Legends That Every Child Should Know

So snuggly! Yet so hard to read!

I didn’t read any Love’s Landscape stories this week. There are many reasons for that, reason one being I got a cat. She’s a really snuggly tortiseshell cat cat cat cat cat cat catcatcatcatcat cat cat CAT… OMG KITTY!!!!

*ahem* Sorry, got a little off topic. I also didn’t get any LL stories read because I’ve been trying to finish Legends That Every Child Should Know; a Selection of the Great Legends of All Times for Young People by Hamilton Wright Mabie.

It’s (as you could guess from the title) a selection of great legends from around the world (mostly Eurasia). I found a few of the stories to be very dull, and a few to be very interesting, and a few to be badly-formatted verse.

I think that overall I read it in skim-mode, but sometimes it was deep skim-mode than others.

Rustem and Sohrab was probably the most interesting story; it’s a middle-eastern tale (I think, certainly not from Western Europe), and begins with a man’s horse being stolen, but written in such a way that we’re supposed to already be familiar with the guy (and the horse, who’s named more than referred to as a horse). Anyway, it’s ultimately a story of a son seeking his Hero father, and the shenanigans of their enemies which  cause the story to end as a tragedy. It was interesting both because I don’t find as many non-Western/non-Indian stories like that, and because here was a tale full of all sorts of battles, but without either side actually being the Enemy, you know? As the reader, you want the two sides to meet, but you don’t want them to fight, and it all seemed so senseless, and yet with a hint of realism, because how many battles in the real world are fought for the prevention/causation of World Destruction, versus how many have been fought because of a selection of politicking assholes and poor communication?

Someone needs to make that into a movie.

And the other stories of note were Rip Van Winkle, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I’ve read the former before, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t read the latter. And I grouped them together because holy hell they were the most horribly boring tales ever. I must have read a different version of Rip Van, because it was…gah. They both got into long descriptive tangents and broke all sorts of ‘telling not showing’ rules and could probably been summarized in two sentences. Or paraphrased into something worthwhile in three pages.

I know there are better Rip Van Winkle stories out there, and I hope the same is true of Sleepy Hollow.