Week 12 Storytelling: Love Letters Of Pied Piper

My Dearest Lorali,

I lie awake at night, consumed with thoughts of you. I long for the day until I may run my fingers through your lush blonde hair again. Money is hard pressed and, while music is my greatest passion, I must find a way to provide for you my dear. I am resolute in pursuing a task for pay without surrendering my love for music. Tomorrow I travel to Franchville. I hear their rat population is vast, slowly causing the town to be in habitable. May my conquest over the ghastly vermin situation be swift so that I may return to you soon. Be calm my love.

-Pied Piper

My Dearest Lorali,

The squeaking of rats is incessant. My task is of great importance. My bravery to conquer the wicked of this town comes only from my undying affection for you. The Mayor bestowed me fifty pounds once my task of ridding the town of every rat is completed. Fifty pounds!

With my pipe laid to my lips, I stepped out of the hall and began to play. As each note pierced the air the rats began to swarm at my feet. I played for a great distance, with hundreds of rats at my heels. Still playing, I hoped on to a small boat and floated out to the waters, the rat’s still following me into the water. Deeper and deeper into the water I sailed until every last rat in the village was extinct. I arrived on shore a hero and hastened to claim my reward.

Remain in the greatest of health. My journey has nearly concluded. Do not have sorrow. Our distance only causes our passion to grow. If only our hearts were always close together, words would not be so difficult to say. Remain my one and only, my treasure, my always.

-Pied Piper

My Dearest Lorali,

Regrettably my journey is still on going. The Mayor had deceived me! He now wishes to pay me a lowly twenty pounds. My fury is greater than the depths of hell! My anger more vast than the deepest ocean! Oh my love, how I wish you were here to calm my outrage. This Mayor will rue the day he deceived my good will. I will be counting down the days until we meet again. I pray that you will not feel the pain of our extended distance. We shall surely see each other soon. Be strong my love.

-Pied Piper

My Dearest Lorali,

It is not possible for one to feel as euphoric as I, but ‘tis the day I finally begin my return to you. My journey was a tedious one, but I bring many gifts with me to help with our work. We will no longer be slaves to our fate, but will now live like royalty. With my pipe I have procured for us a grand group of gleeful souls, eager to toil away. If it were so I would fly into your arms and thus I would know what home is. Love me and make me the happiest of men? My longing for you grows deeper for I know I will shortly be in your presence. Rest my love, for we will be united soon.  

-Pied Piper

Old Letters (Source) 

Author's Note.

The story of The Pied Piper is about a man who comes to a village and says that he can rid the town of their humongous rat infestation for fifty pounds. The Mayor agrees and so the Pied Piper plays his pipe leading the mice to the water where they all drowned and die. He then goes to collect his reward but is told that the town can only pay him twenty pounds. The Pied Piper feels as though he has been deceived by the towns folk so he picks up this pipe and plays a tune the lures all of the children from the town out into the woods, never to be seen again.

I decided that many musicians have a muse, so I decided to make the Pied Piper a striving musician who was desperately trying to be with his love, Lorali (yes I have been watching too much Gilmore Girls). I thought the love letters would be a way to establish that he was a struggling artist, desperately trying to win over his loved one’s affection. I added in the love letter parts while still keeping the basic plot points, but decided to keep the ending, when he takes the children, vague. It does not specifically say what happens to the kids so I figured why wouldn’t he just keep them as servants to make life easier for him and Lorali? 

Bibliography. More English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1894). 

Reading Diary Week 12: More English Fairy Tales

More English Fairy Tales

I have noticed that my stories have become a little bit long, so I am thinking about making my stories a little bit shorter this week. I feel as though this would be a challenge because then I would have to make longer stories into shorter stories. I guess I could leave out some of the unnecessary details.

One of my ideas was a role reversal. Like have you ever thought about what it would be like if we were actually our dog's pets instead of the other way around? Something crazy like that maybe?

While reading the Pied Piper I came up with a great idea: love letters! What if the entire reason for the Pied Piper coming to town was to get enough money for his beloved. Struggling artists always have a muse and back then there was not much money in music. This could be a way for him to make money and still be a musician, thus keeping his girlfriend happy. Writing love letters would also allow me to find a creative way to keep the story short. But writing a love letter might be a little bit awkward.

The majority of these stories did not seem to be just for children, but seemed to cater more towards parents. The stories were more cautionary tales to parents on how to keep their children safe.

I enjoyed the story Children in the Wood. It was very interesting.

Week 11 Famous Last Words

This week has been one of the longer weeks I have had in a while, and definitely one of my most unproductive weeks. For some reason I cannot seem to focus on anything, and honestly I do not want to right now. This happens to me every so often, my brain just seems to shut down on everything and I just am in need of a break from people and school and having to do things. Unfortunately this generally happens when I get so far a head in my work that I have nothing to do, so then I have a lull, and all of the sudden I have responsibilities and that is when my brain decides to give out and my attention span is reduced to the sixe of a flea. Seriously, as I am writing this my fingers do not seem to be working correctly and the amount of type-o’s I am having are infinite. My fingers just do not seem to want to work. I am at a level of being so overly calm that the stress of the many, many things I have to do this weekend appear to be nonexistent. On the plus side, we are watching some weird movie in one of my classes! Needless to say, I think I just need a break from everything. At least it is close to Thanksgiving break, which means that we are one step closer to ending the semester and it being Christmas, or winter, Break. I have to say, I am incredibly excited about going home. I have not been home since the beginning of August and I am really missing my family. I think the one thing that I have learned in 2014 is just how important my family is. My goal is to be able to move closer to them once I graduate in May. Nothing is more important than family.

Houston (Source) 

Week 11 Essay: Rhyme Here, Rhyme There

This week I chose to write over the Nursery Rhymes for the week. What I found difficult was that I had so much liberty with retelling nursery rhymes. There is so much that can be said about them and the hardest part was that I could not pick just one to write about. Events do not just occurs, it is a series of events that lead things to happen, a cause and effect as they say. While reading through the nursery rhymes I could not help but think of the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill. For some reason that seems to be the nursery rhyme that has been imprinted the most in my mind, probably because of the morbidity of it. This is not to say that Humpty Dumpty is not morbid, but the concept of an egg cracking is so normal and such an every day task that it us not concerning. Jack breaking his skull open, however, that grabs my attention. There has always been a morbid curiosity about me. The dark side of man is so much more interesting than the good because it is what drives the dark that sparks my interest. It could very well be the medical side of me that draws my attention to Jack’s injury, but who knows? What really sparked my interest in writing this story was the big question: what caused Jack to fall down that hill? He could not have just decided to jump off of it, something had to cause him to fall and hurt himself. And because Jill did not hurt herself, and she also came after him, I knew that she was probably running down there to help him. So, what caused Jack to fall down that hill? There could have been several reasons, he could have been spooked by Little Bo Peeps missing sheep for instance, but I chose to have him pushed by Little Miss Muffet, It was an interesting challenge to say the least, and most enjoyable. 

Nursery Rhymes (Source)

Reading Diary Week 11: Nursery Rhymes

Nursery Rhymes 


While reading storybooks for last week my wheels began turning. I decided that It would be a fun idea to interweave stories in a similar style to what they used. While I did read the majority of the stories from the reading my mind kept coming back to the story of Jack and Jill because when I think of nursery rhymes that is the first one that pops into my head.

The nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill always felt strange to me. I could not understand why the two of them would go up to a hill just to fall off of it. I thought about the situation for a while and all I could think was that there had to be some dire circumstance that made them go to the top of the hill and then something else happened to where they fell off of it. Maybe writing it from their mothers perspective or a friend or one of them would be a good idea for a storytelling?

I really enjoyed reading the section with the Jingles, especially the ones that were more familiar like the Cow Jumping Over The Moon. It was fun because even the ones I had never heard before had a really good flow to them. It was enjoyable.

Week 10 Storytelling: Ghost Diary

Dear Diary,

All hope is lost. My mother and father are dead and now my sister has passed away as well. I have no other family, so I am forced to live with strangers in the village. I appreciate them taking me in and caring for me, but I’m weak and so they tease me because I have no strength. Now I’m an orphan AND have no strength. It’s no wonder everyone picks on me.

Dear Diary,

Today everyone went hunting, leaving me alone in the house… again. I was feeling very lonesome, since I am always excluded and left alone, when I heard a noise. I got scared and decided to hide in case someone was coming to hurt me. I was hiding and the noise happened again and again and then all of a sudden a ghost came in! It went over to our water tub and drank some of the water, and then it left. I guess ghosts get thirsty too. I tried telling the people I live with about it but they didn’t really believe me. Here’s hoping that more ghosts show up tomorrow.

Dear Diary,

It happened again! I was all alone in the house when the walls and frames began to shake and the next thing I knew a whole bunch of ghost came tumbling into the house! It was so exciting because one of the ghosts was my sister! I missed her so much. They invited me to sit with them on the floor while they played wrestling games and told stories. They told me if I kept their stories a secret that they would make me strong! I’m so excited!

Dear Diary,

Well, I accidentally told the people that I was going to be strong and as soon as I did, all my strength was gone. It was not fun. To prove my strength, the villagers tied me to a post and told me to escape from the ropes and hit a drum that was on the other side of the room. But all my strength was gone and I was not able to escape, so I just looked like a dummy. Eventually they untied me and left to go to a singing contest without me. So here I am, alone in the house again, wallowing in my shame.

Dear Diary,

You will never believe what happened! My Mom and Dad, as ghosts, came in to visit me!!! Once I told them how I am always being picked on by the others and how I am always excluded from activities, Mom and Dad told me that I should come with them and become a ghost! I am so excited! So here’s hoping being a ghost is better than being human!

Ghost (Source)

Author's Note. This is based on the Eskimo Tale Qalaganguase, Who Passed to the Land of Ghosts. It is about a boy whose entire family is dead and he is forced to live with strangers in the village. Because he is weak they exclude him from everything and leave him alone in the house all day. While they were gone, ghosts would come and visit the boy. The ghosts told the boy if he did not tell the villagers about them, then they would give him strength, but the boy did not follow their instructions and as soon as he told the villagers of his strength, it began to leave his body. The ghosts then came back again to take the boy with them to the land of the ghosts and he left with them and became a ghost.
I felt it best to write this in diary form because the diary would have been used as a form of comfort for the boy since he was continuously left alone and had no family or friends. I did not include what happened after he became a ghost because I felt as though him leaving his diary would have been his way of letting go of the past and going on to a brighter future. Leaving the diary also would have allowed the villagers to read about the boy and make it into a story. 

Bibliography. Eskimo Folk-Tales by Knud Rasmussen with illustrations by native Eskimo artists (1921).

Week 10 Essay: What about the Eskimos?

I took a class here at the University of Oklahoma about a year ago called Indigenous People and Resources where we discussed the Native American, or indigenous, peoples who lived in the Arctic region. Since I already knew so much about the people who lived there I decided I would get to know them further by reading their stories, which is while I chose Eskimo Folk Tales as my reading for this week. What is funny is that the term Eskimo actually means eaters of raw flesh. It is a term that the Inuit gave to the Inupiat since they are kind of like rival tribes. The Inupiat actually do eat raw meat because in order for them to get all of the nutrients and vitamins that we get from eating vegetables they have to eat their meat raw. Their main source of food is the bowhead whale, and if they were to cook it then they would lose all those vitamins and nutrients so they eat it raw. Knowing so much about these people from my previous class was definitely helpful when imagining the stories. I was able to better see the types of clothes they would wear, the houses they lived in, the setting of the area they lived. There were actually several things in the stories that I was able to notice was attributed to their surrounding environment. When they described the houses they lived in they would say that they had to crawl in and out of the houses, this was probably to minimize the amount of cold air that crept into the houses and trapped in the heat. The stories often mentioned sealskin; since there are many seals in the Arctic region the sealskin was probably used as a snow and/or water repellant, as well as a thick layer to keep them warm. I think of it as the original rain jacket! Also, they mentioned putting rocks over people who had died. I attributed this to the ground being so frozen that they could not actually burry the dead, so instead they had to burry them with rocks on the surface. All in all, the Eskimo stories were very interesting and entertaining.  

Inupiat Family (Source)