Author: Karen Dionne

Cites

• Carl Gustav Jung (1)
  • IN: The Marsh King's Daughter (2017) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: To be fruitful provokes one's downfall; at the rise of the next generation, the previous one has exceeded its peak. Our descendants become our next dangerous enemies for whom we are unprepared. They will survive and take power from our enfeebled hands.
    FROM: NULL, (None), NULL, Switzerland
• Hans Christian Andersen (1)
  • IN: The Marsh King's Daughter (2017) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: From its nest high on the roof of the Viking's castle, the stork could see a small lake, and by the reeds and the green banks lay the trunk of an alder tree. Upon this three swans stood flapping their wings and looking about them. One of them threw off her plumage, and the stork recognized her as a princess of Egypt. There she sat without any covering but her long, black hair. The stork heard her tell the two others to take great care of the swan's plumage while she dipped dow n into the water to pluck the flowers she imagined she saw there. The others nodded and picked up the feather dress and flew away with her swan's plumage. "Dive down now!" they cried; "thou shalt never more fly in the swan's plumage, thou shalt never again see Egypt; here, on the moor, thou wilt remain." So saying, they tore the swan's plumage into a thousand pieces. The feathers drifted about like a snow shower, and then the two deceiftul princesses flew away. The princess wept and lamented aloud; her tears moistened the alder stump, which was really not an alder stump but the Marsh King himself, he who in marshy ground lives and rules. The stump of the tree turned around, and was a tree no more, while long, clammy branches like arms extended from it. The poor child was terribly frightened, and started up to run away. She hastened to cross the green, slimy ground, but quickly sank, and the alder stump after her. Great black bubbles rose up out of the slime, and with these, every trace of the princess vanished.
    FROM: The Marsh King's Daughter (trans. by Mrs H. B. Paull), (1872), NULL, Denmark