Why did Rapunzel get kidnapped again?

[conuly]

Couldn't the witch just pick an orphan up somewhere else, or find an abandoned baby on a midden or something? And if she'd gone the legitimate route, she would've been the hero of the story and could've stayed in town! Could've had as many kids as she liked! So why did she do things the hard way, again?

Comments

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

You are aware that these fairytales aren't originally set in 20th/21st century 1st world countries, yes?

[conuly]

I'm aware that they don't make any freaking sense.

Does she want a kid? There are abandoned babies all over the place and you won't have to live in a tower. Does she want revenge? How does decreasing their budget for food hurt them, exactly?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Nah, it's not about her wanting a kid, specifically - although it's true, one can't pay the Fair Folk in gold, and they do highly prize human children; remember Titania and Oberon's quarrel over one such. And it's not about her wanting revenge, either. Note that she didn't "kidnap" or "abduct" the child - she was paid the child, as fair price for saving the life of the mother.

Granted the price was high for a few bunches of salad greens, and the peasant was not in any position to dicker. And was the price so high, after all? The wife had said she'd die without it; the husband knowingly risked his life - three times - to steal it for her; fair enough: that rampion was worth a life. And it was that particular baby, nurtured on the witch's rampion, and no other child, to whom she had a right by all the rules of magic.

The stories don't make any sense if one expects magical people in medieval times to think and act like ordinary humans of the 21st century. Even ordinary humans of medieval times didn't think or act like us - my housemate and I get into long debates about whether certain of the women in the Decameron were or were not baggages, and the differences between the medieval Norse and Renaissance Italian ideas of womens' honor. But they're not fairies or selkies or sorceresses; if they were, they'd be even less comprehensible.

Sheesh, want to see the seminal example of "the Sidhe make no damn sense", check out the Tain bo Cuialnge (http://adminstaff.vassar.edu/sttaylor/Cooley/) (summary here (http://adminstaff.vassar.edu/sttaylor/Cooley/)).

[conuly]

Yeah, but the witch isn't sidhe, and by the way, spelling that word that way in English is another thing which is totally nonsensical.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

She's not Christian-human, is the point. In the first version of the story, she's an ogress; in the second, she's a fairy; the Celtic and Teutonic traditions in such matters are close enough as to make no nevermind: one doesn't steal from the magical folk, and doing anything three times in a row nails it down.

Actually, calling them "the Sidhe" is nonsensical from the start, because 'sidhe' means 'mounds' - actually, they're the Daoine Sidhe, or the Aes Sidhe, spelled 'Aos Sí ' in modern Irish.

English lives in too glassy a house of its own to be throwing rocks at anyone else's spelling. My daughter wrote a poem when she was seven, in which she spelled sidhe correctly, but misspelled mortel [sic] - she likes Gaelic; the spelling may be weird, but at least it's consistent.

Well, sort of. More than English, anyway.'

[conuly]

Gaelic spelling may be consistent in Gaelic (it's hard to be worse than English!) but it just messes everything up when transported willy nilly to English. Why do we keep trying to preserve the original spelling?

Also, I still think the story makes little to no sense.