'A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery.'
Guy de Maupassant
🖼️ Lily Seika Jones

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Out in the bayou woods among the lightnin' bugs she dwells.
Always got a pot 'a cookin' and, ohh, the way it smells.

She lives alone stirrin' up a witches brew.
Don't know what's in it but some say it's pure voodoo.

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Sabrina Fair, Illustration for Comus by John Milton, Arthur Rackham, 1921.

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"Come into the water, love,
Dance beneath the waves,
Where dwell the bones of sailor-lads
Inside my saffron cave."

~S. E. Schlosser

And when the Sailor of the ship hear the song, the "Storm Hag" attacks the ship and crew with violent storms.

🎨Iwan Konstanti-,#SwampSunday.

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Creatures of the swamp
by Tomislav Tomic
on

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“I rose from marsh mud
algae, equisetum, willows,
sweet green, noisy
birds and frogs.” (Lorine Niedecker)

🎨 Irenhorrors "Swamp Thing" (2018)

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The Willow
by Adam Oehler
on

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In Welsh the Afanc is said to be a demon that can take on the appearance of a giant beaver, crocodile or dwarf. According to legend the creature will attack and eat those that enter the water where it lives.

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Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know […], but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, […]the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand.[…]Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

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Drowning is not so pitiful
As the attempt to rise
Three times, 'tis said, a sinking man
Comes up to face the skies,
And then declines forever
To that abhorred abode,
Where hope and he part company-

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Crossing the Swamp
by Mary Oliver

Here is the endless
  wet thick
    cosmos, the center
      of everything—the nugget
of dense sap, branching
  vines, the dark burred
    faintly belching
      bogs.

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There is a coal-black Angel
[…]
And he dwells (like the hunted and harried)
In a swamp where the green frogs dip.
[…]
He breathes with a breath that is blastment
And dooms by a far decree.
[…]
There’s a scream that screams up to the zenith

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Some Selkies draw their roots to Irish/Scottish folklore while some say it came from the Norse & Celtic mythology. They are said to be half-human and half seal.

They can shed their seal skin and transform into humans. They also sing beautifully in the water.

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„Plants have long been underestimated. Their intelligence put down to instinct. Downplayed to enforce a human-centric world. But plants have lives of secret drama and insights.“

Are you ready for a reign of the plants? Especially swamp ones? 🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️🖤💚

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Jenny Greenteeth has been a part of English folklore for generations. She, alongside many other related water-demons, would be said to haunt rivers and ponds - dragging any children or elderly that strayed too near into the water to be devoured.

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To ask this cranky old Slavic water spirit for help, fisherman toss a pinch of tobacco to the Vodyanoy and say:

‘Here’s your tobacco Lord Vodnik
Now give me a fish’

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Vilas (1906) by Bartolomeo Giuliano

(from Ukrainian folklore)

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In there is a folktale that explains why jellyfish have no bones. The story begins with the Dragon King who lives in his beautiful palace beneath the sea. He is lonely and so he sent his fish retainers out to find him a dragon princess, which...

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Water fairy by Harold Gaze

Harold Gaze was a New Zealand artist who settled at the 🇺🇸 and worked as an illustrator for books and the studios in the 1920s.

He has a series of water pictures which are really lovely. Here's a few I really liked

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