Mythic Monday

This past weekend I’ve been playing catch up. Catch up with laundry, catch up with making lunches. I downloaded a few books and my pod-casts, so I am almost ready for the week. While at work on Saturday, my co-worker and I had a long talk about folk lore and fantasy. So I started thinking about one of my favorite fairy-tails, or maybe I should say groups of fairytales. When I was little my mother read me Andrew Lang’s “Fairy Book” series. There are twelve books in the series. The first book is “The Blue Fairy Book” and it was published in 1889, the last one was the “Lilac Fairy Book” and it was published in 1910. In that eleven years fairytales went from rather brutal to what we think of them now - Jack went from “Jack the Giantkiller” to “Jack in the Beanstalk” One of my favorite stories was in the first book and was called “Bluebeard”. Basicly a woman marries a siralkiller and is told not to go into a room in the house they share, of course she does and finds all the dead wives he has had before her. In the version in the Lang book the woman’s brothers save her. I probably would have liked it better if she had saved herself. That said, Bluebeard is the French version of this type of tale, there other versions where the woman does save herself. Bluebeard scared the crap out of me as a child and engendered a lifelong love of horror. Read more about Bluebeard here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebeard