Myth!Halp

[x_los]

Damn: you know those myths/folk-tales with Voice Stealers? Like the things that take your cleverness in a sort of Anansi sense--your silver tongue, the sound and the phraseology--like start by repeating and then just take the voice and leave you without one? I can't FIND any of those stories, and yet I KNOW I've heard of them!

Midnight made me think of that whole thing, and I'm almost certain it must have an entry on the Aarne-Thomspson classification system, I just can't find the damn thing!

Augh! Can anyone help me out/back me up here? Even just 'you're not crazy, I vaguely remember that too!' would be good.

Comments

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Gah. This is going to bug me until I get it. And yeah, not quite, but the Little Mermaid IS the pimp-shit.

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

I am thinking...it sounds either Native American, or Chinese. There are the fifteen tons of assorted European mythology, of course--it does have a sort of Celtic/Germanic fairy tale flair--but nothing I can dig up from that body is ringing any bells for me.

Now I recall the episode "Hush" from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but tracing that, Whedon seems to have come across the idea more or less on his own, pulling more from Nosferatu and other silent movies than from traditional folklore.

Voice stealing seems like it might be related to breath-stealing or face-stealing... I'll keep searching, as the idea has me completely mesmerized.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Voice stealing seems like it might be related to breath-stealing or face-stealing... I'll keep searching, as the idea has me completely mesmerized.

That all sounds v. easily potentially conflated to me, yeah.

Do let me know if you find/think of anything, I'm kind of dying of curiosity over here.