![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Sleeping Beauties: Old-Time Styles
Oct. 19th, 2012 01:49 amWant to know a dirty little secret, Internets?
I have never written an entirely original thing in my life. I'm a magpie. I pick up shiny ideas and take them home and throw them into a nest until they turn into a big glittery ball of a novel. I have to pick apart a lot of the ideas before I can use them (… with my beak, this metaphor is starting to fall apart) or turn them into something else that I think will better add to the structural integrity of my new avant-garde jewelry, but I always start from somewhere else.
Usually, I start from a story.
Guardian of the Dead is about stories and the way they shape us, so it shouldn't be surprising that it engages with so many of them. It explicitly talks about A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Orpheus tale, and the stories of Maui and Hine-nui-te-Po, but it's also a Tam Lin story and a Beauty and the Beast story. I have it on very good authority that it's a Gothic tale, which surprised the heck out of me, but sure! The Shattering is not about stories, so it doesn't refer to as many, but it is explicitly and primarily a Summer King story and about the aftermath of that kind of sacrifice, from the point of view of those most harmed by it.
And When We Wake is a Sleeping Beauty story, through and through. I thought I would be a total nerd, and write some nerdly essays on Sleeping Beauty tellings and retellings. "One a month!" I said to myself. "Release one a month until the the publication of When We Wake!"
So let's start at the very beginning (the very best place to start), with the old European origins of the story I transplanted to future Australia.
The Sleeping Beauty archetype has a looong history as European stories go, probably well over a thousand years long. The earliest written antecedent is thought to be in the Icelandic Volsunga saga, which is one of those sagas the Vikings liked to tell each other on cold winter evenings, of which they had many. It was around in verbal form for centuries before it was recorded in prose from the epic poem - the Ramsund carving depicts events from the saga. But not the part we are concerned with, which features one of my favorite Sleeping Beauty figures, Brynhildr. There are a few variations of her story; this is my favorite.
( Read more... )
I have never written an entirely original thing in my life. I'm a magpie. I pick up shiny ideas and take them home and throw them into a nest until they turn into a big glittery ball of a novel. I have to pick apart a lot of the ideas before I can use them (… with my beak, this metaphor is starting to fall apart) or turn them into something else that I think will better add to the structural integrity of my new avant-garde jewelry, but I always start from somewhere else.
Usually, I start from a story.
Guardian of the Dead is about stories and the way they shape us, so it shouldn't be surprising that it engages with so many of them. It explicitly talks about A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Orpheus tale, and the stories of Maui and Hine-nui-te-Po, but it's also a Tam Lin story and a Beauty and the Beast story. I have it on very good authority that it's a Gothic tale, which surprised the heck out of me, but sure! The Shattering is not about stories, so it doesn't refer to as many, but it is explicitly and primarily a Summer King story and about the aftermath of that kind of sacrifice, from the point of view of those most harmed by it.
And When We Wake is a Sleeping Beauty story, through and through. I thought I would be a total nerd, and write some nerdly essays on Sleeping Beauty tellings and retellings. "One a month!" I said to myself. "Release one a month until the the publication of When We Wake!"
So let's start at the very beginning (the very best place to start), with the old European origins of the story I transplanted to future Australia.
The Sleeping Beauty archetype has a looong history as European stories go, probably well over a thousand years long. The earliest written antecedent is thought to be in the Icelandic Volsunga saga, which is one of those sagas the Vikings liked to tell each other on cold winter evenings, of which they had many. It was around in verbal form for centuries before it was recorded in prose from the epic poem - the Ramsund carving depicts events from the saga. But not the part we are concerned with, which features one of my favorite Sleeping Beauty figures, Brynhildr. There are a few variations of her story; this is my favorite.
( Read more... )
