Really, they’re worse? What the fuck - how?!
For starters, Irish faeries are not like tinkerbell. They like to play pranks. Like kidnapping babies and replacing them with mimics. The creature we’d recognize as the Headless Horseman is Irish folklore, as well as the whole concept of Halloween. Bram Stoker, an Irishman need not have borrowed from Eastern European traditions, because the Irish had a bloodsucking undead monster too.
It was fun growing up in the countryside and things like banshees and fairies being taken as a fact of life. I had a childhood friend that would come in to school saying she heard the banshees howling during the night and then woke up to find out a relative had died.
There was a news report that resurfaced a few years back, accessible here, about the Housing Executive in Newry trying to get a fairy tree chopped down to build houses, and even after trying to bribe the workers with £200 no one would touch it and they had to build around it instead. And another where some builders halted work in the Mournes once they realised they were inside a fairy ring, 3 of them went on to suffer accidents that they attributed to revenge by the fairies, the foreman apologised to the fairies, and even the reporter was too worried to step inside the ring. We were told the legends too, like Tír na nÓg or Finn McCool, but I think it’s amazing how much of the superstition and old mythology has persisted through the years, even after the country becoming Christian and even now as it becomes more secular.
Well the Christianity was just a layer painted on top. Peel it back and it was all there, just barely under the surface.
So you’re saying that Irish fairytales are funny parodies that are better than the German originals?
One Irish one I remember is where a man with a hump on his back meets some of the other folk and they tke his hump and throw it onto the horizon where it becomes a hill. He thanks them and they become annoyed with his gratitude and pick up a bigger hill and give him a bigger hump than ever.
So, yes. Got it.
I love Weird Al Yankovic so much!!
Okay so what is worse than “woodland creatures devour still living children”?
Weak. Balkan kids don’t need no tales
German/Irish... American:
$160pp to fairytale.
Malgré leurs prétentions capricieuses d’être les arbitres du goût et du plaisir épicuriens, la sauvagerie impitoyable des Européens ressurgit toujours au premier plan, même après un examen superficiel de leur passé de dépravation sanguinaire qu’ils présentent comme leur folklore et leur histoire.
