Prompted by [livejournal.com profile] 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." When I was six or so, I got ahold of D'Aulaire's Scandanavian folktales out of my local library, and read the troll story (about how trolls lived in the mountains and under bridges and liked to eat little children with blond hair, and could only be escaped if you managed to stay uneaten until dawn, when they turned to stone). Since I had dandelion-fluff-like white blonde hair as a small child, this was like opening up a book to find "THE TROLLS WANT TO EAT YOU. YES, ELSPETHDIXON, YOU." written in block letters across the page. I spent a good potion of my childhood terrified of trolls. When my dad read The Hobbit to me a couple years later, the troll scene made a big impression on me, and I still have issues with walking under underpasses and things in the dark.

"Goblin Market," a narrative poem about two sisters who buy enchanted fruit from goblins despite being warned against it, and then suffer the consequences, I discovered on my own around second grade or so, in an illustrated picture book in my local library. The basic run down of the story (which is a bit more complicated then the troll story) is that there are two sisters, Laura and Lizzie (which just happened to be my own nickname), who are out walking at twilight when they come upon a horde of little animal-human hybrid goblins, offering a long list of exotic fruits for sale. Laura buys fruit from them, despite having been told she's not supposed to, and it's so wonderful that after she's eaten it, she begins to waste away with the longing for more. But of course, because these are goblins, and it's magic fruit, you can only purchase it once--every time she goes looking for the goblins, they are no longer there. Lizzie, who has previously ignored the goblins the way a good girl should, not even looking at them, goes out on her own to search for them and get Laura more fruit. She gives them money for fruit and, when she refuses to eat with them, saying she wants to take the fruit home for later, they "cuffed and caught her, Coaxed and fought her, Bullied and besought her, Scratched her, pinched her black as ink" and pelt her with fruit until she's dripping with juice and pulp. Then she runs away home to Laura and, in a scene that I only recently (upon rereading) realised is astonishingly full of lesbian overtones, gets her to literally drink the fruit juice off her skin. And then Laura is cured, because the second time around, the fruit is bitter and horrible. I don't know why this poem/story affected me so strongly--possibly because the pictures were so pretty, especially the one of Lizzie running home covered in fruit, her hair streaming out behind her dyed a rainbow of colours from the fruit juice, or possibly because of the vivid catalogue of the different types of goblins and all of their fruits, or possibly because it was one of the only fairytales I'd ever read where a girl saves another girl, instead of being saved by a prince.

But anyway, it did make a huge impression on me, in part because it conveyed the idea that fantasy is somehow more real, more vivid than real life, no matter how dangerous it can be (in retrospect, The Wizard of Oz conveys this idea, too, with Oz filmed in colour while Kansas is entirely black and white), that girls can be heroes too, especially older sisters, and that other people who are different from you(read: normal) can beat you black and blue for displeasing them, but they can't force you to become like them if you truly don't want to--the way the goblins, no matter what they tried, couldn't get Lizzie to sit down and eat with them. And because Laura, even while wasting away and dying, never regretted having eaten the fruit in the first place, because tasting it was worth it even if it had doomed her.

In my own personal interpretation, the goblin fruit is, in a way, representative of fantasy, imagination, sex, all of those frowned on and not entirely savory things that "good girls don't do." It's like the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, but instead of making you aware of good and evil, it makes you aware of all of those things outside everyday life--those things one isn't supposed to pay attention to, because they distract you from jobs, and school, and making money, and school, and keeping house, and the whole slew of "normal" things that many people think are all that's important. Things that are frivolous, or "immoral," or "sinful," or "a waste of time." Eating the fruit can hurt you in the end--can make you unfit to stay in the same everyday world as everyone else, or just acquiring the fruit can be painful, but when all is said and done, even when the experience isn't fun, it's worth it. And lesbian sex saves lives, yo.
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From: [personal profile] alyndra


*friends you*

No, seriously, I've been reading some of your stuff trying to figure out whether I should (it was A Pirate's Life which I read and really liked and even recced, that inspired this investigation) and I got to this post and yes. Yes. *g*
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