Week 13: Storytelling -- The Land of No Death

The Land of No Death

I was just a humble barber who lived in a land where people never died. Instead, they left when they heard a voice -- though I'd never experienced it myself, I saw people get up and tell an unseen character that they would go with them. I'd never questioned it, nor thought to try and discover where they went.

That changed when, one day, I was shaving a man who suddenly started shouting at an invisible person. "Go away," he shouted. "Don't bother me, or you'll get it."

So I continued to shave him for a couple more minutes without any incident or noise, when he suddenly started to yell again. "I'll teach you a lesson!" he yelled, and, grabbing the razor in my hand, he proceeded to run after the invisible person.

Naturally, I was upset that he had stolen my razor (he hadn't even paid for my services yet) and chased after him. For an old guy, he was pretty fast, and I barely kept up with him, my attention mostly focused on getting my razor back and not where we were headed.

Only when we reached the place did I take a good look at our surroundings. We were at a dark and grayish kind of land, where little grew and the things that did were crooked and withering. A large pit stood in front of us, and before I could stop him, the man dove headfirst into the pit.

No! I thought to myself. That was my best razor! But one thing I was glad of was that I hadn't jumped as well, that I had escaped with my life intact. So, humming as I headed home, I quickly told everyone where I went and what I saw. Since people were extremely curious to visit the strange pit that the voice had led numerous people to, I proceeded to show it to them.

But when we got to the place where the voice had led my former client, there was nothing. There was no trace of the large pit; instead, I saw a flat plain of land, the place even more dry and desolate than it had been with the pit.

When we got back, days and months and years passed. Something had changed; perhaps because we had discovered the secret of the pit, it no longer existed. People started to die like they did in other countries.

Death

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Author's Note:
This story is based off of "The Voice of Death" story in the unit Lang's European Fairy Tales I. The main character in the original story is the client of the barber, who sought out a place where no one died and tried to resist the voice of death. He couldn't, and like in this retelling, grabs the barber's razor and chases after the voice. So in this retelling I made the barber the main character and decided tell the story from a first person point of view. I kept with the original tale's plot line and ending, though I reworded some of the dialogue.

Bibliography:
The Red Fairy Book by Andrew Lang (1890). Story Source: Project Gutenberg

Week 13: Essay -- Experiences With the Written Word

I can’t say that my high school was the best in the country, because it wasn’t. The ugly pink building may have housed private school kids with good teachers, but it was out in the Midwest, Kansas to be specific. And while location doesn’t matter, being out in a relatively small city tends not to have the quality of a high-end school in a big city.

However, it’s not to say that my high school was bad either. It was actually better than most (around the area, at least), and one of the truly great things about it was its writing program. There are some high schools that only start forcing kids to write essays during junior or even senior year. Mine started the summer before freshman year (and even before that, since the entire school was made up of a lower and middle school as well). And we continually wrote essays – not just at the beginning and end of the year, but within it as well. It was normal. And by the end of freshman year, three page papers were no big deal. 

And we didn’t just write these papers for English class. Throughout my high school career, I had papers for Spanish, History, and Chemistry as well. For Spanish (I took it all four years, with the last being a seminar), the essays were light in terms of length, naturally. Still, it was hard to write in a foreign language. For history…well, those essays were longer. Sophomore year I had the occasional two to three page paper due, as well as the eight page paper at the end of the semester, but nothing too bad. APUSH my junior year is where the essay workload got really heavy. First of all, I hated that class – even though I loved World History sophomore year, I just didn’t find American interesting. So I had to write six to seven page papers every couple of weeks on a topic I hated. That was fun. As of for Chemistry, for the two years I took it (Chemistry II and AP Chemistry), we had to write lab papers. And not just the papers where you fill out the blanks for the answers for the lab – formal papers with an intro, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. It wasn’t that bad though – our chemistry teacher taught us how to write a lab paper well.

Of course, the biggest source of writing papers was English. We always had random writing assignments and periodic essays due my freshman through senior year. Though freshman year was a blast (our English teacher was hilarious), my favorite year had to be my junior year. Incidentally, it was the most writing-heavy class, but I loved the class because my teacher was so good. She had assigned a twenty-page paper at the beginning of the year, which was due at the end of the year. But it wasn’t bad, since she broke it up into two to three page essays throughout the year, which we synthesized into a complete essay at the end. My favorite assignment, however, happens to be the creative writing paper we did for the Beowulf unit. I wrote mine over two characters, battling each other at the ends of an apocalypse. I had a ton of fun writing the fight scene with the weapons I created. 

Beowulf and his Dragon

(Source)

Week 13: Reading Diary -- Grimm (Crane)

Brothers Grimm (Crane)


The Fisherman and His Wife [p1, p2, p3, p4]
So this story within the unit was interesting and hilarious. I'm pretty sure I've read or heard a story about an enchanted fish who's caught by a farmer, but I don't think I've read this one. In this one, rather than a fisherman catching a fish and extorting a wish from it, he just lets the fish go, since the fish says he's a human that's enchanted. The wife thinks he's an idiot for letting the fish go before extorting a wish from the fish and commands the poor fisherman to find the fish and make it grant the wife's wish. The fisherman doesn't really want to ask the fish -- he doesn't care about the riches/desires that could be fulfilled by the magic of the fish -- but asks anyways, since he's completely scared of his wife. So the fish answers the wife's request, which was to get a cottage in place of a hovel. That's a pretty reasonable request, and you think that's fine. The problem is, she gets tired of the arrangement. Now she wants a castle rather than a cottage, and sends the husband to wish for it. He goes back to the ocean to ask the fish, and the fish grants it. But eventually she wants something more again. And he goes back, asking the fish this time for his wife to become king. As expected, the pattern repeats: the wife becomes dissatisfied, she asks for something more ridiculous, the fisherman goes and asks the fish, the fish fulfills the wish (though after the second time, I frankly don't know why). After king it's emperor, after emperor it's pope, after pope it's controller of the moon and sun. At the point when the wife asks for control of the moon and stars, the fish gets tired of it and reverts all their stuff back to a hovel. Though the wife deserves it, the fisherman doesn't. I'm glad to see that it doesn't affect him, even though he deserved to live in the cottage rather than the hovel at the very least.


Aschenputtel [p1, p2, p3]
So this is the original Brothers Grimm fairytale from which the Disney classic 'Cinderella' emerged. I've gotta say, this one was a lot more entertaining as a whole, if a lot more morbid. To be honest, after re-watching Disney's Cinderella, I found the characters to be bland, boring, and uninteresting. The characters in the original story don't really have much of a 'personality' per say, but at least their actions were way more interesting. As for the plot, although Disney kept the beginning and the ending the same, their creative license took hold within the rest. So basically the entire movie was different than the story. Aschenputtel still has to work, she still has an evil stepmother and stepsisters, and she still has to work. But there are no talking mice in Aschenputtel, her stepsisters are beautiful, and the father hasn't died and knows how his new wife treats Aschenputtel. The ball also lasts for three days, and Aschenputtel gets her dress from a hazel tree that is enchanted and grants her wishes because she good and pious rather than from a fairy godmother. And Aschenputtel goes to the ball without the carriage or the horses or the coachmen that Cinderella needs in the Disney movie. There is also no time limit on the clothes she wears -- Aschenputtel just has normal if gorgeous dresses throughout the ball. It is true that the prince is stunned into what I call 'true lust at first sight' and only wants to dance with her all three days. In each of those three days, he tries to figure out who she is, but literally runs away before he can escort her to her house and find her identity. Although I have no idea why she doesn't want to be outed by the prince, she doesn't, and instead returns to being Aschenputtel before he can figure it out. The first time, she runs into a pigeon-house on her father's estate (one of those large ones), and sneaks away to the kitchen without him seeing. The prince, believing the girl he danced with is still in the pigeon-house, asks who she is to Aschenputtel's father, who had somewhen appeared. So they cut down the pigeon-house (a pretty drastic move in my opinion) to find her. And no one's there. Much the same thing happens the second day, except Aschenputtel literally runs up a tree. The father, for the prince's sake has it cut down; no one is there again. On the third day, Aschenputtel away after the ball before he can offer to take her home. But the boy learns; he anticipates her running away and coats the stairs leading up to the ballroom with tar to trap her or her shoes. He gets one shoe, and like in the Disney movie, asks around for its owner. Now here's where things start to get weird and morbid. The first stepsister, at her mother's prompting, cuts off her toe in order to fit the shoe. The trick almost works, except that the doves on Aschenputtel's enchanted hazel tree tell the prince that that's the wrong girl and to look at the blood pooling in her shoe. As though this is all normal, he takes her back home. The second stepsister cuts off her heel to fit the shoe, and the same thing happens as the first sister. As a last resort Aschenputtel is called upon, and her foot fits the blood-stained shoe perfectly. And they live happily ever after. Oh yeah, and then at the wedding, the stepsisters have their eyes poked out by birds.


King Thrushbeard [p1, p2]
Let me just point something out before I start my review of this story: I was so right about the husband! I doubted myself throughout the story, but the ending proved my initial assumption correct. Anyways, this was an interesting story. I've never heard of King Thrushbeard before reading this unit, and I'm glad I got to read it. It's about this princess, who is haughty and entitled and refuses to marry anyone because she finds fault with everyone's appearance. So her dad finally gets fed up with her behavior and promises to himself that he'll marry her off to the first beggar he sees. So a minstrel comes one day, and, true to his oath, the king marries this girl off. So the minstrel takes the girl to the kingdom of a king nicknamed (because of her) King Thrushbeard, who had initially been a potential suitor for the girl before she married the beggar. Needless to say, things don't go well, at least initially. She doesn't have any skills in housekeeping, so the husband sends her to sell pots. That actually goes well, since people buy the pots because she's so beautiful, but a drunk guy on a horse runs into the pot stand and consequently breaks all the pots. The wife goes crying to the husband, and the husband calls her useless and decides that she should work in King Thrushbeard's palace as a kitchen-maid. So she does, when she looks at the wealth and splendor of the kitchen and her life now she realizes what a fool she's been. And one day, she sees the man she insulted, King Thrushbeard, who asks her to dance, even though she's in tattered clothing, because she's so beautiful. Though she initially refuses she ends up going to the center stage and is humiliated when all the scraps of food for dinner she gets from the kitchen falls out of her knapsack. So she leaves the ballroom, embarrassed, when King Thrushbeard stops her and reveals that he is the poor minstrel who she married, as well as the 'drunk' guy who ran into her pot stand . He just wanted to break her haughty and prideful behavior, so he put her in a humbling situation. To her credit she shows she really has changed, since she tells him she is unworthy of his love. But he says she wasn't before, but now is, and they live as king and queen together in his palace.