catseye
Old lady trouser-smell with yesterday's knickers
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2010
- Messages
- 8,570
- Location
- York
But how many girls really DID throw themselves to their nightly, or weekly, re-enacted deaths, for love? How many even had the opportunity to meet, and fall for (in any aspect we would recognise) another man before being introduced to their intended?We shouldn't apply our modern principles here. It's all about courtly love.
The point isn't that she wasn't allowed to marry the stablehand, as everyone knew this could never have happened. It's that once she'd fallen for a man she couldn't face being married off to the one who'd been chosen for her.
She'd've been better off obediently marrying Sir Dullness and then having him take on the handsome stablehand. That'd work under
courtly love.
Ask the minstrels.
It is SUCH an enduring back-story for hauntings that I am wondering a) how often it actually really and truly happened because the likelihood doesn't match the number of stories, and b) when these stories of thwarted love to explain wailing ladies, etc, starting to arise? Even as recently as Victorian times, the wealthy and landed weren't free to marry just anybody, so I would guess the 'not allowed to marry the man she''d somehow managed to fall in love with despite never being allowed out of the house alone or left unattended' would be more recent than that?
I don't have the same problem with 'weeping ladies looking for their lost babies' origin stories, because that is a perennial condition that anyone could empathise with.