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Karen
Unregistered User
(11/16/01 8:37:07 am)
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Swallowing tongues
I've been looking at "The White Snake" (Grimm) lately- a man eats a snake and is thereby able to ingest and understand its language. For me this brings up the whole notion of incorporation- of swallowing or taking into yourself a part of another entity as a means of gaining power over that entity.
So I'm wondering just how common this sort of tale is. Does anyone know of other variants?
Thanks,
karen.
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(11/16/01 6:58:19 pm)
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Irish
I'd look at the Finn McCool stories where he sticks his finger into the salmon cooking, sucks on it, and can then understand the language of animals. And the Grimms Iron John who can also understand because of a similar situation.
(I think, am in a hotel room in Baltimore and trying to remember this.)
Jane
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Terri
Registered User
(11/17/01 6:01:11 am)
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Re: Irish
Karen, it's good to have you back. This tale reminds me of the old belief (among the Celts and others) that ingesting the heart (or brain) of your enemy will give you their strength. And Carrie pointed out, a long while ago on a Snow White thread, that the queen in Snow White insists upon eating the girl's heart...which is particularly interesting in the older versions where she's the girl's mother, not her step-mother...swallowing the child back into her body. She doesn't just want the girl dead; she wants to devour her...which leads one to wonder why, precisely. Perhaps this ritual meal is meant, either symbolically or in actuality, to give her the girl's youth?
Edited by: Terri at: 11/17/01 6:03:41 am
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Karen
Unregistered User
(11/17/01 2:01:15 pm)
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The interplay
Thanks for these references, Terri and Jane. Carrie's idea about Snow White was fascinating... I hadn't made the connection with the Celts, oddly enough- but they are interesting in this regard- the whole notion of consuming your enemy- not only literally eating him/her, but fashioning parts of his/her body into goods, commodities- so you, quite literally, are *enabled* by the enemy's downfall.
Now I'm wondering if something of this nature happens in trickster narratives. It just strikes me as something trickster might do. I know I have a "devouring" fetish, but I think this image is so rich- not only for depicting the relations between an older and younger generation (Snow White and (step)mother, Kronos and Zeus), but also for depicting the whole gamut of political, social and sexual encounters. I read somewhere that British officers in 'the colonies' used to refer to their lovers as "sleeping dictionaries"- because they would learn the language by taking a mistress- they 'consumed' the local women in order to ingest the native language and customs- and thereby establish their authority. So there's this funny interplay between language, eating and power....
But then there's Peter Greenway's film- "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover"- in which the thief murders his wife's lover by forcing the pages of his beloved books down his throat- and, in the final scene, the wife turns the tables by serving the murdered lover's body to her husband.... so the dialectic is more complicated there- consumption doesn't automatically equal power when it's your own words (or actions) you're swallowing. It's an opposing motion, almost (Apologies if this doesn't make sense yet).
karen.
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Midori
Unregistered User
(11/17/01 5:42:07 pm)
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swallowing monsters
Karen,
Along the lines of Greenway there's also the new visually arresting film version of "Titus Andronicus"...where Titus serves up the bodies of the Queen's sons as a form of pate...(also in that movie is a terrifying image of the armless maiden...)
But swallowing does go both ways...there's a good many figures in South African narratives swallowed by various monsters, and once ingested discover worlds which they then liberate, cutting their way out of the sides of the swallowing monster. And what about those versions where Little Red Riding hood is eaten whole by the wolf and then cut out again?
There is a wonderful trickster tale where trickster outwits a cannibal grandmother, dumps her into the pot and disguises himself as the old woman..when the grandchildren come home, trickster ladles up the pieces in the stew..and then begins a funny repetition (ala "grandmother what big eyes you have!) "Hey, this looks like my grandmother's foot...hey this looks like my grandmother's chin...
And isn't this similar to the giant tales where he winds up confusing the human sisters in the night with his giant daughters (a switch of identifying necklaces) and winds up eating them?
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(11/18/01 3:24:22 am)
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Grimm tales
And of course there is the Grimm story where the stepmother kills the boy, blames the sister, makes a stew of his body and serves it up for dinner. The sister gathers the bones and buries them and the little boy becomes a bird,
And we thought modern families were dusfunctional.
Jane
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(11/18/01 3:25:27 am)
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Grimm tales
And of course there is the Grimm story of the Juniper tree where the stepmother kills the boy, blames the sister, makes a stew of his body and serves it up for dinner. The sister gathers the bones and buries them and the little boy becomes a bird,
And we thought modern families were dysfunctional.
Jane
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Meagan
Unregistered User
(11/18/01 12:06:30 pm)
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Wolf and Eddie
Hi all,
I too am interested in the swallowing/consuming metaphor--as it relates to male/female relationships and especially when it is turned on its head.
I'm thinking specifically of Angela Carter's work--throughout the Bloody Chamber in particular. My favorite instance of hers appears in "The Company of Wolves."
Midori reminded me of this when she referred to Red's rescue from the belly of the wolf...
Carter's Red Ridinghood has quite an attitude regarding her carnal embrace with the wolf--when the old "what big...you have" exchange rounds to "the better to eat you with," Carter breaks from tradition (surprised?) and writes "the girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat."
Love it!
Meagan
Also, as an aside, doesn't Frankenfurter cook up Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show?
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Karen
Unregistered User
(11/20/01 1:08:44 pm)
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Carnal balance
Meaghan,
Thankyou for making me clearer to myself! I would like to discuss the
subject specifically as it relates to male-female relations- and whether
it is, as Midori notes above, a two way street in that regard. I was
reading Philip Lewis' Seeing THrough the Mother Goose Tales the other
day and his interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood is striking, especially
with regard to the whole devouring theme. He suggests that eating LRRH
might be a gesture of frustration on the wolf's part, a desperate lashing
out at his inability to establish a meaningful connection with the perpetually
naive LRRH- it's not so much an attempt at incorporation as it is a
measure of his failure to incorporate LRRH into his carnal dialectic.
Does anyone have any comments about this?
k.
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Robin
Unregistered User
(11/20/01 1:31:13 pm)
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re Swallowing Tongues
In line with the original post, I just wanted to add that the Norse saga of Fafnir seems to contain this sort of element as well. When Fafnir slays the dragon, he cooks its heart. Some of the grease splatters on his thumb, and when he puts his thumb in his mouth, he realizes that he can understand the language of the birds. I believe there is a similar Celtic story about Lugh, although it's the cauldron of Cerridwen that is the source of knowledge.
As an aside, these stories have been analyzed allegorically as tales of Shamanic initiation. Whether or not that was the original intent of the tales, it's an interesting parallel (violent initiation involving consumption, leading to sudden increase in knowledge, communication with animals/spirits, that sort of thing).
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Carrie
Unregistered User
(11/21/01 3:58:00 pm)
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Little Red
Karen,
I pondered the variations on Little Red Riding Hood in a poem I wrote. My take on this delicious tale is this -- red as the color of passion, the hood as a metaphor for virginity and of course the wolf as the devourer of carnal delights. However, I think LRRH is just as guilty of wanting to consume as the wolf. They are kindred in the desires of forbidden delights. And it is the wolf that pays the penalties -- not so the girl who was able to flaunt authority, play out her fantasies, flirt with death (I find it interesting still that orgasm means "little death") and walk away from the experience under the guise of youth and innocence. It furthers my interest to think of how frustrated men get when they can't understand women and all of the mysteries of womanhood. My mother, however, sees LRRH as a metaphor for a man wanting to own a woman. She saw the story as one of modern domestic abuse and the man who would kill his girlfriend or wife rather that let anyone else touch her. "If I can't have you no one else will..." I find it interesting that even though I nearly ended my life this way with my ex-husband, I never saw the parallel until she pointed it out. It's worth pondering, don't you think?
Carrie
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karen
Unregistered User
(11/25/01 1:20:52 pm)
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Yes, Carrie...
it is worth pondering! I want to see LRRH as a deviant, playful trickster figure too- and I think that's true of the Brothers Grimm version, but I can't trace that in Perrault's version- the ending leaves us with a very different kettle of fish.
Are you familiar with Helene Cixous' essay "Castration or Decapitation?" I think you'd like her interpretation of LRRH.
karen.
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Lotti
Unregistered User
(11/28/01 12:26:58 pm)
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Italian food
I read an Italian tale a short while ago, where upon eating the liver of a special bird the young man who ate it is -ahem- you know, when he feels the need to use the toilet - he is sh...ing gold. Sorry, that is the story. He is then tricked by an old and a young woman, who seduce him into marrying the young. On discovering his secret they make him throw up. The young woman, his wife, then eats the liver. In turn, he makes her throw up and eats the liver again. There are some other common images in the story (eating one kind of cabbage turns one into a donkey and eating another into a human again) but I found the disgusting thing about the liver particularly interesting.
Does any one have an idea why it would be the liver and not the heart, as one might expect?
His brother ate the head, with the same curios effect, by the way. This brother becomes king without much ado. Ít is the younger who has the story.
I have no idea, though, how it fits in with the newer postings... But I found the tale so strange, I just had to add this.
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(11/28/01 12:29:01 pm)
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gold/dung
I wonder how that story is related to the infamous Gold Dung Donkey story which Calvino was so fascinated with!
Jane
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Meagan
Unregistered User
(11/28/01 2:16:56 pm)
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yuck, Liver
Lotti,
I may just be pulling this out of thin air, but I believe some cultures hold that the seat of emotions--love especially--is the liver rather than the heart. I can't remember where I read that, but maybe someone here can help us out.... In the meantime, I'll see if I can find the reference.
M
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summersinger
Registered User
(11/28/01 5:11:48 pm)
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Re: yuck, Liver
The Greeks thought the liver was the source of lust. One of the giants in Tartarus was there because he tried to rape Hera. The punishment was the same as Prometheus' - having his liver ripped out every day by birds. One of those "punishment fits the crime" things. Eeew.
-Julia
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Midori
Unregistered User
(11/29/01 4:43:31 pm)
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liver
The French have a thing about the liver too..there's an old proverb about "Is life worth living? It depends on the liver." (ha ha...now you know why the French knighted Jerry Lewis) But my father who was a Parisian often used the expression "un crise du fois" (I hope the spelling is correct!)...a "crisis of the liver"..to explain any and all illness. He had terrible heart disease and it was still spoken about among his family as a crisis of the liver...
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catja1
Registered User
(12/8/01 7:22:14 pm)
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Re: ingesting body parts
I think it's a Norse tale, where the heart and the liver of a bird are to be cooked, and whoever eats it receives a gold coin under her pillow every night...? Does anyone remember the title? there's a rich brother/poor brother motif as well.
Oh, re the Celtic connection: in Welsh tales, Taliesin also tasted contents of a cauldron that he was not supposed to, and acquired wisdom. When the goddess Cerridwen found out, she chased him, and they turned themselves into all manner of things until finally he became a grain of wheat, she became a chicken and ate him. She then gave birth to him (in human form) nine months later.
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AM
Registered User
(12/8/01 8:44:13 pm)
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The Meat of Tongue
I think it was in a retelling of the Scheherazade tales that I heard a story about a king whose wife was sickly and could not be cured. He met a peasant who had a healthy happy wife and asked him what he did to make his wife so. The peasant replied that he fed her the meat of the tongue. So the king went home and ordered that his wife only be served the best tongues, but she got no better. So the king went back to the peasant and switched wives. The peasant's wife began to wither as the king's wife grew healthy, because the
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AM
Registered User
(12/8/01 8:46:55 pm)
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The Meat of Tongues cont..
"meat" the peasant had meant was his words and ideas. He talked to his wife and fed her with love and kindness.
Anna Marie
P.S. I don't know how this got cut off the first message.
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catja1
Registered User
(12/9/01 8:04:07 pm)
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Re: The Meat of Tongues cont..
Anna Marie,
That's a great story! it's "Tongue Meat" in Angela Carter's _Virago Book of Fairy Tales_ (aka _The Old Wives' Book of Fairy Tales_).
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Laura McCaffrey
Registered User
(12/10/01 5:49:25 am)
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Ceridwen
Catja or anyone else-
Do you know where one can find the Ceridwen tale, besides Graves' _White
Goddess_ or sources that are taking it from White Goddess? I've read it
in White Goddess, but am interested to see source notes and I don't believe
he has any. The only other versions I've found to date use _White Goddess_
as their source, but don't provide additional source material.
Thanks in advance. Laura Mc
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catja1
Registered User
(12/10/01 11:24:43 am)
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Re: Ceridwen
The Taliesin/Cerridwen story can be found in Lady Charlotte Guest's translation
of the Mabinogian; also, Patrick K. Ford, _The Mabinogi and Other Medieval
Welsh Tales_. He also shows up in the fantasies of Charles Williams, and
in John Rhys' _Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx_. James MacKillop also
mentions _The Poems of Taliesin: English Version by J.E. Caerwyn Williams,
ed. Ifor Williams.
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