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

[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.