On 7 Jan 2003, Jag wrote: >On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 04:23, David Silberstein wrote: >> Some notes concerning the /taltos/. >> >> The following is an summary of a description of folklore surrounding >> the taltos in Hungarian culture. It's an extract from a much longer >> compare-and-contrast of the taltos with similar entities from other >> European cultures >> I doubt this has anything to do with SKZB's take on the taltos in any of >> his stories, but I thought it was interesting nevertheless. >Other than the stallion bit (which I cut), this doesn't sound like >Brust's taltos' at all. Well, part of the problem is that SKZB has to deal with the fact that there are various interpretations of "taltos" - there's the taltos of the stories, who has a bizarre and fantastic mix of attributes, depending on which story it is. There's the more literal concept of the taltos as a priest-magician who had an official, religious role, back when the Magyar were nomadic pagan tribes. And there's the taltos "of the people", as it were - someone who literally has the characteristics of the taltos, as described in the text. The web-page that Holly's grandfather translated mentions a man from the early 1900's who was alleged to have those same attributes. So SKZB is free to take any or all of the above when writing his own stories (or make up pretty much anything he wants, unreliable writer that he is). > However, the bit I left here does remind me a lot of one group of >people from Guy Kay's _Tigana_. I don't remember what they were >called in the book, Dreamwalkers or something like that. They weren't >exactly like the Taltos you describe, but they were close enough for >me to believe the part in the book is based on them. Well - the parts I left out showed that the "fighting in dreams" theme was what the author wanted to stress was a common theme with other European shamanic peoples. There are called benandanti in Italian. Other cultures have people called kresniki or burkudzäutä or werewolves (of a certain type - there are in fact more malevolent examples of such) or mazzeri, who have a similar, but not identical, nature to the taltos. He also mentions Lapp shamans who do pretty much the same thing, the difference being that the shamanic role is explicit rather than implicit. For example, a Livonian werewolf testified that he did not harm others while dreaming that he was in wolf form, but rather fought witches who were intent on harming the fields. I attended a reading a couple years back, where John Crowley read from "Daemonomania", which described a scene of a werewolf going on a long journey in order to fight such a battle. I wondered if he got that >from Ginzburg's book, or perhaps from Ginzburg's sources (it would have been very cool indeed if he had such dreams himself...). >I've also heard of the being born with a caul meaning special things >in other books. For some reason I want to think its Card's Alvin >Maker series. Card was obviously using lots of old folklore and magical traditions when he wrote those books.