Faeries of Color: Tales of the Fae Beyond Europe

[marycatelli]

I was on this one.  The description was a little confused, because it seemed to operate on the assumption the fairy tales were tales about fairies.

Not much.  Talking animals are much more common even in Western European tales.  And obviously there are no fairies in fairy tales stemming from outside that region, because the other regions have their own beings, which may be more or less equivalent.

Brownie-like beings in Hawaii.  Folkloric creatures, who may or may not appear in fairy tales.

We got onto meaning, and I told the story of the solar myth as warning against thinking you can find a meaning.  (Did you know "Sleeping Beauty" is a solar myth?  So are "The Frog King," "Hansel and Gretel", and -- Napoleon Bonaparte.  This was a widely accepted folkloric theory, once upon a time, until the proof of the last did much to explode it.  Always be wary of meanings of fairy tales!)

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What other humanlike supernatural beings, from other parts of the world, did people mention?

[marycatelli]

I'm afraid that I don't remember names -- especially since several people who brought them up did not mention names. I remember one vampire which was just a head. . . .

[marycatelli]

Come to think of it, we got on foxes in Japan, which change into human shape, and I brought up how in European folklore, if an animal changes to a human, it was a human originally, but in Asian folklore, often the animal can just do it.

Once a snake turned into a man to become a monk under the Buddha, who caught him, told him to turn back to a snake and not eat anything, and once he starved to death, he would be reborn as a man and could become a monk.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Once a snake...

Poor snake.