Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

Retelling King Arthur -- or Robin Hood -- hits a major problem:  the characters are given.  And the tension between the readers' thinking "No, you've got that wrong," and the readers' thinking, "Same old, same old," is even tighter than in most works of fiction, because readers will allow more leeway in what dragons can do than in what, say, Lancelot's character is like.

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There are shadows creeping about the city at night. . . not those attached to feet. . . .

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Once upon a time. . . .there was this knight.  Now he's still a knight -- an eldritch knight, haunting the crossroad.
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Pondering it after reading an otherwise good fairy-tale-based novel.  Because at one point, a minor character, a mute girl, had gotten a working name by the cook's taking her out into the garden and telling her to pick a plant -- they would use that.

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A look into folklore for this evening.

One notes, in the folklore, they would be more likely to want our sweat than our brains.

Then, the movie zombie is, in actuality, a medieval European vampire with a few tweaks. . .

Malory and all the earlier romancers might cheerfully plop King Arthur in the High Middle Ages, and Howard Pyle might boldly describe the setting of Robin Hood as the land of fancy, but nowadays, just about any retelling of King Arthur or Robin Hood or what have you goes for the nitty-gritty realistic style (surreptiously idealized in certain aspects -- the pagans, for instance, would never recognize the religions).

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Ah, the grand combination:  the girl has her choice and has to choose between two guys.

Usually it's the girl in the middle.

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There are two main Faust works for the English speaking world:  Marlowe's and Goethe's.

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The term "toddler" was a quite recent invention.  "Baby" encompassed the age span well into the twentieth century.

During the Winter War, a Soviet division broke and fled the Finnish forces over a frozen lake.  The Finns broke up the ice, and as one Finn described it later, "They are still there."

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I was in the audience for this one.

Touched on it as the place of the dead, the place of demons, the dangerous place of great knowledge where you must quest.

One writer explained how a first reader told her she had to send her characteres into the Underworld and dang if that wasn't just what the novel needed.

One brought up Liz William's Inspector Chen series where Inspector Chen has a partner who was a demon, and had worked for Hell's Vice Squad and consequently has to remind himself that on earth, the Vice Squad has a rather different purpose.

One panelist explained the "Lyke Wake Dirge" as a journey to the Afterlife, and despite its refrain "And Christ receive your soul" said it wasn't very Christian.  (I differ a bit:  it tells you how to escape the perils, and its recommendations are exactly those of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats:  alms-giving.)

One audience member recommended Groundhog Day as being trapped in an Underworld, and a panelist thanked him because people keep recommending it to her as a romantic comedy, but knowing its a story about being trapped in the Underworld is just the spur to get her to watch it.

Someone in the audience told about a twentieth century novel that used Hell for social satire and asked when it was switched from being serious; whereupon someone told him about The Frogs which is an ancient play using Hades to satirize that era's play-writing, and all the panelists agreed that it was used for satire probably from day one.