#my brain is working at 1/5 of its normal speed rn

[thoughts-of-a-heathen]

@professor-wednesday

I mean, you also have the falcon and eagle hamr?

In the medieval ballads, it is relatively common for people to turn into animals (or, in some cases, trees). These transformations are (to my knowledge) always involuntary (i.e. curses). People (usually fair maidens or noble knights) get turned into birds (mainly hawks and nightingales), [were]wolves, lindworms, deer, lime trees, foxes, snakes, lions, bears... Wolves and birds of prey seem to be quite common. 

In Scandinavian folklore, wolves and bears are definitely the most common animals in the context of hamnskifte (shapeshifting). And I honestly don’t think that has anything to do with their battle-fury. Carnivores weren’t exactly popular in the rural farming communities, and the alienation from other humans probably was an intended consequence of the curse.  Like I mentioned in my post about werewolves, people would turn into the carnivores that could be found in their local area, and/or the animal that would cause the greatest harm. In areas with no wolves or bears, people would turn into dogs. There is also a story about farmers who turn into wolverines to get back at some Sami men who had (allegedly) slaughtered and eaten the farmers’ horses. Disguised in wolverine hamr, the farmers attacked the Sami’s herd of reindeer, killing and maiming a large number of animals. (A common belief about the wolverine was that it would “keep killing for as long as there was movement.”) All of these tales, no matter what kind of animal(s) they mention, belong to the same category: sägner about werewolves. 

So what about other transformations? People (usually women) could [be] turn[ed] into a mare, and the mare could turn into all kinds of things. Cats and snakes seem to be the most common animals in stories about the mare. But the mare could also take the shape of inanimate objects (like pitch forks).  There are some tales of people turning into snakes (without being mares), presumably because of the snake’s association with Satan. However, this is relatively rare. (But stories about other supernatural snakes are very common.) 

I have also found one tale of a priest turning into an ox, but the transformation didn’t have anything to do with the characteristics of the animal.

We also have the witches who turn themselves into birds (often magpies or crows, sometimes white wagtails) before traveling to Blåkulla. There are many tales about this, like this one from Boda, Dalarna, Sweden (ULMA 19659):

“A man once tried to shoot a magpie that he found impertinent. When [he] fired the shot, he heard a cry of desperation, and when he hurried [to get] there, he realized that he had shot and broken the femur of a woman who was known to be a witch.”

Witches had many different ways of getting to Blåkulla, but I suppose that turning into a bird is slightly more convenient than riding on a chaplain...

To tie this post together with a nice, slightly fever induced bow, I’ll finish off by mentioning the legends of how different bird species were created. These often follow a similar formula: “[A human] fails to do something/does something that isn’t very nice or good, and [a Christian figure] punishes them by turning them into [some kind of bird].” 

A woman doesn’t want to share her bread with Jesus, so he punishes her by turning her into a black woodpecker.

A maid steals a pair of scissors made of silver and some silk yarn, and then lies about it, so the Virgin Mary punishes her by turning her into a swallow A bachelor “causes a lot of resentment among married men,” and is turned into an eagle-owl as punishment.

There are so, so many of these.

But yeah. Generally speaking, hamnskifte (shapeshifting) wasn’t something that “honest and hardworking people” wanted to be associated with.

#scandinavian folklore #folklore #hamnskifte #shapeshifting #animals #my brain is working at 1/5 of its normal speed rn #because sinusitis #so i might have misinterpreted your question #please let me know if that's the case

[rigelmejo]

Took 40 minutes to finish that chapter of guardian in my print book ToT so like 10 pages.

Upside: that’s without a dictionary or any word lookup (the completely unknown words are obvious - I need to look up those Hanzi they’re new I should just like underline them or something)

Eh: again, I read the translation a week or so ago so having context helped a LOT with figuring out any unknown words spelled with Hanzi I know. I’m sure going in blind trying to read like Can Ci Pin with no prior context I’d still drown. (However after reading a translation first? Maybe all the priest novels I got might be doable). What I do like is that with this context, I can read it the way I wanted to (exceptions being 1-2 unknown words a page). I can actually read for details, actually enjoy the sentences and meanings and descriptions. (And I’m sure I will be able to more in a year but just... this was basically the “at minimum dream goal” I had when I started learning... which I thought would take 4 years.. so I am cool with managing to do it earlier than expected if it means I just gotta have read the translations. Also? A nice possible benefit is since words are pretty easy to pick up from the context, hopefully learning these words will help me read some other priest novels a bit.

Interesting: the print novel HAS extra scenes. I mentioned this before (also it has edited scenes with different wording, meaning it does not match word to word for Avenuex’s audiobook which follows the webnovel). I also have bad memory so combine only my blurry memory of the translation chapter with scenes changed and scenes added and every page still has some surprises. This chapter featured a bit more discussion on the guardian order/token then I remember happening this early (it’s the chapter Li qian jumps, they mention the guardian order in the hall in the building - da Qing and zhao yunlan talk about it for maybe 2 pages). Every extra scene is interesting I mean 1. Because I’ve never seen it lol in the webnovel or translation. 2. Because being able to read it really makes me feel like I’m achieving what I wanted when I wanted to read the book way back when I first watched guardian lol. 3. Most fun is me wondering why priest decided to make some changes for the print novel! Like Zhu Hong is introduced earlier and differently in a way that matches the show, in the print novel - but in the webnovel she’s introduced later and some random ghost makes guo changcheng faint in the SID. Now this earlier guardian order scene (if it’s not my bad memory just forgetting it in the eng translation lol) means priest might have decided to scatter more info about it earlier on, and to hint maybe at zhao yunlan being Kunlun earlier. I wonder if more added detail like this will continue. Another scene change - unless the eng translator just CUT out sentences - is that when Shen wei is introduced in the book, zhao Yunlan considers his beauty and appearance. Also it matches up to the show intro as far as petting the cat and their name convo. I don’t remember the webnovel eng translation waxing poetic about Shen Wei’s beauty in that intro scene.

Also interesting: back when I’d extensively read more, what I liked was how when I couldn’t look up words I really tested how much I Actually knew and Actually remembered. Because I had to make my mind remember. I also had to work harder to recognize metaphors, idioms, word boundaries, recognize when it’s one word or 2, etc. Because I don’t have a button to click that automatically sorts those. Also with metaphors and idioms etc I actually think through them and if they make sense I understand them (versus when I read in Pleco and look them up it’s more like me memorizing a word block means “tired” and not the actual phrasing). Also with words - when I figure out a word in extensive reading it’s a more natural process of me going “these Hanzi word parts combine and mean this” and if it’s logical it’s apparent why because my brain had to block them together as a new word to understand the sentence (and had to figure out the meaning of the new word). Again, in Pleco I could just click the word for clock-needle but seeing it and figuring it out myself makes it much easier to remember. Related - sometimes made up words are Easier to figure out in extensive reading. In Pleco, reading hanshe, the word 界结 comes up a lot meaning like a boundary (it’s a spell Xiaoge puts up to protect the hanshe from spirits). I believe it also comes up in love and redemption as the barrier protecting the bottle and the lake in the opening eps? It’s not a word in Pleco’s dictionary but in context and with those Hanzi it makes sense. Guardian has words that might be real or might be terms to describe zhao Yunlan’s magic stuff, but the key point is reading and figuring out the meaning myself tends to make more sense than if I run into them in Pleco, click definitions that make sense but not together as one word and skip the obvious of noticing and trying to understand before I looked it up. Then related to these points? Reading Extensively now that I read the translation first? Makes this process all way funner to me. Because now I can do it will all sentences, all words. I don’t find any paragraph or sentence so difficult I have to skim over it and give up figuring out Anything beyond maybe a phrase or word (whereas in like month 8 that was what I had to do a ton with MoDu and i was lucky if I grasped the overall meaning of a paragraph from the scraps of parts of sentences I could figure out). So like.. it’s a more complete reading and figuring out experience? Compared to before where I had lots of like blank spaces where I had no idea what to do with certain regions. Learning more Hanzi has likely also helped a lot. Like I said in guardian I’m running into 1-2 unknown Hanzi a page rn, whereas in mo du I probably knew 500 Hanzi total? Maybe 1000? Idk it was a low enough number every paragraph had several unknowns at least. Compared to now, especially with prior context from the translation (so if I only vaguely recall a Hanzi and haven’t learned it well yet, I can still guess the realm of its meaning from context) it’s going a lot smoother.

Downside: wow is that a long time ;-; I think 5 pages took me 20 minutes? It was pretty brutally slow. Although on the upside IF print pages correlate in length the way I think they do, 20-30 minutes was how long 20 digital pages was taking me for 天涯客 in Pleco with a click dictionary looking up words. And I think priest chapters are generally like 5 print pages in the webnovel chapter lengths? Because that’s like the translations general page length for chapters? But then my print chinese copy combines some chapters so like the chapter I just read was 25 print pages total ;-; anyway my... point... is just that if 5 pages is taking me around 20-30 minutes that’s pretty normal for me and a priest novel chapter so. On the upside it’s not taking much slower to read print pages compared to in Pleco (provided I have context from seeing a translation at some point). I remember the 5 page chapters in this book took me 20 minutes last time I read one of the short ones? So that’s pretty comparable to my digital reading speed. Which is still pretty slow for priest novels... but much better than the much worse time I was taking before I tried reading After seeing a translation lol

#rant #April #April progress #guardian #I’m excited and also exhausted lol #like on the upside I DO like how it’s written in chinese #I enjoy priests style #also hanshe helped SO MUCH because SO MUCH practical vocab from hanshe applies to guardian as ANOTHER MODERN SUPERNATURAL MYSTERY novel #being in the same genre roughly means I know a huge portion of the Hanzi even if I need context for some words #I run into 1-2 unknown Hanzi a page #which is not really that bad considering with words guessed from context I can usually figure them out #a lot of the Hanzi in hanshe I learned carry over here which HELPS