New From the Research Blog: "From Grendelkin to the NorthFolk NightMarket: Storytelling, Wintering and an Immersive Dramatization of Beowulf" // News // Medieval Institute // University of Notre Dame

A group dressed in medieval-style clothing gathers around a small fire. Blue smoke drifts around them. A bearded person in the center holds a skull adorned with metal and green tassels. Other individuals wear horned helmets and furs, some holding axes or spears. — The Green Sash: Sezo Veniche (Hondscio), Gabrielle Emond (Sif), Andrew Hamel (Thor), Gary Joiner (Hroþgar), Christopher Lassy-Glazier (Weland), Brawn Beserker (Tyr), and Sara Hulsberg (Freya). Image by Rajuli Fahey (2025).

My newly formed theater company, FaeGuild Wonders, having successfully organized two RenFaires last year, Enchanted Orchard Renaissance Faire (annual) and Wyndonshire Renaissance Faire (year one), was ready to pursue one of my bucket-list items, an immersive and interactive full scale theatrical production of Beowulf. We pitched this idea for a winter festival centered on medieval literature to our partnering venue, Red Apple Farm, and the NorthFolk NightMarket was born. This event, to take place February 22-23, 2025 (from 3-9 PM EST), while expanded and redesigned, is in a sense a development of an older project, Grendelkin, which I began to conceive during my graduate studies as the University Notre Dame. With support from the Medieval Institute, Grendelkin debuted at Washington Hall in 2017, bringing together scholars, artists, dancers, musicians and storytellers to create an avant-garde interpretation of Beowulf centered on issues of monstrosity and heroism in the poem...

This is an excerpt from "From Grendelkin to the NorthFolk NightMarket: Storytelling, Wintering and an Immersive Dramatization of Beowulf" by Dr. Richard Fahey. Read the full story.