Week 14 Reading Diary: Italian Folk Tales

(Medieval banquet, via Wikimedia Commons)

I really liked all the stories this week! I'm running kind of low on time, so this will have to be a quicker Reading Diary than most: here are two stories that I really enjoyed from this section, that intrigued me enough to be potential Storytelling material:

The Fair Angiola: so, Rapunzel is one of my favorite fairy tales and this is a very interesting variant of that tale--from the sentient housecleaning products in the witch's tower, to the fact that the witch bites off a part of Angiola's finger when Angiola keeps forgetting to tell her mother to make good on her deal with the witch, to the fact that the witch then turns Angiola's face into a dog's, everything is so interesting. But anyway, what I was thinking was to either write the story from Angiola's perspective the day that the prince arrives to climb up her hair and convinces her to run, beginning when she first sees him and ending with them both leaving would be a cool way to do this (also bringing this scene into the present day would also be very cool. Or maybe telling the story from the perspective of the household objects? Or maybe the balls of yarn? Or maybe telling the story from Angiola's perspective when she has the face of a dog? That must have been very, very weird...

Water and Salt: this is a crazy fairy tale. Every character in it is crazy. From the king that orders his daughter executed on a whim because she says that she only loves him as much as water and salt (although I've made this misstep with other people: if you're logical and not flowery-sounding about how much you love them sometimes they get very offended. Although I've never actually had one sentence me to execution), to the magician that the daughter (apparently?) falls in love with (or did I read the story wrong? I'll have to go back and check when I have more time) but then orders her to kill him for no reason the day before her father comes (is it his magical sacrifice that saves the kingdom? The story says that they quartered him and put his quarters in separate rooms. It also says that his quarters turned into precious stones and metals, which while great is not actually very helpful when we're trying to decide how he died after all). Anyway, I was thinking that it would actually be cool to tell this one from the king's perspective that had his daughter executed, during the final banquet....

Source: Italian Popular Tales by Thomas Frederick Crane (1885). Untextbook.