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It's #FolkloreFriday!!! 😁

The lake maidens of Welsh folklore are among the most quietly subversive figures in the entire tradition, and I don't think they get nearly enough credit for it.

The most complete story is that of Llyn y Fan Fach, the black lake in the Bannau Brycheiniog, where a young farmer encounters a woman of extraordinary beauty sitting on the water's surface. She agrees to marry him under precise conditions, three times stated, three blows without cause, and she returns to the lake. The blows come, as they always do in these stories, not from cruelty but from misunderstanding, from the vast distance between what a mortal considers reasonable and what she does. And she goes back. She takes her cattle, her gifts, everything she brought with her, and the lake closes over her as though she had never left it.

What strikes me most, returning to this story again and again, is that she is never a victim of it. She came on her own terms. She stated her conditions clearly. When they were broken, she enforced them, calmly and completely, and went home. The grief in the story belongs entirely to the mortal side of it. The lake maiden simply returned to where she had always, more fully, belonged.

Welsh water mythology understands something that a lot of folklore doesn't quite manage. That the otherworldly woman is not a prize or a tragedy. She is sovereign, and the water was always hers. 🌊

#FolkloreFriday #TalesFromWales #WelshFolklore

Kudos Comment

Suswatibasu (1703 KP) rated The End of the World Running Club in Books

Jul 25, 2017

Tragic family drama disguised in apocalyptic genre

I spent at least three quarters of this book getting irritated by the protagonist's whiny outlook, however, I was sympathetic by the end when he faces his own demons and realisation.

It's like a drama wrapped in an end of the world scenario, so I was relieved that it avoided any of the ridiculous zombie / outbreak type of plot. It was mostly realistic, analysing how people react differently to extreme situations, apart from the fact a man with zero running skills could manage to run 450 miles in total let alone 20 miles within the first day.

And there were some great characters including old man Australian Harvey and female soldier Grimes, who blasted any stereotypes out of the water.