Friday, June 14, 2013

A New Motif

I just read another Breton fairy tale.  This girl is married to a guy who's been married four times before, but each of his former wives disappeared in suspicious circumstancte (no, it's not Bluebeard).  The girl gets scared one night, fearing that her husband will soon kill her too, so she goes to the chapel to pray and come up with a plan.  The ghosts of the four dead wives appear and tell her to run.  They each give her an object to help her escape--poison, rope, fire, and a club--objects with which they were respectively murdered.

I am absolutely fascinated by this motif; that one's pain and method of demise can be turned into a tool to succor another in their time of need, even to the point of undermining the plans of the original evil-doer.

Brilliant.

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