An aside... (regarding folk tales)

Both "Bustle in your Hedgerow" and "Walkabout" are games about stories, and about the mythlore underlying reality versus the impact of individuals. Sort of... 

...it's actually a fairly common theme through a lot of my games. So naturally when this came across my feed, it got my attention.

The first volume of the Grimmsā€™ ā€œChildrenā€™s and Household Talesā€ was published in December of 1812. It contained 86 stories, including classics like ā€œRapunzel,ā€ ā€œHansel and Gretel,ā€ ā€œSnow White,ā€ ā€œRumpelstiltskin,ā€ ā€œBriar Rose,ā€ and ā€œLittle Red Riding Hood,ā€ along with extensive footnotes. Critics werenā€™t sure what to make of a collection of ā€œchildrenā€™s talesā€ that came with scholarly addenda and sexual innuendos. For the Grimms, what mattered was to be authentic, not appropriate, and fairy tales, across many literary traditions, werenā€™t always intended for children.
Then, there was the matter of the Grimmsā€™ languageā€”sparse, hectic, visceral, unfiltered. In the preface, the brothers boasted of the collectionā€™s fidelity to their sources: ā€œNo circumstance has been poeticized, beautified, or altered.ā€ Well, that much was clear, complained the Grimmsā€™ old friend Clemens Brentano. ā€œIf you want to display childrenā€™s clothes,ā€ Brentano wrote, ā€œyou can do that with fidelity without bringing out an outfit that has all the buttons torn off, dirt smeared on it, and the shirt hanging out of the pants.ā€
But the Grimms wanted to preserve the culture of the common folk, not to make the folk sound cultured. Their aim in collecting folkloreā€”alongside the fairy tales, they published legends, songs, and mythsā€”was to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers. The brothers believed that shared language and cultural traditions could be the connective yarn of a people, their people. ā€œAll that was needed was a fellow, or two, to come along with a spinning wheel,ā€ Jennifer Wilson writes. Read about the Grimmsā€™ quest to bring forth an authentically Teutonic spiritā€”a story both enchanting and disenchanting:

Here's the article.




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