We keep telling the same tales
Folklore and storytelling are hugely inspirational - Here are a few of my favorites
A History of the Tightly Strung- The Changeling
We are terrified and fascinated by the unknown. That may be why we keep returning - time over time, culture to culture - to the changeling tale. In Cornish, Scottish, German, and Scandinavian folktales (to name a few), parents are warned of the risk that their children will be taken and replaced. Whether with a fairy, a troll, an elf, sticks, or stones, caregivers of the past had a collection of sworn-upon techniques for scaring off replacements and getting their children back.
Unfortunately, these stories were often ableist. Babies seeming "other" were often just displaying early signs of neurodiversity or physical disability. Families often harmed their actual children, thinking they were replacements. In some cases, mental illness in adults was explained by the same folklore.
As the changeling folklore progressed, though, neurodivergent, queer, and other groups of marginalized people have readapted the folklore- finding comfort in embracing the "other".
"A History of the Tightly Strung" explores how mental illness - long explained away by stories like the changeling - feels like a foreign intruder in our psyche, and adjusts our reaction to our own fears from hostility to acceptance.
Fussli, Henry, Der Wechselbalg 1780, Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich.
The Fool's Journey - The Folklorist's Tarot
The Major Arcana are often arranged into a narrative structure like Joseph Campbell's Heroes Journey. The first card, the Fool, is the titular character, and each card after represents a stage of life that the character goes through. The High Priestess, for example, is an amalgamation of the Divine feminine, referencing characters like Persephone, Athena, and Isis, but as a stage in the Fools Journey, she becomes a guardian of arcane knowledge.
Tarot began as playing cards for a game called Tarocchi in the mid-15th century. It wasn't until the 18th century when a French occultist known as Etteilla published a book on tarot as a divination tool. The Major Arcana are 22 face cards that represent different archetypes and divine figures, heavily referencing folklore.
The Fool of the Folklorists Tarot leaves a city of industrialization for the wilds of the Major Arcana, encountering chimeras like the Empress, a part-lioness creature who prowls the fields and tends to the bounty of this new world, and the Lovers, A pair of Harpies who wrap around each other, each shielding the other .
Jean Dodal, Tarot of Marseilles, early 18th cen. (The Star, The Empress, The Fool)
Bembo, Bonafacio, Love, form the Visconti Tarot, ca. 1450, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT
The Ferryman - Charon
Between the shores of our world and the world of the dead, flows the River Styx. Rowing across the river eternally is the ferryman of the dead, Charon. The only way to get from this life to the next, the ancient Greeks left their dead with coins in their mouths, a toll so they could get to their destination.
Another Story, which I listened to on repeat as a child, recalls a young man sent by a king to retrieve three golden hairs form the head of the devil in order to marry a princess. His final barrier to reach the devil's stronghold? A river manned by a solitary ferryman. This ferryman has been bound to his little boat, unable to stop ferrying people across the river. When he asks his passenger to find out why, the young man tells him he'll tell him on the way back. The ferryman, in the end, tricks the greedy king, returned to find more gold, into holding the punt, and leaves him to be the new ferryman.
We regularly use bodies of water as boundaries between realms, and therefore create mythology around the people whose jobs are to cross them. The Ferryman combines these stories with changeling mythology to create a new character- fae or devil or god - up for interpretation.
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Dore, Gustave, Inferno - Plate 9, 1857
Spencer-Stanhope, John, Charon and Psyche, 1883, Private Collection, Roy Miles, Oxford