Saturday, December 19, 2020

 

WHAT YOU MISSED


More people attended than one preZoomed would!


Maddie, Paul, Taprisha, Dan, Ian, Iona, Mike and Raph all told, while Liz, Norman, Tom, Juliet, Janet and John listened.


Raph began with a story in which a Canadian trapper is pleased to hear that other trappers avoid a particular area of the forests because they believe it is haunted by a werewolf. A deserted forest means better pickings for him, thinks Baptiste Durand. However, firstly he finds himself hunted by the Devil’s Flying Canoe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasse-galerie) and then his lead dog slips the traces. He flounders through the snow, grabs the dog, puts him back in the traces, and whips up the team. But something wolf-like is pursuing him, and gaining! He fires twice, but misses! The shape leaps on him – and licks his face! It is Loup, his lead-dog, who had been left behind… but if this is his lead-dog, who is in the traces? A grateful werewolf, freed from enchantment, of course! And with the lead-dog back in place, he can outrun the Canoe!


For those who want to know more about the Cursed Canoe, I recommend this splendid song in Quebec French https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efpdOA4y5IE

But if you want to know what they’re singing about, you’ll need the words:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8l0rqE3qJo


Paul continued with a Haida story from Canada’s Pacific Northwest about a man oppressed by his mother-in-law whose quiet response is to transform himself into a Wasgo, http://www.occultopedia.com/w/wasgo.htm, a sea-monster whom he first has to kill, but whose enormous strength enables him to bring increasingly vast quantities of sea-food (culminating in three killer-whales) to feed the family. The mother-in-law boastfully ascribes the plentiful provision of meat on the doorstep to her prayers to the Sea-God. Disabused by the appearance of the Wasgo, she faints and dies. Her daughter recognises the Wasgo as her husband by his eyes, but knows he will never return to her, though he continues to deliver fish daily on the doorstep.


Iona followed this with something equally exotic, if a little closer to home: an account of her native Shetland Yule customs, and the sad tale of two children left at home alone who were stolen away by the trowies and subsequently found dead, all because their mother, keen to go partying, had omitted elementary precautions…


Ian lifted the mood slightly with a version of Frost the Bridegroom, which has two dead girls and one rich one at the end of it. Here is the way that Arthur Ransome tells it

https://www.worldoftales.com/European_folktales/Russian_Folktale_21.html#gsc.tab=0


Taprisha told us the story of an urbanised Nenet family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nenets_people) whose father takes them into the wilderness, where, because the children are slow to bank up the fire, the Blizzard Witch steals away the mother, while the father is out hunting. But, when the blizzard dies, the children (Daughter with Knife, Son with Bow) go out on the snow, where the Sun gives the boy Three Arrows of Light. Helped by the Reindeer, after one Arrow of Light has frightened away the Wolf, they come, crossing a Chasm thanks to the Daughter spinning a rope from her long hair, which she cuts off, to the Ice Palace in which the Mother is trapped. A second Arrow of Light brings the Uncles of the Northern Lights to dance. The final Arrow of Light kills the Blizzard Witch, and the Wind, which had been cold, turns warm, melts the Ice Palace and frees the Mother, so they can all go home to their tent where their Father is waiting.


Since we were already in the snow, it made sense for Mike to tell one of the many possible stories of the Yuki-Onna (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuki-onna) though he tells it his way, with a little carved woodcutter, and many references to Japanese woodcuts, based on Lafcadio Hearn’s version, but without personal names. (He first heard it told by Giles Abbott in the Earthouse, but has read round it since, and feels it’s become his own.)


And after that, Dan, our Japanese expert, discussed the other versions, and told them in bare-bones form, including the tale of the tsurara-onna

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsurara-onna) the Icicle Woman, who melts when she bathes in an onsen (hot spring).


Maddie brought proceedings to an official conclusion with a wonderful and lovingly detailed version of Old Appletree Man. (Here, as a curiosity, is what looks like a Google-translated version of the story out of Russian

https://worldmythology56.blogspot.com/2013/01/apple-tree-man.html )


Those who didn’t have to go to bed immediately were treated to Raph telling/reading The Spirit of the Snows, a tale from Shadow Forms, by Manly P. Hall (a source of one or two other stories that Raph tells) in which a Japanese in Canada tells a Canadian about the Yuki-Onna, and the Canadian experiences this New World variant, in which the beloved who froze to death becomes a spirit with whom he is reunited by also freezing to death…


And then we all went to bed, to get warm… but took great care, because Dan had told us about the Japanese belief that the soul leaves the body when we sleep, and sometimes, if our pillows end up in funny positions, cannot get back in again, so that we are assumed to be dead… !


Here, finally, is the little woodcutter figure that the woodcutter carved for his child in the Yuki-Onna story




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