Oddsbodikins: weird and wonderful – Page 2

Possums in the World Tree

I live in a valley named for the Norse god Odin.*

And there he is, overlooking the square at our local town centre, with his two possums Thought and Memory.** And their little possum baby, Mythappropriation…

You don’t remember the possums? Weird.

Listening to the possums last night, running up and down the branches of the world tree Yggdrasil, reminded me that last year I co-presented a session for writers talking about animal folklore and the symbolism of different beasts. Animals in a story tell you a lot about the character they’re associated with. Let’s face it, Odin squinting at you with two brooding ravens on his shoulders sends a very different message from this Odin with his fluffy possums.

A 9th Century Old Saxon adaptation of the New Testament put a dove, not above Christ in radiance, but on his shoulder, because it made him more god-like to those people (although obviously it wasn’t conjuring the idea of a warrior god).

I wouldn’t be messing with a character who had any kind of corvid or eagle on their shoulder. What about a wren on the character’s shoulder? Or a sparrow? A parrot? A duck? They all send different messages to the reader.

Philip Pullman tapped into this in the His Dark Materials trilogy with Daemons, and I think that anyone who has read all the Harry Potter books and tells you they’ve never considered what animal form their Patronus would take, is probably lying. (Mine would totally be a tapir…)

Another choice of animals is presented in fiction by the notion that every witch needs a familiar. So, what’s it to be? A traditional cat, called Pyewacket or Vinegar Tom (although they were an imp and a dog, back in the day, according to witch-finder general Matthew Hopkins). Maybe a bat, a rat or a toad? A pig? A raven or crow? A snake or a spider? Or something even more exotic?

I love the drawing, by Canadian artist Jean-Baptiste Monge, of a witch on a pig. A copy sits next to my desk, courtesy of RedBubble. When I Googled for that link, I discovered that, apparently, the map of Great Britain looks like a witch riding a pig. Who knew?

Terry Pratchett doubtlessly did and he also knew that a pig witch was going to get a different reaction than a witch with a black cat, because animals come with their own baggage of symbolism and folklore and superstitions.

So, which witch would you want to write about?***

It’s a fun writing prompt if you’re suffering the angst of an empty page. Do an online image search for “girl/boy/man/woman/child/person with a (animal of choice)” and see if you can find a picture of someone who might be a very different kind of witch.

Then write their story.

*Actually, the story of Woden is more interesting than that and totally explains the possums. The Woden Valley is named for an early property in the area, named Woden in 1837. But, did the owner, Dr James Murray, simply name the property after the god or was he influenced by the local Indigenous word for possum, wadyan?
Nothing is certain – but this story of urban etymology reported by the ABC last September makes for fascinating reading.

**This mural is the work of a Canberra-based artist, Voir, who not only painted the god and his possums, but also decorated my favourite coffee place – Coffee House in Fyshwick. Ona! Best. Coffee. Ever. Odin hit the street last December, courtesy of the Woden Youth Centre and the ACT government’s Graffiti Management program.

***All the art in this post is obviously not mine and my post isn’t meant to infringe on the copyright of anyone’s work. The blue-haired witch and cat is a painting by Russian artist Tanya Shatseva, the girl with the deer is a photograph by another Russian artist Katerina Plotnikova and the other two… sorry, I’m still trying to track down where I found them. I find all these works inspiring and I hope you do too.

Word*: the villains are revolting!

B_rats
Darling, I know! **

Today’s word has a wain’s worth of class attitude: villain.

It seems logical to think that villain would share some sort of etymological root with vile and vilify – all the nasty things in one bucket, what ho?

But English is a language which defies logic. No, it snatches logic down from the tree and squeezes the life out of it, adding logic juice as a spicy flavouring to its hot-pot melange of the half dozen other languages it has smashed together. Tasty!

So vile and vilify come to English from French and originally from the Latin vilis meaning base or worthless. And villain comes via the same route, but not from vilis. Villain comes from villa, as in a Roman’s country house. Someone attached to – working at – the farmhouse or villa was a villanus.

Wait. We’re getting there. It makes as much sense as insulting someone by saying they are churlish or a boor.

By the time the Norman’s conquered their way across the Channel in 1066 villanus had become villein – meaning a low sort of peasant. In the feudal world even peasants had hierarchies and the villein/villain was above a serf, but below a thane. Clear as muck? Excellent!

Soon there were villains all over England – raking muck, sowing and reaping, wassailing and morris dancing. Of course it wasn’t all filth and giggles. They had plague and pestilence to keep things real.

But the point is that villains were peasants and they weren’t too clean or too fussy about what they found entertaining. It didn’t take long before the word villain meant not only a peasant but anyone who was low-born, rude, coarse, base and with no manners or taste.

A yokel, a hick, a hayseed.

And, as has ever been the way, it’s a short skip from low manners to low morals. You know: you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. As well as a general insult meaning common as the muck they raked, villain started to mean an immoral, criminal and dangerous person. A knave and a rascal.

Etymologically speaking:

knave = male servant (Old English/Germanic),
rascal = rabble/people of the lowest class (Old French),
churl = peasant(Old English/Germanic),
boor = peasant (from the Latin for cow).

I’m seeing a pattern emerging here.

By early in the 19th century, villain had been attached to the idea of a character in a book or play whose evil actions drove the plot forward. From there it became a more general word for a wicked or malevolent person, and by the 20th century it had also acquired the gloss of being a criminal mastermind.

A defamatory transformation for those poor peasants, but what’s the take-home message for the writers in the room?

Well, you’re no doubt aware that your villain/antagonist shouldn’t be a moustache-twirling cardboard cut-out, who is evil for the sake of being evil and has no reason for stopping the hero/protagonist from achieving their goals other than that someone has to or, hello, no plot.

Villains need depth and motivation and they need to believe in their reasons for doing the evil things they do.

The best villains see themselves as heroes.

Also… check your assumptions.

Are your villains perpetuating class, race or gender stereotypes? Are you thoughtlessly writing white hat/black hat characters. That is, are all your good guys good-looking? Or slim? Or polite, educated, well-groomed, gainfully employed, whatever other virtue you prize, while the villains are ugly, physically deformed, thuggish, fat***, stupid, etc, etc.

You can do better than that. Great antagonists are often a shadow mirror reflecting back the opposite of the hero – what the hero could be if they chose the dark side. But you don’t have to take an either/or approach to every aspect of these characters.

And you really shouldn’t leap in and assume the antagonist is a peasant because all villains are, aren’t they? Make conscious choices about your antagonists and your protagonists – don’t just have default settings.

The etymology of the word villain is a lesson in class prejudice – it permeates our language without us even realising it.

Words are your tools, writers – know what they mean and what they imply and use them with intent.

*It’s Wednesday word time again. This could get to be a thing.

** I know – that’s not a photo of villains or peasants! They’re Skaven and they’re revolting.

***Someone I know has stopped reading a best-selling thriller author because anytime a character is introduced and described as fat it’s a giveaway that they’re the bad guy. Kind of kills the thrill.

Word for Wednesday

Wed shelf What do Wednesday Addams, Sir Garfield Sobers, Hannibal Lecter and Count Tyrone Rugen from The Princess Bride have in common?

That’s right! They were all polydactylous.

Polydactyly is the congenital physical abnormality of having more than the usual number of fingers or toes.

Polydactyly. Now there’s a good-looking word.

When writing, you want to make your characters memorable. According to the exhaustive TV Tropes, polydactylism is one of those shorthand (ba-dum-dum) tropes for difference – your character is either shown to be adorably quirky and unconventional or their mutation is a metaphor for being a monster. For example, the allegation that Anne Boleyn had six-fingers (and an extra nipple to feed her demonic familiar) circulated after her execution and was (probably) false.

In terms of plot, being able to say “I’m looking for a six-fingered man” definitely narrows your field of suspects, as demonstrated in the detective series Monk and by Count Rugen. You know the routine:

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

They didn’t bother with Hannibal Lecter’s extra finger in the films. In Thomas Harris’s book, The Silence of the Lambs, he is described as having the comparatively rare central polydactyly on his left hand. Sinister! More common is ulnar or postaxial polydactyly, where the extra digit appears on the side of the hand, by the little finger.

In real life, many people born with ulnar polydactyly (like ‘Bond girl’ actress Gemma Arterton) have the extra digit surgically removed when they are children. Or, in the case of West Indian cricket legend, Garfield Sobers, they remove their own littlest little fingers – with the aid of catgut and a sharp knife. *shudders*

So what about Wednesday?

You may not be aware, because she isn’t the sort of girl to traipse around barefoot, but according to Charles Addams, writing in 1963, Wednesday Friday Addams has six toes on one foot. Of course, an extra toe is easier to disguise than an extra finger. Fans of classic sci-fi author John Wyndham’s book, The Chysalids, will recall that Sophie’s ‘blasphemous’ mutation was hidden for years by the simple expedient of not removing her shoes and socks in public. Until she did.

In Hungarian folk belief a person born with a sixth finger on one hand could be a táltos and capable of supernatural power. In fiction, extra digits can be good or bad omens, signs that characters are secretly related, or the reason why the character can do something that no-one else can.

They set the character apart, with an abnormality far more subtle than other supernumerary body parts – polycephaly (extra head), polymelia (extra limb), polyorchidism (extra testicle…although I guess that would only be unsubtle if you took your pants off in public). Moving on…

I don’t have any supernumerary body parts, and have to make do with a mere congenital anomaly – the atavistic swelling of the posterior helix of my right auricle. That’s right, I have a unilateral Darwin’s tubercle, which Charles Darwin called a Woolnerian tip when he wrote about it in The Descent of Man. It’s my vestigial pointy ear.

I’ve yet to read any fictional characters who are marked out as destined for greatness because of their tubercle, but I live in hope. Recommendations, anyone?

Weyrd and wonderful: Corpselight by Angela Slatter

Sirens and Kitsune and Norns, oh my!

I swear, the capital of the Sunshine State has never looked better than it does in this fabulous urban fantasy crime thriller.

Back in the day, when I was working for the Gold Coast Libraries and reviewing books on their blog, I waxed a little bit fangirl about Trent Jamieson’s Business of Death trilogy, in part because that wonderful series is set in my home town of Brisbane.

So imagine my delight, last year, to read Angela Slatter’s Vigil, which has harpies on the Kargaroo Point cliffs, Norns in the West End, and so much more. It’s a glorious, dark tale full of myth, monsters and a very nasty vintage. You should definitely read it.

Needless to say I was looking forward to the sequel.

Corpselight delivered all it promised, and then some. It walks the fascinating line that the best urban fantasy always teeters on, showing a hidden underworld of magic sliding along with the mundane and recognisable real world. An insurance investigation sounds ordinary enough, but when the claim comes under “Unusual Happenstance” and involves supernatural mud inundation its rather more intriguing – and dangerous.

I’ve been reading a lot of Lois McMaster Bujold lately, and like some of her books, Corpselight considers motherhood from a number of different, and often dark, angles. It’s not always sunshine and butterflies in Brisneyland, of course, and it makes for gripping reading.

I’m looking forward to Conflux 13, at the end of the month, because Angela Slatter will be there – and I might just have to wax a little bit fangirl to her.

BTW – I wrote a post about brephophagists, the word for people who eats babies. It doesn’t come up much in conversation. The Creative Commons image, by Andrew Bossi, is of the baby-eating statue in Bern, Switzerland. As far as fabulous backstories for characters go, Verity Fassbinder (the heroine of Corpselight) has a cracker: her thankfully departed dad was a Kinderflesser – a child butcher – catering to Brisbane’s Weyrd communities more disgusting dining tastes. Nasty and, for dark urban fantasy, absolutely pitch perfect.

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Boxed up joy for Book Week

It’s Book Week according to the Children’s Book Council of Australian and my social media feeds, which are full of adorable photos of kids dressed up as their favourite fictional characters. I’ve noticed a proliferation of commercially available costumes this year – mostly Disney, DC and Marvel trademarked apparel, with the occassional “classic” movie-styled character included, such as Alice in Wonderland or Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Is this new, I wonder, the marketing awareness of Book Week? Or have I been the amazing Captain Oblivious for the last couple of years? Anyway…

I’m not going to get all grumpy and whiny about how watching a movie is not the same as reading the book. We all know it. Anything which gets kids reading, though – even if it’s *shudder* princesses – is a good thing. So rock the frocks, boys and girls, or the lycra, and then read the book. All the books.

In the spirit of Book Week, and of using movies, comics, and TV shows as a gateway to a lifelong love of reading, here’s a sight guaranteed to gladden the heart of book lovers, librarians, and Whovian geeks alike.

This beautiful book box is in a quiet street in my neighbouring suburb. The front door opens to reveal a treasure trove of books, free for the taking, to suit the tastes of children, teens and adults. Oh, yeah! I love book boxes so much.

So from my happy place, I say happy book week, everyone – read, enjoy, and share the book love.

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Words you didn’t know you needed

I’m a word nerd.

I love bang up to the elephant articles about weird words to add to my vocabulary, like this list of slang from the Victorian Era, and collections of obscure words. One of my favourites of the latter is The Phrontistery with its Compendium of Lost Words.

Feel free to share your favourites in the comments – I’ll be forever grateful!

I have beguiled many a happy hour reading through the Compendium. I could try and justify it by saying it’s research for writing historical fiction, but that would be entirely disingenuous. I just love words.

It has occurred to me, though that there are no words for things that should have words for them, and other words out there which can hardly come up much in conversation. One of the latter, courtesy of The Phrontistery, is brephophagist. Try and recall, if you’d be so kind as to indulge me for a moment, the last time you needed a word for “someone who eats babies”.

Never, I thought (or, at least, I hoped.)

And now, to prove me wrong, a good friend reminded me of the fascinating collection of online oddities at Atlas Obscura, and whilst taking a circuitous route through its treasures, I stumbled upon the Child-Eater of Bern. (That’s him caught in the act in the cropped header image, photographed by Andrew Bossi, available in creative commons on Wikipedia. See the full image at the linked sites.)

The good folk of Bern refer to the subject of the horrific sculpture that tops their fountain as a Kindlifresser – a child eater, or brephophagist. He’s been there since 1546 and, for all I know, it may have been all the rage in Europe during the 16th Century to decorate one’s town with such things. Suddenly, I can imagine the word ‘brephophagist’ arising quite naturally in all manner of conversations.

That’s my disturbing thought for the day.

A serendipitous hare

I love it, when I’m researching for my writing, and I have a kind of tenuous plan of where I want to go with something and I’m following the trail along, reading this and that, which leads to the other and then – BOOM! – I find stuff that’s just so perfect for what I want, I feel like I couldn’t have made it up.

Happily, that’s the way the week’s gone with my research on hares. I like hares. I’m not a huge fan of rabbits, although I’ve been reading some interesting things about rabbits and warreners in The Brecks area of Norfolk and Suffolk. But hares are really fascinating.

There’s a scruffy, fugitive-looking hare that I sometimes startle, late at night, as I drive into my suburban street. I love the way they move, and the way they look. And the things that have been believed about hares – the myths and legends that have been passed on as fact – are just sitting there begging to be told in more stories.

I’m happy to oblige. Not the least of these is that hares would change their sex, just as they changed their coats from winter to summer. According to Sir Thomas Browne, writing in 1646, hares may transition from one sex to the other, or they may be hermaphrodites, either way it is the reason for their vices of “unnatural venery and degenerous effemination”.

Well, how can I resist that? If it wasn’t 1834 my main character would be wearing a T-shirt that read “Warning: may display unnatural venery and degenerous effemination”. And really, now that I’ve thought of it, I may have to design one, because who wouldn’t want one of those?