Recommendations Post

[fairytaleinspired]

This is a post where you can add a comment recommending or talking up a fairy tale, fable, myth or legend that people might not know much about and that you're hoping to garner some interest in.

Feel free to link to free versions of the story, wikipedia pages, YouTube videos, etc.

Comments

[flo_nelja]

I want to talk about the Brazilian Pink Dolphins, that are one of my favourite mythical creatures right now.
Turn into pretty men to seduce women, can also hypnotize people, kidnap them into an enchanted city under the river... so many nice (or not so nice) things.
https://mermaid.fandom.com/wiki/Boto_Encantado

[flo_nelja]

Another of my favourite stories is the Dutch folk ballad Heer Halewijn.

Halewijn lives in the forest (is he a fairy? a wizard? a man who made a deal with the devil? accounts diverge). Every girl who hears his song is so charmed she runs from home to be with him, and there he kills them.

But a badass princess, though bewitched too, manages to kill him instead.

http://www.geocities.ws/reginheim/heerhalewijn.html

[flo_nelja]

Another of my favourite stories is "The Green Mountain", well it's the literal translation of the French name, but as it's not on the Internet, I've nominated this one
jean the Soldier and Eulalie the Devil's Daughter
There a Russian version that's a bit better known, but I like it less, first because it's funnier and more scary if it's the devil himself, second because I'm not a fan of clothes stealing as romance : The Sea King and Vasilisa the Wise. I love the part where his father sold him without knowing, though. (In some other versions, the hero sold himself out of despair for having spent or lost a big sum of money belonging to his parents)

There are also a lot of different versions for the trials. In my favourite, for the first two trials, the devil's daughter does everything with her magic wand while the hero is dozing, his head on her lap (he didn't sleep well on the night, or even at all, because he was sleeping on the stables, where the horses are anthropophagic and tried to eat him all night)

For the third trial, the devil asks the hero to climb a very smooth green moutain, jade I think, to get one ring or a bird that's all at the top. She can't do it with her want, and she's like "boil my body in a cauldron, make a ladder with the bones, you can get it"
Of course he's upset, and she's like "if you put the bones back in the right order, I will come back, of course"
He does, climbs the mountain, gets the token, but forgets a tiny bone on the fingers or toes. Later, when the devil tells the hero he can marry one of his daughters, there are many girls, all with veils. He can choose the right one only because he checks she's missing one of the finger bones.

I really love how cheerily creepy this third trial is. Like, when you're the devil's daughter, you're learning a lot of things, and you get used to lots of things.

[isoxys]

I just wanna put in a plug for Barbara Allen. It's the traditional ballad for anyone who's into hanahaki/fuck-or-die/dying-of-love scenarios, but just wishes the other half of their OTP said "then perish" about it (and then also died about it themself) Also it's got fantastic rose/briar imagery. What's not to love?

Here are some versions of it I like to listen to:
Emmylou Harris - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccP1eeYdQgU
Colin Meloy of The Decemberists's hardcore headbanging version - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSfc3NZm_1I
Cosmo Sheldrake's weird beatboxed version - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G26etk1SR8w