for the next few weeks, not because of failure to write). Nevertheless I did 2000 words on Sunday, in the course of which I discovered that Google is not good for everything. I have a fairy who has been abducted by Bad Guys, and it occurred to me that they'd probably use a mix of modern pharmaceuticals and old herbal lore when they stick a syringe full of tranquillizer into him. My memory refused to cough up specifics of herbal lore relating to controlling fairies, and the books I might have skimmed through are mostly in storage. Alas, my Google-fu failed me, and I couldn't think of search terms that didn't result in hundreds of results in the class "twee modern nonsense" and no serious folklore research.

I think I'll have to go and hit the mythology section in BookBuyers this afternoon. And if that fails me, I'll have to do it the old-fashioned way, and go to a library...

Comments

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I cannot recall any specific herbs that do it, either. The only thing I remember are bells, cold iron, red, and promises.

[julesjones]

I did turn up a couple which are repellents/wards (primrose petals, for one), but nothing specifically for either putting one to sleep or binding one, which is the context I need it for. And there are definitely some out there -- stuff like using rowan. I just can't dig it out of my memory in enough detail.

Definitely time to buy a couple of the classic folklore reference texts... I'm going downtown with brooksmoses for lunch today, so I'll hit the mythology section when we go into BookBuyers. If they don't have what I'm looking for, Amazon does. It'll just be slower.

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

Rowan and St John's Wort I remember to stop bad magic.

[julesjones]

Ah, thanks. He's actually the victim of bad magic, but I think it might still work to use rowan or St John's Wort. There just wasn't enough detail in anything I could find easily online about using rowan.

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

My Big Bumper Book of Herbs is still packed, I think, which is a shame because it's actually good for this sort of thing. No, really. It'll tell you that St John's Wort acts like modern SSRIs and then also that it was a specific against evil magics. You have to love a book like that.

[brooksmoses]

Oooh, that does sounds very interesting and useful. Do you happen to remember enough details about it to enable one to track down a copy?

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

It's something like The Encyclopaedia of Herbs and Herbalism and I've never seen it anywhere else since I plucked it from a bargain bin in Wilcos many years ago. And by many, I mean seventeen or so, so it might not actually have that SJW acts like an SSRI, but it does have equivalent medical info on plants. Angelica, for example, is frightening in quantity.

[brooksmoses]

Does this (Amazon link) sound like the right book? It's got the right name, and is rather long (304 pages) and about the right publication date (1987). (There seem to be a number of different editions of it listed on Amazon, actually.)

There's also what looks like a slightly updated version here (Abebooks), from 1994, though that may just be a typo on the year.

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

That's the bunny. I love that book and if I don't unpack it then I am buying another copy.

[brooksmoses]

By way of noting this for the record: julesjones and I went by Bookbuyers to see if they had a copy, and while they didn't, they did have M. Grieve's A Modern Herbal, Vol I. (A-H) and Vol. II (I-Z) in Dover reprint, which seems to be roughly the same sort of thing except three times the size and from 1931 (so thus missing the modern medicine, but including a reasonable bit from what was current at the time). It also looked quite interesting.

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I probably do want this particular book. Partly because it's more up to date, mainly because it's searchable by english name or latin name, has photographs or clear drawings of each plant and has a full botanic glossary, how to grow the plant, geographic distribution, medical uses, contraindications and the history, myths and legends, for a very, very large number of species of plant.

If those books have all that, then perhaps?

[brooksmoses]

This one definitely doesn't have the drawings for everything (it had only a few, and all black-and-white), and not so much on the how-to-grow and the contraindications so far as I saw.

(I also didn't mean to be implying that you should necessarily get it instead of the other one; it'd probably be more useful as a supplement. Partly I was just posting this was as a record of the title and stuff for Julia's benefit since she had been very tempted by it, but I tagged it on your comment so you'd see it too.)

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Sorry, I'm migrainous as all get out tonight, so I might have been snippy when I wasn't honestly intending to be.

[julesjones]

Come round after lunch and have a poke through the relevant shelf in my bookcase -- I've got a couple like that, though not in the detail I needed for this story (or arranged in a way that was useful to this specific question). Possibly even the one Supermouse has.

[julesjones]

Or indeed, if you want to do Mongolian barbecue again, let me know in the next fifteen minutes or so -- I'm walking down to the Post Office once I've had a cup of tea and some codeine, so I'll be perfectly happy to stop in downtown for lunch.

[brooksmoses]

That does sound good. Do I get in under the 15 minutes?

[julesjones]

Yes. :-) Meet at my place?

[brooksmoses]

Sure! (See email for details.)

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

Encyclopaedia of Herbs and Herbalism. Malcolm Stuart. Caxton Press.