Posted on 11/21/2022 11:44:32 AM PST by nickcarraway
The Slavic crone, known for living in a house built on chicken legs and feasting on children, is a complex, and arguably feminist, figure – as a new book shows, says David Barnett. I In fairy tales, women of a certain age usually take one of two roles: the wicked witch or the evil stepmother, and sometimes both.
A key figure from Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga certainly fulfils the requirements of the wicked witch – she lives in a house that walks through the forest on chicken legs, and sometimes flies around in a giant mortar and pestle. She usually appears as a hag or crone, and she is known in most witch-like fashion to feast upon children.
However, she is also a far more complex character than that synopsis suggests. Cunning, clever, helpful as much as a hindrance, she could indeed be the most feminist character in folklore.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Those Russians may be bad at a lot of things, but they have had the best composers since that second half of the 1800s. And the literature.
Agree
The modern stories we tell children are very different from the originals. Its quite likely that none of the fairy tales you know are in their original form. Some were so deranged that there was no way to update them and were tossed down the memory hole.
He once killed three men with a pencil!...a pencil!
Krampus is another lovely tale.
” she lives in a house that walks through the forest on chicken legs”
Howl’s Moving Castle?
“Enchantment,” by Orson Scott Card is an interesting take on the Baba Yaga tale.
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