Mythology and Folklore

The two articles I read this week were Make Good Art: Neil Gaman's Advice on the Creative Life   by Maria Popova and Rewire Your Self-Critical Brain   by Joel Alemida. Popova's article was essentially a reiteration of Gaman's book which encorages reader to make good mistakes. Making mistakes means trying something you haven't done before, doing things and pushing yourself. I was really encouraged by his notion of turning mistakes into art. Everything we do has the potential to be turned into something wonderful and artistic if we can approach it with the correct mindset. Mistakes only mean that we are growing, the day we stop making mistakes is the day we stop trying anything new. Popova's article addressed how to comeback from setbacks in the pursuit to achieve a goal. She practices what she calls REBS, reality based self-congratulations. Rather than seeing mistakes as a reason to be self-critical, the normal everyday habits should be considered small victories. ...

The first topic I am interested in is dragons. From How to Train Your Dragon to Game of Thrones, I love dragons of all shapes, sizes, ferocities, and roles. I've always been fascinated by their intelligence and strength. It's also very intruiging to me how they can equally be benevolent or monstrosity, depending on what region of the world they are coming from. What I know from them from my East Asian heritage, dragons were a sign of good fortune and would bestow blessings onto people, bringing rain and crops and whatnot. But Asian dragons often look a lot less intimidating than the ones from Europe; their bodies are long and slender and they don't have wings. I would like to learn more about how they originated and why different cultures have the beliefs they do about them. As a topic, I would want to write a story that has them as equals to humans in regards to intelligence. I liked the battle between Beowulf and his dragon , and a possible retelling might be through givi...

At the fork of a powerful river, a small village thrived, peaceful in all ways but one. Every full moon, a Lion would come bounding from the forest, demanding the most prized livestock on which to gorge himself. As King of Beasts, the villagers would not dare refuse him, but gradually their food supplies dwindled so much they would soon no longer be able to sustain themselves. Now the leader of this village and his wife had a daughter, a beautiful maiden whose smile was like sunshine. Knowing that they could not continue sacrificing to the Lion, the village leader decided to take his own action. “What satisfaction am I supposed to gain from this creature?” roared the lion when faced with the maiden. “Please, you Majesty. Allow her to serve you for one month and see whether or not she is more valuable than anything else we could offer you in the village,” the leader replied. “After a moon has passed, meet me once again and if she has not fulfilled your wishes, we will conti...

The reading that interested me most this week were The Fables of Aesop by Joseph Jacobs (1894). These are all short and quick to the point, unlike many longer storytellings that seem to focus on adjectives and descriptions to support a more uninteresting plot. The thing I like most is that there is always a moral, and the reader can take something away from each fable. Sometime I feel like stories that do not impact the reader in some way are a waste; looking into the future, I want my own storybook to focus on an issue of today played out by characters that simplify the issue in a symbolic and easy to understand way. Instead of focusing on a single event, meaningful dialogue between two characters can reveal much more, like in The Lion and the Statue, which takes place in just a few sentences, but the lesson is still clear. Because these fables are so short, every word of the dialogue is meaningful. Futher, these fables do not use difficult language (unlike some older Roman tales)...

I was so excited to see how many different reading topics and options are available on the UnTextbook. I was also suprised that while browsing through each week, there were always a few that I was familiar with or had heard of. I'm most looking forward to week 14, as one of the stories is titled  Hans the Hedgehog.  One of the readings I did last week was loosely based on  Beowulf,  and it was so interested that I choose to read the whole thing for week 12. I have done a lot of previous reading about Hindu and Buddhist tales, so I choose to focus more on different topics for weeks 5 and 6. I noticed that while choosing my readings, I was always drawn to those that contained fantasy elements like dragons, magic, goblins, etc., perhaps because I find it so much more interesting when a human hero has to face powers outside his or her own capabilities.  Choose from CLASSICAL and/or BIBLICAL units for Weeks 3 and 4. Week 3: Ovid's Metamorphoses ...