Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

Online, here: "On Fairy Stories" by J. R. R. Tolkien

It took me several days; I consider this quite an accomplishment. I was expecting it to be about the length of a magazine article. When I copy-pasted the whole thing into Open Office and did a word count, it came out at over 22K words.

There is much in the essay I agree with (at that length, on that subject it would be improbable if there were not). But, if I were to sit across a table from him, over mugs of tea and a plate of bread and cheese, and this were a discussion, there would be many points where I'd be interjecting: "Yes. But."

However, here are seven of my favorite passages (Seven is a fitting number for the subject), where I find myself nodding in agreement:

(Quote 1 [from the section titled "Origins"]:)
( The things that are there must often have been retained (or inserted) because the oral narrators, instinctively or consciously, felt their literary “significance.” )

(Quote 2 [from the section "Children"]:)
( Children as a class —- except in a common lack of experience they are not one )

(Quote 3 [From "Fantasy"]:)
( If men really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-stories about frog-kings would not have arisen )

(Quote 4 [From "Recovery, Escape, Consolation"]:)
( We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. )

(Quote 5 [ibid]:)
( The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you. )

(Quote 6 [ibid]):
( Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? )

(Quote 7 [From "footnote D"]
( I did not want to be quibbled into Science and cheated out of Faerie )

So -- that picture of Baba Yaga's house, that I posted, the other day?

A ballpoint pen and pencil sketch of a small house with a crooked chimney walking on a pair of giant chicken legs -- After the witch "Baba Yaga's" house from traditional Russian folklore.


I have plans-not-ready-to-discuss for it, I think. Anyway, that meant a little Web-surfing to refresh my memory of the Baba Yaga's stories, and the House's role in them, in particular.

And I came upon this page: Baba Yaga Stories, by Susun Weed (Samhain, '08). And this is how the article about her begins:

(Quote)
Who is Baba Yaga? She is the Goddess, she is the Witch, she is the Wise Woman, she is the Crone, she is aged Artemis.

Baba is Grandmother. In Tibet, fierce demons are Yagas. So she is the Grandmother Demon, Grandmother Dragon, the fearsome, the fierce.
(Unquote)

And I don't know... But, today, at least, that just rubs me the wrong way. It's as if a figure from legend and folklore isn't worth thinking, (talking, or learning) about until we turn that figure into some archetype we can admire, regardless of how that figure was actually thought about by the people who originally told those stories. It makes me feel a bit like I do when someone says to me:

"I admire you So Much! When I see you, I don't see a person with a disability, at all!" which (they think) they mean as a compliment, but which I hear as: "Disability is so repulsive to me that I can't think of you as a person unless I pretend that half of your life doesn't exist." So much of New Age Paganism (not all, but a lot of it) has a similar impulse to erase the lived, cultural, experiences of the people to whom these stories first belonged -- especially if that experience doesn't sit well with our twentieth/twenty-first century mores.

Though, actually, no. Now that I've copy-pasted that bit in isolation, and started writing my response to it, I see what else bothers me about that. The author so blithely and easily conflates Slavic folklore with ancient Greek, and also Tibetan -- simply because of the sound of her name -- regardless of what her name actually means, in Russian.

That said... I still want to take the house out of its cultural context and put it in a story of my own, because I think it's nifty... People in Chicken-legged houses shouldn't ... ?? play marbles ???

But at least I'm not trying to pass my nonsense off as Truth and Scholarly Understanding. So maybe I can be forgiven?

Pied Piper of Hamelin: The Children Left Behind.

I think my conclusion is the soap-boxiest (soapiest-boxed?) I've written yet. But I'm feeling a good bit RAWR!!

So -- it boils down to this: the central thesis of Plato's Nightmare / Aesop's Dream (if a blog can be said to have a thesis) is that modern society's attitudes and official policies toward the disabled classes are rooted in ancient superstitions and fear of evil, which advanced science has done nothing to overturn. That:

A) Those with unexplained differences (especially physical, visible, differences) were believed to be omens sent by the gods, rather than actual people in their own right.

B) That ostracizing people so marked became standard policy, in a vain attempt to fool the gods and averting punishment for sins.

C) That over the last several millennia, scientific knowledge has gradually, through a series of minute steps, replaced the Divine explanations of disabilities with tangible, empirically understood causes, but that there has been no parallel refutation of the assumptions that were originally based on those primitive explanations. So society is still working with the policy that "Ostracizing the Disabled Classes is the best way to protect general society from evil."

BTW, this doesn't come up in the blog itself, but I firmly believe that it's the Medical-Industrial complex that is still the greatest promoter of this philosophy (Did you know that the Rx symbol for prescriptions was originally a written prayer to the Roman god Jupiter -- Rex Deii?)

Anyway, with the Disabled being marked by society as living omens, I've become intrigued by those hints about the disabled acting in the role of storyteller -- i.e. someone with a direct, eerie, connection between the Supernatural and Humanity. According to (some) legends, "Mother Goose" was a tenth century queen who either: a) had one human foot, and one goose foot, or b) gave birth to a human son with a goose's head -- these are the legends that don't try to make her a mortal woman who lived in New England in (relatively) modern times, around when the first book of nursery rhymes were published.

And that's where my asking for advice comes in. I'd love to write up a post for "Plato's Nightmare" about these legends about M. Goose. But all my Googling leads me to websites where the paragraphs about Queen Bertha Broadfoot have all the exact same wording, and they all lead back to the same Wikipedia Article, which is both a stub, and lacking in references.

So I posted the question as a thread on Mudcat. And I got a few responses, but the first few of them just repeated the tidbits of info I'd already found... until November, when an anonymous poster gave me a new version of the "Goose-footed" legend, with details I'd not come across before, and it was juicy and actually had the structure of a story. But the story was also brief, and, since the poster was anonymous, I could not engage a in private correspondence asking for more detail. And a never came back. So I left that tantalizing bit as another dead end.

And then, today, another anonymous poster chimed in with one line, claiming to be the queen's direct descendant. So here's my question: should I just post the thread, itself, as a blog entry, with notes and comments, even if I can't cite textual source? Or, maybe just selected messages from the thread?

So, anyway, to help you decide, here is ( The nine-message thread in its entirety, dating from June 23, 2011 to March 28, 2011 )

Mary's Child: The Privilege of Speech and Human Identity

...In which I finally get the injustice I witnessed, aimed at other kids with C.P. who can't speak, off my chest... After nearly forty years of only talking about it privately.

That injustice is the whole reason I made my "Grah" icon...

(For the benefit of folks viewing from the LJ side: )

Okay, which story should I do next, right before Christmas -- The Steadfast Tin Soldier (The soldier is Special, 'cause he only has One Leg, and he's the Bravest of All), or The Ugly Duckling (because of how it frames Difference Within the Family, and how it's used to "comfort" children who are going through illness and/or disability: "But if you're brave, and soldier through, you will Grow Out Of It, and be handsome and admired." Also, I think it was the trope source for "Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer," but that latter one is outside the scope of my blog)?

[Mostly cross-posted from disability]

Story #49 from Children's and Household Tales, by J. and W. Grimm: The Six Swans

Summary, sort of: the youngest daughter of a king must not utter a word for six years, neither speaking nor laughing, in order to save her brothers from a witch's spell. During that time, she is married to a king, gives birth three times, has her children stolen from her, is accused of murdering them, and is nearly burned at the stake, herself, when the six years finally are up and she can speak in her own defense. ...And they all lived happily (yeah, right) ever after.

Part of me wants to put this story in my blog Plato's Nightmare / Aesop's Dream as an entry into discussing the experiences of those who are considered "non-verbal" -- the way they are often at the mercy of authority figures.

But on the other hand, her muteness is voluntary, and all of her "virtue" is tied to her ability to silence herself for the sake of her brothers. So another part of me thinks the story is more "about" misogyny than ableism.
---

In the meantime, this story has spawned two different plot bunnies in my head:

1) What happened to each of the three children her stepmother stole from her? Did the stepmother keep them hidden in a secret castle, the way the girl and her brothers were hidden at the start of the story? Did they get left out in the wilderness to die (and then were adopted by peasants/wild animals/fairies (a reverse changeling)? Each of the above?

2) What sort of life did the youngest brother have, after the "happily ever after" (he was mostly turned back into a human, except for his left arm, which remained as a swan's wing)?

Writing up my old idea for a Mother Goose Costume, yesterday, prompted me to realize that I need a Mother Goose Journal icon (I'm thinking of using this image, which appears to be 19th C., and shows up everywhere via a Google search, but I can't find an attribution. Do any of you know, or dare to venture a guess?). And that brought up new information about the character that makes me feel quite chuffed and vindicated. So!

The Back-story:
One of my very first presents, ever, was The Mother Goose Treasury, illustrated by Raymond Briggs (of The Snowman fame), with the collection of rhymes taken from the research of Iona and Peter Opie. It was given to me for my second Christmas -- three weeks before I turned 3 years old. And I still have it (The end papers are covered with my beginning attempts to write my name and the number 3 [everywhere but the bookplate pasted to the inside front cover... heh])

This is the first rhyme/ballad/story in the tome -- taking up almost six pages ('cause every verse needs an illustration).

( Mother Goose and the Golden Egg (As I learned it) -- cut for length )

[footnote below]

For the 2000 Holiday/New Year season I wrote and illustrated a novella/chapter book based on this witchy version of M. Goose, and tied her in with Christmas, the Winter Solstice, and Santa Claus. My premise was that the laying of the golden egg was an annual event at the winter solstice, and inside the golden shell was magic that M. Goose shared with Santa, so his reindeer could fly in time for Christmas Eve. I finished it up in the nick of time, had a dozen copies printed and bound by Kinkos, and slipped it into my neighbors' mailboxes as a Surprise!present. Not one adult even acknowledged my efforts... one kid did, though, so I know it was read by at least one of them.

Well, according to Wikipedia, that story was first created as a Christmas/New Year's Pantomime by Thomas Dibdin for the 1806-'07 Yule season -- 17 years before "A Visit From St. Nicholas." And she's even witchier in that original story -- raising storms and summoning ghosts, and I'd really, really, like to see that play, now!

So I was hitting close to a well-established tradition when I imagined her as primarily a Winter Celebration character. Can I sing "I told you so!" now?


[Footnote]: A slightly different (and to my mind, less poetic and more clunky) version is reproduced here: Mother Goose and Her Son Jack, with the additional information that it was first published (and perhaps written by) T. Batchelor in 1815 (but it's completely missing the "odd fish," so imnsho, it's not nearly as good -- and, as a warning: that Web page has an annoying and goofy-looking animated .gif).

Finally! After nearly Eight Years of writer's block (is that some sort of record?)!

( Author's Notes (with further thoughts added since last time): )

( No title, yet; she's not yet named 'Eloise'-- length: approx. 5,000 words )

Now: bed.

My latest blog entry is up: "The Girl Without Hands" -- Physical Disability as a "Divine mark" -- monstrosity versus humanity.

I am now going to cheer myself up by dreaming up pretty new, pro-fun monsters for my Zazzle store.

[Breaking News: The "Folk Process" traced and documented! "Old Aesop Tale" a first or second generation Hybrid! Is this as big as documented proof of evolution? Maybe!]

trouble traced one parent: The Blind Man and the Lame Man. pedanther traced the other: The Man, His Son, and His Donkey.

Both stories were on the same site (i.e. a Web version of a single book): Aesop's Fables, by J. (Jenny) H. Stickney, originally published in 1915. There are only 21 stories listed between the one and the other -- so, in a paper-printed book, less than a dozen pages between them.

My mother was born in 1934. I bet Aesop's Fables was on her family bookshelf -- or perhaps even more likely, the local library (Schoolhouse or public) -- and mother, in her youth, wolfed down several stories in one sitting, the way you do, when the stories are short and witty and wry.

Years later, when I came along, she remembered both stories, but her memory mushed them together, and she couldn't go back to check the source.

Hee! Bonus glimpse into my mother's childhood! *\o/*

( The Old News )