The Folklore of Birth
The Three Ravens PodcastPlay episode
Show notes
This week on Three Ravens, as part of our month long exploration of cycles of life, we're talking all about Birth Folklore!
From Ancient Mesopotamian "birth bricks" and fires lit to smoke babies out of the womb to 20th century beliefs in hairy babies prompting their mothers to experience heartburn, human societies have cleaved to a whole load of fairly wild concepts related to reproduction.
Yet, as we explore in this conversation, it's surprising how universal many motifs to do with birth and pregnancy are, from forms of sympathetic magic like the danger of mothers tying knots, weaving, or even crossing their legs for fear they will risk the lives of their unborn children to ideas of phases of the moon influencing whether births will be easy or whether children grow up to be harmonious darlings or challenging little devils.
Working roughly chronologically, we open up a whole range of discussions, including of how prehistoric peoples treated the remains of children who died before joining society to particular demons and supernatural forces believed dangerous to pregnant women and methods for defending against them.
From the changing roles of fathers in relation to birth superstitions and lots of highly spurious methods for determining a child's gender while in utero to enduring customs like the baking of Groaning Cakes and the passing of mothers or babies through hollow spaces in rocks or wheels of cheese, we've done our best to account for how everyday people viewed and navigated conception, pregnancy, and birth itself across millennia.
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Three Ravens is a completely independent English myth and folklore podcast where we share stories, celebrate folk culture, and fall backwards through the hedgerows of history.
Hosted by real-life couple Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, and mostly recorded at our home in rural Sussex in southern England, Three Ravens is rated 4.8/5 from over 500 reviews and has grown by word of mouth care of our lovely listener community ‘The Conspiracy of Ravens.’
We release three episodes a week, on Mondays, Thursday and Saturdays, through which we explore folktales, folkways, fairy stories, folk songs, mythology, local heritage, seasonal customs and traditional beliefs.
Our research inspires our retellings of stories from across history and culture, with episodes standing alone but connected together across over 500 chatty, mostly light-hearted, swear-free installments driven by passion, kindness and curiosity.
Now ranked as an all-time Top 5 podcast across several categories by Goodpods, charting in the Spotify, Apple and Rephonic UK Fiction Top 10 across 2024, 2025 and 2026, if you’re interested in ghosts, monsters, regional beliefs, and the things that unite us all, then join us round the campfire and listen in…
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