Profs & Pints Northern Virginia: Folkloric Felines

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Folkloric Felines,” a look at cats in folklore and fairy tales, with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University and co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

As any cat owner (servant) will tell you, cats are special in ways that make them more than mere domesticated pets. Moreover, humans’ fascination with felines is nothing new, debating back to well before the worship of cats in ancient Egypt.

Join Brittany Warman, a folklorist who has earned a devoted following among Profs and Pints fans, as she explores how our spoiled housecats have inspired the human imagination.

She’ll discuss how cats have been associated with a huge variety of folk beliefs, folk magics, and folktales. They were feared as an agent of the Devil in early Europe and celebrated and reviled throughout the Western world as a witch’s familiar, a creature of magic and mischief. You’ll learn about the enormous Cat Sith of Celtic folklore, the Norwegian Forest Cats of the goddess Freya, and the monstrous Yule Cat of Iceland.

Of course, cats prowl through our fairy tales, too. We will quest with “Puss in Boots,” converse with “The White Cat,” observe the ascension of royalty in “The King of Cats,” and more. Sometimes fairy-tale cats are kind helpers, sometimes they are dastardly tricksters, and sometimes they are both in the exact same tale. With a cat, you can never be sure what you’re going to get!

This talk promises to be more fun than swatting something off a shelf or chasing the beam of a laser pointer. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The Norse goddess Freya’s cat chariot depicted in Ypres, Belgium’s 2012 cat parade. (Photo by Zeisterre / Wikimedia Commons.)