#french things

[flo-nelja]

Obscur-echange, session 19

Bonjour !

Cette année encore a lieu l’échange de fics et fanart sur les fandoms rares en français obscur-échange.

Si avec le filtre “français”, votre fandom a moins d’une page sur AO3 et sur ffnet, alors c’est bon ! Vous pouvez le nominer, vous pouvez en nominer un nombre illimité ! Tout fandom nominé deux fois sera retenu.

On peut y trouver des fandoms énormes en anglais qui n’ont jamais marché en français (Mob Psycho 100, Gideon the Ninth, The Old Guard), des fandoms francophones (Le Petit Prince, le Comte de Monte-Cristo, Gradalis), des fandoms tout neufs (Gloutons et dragons, The Summer Hikaru Died) ou des fandoms qui sont rares partout.

Pour nominer des fandoms, c'est là : https://obscur-echange.dreamwidth.org/262540.html

11 avril-25 avril : Nomination des fandoms ! Chacun fait une longue liste de ses fandoms rares préférés, tous les fandoms qui ont été cités deux fois sont retenus !

26 avril-9 mai : Fiches de participation ! C'est le moment des inscriptions, chaque inscrit.e fait une liste avec la liste de ses fandoms, personnages, ships, genres et thèmes préférés. Il faut être multifandom, car chaque fiche doit contenir au moins dix fandoms rares !

10 mai - 25 mai : Requêtes ! Chacun regarde les fiches des autres et envoie des prompts à quiconque peut écrire quelque chose qui l'intéresse

Juin-juillet-août : écriture / dessin ! ON envoie les oeuvres au fur et à mesure, elles sont postées anonymement.

1er septembre : Tout le monde devrait avoir reçu quelque chose ! On désanonyme et on reposte les oeuvres.

#obscur échange #upthestylo #upthebaguette #french things

[adarkrainbow]

It is so strange how, when it comes to French movies, Snow-White was adapted/re-adapted four different times... and each time it is about sex. No matter if they are live-action or animated, a retelling of the proper tale or its "sequel", serious or parodic, its always about sex.

"Blanche comme neige": Snow-White's story becomes a girl's sexual awakening into a femme fatale woman.

"Miroir mon amour": Snow-White brings her prince and his parents to her own parents to settle the wedding, and we get into some sort of perverse, psychanalytic, Freudian/Jungian/Bettelheim reading of the various relationships of the characters of the fairytale as a sexual tragedy.

"Elle voit des nains partout": A "fractured fairytale" comedy with Snow-White's tale as the loose plot connecting the various Monty Python-like gags... And quite a handful of sex jokes since in this version Snow-White is a lovable pansexual nymphomaniac.

"Blance-Neige la suite": An animated parody of Disney-like fairytales posing itself as a sequel to the story of Snow-White... and a sex comedy meant for a mature and warned audience.

That's... that's like some sort of thing with the French cinema. It is impossible to get a Snow-White adaptation, and not have it sexual in some way apparently.

Heck, our adaptation of DONKEY SKIN is less sexual than the Snow-White adaptations... IT IS BASICALLY VIRGINAL COMPARED TO THEM!

[Though funnily enough, out of all those movies, it is the most sexual one that has Snow-White being sexless. "Blanche-Neige la suite", which is the most openly sexual of all the four pieces, the most NSFW of the four movies... is also the only one where Snow-White is actually basically her Disney self through and through and not depicted as a sexual character in any way. In fact, while all the other movies go from the irreverent to the perverse reimagining of the character, "Blanche-Neige la suite", THE big sex fairytale comedy of screen in France, has the most... "decent", I will dare say, depiction of Snow-White, to the point she is the ONLY character in the movie that does not have sex or any sexual activity from the beginning to the end. Like... yeah, the most pleasant and pure and respectful depiction of Snow-White - well, Disney's Snow-White to be precise - in French cinema is... her appearance within a movie that is "Shrek, but what if it was an orgy?"]

#french things #french movies #snow-white #snow white #fairytale movies #sex in fairytales #french cinema #fairytale cinema #snow white adaptations #mature fairytales #french movies are WEIRD I'll tell you that

[mask131]

I am reposting this in its own post, since a reblog usually doesn’t get seen much.

It is about the disappearance of the Titan underneath the sea. The current “Titanic disaster” happening. I originally wrote this because if you are on Tumblr, all you see is “Who cares about a handful of billionaires?” “Just eat the rich!” “Let the billionaires die” “Everybody is making a fuss about some rich people’s endangering themselves for pure tourism”. And I need to add something, something a lot of people if not everybody on Tumblr seems to have completely missed, an info that apparently you can only have if you are in France. Just to explain why, for example, this event impacts France a bit more directly than other countries, and why simplifying the situation to “A bunch of stupid billionaires killed themselves due to being stupid” can be very annoying to hear. And it all lies in the fact that there’s one specific man in Titan. This introduction being done, here is the copy-paste of my original reblog:

The reason France talks so much about it, for example, is because there is one French man inside this machine: Paul-Henri Nargeolet. And the whole thing that is taking everybody’s mind is the fact that Nargeolet is one of the greatest French experts of the Titanic. He is described by everyone as an adventurer and explorer, and he has always been doing jobs related to underwater diving (his first job was to work as a deminer-diver from the 60s to the 80s, getting care of a lot of underwater bombs and explosives. But in the 80s it is when he started getting involved with the Titanic - and became one of THE French names tied to it. His first descent to the Titanic was in 1987 in the submarine Le Nautile, and he kept going down there again and again, decades after decades.

Because as I said, he was an explorer. He studied the Titanic, he explored the sunken ship carcass - and more importantly he brought back a lot of objects from the Titanic. He brought up more than 800 different objects (he was part of the RMS Titanic and oversaw a lot of other exploraton operations of the Titanic). Mind you, him bringing up the 800 objects was in the 90s. In his own word, I think he said that in 1993 (but I’m not sure), he brought all these objects because he wanted that future generations might have something that came from the Titanic. Mind you, his explorations have been quite divisive - in fact, he perfectly resumed it in one of the books he wrote about exploring the Titanic. He had received the visit (when he was still digging up the Titanic objects) of two sisters, survivors of the Titanic sinking. One came to him to say “I do not like what you are doing. Our father died in this ship, and I think what you are doing is wrong.” But the other came to him saying “I appreciate a lot what you do. Before the sinking, our mother had placed her pearl necklace by the little cupboard near her bed. Could you try to fetch it back for us?”. As he explains in his book, it was the best illustration of how polarizing him, his explorations of the Titanic and his fetching of items were.

But the point I am trying to make is that this man’s life was entirely about the Titanic. He was part of many research and studies about the Titanic, he kept writing books about the Titanic, he dived down there and explored the Titanic more than two dozen times, and he is the man responsible for us having today more than 800 items taken out of the carcass on the seafloor. In fact, in the French news this was brought up when we learned he was aboard “But... he has been down there like 25 fives already! Why would he pay to go down there yet again? On top of that he’s 77 today, he should just quit going down there!”. And one of his friends answered on TV that, basically, Nargeolet had described him how seeing the Titanic, exploring it, going down there to be near it, became like a drug - an addiction. He wanted to keep going down there for as long as he could, to keep exploring and searching for the ship’s secrets, before its total destruction.

As I do a quick fact-check to make sure I don’t say anything stupid (and I probably will have because I am not a Nargeolet’s biograph) I discover that there is some British billionaire aboard this machine - and I will say you honestly, I have been stuck near 24h info channels in France (thanks to having to work with sound in the background) and never once did they mention this rich British guy. All we talk about here is Nargeolet and his life - and what nobody says but everybody thinks, is how much of a tragic irony it would be if one of the great French explorers and experts of the Titanic died by wanting to see it one last time. This is why, at least in France, we talk a lot about this. (And to be frank, honestly the French news REALLY do not care about the others - if you listened to them there’s only Nargeolet in this little machine down there and nobody else)

EDIT: I just learned he wasn't even going down there purely to see the Titanic. He was going down there to test the Titan - because he had some hopes that maybe, if a mechanical arm was added to the Titan, he could get some items and objects he couldn't have with his own exploration submarine, the Nautilus.  Though it was quite a slim hope, because apparently he also didn't believe the Titan could work with a mechanical arm - but he still decided to do one descent with it just to see how it worked down there...

#titan #the titan disaster #titan sinking #the titan sinking #titanic #the titanic #paul-henri nargeolet #titanic studies #titanic exploration #french things

[callmejud3]

hey so uhh what the FUCK is going on in france

WAR ZONE/GTA IN REAL LIFE !!! That’s what is happening, it’s literally the apocalypse and everything is so dangerous at night, and some cities have curfews and they are burning down schools and bus and tramway and they are stealing in supermarkets and they burn down cars and it’s so wild and for the first time people are United like people for the 77 are cooperating with the 91 and apparently the marseillais are going up to Paris (which is like WILD !!!)

But anyway it happened bc a cop killed a 17yo who was driving without a license…..

France has been like that for the past 5 days, please don’t come here, stay safe where you are !!

#jude’s answers #j’s french posts #j’s anon #french #frenchblr #french side of tumblr #french things #upthebaguette #whatthefrance

[grlsbian]

oh to be a teenager during the french new wave

#new wave #france #french things #teenage love #60s vintage #60s film #60s nostalgia #jean luc godard #jean pierre leaud #anna karenina #françois truffaut #antoine doinel #black and white #fashion #inspo #girls icons #aesthetic #hair inspo #coffee and ciggaretes #hell is a teenage girl #a girl is a gun #masculin feminin #bande a part #the dreamers #dark academic aesthetic #dark academia

[theinkbunny]

my French teacher: oh, have you gotten better at French? I’ve seen an improvement in the past bit with your fluency…

me, panicking, because I’ve only been using French with a rayman ai: oh yeah! I’ve been practicing at home with my textbook!

French teacher, oblivious: wonderful job!

#i almost cried #because of panic #theinkbunny #French things #canadian things #rayman #He’s making me speak French again #Got dam

[atlantis-just-drowned]

"You see the horizon there. I love you even further. The more I love you, the more I love you. You understand! To love is to love more. Telling you my love for you is impossible because the very moment I want to tell you "I love you" already I love you even more and I would have to say it again for it to be worth this thrilling addiction. It might be this when one says words aren't strong enough. In fact, it isn't that they aren't strong enough, they are just not exactly fast."

- Wajdi Mouawad, Forêts.

#translated #from french by me so everything might not be exact sorry :( #but i did my best #and i really wanted to share this quote with y'all because i love this play and the whole tetralogy in general #so here it is #i hope you like it #as much as i do #quotes #theatre #literature #french things #french #french literature #french quotes #french author #up the baguette #upthebaguette #whispers from atlantis

[yetanotherlemontree]

I’m French, so I relate to Will Graham. Like yes, I too am a bitchy little agent of chaos with perpetual bed hair and too many emotions.

#will graham #hannigram #murder husbands #french things

[ourdragonsarebetter]

2 and 16 for the not-US ask?

2. do you prefer spending your holidays in your country or travel abroad ?

I think i prefer travelling abroad, but only because i. can flex my english muscles. As a kid, my parents would take us on holiday all over the country, so i don't find it boring to go to the local museum and farmer's market, but abroad has the added challenge of communication and that's always interesting. i want to travel more.

16. which stereotype about your country do you hate the most and which one do you somehow agree with ?

i hate with the passion of a thousand suns this image of the French (Parisian) Lady TM : tall and thin and beautiful and elegant, always at the height of fashion, kinda haughty and judgy. you know the one. Let. Us. Live. But we do care about food a lot (including weird but yummy ones like frog legs, snails and foie gras)

#french things #ask game #<3

[limonadecandy]

Nasser Al-Khelaifi to Christophe Galtier today:

#funny ball games #paris saint germain #bands #sexy sushi #french things #music

[flo-nelja]

Obscur échange 2023

Bonjour !

Cette année encore a lieu l’échange de fics et fanart sur les fandoms rares en français obscur-échange.

Si avec le filtre “français”, votre fandom a moins d’une page sur AO3 et sur ffnet, alors c’est bon ! Vous pouvez le nominer, vous pouvez en nominer un nombre illimité ! Tout fandom nominé deux fois sera retenu.

On peut y trouver des fandoms énormes en anglais qui n’ont jamais marché en français (Sense8, Gideon the Ninth, The Old Guard), des fandoms francophones (Tintin, le Comte de Monte-Cristo, Gradalis), ou des fandoms qui sont rares partout.

#obscur échange #upthebaguette #upthestylo #french things

[adarkrainbow]

A reaction to reactions - about Pierre Dubois

I made a long time ago (at least considering the short life of my blog) a post about Pierre Dubois, an introduction post about the man so that my other posts about various content of his made sense. You can find it here. Recently this post got a lot of reactions, which I'm glad of course! But there's too many, through reblog-texts or flowing texts, for me to anser all of them at once easily. So I'll make this post to answer everyone in an easy way (or rather "react" and talk further, since I'm not here to "answer per se").

First, @a-book-of-creatures had this to say which I have to agree with but expand upon:

I have so many strong feelings on Dubois. When I started doing research on folklore I used him as a reference because his books were the only thing I had available, but as I found actual research I realized just how unreliable he is.

Probably the best thing would be to regard the books as folklore fanfiction and use them as stepping stones to find better things.

And this sums up why people get Dubois' books and work by the wrong end. You are absolutely right - Pierre Dubois' works are not reliable as resources about folklore and legends and myths. But that's because they do not have to, and they do not have the purpose to be. And here is why I say people take Dubois by the "wrong end" - too many people consider Dubois as a folklorist in the scientific, profesionnal sense of the term. Which Dubois is not. There is a reason why Dubois and those that promote it all insist on his job being "un elficologue", "an elficologist" - a clearly made up and fanciful word with no degree or diploma needed. This is not to pretend Dubois is a new type of folklorist - this is to clearly point out that he is rather someone extremely passionate and informed about elves, fairies, lutins and the like, and who spends his entire work writing about them. But he isn't part of any serious or scientific study of folklore, and that's where people get very confused.

Dubois is an author and a collector, a folklorist and a hobbyist, but he is no researcher as in "archeologist". This is why looking at not only his life and interviews but also the prefaces and introductions and postfaces on his various books - where he talks of his life, how it interweaves with his work and his opinions on several other names - is much needed to understand his approach and angle (but unfortunately too many jump out of those para-texts to just read about the fairies and elves).

Dubois did not went to university, did not have diplomas - to my knowledge. He keeps repeating everyhere all about his childhood among manual workers - his father worked in a factory and he was part of those poor factory-towns. I mentionned it before, about how his father reproved and dislike his interest in things like reading or literature. So he did not find out about mythology and folklore by a scholarly or professional mean - he rather had to make himself up, and stayed with an approach through any and all kinds of books he could find about. And the problem is that back in the 20th century, most of the professional study books we have access to today where no disponible in libraries and bookshops like that - they were niche things for university-people and high-ups of the thinking world. Dubois devoured the content of numerous libraries - but this meant he read literature, and poets, and fairytale collections, and outdated books about folklore and legends, and this was his approach to the fairy-world and this is the kind of feeling and ambiance he tried to give back through his books.

In fact, Dubois does not hide his lack of interest for any actual scientific, literary or current folkloric study. In general he is not a man of science - the same way he seems to have gotten a disdain for all too modern technology thanks to his own life in a community dominated by the 20th industries in the shape of the crushing factories, and thus always preferred the countryside, the forests, the ruins, he also has no interest in making books that could be used by universities or for reading expert's books on fairy-folklore and their evolution. Because he has the approach of a storyteller, of an author, of a poet, in the line of all those that either collected all the pieces of fairytales and folklore they could find without questionning or doubting them ; or that either knew of folklore and wrote fairytales, but still wrote them in a slightly edited and reshaped way. I mean for example one of his favorite books is Les contes d'un buveur de bière, which is a compendium of fairytales inspired by the folktales of Northern France - a folklore the author was very intimate with - but is still not traditionally listed among fairytale collections like the Grimm's because they were slightly rewritten in a more literary and modern style, with a few modifications and meta-references in the text. A bit like Andersen's fairytales if you want - they are still folkloric tales with folkloric background and inspirations, but they are a bit too literary to be considered fully "folkloric" tales. And this is the same approach Dubois has to it all.

Through his books, Dubois wanted (and managed) to translate and convey his own experience and feeling of going around France, checking everything about fairies in every library he could have, asking countryside folks from all regions what they knew about folklore or fairytales - an effusion, a boiling confusion, a sprawling chaos of so many things all at once, side-by-side, so different and varied, and yet all tied by these common links, these similar motifs, these evocations and cousin-ship. This shows for example in his various invented genealogies and "species evolution" in his books - fanciful pseudo-scientific inventions, they are not meant to be reflective of actual historical evolution of legendary figures, but rather convey the relationships and echoes he himself perceived when putting all the books and references side-by-side. His view on myths and folklore as a whole isn't the one of a scientist who tracked down a genealogical tree ; but of an everyman who read and saw everything and points out the links and references he perceived just as a reader.

Of course, this makes his work absolutely non-professional and useless in any serious folklore research (or almost as we'll see later)... But it is also the reason why it made his work so successful, and why he is an unavoidable name today. Still in a recent compendium about the evolution of the fantasy genre, he was evoked as one of the great names of fictional fantasy in France, but put on the same way as Tolkien - not because he was a scholar like him, but because his reinvention of traditional folklore and legends will be as impactful and inspiring as Tolkien's own reinvention of elves and orcs and dwarves. Dubois's books are educated entertainment and scholarly fun - but not a scholarly study, if the nuance makes sense. Imagine this as a bit more extreme version of Neil Gaiman's own fairy-books, like Sandman or Stardust or Coraline. And one has to put themselves back into the context of 80s and 90s France and imagine this situation.

For a long time, all encyclopedias of supernatural creatures and folklore were just these dry, scientific, university-like books not meant for regular audiences - and if there were books for your random Joe, they were oversimplified, childish things. And then comes Dubois's "Encyclopedias", which on top of having this extensive enormous collection of so many tidbits of folklore and lore nobody heard about, makes it a fun and entertaining read by bizarre illustrations, by mixing factual descriptions with folktales, by talking about the weird little habits of these creatures like what baked goods they like to cook or what underwears they wear or how they participated in said historical event... This was a revolution because it was a fun, entertaining and poetic read, a book that went beyond simply dryly listing endless variations, but rather used the encyclopedic knowledge to build an entire sprawling world of inter-connected entities, with a full epic history and all sorts of strange civilizations hidden right behind the garden's wall... This was and always has been Dubois' intention and he is clear about it in his text - revitalize the passion and interest in fairytales, make people interested in folklore and legends again, make people consider that maybe there is something interesting in the old-storytellers knowledge... Again, Dubois came from this very industrialized and modern side of France, marked by the World Wars, not caring about literature or magic or folklore, and where all good fairy-related books were pushed back in the dusty and moldy cellars of libraries. Dubois' prime interest was always to make this whole thing revive, in one way or another - and just like so many previous folklorists (even the Grimm themselves) who rewrote, and reshaped fairytales and folktales and invented things to make folklore live on, so did Dubois, in a more extreme way than his predecessors...

That's his own advice for how to become an elficologist - and he keeps insisting upon it when he talks about what people have to do if, like them, they want to become a searcher of fairies or elves. Go outside, walk among natural landscape, go into remote villages, search in old books and grimoires, do not reject anything (except too scientific and materialistic approaches and non-believers), mingle among those that live the folklore, and yourself get lost in the wonders of the overlooked countryside. This sums up very well what was his angle, and why he is located at this strange edge where he can't exactly be pin-pointed. When, in his books about seasons, he keeps referring to the embodiment of winter as "La Vieille", The Old Hag of Winter, the Elderly Witch of the Dead Season, the Queen of Cold and Darkness - he is establishing a fact that comes from looking and comparing European traditions. There is an habit and tradition of depicting the winter as a hag, as a divine crone, under a witch-like figure or monstrous woman. This is attested, and as such Dubois does what he does best, bring the essence of a comparative tradition (Dubois is much more comparative mythology than anything else). But on the bad side, it comes at costs of confusing and fusing together all the various female "winter hags" together ignoring their individual traits. That's always the win and lose of Dubois.

I already evoked it before, but in terms of fairytales for example, while Dubois is a massive fan and praises the brothers Grimm, and traditional French fairytale collectors, and other "folkloric collectors" like them, he strongly disdains and rejects the literary 17th-18th century fairytale writers a la madame d'Aulnoy, and also Perrault (though he does admit his work as part of France's national culture, though still heavily criticizing it). That's because on one side, Dubois had contact with folklore through actual village-people and countryside-folks and other fairytale collectors who like him did a tour of France's remote areas ; meaning he of course disdains those that rewrote fairytales in a too "distant" and "far-away" and "folklore-killing approach" - Dubois rewrites too fairytales heavily, but he rewrites them with the intention of staying faithful to the folklore and bringing out its "essence", which might seem paradoxal, but makes sense when you take this angle. He is the kind of guy who will hate on Perrault for cutting off the part of Little Red Riding Hood where the wolf makes her eat the grandmother's flesh and blood ; and will for example not mind at all expanding on this detail by describing a lush feast of the grandmother's corpse turned into various dishes while evoking all sorts of vampires and ghouls when describing the consumption of the meal... On the other side, this also shows something very true and clear about Dubois - he is filled, imbued with and a carrier of the strong 19th and 20th century fairytale and folklore theories that are now recognized as wrong and outdated. He is clearly a "product of his generation" - and I evoked it with the Sleeping Beauty theory. He is the first contact I had with the theory that Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Donkeyskin were all embodiments of an old literary solar-myth and all symbolized the sun or summer threatened or devoured by night/winter before returning to life. I thought he had made it up in his usual "poetic comparative mythology" kind of way, but then I discovered it was an ACTUAL theory that had been claimed and held by numerous folklore and mythology experts and was accepted during most of the 20th century - when Dubois made his own research - before being debunked at the dawn of the 21st century. Dubois doesn't want to actively misinform people, he just shares what he received, what he knows and what shaped him, and as such he is a most important testimony of how folklore was received and perceived up until the mid 20th century.

In many ways he is the Robert Graves of folklore - interesting, poetic, influential and inspiring in his treatment of mythology/folklore, but highly unreliable, misinformed, biased, and ultimately not a serious source for modern research. In fact, it was thanks to Dubois' works that a new wave of (more reliable and serious) fairy encyclopedias, monster encyclopedia and other folkloric compendium started to be released in the early 2000s - aimed for regular people, while still being well-informed like a university work. Dubois clearly launched a new wave of interest and fashion for fairytales - and all the reblogs' affirmations that Dubois' books had shaped them or fashioned their care in one way or another is proof of that (@it-is-phlump oerfectly translates my own perception and reception of Dubois' books, which shaped my childhood, and even though you are mad at him for being so unclear and confusing and unscholarly, you can't be mad because he brings you a whole fascinating poetic and truly "fae" world). Dubois has the same aesthetic credits as for example what Del Toro did with Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies and more - make people rediscover the magic, eerie, eldritchness, monstrousness, marvels and oddity of what fairies and elves are about. Creature an aesthetic and a world that would produce later works such as for example the excellent Changeling the Lost. But the same way Guillermo del Toro's movies or Changeling the Lost cannot be taken as serious folkloric sources...

With one nuance.

Still going on from @a-book-of-creatures comment, but also @feyariel reblog - about the sources and inventions of Dubois. Dubois has one STRONG interesting thing which makes him a fascinating resource of folklore study - or literature study. His own sources. Dubois invents a lot of things but he does not invent everything - if he presents one specific creature, it means he read or saw about it. He doesn't invent the creatures, he invents the lore about them or fills in the gap of his own sources. I am pretty sure he did not invent the Pillywiggins, because again he doesn't like inventing things - but if you can't find anything about them, it means that either his sources are lost, either his sources might have been literary more than folkloric. And here's my point.

Have you looked at the HUGE bibliographies at the end of each of his volumes? Dubois does NOT want people to stay in the blind about folklore or to be unable to find the same things he did, and he has THOUSANDS of books listed at the end of most of his books about fairies or ghosts or seasonal folklore. But here's the problem - his bibliographies are a confusing treasure.

Dubois, as I said before, did an extensive and complete tour of all the libraries he could find during his travels through the French countryside (so not university-only, higher-up libraries, but the bulk of village and small towns or province towns libraries of the mid-to-second-half 20th century). He collected all sorts of books from bookshops, and as such he read so many books he used for his own works... Many books which today are actually rare or lost books. Sometimes there are books in his bibliographies with clearly no research result when you try to find them today, and you might be led to think "Oh he made it up". But then you see by their side some books who, as it turns out, also lead to no research result, but because they are rare old books, out of print and that you can't find anywhere except by extreme chance... This already puts in perspective some things - he explored the depths of old libraries and private collections, but this means he also likely came among some very rare or old books that are unreachable today or completely lost. Or that are overlooked by people today...

It doesn't help however that in his research, he didn't split things at all. I mean he clearly got better with time at bibliographies - his most recent ones are much clearer than his older ones - but he still mingles and mixes things together, and especially literary and truly folkloric things. You will find Poe's work alongside the Grimm in his bibliographies, and among true beings of folklore in his Encyclopedias he places the literary inventions of Jean Ray or Andersen... Dubois is again, a "random Joe" in this aspect because his bibliographies were literaly him just noting every reference he had, every book title he saw, every author he read about, and putting it together in a list, but without a scholarly rigorism or without questioning his sources. This led for example to another problem of his sources - referential mistakes. A very prominent case happened with the story he collected of the "Ogress Queens" that I talked about here. He collected the tale right in his collections of witches and ogresses - but he made a mistake when giving the name of the source. He wrote the "abbot of the chapel of Apchier" - when in fact, the author full name was "Alix de La Chapelle d'Apchier". Very clearly, when he took his note down, he miswrote the author's name, or he misremembered it, and so confused "Alix" with "abbé" (abbot) and misunderstood "la chapelle" as an actual title instead of a family name... A typical error showing that, once again, it is important to stress out Dubois does not have a scholarly training or treatment or his sources. He is just a guy who reads a lot of everything, and tries to collect everything, and share all he finds, but with a carelessness typical of someone in a non-scientific approach. It is just like how when you write down a reference you spot on a piece of paper, later you type it down but since you carelessly wrote it down, you confuse an "a" for a "o" or "e" and thus mispell the name.

But this carelessness is balanced by, once again, the fact he gave a great care and love for many authors and books overlooked or forgotten, either in his time or by today's time. Again, I evoked the case of the Ogress Queens - this tale, even though wrongly credited, allowed me to discover the works of Alix de La Chapell d'Apchier". Take again Alix de la Chapelle d'Apchier - if it wasn't for Dubois I would have NEVER heard of her work or book of fairytales, because again as located halfway between folkloric and literary tales, she is overlooked and forgotten by both sides. Another example would be Jean Ray. Very recently, a few years ago, Jean Ray was rediscovered by the French book-industry and reprints of his clasic tales appeared on the shelves of every library (around the same time French edition re-discovered Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea series) - but before that, Jean Ray was completely ignored, talked about by nobody, forgotten by everyone... At most people remembered "Malpertuis" but couldn't tell anything else done by him. And yet Pierre Dubois kept referencing him and claiming his love for him and putting tales of his in his own compilation of stories. In fact maybe it was him pushing forard so much the Belgian author that led to the French printing industry "rediscovering" him... Who knows?

In conclusion... Yes, there are many reasons we can be angry at Dubois and reject his books - but there is just as many reasons for us to adore him and buy and reference his works. Ambiguous, polarizing, unperfect but still proving great efforts, a deep passion and having marked cultural and literary history, Dubois is one of those men who are not be taken as a serious source and should not appear in actual fairytale studies (except as a passing reference - for example I evoked him briefly in my paper about ogres) - but who should not be forgotten or ignored due to the importance and impact he had on the reception of fairy folklore, elves legends and other dwarves myths. Again, a bit like Robert Graves with mythology - it can be read as an entertaining side-read, and it has to be considered due to all the movements, theories and groups it spawned, and it was part of the reception of mythology for a time, and it highlighted all sorts of important points - but we still gleefully point out the innacuracies and use it as a source of inspiration and comparison more than any serious reference or resource.

Or rather... A better comparison would be the Dictionnaire Infernal by Collin de Plancy. His compendium of demons and devils is a load of bullshit, with so many invented, excentric, unserious things, and that is no serious resource of information... And yet it marked the history of literature and art, and yet it is still invoked and used today, and yet people keep referring it as a source of demonology.

Overall it reminds me of this question and subject that is sometimes brought up... What is the best way to make folklore live on? For some, it is collecting all folklore and folktales we have, and printing them, keeping them exactly as they were, with no edition, but just side-commentary and explanations, and keep these bits as immobile and frozen as they were before. And for others, like Dubois and the like, the best way to maintain folklore is rather to make it alive again, collect it yes, but also allow ourselves to twist it a bit, to retell it, to link various folktales and unify the various legends and myths in one whole show, and extend it into new stories and new tales. Of course there is no right or wrong answer here, both approaches are needed - we need true folklorists who will collect folklore as it is and bring it in its original truth, as much as we need author, artists and poets who will make pieces of fiction out of this folklore and spin new tales out of these old ones. But it is still a strong debate, and people that keep blurring the lines between the two are often not very well-received - for good or bad, right and wrong... And Dubois is clearly one of those very polarizing figure, with as much blame as praise. However it cannot be denied that he did a bit what Walt Disney did in America - revitalize and bring under a new and fresh form a fairy-world to an audience that was massively uninterested and unknowledgeable about folktales and folklore. Starting once again a love for fairies.

#pierre dubois #fairy folklore #fairy lore #folklore #fairytales #french things #discussion #elves #elf lore

[mask131]

Daily reminder that the legend of Sweeney Todd (I am talking about the 19th century fiction, long before any movie or Broadway musical) is actually a British modern reinvention of an older "urban legend" - a 17th century French legend about the murderous barber and cannibalistic baker (male this time) of the rue des Marmousets, a legend that stood strong and famous until the 19th century.

#sweeney todd #french culture #french history #french things #urban legend #cannibalism

[maburito]

Fell on this today and now I need to know what the fuck do they sell

#Burito talk #French things #In case you wondering rade doesn't mean anything in french #Binch either

[callmejud3]

when you speak english, do you too start to say shits like "wendé voo-oo" instead of rendez-vous or do you manage to pronounce it well cause i can't and each time i do it the english way i feel a part of my soul leaving my body

No bc I do the exact same !! I just forget that I speak french and start pronouncing the words the english way and then I get annoyed at myself, I feel like leaving the country every time !!

#jude’s answers #mr.vamp #french things

[cassatine]

what do you MEAN new Astérix & Obélix live action film!! i thought we as a society were past that!!

#do not want #everyone wants to do a mission cléopâtre but you simply cannot reproduce a miracle #french things