Random myth/folklore thing
Jan. 8th, 2012 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwJust gotta say - mythology and folklore are fully as weird as anything Rule 34-ed on the internet. Fully. Even in the expurgated Time-Life or Bullfinch's or Andrew Lang versions. Let alone whatever semi-expurgation there is in the British and Scottish Popular Ballads.
Having your magician uncle turn you (male) and your best friend (male) into alternating male-female animal pairs every year to mate and have kids?
Pregnant fairy women transformed into mice which you take up on hilltops and build elaborate tiny gallows for?
Swapping bodies with the lord of the underworld for a year so that you can slay his enemy for him and having to resist his hot wife who's making up to you because you're wearing her husband's body every night for a year and listening to her sob her broken heart out while you cling to a manly notion of honor?
Singing your mom a little song about how you impregnated your sister and took her out in the woods and killed her to hide the fact? Creeeeepy, and beyond Jerry Springer-ish.
And that's totally leaving aside the whole Gargantua/Pantagruel thing, or the Canterbury Tales, or the Arabian Nights - with the creepy donkey genitalia and fruit political thing and the butt kissing and the cabinets full of stacked dignitaries locked away by the girl they're sleeping with and losing control of their bowels on each other in an order that mimics/mocks a social hierarchy.
All of which I mention explicitly by way of saying: folks who go on and on about how the internet has degraded human communication and rendered us more something something? Need to check their sources. People are people. This is the kind of stuff they talk about. Look at Greek pottery, if you care to. Give people art tools and writing tools and they tell stories full of scatological, sexual, and sociological details. It's a thing. It's not time or medium dependent.
Having your magician uncle turn you (male) and your best friend (male) into alternating male-female animal pairs every year to mate and have kids?
Pregnant fairy women transformed into mice which you take up on hilltops and build elaborate tiny gallows for?
Swapping bodies with the lord of the underworld for a year so that you can slay his enemy for him and having to resist his hot wife who's making up to you because you're wearing her husband's body every night for a year and listening to her sob her broken heart out while you cling to a manly notion of honor?
Singing your mom a little song about how you impregnated your sister and took her out in the woods and killed her to hide the fact? Creeeeepy, and beyond Jerry Springer-ish.
And that's totally leaving aside the whole Gargantua/Pantagruel thing, or the Canterbury Tales, or the Arabian Nights - with the creepy donkey genitalia and fruit political thing and the butt kissing and the cabinets full of stacked dignitaries locked away by the girl they're sleeping with and losing control of their bowels on each other in an order that mimics/mocks a social hierarchy.
All of which I mention explicitly by way of saying: folks who go on and on about how the internet has degraded human communication and rendered us more something something? Need to check their sources. People are people. This is the kind of stuff they talk about. Look at Greek pottery, if you care to. Give people art tools and writing tools and they tell stories full of scatological, sexual, and sociological details. It's a thing. It's not time or medium dependent.
