Folklore Resource

Topix has an ongoing news feed that draws articles from newspapers around the globe pertaining to the study or the practice of folklore. For example, recent articles highlight upcoming books, the founding of centers for the study of folklore, new graduate degrees and research projects, and the touring of traditional Serbian dances. Having found this resource, I plan on checking it frequently. The feed is also searchable. Just click on Wire. The feed updates many times a day, and of course is available as an RSS. It's an efficient and tantalizing way to get a quick daily or weekly view of the richness of folklore and folkloric study currently happening in our world.

"The Best Introduction to the Mountains"

Take a look at this tribute that renowned fantasy and science fiction writer Gene Wolfe (author of The Book of the New Sun and Soldier in the Mist) has provided as an anecdotal introduction to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I stumbled into the piece recently by accident and had some excitement reading it - a brief essay by one of my favorite writers about one of my other favorite writers. A man of eclectic reading tastes and even more eclectic writing, Wolfe gives air time to his own interpretation of Tolkien's world through the eyes of a former and quite successful engineer, but the main body of his essay is a deeply personal meditation. The tribute is written on the occasion of plucking down from a glass case three often-read old editions of The Lord of the Rings and reflecting upon the bits of verse and brief annotations Wolfe had penciled into the front leaf of each volume. As an example:

Surely I need not tell you that I read and reread these books. I married in November of that wonder-filled 1956; and Rosemary and I read them to each other, most often while driving. A note in The Return of the King indicates that my older son Roy and I read them together, reading the final page on April 20, 1967. (Roy was born in 1958.)

There is a field of study now developing devoted to the marginalia of great writers - their quick sketches and desperate little doodles and quotations inked into the margins of their favorite books. There is a voyeuristic fascination to this sort of thing. What would Coleridge have written in the margins of Milton, or Anne Sexton in the margins of Emily Dickinson? It's the literary arts' world's version of catching up on the latest celebrity gossip, but there's more to it than that: often, great, iconoclastic writers come up with observations about other great writers that just floor us. There is also a sort of literary archaeology involved: delving up the traces and remnants of a reading experience, fragments that allow us to interpret the aesthetic and emotional experience of reading a great work, fragments that invite tentative speculations on the question: Why does a great story so effect us?

Definitely worth taking a look. Wolfe's tribute also includes the text of a letter written to him by J.R.R. Tolkien, for those avid letter-readers among you.

The painting above is Redhorn Gate, by Alan Lee, long-time illustrator of Tolkien's work and one of the two conceptual artists for Peter Jackson's recent film adaptation.

Midsummer Night's Dream Sculpture - A Fountain by Charles Vess

Charles Vess, that artist who knows Faerie so well - illustrator for Stardust and some of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, among many other wonderful projects - is together with artist David Spence in the late stages of a truly massive sculpting project - a fountain commissioned by the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia featuring figures from A Midsummer Night's Dream - Titania the Queen of Faery; Robin Goodfellow, that merry wanderer of the night (see his form taking shape above); an assortment of woodland creatures and wild faeries leaping, like this one below, out of the marble with wild abandon:

Like a shrewd and knavish sprite myself, I am thieving this story shamelessly from the Endicott Mythic Arts blog, in case some of my readers do not know of the project or read the blog. (If you don't, you should!) Longtime readers of this blog may remember my passion for fairy tale statues.

The best news is that Charles Vess has offered a generous article at the Green Man Review chronicling the way that the project has taken shape - conception, design, and all the beautiful work and merry mishaps that then ensue. Of the making of Titania, Vess writes in jocular, if rueful, good humor:

We were, perhaps, a little more than a week away from completion when the faeries began to laugh at us mere mortals. I was working below the face you see above and heard a series of small cracks. I looked up and Queen Titania slowly leaned forward, bending over as if to kiss me perhaps? But that’s 300 or so pounds of clay we’re talking about. A central steel pipe had snapped and down she came, to rest gently on a scaffolding that I quickly swung under her form.

She has an air of having just stepped out of a mist or out of the hollow hills - of being only barely present in our world. Titania rises 16 feet high in the center of the fountain, as befits a Queen. 16 feet - think Michelangelo's David, and then consider that five centuries have not made the sculptor's task much easier than it was then. I encourage all our readers to visit Vess's article. It makes for an exciting read, and the photos of the sculptures are breathtaking. They are Charles Vess drawings sprung into three-dimensional life - something I had not even dreamed of when reading Stardust or other works. Now, seeing the sculptures, I wonder how I couldn't have dreamed of them. They are beautiful - though photos do sculptures no justice. Is anyone with me on wanting to check their spare change for a trip to this Virginia theater in a few months?

Drowned Giantesses

Dear readers, I stumbled into this eldritch passage in Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson's Celtic Miscellany this weekend, and had to share it with you:

A woman, whose breasts had not grown, was cast up on a sea shore in Europe. She was fifty feet tall, that is from her shoulders to her feet, and her chest was seven feet across. There was a purple cloak on her. Her hands were tied behind her back, and her head had been cut off; and it was in this way that the wave cast her up on land.

Another woman was cast up from the sea in Scotland, and she was a hundred and ninety-two feet long; there were seventeen feet between her breasts, and sixteen was the length of her hair. and seven the length of the finger of her hand. Her nose was seven feet long, and there were two feet between her eyebrows. Every limb of her was as white as the swan or the foam of the wave.

Translated from the medieval Irish.

Ah, what do you make of that?

I love the combination of mathematical precision and poetic fervor: we are made to see the second of the drowned giantesses first as an engineer would - in measurements; but second, as a poet would - every limb of her was as white as the swan or the foam of the wave.

Bambi and Thumper

Dear readers,

While we're on the topic of folklore, a friend forwarded these to me, and I could not resist sharing them. These photographs were taken by German photographer Tanja Askani of Alberta, Canada, and more in the series can be viewed over at the Dark Roasted Blend blog. Here is something for the enjoyment of Disney lovers, wildlife enthusiasts, and those who can be interested or startled by the way photography creates folklore:

Stromkarl

Over at the Dutch artist Isabella's gallery, Land of the Dreamers, I ran into this depiction today - of Stromkarl, the Scandinavian water spirit, "riverman." Isabella says this of him:

It is said he knows how to play eleven different musical compositions, ten of them he plays often and anyone is free to listen. The eleventh he only plays at night as it could be dangerous for any living soul to hear it. It's said that when he plays the tune all things start to move from their places....

In fact, according to Brewer's Dictionary of folklore and fable, if anyone hears or plays the eleventh melody, "tables and benches, cups and cans, old men and women, blind and lame, babies in their cradles, and the sick in their beds, begin to dance."

What a beautiful and perilous folk figure Stromkarl must be! As wild as Orpheus with his lute. This is actually my first encounter with Stromkarl, and information on him is surprisingly scarce. Is he not well known in the West? Finding material on him is proving as tricky as carrying water in one's hands up a hill. I intend to begin raiding several local libraries and universities to learn more. I know a top-notch scholar of Scandinavian folklore whom I will have to interview shortly. I have located references both to Stromkarl as a character and to stromkarl as a plural of water spirits, a term analogous to naiad or selkie, rather than a name for an individual. Of depictions in art, so far I have only found Isabella's - even deviantart, that massive online catalogue of contemporary photos, paintings, and sketches, has no Stromkarl. If not for Brewer and a few other references, I might almost think Isabella had made him up. (I would be delighted by that.)

I have found one folktale that refers to stromkarl, actually while I was writing this very post. The written variant is very brief, and to be found in a truly ancient little piece of anthropology, a volume from 1841 entitled Fragments from German Prose Writers, translated in the UK by one Sarah Austin. As the fragment is brief, I will offer it in its entirety here:

Norwegian Legend:
Two little boys were playing by the side of the river, and they saw the Stromkarl, or water-spirit sitting on the shore and playing his harp. Then the children called out to him and said, "Stromkarl, why are you playing? There is no salvation for you." Thereupon the Stromkarl fell to weeping bitterly, threw his harp away, and sank in the deep waters. When the boys returned home they related to their father, who was a godly man, what had befallen them. The father said, "You have sinned against the Stromkarl,--go back and comfort him, and tell him that he too shall be saved." When they went back to the river, the Stromkarl sat on the shore weeping and lamenting. And the children said, "Weep not so, Stromkarl, our father says that thy Redeemer also liveth." Then the Stromkarl joyfully took his harp and played sweetly till the sunset.
Jacob Grimm. (Deutsche Mythologie.)

This is a curious version of the Norwegian, made the more so because it has been translated at least twice - once into German, again into English, and probably many more times as it circulated through German villages - and so this version probably suffers from outrageous replica failure - like the Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a print of some painting. And where does this odd tale find its theme and its origin? In the conflict between Christianity and paganism? In the nostalgia of a people for forgotten tales and old rites? Or in the joy of finding compatibility in two traditions? A very curious tale.

I wish I could find more on this stromkarl and his history. If anyone knows anything of him, drop us a comment here!

Dante's Heart Newsletter

As we hope Dante's Heart will continue to grow as a venue for artists, writers, and readers to connect, admire and contribute exciting work, and converse, we are going to launch a biweekly e-newsletter, Wunderkammern, beginning March 17. Here's what it's going to have:

* Calls for submissions
* Links to exciting projects and websites (new in each issue)
* News updates on Dante's Heart (example: new features and upcoming special issues of the journal)
* A few memorable or otherwise provocative passages & quotations from fantasy or folklore
* A list of the recent highlights from the blog

You can sign up for this biweekly newsletter by sending an e-mail to us at:

editors@dantesheart.com

Subject Line: Wunder

In the body of the e-mail: include your name and best e-mail address.

We'll do the rest! Also e-mail us if there is something you're interested in seeing included in the newsletter or on the blog. We're quite serious about that - this newsletter will become what its readership wants it to become.

We'd love to hear from you - and we hope you're excited to hear from us. Until then, enjoy the blog!

Cheers,
Daniel

Daniel Fusch
Editor, Dante's Heart