Baba Yaga

[KingOrfeo]

Never trust a toothless old woman with chicken feet.

No, her hut has chicken feet. Walks, too.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Did she fly around in a pestle & mortar too?

Yes, she did.

 

[KingOrfeo]

The tale of "Vasilissa the Beautiful."

 

[rosco rathbone]

There's something extremely unsettling about Baba Yaga and her chicken footed house. I think the Slavs are probably a little closer to the chthonic, shamanic roots of our nightmares than the western fairytales, but it's there too if you look for it. Think of Hansel and the candy house...LIttle redridinghood....

 

[Joeybagadonuts]

Baba O'reilly

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2KRpRMSu4g

 

[CandiCame]

There's something extremely unsettling about Baba Yaga and her chicken footed house. I think the Slavs are probably a little closer to the chthonic, shamanic roots of our nightmares than the western fairytales, but it's there too if you look for it. Think of Hansel and the candy house...LIttle redridinghood....

Hansel and Gretel's witch had the dumbest house ever. Can you imagine the fucking ants in that place?

 

[Equinoxe]

Oh yes I love that. Watched it many times. I love the white horse in it. Truly magical.

I like it even more than Tale of Tales, which is usually considered his best film.

There's something extremely unsettling about Baba Yaga and her chicken footed house. I think the Slavs are probably a little closer to the chthonic, shamanic roots of our nightmares than the western fairytales, but it's there too if you look for it. Think of Hansel and the candy house...LIttle redridinghood....

I think that's a fascinating idea, though I'm not sure if it's that Slavic folklore is truly closer to its roots or if it's that Slavic folklore hasn't been forced through the same filter that Western European folklore has.

Even Arabic folklore, in its Westernised guise at least, has more pop cultural presence in our society, and it seems always has, except when both were wholly unknown—Genies, Sinbad, Aladdin, Rocs, etc. are far more familiar to most people than Baba Yaga, the Firebird, Ivan Tsarevich, Koschei the Deathless, Sadko, etc.

But, even before being seized upon by modern authors (and others), Western folktales were subject to a special sort of literarification (spellcheck says that's not a word, and it isn't, but I see no reason not to use it) going back to Perrault and Les Précieuses, if not much earlier. Not that Russian folktales were never literary, but I don't think they were subjected to quite the same re-imagining even when they were. Or, not until recently by Western authors.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I think that's a fascinating idea, though I'm not sure if it's that Slavic folklore is truly closer to its roots or if it's that Slavic folklore hasn't been forced through the same filter that Western European folklore has.

Indeed.

Jacob Ludwig Carl and Wilhelm Carl Grimm, known collectively as The Brothers Grimm, were German linguists born in the late 18th century, who, in an effort to preserve Germany's heritage and promote cultural unity in a period of political disunity, collected a vast array of folk tales from their fellow Germans (mostly middle-and upper-class friends). The brothers eventually published these stories in the famous collection which they called Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), but which is generally better known among English-speakers as Grimms' Fairy Tales.

While the original intent of the collection was to preserve the stories exactly as told, the Grimms gave in more and more in each new edition to the temptation to make various "improving" alterations. The scholarly Jacob sought to establish more Germanic forms of the stories by replacing foreign words such as "Prinz" and Prinzessin with Teutonic terms such "Königssohn" and Königstochter, replacing fays with enchantresses and wise women and by supplying missing plot-elements from historic sources; the more creative-minded Wilhelm tried to make the stories more acceptable to a popular audience (presumably including children), by selectively Bowdlerizing the tales published, notably removing evil mothers and replacing them with step-mothers (as in the case of "Snow White"), by removing implications of sex and pregnancy (as in "Rapunzel"), and by re-writing the stories in a more literary style. (Though they notably did not tone down the violence, even for the children.)

Standards of child-friendliness have shifted in the past 200 years; some of the Grimms' stories are now considered shockingly violent — and at least one of them, "The Jew in the Thorns", notoriously religiously insensitive. (Similar stories appear in the Grimms' other, more adult, story collection, Deutsche Sagen (German Legends). The... well, grim... nature of many of the original stories have made the Grimm Brothers the Trope Namer for Grimmification. It should be noted, however, that some of the tales included by the Grimms were not intended for children in the first place — hence the distinction made in the name of their popular collection.