A woman marries a king.

The king goes off.

The woman hides that he’s left by crossdressing as the king.

The king gets back into the castle by crossdressing as the queen.

There are adventures between his leaving and return.

Does anyone know this story?

This is just a note for later exploration—

Sleeping Beauty pricks herself on an old spinning wheel and falls asleep.

Her entire kingdom then follows suit.

SLEEPING BEAUTY IS PATIENT ZERO. The disease needed a human in order to spread. The people who found and tended to her then caught the disease and it spread outward. This is also how her story survived, because some people escaped before they were infected.

In some versions of the story, the young king rapes Aurora, but what if his pricking of her was far more mundane? What if it was only a needle (but the story grew bawdier in the retelling)? And then her body was used to incubate the cure. This is why he leaves her behind.

Then the cure works faster than expected and she wakes alone. Or, she wakes the next time he visits and he’s bent over her (and she assumes he’s kissed her).

And the king’s ogre mother hates Sleeping Beauty because (a) she is distracting her son from statecraft with a medical mystery; and (b) she represents a new power (a ‘new’ old power) to the political game.

merverb:

Rapunzel by *MirrorCradle

respect for the pregnancy version LOVE IT

though it’s not really the first Rapunzel fairy tale as everyone seems to think (Petrosinella is closer to being the original)

the idea of her course hair in contrast with her swelling stomach (the ultimate in vulnerability & softness) is really interesting!

(1) I prefer the pregnant version as it seems to respect the character so much more. It is entirely believable that she’d have no idea what pregnancy was or what was happening to her body. It is far less believable to me that she’d be an air-head and more or less tell Gothel outright about the prince.

(2) Trying to find and pick the original, truest, purest, etc etc etc version is a bit annoying. Every version is equally valid, true, and pure for the people who tell it, imo. Besides, you also get into questions of whether the stories spawned separately or together, if one only appears older due to better record-keeping, etc etc etc.

(via fairytalescrapbook)

His stomach burned with hunger. Bread, milk, and eggs. Torte, sausage, and cream. Raw fish, lake weeds, horse tongue. Straw, grass, his wooden bed frame. He ate everything. Food, piled high on shelves like books in the great library, filled his dreams. Nothing ever satisfied him. His appetite never stopped demandingmore. Nothing filled the boy. Except want. He always wanted.

The 10th Kingdom is a miniseries in which two New Yorkers travel to a land of fairy tales, post-happily ever after. 

In one scene, one of the main party of characters is accused of murdering a shepherdess. He is put on trial with a judge who has already decided his guilt and, worst of all, a jury panel composed entirely of sheep.

After the closing arguments, the sheep are released from the jury pen and are allowed to wander into one of two other pens: Guilty and Not Guilty. 

The Not Guilty box is empty. The Guilty box is full of food. Unsurprisingly, the sheep crowd on in.

On face this seems like a terrible system, but you have to remember— the characters are outsiders to an insular community and the crime in question is the death of a young girl. They never were going to get an advantage.

Imagine instead how the system probably works when the only ones on the stands are the ones who live there— when the town members are actually divided.

Now, here is aspect of the courthouse I neglected to mention before— the guilty/not guilty pens are open air and easily accessed by those watching. Anyone can toss food in. Instead of placing the responsibility of a decision in the hands of 12 people who, given the community and the large family sizes, could not possibly be neutral, the decision belongs to everyone who bothers to watch. Also, given that everyone in town appears to belong to some family and have access to a farm, sheep food, or something they can use to influence the sheep.

So, the justice system in the town allows for any member of the town who cares enough about the outcome of the trial to affect the trial.

Secondly, the use of sheep also introduces an element of chance or divine right. Think of trial by combat— whoever won was right. The idea was that the gods would side with whichever combatant was right and ensure that s/he won.

The sheep are the same. Sheep cannot understand human arguments or be persuaded, other than by food. If the two boxes are equally full, then whichever the sheep are led to occupy must be the truth. And, if the sheep ever turned from a full box for an emptier one, then that is even greater support. Remember, this is a world of fairy tales and narrative necessities— to borrow from the words of one character, the people in this world either live happily ever after or die from horrible curses. The toast in another scene is ‘happily ever after.’ So, instead of divine right, we have narrative right.

In other words, the story will decide, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stack the deck anyway.

And my lunch break is now over. :)

And when the lullaby had done its work, the little man lifted the illusion, leaving the glittering room once again dull and filled with straw. He filled his sack and pockets and returned home in a twist. His wife, cold and quiet, sat by the empty crib. And though she no longer laughed and sparkled as she had on their wedding day, he loved her still.

“Dearest Light,” he said in a voice like a cat’s purr. He knelt before her, pressing a handful of straw and an old drop spindle into her hands. She did not look, but her fingers squeezed the straw and wood. “Spin for me,” he said. “Spin to fill our lovely crib.”

And the straw which had torn the crying girl’s hands and broken in his own, bent pliantly in his wife’s. She spun the spindle and let it drop.

(via littlehappyflower-deactivated20)