What urban legends do you find most interesting in literature and books?

Submitted by VengefulMight t3_11bh4kp in books

I find some of the stuff around The Wizard of Oz fascinating. That the Wizard was supposed to symbolise the financial authorities and the treasury with all of his authority being only surface. One scholar even suggested that the silver slippers represented the silver standard.

It is the juxtaposition between the light airy nature of Baum’s work and darker tones.

The same way the nursery rhyme “London Bridge is Falling Down” was alleged by the Victorians to be about the bones used as mortar when the bridge was constructed.

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noknownothing t1_j9ymphk wrote

ur·ban leg·end

/ˈərbən ˈlejənd/

Learn to pronounce

noun

a humorous or horrific story or piece of information circulated as though true, especially one purporting to involve someone vaguely related or known to the teller.

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[deleted] t1_j9yq1za wrote

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[deleted] t1_j9zedfj wrote

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[deleted] t1_j9zf6ln wrote

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Yanowknow t1_j9zgncu wrote

TBF,, your example is more a political interpretation than an urban legend. A lot of high school freshman classes use the Wizard of Oz as an introduction to allegories. It can be viewed as a metaphor for the social,political, and economic events of America in the 1890s. I believe that's what you're referencing. An urban legend about the movie, for example, would be that one of the munchkins hung himself from a tree and can be seen briefly in the film.

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VengefulMight OP t1_ja067nm wrote

To some extent, it can veer into conspiracy theory stuff at times.

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Glitz-1958 t1_j9yjist wrote

The myth perpetuated in Pratchett and other books that witches and midwives were the same.

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VengefulMight OP t1_j9yqf37 wrote

There will probably be a grain of truth in that. Most witches accused were women, but most of those who accused them were also women.

So, say a mother loses her baby in a miscarriage and the midwife herself happens to be childless. It is very easy for her to suspect that a jealous midwife has done something sinister.

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Glitz-1958 t1_j9z96ka wrote

I recently discovered that the research behind Terry Pratchett’s midwife-witches was flawed. He’d got the idea from the writer Lovecraft who he was parodying. Lovecraft had picked up on the ideas of a writer and a biologist, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English. It seems that not being historians they made a natural mix up by not having read the original documents, only later opinions. They were absolutely correct on both of their main ideas - 

* one that witchcraft accusations had been a way of policing and repressing women’s behaviour in the past, and 

* two that midwives were eventually pushed out of medicine by so-called ‘real’ doctors. * Their mistake was lumping the two groups together. 

Midwives were pushed out by doctors but weren’t persecuted with the witches. Witches, and many innocent women along the way, were persecuted but wouldn’t have been recognised as professional midwives.

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They did have an important role in society and witchcraft was one of the few ways a woman could make an independent living. They were who you went to if you wanted to know about your future and probably gave advice along the way. You went to them if you had a grudge and wanted to get back at the person you were blaming with a curse. Some did useful herbalist and faith healer work too. 

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Historians have checked the records and found that while midwives occasionally appear among the lists of people accused or executed for witchcraft, it was no more than any other profession or position in society. Also the church wouldn’t have mixed the two up as midwives get a good rap in the bible but witches don’t. 

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I still love the witches characters but have to do a bit more gymnastics in my head now when he mixes up the witch, midwife and traditional healer roles. I know this is fantasy, and Discworld at that, but he’s so thorough in other historical details about traditional sheep rearing, relationships between the Lord of the Manor and the village, or describing how Granny made her hat with willow sticks it disappoints me a little that he’d been misled. This “ Dig'' podcast has the details and all the references in the show notes in the link. It’s proper studies not opinion.

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https://digpodcast.org/2020/09/06/doctor-healer-midwife-witch-how-the-the-womens-health-movement-created-the-myth-of-the-midwife-witch/

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VengefulMight OP t1_j9z9u7z wrote

Hence, why I said just a grain. Many urban legends have a kernel of truth to them.

Oh absolutely, the idea that witchcraft was a pagan religion being supressed is nonsense.

Witches were considered Christians, just flawed ones. Midwives and others would have actually been used to help carry out the witch trials, to search women for the alleged "marks of the devil".

The reality is that if you were a woman, disease and starvation were a far bigger anxiety than witchcraft accusations.

The number of women allegedly burned (witches were normally hanged, rather than burned, as burning was a punishment for heretics and witches weren't considered heretics) is always massively exaggerated.

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Jack-Campin t1_ja01o90 wrote

Lovecraft died in 1937. Ehrenreich was born in 1941, English in 1948. I don't think he was quoting them.

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Glitz-1958 t1_ja03f40 wrote

The article and its soures make clear how the misapprehension happened.

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Jack-Campin t1_ja07fl9 wrote

It's not the article, it's what you wrote:

"Lovecraft had picked up on the ideas of a writer and a biologist, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English."

There's a true and interesting statement trying to get out in your post though.

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Glitz-1958 t1_ja09z29 wrote

Looks like I got them in the wrong order. They picked up on the previous person who wrote for the encyclopedia. Thanks for pointing that out. The show/show notes are much clearer.

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thesamim t1_j9yr824 wrote

Pratchett said it. I believe it. That settles it!

(For bonus points: spot the irony.)

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Glitz-1958 t1_j9z7zji wrote

A belief so stong you could bend irony round it.

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Immediate_Area9178 t1_j9yzfh4 wrote

This doesn’t really fit here, but I started reading some of Baum’s other works because I got curious. There’s a story I started where two children are turned into birds and are trying to turn back with the help of their new avian caretakers.

The story is actually pretty dark in many parts. There’s a particularly haunting scene where this mother bird is desperate to have her eggs back and her mate, only to fly to a house and find they’d all been taxidermied. She flies to the window everyday to just sit and stare at them, unable to carry on until she gets killed herself and is put on display alongside her mate.

It’s one of the most haunting scenes I’ve ever read and that’s just one of the little side notes mentioned in the story. There are many more, but after that I decided not to read his stuff for a while.

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VengefulMight OP t1_j9z5jmw wrote

The period before WW1 is remembered as an Age of Innocence but it had its own macabre stuff.

Many of the books bound in human skin, are from the late 19th century and were poor people whom the doctors felt entitled to use their skin to remember them by.

General Kitchener the head of the British Army, kept a human skull he had taken from a dead chieftain and used it to store pencils in.

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Dismal_Contest_5833 t1_j9z7wlp wrote

not sure if this counts, but theres quite a few theories claiming Shakespeare didnt actuallly write his plays, with historical figures of the time, such as Shakespeares friend Christopher Marlowe and the philosopher Francis Bacon. in fact major details of his life are somewhat uncertain. these are all fringe theories tho.

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Tiara2002 t1_j9xz74k wrote

"The Tale of Death and three brothers" from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, part 2". That thing can drive your mind for a plenty of time, if you think of it.

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avalon1805 t1_j9yd4xz wrote

Not an urban legend, but the whole "butlerian jihad" background of Dune. It really made me think about technology.

I always imagined the times before the jihad not as a terminatoresque apocalypse but rather as a really advanced civilization with similar problems to ours. People connected to their machines (like social media) and the ones in power wielding the power those machines enact over hummanity.

The jihad for me is not a war between man and machine. I imagined it more as a social uprising, a rebel movement to abhor the control of a few over hummanity using technology. There was violence for sure (Haven't read brian's books) but is not your normal "machines bad" war.

Off course after 10k years or more, the people of dune only remember the "machines bad" part. But the way society is made up and what people can achieve in dune, tells me that hummanity wanted to trascend what machines could do.

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