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Bats for Tea
Registered User
(11/3/05 9:14 pm)
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hmm
I recall one of Grimm's tales. I don't know if it's quite what you had in mind, but i beleive it was called "Babes in the Wood". A young boy and girl sent away by their stepmother to be killed. Instead the men she payed to kill them simply left them in the forest, and they died of hunger and the cold.
As for mental illness in fairy tales, i think it all depends on how you look at it. There's a nutt in almost every story i can think of. Let's face it; Snow White's stepmother definately had some self esteme and abandonment issues lol
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(11/3/05 11:41 pm)
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deserting soldiers
This may be kind of prosaic after all those other posts. :)
But quite a few tales start out with one or more soldiers deciding to desert from the army, and becoming wanderers. Usually luck and cleverness take care of them. At least some are shrewd, practical. Sometimes such characters have just been discharged from the army, far from home, rather than deserting.
I've heard of current day deserters who wander homelessly so the authorities can't catch up with them.
Btw, I was just reading HUCKLEBERRY FINN and I was a little shocked at how they lived on the raft: sleeping naked outside in the "warm" rain. Louis L'Amour's books have a lot of people just wandering, living outdoors: competent sane people. It doesn't have the same stigma it has for us. I suppose there was a time between those eras and ours, when such wanderers were "hoboes" (sane, competent, honest people who did odd jobs) or "tramps" (likely thieves, perhaps drunk, but not necessarily considered crazy).
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Daniel
Unregistered User
(11/5/05 4:44 am)
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Re:Hmm.
"There's a nutt in almost every story I can think of".
What exactly do you mean by a "nutt"? Such a term
could be taken as offensive to the mentally ill.
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(11/5/05 5:43 pm)
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wanderer
:-) Warning, I'm simpled out and can't resist posting something that just turned up on Google:
Guardian Unlimited | Arts Friday Review | The Wanderer
The Wanderer Bernarda Fink tells Stephen Everson how persecution and exile shaped
her life as a mezzo-soprano Friday November 5, 2005 The Guardian ...
I was looking for "the Wanderer", thinking it used to be used for adventurers, Conan the Wanderer sort of thing. Apparently that was a title used for a collection of Conan stories.
There was a "Woot the Wanderer" in Oz. I have the impression that 'wanderer' was more or less respectable, at least in stories -- compared to our 'homeless' or even 'itinerant'.
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(11/6/05 10:04 pm)
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Woot the Wanderer, Conan
Thought I'd sent in a post here....
Oz had Woot the Wanderer, who seemed pretty accepted and respectable. A Conan anthology was titled CONAN THE WANDERER. My impression is that in some past cultures, wandering, even if it meant sleeping out of doors, was more accepted, at least in old stories, than our term 'homelessness' would suggest. It was a choice some people made. Presumably an unusual one -- but without the suggestion of helplessness or dysfunction.
Isn't there even a Rider-Waite tarot card about that? :-)
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