In the deep winter, and the dead of the night, the ghosts hold their own masses. And the unfortunate among the living can stumble into them, if they go to church at the wrong time...
“I sometimes feel as if there is a great chain of stories that links us all through the ages. And each link in the chain is a gift received and passed on in turn.”
S.F. Said
And another #book of Yi #FolkTales, the latest in my #folklore obsession purchases. This one is called 梅葛 (Méigě) You can read about it (if you read Chinese) and is a collection of ...
OK, this is complicated. I'll break it down. 梅葛 is the Chinese transliteration of an Yi word which is usually transliterated into Maegor. And the term "maegor" refers to two things.
The most common meaning of "maegor" is a general term for Yi nationality oral folk traditions: song and dance, mostly. It is a style of such. (There are several styles of Yi folk traditions, see.) But... "Maegor" (big-M) is also the title of a specific work in the maegor (small-m) style which contains the creation of the world, the origin of human beings, the creation of, e.g. marriage or funereal social rites, and the history of the relationship between the Yi and other ethnic groups.
It's a hefty tome of fairly dense poetry in an unfamiliar-to-me style. It will be a lot of work to decode. More fun!
At last I have been able to verbalise (textualise) my thoughts concerning the publication of my work. My attitude may be summed up by reference to the attached .gif.
The upshot of all this is that my article on the billy-goats on the bridge will be much more comprehensive, including as an appendix translations of five Norwegian variants and an original composition of a sixth. Hell, I might even have a go at writing the ultimate story of the billy-goats and the troll, giant, fox, bringing all the variants into one epic story.