What's your favorite tale? Favorite collection? Favorite author?
"Lud in the mist" by Hope Mirrlees is awesome. It's also public domain, so can be downloaded legally.
How OG was he when it comes to pioneering modern fairy tales?
>>25494157Baš Čelik has always been a personal favorite--a Serbian twist on Koschei the Deathless, with a lot of extra twists and turns. I think I first encountered it in a tiny, beat to shit library book with a whale on the front. Went away for summer camp and came back and the library had gotten rid of the book. It took me years to put enough of the details together into google to get the name of the story. Hard to beat the 1812 Grimms' for me overall. The Zipes translation that came out recently is great.This semester I'm teaching a fairy tale class and we're going to do the Cruickshank versions of Cinderella and Hop'O My Thumb, and Dickens's rebuttal. If you haven't read those, they're hilarious. The whiplash in the last few pages of Cinderella had me cackling the first time I read it.
>>25494157The Faerie Queene
>>25496494Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrel.Or, to be less smarmy about it, stuff about the leshy. >A certain priest’s daughter went strolling in the forest one day, without having obtained leave from her father or her mother—and she disappeared utterly. Three years went by.Now in the village in which her parents dwelt there lived a bold hunter who went daily roaming through the thick woods with his dog and his gun. One day he was going through the forest; all of a sudden his dog began to bark, and the hair of its back bristled up.The sportsman looked and saw lying in the woodland path before him a log, and on the log there sat a moujik plaiting a bast shoe. And as he plaited the shoe, he kept looking up at the moon, and saying with a menacing gesture: “Shine, shine, O bright moon!”The sportsman was astounded. “How comes it,” thinks he, “that the moujik looks like that?—He is still young; but his hair is grey as a badger’s.”He only thought these words, but the other replied, as if guessing what he meant: “Grey am I, being the devil’s grandfather!”Then the sportsman guessed that he had before him no mere moujik, but a Léshy. He levelled his gun and—bang! He let him have it right in the paunch.The Léshy groaned and seemed to be going to fall across the log, but directly afterwards he got up and dragged himself into the thickets. After him ran the dog in pursuit, and after the dog followed the sportsman. He walked and walked, and came to a hill: in that hill was a fissure, and in the fissure stood a hut.He entered the hut—there on a bench lay the Léshy stone dead, and by his side a damsel, exclaiming, amid bitter tears: “Who now will give me to eat and to drink?”“Hail, fair maiden!” says the hunter. “Tell me whence thou comest, and whose daughter thou art?”“Ah, good youth! I know not that myself, any more than if I had never seen the free light—never known a father and mother.”“Well, get ready as soon as you can. I will take you back to Holy Russia.”So he took her away with him, and brought her out of the forest. And all the way he went along, he cut marks on the trees.Now this damsel had been carried off by the Léshy, and had lived in his hut for three years—her clothes were all worn out, or had got torn off her back, so that she was stark naked but she wasn’t a bit ashamed of that.When they reached the village, the sportsman began asking whether there was any one there who had lost a girl.Up came the priest, and cried, “Why, that’s my daughter.” Up came running the priest’s wife, and cried: “O thou dear child! Where hast thou been so long? I had no hope of ever seeing thee again.”But the girl gazed and just blinked with her eyes, understanding nothing. After a time, however, she began slowly to come back to her senses. Then the priest and his wife gave her in marriage to the hunter and rewarded him with all sorts of good things.
>>25496728>And they went in search of the hut in which she had lived while she was with the Léshy. Long did they wander about the forest; but that hut they never found.It sort of reminds me of a painting by Jean Leon Gerome, "quaerens quem devoret". I have no idea why, the topics aren't remotely similar.
are his tales any good?
>>25497917They are alright, yes.His prose is legit, and even the most hardened 4chan cynic has to admit it’s catchy to read.>“She has all the qualities of a monster without the courtesy of being a myth”. People just don’t write like that anymore
>>25494157Russian Magic Tales
>>25498059The Spiritual Meaning of Stories, a lecture read in Berlin on May 3, 1934.Whatever shadow may fall on your life–maybe you are worried about the fate of your country, or perhaps dark thoughts visit you concerning your own future, or maybe your entire life seems an unbearable wound–remember the Russian fairy tale. Listen to her quiet, ancient, wise voice.Don’t think the fairy tale is a childish diversion, not worthy of the attention of a grown man. And don’t think that adults are smart, and children stupid. Don’t imagine that an adult has to “stupefy” himself to tell a story to a child.Is it not perhaps the opposite? Aren’t our minds the source of most of our woes? And what is stupidity, anyway? Is all stupidity dangerous or shameful? Or is there perhaps an intelligent kind of stupidity, something desirable and blessed that begins with stupidity but ends with wisdom? Maybe there are two kinds of stupidity? One comes from blind self-contentment, the other from a healthy skepticism? One stupefies with pride and leads to vulgarity, while the other stupefies through humility and leads to wisdom…This sort of stupidity, or perhaps better called simplicity, exactly describes all folk tales, especially Russian folk tales.The fairy tale doesn’t insist on anything. It doesn’t intrude on anyone. It’s not in the least contrived. If you don’t want to listen, don’t! It’s like a flower, but not one from a cultivated garden. It’s like a wildflower in the field that sows itself, that roots itself, that pushes its own flower petals up toward God’s sunlight. This flower gives its own kind of honey, a wondrous and fragrant honey that only a simple and wise beekeeper can harvest.https://nicholaskotar.com/2016/12/02/spiritual-meaning-stories/
>>25495924>Hard to beat the 1812 Grimms' for me overall. The Zipes translation that came out recently is great.Agreed.
The eyes of the dragon and by default, the dark tower. I consider it a modern fairy tale.
>>25496728I liked the tv series. The effects were cool af!
>>25499624Read the book. It's literally a fairy story, but it's very well done.
>>25494157This one where this load of desert tribes piss their God off and then spend the next eternity shitting the place up and whining about it.
>>25494157No favorite, but any folkloric motif of extreme ancienty (over 12000 years) is endearing. If I have to give an example, it would be Apuleius' Cupid and Psyche from the the 2nd century AC, which is still retold to this day (picrel), with may parallels around the world.
The ones I love retelling the most, mainly for trolling reasons, is Heart of a Washman's Donkey and Abiyoyo.Both are hilarious to tell if you set it up right. Though to tell Abiyoyo correctly you can't be afraid to make a fool of yourself. You got to go full ham in singing the music parts. The more shameless and enthusiastic you can preform the funnier it is.Meanwhile Washman's Donkey is intentionally structured to waste the maximum amount of time to deliver the most simple of insults as a punchline. It's a rare occasion where explaining the joke is actually the joke because it makes a fool of the person who bothered to listen to the convoluted story within a story within another story to hear the explanation of a nonsense phrase.
