Week 13 Reading Diary: Russian Folktales, Extra Credit

(Leshy, via Wikipedia)

I really enjoyed the tales from this unit--I was looking for something written in a more colloquial style (see: I have reached exceeded my thinking capacity for this week, apparently, so stuff written in a higher style was out) and these stories all had really awesome characters--and so many twists! A lot of them deal with a sense of poetic justice, too, which is really satisfying to read when you're just done with everything! But anyway, here were some of the stories that I especially enjoyed:

The Water Snake: this one was actually really sad, but I thought it was interesting that, unlike so many other stories where the daughter is tricked into marriage, she actually ended up happier married than she was at home--I'm sure there's some kind of socioeconomic-situational stuff that I just didn't catch here, but that kind of ending to that particular kind of marriage isn't very common in fairy tales in general (at least not any that I've read, and especially not when the girl is tricked into marriage, as opposed to being sold/traded into it by a well-meaning but rather thick father). Anyway, the storytelling period for this week is over, but if I were to write a story about this one I would probably focus a bit on the snake's background--a legion of snake-people sounds really cool, actually--there might be more mythology out there that I could find...

The Leshy: I'm a sucker for stories that include "Green Men"--wild woodland spirits--although I find it really interesting that, in this case, the woodland spirit is related to the Devil (the spirit is the Devil's grandfather) as opposed to being a beneficiary of any of the characters in the story. If I were to write a story focusing on this one--although I suppose it would be possible to write a story that focused on a combination of some of these stories--I would focus on the priest's daughter's life after she goes to live with the huntsman as his wife. The story says that she was "given" in marriage to him, but I might change the story so that she ended up choosing him, or write one that focuses on the fact that she didn't agree to marry him. Or a story that focuses on the transition back to normal life from living with the man in the woods. That turned dark fast...I'll stop now...

Source: Russian Fairy Tales by W. R. S. Ralston (1887). Untextbook.