Episode 40: Folklore in Pop Culture pt 2 | Show Notes

Amanda’s Notes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giselle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vila_(fairy)

https://petipasociety.com/giselle/

Alright, I am so excited about my topic for today. So, as you know Corinne, I spent the entirety of elementary and high school taking ballet classes and performing. And now I’m going to make that everyone else’s problem! Today I would like to talk about the ballet Giselle and the liberties it takes with the story of the Wilis, or the Vili (singular Vila) from Slavic folklore.

So, the ballet. First of all, ballet is probably the one place where I feel like you should go into the performance spoiled for the plot so that you can notice some of the more subtle details in the dancers’ performances so I am in fact going to sum up the entire plot here. Deal with it.

The ballet is set in Germany in the Middle Ages in a small farm community. Act one opens on an idyllic sunny autumn morning with a man named Loys courting Giselle, a peasant woman with a weak heart. Loys is new to the town, and the local gamekeeper Hilarion (also in love with Giselle) is supes suspicious of this new guy. And it’s totally not just jealousy, nope no ma’am. Giselle’s mother discourages just, so much of what’s going on. She’s like hey, maybe stick with the good local boy Hilarion, I also don’t trust the new guy. Hey daughter of mine, maybe stop dancing through the streets. I don’t care how happy you are, you have a weak heart and shouldn’t be so physically active. Giselle is all like, don’t care, do what I want.

That day, a party of noblemen and women show up in town and decide to stop there to break for a meal and to mingle with the commonfolk. Loys immediately hides himself away. The noblewoman Bathilde is absolutely enchanted with Giselle and the two discuss love. Bathilde talks about her recent engagement, Giselle talks about her new love with the new guy in town. The nobles eventually pack up, and Loys comes back to dance with Giselle. 

Of course, act one can’t end there. Hilarion finds a very nice sword and a hunting horn, which he blows. The group of nobles turn around to come back as they recognise the horn. Once the noble party is back in town Loys is exposed as not being a commoner, but as Duke Albrecht, Lady Bathilde’s betrothed. 

Giselle…does not handle it well. She goes a smidge mad and starts dancing a really frenetic version of her moments with the Duke, getting faster and wilder until, as her mother feared, her heart stops from the overexertion and grief. Thus ends act one. Super cheerful, have a fun intermission.

Act two is where our episode topic appears as we are introduced to the Wilis, the vengeful spirits of women who died before their wedding days. Led by the Queen of the Wilis, Martha, the Wilis take turns dancing with any man they come across until the men die of exhaustion. And it’s Giselle’s first night as one of these spirits. First, Hilarion comes by her grave with flowers. And yeah, I’d be distraught if my decision to blow a random-ass horn killed the person I loved. Fair. He is of course found by the Wilis, who dance him to exhaustion, and then I guess upset about how long it’s taking to kill the guy they drown him in a nearby lake. 

Now, our favorite asshole Duke Albrecht ALSO came to the cemetery and asked Giselle’s forgiveness for his part in her death. And because we’re supposed to believe their romance was the real deal she forgives him. Her fellow Wilis however? No, they have the correct reaction and want to dance him to death because sure Hilarion shouldn’t have blown the horn but maybe don’t come up with a fake identity in order to cheat on your fiancee? Controversial, I know. I have very strong opinions about classical ballet plots, tune in next time to hear me complain about the fever-dream that is Coppelia. 

Anyway, Giselle does not want her new sisters to dance the Duke to exhaustion because reasons. So she steps in and dances with each spirit that tries to dance with him throughout the night, ending only at dawn when the spirits fade until night falls again. 

The ballet was a massive success when it premiered in Paris in 1841 and really injected some renewed appreciation for what was a bit of a dying art at the time. 

So how close to the actual mythology was the ballet? Well, we all take poetic license when we write, right?

The Vila is a Slavic fairy-type spirit described as I saw, as similar to a nymph. They are always female spirits and they have an interesting relationship with humanity. Sometimes they are super nice. In fact, in Serbian epic poetry there is usually a Vila helping the hero along the way throughout the entire hero’s journey. But! If you insult a vila they will put a blight on your crops, hurt your livestock, kill you, whatever they’re in the mood for and how bad they perceived the slight.

In Czech folklore they are pretty much always malicious unless you give them a wide berth. They are said to try to entrance men who wander into their territory, often dancing around in a circle to trap the men in the center. Men trapped in this way are never seen again. So you can see the similarities there.

So, how did the “woman who died before marriage” thing happen? And the name change? Well, the brains behind the ballet, Adolphe Adam, read Heinrich Heine’s De l’Allemagne which describes the Wila as a Slavic folklore spirit who died before their wedding day and danced men to death. As far as I can tell this is Heine’s own interpretation of stories he heard and the particular “before the wedding day” thing was a bit of a misinterpretation as some bits of folklore did have the Vila being spirits of woman who died “before their time” which some sources believe to be women who died without becoming mothers. 

And that’s my segment!

Corinne’s Notes:

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie 

https://books.google.com/books?id=DLmoKKkxAX0C&pg=PA121#v=onepage&q&f=false 

https://books.google.com/books?id=H_3ZAAAAMAAJ&q=Seal-Skin

http://echoes.devin.com/selkie/selkie.html

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/12/selkies-sex-and-the-supernatural/ 

https://www.vikingrune.com/selkies-folktale/

https://www.tor.com/2018/07/13/11-selkie-stories/ 

https://bookriot.com/ya-books-about-selkies/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_maiden 

Quick correction: Corinne inadvertently mixed up Heather Dale and Alexander James Adams. Both singers perform folk and/or filk and were active in the 90s and 00s and released music with the first name “Heather”. We regret the error! “The Maiden and the Selkie was performed by Heather Dale, not Alexander James Adams.

As I have threatened Amanda MANY MANY TIMES, I’m doing this edition of Pop Culture Folklore on SELKIES. Because hot damn I love selkies a lot and also we did an episode about them so I had a lot of research close to hand. 

I am going to quickly rehash a few of the more common stories on the origins of Selkies - again, this material is largely taken from research I did in our Selkies episode, and I’ve linked to the show notes to that here.

There are a few different takes on where selkies come from, and I’m going to share a few of my favorites, some based in mythology, some based on people trying to explain things that they didn’t have the technology or medical knowledge to explain:

• Okay so probably my FAVORITE explanation is that selkies are actually fallen angels. According to some traditions, when God cast out the rebellious angels who sided with our good good GirlBoss Satan, the ones who landed on the earth became what we know as fairies, and the ones who landed in the sea became selkies. 

• In Norway, there was a common belief that the Finns (by which they meant indigenous Sami people), especially their shamans, could just turn into seals?? Because reasons?? And Magic???? I saw a reference in a book called The Good People about a tale where a Norseman stabbed a seal and then later had his knife returned by a Finn who had a scar from the knife wound. So like. That’s a thing I didn’t know until I did this research

• One explanation I’ve seen was that when vikings invaded Orkney, the fur-wearing invaders were somehow mistaken for seals transforming into people

• OR intermarriage between the residents of Orkney and Sami and Finn women, who used sealskin kayaks and wore furs

• Another variant of this is dark-haired, shipwrecked Spaniards. No I did not make that up.

• One of the more science-y leaning explanations I’ve seen is that people were trying to explain syndactyly, which is a condition that causes “webbing” between people’s fingers. Before our understanding of medicine got stronger, a common explanation for any sort of abnormality or deformity was to blame the Fair Folk. So if you had webbed fingers, clearly your mom banged the fae.  

Selkies are a popular motif in literature, ballads, and film. They can be categorized as part of a larger “grouping” of folk tale motifs named for the “Swan Maiden” variations of the stories. The basic story beats include a (usually) young man taking an enchanted article of clothing from a (usually) beautiful young woman, thereby acquiring a spouse. So long as the human half of the couple has the enchanted clothing, the supernatural spouse is essentially trapped in marriage. However! Because of the wide variances in animal brides and grooms and their enchanted clothing, they’re not all categorized under the same Aarne-Thompson Index, it’s a little more scattershot than all that. The wikipedia article on Swan Maidens has a better explanation than I can give succinctly. 

In terms of *some* of the pop culture where you can find selkie stories, I’ve got a small list that I’ll talk about here. I’ve included some other links that have more, but I’m trying to limit myself to works I’m familiar with.

I’ll start with one of the classics, the 1994 film The Secret of Roan Innish. I’m including this one on a technicality. I think I watched this when I was very very small at my best friend’s house? But I genuinely can’t remember. However, it’s frequently cited in modern tellings of selkie stories and is by all accounts a very charming indie film. 

Slightly more contemporary, and one I know for a fact I’ve seen is Cartoon Saloon’s Song of the Sea from 2014, about a young boy who lives with his father and his little sister. His father is a fisherman who wants his children to have nothing to do with the sea, but his sister is nevertheless drawn to it. Three guesses why and the first two don’t count. Cartoon Saloon is probably one of my favorite animation studios out there, so even if you aren’t into Selkies, I recommend watching it just for their unique style.

In terms of literature, the very first time I heard about Selkies was in a Middle Grade novel called THE FOLK KEEPER, by Franny Billingsley. It incorporates a lot of celtic folklore, including stories of selkies. I don’t want to give too much away because it’s such a great story and also has an extremely cute romance. I will fully admit that I only picked it up in the bookstore when I was a kid because the main character’s name was “Corinna”, and I never see anything like my name in books.

Obviously, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the role selkies play in Seanan McGuire’s OCTOBER DAYE series. I love her take on them and how she weaves in just So Much Tragedy. She definitely keeps the core of selkie lore the same while also putting her own spin on things. I can usually be found screaming, crying, and throwing up after reading her books – I highly recommend them.

If you’re looking for music about selkies, there’s the Child Ballad “The Great Silkie Of Sule Skerry”. I also highly recommend Heather Dale’s “The Maiden and the Selkie”, or Talis Kimberly’s “Still Catch the Tide” (Seanan McGuire has a gorgeous cover on her Stars Fall Home album).