- 10 months ago
Medieval historian Dr. Juliette Wood joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about folklore.
Director: Lauren Zeitoun
Director of Photography: Simon Van Parijs
Editor: Paul Tael; Alex Mechanik
Expert: Juliette Wood
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Senior Casting Producer: Nicole Ford
Camera Operator: Davide Bianco
Gaffer: Jake Newell
Sound Mixer: Sean Simpson
Production Assistant: Grace OConnor
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo
Additional Editor: Sam DiVito
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Director: Lauren Zeitoun
Director of Photography: Simon Van Parijs
Editor: Paul Tael; Alex Mechanik
Expert: Juliette Wood
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Senior Casting Producer: Nicole Ford
Camera Operator: Davide Bianco
Gaffer: Jake Newell
Sound Mixer: Sean Simpson
Production Assistant: Grace OConnor
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo
Additional Editor: Sam DiVito
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00I am Juliette Wood. Can I say I'm Dr. Juliette Wood?
00:03Yeah.
00:03Yes, my mother's ghost will come back if I don't say that.
00:06Hello, I am Dr. Juliette Wood, and this is Folklore Support.
00:14First question from Josua.
00:16How did unicorns go from being thought of as dangerous beasts of the wilderness
00:21to being possibly the most stereotypical cutesy thing for little girls in modern Western culture?
00:27Initially, the unicorn was thought of as a real exotic beast.
00:31The Greeks and the Romans really thought it existed at the edge of the world.
00:35It was fast, it was vicious, it never really got together with other creatures except when it was mating,
00:41but it defended its young.
00:43By the medieval period, it becomes associated with a Christ symbol, the lady and the unicorn.
00:48The unicorn goes to the Virgin, puts its head in her lap, and the hunters can capture it.
00:53And it kind of stays this way for a very long time.
00:57It appears really in the 1990s as a kind of popular culture thing.
01:02In the 1930s, J.D. Rockefeller gave beautiful unicorn tapestries, famous unicorn tapestries,
01:08to a museum in New York, the Cloisters Museum.
01:11So you're beginning already to get the unicorn seen as something popular, something modern,
01:18rather than a medieval or a classical image.
01:21It becomes a fantasy creature, a couple of very famous fantasies written about the unicorn in the 1960s.
01:27Other fantasy writers take it, take it up, and suddenly you begin to get it merchandised.
01:32This, for example, which is a little box with a unicorn on it, a little papier-mâché box,
01:37which you could buy at any craft fair.
01:40Pink ones abound because of the little girls and the My Little Pony.
01:43What you see here is how folklore works.
01:46It's very dynamic.
01:47You have something which starts off as speculation about a real creature.
01:51Does it exist?
01:52It becomes a medieval image, a Christian image, associated with art and with sort of explanations.
01:58It becomes a modern artistic image in the tapestries.
02:02It becomes written in fantasy, and it kind of suddenly explodes outwards.
02:07And you get all these beautiful unicorns, not only little girls.
02:11Keep in mind that they're also an important pride symbol as well.
02:14They become something which all kinds of groups can find meaning in.
02:20Meaning which was not there to begin with, but which in a sense is possible in this kind of wonderful creature.
02:26The next question is from Dr. Bushka.
02:30Why are there so many stories across time and cultures about mysterious little people?
02:36Miniaturization of sort of folklore beings is actually something that has occurred more recently than has occurred in the past.
02:44You can see this with fairies kind of shrinking, leprechauns shrinking.
02:48I suppose one of the things that if they're sort of tiny creatures, you kind of don't see them easily.
02:54So they can kind of come out and jump at you.
02:57The thing that comes to mind is in one of Gulir Malditora's films, he had something called the Tooth Fairy,
03:02which was so cute until it got you and ate your bones from the inside out.
03:07And I think he really captured the cuteness and the horror of these small creatures.
03:13Jezwar asks, where does the idea for magic wands come from?
03:19Wands have often been associated with symbols of power.
03:22Kings carried them, magicians carried them, and they were very large.
03:26They really, really said, you know, here I am and I'm very, very important.
03:30You get in the Middle Ages, you will often see Merlin carrying a long wand.
03:35But as magic sort of comes into its own much later on, particularly when you begin to get sort of the stage magicians,
03:42the wands become too big to carry around and therefore they become much smaller.
03:47Once you have a smaller wand, the sense of sort of calling up the magic sort of occurs.
03:53So, you know, you're facing a bubbling cauldron and you bring out whatever it is in the cauldron that you want to bring out.
03:59You're facing an enemy and you kind of zap them with the wand.
04:02And that's kind of carried back over into contemporary fantasy, which often involves fairies with small wands or children, again,
04:11who would look a bit silly with these great big things.
04:13The next question, TapTap26, are memes technically internet folklore?
04:17That's exactly what they are.
04:19They're something that really has been created by the internet.
04:22So rather than going from person to person, they will go from website to website.
04:27And that basically is how internet folklore works.
04:29The next question comes from TheZombieWoof.
04:32Seriously though, did any one of you ever find razor blades in your Halloween candy?
04:38Well, I never have.
04:39This is part of the sort of folklore that surrounds Halloween.
04:43And it's also part of the stranger danger that surrounds Halloween.
04:47The idea that here are all these sort of innocent sort of neighborhood children going from house to house.
04:52And you get one person who hates Halloween or hates children and therefore tries to kill them.
04:57Undoubtedly, children may very well get sick on some of the things they eat at Halloween.
05:00But that's probably not because anyone's deliberately poisoning them.
05:04What it does reflect is this interaction of social situations.
05:08So the Halloween candy, the poisoned Halloween candy, is a kind of, not so much a bogeyman for children.
05:15I think it's more a bogeyman for adults, quite frankly.
05:18The fear that something is going to happen to their children when they're off doing something innocent.
05:23Starry dojo.
05:24Are mermaids and sirens different or am I stupid?
05:29Well, you're not stupid.
05:30Sirens initially were voiced and they were seen as birds, vultuous birds with women's heads.
05:39And what they would do is they would stand on a cliff and sing and lure the sailors into the water and to their death.
05:45They represent the threats and the dangers of travel and the sea.
05:50Now, Ulysses had himself tied to the mast and stopped his men's ears with wax.
05:55And because of this, the sirens were so frustrated that they drowned themselves into the sea,
06:02where they acquired fishtails and become mermaids.
06:06Mermaids also stick their heads above the waves and sing, trying to lure the sailors to their death, basically.
06:12But in the Middle Ages, mermaids were also very often associated with sinfulness,
06:17particularly the sinfulness associated with women, the way they sort of tempted men to do things they shouldn't.
06:23But then again, by the time you get to the 19th century, you have really wonderfully good mermaids.
06:28And by the time you get to Disney, you have a mermaid who is, you know, a feisty adolescent
06:33and very, very different from anything that either the Greeks or the medieval world thought of.
06:38This question is from Veer03255.
06:42Why are vampire stories always tied with werewolves?
06:46Both vampires and werewolves are sort of what anthropologists call liminal beings.
06:53In other words, they exist between life and death.
06:55Human beings who don't quite make it past death.
06:59So the idea that sort of a thing would come out of the grave, which looked, you know, vaguely human,
07:05you find particularly in Slavic countries.
07:10Now, with werewolves, wolves have always been outsiders in society.
07:14They're dangerous.
07:15They're the sort of dangerous dog.
07:18There's also another set of folklore which goes with them,
07:21in that sometimes they are cursed because of something that is done,
07:26not necessarily by the werewolf himself or herself, but by the family.
07:31They kind of can't die.
07:33They get sort of stuck in the middle.
07:35Neither vampire nor werewolf really actively becomes a vampire or a werewolf.
07:40So you get this notion of those things which are beyond human control.
07:45And it's certainly something which I think it's safe to say all cultures fear.
07:50We're afraid of the dark.
07:51We're afraid of the nightmare world.
07:53And these two characters represent it.
07:55The next question is from Alina Raine.
07:58What is the real story behind the Mothman legend?
08:02Anyone here familiar with its origin?
08:04The Mothman was a humanoid creature with wings and red eyes
08:09that was seen in a small West Virginia town in the 1960s.
08:14Basically, you had two couples driving along
08:16and they were passing a disused, well, derelict World War II munitions plant.
08:22And they saw this tall, thin creature with these great big wings and these fiery eyes
08:28immediately turn the car around to leave.
08:30And they said it followed them.
08:32It got picked up by the national paper.
08:34Some few years later, two paranormal specialists came to the town,
08:40wrote up the story, called it Mothman, and started connecting it with sort of events.
08:47Not long after the people had seen this, a local bridge collapsed with the loss of life.
08:53And it was put forward that the Mothman appeared to warn people about what would happen.
08:58And when the film was made, it really pushed this idea of the Mothman as a portent.
09:03So, very unusually, a character which was supposedly scared people,
09:09which professional paranormal writers turned into a monstrous present,
09:14has become a real local celebrity.
09:17This question comes from Terminal Reddit.
09:20What were the Cottingley Ferry photographs and what was so mysterious about them?
09:24The Cottingley Ferry photographs were a series of photographs
09:28that appeared at the beginning of the 20th century.
09:31They were taken by two girls in Yorkshire who claimed they took pictures of fairies.
09:37And they were taken up by Arthur Conan Doyle, who believed in fairies.
09:42Eventually, they were proved to be fakes.
09:44And the girls, when they were grown up, actually admitted to this.
09:49If you look at them now, it's kind of difficult to believe that anybody thought there were anything else.
09:54What the girls did is they cut out pictures out of a picture book,
09:57stuck pins in them, and stuck them in the ground.
09:59One of the girls is standing behind them, and the fairies are in front.
10:02And it was pointed out that, you know, they're fairies,
10:04but why have they got 1920s hairstyles and various things?
10:08But so strong was the authority of Arthur Conan Doyle.
10:11And people just kept saying, no, they must be real, they must be real, they must be real.
10:15The next question is from Jen Thusiast, who asks,
10:19What the f*** is a Wendigo?
10:20It's a very, very nasty monster.
10:24It comes from First Nations.
10:27It's cannibalistic.
10:28It haunts the edges and kind of invades places.
10:32It was first sort of identified and talked about in the 19th century,
10:37when various people became interested in the stories of the First Nations in America.
10:43It's now escaped.
10:44It now belongs to the sort of general horror fantasy.
10:48But originally, it was a much more specific thing,
10:51a representative of the fears of not being able to survive the winter,
10:56fear of what might happen if you kind of starved to death
10:59and didn't have a right burial and didn't have the right rituals
11:02to get you into the afterlife.
11:04Hurt Stopper asks,
11:07Is Dracula really inspired by Vlad the Impaler?
11:10The novel Dracula is quite a complex novel.
11:13It isn't based on Vlad the Impaler so much.
11:16Vlad the Impaler was never thought to be a vampire.
11:19In fact, he's a national hero in Romania because he repulsed the Turks.
11:24He just seemed a kind of good backstory to this character.
11:28So Dracula doesn't come out of nowhere.
11:31He becomes a creature who has a more complex Romanian heritage.
11:36Bram Stoker's story appeared just at the end of the 19th century.
11:39There had already been several vampire stories.
11:42Most of those vampire stories initially were based on Lord Byron,
11:46which is why you get the glamorous vampire in the dark clothes
11:49and all the women fall over in love with him.
11:52Stoker decided he wanted to change this a little bit.
11:54So he puts his character in a much more exotic area,
11:59which then he reworked into what has got to be
12:02the seminal vampire novel ever written.
12:05The next question from Smythe70,
12:08Red Rover, Red Rover, anyone?
12:11Well, I think this depends on whether anybody has played Red Rover,
12:14a game that I played when I was at school.
12:17And basically you had two opposing groups and you called someone over.
12:21They had to run across and crash through the group.
12:23I don't quite understand why it's now become unpopular,
12:28possibly because it's regarded as aggressive or dangerous.
12:31But I have to say it was actually quite a lot of fun to play
12:34because you sort of, when you were called,
12:37you kind of looked down the line
12:39and either found the person you liked least
12:41or thought was the weakest and charged for them,
12:44which may be revealing something about my background and my childhood
12:47that people might not want to know.
12:49This question is from Cora.
12:51Can you explain the differences between a Sasquatch, Bigfoot, Yeti and Abominable Snowman?
12:57Yeti and the Abominable Snowman come from snowy regions.
13:00They're associated with Tibet, so they're white.
13:03Sasquatch and Bigfoot come mostly from North America.
13:06They're hairy and dark because they live in the forest.
13:09All four of them are actually quite similar
13:11in that they represent creatures who live in the margins.
13:15What was interesting about them when they were first discovered or first identified
13:19is that they were often seen as the missing link.
13:23This was a time when it was thought that Homo sapiens descended from the apes
13:27and somewhere there was a missing link and this was it.
13:30We completely changed our attitude
13:32and they've become a sort of independent monsters.
13:35People go hunting for these things and they find footprints
13:38and they find all sorts of things,
13:40none of which really ever is proved to exist,
13:45which is very nice because it means they can still go hunting them.
13:47Caffarelli asks,
13:50When and how did fairies shrink?
13:53Victorians shrunk the fairies.
13:55Fairies initially were as large as human beings.
13:58Sometimes they were larger.
13:59They were more beautiful than human beings as well.
14:02But during the Victorian periods,
14:04interesting things happened to fairies.
14:06Victorians were very interested in the natural world.
14:09They were very interested in insects.
14:11And there's something about the insect,
14:13the firefly and the dragonfly.
14:15They were also interested in sort of pretty fantasy ballet, for example.
14:19So the fairies suddenly acquire ballet skirts.
14:22So you get this kind of diminutization of these fairies
14:26simply because the Victorians are sort of interested in them.
14:30And you also get what could only be described as an explosion of fairy art.
14:34There are a number of artists who really specialized in this.
14:38And there are anything from the sort of pretty fairies
14:40in Victorian fairy books
14:42to one particular artist
14:44where the fairies look really like something out of a fever dream.
14:48But as far as the Scots and the Irish are concerned,
14:51fairies are still large.
14:52The next question comes from Pinchy Isaac.
14:56Who invented zombies, man?
14:59The zombie comes out of the Caribbean culture,
15:02which sort of synthesized stories and traditions from West Africa,
15:07which is where most of the slaves came from.
15:09So they were a slave tradition
15:12in that the zombie was seen as a corpse who couldn't rest
15:17or a person who couldn't really die,
15:19who was enslaved literally by a boker,
15:22who is a black magician associated with voodoo.
15:26So there's a lot of colonialism here
15:29and a lot of very negative attitude towards beliefs
15:32which were being syncretized and reworked
15:35in the impossible situation of slavery.
15:38But it really kind of comes to the fore
15:40when the United States begins to interfere in Haiti.
15:44And there's a book written, The Magic Island,
15:46which is very negative in its view.
15:49And it sees the Haitians
15:50and it extends it to other Caribbean peoples
15:52as basically very backwards.
15:55Ex-slaves, descendant from these West African cultures
15:58and really in need of civilizing.
15:59The idea of these sort of voodoo cultures
16:02is that you are possessed in a positive way
16:05by these sort of ancestral beings.
16:08And the zombie is kind of twisting
16:11by these sort of evil priests, these bokkars,
16:14who enslave, literally enslave these characters.
16:17Very negative stereotype of a culture
16:20which is just coming out of slavery on these islands.
16:22So you kind of get this going from a racist stereotype
16:25to an understanding of these cultures
16:28and how they function,
16:29to this notion of,
16:30well, maybe we can explain it scientifically.
16:33This question is from Cora.
16:34How has the legend of the Loch Ness Monster
16:37evolved over time?
16:39The Loch Ness Monster, or Nessie,
16:41as he is affectionately called,
16:43is supposed to live in Loch Ness.
16:45He was first observed in the medieval period
16:48by one of the most famous of the Scottish saints.
16:51It's included in his biography,
16:53a biography written by a fellow monk
16:55who wrote this up very seriously.
16:57The saint had forgotten his book
16:59on one side of the loch,
17:00and he asked one of his young acolytes
17:03to swim across the loch and get it.
17:05He got it and was swimming back
17:07halfway through the loch.
17:08Up comes the monster.
17:09And basically the saint says,
17:11don't dare touch him.
17:13The monster, of course, listens to the saint
17:15and disappears.
17:17You don't hear much about him for a while.
17:20And then again in the 1930s,
17:21the Loch Ness Monster kind of comes onto the scene
17:24and has never less.
17:25And people kind of look back to this and say,
17:27oh, well, there's always been a monster in Loch Ness.
17:29People have seen the monster swimming.
17:32It's been said to be seals, logs,
17:34strange waves, all sorts of excuses.
17:37People have faked the monster.
17:38There's a small monster
17:40and you can tell it's a fake
17:41because the waves aren't right.
17:42And as biologists have said,
17:44well, the problem is
17:45there probably aren't enough fish in Loch Ness
17:47to keep a large creature alive.
17:49However, it's also one of these monsters
17:52which local people have taken to their hearts.
17:55He is a big, or she, or it,
17:57however you want to call it,
17:58is a big tourist draw.
18:00And while the locals sort of say,
18:02no, we don't believe in them,
18:03we're quite happy for tourists to come and visit us.
18:06Ask Europe subreddit.
18:08What's your country's version of the tooth fairy?
18:11Well, as an American,
18:12my version of the tooth fairy is the tooth fairy.
18:14But it's a fairly modern reworking
18:17of a character who more often is a mouse.
18:20I'm not sure whether there's
18:21a specific folkloric reason for the mouse,
18:24but it's a creature that was often found
18:26in the older houses
18:27and often had little burrows somewhere
18:30and often collected bits and pieces.
18:33Obviously, it's going to collect
18:34the children's teeth as well.
18:36But so often these things are
18:38not so much this happens
18:41and this happens and this happens
18:42as you look back and think,
18:44oh, well, this and this and this
18:46is in the environment
18:46and I can put it together
18:47in a certain kind of way
18:48and have a folk story.
18:50The next question is from DaisyJane1.
18:56Rabbits' feet kind of go back quite a long way.
19:00Rabbits, because they were prolific,
19:02were thought of as very lucky.
19:03Nowadays, I think we would sort of sympathize
19:05with the bunny and not want a rabbit's foot.
19:08So we've substituted it
19:09with all kinds of good luck symbols
19:12and sort of key chains with something on it
19:14because they allow you to find the keys.
19:16But I think the practical
19:17has sort of been overtaken
19:19by the fact that what people put
19:20on their key chains
19:21are often very important
19:23to them personally.
19:25So you're beginning to get
19:26not just a good luck charm,
19:28but a kind of how I want
19:30to project myself to the world.
19:31It's very interesting
19:32what you get on key chains.
19:34Currently, it's the little boodoo dolls,
19:36which are sort of scary versions
19:38of the trolls.
19:39Some people are saying
19:40they're actually demonic creatures,
19:42but people like them.
19:43They buy them in boxes
19:45where they don't see
19:46what they're going to get
19:46and they reveal something particular.
19:48So it's something very personal,
19:50something almost that's come out
19:51of a grab bag
19:52that is mine and no one else's.
19:56Impression Cool 5341 is asking,
20:00what is Slenderman's origin?
20:02Slenderman originated on the internet
20:04as an internet meme.
20:06It's a kind of mysterious bogeyman
20:08who goes after mostly young children.
20:10He's tall, thin, dark, no face.
20:14He's completely covered in sort of
20:16almost like a shroud,
20:18a tight-fitting shroud.
20:20He belongs in a whole class
20:22of either faceless
20:23or masked nightmare characters.
20:26Think of Freddy, think of Jason,
20:28think of V for Vendetta,
20:30even Pennywise.
20:31These characters who don't look human
20:34and who aren't human
20:35and mostly will attack young people.
20:38There was a very tragic situation
20:40of two girls who killed someone
20:42thinking that Slenderman
20:44ordered them to do it.
20:45Very disturbed girls.
20:46Very unusual that this sort of thing happens.
20:49But of course it becomes
20:50a cause celeb
20:52and a wake-up cry
20:53that, you know,
20:54what's happening on the internet
20:55that our children are beginning to see?
20:58It's kind of downplayed now.
21:00He's become a character
21:01which you kind of find in horror films.
21:04It's a character
21:04who is much talked about
21:06and much less,
21:07because he's not so new,
21:09kind of much less frightening.
21:11Brent E-A-A-A.
21:14I'm not even going to try to pronounce that.
21:16Saw There's a Full Moon out tonight
21:17and I had a thought.
21:18Why do werewolves only change on the full moon?
21:21And why have I never thought about this before?
21:24The full moon in werewolf folklore,
21:26again, is a fairly modern one.
21:28The full moon was always associated
21:30with strange happenings.
21:32Mad men were thought
21:34to become more mad at the full moon.
21:36People were thought
21:37that they shouldn't look at the full moon,
21:38particularly if you were looking through glass.
21:41You ought to curtsy to the full moon
21:43and acknowledge it.
21:44So the full moon has this uncanny nature.
21:46But once werewolves
21:48became part of horror literature,
21:49it begins to accrue
21:51these other kind of superstitions.
21:54Turning into a werewolf in the full moon
21:56is one of those sort of accretions.
21:58Tenacious Deave asks,
22:01everyone knows about vampires and werewolves,
22:03but are some lesser known creatures.
22:07One of my favorite characters are griffins,
22:10the sort of lion eagle ones,
22:12which you see a lot in architecture,
22:14but also which have this wonderful story
22:16is associated with them
22:17about how they guard gold.
22:20The other character
22:21who I think is fascinating
22:22is the hippogriff.
22:23Rowling did not invent the hippogriff.
22:25It actually comes from a medieval poem.
22:28I think what I like about griffins and hippogriffs
22:30is that they're hybrid characters.
22:32And they're a mixture of two very important beasts,
22:35the lion, the king of the beast,
22:36the sort of eagle,
22:38again, these sort of powerful creatures.
22:40But when they get hybridized,
22:42they become much more domesticated
22:44and much more user-friendly.
22:46And I think it's quite interesting
22:47to see the arc that these characters take
22:50as they move from,
22:52let's call it elite culture,
22:54into sort of architecture and pictures and art,
22:57and then finally into modern popular culture,
23:00which is so, so an amateur fantasy.
23:03This one is from the AskHistorians subreddit.
23:07Why did women become associated
23:09with witchcraft and magic?
23:11You have both men and women
23:13who were prosecuted as witches.
23:15Numbers are difficult to establish,
23:17but certainly no matter how you cut it,
23:20more women were killed as witches than men.
23:22It's a misogynistic thing.
23:24It's assumed that basically women
23:26are more devious than men.
23:27But there was also this notion
23:29that women were more powerful than men.
23:32And women's power was not so much
23:34the fighting power, the power of strength,
23:36but the power of something internal to them.
23:39The obvious thing is they produced the children.
23:40But it's also seen that they had
23:42a kind of mystical power as well because of this.
23:45And so there's this notion
23:47that they're sort of more in touch
23:49with things that are intangible.
23:51The next question is from the Twilight subreddit.
23:54What makes Twilight vampires unique
23:56among all the different types of vampires
23:59in vampire lore?
24:00Well, Twilight represents a new strain
24:03in vampire lore, which is not traditional.
24:05It's very much part of modern sort of fantasy writing.
24:08And it's often called the horror romance,
24:11where the young boyfriend is a vampire.
24:13Well, basically, if you're going to make him
24:15into a boyfriend, you can't have him
24:17sleeping in a coffin all day.
24:19You can't have him disappear in a puff of smoke
24:21when the sun shines.
24:22So you're going to have to invent a new kind of law.
24:25That said, sleeping in coffins all day
24:28and disappearing in a puff of smoke
24:30is actually part of the sort of literary vampire law
24:33that was created in the 19th century.
24:35So all you're really doing here
24:37is not so much changing the folklore
24:39that was associated with folk vampire figures,
24:42but the kind of literary folklore
24:44associated with the literary vampire.
24:47The next question is from Final Hour.
24:49How did the concept of the Grim Reaper
24:51come into existence?
24:53And why is he portrayed as he is?
24:55The Grim Reaper is simply the figure of death.
24:57He reaps the souls, hence the scythe.
25:00And he's clothed in black, as if he's shrouded.
25:03Because for many, many centuries,
25:04the dead were simply shrouded.
25:06They weren't buried in coffins.
25:08And it wasn't really any idea
25:09of what a decayed body looked like.
25:11So you get this idea of the figure of death
25:13being a reaper.
25:14The next question comes from Wastevens.
25:18Did the Brothers Grimm make the children's stories
25:20they collected darker and more violent
25:22than the original oral traditions?
25:24The Brothers Grimm's actually collected stories,
25:28surprisingly, from women's storytellers
25:29for the most part.
25:30The Grimm's fairy tales were published
25:32five or six times during the Brothers' Lifetime.
25:35And they changed the stories as they went along,
25:37not so much making them darker
25:39as making them more bourgeois,
25:42because they were being addressed to a middle class.
25:45So they were beginning to express
25:47the values of that middle class.
25:50They were quite dark to start with.
25:52Fairy tales can be very dark.
25:54They're sort of dealing with
25:56sort of structures in society.
25:58And so you get unpleasant things
26:00like deaths, cannibalism, transformations,
26:03witchcraft, magic.
26:05And the Grimm's used this.
26:06But I think, if anything,
26:08they could be accused of kind of taming it a bit.
26:11Some people sort of say you shouldn't scare kids,
26:13or you shouldn't tell them these stories.
26:15But the positive thing is that these are stories.
26:18Children know that the narrator is going to stop
26:20and the book is going to be closed.
26:22So it's a scare within a safe space.
26:25And it's a way of allowing children
26:26to deal with the fact that life
26:28is not always going to be wonderful,
26:30and yet not actually be frightened or threatened.
26:34This question is from Sammy James Z.
26:38A lot of Disney's versions of popular fairy tales
26:41have more optimistic portrayals and endings.
26:43But the original versions
26:44are often bleak and depressing.
26:46How come many of these famous fairy tales
26:49are very bleak,
26:50even though they were made for children?
26:51I think one has to sort of point out
26:53that fairy tales were not made for children.
26:56It's the Victorians who decided
26:58that fairy tales are a children's genre.
27:01Fairy tales were told by adults to adults,
27:04often after the harvest.
27:06They were told in work situations.
27:08They were told by professional narrators
27:10who traveled around.
27:12The Victorians decided,
27:13no, no, no, these are suitable tales for children.
27:16So I think Disney isn't sort of taking them
27:18into being more optimistic.
27:19He is certainly addressing an audience
27:22where he wants a kind of feel-good factor.
27:26Although any Disney fairy tale,
27:28although it ends happily,
27:29will invariably have a scary monster.
27:31The witch is really scary in Snow White.
27:34The queen in Sleeping Beauty
27:36turns into a horrible dragon.
27:38Disney always liked to scare
27:40before he lets you be happy
27:42and sort of go off into the sunset.
27:45The next question is
27:46Why are the depictions of banshees
27:51in modern media
27:52completely different
27:53to the depictions of banshees
27:54in traditional Irish folklore?
27:57In Irish folklore,
27:58the banshee is the banshee,
28:00the fairy woman.
28:01And she's a sort of supernatural figure
28:03that appears before a death
28:06and cries and wails,
28:08sort of indicating
28:09that a death may be coming.
28:10She has nothing to do
28:11with the death itself.
28:13And it comes from something
28:14which you get in Irish folklore.
28:16The keening women
28:17and at funerals,
28:18women were hired
28:19to mourn the dead
28:21with these loud cries,
28:23with these sort of desperate cries.
28:25But the dead person was dead.
28:27Now, again, what happens
28:28when the banshee is taken over
28:30into horror literature?
28:32She's made much more
28:33of an individual and personal thing.
28:36And she becomes
28:36this kind of monstrous creature.
28:38Again, horror fantasy writers
28:39have a lot more flexibility
28:41than the traditional sort of purveyors
28:43of folklore.
28:44This is from the
28:45AskScientFiction subreddit.
28:47Why do gremlins always
28:48take stuff apart on planes?
28:50Gremlins were invented
28:52by the pilots of World War II.
28:54They blamed anything
28:56that went wrong on,
28:57oh, the gremlins must have done it.
28:59But the gremlins kind of
29:00didn't have any shape.
29:01It was only subsequently
29:03that they were drawn
29:04as these sort of strange
29:06little sort of mischievous beings.
29:08And it was really only
29:09with the gremlin films
29:10that you get these kind
29:12of vicious little monsters.
29:13This next question
29:14comes from Gimme Some Loki.
29:17Why is the Christian devil
29:18depicted with a pitchfork?
29:20Well, the idea of the pitchfork
29:21is something which is used
29:23to kind of move useless things around,
29:26hay or manure or whatever.
29:28And so the Christian devils
29:29who are simply tormenting
29:31the souls of the dam,
29:33they're tormenting souls
29:34who have completely lost
29:36the right to be considered individual.
29:39So it's almost a further
29:40dehumanization of these souls.
29:43Next question is from Cinnamon Remote.
29:46My Google skills are failing me.
29:48Eldest child wants to know
29:49what tree you need to be buried under
29:51to prevent the face
29:52snatching your body.
29:54Well, I can tell you
29:55what trees you shouldn't
29:57be buried under.
29:58And for the most part,
29:59they're apple trees.
30:00If you even sleep under an apple tree,
30:04the fairies are likely to snatch you.
30:06The definition of a fairy tree,
30:07you will find often,
30:08particularly in Ireland
30:09and in Scotland as well,
30:11a bit in the center of a field,
30:13which is a tree
30:14surrounded by a little fence.
30:16And the idea is that
30:17this is the fairies come to
30:19or it's the entrance to fairy land.
30:21And they have to be protected
30:22to some way.
30:23This question is from Cora.
30:25In Hans Christian Andersen's
30:26Little Mermaid,
30:27the mermaid's penalty
30:28for having legs
30:29was feeling like
30:30she was walking on thorns.
30:32Why did she get a penalty
30:33if she didn't do anything bad?
30:35Hans Christian Andersen
30:36is writing in the 19th century.
30:38And he was very interested
30:39in notions of Christianity
30:43and behavior.
30:44Behind this is a very common
30:47folklore trope
30:48of a supernatural being
30:49who wants to acquire a soul
30:52and therefore has to go through
30:54a number of trials.
30:56In the story,
30:57the little mermaid is told
30:58that she can dance.
31:00Obviously, the legs are painful.
31:03It's as if she's walking
31:04on knives and thorns.
31:05It's part of the test.
31:07How badly do you want a soul?
31:10And what happens at the end
31:11is she actually told,
31:13you can have your soul
31:13if you kill the prince.
31:15And she refuses to do this,
31:16proving herself to be
31:18a really worthwhile creature.
31:20So it's actually a positive story
31:22about the little mermaid
31:24rather than a negative story
31:26about how she loses a prince.
31:27Clear Cut Punk is asking,
31:31what superstitions,
31:32cryptid folklore
31:33do you not really believe in
31:36but avoid and or abide by
31:38just in case?
31:39None.
31:40As a folklorist,
31:41I'm much more interested
31:42in the phenomena
31:44than I am
31:45and whether they're real or not.
31:46However, as a person
31:48coming from an Italian background,
31:50I had a grandmother
31:51who, when she discovered
31:53she had sort of
31:54red-haired grandchildren,
31:56made sure that we wore coral
31:57because it protected us
31:59from the evil eye.
32:00Whether it actually protected us,
32:01I don't know.
32:02But I still have the coral charm
32:04which she gave me
32:05when I was a child.
32:07I no longer wear it.
32:07I'm not sure I believe in it.
32:09But I wouldn't give it up.
32:11I hope you enjoyed this
32:12as much as I did.
32:13This is Folklore Support
32:14and I hope to see you next time.
32:15I hope to see you next time.
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