Subject: Now half a minute. I've been reading sanitized verions of Grimm's fairytales...
Author:
Posted on: 2022-12-06 16:01:20 UTC
... my whole life? What? Ok, where can I find the originals and are they any good? I have never heard this. I always thought there was something about the fairytales I've read.
I am working on a story again, yay! Less yay is that it takes place yet again in a region I'm only barely familiar with, namely 17th century Germany. It's an alternate-history world (I'd rather not divulge the premise beyond that), but it takes place partly in a small village that desperately needs a name. I'm writing in English and I can wing it with the characters' names, but I'd rather not name my village something ungrammatical I got from a name generator (name generators are my salvation when I write fantasy, not so much with IRL settings). Do any German speakers frequent the Board who can give me some advice on how to name a village?
It's not like the rural Germans have been laying down new villages on the regular, so somewhere like Eimelrod, Diesfeld, Hemmighausen, or Schweinsbühl would have been there, likely with the same name, at the time you're writing about. And it's not like anyone's going to recognise them, right?
(All four of those are on the same two mile stretch of road on Google Maps; I have fond memories of Fort Fun a few miles west from 30-odd years ago.)
hS
The thing is that I had a specific made-up geography in mind, and I'd feel weird putting invented castles of nonexistent noble families and weird eldritch forests next to a real-life place. I know I'd raise an eyebrow if, say, someone from Florida wrote a fantasy story about my little home village and made up a bunch of stuff, to say nothing about how all the Transylvanian misrepresentation in Dracula makes me want to yeet the book ('course, I'll admit that has to do partially with the impact it had on horror and fantasy with the 'backwards monster country' trope). Obviously I can still change things around if they don't quite fit together or my eventual beta reader(s) tell me they sound awkward, but when I write a historical setting I'm usually more comfortable making up a place than modifying an existing one.
I'll keep what you said in mind, though. :)
The bedrock of German village names seems to be the same as English ones - a lot of them are named after features of human geography. Oxford (a ford for oxen), Cambridge (a bridge over the river Cam), and Birmingham (the home - ham - of Beorma's people, the Beormings) are good examples of these.
You've got a castle and a forest. I could easily form *Waldburg (forest-fort) from that - but Waldburg is an actual city, and a county of the Holy Roman Empire to boot! How about Wälderburg? I've simply used the plural for "forests", which appears in a couple of place-names, but the actual compound doesn't seem to exist. -burg actually means "fortified place", so this would imply the castle was the original settlement, with the village growing up afterwards.
Failing that: how was your village founded, 700 years before the story takes place? Is it a river crossing? Was it a farm with a specific animal or crop? Was it a deliberate resettlement? If your nobles are particularly obnoxious, they might have renamed it after themselves (there's a lot of "King's X" towns dotted around England that suffered this fate). I can probably put something together, but I need something to work from. :)
hS
I have a working name for now that Akrinor helped derive from the region's geography, but I do like Wälderburg, so I might end up going with that and reusing the current name somewhere else. I tried to keep the premise of the story somewhat vague in my posts because I don't aim to publish any of it until it's done, but it's basically a darker, and queer, fairytale retelling, though I'm going out of my way to conceal the inspiration for this project because I want it to be its own thing. I'm drawing heavily from folklore, the brothers Grimm's original tales - by which I mean not the sanitized versions - and retellings in the vein of Angela Carter. I'm mostly telling you that so that you know roughly what kind of worldbuilding I'm aiming for, but you should know that I'm on my first draft, so most of the details aren't fine-tuned yet and even the plot outline is prone to change.
I do appreciate the help, though! As I said to Ak, I used to study German but I had to drop it in high school and have forgotten a lot since then. I aim to pick up my studies, but in the meantime I'm grateful for every bit of writing and naming help that comes my way. So thanks for the reply! :)
... my whole life? What? Ok, where can I find the originals and are they any good? I have never heard this. I always thought there was something about the fairytales I've read.
The original Beauty and the Beast had an epilogue where it turns out Belle is half-fairy and destined to break the Beast's curse, and the Beast was meant to be nice, just ugly, because he was a decent prince who refused the advances of the evil fairy that cursed him. The story itself was meant to be an instructive tale for young upper-class girls in finishing school, encouraging them to look past the external ugliness of a potential husband, especially if the guy in question is good and kind.
Very different from, say, the Disney version of the Beast who's beastly in both senses of the term!
Some outlets say in the original version of the tale, the boy wasn't born directly from a peach; the old couple eat the peach, become able to make babies again, and produce Momotarō the normal way.
I only remember certain stories from articles and folklore anthologies read very long ago, but I do know that for instance the original Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Rapunzel were somewhat, uh... more adult than the children's tales found in most fairytale anthologies nowadays. For example, Cinderella's stepsisters' fate in the version I'm familiar with is straight up gory, man. I love finding out more about the stories I grew up with so I adore the "original" Cinderella, but then again, my disturbing meter is rather differently calibrated than most folks'.
Of course, this being folklore, there are several versions floating around. But if you're interested you could go to a certain fairytale's Wikipedia page or even look up the brothers Grimm, and see what sources are cited in the relevant entries. For example, look up Persinette if you're interested in the early and more mature version of Rapunzel that I myself have read as a teen. (Mind you, it was a translation and some aspects were still toned down, but the prince's fate most assuredly wasn't.)
The Restaurant of Many friggin Orders. Not a fairytale (written by Miyazawa Kenji in 1924) and doesn't have especially disturbing content beyond attempted BL2, but I still had trouble sleeping after reading it.
... is the school pantomime which was just shown to my daughter. It was a version of Sleeping Beauty, which began by time-travelling the audience back 118 years to the beginning of the story.
You know.
To 1904.
I don't think they realised that they were having Sleeping Beauty be born in the Belle Epoque, grow up during WWI, and fall asleep in the Roaring Twenties, but it's an absolutely hilarious concept. I'm busy trying to work out where she fits in the royal family trees of Europe at that time. A king's daughter born in 1904? Most of the kings at the time were way too old, even if you look at the sub-kings of Germany. If we give ourselves a year's wriggle-room she could be a daughter of Haakon VII of Norway; or she could be the eldest child of Alfonso XIII of Spain - or, somewhat distressingly, a child of Nicholas II of Russia, who ended up being put to sleep in the closing stages of the Russian Civil War. o.O
hS
I love modernized fairytales, but that, uh... is an interesting take for sure. I wonder if in the planning stage no one took a step back and went "Wait a minute..." :D
My inspiration for my project came from various places, but one that really stuck with me was a quote I saw from Angela Carter where she talks about how a lot of fairytales of old were rooted in everyday experiences of the poor and the working class that were sometimes horrible (see Hansel and Gretel, although that story hits several Blacklist items so I won't go deeper into what she said). And then she goes into how those tales became sanitized and divorced from their roots once they started to spread and were adapted more widely. I already knew some of that, but it still was pretty eye-opening to see it put so concisely. I can count on one hand the genuinely good fairytale retellings I've read or seen, but I feel she's one of the authors who can do it right (although hers are borderline Gothic horror with some pretty twisted imagery, so check them out at your own discretion). And there's also the fact that the only queer fairytales I've managed to read were fairly awful, but that's a long and very salty story.
Also fun fact, I blame Sleeping Beauty for my obsession with Gothic stories. :P When I was a kid, I had an audiobook cassette of the tale with a cover where Sleeping Beauty was a dark-haired and very pale, scared-looking girl in a blue gown, being menaced by the evil fairy looming over her. Formative experience for itty-bitty Oculus, seeing imagery like that.
There are some important dialect divisions between different parts of Germany that might have a strong impact on how a small village is named. (Not to mention that "Germany" as we think of it today wasn't quite a thing yet in the 1600s, but I'm sure you knew that already!)
~Neshomeh
Akrinor was kind enough to help me out on Discord when I told them about the region and the worldbuilding, and I'm doing my best to research the time period enough to not make any potential readers squint very hard or facedesk later on. However, I do still need resources for my research because most websites are only so-so when it comes to reliability. So any pointers on articles or even books I could read on the relevant bits of the Black Forest region's history would be appreciated. :) Like I said, historical accuracy isn't really a selling point in an alternate history universe, but I want to keep things at least plausible. This is a novella-length project, but I know the feeling of being taken out of the story by a wildly historically inaccurate detail (hello canned food in the Golden Age of Piracy - no, I'm not making that up), so I do what I can.
I'm afraid I can't suggest any resources. My knowledge in this area is purely incidental to other things. >.>;
Best of luck on the project!
~Neshomeh