‘…The Earth will see you on through this time…’
*
…There always is.
The Marsh King sinks back beneath the waters with the unnamed Egyptian Princess in his thrall.
Some time later a green shoot with a water-lily bud appears above the slime.
The bud unfurls to reveal a small girl-child.
The child is spotted by a watching Stork and is taken to a barren Viking couple who, quite naturally, are enthralled with the gift and immediately besotted with the child.
Children normally display both the physical and temperamental characteristics of their ancestors, predominantly their parents, and usually in more or less equal measure.
Here, these tendencies are pronounced.
Helga, for this is the name the Viking couple choose for her, is a beautiful girl-child during the day, albeit displaying a strong blood-thirsty streak, whilst as the sun sets she turns into a compassionate, toad-like monster!
Is the name significant?
How important is it that Helga is the only named character in the story?
Could any device be better chosen to make us consider the diurnal polarity of Day and Night and their profound affects upon our consciousness and its natural tendencies?
Cold mountain…
Warm earth…
If we are in any doubt as to what we are to make of these devices we are introduced to the somnambulistic nature of both Denmark and the nether regions of Marsh-Land later in the tale.
To make matters worse, Helga’s apparent beauty beguiles all those who gaze upon her and blinds them to the reality of her brutish day-time nature.
It is only her adoptive Viking mother who witnesses and begins to see and realise the true nature of the problem presented to both her, and by extension us, in the form and expressions displayed via the mysterious Marsh King’s Daughter.
There is more…
*
Reblogged this on GrannyMoon's Morning Feast.
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Look forward to the next post.
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Reblogged this on Sue Vincent – Daily Echo.
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Looking forward to more… Reminds me of (I think) a Grimm fairy tale where the man was turned into an animals form and only allowed to be human one night a year? My memory is going…
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Animal/Human transformations are a mainstay of fairy/folk tale traditions Noelle, and may reflect some of our earliest spiritual experiences… the next in the series should be up next week…
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This is fantastic, and those are great opening and closing lines.
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Thanks Ken… its neat way to continue a story.
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This is really interesting- the constructs of myth behind a fairy tale. Egyptian Princees is reminiscent of Isis searching for Osiris & (You certainly don’t need me to point it out) Hel was the name of Loki’s daughter the Goddes that gave us the term Hell.
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Yes, even when the writers aren’t deliberately doing this, the subconscious is so structured as to make it an inevitability…
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Yes the more I look (Probably the wrong word but bear with me) at writing the more I see the action of the subconscious.running through novels. It is amazing how you see even in your own work how something you mention as a throwaway early in a novel ends up becoming a theme that works its way through the whole narrative
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Master Story-Tellers live in the sub-concious…
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Very true
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How interesting that the day time character is beautiful and brutish and the night time character is supportive but ugly.
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Is this because the Vikings had no regard to softness and compassion?
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Possibly, but the story teller may also be making a point about the nature of polarity…
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roots, not all that glitters is gold, and those bearing gifts are many times bribes, amen
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