Elizabeth Hopkinson's Hidden Grove

  Art by Anna Hopkinson 2024 I've been reading the Advent Lyrics from the Exeter Book as Christmas approches. These are poems in Old English. (The version of the English language brought to the British Isles by the Angles, Saxons etc.) that explore the mysteries of the Incarnation and Virgin Birth in early medieval aliteration and symbolism. In the fourth lyric - addressed to the Virgin Mary - one phrase stood out for me. ond no gebrosnad wearð mægðhad se micla. Which translates as:  and your mighty maidenhead was not destroyed Your mighty maidenhead! This makes Mary sound like a shieldmaiden, a Valkyrie. I love it.  It reminds me of some of the tales of mighty virgins I've retold in my  Asexual Fairy Tales  books. Of Sir Galahad and Clorinda the Knight. Of the potency of amethyst, and the magic power of the unicorn. In fact, that even reminds me of the perfect asexual comment that said, "Forever a unicorn. No one is majestic enough to ride me." Mighty and majes...

  Me and Carlo: BBFs (by Kirsty Rolfe) I’d like to introduce you to Carlo. Some of you may have met him before, but he’s one of the two heroes of Cage of Nightingales , the first of my Angelio novels, which is finally due to be published this year by Deep Hearts YA . Carlo is a castrato singer. When we first meet him, he’s thirteen years old, a student at the Conservatorio Archangeli, a prestigious music school in the city-state of Angelio. He’s talented, kind, loves beautiful things, hates arguments, can be flirty, and just wants a friend who sees him as more than a beautiful voice. And he’s canonically asexual and biromantic. Just thought I’d get that out there. Carlo is named after Carlo Broschi (aka Farinelli), the most famous of the castrato singers of the 18th century. I’ve written quite a bit about Farinelli and the other castrati on this blog, but as it’s LGBT+ History Month (in the UK at least) I thought I’d share with you a few facts about them. “Portrait Group: The Singe...

  The Rings of Power: Amazon Studios, 2022 Like many, I have been enjoying Amazon’s new drama series, The Rings of Power , based on JRR Tolkien’s mythos regarding the Second Age of Middle-Earth, Númenor and the Undying Lands. It’s driven me back to the source texts, to discover from where the creators of the series got their ideas.  One of those source texts is the book of Unfinished Tales . And that’s where I discovered the story of Aldarion and Erendis. It’s an unusual tale for Tolkien, in that it deals with the breakdown of a marriage. And while it provides canonical precedent for the Elves asking the Men of Númenor for help against the growing threat of Sauron’s return, that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about ace representation. Many people will find Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit pretty ace anyway. For me, the film trilogy in the 2000s was the beginning of my journey back to my true self. In my head, Legolas is ace. There’s nothing I know of in Tolkie...

In my latest book, More Asexual Myths & Tales, I retell a story from Latin America that I call “The Wife With the Flying Head”.  Support  More Asexual Fairy Tales  on  Kickstarter . I first came across this story in Jen Campbell’s  The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers   (2021). As soon as I read it, I knew I wanted to retell it.  It’s about a wife who - whenever she is in bed with her husband - finds her head detaches from her body and goes flying about without her body.  The symbolism really related to my experience of being a married ace.   I traced a source tale in  The Journal of American Folklore   (1907). That version is taken from El Salvador, but there are versions of the “flying head” myth across Southeast Asia and Latin America, including Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand, Bali, Chile and Argentina. Readers from those cultures may recognise it as a vampiric creature, and probably know a lot more about it than I ...

I’ve written on a third collection of Asexual Fairy Tales. It’s crowdfunding now on this link . One of the tales I discovered - and which I retell in the book - comes from the pen of Miguel de Cervantes, the 17th-century author of  Don Quixote.  It’s called “The Glass Lawyer”. The title character Tomás Rodaja, a lawyer from Salamanca, has never been in love. When a lady’s advances to him are snubbed, she feeds him a potion she believes to be an aphrodisiac. But instead of having the effects she hopes, it makes him ill. And when he recovers, he finds he has developed a strange condition. He believes he is made of glass. I won’t tell you the whole story. (You’ll have to wait for the book!) But Tomás becomes terrified of being touched in case he breaks, and travels around in a packing case full of straw. What is interesting about this story is that, although it’s fictitious, there was a condition known as Glass Delusion, documented from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. S...

Two mermaid dolls 27th January is the feast day of St Muirgen, also known as Li Ban or Liban. She appears in a number of old Irish annals, such as the Martyrology of Donegal and the Annals of the Four Masters. There's nothing unsual about that: the history of Ireland is crammed to bursting with saints and martyrs. But what's unusual about Miurgen is that she is a mermaid. According to the stories, she was three hundred years under the sea, until the time of the saints. At that time, a man called Beoan was on a mission to Rome, at sea in his curragh (ship) when the ship caught a mermaid (liban) in its nets. She told him she was the the daughter of Eochaidh from Lough Neagh, who was changed to a mermaid when her family was drowned. They brought her to land, where she was baptised by St Comhgall under the name Muirgen (traverser of the sea). The calendar of St Oengus says of her: My God loved Muirgen, A miraculous triumphant being. I love it that there is a mermaid saint! That som...

  It’s Ace Week! A week set apart to raise awareness of identities on the asexual/aromantic spectrum and to campaign on issues that matter to us. For example, why young people should learn about ace-spec identities in school. This year, I was asked by Stonewall to make a 59 second video on that topic, which should appear on their TikTok during this week. But I’ve also been reading. To help with my own writing, I asked around for recommendations of YA fiction with ace representation. Then I bought two of them and had a read. The books in question are: Loveless by Alice Oseman (author of Heartstopper ) and The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee. These are two very different books. Loveless is a contemporary story about a girl called Georgia who goes to university hoping to find the big romance that has so far eluded her, but ends up finding herself. The Lady’s Guide  is a historical adventure set in an unspecified part of the 18th century, about a girl called ...

"Zellandine and Troylus" by Anna Hopkinson, 2019 [Warning: contains sexual content] As Asexual Myths & Tales comes out this week, I would like to return to one of the most controversial stories from Asexual Fairy Tales , “Zellandine and Troylus”. The reaction of some readers to this story almost caused me to abandon writing the second volume of tales. Opinions were raised about the "lack of consent" in the story and how offensive it was. (Yes, yes, I know. Never read your own reviews). Be assured, I take this kind of thing very seriously. I've tried very hard to put trigger warnings into Myths & Tales . And there is also a story - "The True Love Knot" which could be considered the antithesis of "Zellandine". I won't give any spoilers here. As I wrote in Asexual Fairy Tales : “Zellandine and Troylus” is one of the earliest known versions of “Sleeping Beauty” and comes from the medieval French romance Perceforest (c.1330-44). It als...

As my home district of Bradford goes back into lockdown, it might feel as if horizons are contracting. But thanks to the LGBTQIA community in the neighbouring city of Leeds, this last weekend mine expanded. It was last year (in 2019, when most of us couldn't have dreamt of the devastation of COVID-19) that I received a private message on Twitter from Leeds LGBT+ Literature Festival saying someone had recommended my book Asexual Fairy Tales for inclusion in the 2020 festival. My first festival! Well, I have read twice at the Fringe of Ilkley Literature Festival, but this was a proper, invited, paid author appearance! So exciting!! As it happened, none of the invited guests would actually get to appear in the usual way. But, like so many, the organisers of the festival put all their efforts into producing an online, virtual festival. Pre-recorded readings, zoom workshops, the lot. The benefit is, you didn't (and still don't) have to be in Leeds at a certain time to enjoy the ...

The world is going through very tough times at the moment and there's a lot to make us cry, but there are always things that bring us joy in the midst of despair. For me, one of those things has been the successful crowdfunding of Asexual Myths & Tales   (the follow-up to last year's Asexual Fairy Tales ) right in the middle of Pride Month.  So, what better time to share my top five asexual icons. Just to clarify, I don't mean by this that I necessarily believe all these people and characters are historically/canonically asexual, but that to me they symbolise something about my asexuality; they are somehow poster people for my identity.  The Virgin Mary "Pearls and Roses" by Anna Hopkinson Trust me, as a Christian with both Protestant and Catholic friends and relations, I've heard all the arguments back and forth about whether Mary really was a lifelong virgin. To me, it matters less from a theological point of view than it does from a personal viewpoint....

"I write asexual fairytales" - BBC How often does an opportunity like this come up? "The BBC are running a special week on Bradford, across all media. Send us your stories." My home town. On the BBC. And it coincides perfectly with my crowdfunding campaign for Asexual Fairy Tales . I can't send the email fast enough! Which is how it happens that - on an unusually springlike morning - a shiny, black vehicle containing camera equipment turns up on my street of small, back-to-back houses, with an operator and a reporter, ready to start filming. I have warned Louise from BBC News how small my house is, and have been assured the camera will be a small one. Obviously, she meant small by BBC standards. Still, the cameraman is unfazed by the fact that one camera and stand fills up practically all the available floor space. We squash in, just as we always do with friends and relatives. And, as it's a nice day, we film some stuff on the front step, and in the...

In case you have somehow failed to notice, loyal readers, I have written a book of Asexual Fairy Tales, which I am currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter. The illustrations are by my lovely daughter, Anna Hopkinson, and SilverWood Books have agreed to publish it if we meet our target. All we need now are backers. We've got a fair few already - 60 as I write this blog. If you are one of them, thank you so much! We can't do it without you. But we need more. And we've only got until 28th February to make it happen! The great thing is that February is LGBT History Month in the UK, so it coincides with some great promotional opportunities. So, what's in this book, I hear you ask? Twelve tales, some original, others retelling of classic tales from around the world. Tales from Greek mythology, 1001 Nights, Arthurian legend. Japanese, Scandinavian and German collections. Even a 20th-century fairy tale from the days of silent film. Featuring many of your old favourites fro...

As writers, we are asked lots of questions. Most are some variation on: Are you still writing? How's the writing going? Are you writing anything at the moment? We writers can feel pretty frustrated by these questions as, for us, they are the equivalent of asking a plumber: "Done any plumbing lately?" Or asking a specialist doctor: "How's the gynaecology going?" However, we know you mean well and are interested in our work. So, in answer to your questions, I thought I'd bring you up to date with my three main projects. Asexual Fairy Tales This is a book of retold and original fairy tales I've been working on with my daughter, Anna, who has done the beautiful illustrations. It's all written, and I'll be launching a crowdfunding campaign to fund it on Kickstarter. (You pledge money to help fund it, you get a signed book and/or other goodies). I'm doing it this way as I believe it's the best way to connect the book with it'...

Warning: sexual content I am currently writing a book of Asexual Fairy Tales, which I am hoping to pitch to the crowdfunding publishers, Unbound, very soon. It contains twelve stories from fairy tale, myth and legend, and twelve black-and-white illustrations by Anna Hopkinson, an Illustration undergraduate at the University of Huddersfield, who also happens to be my daughter. One of the tales I retell in the book is Zellandine and Troylus, a very early version of Sleeping Beauty. It's a bit of a controversial choice because Troylus impregnates Zellandine in her sleep, but I wanted to include it. Here's an extract from the book: “Zellandine and Troylus” is one of the earliest known versions of “Sleeping Beauty” and comes from the medieval French romance Perceforest (c.1330-44). It also has echoes of “Rapunzel”, as the maiden is kept in a tower that can only be accessed by a high window. Many commentators find the tale deeply problematic because of its apparent portrayal of non-c...

These are my thoughts on the Repeal of the 8th. I don't normally do this sort of thing on the blog, but I felt so helpless in the face of angry, hurtful comments that I had to put something into writing. And as I've written a lot about asexuality and so-called "monstrous births" on here, it didn't seem altogether inappropriate.   I have no desire to condemn women to illegal abortions. In fact, I have no desire to condemn anyone, full stop. I understand that abortion may be necessary in certain, extreme, circumstances, but there are several things that deeply trouble me.  1. The unborn have no human rights. In these days when we know more about the life and development of the embryo/foetus than ever before, and when mothers of miscaried babies are asking for death certificates, this seems both hypocritical and backward. I truly think the UN should convene to discuss what rights the unborn ought to have. I don't believe the unborn are the property of the mother ...

On this blog, I have written a number of pieces about parthenogenesis and asexual reproduction. The first was this one: Giving Birth to Hairy Worms , which was inspired by a book called The Manly Masquerade. In it, I noted the Renaissance belief that reproduction could happen spontaneously, that things could be born of putrefaction, and that: Women's wombs could spontaneously produce all sorts of things, from monsters and harpies, to wood, glass or combs, to serpents, toads and hairy worms.  (I particularly like the hairy worms.  Why hairy??)  It seems this idea is less far-fetched than it seems, as today I was reading about homunculi. Rather than attempt to explain it myself, I direct you to this article: The Homunculus Inside . (Trigger warning: the photos are not for the squeamish!) It seems this would also be a good time to tell you that my articles on parthenogenesis (as well as my own experience of both asexuality and gynaecological problems) have insp...