folklore and fantasy

[marycatelli]

One thing about folklore -- it's sloppy.  The sort of world-building you would never get away with in a fantasy novel.

Are ghosts corporal?  Obviously not -- the corpse is buried.  But folklore frequently has ghosts that can do quite corporeal things.  There's a Norse legend where the ghost is in the habit of wrestling with those it meets -- and it's a good wrestler.

And even if it had the power to move the corpse from the grave without opening it, there are the grateful dead.  They can pass themselves off as completely human until he end of the story.  And then only because they reveal the truth.  But the entire point of a grateful dead story -- what exactly inspires the gratitude -- is that the corpse is buried.

And then you get the ones that reappear as talking animals.  Or a tree and doves -- well, maybe Cinderella's mother was guiding those, not actually was those. . . .

sigh

Comments

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

This may be one of the problems the nineteenth-century spiritualists (or whoever they got the idea from) were attempting to deal with when they came up with the concept of ghosts being composed of ectoplasm, which is apparently supposed to be able to shift from a wispy, near-imperceptible state to a clearly visible and semi-solid one. Or maybe the spirits allegedly invoked at seances were supposed to be capable of simply teleporting--or something--back to the spirit realm once the seance was over.

[marycatelli]

Could be. . . .

Also could be a side-effect of the mind-body interaction conundrum, which has plagued philosophers for millennia. It's very like the "spirits" of medieval philosophy, which were so thin and refined the soul could act on them.