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