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permetaform's post about "The Little Match Girl."
"The Little Match Girl" deeply traumatised me as a small child, in a way that most other fairy tales (even the ones packed with death and gore and people being eaten alive and the chopping off of bodyparts) never did. I think it was not so much because the little girl died as because she died alone, with no one caring, and only her imagination to comfort her. The fact that she got to go be with the Baby Jebus in the end did not, in my six-year-old-self's estimation, make up for that.
Personal myths... hmmm. I loved fairy tales as a kid, and before I was out of elementary school I'd read all the Greek and Norse myths, Grimms Fairy Tales (the affore-mentioned blood and gore and people being eaten), and most of the Red/Green/Blue/Yellow/Pink/etc. Fairy books. Ruyard Kipling's "Just So Stories" would probably go somewhere near the top of the list, though, since my mother read them to me repeatedly when I was a small child. "How the Elephant Got His Trunk," "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin," "The Sing Song of Old Man Kangaroo," that story about the armadillos… The first story I ever wrote, when I was four or five or so, was essentially a fanfic for Kipling--my own "Just So Story" about how lambs ended up with wool (there once was a little lamb who was so filthy that his mother got mad and decided to scrub him clean. And she scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed, and the soap bubbles turned into wool).
Then there was The Wizard of Oz (the movie--I didn't read Frank L. Baum's book until I was nine or so), The Princess Bride, and Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang. The Wicked Witch of the West and the Child Catcher used to scare the daylights out of me, and I'm pretty sure my love of things like Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini novels and Pirates of the Caribbean goes right back to Inigo Montoya and The Man in Black dueling atop the Cliffs of Insanity. I know Inigo and Wesley are where I picked up my thing for angsty anti-heroes.
The myths that probably have the most personal meaning for me, though, are this Scandinavian folktale about trolls, and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market." ( Read more... )
permetaform's post about "The Little Match Girl.""The Little Match Girl" deeply traumatised me as a small child, in a way that most other fairy tales (even the ones packed with death and gore and people being eaten alive and the chopping off of bodyparts) never did. I think it was not so much because the little girl died as because she died alone, with no one caring, and only her imagination to comfort her. The fact that she got to go be with the Baby Jebus in the end did not, in my six-year-old-self's estimation, make up for that.
Personal myths... hmmm. I loved fairy tales as a kid, and before I was out of elementary school I'd read all the Greek and Norse myths, Grimms Fairy Tales (the affore-mentioned blood and gore and people being eaten), and most of the Red/Green/Blue/Yellow/Pink/etc. Fairy books. Ruyard Kipling's "Just So Stories" would probably go somewhere near the top of the list, though, since my mother read them to me repeatedly when I was a small child. "How the Elephant Got His Trunk," "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin," "The Sing Song of Old Man Kangaroo," that story about the armadillos… The first story I ever wrote, when I was four or five or so, was essentially a fanfic for Kipling--my own "Just So Story" about how lambs ended up with wool (there once was a little lamb who was so filthy that his mother got mad and decided to scrub him clean. And she scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed, and the soap bubbles turned into wool).
Then there was The Wizard of Oz (the movie--I didn't read Frank L. Baum's book until I was nine or so), The Princess Bride, and Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang. The Wicked Witch of the West and the Child Catcher used to scare the daylights out of me, and I'm pretty sure my love of things like Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini novels and Pirates of the Caribbean goes right back to Inigo Montoya and The Man in Black dueling atop the Cliffs of Insanity. I know Inigo and Wesley are where I picked up my thing for angsty anti-heroes.
The myths that probably have the most personal meaning for me, though, are this Scandinavian folktale about trolls, and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market." ( Read more... )