Our
last meeting's theme was My Dodgy Valentine,
and Raphael opened with an amazing version of The
Master-Thief,
a traditional folktale that you can find in Grimm – but not the way
he
told it. Raphael's master-thief had a sister who had been in a coma
ever since he went away, and whom he said he wanted to marry, and the
three thefts from the Count [his guarded horse from its guarded
stable, the sheet from his bed and the wedding-ring from his wife's
finger, and finally the vicar and verger from the church] were all to
acquire the Count's permission for the match. When he accomplished
them, he bent over his unconscious sister, whispered in her ear and
then departed, never to be seen again. But she, as she woke, said
only, “He has stolen my heart.” And after Raphael said that, you
could have heard a pin drop.
Maddy's
tale dealt with the importance of following instructions precisely
when taking medicines, and the dangerous side-effects of fertility
treatments – well, you don't want to have a huge woman-eating
serpent as a son, do you? However, thanks to consulting a properly
qualified health professional [aka the
Wise Woman]
and doing exactly what she said, the brave lower-class girl was able
to draw the snake into a mutual strip-tease and turn him back into a
human being and a proper husband. [Don't know if this treatment works
with husbands who aren't literally
snakes.]
Laura
covered the difficulty of finding an appropriate mate – but
selection criteria seem a bit clearer in the animal kingdom, and
especially among Vogelkop bower-birds, where the selfish gene is the
one for interior design, and the audience was delighted to hear Barry
triumph over Derek [aka Vlad
Raven McBlackbird
– he was after freaky Goth chicks] and win the rump of Veronica,
before she fluttered off to raise the brood on her own. The audience
definitely appreciated the way in which the aesthetic dimension of
the bower-bird cast light on contemporary artistic practice and the
way in which it is discussed.
Mike,
as host, closed the first half with an account of the Eh'häusl
in Amberg in the Oberfalz – a tiny house that was passed on from
one poor loving couple to another, so that they could meet the
property-owning requirement needed to get permission to marry from
the town council.
Jill's
headline story was The
Enchanted Palace
from Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales,
with bookish Fiordinando being introduced to the delights of hunting
[not!] and choosing instead to follow a mysterious white hare to an
enchanted palace, where he eats a delicious meal with a veiled lady
and then finds her getting into bed with him, naked. As a gentleman,
he does nothing, not even the second night, but the third time he
finds his way there he has been home in the meantime, and the mother
has advised him to get a look at the woman's face, which he does at
the dinner table, and of course this is disastrous!
So now he has to follow her to Paris, but there his wine and food are
drugged three times in a row by the jealous innkeeper's daughter, and
the Queen of Portugal [for so she is – staying at the Premier Inn
down the road, of course] can only leave tokens of her affection for
the slumbering Fiordinando, which the interfering hermit takes into
safe keeping, so as to hand them over when the lad wakes up after the
third occasion. Inspired by these signs that affection is mutual,
Fiordinando sets off for the tournament at Peterborough, where the
Queen of Portugal is to be the prize, and, despite his bookish
beginnings, jousts well enough to win her hand – he had her heart
already! All these involved improbabilities delivered with gusto and
delight!
Finally,
Mike told The
Scales of Happiness,
in which two unattractive people entrust the handing-over of their
valentines to two attractive ones – who, each perhaps influenced by
the sight of the card in the other's hand, promptly fall in love. In
dreams they see the Scales of Happiness, where one person's joy is
always counterweighted by another's sorrow, but nonetheless they stay
as happy ever after as people can be who aren't in a story – only
of course they are
in a story! Lucky them!
Next
month: all
at sea
No comments:
Post a Comment