this is a detail that i actually didn't notice until this year, but i ADORE the fact that dan andreason's portrait of sam has her bow just a little bit crooked
like yes! that's sam as we meet her! she is trying her best to fulfill all the expectations that are set for her, but she already is feeling like she's not going to be able to be the proper young lady that grandmary wants her to be. she's trying so hard--her bow is neat but crooked--and she's about to learn that sometimes doing the right thing means following your heart rather than the rules
Hi !! In your post about "Mad Sweeney through the ages" you noted in the tags that you restrained yourself from going into tangents... I'm super interested about what you mentionned though ! Would you mind wiritng a little bit on the relationship between the Tuatha de and the fairies and the dead ?? Sorry, i'm very curious and I love history and mythology a lot !! (Also sorry for any mistakes, I'm not a native speaker !!) Thank you ! :)
Hello! Sorry it took me all day to answer this; it’s just that, well… this got a bit long, even though I tried to be brief. XD
Basically, what I was referring to is the same thing Sweeney talks about in the show: the way his identity has changed SIGNIFICANTLY over the centuries because the stories about him have mutated over time. People gradually conflated stories about certain types of beings (such as the Tuatha De Danann) with stories about other types of beings (such as fairies), or allowed elements of certain stories to influence others, and as a result, the very essence of what Sweeney IS evolved along with the folklore.
The cool thing, though — and I guess this is really the crux of what I was getting at in my tags — is that Sweeney’s particular evolutionary path isn’t a concept that’s unique to American Gods. I mean, to SOME extent, it’s AG’s invention; after all, the traditional figure of Mad Sweeney as portrayed in the Buile Suibhne is not a leprechaun or Lugh. He’s cursed, but he’s still just a mortal dude. But I think AG’s decision to MAKE him into those other things makes perfect sense in light of the fact that in certain areas that historically retained a strong Celtic influence (including much of the British Isles as well as Brittany), there really are a lot of intriguing similarities, overlaps, and parallels between the way folklore portrays fairies and the way it portrays the spirits of dead mortals. In Irish mythology specifically, the Tuatha De Danann get wrapped up in the relationship as well. These similarities have inspired a theory that elements of Celtic folklore about fairies might have evolved out of ancient superstitions about the dead and the places the dead were believed to inhabit. Which isn’t to say that it’s a direct evolution, nor that these three types of being are all exactly the same thing — simply that they seem to be related and to have influenced one another over time.
Unnecessarily detailed discussion under the cut, along with more of my thoughts on why I think this whole concept works out really well with regard to Mad Sweeney and lends a lot of weight to his backstory’s arc.
The People of the Mounds
One of the most familiar narratives in a classic fairy story is the human traveler who accidentally wanders into the fairy realm. It’s a story with innumerable variations. Perhaps the traveler simply follows the wrong path, or perhaps they enter a doorway in the side of a hill — either way, they end up in Faerie. It is a liminal space inhabited by beings that, because they are immortal or non-mortal, are not DEAD, exactly, but aren’t quite ALIVE, either, not in the way that mortal human beings are alive. And in many stories, it is also inhabited by dead humans. There are many versions of this story in which the traveler in Faerie is shocked to encounter a neighbor or loved one whom they know for a fact died years ago — like, actually physically DIED. And yet here their spirit is, trapped in this other world! The realm of Faerie is thus a place of great wonder, yes, but also great peril. It’s a place into which a person’s soul might be tragically stolen, though also a place from which they can sometimes be rescued. One such tale of rescue is the medieval poem Sir Orfeo, which is straight-up a Breton/English reimagining of Orpheus and Eurydice — except it’s set in Faerie instead of in the realm of the dead.
In short, Celtic stories often handle fairies and Faerie in a way that strongly evokes death, the realm of the dead, and the spirits of the dead. But for me, perhaps the most interesting aspect goes back to what I mentioned about WHERE these stories often take place. Where do the aos si dwell? Underground, of course — specifically, in hollow hills. It’s right there in the name: “aos si” means “people of the mounds.” Hence the stories in which a traveler enters Faerie through a door in the side of a hill. Coincidentally, where do the Tuatha de Danann dwell? Also underground — not originally, but they were driven underground by the Milesians, who took the above-ground world as their half of the earth in their truce.
But what kind of hill would be hollow? What kind of hill might have a doorway set into the side…?
Well… A hill like Newgrange, perhaps. Or like other hills within the Bru na Boinne complex. Or a hill like Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales, or Maes Howe in Orkney, or the Mound of the Hostages at Tara, or any number of other ancient barrows/tumuli: burial mounds built in prehistoric times as tombs for the human dead. Because the answer to “What other kind of creature dwells underground?” is, of course, dead people, at least in cultures which have tended to bury them.
Thus, the familiar trope of entering Faerie through a door in a hill very much evokes the idea of entering a tomb. This concept is reinforced by the fact that some specific fairy legends are anchored to specific tumuli. Newgrange is said to be the home of the Dagda and other Tuatha De; Cnoc Maedha is home to the fairy king Finvarra. Glastonbury Tor is associated with Gwyn ap Nudd of the Tylwyth Teg, ruler of the underworld of Annwn. Willy Howe is proposed to be the location of a specific version of one of those tales about a traveler wandering into a hill.
Not every fairy legend is associated with a specific hill, not every tumulus is associated with a fairy legend, and not every hill associated with a fairy legend has been confirmed to actually be a tomb. It’s more of a general association based on the tumulus shape. Also, some of these associations seem to have originated much later than others; they might be fairly recent inventions rather than old, traditional myths. But that’s kind of the point in AG, isn’t it: traditions evolve. Over time, they gather new associations and take on new meaning as the stories change. Did the idea that the aos si live in hollow hills evolve directly out of a superstition that specific hills — specific burial mounds — were home to the spirits of the dead? Perhaps! Perhaps not! Perhaps it’s more a case of stories mutually influencing each other, or maybe it’s convergent evolution, or maybe it’s sheer coincidence. But I think that the amount of similarity and overlap in these legends is enough to suggest roots in a common tradition, or at least to suggest that beliefs about these three categories of being have, over time, become intimately associated with each other.
Suibhne, the Dead King?
Which FINALLY brings us back to Sweeney.
I think the idea that the aos si evolved out of the Tuatha De Danann is pretty well known; I don’t think it’s entirely clear-cut from a historical standpoint, but it’s a theory I see mentioned quite often, and I feel like it intuitively makes sense. A transition from one supernatural, subterranean creature to another feels natural; it’s easy to grasp how those legends could be related. So it’s no surprise that American Gods would have a character who starts out as one of them and evolves into the other, especially since it’s been theorized that the concept of leprechauns in general might have evolved specifically out of Lugh. (The names share a possible etymology, and the characters share an association with luck.)
But the primary inspiration for Mad Sweeney — Suibhne, son of Colman Cuar, of the Buile Suibhne — feels, at first, like more of an outlier. Sure, Suibhne was under a curse, but he wasn’t, like, any type of supernatural creature… He was just a mortal human. The whole legend at least purports to be based on a real-life historical man. How does a mortal human get turned into a god or a fairy? How does that stage of Sweeney’s evolution fit in with leprechauns and Lugh?
To me, the key lies in the Annals of Tigernach. As I mentioned in my Mad Sweeney Through the Ages post, these annals record that Suibhne didn’t FLEE from the battle of Magh Rath… he DIED in it. And I don’t know whether AG is doing this on purpose, but in my opinion, this death really fits with the way AG has chosen to tell Suibhne’s story? In the Buile Suibhne, Suibhne flees the battlefield simply because the frenzy and St. Ronan’s curse overwhelm him. The idea that he fled because he foresaw his own death is AG’s own particular twist on the legend. AG’s Sweeney is a character who is haunted, throughout the different versions of himself, by near-deaths and foreseen-deaths and deaths that may or may not have actually happened. By choosing to reference the fact that Sweeney should have died at Magh Rath — possibly even did die at Magh Rath, heck, he supposedly died that night with the seer, too! — American Gods makes the critical decision to recast Suibhne mac Colmain as not merely the story of a king, but of a dead king.
And if you view the Buile Suibhne as the story of someone whose life, historically, ended at Magh Rath, but who through the power of mythology has been given an existence beyond Magh Rath, it becomes a story of undeath: of a mortal who becomes trapped in a strange, supernatural form of existence that is not exactly death but not really life as he knew it, either — sort of like a spirit trapped in Faerie. For me, AG’s decision to connect Suibhne’s legend with leprechauns and Lugh makes the most sense when I view Suibhne as a figure who kind of escaped death, but also kind of didn’t escape death, and always has this specter of death hanging over him for the rest of his cursed “life” after Magh Rath. If Suibhne is, essentially, a spirit persisting in a type of pseudo-life beyond death, then I can contextualize his role in Sweeney’s evolution within this whole theory of how the dead, the fae, and the Tuatha De Danann are intimately entwined.
Conclusion???
…WOW, this got long! Thanks for listening to me ramble. I hope it was interesting to you and that I’ve explained myself in a way that makes sense.
Obviously, I don’t know whether Gaiman / the showrunners of American Gods had any of these same concepts in mind when they were creating the book or the show. And I want to reiterate that the proposed relationship between these types of folklore is more of a theory than a concrete historical fact. It’s a theory that I find very compelling and very inspiring, but it’s difficult to really prove that traditional beliefs evolved in this way. Also, much of the actual scholarship I’ve found on this subject is older than I’d like, and I’m not sure whether different interpretations have since gained more traction in the field. Still, the work of Katharine Mary Briggs is a good place to start if you’re interested in reading more on this subject, especially her article “The Fairies and the Realms of the Dead.”
Regardless of whether it’s provable, though, I think it’s a theory that works beautifully with what we see in “Treasure of the Sun” and that fits really well with the mechanics of American Gods. And when it comes to AG, it doesn’t really matter, anyway, whether the dead and the fae and the gods were originally related or not — all that matters is that we humans believe that they are.
thinking about how we don’t know grandmary’s maiden name… like we have some information about her as a young woman, but we don't get to know basically anything about her pre-william.
and we all know i love grandmary as she is in books! but who was she prior to the death of her husband, her child, and at least one close friend (looking at you, unnamed first wife of admiral beemis)? what kind of dreams did she have for her life? quite literally, who was mary before she became mrs. edwards and took on all the grief and anxiety that came from her married family life?
so much of her when we get to meet her is shaped by absence, and i just wish we had been able to meet her at a kinder time in her life.
i know turn-of-the-century ideas about adulthood are vastly different than ours, but do you ever think about how young cornelia is?
like, it's her first christmas with her boyfriend's family. the girl that is going to be her niece is the age as her younger sisters. she's grown up with sisters who are sam's age, and yet she's somehow crossed into womanhood and they're still getting to enjoy their girlhood.
and you can see that it the christmas book! you can see this confusion (longing? nostalgia?) in cornelia as she experiences this last christmas as an unmarried young woman. she can't spend it with her sisters, but she can gosh darn spend it with another girl their age, and so these moments of cornelia's girlhood peek through as she's trying to bond with samantha.
she gets sam to make gingerbread with her like cornelia would usually be doing with her sisters. she goes sledding with her and gard, and cornelia has this moment where she gets so caught up in the joy of it all that even sam can see how young she is.
and then they're downtown, and cornelia spots a beautiful doll in a shop window and, just for one moment, she forgets that's she's too old to want a doll. except that “just a moment” lasts for days, so she ends up going back to buy the doll for samantha because that’s the next best thing to buying it for herself.
sam gets her doll, and cornelia gets a ring.
and i know that cornelia growing up and getting married is not a tragedy, but for some moments it feels like it is because it means that sam is next. and the womanhood that cornelia experiences seems joyful and privileged and purposeful, but it's still not girlhood. cornelia's not putting can telephones through the lilac hedge, or threatening the annoying neighborhood boy. cornelia's not starting schools in the tower room, befriending the servant girl next door, bedgrudingly practicing piano for an hour a day and then going to get gingerbread from the cook.
and, if all goes well, eventually neither will sam
alright y'all. now that babbity kate's second samantha video is up (and you should go watch it if you haven't, it's delightful!), let's talk about the date of gard and cornelia’s wedding and its possible narrative implications. this is a very long post, so we're going to jump below the cut to do so.
to catch everyone up to speed, on march 19, babbity kate posted a preview of part of this video on her patreon, whereupon i learned that she'd also had the thought that one version of gard and cornelia's wedding timeline makes it seems like they moved up the date of the wedding, which makes one automatically think that there was a baby. if you don't feel like clicking the link, the important thing to know is that i'd had a draft as of march 8 for a meta post wondering if the wedding timeline for gard and cornelia was because of a baby that they then lost.
back when i posted that, @emilybennettstan had asked if i could actually explain what this all was about, so let's finally give a recap about what babbity kate was explaining now that the video is public, and then talk about my thoughts on the narrative of it all.
if you are only very vaguely familiar with the samantha books, it is important to note that the series seems completely incapable of keeping canon intact. maybe that's a little harsh, but the series often has details out of step with one another, such as the fact that bridget and jenny cycle through every hair color imaginable, the word-of-god date for nellie's birthday doesn't make the most sense, and who even knows when samantha's grandfather dies.
the date of gard and cornelia's wedding is another one of these instances, and babbity kate does a great job of getting into it (seriously, i'll still recap her thoughts, but you should also go watch the video starting at 1:20:40). when gard and cornelia get engaged at christmas, they tell samantha and grandmary when they are thinking about having the wedding--and the date which they say varies from edition to edition (and yes, we do actually have the short story with the wedding, but that was published way after the main series, so ignore that for now). the important thing to remember here is that they always are married by happy birthday, samantha!, which takes place in late may. and yet, there's one version of the date that they announce at christmas where they say that they are going to have a june wedding, which means that by the time the next book rolls around, it makes it look like they have moved up the wedding.
i was aware of the date changing around (hence the draft post), but babbity was clever enough to look at when ag printed what dates. as it turned out, the first edition had gard and cornelia saying that they would have a march wedding. for some goddamn reason, the next printing changed this to them saying that they'll have a june wedding DESPITE the established timeline. this mistake is then corrected in another printing with them saying they'll have a spring wedding (which does work fine with that established timeline), but that still leaves this one bizarre instance of ag deliberately changing the books to make it seem like gard and cornelia moved up their wedding from what they were planning at christmas.
as babbity then goes on to say (and the actual thing i wanted to talk about when i made the draft), this makes one automatically think that, for the mucked-up timeline, it is because of a baby. when you hear that a wedding's been moved up, especially in the era of the samantha books, you think baby. unfortunately, the implications of ag messing up their own timeline then further go on to spiral out of control, because then cornelia doesn't have a baby for over another year.
so, to recap, ag messed up so bad that they created a divergent timeline where the implications, as an adult looking at the series, seem to be that aunt cornelia has had a miscarriage.
let's also be super clear: babbity doesn't pose this theory because she likes or agrees with it, but because it's a logical train of thought to go down with the june wedding timeline. i would very much agree with this--again, i started drafting a post about this same situation with a lost baby because of this inconsistency in the timeline--but i do still think there's some narrative implications to think about here. like it or not, one of the timelines that ag created is this one, so now that i've recapped babbity's incredible research into how this timeline happened, i'm want to go further down this rabbit hole.
for the sake of the rest of this post, we're going to be looking at the june wedding timeline as if it were more canon than it actually is (because the fandom does correctly seem to mostly treat it like the mistake it is, but i'm here to overanalyze everything, so you're getting what you signed up for). as a reminder, an overarching theme of samantha's stories is building a family after loss. now, depending on what kind of person you are, the idea of a lost baby can make this narrative even more compelling, or it can really detract from the progression and characters of the series.
on the more compelling side, if gard and cornelia lost a baby somewhere in the first half of 1905, it gives a bit more weight to how readily they build a family with samantha and the o'malley girls. they are grieving the loss of what they thought would be the start of their new family and, given the opportunity to have a family through adoption, they jump on it. much like the how samantha's healing process culminates with her getting the parental figures and siblings she's always been dreaming of, this moment of adoption can become more significant for gard and cornelia if you work with the idea that they, too, have now suffered a loss as expectant parents, and are still choosing to heal and rebuild from that.
but this can also just be a total bummer, and i think the narrative also supports that. in particular, gard has been going through it for years with the loss of his sister and the fact that he then is forced to step into a more parental role with sam than he maybe would've if he had just gotten to be her uncle. and now he's finally getting married! he's open to love and creating a relationship and they're off on a lovely honeymoon and... oh wait, the child they thought that they'd have is no longer going to happen.
and so, this timeline seems like it can also cut into the overarching development of gard's life in particular towards happiness, which he is pretty firmly on by the stage in which a miscarriage would happen. furthermore, it also could detract from his and cornelia's strength of character by giving them an underlying personal motive for adopting all the girls, instead of just them wanting to do what's right and being in a stage of life where they can finally do that. it also complicates the grief expressed in the books--all the focus has been on lydia and her husband, despite the fact that grandfather edwards also died (potentially) fairly recently. why add another loss into the mix?
and… yeah, i think that’s my full exploration of how one editorial/printing error can create unintended implications in the narrative! hopefully more people than me find this interesting:) and if any of this is unclear, feel free to pop into the replies or my dms. oh, and go watch babbity kate's video--it'll be worth your time, i promise!
you ever think about the fact that mrs. ryland, mrs. eddleton, and mrs. van sicklen probably went to school with lydia?
well, maybe not—there's certainly the chance that they all didn't grow up in mount bedford. but considering the fact that they all have children samantha's age (sure, clarisse isn't confirmed to be mrs. van sicklen's daughter, but it is very likely), it goes to reckon that, if they have spent their entire lives in the town, they should be very close in age to lydia.
this is interesting in and of itself to me, but i also think it's also interesting to think about this in relation to grandmary. i've already gone on at length about grandmary and grief, so let's keep this post a little lighter: how absurd must it be for her to have to now socialize with women that she once knew as her daughter's schoolmates or friends?
i also think, if we're running with this theory, it offers a really good explanation about the social weight that grandmary throws around during the series. of course she's able to get mrs. van sicklen to offer jobs to nellie's entire family—she's known that women since she was in diapers. of course she’s able to talk back to them all when they’re scandalized about samantha’s friendship with nellie—what are they going to do, go up against a women that hosted them for birthday parties? nah, grandmary probably has sooo much dirt on them, and that in turn gives samantha social leverage that she’s not even aware of.
one thing that i wish the books had addressed is how haunting it must’ve been for samantha to visit coldrock house. i think the fandom really easily forgets that samantha is an orphan (and has been since she was around jenny’s age) because she has an otherwise functional and loving family in her life. but there’s no way that she never thought about the fact that she could’ve ended up in a place like coldrock house had she come from a different background… i cannot imagine how haunting that must’ve felt, especially at her age, and i think it makes it even clearer why she was so determined to get nellie and her sisters out of the orphanage
i've gone down a mini rabbit hole about the pitt siblings (as is probably evident by my recent posting habits), and that's led me to discover a fifth pitt sibling: beatrice. or, rather, not a fifth pitt sibling per-say, but a bonus pitt sibling, since she's the only sibling of cornelia's mentioned in the movie.
she is not named in the movie itself, but her name and status as cornelia's sister are given in the teleplay. there are variations between the scenes in the movie and the scenes as they're written there, but i think it's a safe bet to assume that she's still cornelia's sister and movie!agatha's mother. her last name is also likely no longer "pitt," since she is presumably married. based on the fact that she has a young daughter and cornelia is just getting married, i'd wager that she's meant to be older of the two, which interestingly makes cornelia a younger sibling in the movie universe when she's the eldest in the books.
but my headcanon? that her and cornelia are twins à la book!agnes and agatha. cornelia as a twin sounds so amusing to me.
