Folklore Sad Quotes

He had many strange sights to keep him cheerful or to make him sad. I asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, 'Am I not annoyed with them?' I asked too if he had ever seen the banshee. 'I have seen it,' he said, 'down there by the water, batting the river with its hands.' ("A Teller of Tales")

They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the reeds,[1] seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle has kept one version of one of the great Norse stories alive in the minds of music lovers. Readers of modern fantasy will find many echoes of the Norse tales as well. Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams and others have explicitly taken some of the Norse gods and put them into a modern setting with strange, sad and humorous results. Echoes of Norse tales and creatures abound in the speculative fiction of Ursula Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Tad Williams and others. Something in these old and puzzling stories still has the power to move and unsettle us, and to inspire new acts of creation.

Some of my other judgements were sadly wrong. Russia has not yet lost its imperial itch. Putin's brutal invasion of Ukraine has postponed for many decades the prospect that Russia will become the modern democratic state at peace with its neighbours, which so many courageous Russians had fought so hard to create. But no people should ever be written off beyond redemption. I hang on to the golden image of the firebird which fleets through the dark forests of the Russian folklore to symbolise the hope that Russia will see better days.

The Englishmen in the Middle East divided into two classes. Class one, subtle and insinuating, caught the characteristics of the people about him, their speech, their conventions of thought, almost their manner. He directed men secretly, guiding them as he would. In such frictionless habit of influence his own nature lay hid, unnoticed. Class two, the John Bull of the books, became the more rampantly English the longer he was away from England. He invented an Old Country for himself, a home of all remembered virtues, so splendid in the distance that, on return, he often found reality a sad falling off and withdrew his muddle-headed self into fractious advocacy of the good old times. Abroad, through his armoured certainty, he was a rounded sample of our traits. He showed the complete Englishman. There was friction in his track, and his direction was less smooth than that of the intellectual type: yet his stout example cut wider swathe. Both sorts took the same direction in example, one vociferously, the other by implication. Each assumed the Englishman a chosen being, inimitable, and the copying him blasphemous or impertinent. In this conceit they urged on people the next best thing. God had not given it them to be English; a duty remained to be good of their type. Consequently we admired native custom; studied the language; wrote books about its architecture, folklore, and dying industries. Then one day, we woke up to find this chthonic spirit turned political, and shook our heads with sorrow over its ungrateful nationalism - truly the fine flower of our innocent efforts. The French, though they started with a similar doctrine of the Frenchman as the perfection of mankind (dogma amongst them, not secret instinct), went on, contrarily, to encourage their subjects to imitate them; since, even if they could never attain the true level, yet their virtue would be greater as they approached it. We looked upon imitation as a parody; they as a compliment.

The Muslim role in slavery and the slave trade is ignored by Zinn, but, in fact, it was “through the Moslem countries of North Africa” that” black slaves were imported into Europe during the Middle Ages.”21 By “the end of the eighteenth century,” the Islamic Middle East held “the majority of the world’s white chattel slaves.”22 Whites to the north and blacks to the south were both seen as inferior and therefore legitimate slave material. As Bernard Lewis points out, “The literature and folklore of the Middle East reveal a sadly normal range of traditional and stereotypical accusations against people seen as alien and, more especially, inferior. The most frequent are those commonly directed against slaves and hence against the races from which slaves are drawn—that they are stupid; that they are vicious, untruthful, and dishonest; that they are dirty in their personal habits and emit an evil smell.

*MY LITTLE COLORED CHILD was a well-known lullaby sung by slave families in the 1800’s. Sadly, it was based on the folklore told by plantation white women to black slave children that the stork delivered white babies to the plantation; where as black babies were hatched from a buzzard’s egg.

An upturned axis mundi, a sad parody of the pure, healthy and luxuriously verdant tree, of vigorous and fecund vegetation overflowing with life-giving juices and sap; a feeble shadow of arboreal life, of aromatic and salutory herbs, Man, nature’s discard, a living and walking incarnation of decay, like a contaminated and worm-infested blood clot, was the chosen pasture ground of the immortal earthworm which gnaws and devours (‘esca vermis qui semper rodit et comedit immortalis’), a lurid ‘thing’, which rotted and became contaminated. A bag of excrement producing nothing but a foul stench, infected blood, purulent sperm, a ball of filth. ‘Man is nothing but fetid sperm, a bag of dung and food for worms. After man comes the worm, and after the worm, stench and horror. And thus is every man’s fate’ (St Bernard).