#mwindo epic

[rotomartsblog]

Stories I want to base Ever After High OCs off (an ever growing list)

Hans My Hedgehog (One of my favourite ‘obscure’ fairytales. Already decided her name would be Hannah M. Hedgehog. To fit the design aesthetic of eah she wouldn’t literally have the upper body of a hedgehog and the lower body of a human, she’d be more of a hybrid. She’s a rebel because she rejects her destiny of becoming fully human at the end of the story and embraces her hedgehog side.)

Boy Who Cried Wolf (See my last reblog. Lies a lot but because of their destiny no one tends to believe them anyways. Also accidentally right a lot. Not lying maliciously just doing it for shits and giggles)

The Frog Princess (Because I think it’d be funny for there to be two royals who turn into frogs but are completely unrelated to each other. Also there’s so many variants of this story from region to region that it’d be fun to write this girl)

Speaking of, The Frog Prince (Specifically the daughter of the princess from the tale and the son of the prince’s gayass servant. Princess Girl does not want to be Hopper’s princess but is slightly willing to enact the version where she gets to throw Frog Hopper at a wall instead of kissing him. Dislikes frogs a bit but plays it up as a seething hatred to scare Hopper. Kind of a bitch if you couldn’t tell. Sporty girl. The servant boy is 100% in love with Hopper, like father-like son, and has the iron bands around his heart. Maybe he could be Hopper’s real true love :x)

Pinocchio (Daughters of The Coachman and Mangiafuoco, and niece of Lampwick. The Coachman’s daughter has a pet donkey that everyone thinks is a turned boy, but nope it’s just a regular donkey. She’s a rebel because she doesn’t want to go down the route of her father. Mangiafuoco’s daughter is scary and off-putting, but actually a genuinely nice girl. Would love to perform onstage but she has stage fright and is just so shy in general, so she resorts to puppet theatre instead. Always uses a hand puppet to talk through. Lampwick’s niece is a rebel because she’d rather not turn into a donkey thank you very much. Low-key resented Cedar up until Legacy Day because she believed if Cedar didn’t exist she wouldn’t need to turn into a donkey. Now they’re on better terms since Cedar decided she’d become human in her own way)

The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats (Youngest son of the youngest goat. Really I just like people with goat features. He’d feel tense around Ramona, even though he’s pretty sure she’s probably not the wolf from his story)

Puss In Boats (Daughter of Puss In Boots. Would probably be able to transform between an animal and human form like Bunny Blanc. Doesn’t really align herself with Royal or Rebel, but has slipped into thoughts like ‘if I can make someone else royalty, why can’t I make myself royalty?’)

The Prince and The Pauper (It’s not a fairytale but the books included King Lear’s daughter so I feel like I’m free to do this. I just think designing two boys that look identical would be fun)

Mwindo (One of my favourite tales because of how entertainingly OP Mwindo is. I imagine that his son would be equally as OP and like half of the student population is scared of him. But that fear often gets subsided because he’s not that keen on using his powers like his dad was)

Commedia dell’arte (Not a story but kids based on the stock characters could be fun. They probably wouldn’t attend Ever After High since they wouldn’t have actual destinies, they’d attend another high school. I had the idea of Cedar doubling as the Burattino stock character, and it developed into all the stock characters being based on different dolls/toys, ie Pierrot being a rag doll, Pulcinella being a wind-up toy, etc. Really I just want Cedar to have people who could understand her whole ‘Am I even real’ situation better, is that too much to ask?!)

Two miscellaneous additions that don’t actually align to specific stories; a Warrior Girl and a Forest Witch. (The Warrior Girl is the daughter of a warrior tribe leader. My idea for her story is that it’s an ancient epic that is so old it has lost its exact name, having been repeated so many times. Also, her reason for following her destiny is less ‘we have to or we all disappear’ and more ‘I have to so I can prove myself worthy’. Her warrior kingdom’s society is very different from Ever After’s society, which she learnt the hard way. She feels awkward hanging out with the other girls because of cultural differences, and she doesn’t like hanging out with boys because they tend to underestimate her. She was only supposed to attend for Legacy year so that she could sign the Book of Legends because Milton Grimm would not stop bugging her father about it, but she decided to stay after the shit show that happened on Legacy day. I didn’t base the Forest Witch of a specific fairy tale because goddamn it there are too many witches living in the forests in these tales for me to choose just one. In universe she probably has a specific destiny, or a few, I just haven’t chosen it yet. Very closed off from others. Actually lives in the Enchanted Forest with her mother. She also likes archery but how much of her skill is genuine and is magic is up to debate)

The Devil (He appears in a lot of fairytales. The OC is a girl who is clearly the daughter of the devil, but it’s never said so no one actually knows it. Every time someone asks about her destiny she’s like ‘it’s nothing important don’t worry about it :)’)

[chimeride]

Mpaca, the 220th Known One.

“Mpaca is humanoid, with long hair and a snout. It has fingernails that can grow to incredible lengths, which is stabs people with in order to make them do its bidding. It jumps on people's backs”

Suggested by @thecreaturecodex. More to read here.

[thecreaturecodex]

Mpaca

Image © @chimeride​, accessed at their blog here

[Mpaca is a forest spirit in the lore of the Nyange, a people in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo who have a rich and mostly still extant oral tradition. The Epic of Mwindo is the most famous of their sagas in English, and Mpaca appears in that story in passing, as a point of reference and comparison. The folktale in which he plays a starring role is collected in The Dictionary of African Mythology, and is online for free . Something I think is interesting is how closely the story “Mpaca’s Very Long Fingernail” maps to the davalpa/himantopus. It is a greedy, parasitic creature that rides on its victims’ backs, and can be defeated by getting it drunk. I’ve talked before about how I don’t hold a lot of stock in diffusionism, but part of me does wonder if the voyages of Sinbad made it to east/central Africa, or Nyange epics made it to the Middle East. There was a lot of trade between the regions, after all.]

Mpaca CR 4 CE Monstrous Humanoid This little man has long, wild hair and long fingers. The middle finger on each hand is extremely long compared to the others, ending in a single claw. His face is elongated, ending in a mole-like snout.

An mpaca is a twisted little humanoid that delights in enslaving other creatures. They can control the behavior of humanoids by jabbing them with their long middle finger, and then ride atop them. They do not treat their slaves well, forcing them to do exhausting work on long hours, and restricting their food and water. An mpaca may even ride such slaves into combat as a mount. Such slaves are controlled repeatedly and often worked to death if the mpaca can manage it.

In seeking out new slaves, an mpaca can shapechange, often favoring the shape of young women and girls. They can also extend their magical fingers to extreme distances, spying on their charges from afar though the nail. If their fingers are severed, the mpaca cannot use its charming ability, and so almost always only extends the finger on one hand and keeps the other in reserve.

Most mpacas live as parasites of humanity, taking over small villages to use as their personal dens of iniquity. The mpaca keeps the community in line with threats and magical charm, alternating between hosts while draining the wealth and happiness from everyone who lives there. When not finding victims, mpacas are lazy and slovenly. They are prone to indulging in drugs and drink, and victims of an mpaca have been known to dislodge the creature by getting it intoxicated.

Mpaca                  CR 4 XP 1,200 CE Small monstrous humanoid Init +3; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, Perception +5, scent Defense AC 18, touch 13, flat-footed 14 (+1 size, +3 Dex, +1 dodge, +3 natural) hp 37 (5d10+10) Fort +3, Ref +7, Will +3 Offense Speed 30 ft. Melee 2 slams +8 (1d4+2 plus grab) or charm claw +8 (3 plus charm) Special Attacks grab (Medium) Statistics Str 15, Dex 17, Con 14, Int 13, Wis 8, Cha 14 Base Atk +5; CMB +6 (+10 grapple); CMD 20 Feats Deceitful, Dodge, Mounted Combat, Undersized Mount (B) Skills Acrobatics +10, Bluff +7, Climb +8, Disguise +7 (+15 using change shape), Perception +5, Ride +14, Stealth +9, Survival +5; Racial Modifiers +4 Acrobatics, +4 Ride Languages Common, Sylvan SQ change shape (humanoid, alter self), probing finger Ecology Environment warm hills Organization solitary or ward (1 plus 1 humanoid) Treasure standard Special Abilities Charm Claw (Su) As a standard action, or as part of an action made to maintain a grapple, a mpaca can jab a humanoid creature with its long clawed finger. A creature so struck must succeed a DC 14 Will save or be charmed for 24 hours. A creature that resists is immune to the charm claw of that mpaca for the next 24 hours. Feats An mpaca’s Undersized Mount feat allows it to ride Medium bipeds without penalty. Probing Finger (Su) An mpaca can extend its middle fingers and see through them. A finger extended in this way can stretch out to 600 feet long, extending or retracting as much as 30 feet a round. The mpaca can see and hear through the finger, and make charm claw attacks with it. While using its finger in this fashion, the finger can make Stealth checks as if it were a Diminutive creature, and fit through cracks as narrow as 1 inch. The mpaca can still use its normal senses while extending a finger in such fashion, but it is distracted; treat the mpaca as being flat footed. The finger can be destroyed through damage (AC 18, 5 hp, DR 5/bludgeoning or slashing). An mpaca regrows a destroyed finger over the course of 1 month, and if both of its fingers are destroyed, it cannot make charm claw attacks. 

[a-book-of-creatures]

Looks sharp ❌

Tidied up ❌

Dashing ❌

Spruced up ❌

The image of neatness and cleanliness ❌

Like the anus of a snail ✅

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture

For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and Beowulf.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how writing things down changes how we feel about them. We talk about a Ted Chiang short story comparing the spread of literacy to the spread of video recording, how oral cultures around the world have preserved astronomical information about the Seven Sisters constellation for over 10,000 years, and how the field of nuclear semiotics looks to the past to try and communicate with the far future. We also talk about how "oral" vs " written" culture should perhaps be referred to as "embodied" vs "recorded" culture because signed languages are very much part of this conversation, where areas of residual orality have remained in our own lives, from proverbs to gossip to guided tours, and why memes are an extreme example of literate culture rather than extreme oral culture.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We've created a new and Highly Scientific™ 'Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?' quiz! Answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with your personality. If you're not sure where to start with our back catalogue, or you want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm, this is the perfect place to start. Take the quiz here!

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

The 'Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?' quiz

'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling' by Ted Chiang

'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press' blog post by Devon Zeugel

'Orality and Literacy' by Walter J. Ong

Wikipedia entry for Grimms' Fairytales

Wikipedia entry for Milman Parry

Wikipedia entry for Homeric Question

Wikipedia entry for Mwindo Epic

Encyclopedia.com entry for Mwindo

Crash Course episode 'The Mwindo Epic'

'The world’s oldest story? Astronomers say global myths about ‘seven sisters’ stars may reach back 100,000 years' by Ray Norris on The Conversation

'The Pleiades – or 7 Sisters – known around the world' by Bruce McClure on EarthSky

Wikipedia entry for Nuclear Semiotics

99% Invisible episode 'Ten Thousand Years'

Wikipedia entry for Aesops Fables

'How Inuit Parents Teach Their Kinds to Control Their Anger' by Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh for NPR

Deafness and Orality: An Electronic Conversation

Wikipedia entry for The Tale of Genji

Bea Wolf, a middle-grade graphic novel retelling of Beowulf, by Zach Weinersmith

Lingthusiasm episodes mentioned:

'Writing is a technology'

'Arrival of the linguists'

How translators approach a text'

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

[h0bg0blin-meat]

[galwednesday]

This week's deep dive rec is an episode of the Lingthusiasm podcast, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics, on Connecting with oral culture:

For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and Beowulf. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how writing things down changes how we feel about them. We talk about a Ted Chiang short story comparing the spread of literacy to the spread of video recording, how oral cultures around the world have preserved astronomical information about the Seven Sisters constellation for over 10,000 years, and how the field of nuclear semiotics looks to the past to try and communicate with the far future. We also talk about how “oral” vs “ written” culture should perhaps be referred to as “embodied” vs “recorded” culture because signed languages are very much part of this conversation, where areas of residual orality have remained in our own lives, from proverbs to gossip to guided tours, and why memes are an extreme example of literate culture rather than extreme oral culture.

I'm about the same age as the hosts and remember the same shift in gossip from an oral culture ("did you hear what so-and-so said to so-and-so at that party") to a written culture ("let me show you this screenshot of what so-and-so posted"), which I had never thought about in that way before and haven't stopped thinking about since. If you're interested in linguistics, I recommend the whole podcast archives, but this episode in particular is great for anyone with an interest in storytelling.

[thegeekytaurus]

Instead of focusing on making soulless and unwanted live action remakes of their animated movies here are some fairy tales/legends/myths/fables/folktales/literature and original ideas that Disney should focus on adapting into animated movies:

The Twins/The Boy who was brother to the Drague

2. Don Quiote

3. Little red riding hood

4. Puss in Boots

5. Tatterhood

6. Iron John

7. Ivan Tsarevich

8. Dobrynya and the Dragon

9. Rasputin

10. Journey to the west

11. Norse Mythology(Aesir, Vanir and Jotnar)

12. Cu Chulainn or Fionn mac Cumhail/Finn McCool

13. Till Eulenspiegel

14. Egyptian Mythology (Horus)

15. Nora of Kelmendi

16. Ibonia

17. Anansi

18. Epic of Mwindo

19. Epic of Gilgamesh

20. Momotaro

21. Aztec Mythology(Quetzalcoatl)

22. The Kalevala/Kalevipoeg

23. Ramayana/Mahabharata

24. Rostam

25. Kiviuq

26. Princess Bari or Shimcheong

27. The epic of king Gesar

28. the tale of Thanh Giong or the legend of Au Co and Lac Long Quan.

29. The story of bidasari

30. The legend of Mayari

31. a Maltese fairy tale or myth

32. Gothic fairytale story idea(one with vampires)

33. Steampunk/ Gaslamp fantasy story idea

34. A re-imagining of Moby Dick from the whale's perspective.

[greywritesrandom]

Legends and Lore - 7 {Monster}

Dragon

Though never proven to exist, dragons have slithered and soared through the myths of countless civilizations, leaving behind a trail of awe and fear. These legendary beasts, often linked to royal power, have been etched into the tapestry of human history, becoming symbols of the unknown and the untamable. From the fire-breathing terrors of the West to the wise, serpentine guardians of the East, dragons have captured our imaginations, taking on many forms and meanings.

In Western mythology, dragons are the embodiment of destruction—massive, winged reptiles with scorching breath and a penchant for devastation. They dwell in dark caves, guarding hoards of treasure, yet their true treasure is the fear they instil in those who seek them out. Their fiery breath and razor-sharp claws are the stuff of nightmares, making them both revered and reviled.

In contrast, Eastern dragons are creatures of deep wisdom and mystique. These serpentine beings, often depicted with four legs and flowing manes, are not merely beasts but celestial beings, symbols of balance and power. They command the elements, bring rain to parched lands, and are worshipped as deities in their own right. But even they possess a dark side, one that whispers of ancient, forgotten powers.

Here are some of the most intriguing dragons and dragon-like creatures from mythology, each with its own tale of mystery and dread:

Ayida-Weddo: A serpent-loa in Dahomey and Haitian Vodou mythology, Ayida-Weddo is the rainbow serpent married to Damballa. She represents the connection between the earth and the heavens, yet her true nature remains elusive, a mix of nurturing and terrifying power.

Bida: In Soninke mythology, Bida was a serpent that protected the kingdom but demanded human sacrifices. When a young warrior defied her, the kingdom crumbled, revealing the dark cost of her protection.

Ninki Nanka: This West African legend speaks of a dragon-like creature lurking in the Niger River, a beast of many forms and descriptions. It is said that those who encounter the Ninki Nanka do not live to tell the tale, their fate sealed by a single glance at this mysterious creature.

Ouroboros: The ancient symbol of the serpent eating its own tail, the Ouroboros is both a dragon and a symbol of eternity. It represents the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth, a creature that devours itself yet is never truly vanquished.

Kirimu: From the Mwindo Epic, this seven-headed dragon is a creature of nightmare, with black hide, a massive belly, and the tail of an eagle. It made a blood pact with Nkuba, the lightning god, sealing its place in myth as a being of raw, untamed power.

Kulshedra: An Albanian dragon that, after years of growth, reveals its true fire-breathing nature. This creature causes droughts and demands human sacrifices, a force of nature that brings ruin until it is slain by a Drangue, a winged warrior with supernatural abilities.

Tatzelwurm: A creature from Alpine folklore, the Tatzelwurm is a lizard-like beast with the face of a cat and a serpent-like body. It is said to dwell in the dark, remote corners of the mountains, its very existence a mystery shrouded in fog and fear.

Drac: Catalan mythology speaks of the Drac, a serpent-like dragon with poisonous breath and a stench that rots all it touches. These creatures are rarely seen but always feared, their presence heralded by a wave of decay and death.

Beithir: In Scottish lore, the Beithir is a snakelike dragon associated with lightning. Wingless and fearsome, it strikes from the shadows, its very name a whisper of doom.

Peluda: Also known as La Velue, the Shaggy Beast, this French dragon is covered in quills that it shoots like arrows. It is a creature of chaos, bringing death and destruction wherever it roams, feared for its relentless, unpredictable nature.

These dragons, with their diverse origins and terrifying powers, are more than mere legends. They are the embodiment of humanity’s deepest fears and desires, creatures that bridge the gap between the known and the unknown, forever lurking in the shadows of our stories. The dragons of myth are not just monsters—they are the guardians of secrets, the keepers of ancient knowledge, and the ultimate challenge for those who dare to seek them out.

[musical-theatre-encyclopedia]

Watch "Miscellaneous Myths: Epic Of Mwindo" on YouTube

[kaleb-is-definitely-sane]

youre welcome😂

Yeahhhhhh i love when i get them all at once ♥️

🦄 What’s your favourite story? I have soo many favorites but the first that comes to mine is the Epic of Mwindo. An African Prince who saves his family and kingdom by killing people and then resurrecting them with his magic flyswatter (😂)! But THEN! The gods, after he unknowingly kills one of their children, brings him up into (heaven? the sky? idk) where they teach him the folly of hubris. How there is always a bigger fish. How you are not the end all be all. And it’s sooo incredible that a hero actually like learns a lesson ♥️

🌹What do you love about nature? I love the fact that it is naturally beautiful. By it’s very nature (pun not intended) it’s beautiful. But also it’s wild. The lotus — symbolizing purity, enlightenment and spirituality — cannot exist without the dirty, stinky and mundane mud. It’s soooo deep without even trying 🤩

👭Say something nice about your best friend or partner. All of my besties are just soo sweet and funny and sassy and amahzing!

👼🏻What are some things you like about yourself? I like my loyalty, my sense of humor and my appreciation of books

❤️How do you express affection? Listening. I don’t know what to say. I hate spending money. But if you need an ear i’m here. 💜

🌈 What things make a good day for you? Tumblr, books, youtube, books, Jesus, mutuals, BOOKS!

👍🏻 How do you cheer yourself up when you’re feeling down? I go to my room, stay alone, read, pray talk to mutuals and then feel better ♥️

🎼 Is there a song that you listen to that makes you feel happy? What song? The Hamilton Sountrack, Perfectly Loved by (?), Loved me Like I Am by (?)

🥗 What are some good tips for taking care of yourself mentally and physically? Physically? You’re asking the wrong mutual 😂. Mentally — read, take a walk, handle small innocent happy children. Engage in soft things.

🏳️‍🌈 What things do you want to see being celebrated? Emotional Wellbeing

🖤 What’s one thing you like that other people don’t? Philosophy, history, ethics, moral dilemmas, along side a lot of things (evil) people see as “childish” or “feminine” (like what the heck does that even mean” 🙄

🧘🏽‍♂️ What do you do to make time for yourself and relax? I go to my room. And when a sister of mine comes tryna hang out i say “I’m having me time, go have you time. By YOUrself.”

🌸 Who are some people you think deserve more love/attention?

🧠 Tell us a fact that makes you smile/laugh. All of the Mysterious Benedict Society main characters are on the spectrum ♥️

😍 This isn’t a question I just wanted to say you’re pretty awesome! Oh my gosh!! Thank you ♥️ 🥰

[thegaytraveler]

2023 LGBTQ Mardi Gras events in New Orleans

Article by Topher Danial, courtesy of New Orleans & Company

During Carnival season, the already vibrant and colorful culture in New Orleans is amplified tenfold—and things only get more spectacular when you add in LGBTQ-specific events and balls. From annual extravaganzas thrown by gay Mardi Gras krewes to block parties that invite you to leave your inhibitions at home, every day of gay Carnival is an opportunity to show up as you are, wherever you are.

With 2023 marking the full return of LGBTQ happenings and events after two years of scaled-back celebrations, this Carnival season is sure to be the biggest—and queerest—yet. Here are notable events LGBTQ locals and visitors won’t want to miss.

Mystik Krewe da la Rue Royale Revelers Twelfth Night Party (January 6, 2023)

In Carnival tradition, Twelfth Night marks the commencement of the season’s parades and festivities, and the Mystik Krewe de la Rue Royale Revelers kicks it off in style with a night of grand, gay jubilation at the Mardi Gras Museum of Costumes and Culture. The cost of admission gets attendees access to an open bar, food, access to the museum, a commemorative pin, and a one-year membership in the krewe. Tickets and capacity are limited, so don’t wait to secure your spot in this can’t-miss cornerstone of gay carnival.

Krewe of Stars Masquerade Show Ball (January 13, 2023)

One part tradition, one-part modern showmanship, and completely unique, the Krewe of Stars’ “Ball for All” creates a unifying space for people from all walks of life. The event combines music, entertainment, over-the-top costuming, and pure decadence for an evening that honors both our differences and our similarities.

Mystic Krewe of Apollo’s 20th Annual Ball (January 28, 2023)

This Krewe’s events have become the stuff of local legend for their elaborate and mesmerizing costumes. With the theme for this year’s 20th-anniversary event announced as “A Night of Magic,” it’s sure to be a spellbinding night of hocus pocus and bewitching sights. This Bal Masque typically sells out well before the event date, so don’t delay if you want to be a part of this wickedly good time.

Mystic Krewe of Amon-Ra’s 58th Annual Ball (January 28, 2023)

Securing an invitation to this exclusive ball is quite the honor, as each member is given just ten seats to fill with family and friends. But those who are lucky enough to attend this dazzling formal event get to witness a gay Mardi Gras tradition that has been going strong for nearly 60 years. Become a member or befriend a member to experience this show-stopping Carnival fantasy.

Krewe of Mwindo Bal Masque (TBD)

With education and outreach events throughout the year and an annual Bal Masque, this Krewe strives to unite queer people of various backgrounds, with specific emphasis on uplifting and celebrating the city’s queer Black community.

Krewe of Belle Reve’s Friday Night Before Mardi Gras (February 3, 2023)

Want to experience the splendor of Gay Mardi Gras while supporting a good cause? This celebration is hosted by the Krewe of Belle Reve of Belle Reve NOLA, which provides affordable, LGBTQ-affirming housing to the city’s aging population. This year’s epic masquerade ball will be hosted at the Allways Lounge & Cabaret, where drinks, hors d’oeuvres, costumes, and entertainment will flow in abundance all night long.

Armeinius Bal Masque LIV (February 17, 2023)

Since the 1960s, the Krewe of Armeinius has staged elaborate balls that showcase a full tableau of queer artistry, invention, and community. Everything from the outlandish and satirical to the formal and refined feels right at home in this legendary Bal Masque, which continues to sell tickets to the public to pass on the history and grand tradition of gay Mardi Gras. While this year’s event will be hosted in Chalmette, partygoers can convene at Grand Pre’s for a shuttle to and from the Frederick J Sigur Civic Center.

Krewe of Petronius Ball (February 19, 2023)

The world’s oldest gay Mardi Gras Krewe returns for another triumphant evening of queer resilience. Founded at a time when anti-gay laws were still in place in much of the country, this Krewe has long been revered for its dedication to uniting the LGBTQ community, even when it was dangerous or difficult to do so. This year’s event supports Covenant House New Orleans, where young people can find safety and security during times of crisis. Tickets are exclusive to members, so you’ll have to join the ranks of Petronius to see this historic Krewe in action.

Lords of Leather Ball (February 19, 2023)

The only rule at Lords of Leather Ball? Don’t dress casually. Here, leather outfits, flamboyant costumes, gowns, and tuxedos are the name of the game. Tap into your bawdy side with the only krewe in the country that specifically caters to the gay leather community while promoting education, raising public awareness, and dismantling stigmatization of this often-overlooked (and prejudged) queer subculture.

Fat Monday Luncheon (February 20, 2023)

This Gay Carnival tradition celebrates its 73rd year with a delicious multi-course luncheon at Arnaud’s Restaurant. In addition to mingling and dining with fellow queer revelers, attendees will enjoy a human chandelier decoration contest, a second line led by a New Orleans jazz band, and a Queen’s Reception at Crossing Bar. Because the event carries such historical significance, tickets sell out quickly, so plan ahead if you want to be in that number.

Mardi Gras Day (February 21, 2023)

Take to the streets in all your queer glory for the citywide celebration of Fat Tuesday. Parades, dancing, indulgences, and more await you at nearly every stop, and the best costumes of the season will be on full display.

Bourbon Street Awards (February 21, 2023)

Gather at the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann for a block-party that dishes out awards for Best Drag, Best Leather, Best of Show and more, all against the colorful backdrop of Mardi Gras Day. This tradition has carried on for five decades and is guaranteed to delight your spirit and imagination. Think you’ve got what it takes to win a Bourbon Street Award? Be sure to sign up early that morning to participate in this famously flashy spectacle.

Gay Mardi Gras Bead Toss (February 21, 2023)

Every year, the Krewe of Queenateenas’ reigning King Cake King and Queen take to the balcony of the Ambush Mansion for a bead toss that will have the queer community leaping, grabbing and cheering. This is, quite literally, one of the crowning moments of Gay Mardi Gras.

Now that you know what you'll do, you can start thinking about where you’ll stay, what you’ll eat, and what you’ll drink. Need ideas on what to wear? Our local costume and accessories shops have you covered there, too. Let the gay times roll!

[phantomas99]

Nkuba, god of storms and lightning from the epic of Mwindo

[thecreaturecodex]

May I ask what reference materials you have at your disposal?

This list includes only books about monsters that I own and have used for the Codex at some point. It does not include books I've gotten from libraries (I have access to an excellent university library and one of the best public library systems in the country), nor does it include RPG books or books about science and nature. We'd be here all day, and this list already took like 90 minutes to collate.

A Field Guide to the Little People—Arrowsmiths and Moore Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials; Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy—Barlowe The Dictionary of Demons—Belanger Monsters in Print—Benedict Ghosts Monsters and Demons of India—Bhairav and Khonna The Mwindo Epic—Biebuyck and Mateene, ed. The Beast of Boggy Creek; Momo—Blackburn Bigfoot: Life and Times of a Legend—Buhs The Hidden—Christopher and Austin The Unexplained!—Clark Ghostland; The Unidentified—Dickey Prehistoric Monster Mash; Dinosaur Memories II—Debus After Man; The New Dinosaurs; Man After Man—Dixon Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology—Eberhart Welsh Monsters and Mythical Beasts—Ellis The Book of Yokai; Pandemonium and Parade—Foster Encounters With Flying Humanoids—Gerhard The Leprechaun’s Kingdom—Haining Meeting With Monsters—Hlioberg and Aegisson Dragons—Hogarth and Cleary Monster Atlas Volume 1—Hyland and Kay The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials—Hyughe Bestiarium Greenlandica—Kreutzmann Evil in Our Midst—Jones The Natural History of Unicorns—Lavers Legends of the Fire Spirits—Lebling Travels to the Otherworld and Fantastic Realms—Lecouteaux and Lecouteaux Cowboys and Saurians 1 and 2—Lemay Medieval Monsters—Lindquist and Mittman The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures—Matthews and Matthews The Night Parade of 100 Demons; The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits; The Book of the Hakutaku; The Fox’s Wedding—Meyer Hunting Monsters—Naish Cryptozoologicon Volume 1—Naish, Koseman and Conway Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology—Newton The United States of Cryptids—Ocker Chasing American Monsters—Ofutt Iberian Monsters—Prado The Creatures of Philippine Mythology—Ramos A Wizard’s Bestiary—Ravenheart Giants, Monsters and Dragons; Spirits, Faeries, Leprechauns and Goblins—Rose The Encyclopedia of Monsters—Rovin Bad UFOs—Schaeffer JaPandemonium Illustrated—Sekien, translated by Yoda and Alt Dragons: A Natural History; A Manifestation of Monsters; The Beasts that Hide from Man; Flying Toads and Snakes with Wings; Extraordinary Animals Revisited; Mirabilis; A Menagerie of Marvels; The UneXplained—Shuker Dangerous Spirits—Smallman Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginies—Smith Monsters of the Gevaudan—Smith A Chinese Bestiary—Strassberg Mummies Cannibals and Vampires—Sugg The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters—Weinstock, ed. Mythical Creatures of the USA and Canada—Wyman The World of Kong—Weta Workshop Mystery Animals of China—Xu

Appearing on this list does not necessarily constitute a recommendation. Carol Rose's books, for example, has a lot of gaps and are responsible for a number of myths and misconceptions that have circulated around the internet. And A Wizard's Bestiary by Oberon Zell-Ravenheart is more worthwhile as a curiosity than as reference material.

There are a lot of internet sources, of course, but I'm linking my top choices. If you're not already aware of A Book of Creatures and Yokai.com, you need to be.

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Connecting with oral culture'. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about oral storytelling. But first, we have a fun new thing that you can do which is that we’ve created a highly scientific – [clears throat] – personality quiz where you can answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with those responses.

Lauren: If you’re new to the podcast, and you’re trying to figure out what episode to start with, or if you’ve been with us for ages, and you wanna dive into the back catalogue, or if you’re trying to figure out which episode to recommend to a friend, our incredibly un-scientific, often-amusing questioned quiz is there for you to find the perfect episode.

Gretchen: You mean, you don’t think that which beverage someone likes corresponds to which Lingthusiasm episode they’re gonna like? I think this is very scientific.

Lauren: Absolutely unvalidated, absolutely untested, they are entirely for your amusement at bit.ly/lingthusiasmquiz.

Gretchen: Unscientific – but very fun.

Lauren: You can also find the link in the episode show notes.

Gretchen: In our most recent bonus episode, we take this quiz ourselves to find out which episode we are – although, of course, we love all of them as our children – and we also talk about the results of our 2023 listener survey.

Lauren: This one is rigorously scientifically constructed and tested. We have all the results, including whether Lingthusiasm is more kiki or bouba, and we discuss the results of important questions like, “Is the thumb a finger?” and “Is your sister’s husband’s sister still your sister-in-law?”

Gretchen: You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to this bonus episode and way more behind-the-scenes and other fun topic bonus episodes that help us keep the show running for all of you.

[Music]

Lauren: A conversation I enjoy having is to ask two people how they met because, sometimes, you’ll get this wonderfully honed and polished version of the story that they’ve both told that may not actually be entirely the original story but is “The Story” of how they met. And sometimes, you get two completely different takes on the event, and that has its own value as well.

Gretchen: When it comes to the story of how we started this podcast, my version of the story is Lauren and I had been friends on the internet for a long time. We were finally hanging out in person for the first time at a conference, and Lauren was like, “I’ve been thinking about starting a podcast,” and I was like, “I’VE been thinking about starting a podcast,” and the rest, as they say, is history.

Lauren: Whereas I swear by the story that Gretchen was like, “I would love to do a podcast,” and I was like, “I have skills that I could bring to your great idea for a podcast. We should do this together.”

Gretchen: We had this conversation face-to-face not over email or over DMs or somewhere where it might’ve been recorded, so we have no record to know whose version of this memory is factually what happened, but emotionally, both of us think that it was the other person’s idea first, which I think is really funny.

Lauren: I’ve even gone back to look at early written interactions that we’ve had to see who started the conversation from social media through to DMs and emails, and I’ll tell you what, direct messages on social media platforms are not an archivist’s friend.

Gretchen: It’s really hard to actually find out what’s going on. Even our first emails to each other which we can find are continuing the conversation from DMs. But this tendency to want to have our life histories documented is a very written-culture technology sort of thing. It’s what made me recommend to you to read this short story by Ted Chiang, who I knew that you’d heard of as the author of Story of Your Life, which is the short story that was adapted into the movie Arrival. He has this other short story called The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, which I thought you would enjoy. Do you wanna give us a little summary of it?

Lauren: Sure. I mean, we’ve already talked about the fact that writing is a technology. We have a whole episode on the idea of putting symbols onto clay or paper or tortoise shells is a very particular cultural invention, but what I like about this short story is it gets to the point that this technology brings with it all of these social changes and social dynamics that create literacy. It’s a short story, but you get two for the price of one. There’re two completely different narratives that are happening in this story. The one that’s specifically about writing is about Jijingi, who is a Tiv speaker from Tivland. A missionary named Moseby arrives in his village. Jijingi is the only person in the village who takes Moseby up on the offer to learn how to write. Moseby comes along with a whole colonial project – very much like British colonial vibes – where writing comes along as a technology that is used to govern people administratively, so along with writing comes record-keeping and trying to write down and codify histories and rules. That brings with it all these changes to the social fabric of Tivland.

Gretchen: I liked this story because it talks about the effect of the transition from oral culture to written culture on memory and cultural shift. One of the ways that Chiang illustrates this is by having the second strand of this braided story, which features an unnamed journalist as the narrator who is talking about this futuristic technology – which the story is set some unknown number of years in the future – when everyone has started using “Remem,” which are these optical cameras – you carry around this iris cam which is giving you access to video footage of a whole bunch of things that have happened in your life, all of these moments that would’ve gone undocumented, like the moment when Lauren and I decided to start a podcast.

Lauren: We could go back and get the definitive version, which for us would be an amusing resolution, but our unnamed protagonist goes back to look at all the arguments he had with his teenage daughter, which is never gonna end well.

Gretchen: It causes the unnamed narrator of that story to reassess his relationship with his daughter and the accuracy – or the emotional truth – of these memories that he’s been feeling in one particular way and how it feels to go back and look at them from the perspective of this disinterested camera which was also present at the scene.

Lauren: We are so familiar with writing as a technology and as a memory tool. It was nice to be put in the position of being slightly bamboozled by this future technology and how that would once again make us reassess our relationship with – as the title of the story says – the truth of fact and the truth of feeling.

Gretchen: We’ll link to the short story because it’s available online. I definitely endorse reading it. What did you think about it when you read it?

Lauren: I assume that the story of the Jijingi is – it seems to be drawing on the thing that we see happen when Western cultures brought literacy in with them because there’s all these dynamics around the written record changing the oral tradition where different tribes would talk about how they were related to each other, and then they were like, “No, because you’ve written it down here, and the written version is the definitive version, so we’re not gonna honour the current status of knowledge about which groups your group is aligned with.” I assume the specifics of that were fiction, but it seems to really capture the vibe of that.

Gretchen: Interestingly, this specific case is a real case that happened. Of course, the specific names of the people involved and what they were thinking, I think, are, indeed, fictionalised. But the Tiv people of Nigeria had a set of genealogies that were being used in settling court disputes, and they were recorded by the British in the colonial context. Then they diverged in the oral tradition from the written thing, and then the later oral people were saying, “No, you guys have written down the wrong thing. We have what’s true here.”

Lauren: Because that’s what’s true at this point in time for – like, “We’re friends with this community over here right now and not this other village, so we’re gonna update the story to reflect the current state of things.”

Gretchen: Right. And there isn’t perceived to be a rupture in that the way writing can create a rupture between your perceived-self versus the version of yourself that you’ve projected into the past. What I was told was that Chiang had read an academic manuscript about the effects of orality and literacy on cultures and on humans by an academic named Walter J. Ong and had been inspired to take a few sentences from that and expand that into a whole short story that elaborates on the emotional truths addressed in that relatively dry academic fashion.

Lauren: It’s very satisfying because I was like, “This feels like a story,” but it did feel grounded in an understanding of how literacy can change social dynamics.

Gretchen: I was inspired to read the academic book as well by this, but the short story conveys these truths in a more vivid storytelling way, which gets to the whole storytelling themes that come up from making things memorable by telling them as stories.

Lauren: I appreciate you sent me the short story and not the 200-page academic manuscript.

Gretchen: I read the 200-page academic manuscript! I think it’s very interesting. We’ll return to more things from the Ong book so that not everybody has to read it. But one of the things that reading this Ong book about orality and literacy made me reflect on was what he calls “residual orality,” little pockets of our lives and our experiences that may still be in an oral culture even when we’re living in predominantly written cultures, which you and I are both predominantly in a written culture. One example of this coming up in my life was I’m just young enough to remember when social media changed the way that gossip worked to be more written from being more oral.

Lauren: Ah, yes.

Gretchen: I remember in a pre-Facebook era of gossip where let’s say there was a party, and I wasn’t there. If some big drama happened at the party, you know, “I can’t believe so-and-so said this to so-and-so,” there’s a big fight or something, and I wanted to reconstruct what happened, I had to go talk to a bunch of people – I remember doing this – talk to a bunch of people, get their stories, which would all be a little bit different from each other, and decide what I believed from that based on my knowledge of these people and their personalities and what they were likely to tell as a story. I remember it being a really weird experience when Facebook started, and people would be posting things that were in view of just their friends. You could see similar types of dramas playing out – you know, “I can’t believe what this person said to that person” – but you could actually read the whole thing, and you could be present for the whole thing, and you could have that factive truth of witnessing the whole thing, even if you weren’t there at the time, because a few hours later it would still be there.

Lauren: And the pulling out your phone to tell someone some gossip that’s happened because you want to hold up the Instagram photo or you want to show them the Facebook thread where all the drama went down.

Gretchen: Right. Screencap culture of “I can’t believe this person said this thing. I’m gonna take a screencap and just show it to you” rather than “I’m going to report the story of what happened from my perspective” has made gossip more of a written culture than an oral culture where we have less acceptance for the fact that things may change a bit in the retelling, or you may retell the version as you experienced it from your own perspective and massage it to be more of a story with emotional beats at particular places. Now, you pull out a screencap, or you pull out the actual version, “Let me just read you what this person sent me.” Gossip has gotten more written in the last 20 years, which you can phrase that as a loss, and it’s also harder for people to deny obviously jerk-ish behaviour, so there are pluses to it, but it is something that’s changed.

Lauren: Another area that I think of as residual oral culture is when it comes to fairy tales. As a kid, it took me a long time – and I think a lot of people struggle with this tension – where the animated film version of a fairy tale is different to the picture book that you have which is different to a different picture book that someone else might have or the version that your grandmother told you not from a book just the version that she had. This is how fairy tales traditionally go. This idea that there’s a written, canonical version kind of came about when the Grimm Brothers decided to record fairy tales that they had encountered as part of their general documenting of German language and German history. I love that the Grimm Brothers are known most broadly for their fairy tale writing down. In linguistics, they’re known for doing all of this amazing historical research on the sounds of German and Proto-German. Fairy tales are their secondary claim to fame for linguists.

Gretchen: But giving the claim to fame of the people who did the documentation when what they were actually doing was documenting a thing that was in the collective memory of a group of people is a theme that keeps coming back when it comes to oral culture. Again, I am grateful to the Grimm Brothers for writing all of these stories down because otherwise I probably wouldn’t know them, as with many of the documenters. On the other hand, they ended up getting credit or claiming credit for all of these people whose names we don’t know who iterated on various versions of these fairy tales because they were part of a collective oral tradition.

Lauren: Also, writing something down doesn’t mean that it will stay a part of the transmission tradition. The Grimm Brothers over multiple volumes and multiple reversions of it ended up with around 200 fairy tales.

Gretchen: I don’t know 200 fairy tales.

Lauren: You mean you don’t know “The Three Snake-Leaves”?

Gretchen: I know “Cinderella.”

Lauren: Are you looking forward to the animated remake of “The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage”?

Gretchen: I know “The Princess and the Pea”?

Lauren: Some Grimm fairy tales have stood the test of time, and others have not remained in transmission for different groups of people. You might be from a different part of the world where you still know “The Magic Table, the Gold-Donkey, and the Club in the Sack,” but that’s not one that I’ve kept in my family repository of stories.

Gretchen: But writing lets things remain in an archive for someone to rediscover rather than the cultural pruning of the oral tradition where the bits that gets remembered are the bits that get continually repeated.

Lauren: There’s a lot of oral culture that we only have thanks to the written form. Homer and the Homeric epics – the Iliad and the Odyssey – only exist because someone at some point wrote down a version of those stories.

Gretchen: Somebody who may or may not have been a guy named Homer.

Lauren: But I have a statue of the bust of Homer! He was a person!

Gretchen: I mean, there certainly was some person and some people somewhere, but Homer is, in many ways, a cultural folkloric figure himself. By tradition, these poems are attributed to Homer, but they may not have even been written by the same dude. They certainly seem to have some temporal distinctions between the Iliad and the Odyssey. They were definitely part of the Ancient Greek oral tradition because they have a lot of structural features that are characteristic of the oral tradition, the sort of episodic structure, the formulaic things like “wily Odysseus” and “owl-eyed Athena” and the various epithets that get attached to the characters who are these clear archetypes. Homer himself – we don’t really know. This idea that he was this blind guy is because one of the bards in one of the Homeric poems is blind, and people have said, “Well, maybe this is a self-insert because he himself was blind.” We don’t know.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: The paintings and the busts and so on of Homer are all produced several hundred years later. They’re sort of fanfic adaptations of him.

Lauren: I actually feel more impressed when I discovered that Homer wasn’t a single person and, in fact, this whole debate about the status of him is known as the “Homeric question.” I feel more impressed knowing that there wasn’t just one person who told these stories but there were, and still are, people across this region who would remember thousands and thousands of lines of oral stories and be able to perform them – not word-for-word every time – but they would hit the same beats, they would be transmitting the same stories, they would all put their own spin on it, and that this continued on for centuries and millennia, and somehow I find that more powerful than the idea that there was this one dude in particular who was really good at this.

Gretchen: It wasn’t this lone genius. It was a culture that supported bardic storytelling.

Lauren: It wasn’t necessarily a culture that just disappeared with Ancient Greece. In fact, even well into the 20th Century, if you went to the region in Europe around there, there would be people in mountain villages who still sang epic songs of incredible length. Milman Parry was an American classicist who decided to see if there were any “modern Homers,” as it was put, and he recorded one song that was performed over five days and ended up being 13,000 lines, which is just an amazing skill to have and one that, as a literate person, I’ve not grown up to be trained to have the kind of memory to perform that kind of feat.

Gretchen: That’s really neat. I think a thing that interests me about the question of the Homeric recordings and Milman Parry’s recordings is that the Homeric Greeks, whoever Homer was or all of the Homers were, were using this new technology – to them – of writing to record these oral poems that were very important to them culturally. Then you have Milman Parry using also the latest and greatest recording technology which was, what, wax cylinders?

Lauren: Oh my gosh, I think it was these aluminium disks that they had to swap out every five minutes or something. I can’t even imagine the amount of equipment that they had to move around to make this happen.

Gretchen: Yet, it’s still such a feat to record a five-day poem. There’s also a big recording feat that happened in the 1960s to record the Mwindo epic from the Nyanga people in the Congo. The poet there, Candi Rureke, who was asked to narrate all of the stories of Mwindo, who’s the hero of these folk stories, and said, “Never had anybody performed all of the episodes in sequence.” He narrated, as a result of the negotiations between the researchers who wanted to do this, all of the Mwindo stories – sometimes in prose, sometimes in verse – over 12 days. There were three scribes – two Nyanga scribes and one Belgian scribe – who were writing down his words at the same time because it’s obviously faster than one person can write. This is not like writing a novel or a poem. It’s much more of a performance. After the end of those 12 days, he was exhausted, obviously.

Lauren: I’m not surprised.

Gretchen: It’s already framed in terms of the demands of writing, which says, “Okay, we’re gonna try to do this in a big, tight sequence and have this efficient thing.” Oral poems are created to be told to people for maybe an hour or two in the evenings, and then the next day, you tell another story for an hour or two, and together, they form an episodic mythology of “Here are all the stories of the gods” or “Here are all the stories of the heroes” or “Here are all the stories of these archetypal, legendary figures” – the princesses and the dragons and these types of things.

Lauren: As a member of the Nyanga community, you hear all the Mwindo stories across your lifetime. The idea that you would sit down and tell them in some kind of sequence is not the normal way these are performed.

Gretchen: Right, exactly. There’s a story about Mwindo, who’s the hero – the omnicompetent hero – his epithet is “Little-One-Just-Born-He-Walked.” He walked as soon as he was born. There are stories about how he climbed from the womb and, in one case, emerged from his mother’s bellybutton. This is the version from the recording with Rureke that I was able to find. But I also saw in a different encyclopaedia that Mwindo emerged from his mother’s middle finger. They’re both clearly doing a similar preternatural birth-style story – emerging from your bellybutton or from your middle finger – but the details can vary. In both cases, the important stuff is still there where he’s helping his mother with chores even while he’s still in the womb. He’s walking and talking from the moment he’s born. His father’s trying to only have daughters because there’s a prophecy that his son will be his downfall. He tries to kill Mwindo even as a baby and, of course, he doesn’t succeed because this is a hero.

Lauren: What a precocious child.

Gretchen: Exactly. But the birth story is one of the many stories that gets told and isn’t necessarily told in sequence where it’s like, “Well, first he was born, and then this thing happened and then this thing happened.” You could pick any one of them to tell on a given night.

Lauren: It’s interesting how we see stuff vary in oral narratives, but there’s also something really compelling about what is emerging as the same across different stories and, often, across large areas. I mentioned briefly that the Grimm Brothers kicked off this whole recording of folk stories and fairy stories across Europe and beyond. People have looked at the similarities there. But there’s this even bigger story that I find really compelling, which is the story of the Seven Sisters, which I know from Indigenous Australian narrative tradition.

Gretchen: I’ve heard of the Seven Sisters as referring to a Greek story about the constellation that I also know as the Pleiades. It’s got this very closely clustered set of stars in the night sky that's sort of shaped like a teeny-tiny Big Dipper, I think of it. In my recollection, when I’ve looked at the Pleiades myself, I’ve seen six stars, and yet, the Greek stories about the Seven Sisters, the Indigenous Australian stories about the Seven Sisters.

Lauren: Yeah, the story in Australia is about the same set of Pleiades of which there are six if you look in the sky now, but some astronomers did some research that looked at how one of those stars is actually two stars, one in front of the other, and if you rewound the sky 10,000 years, they would be two different stars. The story of the Seven Sisters is that one of them is shy. You don’t see her, and she hides herself. It seems like this story that gets told across cultures is to account for what has been a changing of the sky across millennia.

Gretchen: That’s fascinating. This lost seventh star, or seventh person represented by the star, has been found in European, African, Asian, Indonesian, Native American, Indigenous Australian cultures that have – I mean, they’re a very cluster-y cluster. I have to say, if you’re looking at the night sky and looking for like, “I think these ones all go together,” they’re very close according to our visual perception on Earth. I can see why you’d come up with a story about them.

Lauren: Being in the night sky is a really good hook for remembering the story and continuing to pass it on as you all look up into the sky.

Gretchen: Yeah. But the fact that this seventh star has been transmitted for maybe 10,000 years is phenomenal.

Lauren: And a really great example of how oral culture can be a really great way of preserving knowledge or recording history not in the way that we think about it with writing. Not to say that that’s the only value that it has because it absolutely doesn’t, but it is one really interesting thing about the way we preserve and transmit these stories.

Gretchen: We don’t have written records that are 10,000 years old. Writing is not that old. Scientists have sometimes wondered, “How could we try to transmit a message to people 10,000 years in the future?” If we look towards the past of what kinds of things did get transmitted, maybe we need to take inspiration from oral cultures. One group of scientists and folklorists who’ve been trying to figure out the way to transmit messages for a long period of time are people who are trying to come up with long-term nuclear waste warning messages.

Lauren: Hmm, because that nuclear waste is still gonna be nasty well beyond any period we know we have successful transmitted messages in human history to date.

Gretchen: There’s this fascinatingly named field of research called “nuclear semiotics.”

Lauren: Oh, that sounds amazing. What is that?

Gretchen: Which is the study of how to create nuclear warning messages that will still be intelligible 10,000 years in the future.

Lauren: Oh, because we have that yellow triangle with the black spikey symbol, but I’ve absolutely heard of people who were like, “My 5-year-old looked at that symbol and thought it was a flower.”

Gretchen: Right. Or if you use a skull, well, sometimes skulls are, you know, maybe it’s pirates.

Lauren: Yellow might be meaning that it’s something really cool in here rather than a bit of a warning.

Gretchen: There’s a lot of proposals. Some of them are more practical and some of them are a little bit more wacky. Certainly, writing it out in a whole bunch of different languages so that even if some of them aren’t in common use in thousands of years, maybe at least some of them will still be sort of around.

Lauren: Or maybe we’ll have reverted entirely to being oral cultures again. Literacy has arrived. It may not stay.

Gretchen: But if literacy doesn’t stick around, then one of my favourite proposals is the breeding of so-called “radiation cats” or “ray cats” – because we have had cats for more than 10,000 years. We know that.

Lauren: That is true.

Gretchen: If you bred a special type of cat where they would change colour when they came near radioactive emissions, and then you’d have to transmit the message that if the cat changes colour, it’s bad.

Lauren: Oh, you make a folk story out of colour-changing kitties which will be out there in the world and, hopefully, that story gets passed on along with the other folktales.

Gretchen: You have to make a fairy tale and myths and poetry and music and painting about the dangers of colour-changing cats. You have to get all of the cats or many of the cats to be colour-changing, but people like cats. There was an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible where they commissioned a musician to write a song about ray cats for a 2014 episode about this which was called “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Resettlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty),” which was supposed to be so catchy and annoying that it might actually get handed down and stay working. But I have to say, I have never heard people sing this song in a cultural-folkloric sense, so I don’t know if they succeeded in having it be transmitted even 10 years.

Lauren: But you know, I listened to that episode many years ago, and as soon as you said “colour-changing kitties,” I knew exactly what was happening even though I did not know nuclear semiotics. So, there you go. There might be hope.

Gretchen: Maybe if it’s a wacky enough idea, people will keep talking about it because it sounds so cool.

Lauren: It’s really good applied folklore studies there.

Gretchen: In addition to transmitting information about how many stars are in this particular constellation, this speaks to the role of folklore and oral cultures in shaping behaviour. Maybe that’s telling people to not go near the colour-changing cats, but also, there’s a whole bunch of Aesop’s Fables around things like jealousy or things like ingenuity, various clever things that foxes do or things like that. Those are ways of telling people about appropriate or inappropriate behaviour.

Lauren: I bet you’re gonna tell me Aesop isn’t real either.

Gretchen: Well, look, it seems like the fables originally were part of oral tradition and were written down about three centuries after Aesop’s death.

Lauren: Ok, so the fact of feeling rather than the fact of truth. I get it.

Gretchen: I think at that point there were various things that, once you had Aesop’s Fables as a template for a certain type of morality story, you can ascribe various other kinds of stories and jokes and proverbs to him, even though some of that is from earlier than his period or is not just strictly from the Greek cultural area.

Lauren: Aesop’s Fables, where usually animals perform different actions, and they have moral consequences, it’s actually a really good teaching tool, teaching children about cultural expectations around behaviour and what counts as good behaviour and what counts as rude behaviour. That’s really hard. Having stories to do that with rather than waiting for them to make every possible social mistake is a really great cultural tool.

Gretchen: A lot of parents these days will buy their kid a picture book about, like, “Here’s the potty, and why you might want to use it” or “Saying ‘thank you’ – it’s important. Here’s all the ways we can say ‘thank you’” to also try to mould their kids’ behaviour into some of the things that’re culturally important to us.

Lauren: It’s why it’s really fun to see different morality stories across different cultures as really interesting ways to see what a particular culture values.

Gretchen: There’s an interesting story about Inuit storytelling as used to discipline or to train children into things that are important. Obviously, it’s important for kids to stay away and be careful around the ocean where they could easily drown. Instead of yelling at them, you know, “Don’t go near the water!”, you can tell them a story about a sea monster who is in the water who could eat little children, which is a little bit more vivid in terms of the potential –

Lauren: It certainly gets the point across.

Gretchen: It’s a bit more vivid than just saying, “Don’t go near the water. It��s not safe,” to tell you here’s this fanciful story that the kid may or may not completely believe in a literal sense but conveys this message of “This is dangerous. Don’t do that.”

Lauren: You know, we don’t just have to tell children stories to teach them lessons. Society has a long tradition of telling children stories at bedtime.

Gretchen: There’s a really fun version of this. Another epic poem that was written down so early that we don’t know the original poet’s name is Beowulf in the Old English Tradition. In this case, we don’t even have a “Homer” name. Even though we don’t know anything about Homer, Homer’s name is ascribed to this poem by tradition. In the case of Beowulf, we just call this person the “Beowulf Poet” because we don’t even know who wrote it down or which exact people it passed through, but it has many of these similar characteristics in terms of having these formulaic elements and these rhythmic elements that make it easy to remember as a poem and eventually get written down.

Lauren: It was written so early in the history of English that we’ve even talked in a previous episode about how there is a modern translation of it into an English that is more accessible to us today.

Gretchen: There’re many translations of it into various different kinds and registers of Modern English. At the time, I was very excited about the Maria Dahvana Headley translation, which begins with “Bro” to translate the “Hwaet” word at the beginning which gets your attention. Other people have also translated this word with things like “So” and “Look” or “Listen.” There’s another new translation of this poem which reimagines it as a children’s story where all the characters are children, and the monster that comes and eats the warriors and drags them back to his lair and so on is, instead, a sort of grumpy old neighbour who goes into the children’s treehouse and makes them grow up instantly into boring adults.

Lauren: Oh, how terrifying!

Gretchen: The connection here is that this adaptation was written by Zach Weinersmith, who’s a webcomics guy, mostly, who started telling it as a story to his kids as a bedtime story and found that oral culture stories, even though we think of them as high-culture and complicated and things, actually tell really well to children because children are still operating under an oral culture in many cases because they haven’t learned how to read yet.

Lauren: Oh my gosh, you’re so right. I feel like my early primary-schooling days were such a rich world of all those rhymes and stories and games that you learn as a little kid. So good!

Gretchen: Right, like the skipping games and the clapping games which get transmitted by other children, and sometimes you meet someone from somewhere else, and they’ve got a slightly different version of “Ring Around the Rosie.”

Lauren: Mine was “Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies, a tissue, a tissue, we all fall down.”

Gretchen: Mine was “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

Lauren: Ah, there you go. I mean, yours is obviously incorrect, but good for you. [Laughter]

Gretchen: We were transmitted different versions of those rhymes, but they have this characteristic game of holding hands and running around in a circle and falling down that they go with even if parts of it, especially the little bit more nonsensical parts, got transmitted into something else that felt a bit more sensical.

Lauren: How does the Beowulf retelling read? It must be fun to read out loud.

Gretchen: It’s really fun to read out loud. Here’s the first couple lines, which go “Hey, wait! Listen to the lives of the long-ago kids, the world-fighters/ The parent-unminding kids, the improper, the politeness-proof/ The unbowed bully-crushers, the bedtime-breakers, the raspberry-blowers/ Fighters of fun-killers, fearing nothing, fated for fame.”

Lauren: Oh, so good.

Gretchen: I love that it’s doing the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre, and it’s doing all these very Old English compounds of “world-fighters” and “bedtime breakers” and “fun killers.”

Lauren: That’s still accessible.

Gretchen: That’s still accessible and playing with the language but in a way that’s still available to kids. I recommended it to some of my friends with kids, and they said their 5-year-old loved it.

Lauren: Perfect. A lot of highly literate people are untrained in oral storytelling that, personally, having something I can read to replicate that experience is really reassuring for me as a limited-capacity literate person here.

Gretchen: I also think it’s neat because children’s stories are trying to do two different things. One of those is create pre-literate and early-literate and proto-literate children by giving them these books with relatively simple language and words that are relatively phonetically spelled, especially for English, which is not very phonetically spelled all the time, and trying to give them something that they might be able to read by themselves relatively early on. And then simultaneously, these kids are quite sophisticated language users in the oral domain, and so giving them texts that are very dense and rich and have a lot going on and aren’t simple texts that they could read by themselves but let them engage with that level of oral language that they already have is this other thing that children’s storytelling can also do. A lot of these stories were either told, you know, fairy tales are traditionally told to children but also are traditionally told to mixed audiences including both adults and children. It’s interesting to see that more explicitly brought back.

Lauren: It’s interesting when you look across things like Beowulf and the stories of Mwindo and the stories that we have from the Homeric epics. You see, as there is in this Ong book, all of these features of particularly oral storytelling. It doesn’t have to be beginning to end. It doesn’t have to always be exactly the same every time. It’s these features that make you realise what a weird genre the idea of narrative fiction in book form is and, again, how literacy has created this weird layer over the top of human storytelling.

Gretchen: It took hundreds of years of literacy for someone to invent the novel. Poetry is much older than the novel, and diary or memoir or “Here’s my life story” is much older than the novel, but the idea that an author can see into characters’ brains and tell you what they’re thinking and tell you what a bunch of people are thinking but in this very psychoanalytic way and in a way that is linked together – one of the points that I thought was interesting that Ong makes in the book is that many of the early novelists were women perhaps even because they were educated enough to be literate but not educated in the what he calls “residually oral classical tradition” that the men were being educated in at the time. They were more willing to look at writing as its own medium and to see what writing could be capable of that wasn’t trying to learn Latin and study Greek rhetoric or, in the case of Murasaki writing the first novel in Japanese, learning as much of the classical tradition that was still bound up in this rhetorical history of trying to learn these very formal and stylised and performative types of stories.

Lauren: We talked about Murasaki’s Tale of Genji in our translation episode as well. That was written, and then no one paid attention to it for literally hundreds of years. It’s like a millennium old.

Gretchen: It was very popular at the time.

Lauren: Yeah, just kind of written for her friends we think. It’s all very opaque what the context of that being created was. Fiction, for a long time, was not taken seriously as a written art form. It was all about the oral storytelling in cultures that are now very book story focused.

Gretchen: You have Jane Austen sort of inventing what we can think of as the modern novel, at least in English-speaking cultures, and yeah, some of these early novel writers not being educated as much in this classical rhetorical tradition.

Lauren: Fascinating. I’ve never really thought about it before, but it’s an interesting observation.

Gretchen: One thing that I will say that I disagree with – so Ong is writing this book which is very interesting in 1982, and our thoughts on some things have changed since 1982.

Lauren: Right, okay.

Gretchen: One of the points that oral culture people who are newly encountering writing make and, like, Plato has Socrates make this point when he’s writing down Socrates' speeches because this was also an early transition from oral to written culture is that when you have a person telling you something, that person can be asked questions and can be interrogated, can answer and be held to account for the story that they’re telling you. You could ask them how they know things. When you have a written book, you are just forced to take the writer’s thoughts and opinions on their say-so at this one snapshot of the time that they’ve written them down, and you don’t have the living person there to ask questions of. We think, as very literate culture people, that the book is the better version, but not actually having access to the person is both a plus because it can live on beyond them and also a downside because their thoughts might’ve changed, and you don’t have a way of knowing that when all you have is a record from one period of time. Which is to say that the Ong book is not great about sign languages, by which I mean, it just really doesn’t include or look at them.

Lauren: Oh, dear.

Gretchen: Yeah. Charitably, I’m gonna say that the research has come a long way since 1982, when it was published. Ong’s dead now, so we don’t know what he thought in more recent times. But what the sign language research does show is that even though “orality” and “oral culture” is this term that’s based on the mouth and the voice, the cultural phenomena that we now attach to that word are very much features of signed language cultures and d/Deaf cultures as well.

Lauren: We have that great interview with Gab Hodge where she told us all about the amazing resources that d/Deaf people have for storytelling in signed languages, particularly Auslan and BSL that she works in.

Gretchen: I also came across a very interesting discussion from a Listserv from 1993.

Lauren: Oh my gosh! How did you manage that? We couldn’t even go back to DMs from five years ago.

Gretchen: This got archived as a PDF from the ORTRAD Listserv – the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: There’s an electric conversation on d/Deafness and orality that got preserved in this very, very written culture way. Because I was able to go back and read what people were writing in 1993. It’s slightly edited to add little footnotes about like, “This is an emoticon. Here’s what an emoticon is,” because maybe in 1993 you don’t know that.

Lauren: So cool. Okay. What is in this Listserv conversation?

Gretchen: There’s a lot of really good commentary from Lois Bragg, who was a d/Deaf professor at Gallaudet University who was talking about the d/Deaf community doing oral culture. She was very clear that this is something that she thinks applies to the d/Deaf community and that there is a lot of narrative that is epic and legendary and somewhat historical or autobiographical, and it tends to be quite stylised. This is what she thought of as characteristic of d/Deaf culture. There’s a lot of storytelling and plays and poems and wordplay and things like that. There was some discussion with both Lois Bragg and Stephanie Hall – and this is in 1993 – that d/Deafness is in this unique situation regarding literacy because there isn’t one widely used way of writing sign language that lots of d/Deaf people use, although there’s a variety of systems that researchers and various people use experimentally. This is still an oral culture that has maybe a relationship to English as a literate culture that’s like the Anglo-Saxons who were going home and speaking Old English to each other and learning to read and write in Latin, which was a completely different language, just to access the technology of writing. Even though d/Deaf people can learn to read in English or another oral language that has a written tradition, there isn’t an endogenous way of writing signed languages that’s widely accepted.

Lauren: One bit of oral tradition that I love that’s at the opposite end of the scale from remembering a full epic – maybe this is just because of my terrible literate-person memory – but I love the oral tradition of memorable units of small sayings that everyone remembers and get embedded into your reflexive response to things. So, things like, “A stitch in time saves nine.” You have to learn what that means, but you get told it a whole bunch, and then you learn what it means, and then you say it to people when they wanna put off doing something that needs doing.

Gretchen: Or something like, “Red sky at night, sailor���s delight,” and how you can learn, “Oh, okay, so if the sunset is really red, the weather’s more likely to be nice the next day.”

Lauren: Ah, I have it as, “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.”

Gretchen: Well, you see, I grew up on the coast.

Lauren: That’s your maritime culture coming through and my pastoralist culture coming through there.

Gretchen: Or “Measure twice, cut once,” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

Lauren: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” I was about to say they rhyme, often, or are alliterative. That one doesn’t, but it still sticks in my mind.

Gretchen: They’ve got a metrical quality to them like the longer poems, and we’ve retained the shorter proverb-y bits of memorable units. I was thinking about when I was reading the Ong book, and he talks a lot about “residual orality” even in cultures that are primarily literate. I have an example in my own life about a thing that I did that was part of oral culture. I worked as a tour guide as a summer job. We had a half-hour guided tour of the museum that the various tour guides would give the same way. Once I had been working there for a few months, I had certain jokes and anecdotes and beats that I knew, things that would work as laugh lines, and things that were more serious, and ways to get from the serious bits to the funnier bits, and not just have sudden transitions there. I had the memory of which bits that I said at which parts of the tour keyed to different locations along the route within the museum, which is a very long-standing memory technique. I learned to do that tour in an oral culture way by watching some other people’s guided tours, and then they said, “Okay, you can probably do one now.”

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: One time I saw a script of the guided tour written out, and it just felt weird. It felt flat, and it didn’t have the jokes in it the same way. It didn’t have the delivery. Some of our tour guides would try to learn it from the written script, and it just didn’t feel like it was the tour the way it existed in this more fully-featured and three-dimensional and located-in-time-and-space version as it was in my mind.

Lauren: You might not always give the tour exactly the same way twice, but you were probably paying attention to like, “Oh, this is an audience that really likes the emotional bits. I’m gonna tone down the jokes,” or “I’m gonna move through this bit quickly.” You can react to the moment.

Gretchen: Right. Or “These people are giving me lots of laughs, so I’m gonna be even jokey-er.” I would have versions that I would do with seniors or with kids that would be a little bit different, but yeah, it felt like it was this very oral object that I hadn’t realised that I had that part of oral culture in my memory. The other thing that I thought about when I was reading this Walter J. Ong book – which made me wish that I read it before I wrote Because Internet, but you know, a book is a snapshot of a moment in time.

Lauren: Oh, it’s not an oral saga that you can update depending on the season.

Gretchen: I can’t just update it. I’m doing the updating in our oral saga of the podcast. Which is thinking about the relationship of internet memes to oral culture. Because in oral culture, the only things that get transmitted are things that have been put into a form that is memorable. Proverbs like, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” you can substitute “sailor” for “shepherd” because they have the same number of syllables, and it still works, but if you try to say, “Red sky at night, sailor’s enjoyment,” that one doesn’t get remembered the same way.

Lauren: At some point, someone sat down and explained to me, you know, “The reason we say this is because where the sun is reflecting off the sky at the sunset or the sunrise reflects what’s happening with the clouds, and that gives you some indication of what might happen with precipitation later on that day.” Like, sure, that’s an explanation, but it’s not as catchy.

Gretchen: And weather tends to move from west to east because of the rotation of the Earth, and all various things like that. But it’s the mnemonic “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight” that sticks with you in your brain, and you have to preserve that mnemonic in a form that is memorable and that is pass-around-able. If you say something like, “Red sky at night, saves nine,” “You can lead a horse to water, but it’s worth two in the bush,” these are silly, playful things that we can do because we have that memory of them. But memes are not oral culture in that sticky pneumatic way. The thing that enables memes is being able to Google them. And the thing that enables the tremendous proliferation of memes – and there are so many of them. The early stages of memes were more oral. Like, “I Can Has Cheeseburger” was just the same image that kept getting repeated in a whole bunch of contexts. Whereas now, you have a template of a meme that’s like “The Distracted Boyfriend” meme where you have the guy, and he’s looking at the one girl, and the other girl’s looking at him, and you can put a whole bunch of different labels on that. Because you can search for the template, and you can search for the name, and you can see a whole bunch of people making their riffs, and then you make your own riff, and it prizes originality and riffing off of it – like, when I see a new meme that’s been going around, sometimes I look it up, or I read the meme explainer of like, “Here’s what it is,” from Vox or somebody.

Lauren: You have to work backwards. That’s been five minutes not five hundred years.

Gretchen: Right. And the fact that there are all these templates and variants that we make of the memes, rather than repeating the same really sticky one, that’s actually a very written culture phenomenon that there’s lots of different versions and edits and metacommentaries. Whereas having something that’s more sticky that just gets repeated is a more oral culture thing. Sometimes, people try to say that memes are oral culture because they’re pointing at something, but what they’re actually pointing at is that memes are an extreme of written culture rather than an extreme of oral culture. They are a cultural shift, but they’re a cultural shift in the opposite direction that people typically say, which I wish I’d been able to put that in Because Internet, but here’s the updated version.

Lauren: This episode has really, once again, hammered home how unusual in the course of human history written literacy is and how amazing and creative and powerful – and how much of a skill – oral literacy is.

Gretchen: It’s hard for you and I to even talk about oral literacy or oral literature without using metaphors brought in from literate culture. Even when we try to project our memory of what it could’ve been like to not be literate, we end up bringing in a bunch of our literate assumptions. People doing the detailed ethnography and record-keeping of oral cultures help us disturb some of those and understand more deeply a very old and also still present way to be human.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all of the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our new “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo.

Gretchen: Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include an episode about swearing in fiction, some of our favourite deleted scenes from interviews that we’ve done over the past year or two, and the hosts of Lingthusiasm do the super scientific “Which Lingthusiasm Episode are You” quiz, as well as reporting on the results of the Lingthusiasm survey and talking about what’s coming up for the next year. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[thenixart]

[id: Digital art of a seven headed dragon with the body of a fat bellied brown bird against a green circle background. Each of the dragon’s heads have only one green eye, one horn the same color as the yellow skin on its face, dog-like muzzles with blue teeth and tongues, and a pair of nostrils close to the eye. It is posed in flight with its talons facing the viewer and each of its faces looking in a different direction and making different expressions. /end id]

Fat dog faced birb.

Kirimu from the Epic of Mwindo.

The Lord of the Forest.

A dragon with seven heads, seven eyes, seven horns, a pot belly, and the tail of an eagle. 

Blood brother to the lightning god Nkuba, who will have beef with you if you kill his pal.