New Leaf

Dear Readers,

     I am not really sure what I am going to post on this blog, but I plan on reviving it in some form or fashion.  I might use it to critique pieces of literature, or I might use it to ramble on and on and on and on about............ I don't really know.

     Today's Random Ramble is brought to you by the Brothers Grimm, always a good source.  I have long aspired to someday have read every last story penned by the famous duo.  This is quite the undertaking, as there are over 211 such stories, and many of them are very similar to each other.  Nonetheless, I hope to complete this task before I die, so I have renewed my efforts.

     A great way to accomplish this, I have realized, is the invention of the audiobook.  (And to think I used to hate them, too.)  Two of the great many lesser-known fairy tales are "The Golden Bird" and "Jorinde and Joringel."  The latter story is much shorter than the first, but I thought both to be good examples of the quintessential fairy tale. 

     SPOILER ALERT!

     "The Golden Bird" is not really about a golden bird so much as it is about two families who are brought together by a golden bird.  It includes such classic motifs as a man with three sons (the first two are useless, but the third is a hero), a random character with fantastic powers and a strangely strong desire to help, and a single princess.  Trust and obedience are strong themes in this story.  All in all, it's a fun story with a classic feel-good ending to it.

     "Jorinde and Joringel" has a more narrow scope, as there are only three characters in the story, and the little travel that happens in the story is not discussed at length.  A pair of lovers goes for a walk in the woods, and a fairy (more like a witch, but more on fairies later) turns the girl into a bird.  The man is despondent until a dream shows him the only way to withstand the power of the fairy and save his girlfriend-- and also all the other girls who are being held captive.  I can't really put a finger on what makes this one stand out more.  Maybe it is that a fairy is holding hundreds of girls captive by turning them into birds, maybe it is the initial helplessness of the hero, or maybe it is the fact that the hero's weapon/safeguard is a magic flower that appeared to him in a dream.

     Brief discussion on fairies: it seems that at some point in our history, fairies were turned into these tiny little flying humans with diaphanous wings and flower-petal dresses.  Our fairies are always nice, but don't always talk.  These seems to be a trend as far as all fantastic creatures are concerned, whether they are mermaids, fairies, dragons, or even Grendel himself.  Pre-Victorian creatures of the fantastic realms, however, are rarely good and innocent, and certainly are not misunderstood.  They are annoying at best, and are often downright evil.  A fascinating observation.

Sincerely,
Hans My Hedgehog

More Coffee, Please

Dear All,

     Happy very belated New Year!  In the turmoil of senior year, thesis, graduation, moving out, and the passing of dear Ulysses (my faithful laptop), I have been very absent from the blogging scene.  I am going to try to make a comeback, kind of like a sequel to a cartoon that came out more than thirty years ago-- only not that lame, I hope.
     This Christmas, Santa got me some pretty sweet gifts, one of which was a collection of Turkish fairy tales.  This book, which I met while writing my thesis, contains some pretty bizarre stories.  It also contains many references to coffee.

     One of the things I love about reading fairy tales and myths from a wide range of times, places, and cultures is learning about the people who created them.  From the infinite references to coffee-drinking in Turkish stories, it becomes apparent that coffee has been important to that part of the world for a long time.  Coffee, it seems, was also an important part of hospitality.  If you show up at someone's house, you of course are offered some coffee.
     It also would appear that coffee was an integral part of traveling.  Every time a Turkish hero goes off on a journey, the book tells us that he drinks coffee as he goes.  (This I find both fascinating and humorous, because it reminds me of my own coffee-and-travel ritual.  I never get on a plane without first getting some coffee at the airport.  Once I even fell asleep on the plane with half a cup of coffee in my hands.  When I woke up, I was still holding the cup upright.  I'm still amazed and I wonder how I managed that.  I guess, like the Turkish fairy tale heroes, I hold coffee in a place of high reverence.)
     I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in folklore.  It's something of a cross between Grimms' fairy tales and the Arabian Nights stories.  Something I will have to study is the large number of parallels between these stories and European fairy tales.  There are too many similarities for the parallels to be explained away as coincidence.
     It's good to be back and giving my unsolicited two cents, but I'm afraid I have to get back to my grown-up chores, like kitchen cleaning and budgeting-- those odious activities.  At least I have coffee and Hans My Hedgehog to aid me in my endeavors.

My growing collection of hedgehog- and porcupine-themed items.

Apples to Apples

There are a lot of stories that feature apples, I've noticed.

- Eris and the Golden Apple of Discord (the one that started the Trojan War, according to Homer)

- St. Dorothy, who is said to have sent an angel with golden apples and golden roses to a Roman governor after her martyrdom

- Guinevere and the poisoned apple

- Snow White

- Popular imagery concerning Adam and Eve (Though thanks to Prof. Eric Jenislawski of Christendom College, I actually have an explanation for this one)

     I want to say there are more, but I can't think of them. Why apples? Is it because they are base or low or ubiquitous?

     Now for the fun fact about Adam and Eve and the "apple": Nowhere in Genesis does it say that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was an apple, so. . . Why does everyone think of an apple? The Latin word for "apple" and the Latin word for "evil" are spelled exactly the same, minus a mere macron in certain works. So, Genesis translated into Latin, word is "malum" and somebody must have thought that it wasn't a coincidence that "malum" is either evil or apple. Tada! There's the explanation I got in 201. Fascinating class, that.

 

See, folks? This is why you should never buy a Mac. ;)

     Oh, and check this out, y'all! *squeal*     http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/05/five-hundred-fairytales-discovered-Germany

Sundry Notes

Typed from notes I'd taken a week ago while reading the aforementioned book, The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales:

     Why are the stories so often about young people? Always a child or a youth as the focus. You could say that it's the same today, but I think it's safe to say that there are more modern stories about middle-aged people than fairy tales about them. I can't think of a fairy tale that has as its main character a person over 30. I'm sure they exist, but I can't think of any.

     Since fairy tales are about such human things, everyone in every age can read, feel, and understand them. They deal with people from many classes, but they're not about "class warfare" or anything like that.

     On the attitude fairy tale characters take to dwarves and dragons and stuff that doesn't exist in the real world: Maybe because everyone more or less believed in God? That's not to say everyone was a saint, but there were a lot less atheists. Medieval culture. Because they didn't have the science we do, people accepted religious/superstitious explanations for things, and it was therefore easier to suspend disbelief with these stories? Just brainstorming.

Rant on Misconceptions

 

     This is a rather unprofessional bit that I would normally edit before I really published, but I'm too lazy. (Like the "Three Sluggards") Please understand that I know full well that these are undeveloped thoughts with a good many holes-- like a fine Swiss Cheese. Were I to write a paper with these ideas, they'd be much more bettererly presented. . . . Yeah. And understand that I pretty much just typed up a handwritten note that I wrote in order to vent one day when I was crabby because people were dissing fairy tales. Snobs. "Snobs don't eat fishsticks," as my sister said as a toddler. Okay, enough of that. Moving on.

     Fairy tales are not meant to be real. You need a faith to believe in and listen to them. Like icons and medieval art-- they weren't realistic because they weren't supposed to be only-realistic-based-on-the-empirical-world. You need to figure it out.

     Also, they don't all have happy endings. The values of fairy and folk tales vs. modern stuff, like all those wretched teen movies. I tell you, I got real sick of all the movies being about nothing but "being yourself"; you should not focus of being yourself via doing whatever you darn well please; there is duty to be considered. You should be yourself, but the best version of yourself.
     Consequences of how you act: not the YOLO mentality. Fairy tales emphasize that what we do now will have consequences for later. Like Andersen's Little Mermaid. Heh. Not exactly like the Disney movie. (I think this idea might be thanks to Maria Tatar's cool book The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. Or else one of my friends. . . Or else another commentary. .  Ack, I can't remember.) 

     Morphing into modern ideas of fairy tales, AKA, chick flicks. I guess that's why people think of fairy tales as a girly thing: they only think of the probably French princessy ones. There are lots and lots of "manly" fairy tales. (The Brave Little Tailor, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Boy Who Did Not Know Fear, et aliud.) In fact, most fairy tales don't even have legit fairies, do they?

     As to the reading of fairy tales-- esp. as adults--, people need to stop thinking about what's practical, because even "frivolous" things are important. Like the dude in Enchanted.

     Read Germanic myths and saint stories looking for roots of fairy tales (like St. Denis' head with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Also, with Apples-- the Iliad, Guinevere, St. Dorothea, Adam and Eve, and Snow White.

     I would absolutely LOVE if I could somehow spend lots of time on the different versions of the stories over time (meaning I can rant on modern fairy tale movies-- like Snow White and the Huntsman) and in different countries. That would be fun.

     Later touch on industrious women vs. lazy men. Very, very weird thing that seems to reoccur. Maria Tatar makes mention of it, but not a whole lot. An older form of feminism? Doesn't sound likely, but in a way. I guess that makes the Grimm brothers hipsters? Heroines before they were cool............? Of course, this isn't always the case, only some of the time. And I need to read more. Of course, these are womanly heroines. They don't run around in men's clothes and swing swords around and outman the men. Gosh, I hate that about so many modern movies. There's a difference between a strong, no-nonsense woman and a downright obnoxious one. Oi, this all is starting to sound like confusing gibberish that is probably offending people in a hundred different ways, and I'm too half asleep to properly argue with brains and dignity and civility, so here I'll stop rambling for today. Need that book to come in. . . The Library should just drive over to my house and hand over the books I need. And give me wine and chocolate and flowers, too. That would be nice.

 

     And here's a picture, because I'm like Gaston. I like pictures.

 

 

ISN'T IT ADORABLE?! Sorry.  This is a hedgehog from "Latin Bestiary," roughly 1320.

Hedgehogs + illuminated ye olde manuscript = pure awesome.

 

What's in a Name?

     Well, what is in a name? More specifically, what's in the name "Hans"? I've yet to read the entirety of my giant Grimms' Fairy Tale book, but from what I've read so far, I've come across at least eight different fellows named "Hans," and about three or four women whose names are a variant on the well-known "Gretel."

     Couple of different thoughts about this:

1-- YAY! Lots of Hanses! :D (. . . . I absolutely love that name.)

2-- Hans = Jack. Plenty of stories about dudes named Jack.

3-- The storytellers had lame imaginations. They could never think of anything but Hans/John/Jean. (Obviously, I don't believe this one. What kind of an English major would I be if I did?)

4-- Giving the hero such a commonplace name turns him into an Everyman figure, makes him more relatable, more real. It shows the audience that they, too, can be great like this Hans figure in the story-- or foolish, as is the case in "Clever Hans" and "Hans in Luck."

Testing 1, 2, 10

     Hi. Behold new blog for me to not post to. I will here begin to proclaim the greatness of Hans My Hedgehog until further notice, and until I can think of an intelligent and sophisticated sounding name for this thing.
     The main purpose of this is to help with ye olde thesis, which is going to be about Western European fairy tale and folk literature. Not Eastern European, though I like that, too.

Brainstorming--
     Why are fairy tales important? Why certain kinds of them? At which ages? What happens when we have too much or too little or the wrong kind? How have fairy tales impacted society? Now vs. Then, a look at the different tellings of Snow White, for example. Happily Ever After: the Modern Invention. (sort of). Myths vs. Fairy Tales.

Sources--
     The highly to be praised Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Andrew Lang, Tolkien, Chesterton


     And here's a picture of Hans My Hedgehog for good measure, with bagpipes, shod rooster and everything.

From  http://killskerry.deviantart.com/art/Hans-the-Hedgehog-Boy-47218570