I Have A Dreeeeaaaam!

 

Well my readers, here you are on my page, and this is where my exciting tale could well be said to have a beginning... I am perhaps cheating a bit by including these photographs, as I am in them, and so have have not taken them (timer you say? Unlikely to happen. Ever.) but their origins were creative, so I'm not really breaking the rules.

At my college in the second year students have an independent project called Telling Tales, in which we are required to choose a fairy tale from an irritatingly restictive list, and produce a nice range of work to tell the story. I picked Rapunzel, and had a lovely time following the roots of the story down to the original scattered pieces in folk traditions from nearly every culture. It was refreshing because my first Rapunzel story was the Ladybird version, which is sweet and familiar but very dull. Rapunzel is a naive, innocent moron, who gives away the cunning plan thought up the Prince (her perfect match, obviously), and then there are baby twins that appear from nowhere. The originals weren't much like that, in my research, I discovered a smashing version in which Rapunzel stabs the witch with a knife. I really enjoyed it. Images of prints and other work created during this project will be up soon, with more information about the folk tale originals but to link back to the lanterns, I will describe a very specific moment when I was stuck in my research... And watched Tangled on YouTube- YAY! It is sad that Tangled was probably my favourite interpretation of the story given some of the lovely pagan originals that I came across, but that doesn't make it less true. So here we are again, on my eighteenth birthday, there were floating lights released for me.

Less than Rapunzel had but pretending is free...