I could have sworn I posted about this idea years and years ago, but I can't turn the blog post up. (Maybe I need an index.)
ANYWAY. Lo, somethings like eight or ten years ago, my imagination was caught by the right-hand panel of the Franks Casket. It shows scenes from some lost tale, featuring a woman-horse-bird monster, a spearman, a woman, a horse, and a bird, a dead guy, and three women holding hands. The inscription says that Hos (the name means "Thorn") was cursed to sit on the sorrow-mound because of the fate Ertae had decreed for her.
I'm participating in the Twelve Months of Bardic challenge on Facebook. I missed January's jigs, but February was "Legends," and I thought it was finally time to figure out something with poor Hos. You can download the resulting The Tale of Thorn, with the tale and the sources/inspirations.
But I am not really happy with it. I mean, it's... fine. It's not bad. It's also not very good, either. I have puzzled over it for a few days, and I have some ideas.
A lot of the Germanic stories are rich in dramatic irony - where the reader knows something, but the characters don't.
- Wealhtheow, in Beowulf, trying to make the great hero the guardian and protector of her children. The reader knows (if they read the footnotes!) that when her husband Hrothgar dies, his brother will kill the boys, and Beowulf will not be around to save them.
- The whoooole thing with the memory-eraser potion in Nibelungenlied/Volsungasaga.
- Brunhild's revenge in those
- Guthrun's "special stew" for Atli in Volsungasaga
- Signe's deception of her brother, also Volsungasaga
- Weyland Smith providing his captor king with baubles made out of his sons' bones
Taboo transgressions figure heavily as well, adding impact - the list above includes a truly extra suicide, double infanticide with bonus cannibalism, incest, and rape.
And all of the works have larger themes. I am sure that if I were a grad student in this field, I could count dozens of analyses on those topics. The ones that jump out at me are the tensions between the apparent glorification of honor warrior culture that the Ideal Heroes of the piece (Sigurth/Sigurd, Beowulf) seem to embody, juxtaposed with the General Awfulness that results from following those codes.
My story has none of that.
I don't know if it should have any of that? I would have to create a much larger tale that happens to include the Franks Casket scenes, rather than a tale that is composed of the Franks Casket scenes. (Compare to say the Weyland story - the single panel that shows Weyland on the casket is jam-packed with references to events in it, yet still misses a lot of the narrative. If you know the story, you get it all; but if you don't, you won't.)
Maybe - given the similarities in theme and subject to some of the later ballads - this would work better as a ballad than a prose story? You kind of expect ballads to have little in the way of characterization, and an overall sparse narrative.
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