Jewish Fairy Tales and Stories

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Rammstein and Snow White

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The music video for Rammstein’s “Sonne” has many elements that are very different from other versions of the story but is also very similar. A common symbol in the different depictions of Snow White is of the glass coffin. In “The Young Slave”, when Lisa is cursed, her mother puts her in “seven caskets of crystal, one within the other” (92) where she stays until the curse is broken. Likewise, In the Grimm Brothers’ version of “Snow White” the dwarves find Snow White lifeless on the floor after eating the poison apple and “They were about to bury her, but she still looked like a living person with beautiful red cheeks” so they put her in “a transparent glass coffin” and brought “the coffin up to the top of a mountain” where “one of them was always there to keep vigil” (101). In Ann Sexton’s “Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs” the seven dwarves cannot bring themselves to bury her, so they “bury her in the black ground / so they made a glass coffin / and set it upon the seventh mountain...
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Danielle Wendt is Good at Blogs

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I really enjoyed going through Danielle's blog posts, and it definitely gave me ideas for my own. Danielle's blog is a lot more professional than mine - all of her titles are like titles of papers, for example: "Giving Kids Relatable Heroes: The Role of Tricksters" and "The Importance of Luck: An Analysis of the 'Rags to Riches' Motif". All of her blogs are long and descriptive, each having more than one paragraph. She frequently uses pictures, all of which are aesthetically pleasing and fit with what she's talking about in each paragraph. She also provides links to all of her pictures, citing where she got them. I think that this is a great idea and something I hadn't thought of; I will try to also do this in the future. In her most recent blog post, she discusses the psychology in fairy tale trickster stories, and how the role of the trickster figure helps children. She made excellent points about the powers of escapism and how stories can ...
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Possession Stories

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I think the lectures that Dr. Valk and Dr. Lyngdoh gave were really interesting and opened my eyes to a whole different realm of fairy tales that I’d never really experienced before. Before going to the lecture, I had a different view of possession. Being Catholic, I had always thought of possession as a very religious thing, only consisting of a person and a demon. The person is usually not responsible and has no agency when possessed, completely controlled by what is possessing them. The lectures of both professor’s, however, changed my views and showed me a totally different side of things. Dr. Lyngdoh’s talk especially was very insightful into possession on India. I found the idea of the sankhini extremely interesting, especially how they view the act of possession. Instead of a complete possession, their version reminds me more of a werewolf. The differences between snake and tiger possession were really interesting, as well as how the different stories reflect the culture of th...
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