The Fairy Tale Tower
Spirits: Mythology, Legends, & Folklore
Multitude
4.8 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2023
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What’s the deal with all these towers? We’re deep diving into the origins of the fairy tale tower, the historical reasons why they were keeping people in towers anyway, and laying out all the romance novel tropes beat by beat.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of arophobia/aphobia, animal death, injury, imprisonment, abusive relationships, death, sex, suicidal ideation, war, misogyny, patriarchy, religious persecution, torture, beheading, death by lightning, and animal attacks.
Housekeeping
- Recommendation: This week, Julia recommends Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott!
- Books: Check out our previous book recommendations, guests’ books, and more at spiritspodcast.com/books
- Call to Action: Games and Feelings is an advice podcast about games. Join Question Keeper Eric Silver and permanent guest Jasper Cartwright weekly as they recommend games, answer advice questions, and play whatever quizzes Eric comes up with. New episodes every Friday!
Sponsors
- BetterHelp is an online therapy service. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/spirits
- Shaker & Spoon is a subscription cocktail service that helps you learn how to make hand-crafted cocktails right at home. Get $20 off your first box at shakerandspoon.com/cool
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm |
| 0:02.0 | M. |
| 0:05.0 | The Welcome to Spirits podcast, boozy dime into mythology, legends, and folklore. |
| 0:33.0 | Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. |
| 0:36.2 | I'm Amanda. |
| 0:36.9 | And I'm Julia. And this is episode 337, which Julia, our handy spreadsheet tells me, is about the fairy |
| 0:43.0 | tale tower. Now, I recall talking about this pretty recently. Yes. So in a recent episode, |
| 0:48.9 | the return of bird husband, bird husband, he's a husband and a bird, bird husband. |
| 0:54.8 | So we were talking about the story of the bluebird. |
| 0:58.3 | And you mentioned something that really like made the gears in my brain kind of start pumping and going. |
| 1:04.0 | Ooh. |
| 1:04.6 | I was very excited. |
| 1:05.7 | So you asked something along the lines of like, why are there so many towers in these stories? |
| 1:10.3 | What were these towers being used for before so many towers in these stories? What were |
| 1:11.1 | these towers being used for before the heroines of these stories were locked in them? What's |
| 1:15.7 | the deal with them? |
| 1:16.6 | Oh, Julia, are you about to tell me the deal with them? |
| 1:18.6 | Yes, Amanda, because I have, as a lot of people can tell from the episodes we've been releasing, |
| 1:25.0 | been on a bit of a fairy tale kick lately. So I decided I wanted |
| 1:28.0 | to explore the origins of the fairy tale tower. And then maybe we could talk a little bit about |
| 1:33.7 | some of my favorite examples of the tower, some fun little twists of the original tale. |
| 1:38.8 | But to start us off, Amanda, what are some of the stories that feature the like locked in a tower trope that |
... |
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