Games From Folktales

We’ve completed the Pentamerone stories which were published for children in the Victorian period. Seventeen of the stories, however, were taken out as unsuitable. I won’t be recording them, but I’ll be using the Burton translation to summarize their plots and the hooks we can hang on them. Burton’s summary for the what’s now called…

A change of pace on the Venice material – I think that trying to draw all the folklore together, like I did with Cornwall, may be a fool’s errand. I keep heading off into the weeds. My plan is to keep adding the folklore I find, but to try and give the whole thing a…

This week I’m taking time to get the backlog of monsters sorted. As a sort of filler, here’s a poem about a troubadour trying to rescue a maid, by W.S. Gilbert, of musical hall fame. *** A Troubadour he playedWithout a castle wall,Within, a hapless maidResponded to his call.“Oh, willow, woe is me!Alack and well-a-day!If…

This section is where Dunsany starts paying off his earlier bits of folklore, so there’s not much new to discuss, but I do want to flag that Zironderel has the same attitude to magic that House Jerbiton does. Magic causes beauty, even natural beauty. Thanks again to Librivox and Michele Fry for the recording. CHAPTER…

The story which follows seems folkloric, but the MonsterTalk podcast has done some digging and found the places mentioned don’t seem to accord with real geography. The original writer was a bit of a racontuer, known for great dinner stories, so this may have been his own work. For example the reaction of the young…