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#folklore

41 posts22 participants3 posts today

#FolkloreSunday: `#Fionn Mac Cumhail was tracking Gráinne. So she hid from her former suitor on a magical rowan tree. But the leader of the Fianna suspected where she and her lover Diarmait were. He sat beneath the tree of the giant named Searbhan and began to play fidchell that had been Diarmait’s passion, against his friend Oisín the bard. Unable to resist indicating the best move to his chum, Diarmait dropped berries onto the board from above, thus revealing his location to Fionn. And so the pursuit began again.`
Source: P. Monaghan `Encyclopedia of #Celtic #Mythology and #Folklore`

The Nine Standards are large stone cairns high on the moors between Cumbria and North Yorkshire. Their age is uncertain and their origins mysterious. They may have been erected to mark a watershed, with the nearby headwaters of the River Swale flowing east towards the North Sea and those of the Eden and Lune flowing west towards the Irish Sea. A more fanciful explanation is that the Romans - or, perhaps, later the English - set the Nine Standards up to scare off the Scots, by giving the impression soldiers were massing on the hills. Often swathed in mist or under glowering cloud, the cairns remain majestic and enigmatic landmarks. #psychogeography #history #folklore #hiking #weird #gothic

Guess who finally located a folkloric source of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” (if not of Robert Southey’s “The Three Bears”)? 😀

This is something that has been nagging at me for the last few years. Several writers allude to the existence of such a source, but none have published it because the Norwegian dialect of the original publication is rather impenetrable.

In fact, the folktale gives a backstory involving trolls (of course), and unites “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” with “Snow White” (not remarked upon by the above-mentioned writers, whose information is partial and second-hand), making the world as a whole just a little more rational.

Translation and commentary in due course.

#AmTranslating #AmWriting #Folklore #NorwegianFolktales #Folktale #Bookstodon

(If you can identify the artist behind the attached illustration, please let me know who it is, and the edition it appears in.)