@GreenSkyOverMe It's a surprisingly common thing in Germany - lots of strange entities demand piggyback rides from travelers and won't take "no" for an answer.
Just like the later Santa Claus, Frau Gaur rode through the air on a sled at wintertide, and distributed gifts and punishments according to her own moral standards.
"Elon Musk says his posts did more to ‘financially impair’ X than help it"
Ya think?
Also, there's this gem:
'Musk also made it clear that he didn’t believe that Brody, who was forced to evacuate his home at one point, was “meaningfully harmed” due to the false accusations that he helped spread.
“People are attacked all the time in the media, online media, social media, but it is rare that that actually has a meaningful negative impact on their life,” said Musk.'
Aka: "What's the problem, can't he just buy another house?"
We should note that Elon Musk had no problem banning @elonjet as a perceived threat to _his_ safety...
I did not come up with these tales - I merely translated them from transcripts based on a centuries-old storytelling traditions. And I strongly feel that these tales deserved to be told further - which is why I am putting all my translations under a #CreativeCommons Zero license.
So it is _extremely_ gratifying to see how others use these tales in their own work - whether in art, in #ttrpg , or in podcasts and online shows.
One of the fun things about researching #folklore is that you come across a farmer who offended the spirits of the mountains somehow and then his entire lineage was cursed...
...and then you google the farm and discover it rents out holiday apartments.
One of the things I am becoming increasingly aware of as I am getting older is that I will never be able to read all the books, visit all the places, do all the things I want to do. Sooner or later, I will run out of time.
Thus, it is becoming increasingly important to figure out what really matters to me, and focus on that with the time I have been given.
Studying old folk tale is a useful corrective to misconception about life in earlier centuries.
For instance, we often assume that the farmers were at the bottom of the old feudal hierarchies. However, by the time the folk tales were written down - in 19th century Germany, in my case - independent farmers were in fact at the top of their own miniature social hierarchies.
Below them: Tenant farmers who only rented the land, as well as farmhands and maids who worked for room and board and paltry wages.
It is not surprising that, between the Napolonic Wars and WWI, millions of Germans emigrated overseas - for many, many rural people suffered desperate poverty and no prospects. They had no land of their own, no prospects for building prosperity for their family. Even the rapidly-industrializing cities, who had their own working poor aplenty, were better than rural poverty.