E.G. Radcliff's Blog, page 2

More Text Message Folk Tales

I've been reading Irish and Welsh folktales lately, and have just explored the first three branches of the Mabinogion, an eclectic collection of Welsh folktales which were compiled in the medieval era from many centuries of oral tradition. This is my (fun) retelling derived from a small portion of the third branch.

“Oh, woe is me!” exclaims Manawydan, full of woe. “The beautiful and flawless and perfect wheat field of Dyfed--that my homie Pryderi let me just, like, have, before getting his and his mother’s hands stuck to a magic bowl and immobilized in time--is all empty and gross!”

Cifga, Pryderi’s wife, doesn’t seem to have anything to say. I like to think she was wildly dramatic about it, but I suppose that just by having lived with Pryderi for a while she’d have gotten used to a degree of shenaniganry.

Manawydan doesn’t know how it happened, but he does know that procrastination is the tool of artists, college students, and Ye Olde Heroes, because instead of using the day he would have spent reaping the first field to reap the second, equally luxurious field, he decides he’ll reap Field Two the next day.

To nobody’s surprise except Manawydan’s, the second field is toast by the time he gets up the next morning.

Finally deciding that someone is probably stealing his wheat, Manawydan decides to… procrastinate and reap the third field the next day. But it’s okay, because this time he’s gonna keep watch!

So Manawydan keeps watch, ready with his weapons to fight off a thief.

‘Course, it’s kind of hard to use a sword to fight off a gargantuan army of mice that attack the field with the loudest munching noises known to man. All he manages to do is capture one especially chunky mouse who was slower than all the others, which he puts in his glove and proudly shows to Cifga. Cifga asks what the actual hell he plans to do with it, and Manawydan, wise fella and generally smart dude, says that it is a thief and therefore he will hang it.

Cifga stares at him for a second, and eventually is like “Dude. Bro. My husband’s best pal.

W H Y.”

To which Manawydan says ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So Cifga quits, and Manawydan starts building a tiny little gallows because real men are into absolutely METAL arts and crafts.

As he’s doing this and Cifga is facepalming in the background, a cleric comes by. The cleric takes in the scene, can’t figure out what on earth is happening, and finally has to ask. When Manawydan proudly tells him, the cleric says Manawydan should let the mouse go, because honestly, what is he even doing. Manawydan says hey, you don’t argue with the L A W. Cifga presumably starts drinking.

The cleric offers Manawydan a pound to let the mouse go. Manawydan refuses, and the cleric decides he’s tired of this conversation, God bless, have a nice life and RIP the mouse.

Manawydan keeps building his gallows, when lo and behold, a priest comes down the road. Rinse and repeat the previous encounter, except this time, the priest offers Manawydan three pounds to free the mouse and stop embarrassing himself. Manawydan refuses.

But third time’s a charm!

This time, a bishop comes down the road. The bishop says “what do you have there?” Manawydan says “a thief!” The bishop blinks a few times and says “That’s a mouse.” Manawydan, apparently unfazed by constantly having to explain his nonsense, is all like “yep, sure thing!”

The bishop says that he’ll give Manawydan seven pounds if he frees the mouse. Manawydan says that by God he shall not be denied his justice, and seven pounds ain’t it. “Twenty-four…?” the bishop ventures.

“NAY”, crieth Manawydan. “You could double that and I’d still hang this fat little monster.”

“Fine!” The bishop says. He’s invested. “I’ll give you every horse you can see on this plain, and also like an absolute TON of other stuff.”

Manawydan flatly refuses.

The bishop throws up his hands. “Then name your price!”

Manawydan gets all sly. “Alright then,” he says, petting the moustache I assume he has. “You know my best friend and his mom who are currently stuck to a bowl and imprisoned frozen in time? I want you to release them.”

The bishop agrees, and the reader begins to wonder if Manawydan is actually onto something and just couldn’t be bothered to explain it, maybe because plot tension or maybe because he likes watching Cifga’s eye twitch every time he says something stupid.

“Swell,” Manawydan says. “But actually, that’s not enough.”

The bishop fidgets as Manawydan proceeds to negotiate his way through increasingly impressive and cleverly-specific demands, to all of which the bishop hurries to agree.

When Manawydan is doing this, he looks at the bishop sideways. “Right, okay,” he says slowly. “Now I really want to know why you care so much about a mouse.”

The bishop, very harried by this point, blurts out that he’s literally just a friend of someone who got (very rightly) screwed over in the first branch of the Mabinogion, and he’d cursed Dyfed, captured Pryderi and Rhiannon, and set the mice on the fields to get revenge in what was a bro move until MANAWYDAN CAPTURED HIS WIFE, BY GOD MAN GIVE THE MOUSE BACK SHE’S PREGNANT

So Manawydan did, Dyfed got un-cursed, and Pryderi, Cifga, Rhiannon, and Manawydan lived happily ever after (until the next shenanigan).

E.G. RADCLIFF IS A PART-TIME pooka and native of the Unseelie Court. She collects acorns, glass beads, and pretty rocks, and the crows outside her house know her as She Who Has Bread. Her fantasy novels in The Coming of Áed series are crafted in the dead of night after offering sacrifices of almonds and red wine to the writing-block deities.

You can reach her by scrying bowl, carrier pigeon, or @egradcliff on social media.

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mouse photo credit Frenjamin Benklin/Unsplash

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Text Message Folk Tales

I really like folk stories. So much that, after reading a particularly juicy one, I’ll text thoroughly-uninterested friends and tell them what it was about, so they can be excited too. This has led to some… interesting retellings.

The Pangs of Ulster, taken from the ,Táin Bó Cúailnge,or the Cattle Raid of CooleyA Very Irish Tale™

Once upon a time in Ye Olde Éire, there lived a man. He lived somewhere around the middle of nowhere, as Ye Olde protagonists do.

One day, a lady comes up to the house! She is--say it with me--v e r y g o r g e o u s. She declares that she will be living there with the man for the foreseeable future, and leaves no room for argument. The man is *more* than fine with this. She’s incredibly awesome. In fact, it seems she can do just about anything, because apart from being damn smokin’, she’s also witty and, more importantly, ridiculously athletic. As the two live together for a while--the man, of course, perfectly accepting that his wife is a normal human person--they fall in love and get married. The woman gets pregnant.

When she’s pretty far along, this lit festival comes to the nearest town. The man really wants to go--I mean, they’re gonna have everything there! Alcohol! Parties! Brawls! So he begs like a puppy for a little while until his wife caves and says fine, they can go--but he’d better keep his nose clean. Terribly excited, the man and his lovely wife head into town.

It’s a great time! Everything is going swell!

Until it’s not.

See, there’s this chariot race. The king has a mad fast chariot, and nobody can beat it, which has led to a lot of people presumably losing bets and also dignity. But the man, all proud and definitely a few drinks in, is like “ahaha! My awesome wife could outrun ur dumb cart!” and of course the king is all like “whatyousay????”

Brimming with royal indignation, the king orders his guards to find the lady in the fair, and after a few moments of mentally strangling her man, she sighs heavily and tells them that she is very obviously super pregnant, and that they are the absolute worst.

Unfortunately, they tell her that the king is going to kill her himbo if she doesn’t show up. Resigned to being the only character with a brain cell, she trudges to the race course, makes it clear how very annoyed she is, and then ✨absolutely dominates ✨.

However!

She goes into labor at the finish line.

Understandably massively pissed off at everyone involved, she starts screaming in pain and anger: “I AM THE GODDESS MACHA, AND YOUR SORRY ARSES ARE APPARENTLY BLOCKHEAD PREPUBESCENT BOYS, AND FROM NOW ON I CURSE YOU TO HAVE LABOR PAINS FOR FIVE DAYS AND FOUR NIGHTS EVERY TIME YOU’RE IN TROUBLE!’

So they did, and also named the town after her children. And that’s where we get Emain Macha (Modern Irish Eamhain Mhacha), or the Twins of Macha.

The end.

E.G. RADCLIFF IS A PART-TIME pooka and native of the Unseelie Court. She collects acorns, glass beads, and pretty rocks, and the crows outside her house know her as She Who Has Bread. Her fantasy novels are crafted in the dead of night after offering sacrifices of almonds and red wine to the writing-block deities.

You can reach her by scrying bowl, carrier pigeon, or @egradcliff on social media.

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Photo credit Priscilla Du Preez

Harmless Magic

I was most certainly not supposed to be born. My father, eighteen, working the streets; my mother, twenty-one, a servant in the household of the town’s wealthiest landowner, out for a night of regrettable fun. She couldn’t keep her job and a child. My father couldn’t either, but he… well, he chose differently.

When my mother, furtive and wrapped in an impeccably-modest dress (or so my father always told me), delivered a tiny, silent infant into my father’s arms, she couldn’t meet his eyes; she clearly felt guilt for delivering the burden that was me into my father’s transient, nocturnal life.

But my father, despite the hardship I know I caused him, never treated me like a burden. I grew up in an ever-shifting landscape, city after city, street after street. My father looked for work at every chance he had--there weren’t many people, in the towns and hamlets we travelled, who wanted a dirty, homeless tiefling working anywhere, much less anywhere visible, much less with a child in tow. He worked jobs that paid in kitchen scraps, went sleepless for days on end balancing shifts that never seemed to end, bowed and scraped and apologized and said anything he needed to in order to get by. And when that still wasn’t enough… well, he was still young, and the streets always welcomed another body. I saw a lot, growing up. And I learned to say very little.

That life couldn’t last.

By the time I was ten or eleven, we were spending a lot less time in cities. I had always shown something of an uncanny attraction to the wilds; while my father was working, I often wandered into the woods surrounding whichever town we were in for that month, from which I’d return with berries, nuts, and various woodland trifles. My father always thanked me the same way--a tired ruffle of my hair, a gentle admonition to be careful in the woods, and an insistence that I eat most of what I’d brought. As I grew older, I began to bring back rabbits and woodfowl to cook over a fire in some alley or another, and after that, it wasn’t long before the fruitless towns began to lose their appeal.

Living in the woods had its perks. My father was never much of an outdoorsman--cities were his origin, the ground that felt most stable under his feet--but I was more comfortable than I’d ever been. My father said it probably had something to do with my mother; she was certainly a tiefling, like he was, but there was something more to her. She’d smelled like leaves, he said, the sort that fall down dry and turn to dirt on the damp forest floor. And the antlers--he’d flick mine with a little smile--had certainly not come from him. I could tell, in these times, that my father was happier. Not content, maybe, not satisfied, but happier. And so I was happy. We fell into a pattern of camping and hunting, and when we needed supplies that the forest couldn’t provide, we set up ambushes on the roads and raided carriages and merchants’ carts. My father clearly enjoyed the thrill of the theft; it was like a drug for him, a heady high that fed and clothed the both of us. Truth be told, though, after a while, we stole more than we needed to. We perfected the highwayman’s routine, and my father was more alive than I’d ever seen him.

The winter of my thirteenth year hit both of us like a rockslide to the skull.

We had experienced plenty of winters both on the streets and in the woods, and we knew how to survive. We’d prepared, stocking our little camp with stolen furs, coats, and blankets, and piling preserved rations high under our oilskin tents. My father was even cheerful as the first snows came in; he liked beautiful things, and the ice hung like jewelry from every tree branch. But on the last highway heist before the weather changed for good, things turned very, very badly.

The driver was a human, and an old one at that. Harmless, really. The passenger was a likewise-aging half-elf.

Not so harmless.

The half-elf’s curse hit my father directly. It wasn’t a killing spell, or it wasn’t supposed to be, but I watched as my father’s muscles locked and he fell by the side of the road. The carriage didn’t even slow down as I sprinted to his side.

He was motionless for eight entire hours.

Night fell. The fire I made wasn’t warm enough, nor were the blankets I brought--I carried nearly our entire camp to the side of that road, since I was too slight to drag my helpless father through the darkening woods. The man couldn’t even shiver, so still he was forced to be. When finally his fingers twitched, the cold was so deep that his skin had turned pale, his lips were purple, and he could barely open his eyes.

My father had never been the most hardy man. Life had been too meager for too long. Unable to recover while surrounded by powdery-cold, waist-high snow and buffeted with biting wind, he caught a chill.

It didn’t go away.

I did everything I could. I searched under the snow for any herb I could find, but the ground was frozen and the plants were shriveled. I tried to ambush more travelers on my own, but my father was the talented thief, not me. I piled him high with blankets as he sweated and shivered, but…

Well. I’m sure you understand.

I’d never been alone before. I survived the winter by the skin of my teeth, half-starved and speechless, hating the magic which had brought about my father’s end--even harmless magic, as I’m sure the curse was meant to be, was treacherous. Repellent. Not to be trusted. When spring thawed the snow, I retreated deeper into the wilderness, deeper into my own head, and far, far away from anyone who might pull me out. I don’t think I spoke a word for almost three years, because… well, who was there to talk to? I hunted, and I fished, and I wandered.

I was sixteen when I finally decided to go back to a town. I hadn’t even approached one since I was twelve and holding tightly to my father’s hand, but even if the wilds could provide me with food and shelter, I was… missing something. Something that my father had understood. The reason, perhaps, that despite the hardship we’d faced on the streets, civilization never stopped calling to him.

No matter how much the wilderness felt like home, or how surely I found ways to survive, I was not built to be a solitary creature evermore. When I walked through the streets of my first town in years, I felt something tug in my core that was almost as strong as the pull of the woods.

People.

I was starved for company in every way a person can be.

I’d never been talkative, but even by my own low standards, my social skills were rusty. Eventually, I loitered around a butcher’s shop long enough that the butcher asked me if I had a kill to sell--I suppose he identified me as a hunter, which wasn’t wrong--and I realized how I could access the world of the city. The next day, I brought him a deer. And he paid me in coins. And I bought a new shirt.

And thus began my slow reintegration.

I still spend the vast majority of my time in the wild. Now, though, I’m a bit more willing to stop in a town to sell a pelt, repair my weapons, or purchase new shoes. I go where I want to in the moment, which is usually the result of me seeking both isolation and society at once. I don’t trust very easily, but I need intimacy profoundly, and… well. I might be a mess right now, prickly and quiet and wary of the world, but I hope that somehow, with work and maybe even a friend or two, that can change.

(I'm learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons and this is my character's backstory. If you have ideas to make this character more fun to play, post me on Twitter @egradcliff !)

E.G. RADCLIFF IS AN INCURABLE WRITER, lifelong imaginer of worlds and author of T ,,he Coming of Áed series of fantasy novels. An insatiable reader and researcher with a penchant for all things Celtic and a love of the mysterious and magical, she brings a knowing touch to her Young Adult fiction.

She enjoys adventure, reading on the train, and dreams about flying.

She is a Chicago native and is based in Illinois.

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