Once Upon A Time… (the fairytales and folklore thread)

Let's share some myths and legends, folks.

Tell a story, talk about a story, compare different culture's versions of a story, anything.

 

ONCE UPON A TIME EVERYONE ENDED UP DEAD PROBABLY.

but yes.

good.

rarhgfdhtj

will post things here eventually

 

screeches quietly I know a few
you do not fuck with madame pele ever for one and also she's really chill if you're cool but Never about pork
I need to type them up when I can Words properly

 

you motherfucker

 

…okay, it is ridiculous how many pages of Tim Burton stuff I have to wade through to find info about the actual Corpse Bride story. I know it's a popular movie, but geez. (Oh, and here's a mostly-unrelated story about a creepy mannequin, because those are cool too.)

SO ANYWAY THOUGH I'MA START US OFF WITH SOME JEWISH STUFF

The Corpse Bride is an excellent 16th Century Jewish folktale featuring many very Jewish things, like anti-Semitic violence, women sticking together, and rabbinic arguments. It goes roughly thus:

Spoiler: this got hella long

A guy is camping with his friends in the forest on their way to the village where he's gonna get married (terrible bachelor party idea, by the way). He sees a weird-lookin' stick that reminds him of a finger and decides the very best possible thing he can do is put his wedding ring on it, recite the marriage sacrament, and do the traditional wedding dance around it. Jewish weddings can be pretty quick and informal, so this counts as a legit wedding ceremony. With a stick.

…which of course is not a stick, it's the finger of a dead lady in a wedding dress*, who proceeds to get up out of the ground and demand her conjugal rights. The groom is apparently not into dead ladies, so he and his buddies run screaming to the village where his living fiancée is waiting and demand to speak to the rabbi.

"So hey rabbi hypothetically if I were to have accidentally married a corpse that I thought was just a weird-lookin' stick—" says the groom.

"This is an interesting hypothetical situation," says the rabbi.

Enter the corpse bride, still pissed. "HEY DEADBEAT," she says, "I WANT MY WEDDING NIGHT."

"This is an interesting actual situation," says the rabbi. (Rabbis in Jewish folklore are notoriously unflappable.)

So the rabbi calls in some more rabbis from other villages and they confer about the matter while the totally useless groom hides somewhere and the corpse bride just gets madder. By this point the living fiancée has got wind of this ruckus, so she comes down to find out what the hell is happening. She's understandably pretty upset. The rabbis come out and ask the guy "Did you do all the steps of the marriage ceremony?" and he says yeah, and they go back to talk some more while everyone else cries and the corpse bride just wants to get laid (no, seriously, basically every version of this story has her specifically demand her wedding night).

Finally the rabbis come back out and say "Okay, we've determined that even though you did the whole marriage ceremony properly, we just can't accept that the dead have a claim on the living." (In Catholic terms, they've granted an annulment.)

All the living parties are highly relieved, but the corpse bride collapses and starts crying, saying she's lost her chance at happiness forever now. The living fiancée takes her in her arms and says "I'll live the life you didn't get to have, I'll have sex children and I'll be happy and I'll fulfill your dreams so you can rest in peace." Then she takes the corpse bride outside and digs a grave for her and buries her (with the wedding ring, by the way) and lays her spirit to rest. In case you're keeping track, this makes the fiancée the single most effective person in the entire story.

AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER (except the corpse bride, who was dead)

(you can read a less-irreverent version here, if you wish. I do recommend, it's a good 'un. Or here, for a version that sadly lacks the awesome living fiancée.)

*see, back in the day, Jewish wedding parties would sometimes be waylaid on the road by anti-Semitic thugs, who would murder the bride (and presumably anyone else they felt like) and probably steal shit. Rough times.

Anyway, I haven't actually seen the Tim Burton movie, so I don't know how much it actually sticks to the folktale beyond "whoops I accidentally married a corpse". There's also another Jewish story where a guy puts his wedding ring on a weird stick, only in that one it's not a corpse it's a succubus-type lady demon, who then kills all the human ladies the dude tries to marry until eventually he finds one who doesn't mind sharing him with the demon. Judaism: Come for the centuries of persecution, stay for the polyamorous relationships with demons!

 

@valenstyne holy shit ive been jewish forever and i never knew that the corpse bride was jewish folklore, wtf
there is so much good jewish folklore im excited now

 

@rats same! I don't think I heard any folklore, except for stuff like the Golem of Prague.

@valenstyne do you have any other ones?

 

I do! :D It may take me a bit to dig up the books I've got, but in the meantime, some links: This book is really great (personal favorite: the Romanian story that amounts to "a guy fell asleep in a synagogue and when he woke up there were a bunch of ghosts so he freaked out and the rabbi came and saved him, the end"); a few anecdotes about the wise people of Chelm; and a whooooole bunch of stories here (common theme: "The local authority hated Jews, then something changed his mind/God set him on fire").

 

Do you have a link to the "it was actually a stick, shhh only poly demon relationships now" story?

 

It makes absolutely no mention of Judaism whatsoever, so for pretend!Victorian England the implication is that they're Christian (I don't actually remember specifically, but I'm pretty sure there was supposed to be a priest at their wedding). The bride - hang on, do I need to spoiler this?

Does anyone really care about spoilers for Tim Burton's Corpse Bride?

...I'm going to go ahead and assume "no", so anyway.

The bride was murdered by her original fiance, because they were supposed to elope but it was actually just a scam so he could steal her family fortune. She doesn't like being dead and falls instantly in love with the protagonist because she actually thought he was marrying her on purpose, or something? There's no rabbi.

You know what, I don't remember and I don't care, cause the version you told was way better. I'll leave you with this if you want an idea of how the movie went.

 

[camps out in thread quietly because this is My Jam] 8)a

 

Ooh, hello! Mostly I grew up on Russian and Irish folklore and tales. Once I wake up more someone remind me to tell the story of Maria Morevna.

 

Yep! Did you know that demons love jam above all things? :D

Why am I totally unsurprised? :| (I mean, I like Tim Burton movies just fine, but. And that video made me laugh way too hard, thanks for that. :D)

 

It's closeish, but you sure as heck wouldn't know about its Jewish origins without a heckton of research.

Spoiler: Corpse Bride movie spoilers

Eponymous corpse bride was wooed by a sleezy con artist who asked her parents for her hand in marriage, got turned down - her family is implied to have been really rich and really noble. Skeezeball goes "oh, dearest Corpsey, since your parents won't acknowledge our true love, clearly the only option is to elope. Meet me at the crossroad a week from now, I'll arrange everything so that we can get out of your family's reach and live happily somewhere else. Oh, and bring as much of your family's money with you as you can carry, so that we can keep living in the style you're accustomed to - I wouldn't want to treat you to anything less than you deserve~." As anyone with an ounce of genre savviness can guess, Skeezeball did set things up - so that Corpse Bride would get murdered by what looked like bandits, and he ran off with the money.

A few generations later (it's never stated exactly how many), Corpse Bride's family is practically broke. All they've got is the land in their name - and their names. (Also clothes, jewelry, that sort of thing.) If they don't want to start hocking family heirlooms or, worse, go into business as merchants, they're going to have to find a solution that'll bring in money for the family. And hey, there happens to be a local wealthy merchant family whose matriarch is a social climber - and she has a son who's a very eligible bachelor. (He's also socially awkward af, at least at the start, but they're in no position to be picky.) Their daughter's unmarried - unbetrothed, for that matter; it's a simple matter to arrange for the two families to become in-laws.
The movie opens on the day of the rehearsal. The merchant family is looking forward to the marriage (or at least mom is), the noble family is dreading it (or at least their matriarch is) and no one's giving a single fuck what either kid wants. (Fortunately, neither kid objects to being married, eh?) The son is very nervous - he knows how much is riding on this, he knows his mom has high expectations, he doesn't want to fuck up.

So naturally, he manages to completely fuck up the whole ceremony in the rehearsal. Not for lack of trying to get things right, but - he does. And everyone except Live Bride expresses deep disappointment (including the priest) and Groom is told to shape up before the actual ceremony. So he goes off into the woods to practice, and he's (of course) a lot more witty and charming when he thinks he's alone than he is with everyone staring at him, and he does the whole ceremony correctly and finishes off by putting the ring on what he assumes is a weird tree branch.

Turns out no, that was Corpse Bride's hand! And now she's gonna drag him down to the land of the dead with him, so they can be a happily married couple! He naturally has a couple objections to this, and the dead priest points out that he kinda can't stay in the land of the dead if he's alive. So the solution is 'whip up a potion that'll kill any living person who drinks it, do the ceremony, have Groom drink the potion, everyone's undead happily ever after'. There's a couple musical interludes where Groom finds out the tragic history of Corpse Bride (minus 'who killed her / had her killed') and it's made clear that just about everyone in the underworld likes Corpse Bride; meanwhile Corpse Bride is debating with herself and her pet worm about whether she should actually go through with this, especially once she finds out he was already engaged to someone alive. (She's also moderately jealous of Living Bride, although it mostly seems like that's because Living Bride is...still alive and she's assuming that Groom isn't really going to be into a corpse.)
Groom decides he can't break Corpse Bride's heart again (and may be influenced by the fact that everything in the living world has been depicted as a very grim pseudoVictorian thing, while the underworld is shown as being a lot more fun), and everyone who's anyone in the underworld makes the trip up to the world of the living so that they can do things properly and Corpse Bride can meet Groom's family.

Upon the arrival, it turns out that 1) Groom's been gone for a day or so, 2) everyone assumed he lost his nerve and ran off (an assumption pushed by Skeezeball, who is back in town and posing as a wealthy distinguished gentleman), and 3) no effort had been made to go looking for him. The complications presented by Corpse Bride being in the picture mean that Skeezeball now has room to try and wiggle his way into the good graces of Living Bride's parents, and there's a sudden switch in who Living Bride is marrying; if I remember right, he actually manages to speed things along so that he does marry Living Bride, despite her objections. He is incredibly upset when he finds out that Living Bride has no money to her name - just the family name and title; Living Bride snarks back that perhaps now they're equally matched in disappointment.

Groom and Corpse Bride make their way to the chapel, and dead priest starts to do the ceremony. Skeezeball interrupts, Corpse Bride recognizes him and is very pissed off because now she's figured out the truth of what happened: he had her killed and stole everything off of her but her dress. Skeezeball is a bit shocked that he's been recognized (and really freaked out by the dead people, honestly), but regains his footing once dead priest points out that they have no jurisdiction on the living.
And then, while he's gloating, Skeezeball drinks from the cup of poison that had been prepared for Groom. The death is painful, but very swift. And Skeezeball is now fair game for the mob of dead people who really like Corpse Bride. Corpsey, meanwhile, meets up at the entrance to the chapel with Living Bride; there's a bit of "you can have him" "no, you should" and then Corpse Bride goes "oh - you're both good people and you both deserve to be happy, please have better lives than I did" and she turns into a cloud of butterflies. (No. Seriously. I don't even know what the hell, and there was no hinting in the movie that this was a possible outcome if things resolved for her; the dead people seem just as shocked.)

The movie closes on Groom and Living Bride finally getting properly married.

Fake edit: still not sure if I should've stayed up to finish this last night, instead of leaving it half-done till now, but screw it; posting anyways.

 

so my friend shared this article with me and im both fascinated and crying

it's about the deeply intricate mythology homeless kids in miami created to try make sense of the world and i love it because modern folklore is endlessly fascinating to me

 

(whoops this is belated)

I AM REMINDING YOU TO TELL THE STORY :D

That's amazing, holy shit. Kind of reminds me of the Narco-Saints :o

 

Working on it! It's taking forever to type up.

 

I have a Tumblr friend who's doing a Shin Megami Tensei compendium of modern mythology so naturally I sent him this link within two paragraphs of starting to read this. (Considering the publication date, I wonder how the folklore's changed in the last 20 years?)

 

typing is so much work when you're spacey and distractable :( here have what i've gotten typed up so far

So! Once upon a time, as there always is, there was a prince named Ivan. He was the youngest of his siblings, and before he finished growing up, his sisters were all married to powerful magicians and Kings of Birds: the Eagle, the Falcon, and the Raven. And once young Ivan finished growing up, he decided that he missed his sisters, and sent letters to them, and they sent letters back, and as a result of these letters Prince Ivan set out on a journey to go and visit his sisters and their husbands.

However! Along his journey, Prince Ivan came to a grand encampment, an entire city made of tents and each tent occupied by a great warrior, and the grandest tent of all occupied by their general, and their general was Maria Morevna. She was a great conqueror and general, and beautiful and learned besides, although she cannot have been overly wise if she expected a prince named Ivan to keep his nose out of forbidden things. But I am getting ahead of myself. Maria Morevna received Prince Ivan hospitably and made him welcome, and after they had talked for many hours they developed a fondness for each other, and after they had talked for many hours more they felt it would be a great shame if they never saw each other again, so they got married right away, and Prince Ivan travelled with Maria Morevna and her army as they returned home to their own grand city.

Prince Ivan and Maria Morevna lived together quite happily all that winter, but by the time spring came and melted the snow, everyone was a little tired of being cooped up all the time, and by the time it was early summer and the roads and fields were dry enough for soldiers to ride across, they were even a little tired of each other. You know how it is, with long winters! Even the grand rooms of a castle felt like they were not quite big enough for everyone who had to be in them. So when she rode out again with her army, to collect tribute from conquered lands and conquer new lands to pay her tribute, Maria Morevna left Ivan to run the castle for her and make sure nothing went wrong at home. She gave him all the keys of the castle and the city, and told him he could go anywhere he liked, except into the tinest room at the top of the tallest tower of the castle. If I had been her, I would have taken that key with me and never even told him about that room, but I suppose no one ever told her fairytales when she was a child. She must have been too busy learning to ride and fight and command an army. They kissed each other goodbye, because they still loved each other very much, even if they could barely stand the sight of each other after being snowed in and cooped up for so long, and then Maria Morevna and her army rode off.

Prince Ivan had plenty to do, running the castle and and taking care of everything for the city, but try as he might, he couldn't forget the room he'd been told not to go in. It gnawed at him when he was trying to get to sleep, and finally he could stand it no longer. One bright summer day, he climbed the tallest tower of the castle, and went right up to the door to the tiniest room, and opened the door. Inside the room was a barrel, bound with nine great iron bands.

"Ivan!" said the barrel. "You've climbed a long way, just to see an old man. Would you be a kind soul, and fetch me a drink of water? It's been years since I had so much as a drop." Ivan, poor lad, was kinder than he was wise, and did not hesitate at all to climb down the tower, fetch a bucket of water and a dipper, and climb back up. He poured a dipperful of water into the bunghole of the barrel, and three of the iron bands burst. "Ah, so refreshing!" said the barrel. "Would you be a kind soul, and give me another drink?" Ivan poured another dipperful of water into the barrel, and three more of the iron bands burst. "Just one more drink, Ivan?" Ivan poured one more dipperful of water into the barrel, and the last three iron bands burst asunder, and then the barrel itself burst into splinters. There in the tiniest room of the castle stood a giant, clothed in rags, barely able to stand hunched over in the tiny room, far bigger than the barrel he had burst from. "Free at last!" the giant roared. "O little Prince Ivan, you have freed me! I am Koshchei Bessmertniyi, Koshchei Without-Death, Koshchei the Deathless! Your wife Maria Morevna imprisoned me many years ago, and now I shall have my revenge! Out of gratitude for the water, Ivan, I give you your life, but if I ever see you again I shall slay you!" With this he burst forth from the tower and flew off in a whirlwind, and Ivan was very sorry for his curiosity.

Ivan ran down the tower stairs and saddled his horse, and rode off after Koshchei the Deathless. He did not have much trouble at all following the trail of destruction left by the whirlwind, but he could not ride as fast as it flew, and so it was many days before he found Maria Morevna's army. Her officers told him that Koshchei had come upon them quite by surprise, falling upon them just before daybreak and carrying Maria Morevna off with him. They offered to go with Prince Ivan, but he told them to return to the city and be prepared to defend it in case anyone attacked it in Maria Morevna's absence, and continued on his way.

Finally he came to the giant's castle. It was vast and terrible, perched atop a rocky sea-cliff where Ivan's horse could not go. He left his horse, climbed to the castle, and crossed the great bridge. The courtyard was vast, big enough for an army of soldiers, but completely empty, and he crossed it boldly and entered the great hall. There sat Koshchei the Deathless, at the end of a long table, all by himself. He no longer wore rags, but fine royal clothes of scarlet silk with golden embroidery, and his magnificent beard covered his lap.

"Koshchei, I've come for Maria Morevna, my wife!" said Prince Ivan. "So you have, Prince Ivan, but you shall not have her," said the giant. "I told you, if I saw you again I would kill you." And with that he drew his sword, a great curved blade longer than Ivan himself was tall, and chopped Ivan into pieces. He put the pieces in a barrel, sealed the barrel up tight, and threw it off the cliff and into the ocean.

Meanwhile, Ivan's sisters had begun to worry, since he had not arrived on his visit like his letters said he would. They asked their husbands, the Eagle, the Falcon, and the Raven, to look for Ivan and make sure he was safe, and so the three great magicians and Kings of Birds set out. They searched for a very long time, but finally the Eagle, the keenest-eyed, saw the barrel floating in the ocean and wondered what was inside it. He brought it to land, where the Falcon, strongest of them all, broke it open. They recognized Ivan at once, though it had been years since they saw him as a child and he had not at that time been chopped into bits, and so the Raven, the most learned, flew at once to the eastern end of the world to bring back some drops of the Water of Life, for his books had told him where it might be found. The three kings sprinkled Ivan with the Water of Life, and soon enough he sprang up again, whole and alive and very angry at both Koshchei and himself.

"Ivan! How did you end up in that barrel, floating in the ocean? You might have floated forever, had we not found you," said his brothers-in-law. And so Ivan told them all the story, how he had met Maria Morevna and lost her, and how Koshchei the Deathless had chopped him into little pieces.

"Ah," said the Raven. "Koshchei the Deathless has a sword and a horse that were given to him by Baba Yaga, and you will never be able to defeat him unless you can convince her to also give you a horse and a sword. But more than that, he has hidden his life outside his body, and unless you can find it, defeating him will do you no good, for he will just come back and you will have to fight him again and again, and eventually you will get tired and he will chop you up again, into even tinier pieces. You must go to your wife, in secret this time, instead of striding boldly in, and tell her you are very sorry, and ask if she has found out anything about where Koshchei keeps his life."

 

beautiful

Ivan. Ivan you had one job. ONE JOB, IVAN

(I actually really love stories where the hero is a bit dim and it's his sidekicks who do the actual problem-solving. Also HECK YES LADY GENERAL, YOU GO MARIA)