Sourcing & Attestation Policy

This is the method behind everything on Sidhe Wolf. We call it Sources & Attestation, and it is the single practice that separates a kept story from a decorated one. Folklore is not a fixed text handed down intact; it is a long conversation, edited by every century it passed through. Our job is to show you the seams. For each story we ask five questions, and we try to answer them in the piece where you can see them.

1. Which tradition, exactly?

We name the tradition specifically, and we resist the word “Celtic” as a catch-all. “Celtic” is a useful term for a language family and a broad cultural sphere; it is a terrible term for a story, because it erases the differences that make the story what it is. Irish is not the same as Scottish Gaelic tradition; neither is the same as Welsh; none of them is Norse; and Breton, Cornish, and Manx each have their own inheritance again.

Concretely: the Irish bean sí (banshee) and the Scottish bean-nighe are related death-omen figures, but they are not one being, and to merge them is to lose both. The Welsh Mabinogi is not an Irish source and cannot be cited as one. The Norse draugr is not a Gaelic revenant. When a motif genuinely appears across traditions, we say so and show the parallel; we do not assume unity and backfill it.

2. How old is the attestation — really?

We date the earliest text we can find the story in, not the feeling of age it gives off. Age in folklore comes in distinct layers, and the layer matters enormously:

• Medieval manuscript. Material surviving in sources like the Irish Lebor na hUidre or the Book of Leinster, or the Welsh Book of Aneirin and the manuscripts behind the Mabinogi. Old, but already written down by Christian scribes with their own agendas — not a direct transcript of pagan belief.
• Early-modern collection. Antiquarians and collectors from roughly the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries writing down oral material. Valuable, but shaped by the collector’s interests and era.
• Victorian / Celtic Revival. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a great deal was reworked, romanticised, and sometimes invented (see below).
• Modern invention. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century coinages — from mid-century revival movements, fantasy fiction, games, and the internet — often circulated as ancient. When this is what a claim is, we say so plainly.

“First attested in a 1911 collection” and “attested in a twelfth-century manuscript” are different facts, and we will not let one masquerade as the other.

3. Where is the nineteenth-century layer?

The Romantic and Celtic-Twilight writers deserve their own question because their influence is so pervasive and so easily mistaken for antiquity. Figures and movements of that era sanitised the strange and violent edges off older tales, added moral and sentimental framing, standardised loose oral variants into single “canonical” versions, and in some cases invented material wholesale that was then absorbed as tradition. The most famous cautionary tale is Macpherson’s Ossian — presented in the 1760s as translated ancient Gaelic epic, largely his own composition, and hugely influential regardless.

We are not hostile to the revivalists; their work is part of the story and often beautiful. But we credit them as authors of their additions rather than letting those additions hide inside “the old tale.” If a detail entered the tradition in 1890, it belongs to 1890.

4. Which translation?

Nearly everything we quote from Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and the rest reaches most readers through translation, and translation is interpretation. We name the translator and edition we quote, because a line can carry very different weight in Lady Gregory’s Edwardian English, in a mid-century scholarly rendering, and in a recent one. Where translators genuinely disagree about a key word or passage, we note the disagreement rather than picking one silently. Where we can, we give the original term alongside the English so you can see what is being rendered.

5. What don’t we know?

Folklore studies is full of open questions, and the honest answer to many of them is uncertainty. When the origin of a motif is disputed, we write “contested” and say who contests it. When the pre-Christian layer of a story cannot be reconstructed with confidence — which is often — we say so instead of confidently describing “what the ancient Celts believed.” “We don’t know” is a legitimate, and frequently the most accurate, thing for a folklore publication to say. We would rather leave a gap visible than fill it with a plausible invention.

How this looks on the page

In practice, a Sidhe Wolf article will tell you the tradition by name, the earliest source and its rough date, whether the familiar version owes something to the Victorian revival, and which translation any quotation comes from — with contested points marked as contested. It is a little more text than a purely atmospheric piece would carry. That extra text is the product. It is what “kept properly” means.