Lost in the Rabbit Hole - PART ONE: Getting Lost, Being Found

PART ONE: Getting Lost, Being Found

Explicit content warning

12/05/20 • 24 min

Lost in the Rabbit Hole

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This is HUGE! For the month of DECEMBER the LOST IN THE RABBIT HOLE podcast will be a TWO PARTER!
Join me as I delve into the variant tales of abandoned children. Hansel and Gretel are only a part of this story.
We begin: "Long, long ago, beside one such Winter forest there lived a poor woodcutter with his wife and their two children – a little boy and a little girl. They lived humbly in a house made of wattle and daub, all snug together under their thatch roof. There was a little coop around back for the chickens, and the woodcutter’s wife kept a vegetable garden full of lush, ripe tomatoes in the summer and squash in the fall. The house was perfectly placed between two aspen sentries, each guarding a side."
Come along down the sugared path and I promise, no one will bite.
PART TWO is available immediately.
Versions Referenced in this episode:

"Little Brother and Little Sister" aka "Hansel and Gretel" (Germany, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, 1812-1840)
"Ninnillo and Nennella" (Italy, Giambattista Basile, 1635) also here
"Little Thumb" aka "Hop on my Thumb" (France, Charles Perrault, 1697)
"Jan and Hanna" (Poland, author unknown, 1863)
"Finette Cedron" aka Cunning Cinders, (France, Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy, 1967)
"Little Earth Cow" (Alsace, Martin Montanus, 1557)

Reference Materials

The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang by Jack Zipes
The Classic Fairytales, Iona and Peter Opie
The Third Horseman A STORY OF WEATHER, WAR, AND THE FAMINE HISTORY FORGOT By William Rosen

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"Little Brother and Little Sister" aka "Hansel and Gretel" (Germany, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, 1812-1840)
"Ninnillo and Nennella" (Italy, Giambattista Basile, 1635) also here
"Little Thumb" aka "Hop on my Thumb" (France, Charles Perrault, 1697)
"Jan and Hanna" (Poland, author unknown, 1863)
"Finette Cedron" aka Cunning Cinders, (France, Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy, 1967)
"Little Earth Cow" (Alsace, Martin Montanus, 1557)

Previous Episode

Here, In the Dappled Shadows

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In this episode we are lost in the dark woods, the enchanted forests, and we come upon the sleeping beauty.

How many times have we walked through a small grove or copse of trees and been startled from a rattle just off to our right? Was it a little bird, or maybe a squirrel? But when you looked, nothing else moved. Except the shadows; shadows don’t make any noise. Do they?

Angela Carter tells us how “The woods enclosed. Like a net, like a cage.” She says, “There is no way through the wood any more...Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again...”

And we see in our folktales that these woods hide secrets, we lose our sense of self, and our identities are hidden. There’s a different kind of beating heart deep in the woods, with a blood stream literal streams pumping life to the dark center. The lungs are high overhead, rattling a leafy canopy, and we know all around, the woods are alive.

Folktales, fairytales, myths, legends, medieval romances, plays, and even today in contemporary works of literature and movies, forests and woods and even just clumps of trees in the distance manifest as representations of...something...something big, something small, something dark, something needed.

Episode Notes
For more information on all of the stories and authors and themes
VARIATIONS of Sleeping Beauty tales of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 410
translated and/or edited by D. L. Ashliman
Disney's, Sleeping Beauty
Andrew Lang's, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood (1891, The Blue Fairy Book)
The Grimms, Little Briar Rose
Charles Perrault's, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood
Giambattista Basile's, The Sun, The Moon, and Talia
References Used