Archive Tag:fairy tales

Drabble 37 – Quarender

Quarender
Franz Jüttner

I’ve never been much for princess stories. I never wanted to be saved. I wanted to be the hero, the one with the destiny and the sword and the merry band of adventurers, not the one awakened by a non-consensual kiss.

Fairy tales–the ones I watched on video–were dull and lifeless things with heroines who did little but lose their personalities once they fell in love. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the original tales were much darker. Violent, in some cases, and downright disturbing in others. These were stories to fear.

Given my relationship with horror, is it any surprise that it was then, and only then, that fairy tales and princess stories became something enticing? Stories of fair maidens intertwined with the grotesque–now that was something that interested me, and never more than when Angela Carter did it.

Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered.

– Angela Carter, The Werewolf

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

Drabble 34 – Unseelie

Unseelie
Scene from a Midsummer Night’s Dream by Edwin Landseer

Remember how last week I felt like the year was closing in on me and I was running out of time? Well, my drabble is late for precisely this reason. I am too busy for the end of the year to happen at all and I can’t wait for 2016 to roll around so I can heave a sigh of relief and tell myself I have an entire year to get my life together.

Anyway: fairies. I’ve never been much for fairy tales, at least not until I got older and discovered that I’d been lied to for the vast majority of my life–fairies are way creepy. I stumbled upon Holly Black’s Tithe as a teenager and discovered that a world where fairies were dark and weird and malevolent was way more interesting to me than one where they danced around on flower buds and sipped dewdrops. Tithe introduced me to classic fairy stories (like, the ones about kelpies and changelings and so on) and somewhere along the way I learned about Bordertown and I’ve been hooked ever since.

And like, sure, the picture I chose for this is of Titania, who seems pretty much as Seelie as you can get, right? But let’s be real: A Midsummer Night’s Dream is all about fairies dicking around with mortals for their own purposes and amusement. The lines are not sharply drawn between Seelie and Unseelie, but I wonder whether we ought to draw them at all.

Anyway, here’s a drabble, and let’s hope nobody curses me for my insolence. Maybe I’ll leave out a bowl of cream just in case.

Drabble 15 – Serein

Sunset in the Rain by Cam Miller
“Sunset in the Rain” by Cam Miller.

Folklore tends to go hand in hand with mythology, so I doubt it comes as a surprise that I’m fond of folk and fairy tales as well as stories about gods. They’re even better when they’re tied in with etymology–I don’t remember exactly when I found out that the days of the week were named after Norse gods, but I’ve never forgotten it.

I remember hearing a particular bit of folklore when I was at the community fair with a boy I absolutely detested. The weather was beautiful and warm, but it started raining suddenly, and he told me that meant either God was spitting on me or that the devil was beating his wife.

Neither of those sounded all that great, to be honest. I remember being struck by the idea that the devil had a wife–who was she? Why was he beating her? Did she live in Hell, too?

It stuck with me, as weird, folkloric references often do. Though “the devil beating his wife” is typically a Southern phrase for a sunshower, it found its way to my hometown in the Pacific Northwest. Myths are weird like that; they have a complete disregard for geography.

Anyway, a drabble.