Tag Archives: Origin Story

Winken, Blinken, and Nod

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Torrence, CA
Performance Date: 4/6/2014
Primary Language: English

About the Interviewed: Max is a twenty year old college student at Pasadena City College studying Architecture and Fashion Design. His ethnic background is remotely Swedish, though his family has been in America for a couple generations.

I got Max to tell me a bedtime story his grandmother used to tell him a long time ago.

Max: “There were once three children: Winken, Blinken, and Nod. They were bored of their dull, ordinary lives and sailed out to sea in a wooden boat to find their fortune. While they were out adrift, Winken, Blinken, and Nod found three beautiful golden nets that they decided they would each use to catch all the fish in the sea.”

“They used their nets to capture as many fish as they possibly could, and soon the ocean was empty. Not satisfied with that, the three sailed into the night sky to catch the stars themselves. They began to round up the stars, but soon the night sky was black.”

“Lost in the cosmic abyss, the fishermen couldn’t find their way home. Tired and bloated from collecting all the fish and stardust, the trio dosed off. As they slept, the stars and the fish began to unravel from their nets. As the fish fell, the became shooting stars, which shot Winken, Blinken, and Nod to the moon. There Winken and Blinken became the eyes, and Nod the mouth, of the Man in the Moon. If you look out into the night sky, you can still see them, smiling at their catch.”

I asked Max if he knew where it came from, but he had no idea. His grandmother is long since passed away, and he thinks that she carried on the tale from her mother. It’s a very sweet, but kind of melancholy story. It has almost some mythic proportions, explaining the origin of the Man in the Moon.

Origin of the Austrian Flag

Nationality: Austrian
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 29, 2014
Primary Language: German
Language: English

My roommate this semester is from Austria, from a tiny village about half an hour by car from Vienna, and I asked her if she knew of any national legends. She then began to tell me the legend of how the Austrian flag came to be what it is.

She said, “So you know how the Austrian flag is red-white-red? Well there was a king, and he supposedly wore a white mantle/cloak and he fought in a war and he got bloody all over, but he won in the end,  but his mantle at the end of the battle/war, was bloody over here [as she gestures to one area of her body] and bloody over here [she gestures to the opposite side of her body] and was white in the middle. And that’s how the Austrian flag developed.” She then told me that she had been told that legend while in elementary school by her teacher.

I did a bit of research, and the king mentioned in the tale was not a king, but a duke, Leopold V, and he fought in the crusades. During the battles, he was soaked in the blood of his enemies and his white cloak turned red. However, the small strip of his coat that was underneath the belt remained white, and so when he took of his belt, there was a horizontal strip of white separating the two swathes of blood-soaked cloth. Leopold V was from the first ruling dynasty of Austria, and this red-white-red became a part of their coat of arms and eventually came to represent Austria as a whole.

I believe that this legend is a classic example of a national legend, or origin story. It is based in fact, after all, many European nobles traveled to the Middle East to fight in the on-again-off-again wars called the Crusades in the late Medieval Period (11th-13th centuries, mainly). Whether or not Leopold V actually wore a white coat on the battlefield, which is not too much of a stretch of imagination, as the Knights Templar wore white cloaks emblazoned with a red cross, or whether or not he actually got so soaked in his enemies blood that it turned that white coat red, is up for debate. However, it is a Romanticized tale that is at the very least based in facts; whether or not it is true does not really matter. This story also reveals something about the Austrian people, Leopold V was a great warrior who accomplished great feats on the battlefield. To have adopted the colors he wore at the end of one of the bloodier wars of the Middle Ages shows that the Austrians are proud of their military might, of their warriors.

 

Syrena

Nationality: Polish-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 22, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Polish

My informant was born in Boston, but his parents immigrated to the United States from Poland. He is an American citizen, but he has spent a few summers in Poland, and his parents keep many Polish traditions alive in his household. He told me about some of the similarities and differences between the ways that Christmas is celebrated in America versus in Poland. This is his account:

“Okay so, there’s a mermaid, and the Polish word for mermaid is Syrena. I don’t think she has a name. She’s just, like, “the mermaid.” And she frolics the world’s seas, and like waterways, I guess, with her mermaid family, because her dad is the ruler of water. He’s like, the king of water. And then one day she’s just swimming around, and she almost gets caught in a fishing net, and she needs to swim to shore to seek refuge because she’s hurt. And when she gets to the shore, she asks the river—because she can talk to all the waters—she asks the river, “Where am I right now? What’s going on?” And the river’s like, “Oh, you’re in Poland.” And the mermaid is like, “Oh. Okay.” And then the river offers to like, show her the lands, basically. She’s like, “Yeah, just swim upstream, and I can show you the beautiful lands that Poland has to offer.” And the mermaid’s like, “All right. That sounds awesome.” Um… so then they’re swimming, and eventually they swim towards like, a village. It’s called Mazowsze, and she just starts talking to the people there, and they’re all really friendly and hospitable. And she likes them and she decides to like, live with them. So then one day, the tribe is doing a hunt in honor of the prince, for whatever reason. And… But the prince has these golden arrows, and he’s on his last one, and he lost it, and he’s looking around for it on the banks of the river, and he meets up with the mermaid, because the mermaid, it turns out, had the arrow. And so she points him in the right direction of where she saw the reindeer that he was like, tailing. And then they get to this hut of the guy named Mr. Warsz, and he’s very hospitable and gives them food and shelter for the night. So they’re very grateful. And they’re in this beautiful clearing that this guy had like, set up. And then, because the prince was so grateful to this dude, he named the clearing Warszowa, which later became Warszawa, which is the Polish word for Warsaw, which is now the capital of Poland. So that’s the story of how Warsaw came to be.”

Analysis: My informant remembers this story from the times his mother told it to him when he was younger. He thinks she must have learned it from her parents; as he explained, “I mean, it’s a very culturally significant story, so I’m sure she heard it growing up.” This story is classified as a myth because it takes place essentially “before” or “outside” the real world. It has a sacred truth value because it is supposed to be an account of the formation of a nation’s capital; the mermaid likely did not literally exist, but she is accepted as “truth” and as an integral part of the narrative. It can be categorized as an origins story, for, like many myths, it explains how something came to be. These stories are, as my informant says, “culturally significant” because they provide an explanation for why the way the world is the way it is. The fantastical elements—golden arrows, talking mermaids—make the story intriguing, especially for children. Indeed, my informant was a child the first time he heard it. Yet it is also a story for people of all ages; children may be fascinated by the prince and the mermaid, whereas adults may take nationalistic pride in the fact that it is a story about Poland and its capital.

Roma origin Story

Nationality: Mexican, Portuguese, Roma, Gypsy
Age: 25
Occupation: Real Estate
Residence: Venice Beach, California
Performance Date: 4/24/2012
Primary Language: English

My informant learned this from her parents when she was a child. It is the origins of the Roma people

“The oldest stories come from Egypt. Gitano is how they say gypsy in Spain, so Gitano like hyptano. Like Egyptian.  They say that on the outskirts of Egypt there lived the mystery people. They had the knowledge of the past and future and could cure people.  They would be called in by the pharaoh if he needed soothsayers….so the Roma people became very powerful in the land. And people got jealous and so they drove them out into the desert and they continue to wander and continue to be a nomadic people.”

My informant believes that this is a very important story because the Roma people are nomadic and so it is important to know where they came from.

It is very important for this group to know where they come from, especially since they have been so split up over the centuries.  Nation states do not take kindly to nomadic people who wander over their borders and so the Roma people need to be strong in their identity.  This story also allows them to have always been outsiders with mysterious powers.  It’s very empowering for a people to know that they had all of this power before and could continue to use it.

What we call a clothes-pin

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 21
Occupation: Film Student (Assistant Cameraman, Director of Photography)
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/7/12
Primary Language: English

Context and Informant Bio

My informant is a female USC film student who is studying to become a director of photography (or DP: the crew member on a film set responsible for lighting scenes and composing shots with the camera). She started learning set procedure and lingo even before taking film classes at USC by volunteering to help out on student sets. Today she is well-versed in set terminology and, as a senior film student, enjoys teaching younger students set protocol.

On this set of a USC student project,  my informant worked as the 1st A/C (first assistant cameraman – assistant to the camera operator). At one point she asked a freshman production assistant (or PA:  a person who can help any department on the set with small tasks, such as running errands) to give her the “C47” she had clipped to her sweater. The PA was unsure what my informant meant, so my informant pointed to the clothes-pin clipped to the PA’s sweater. She then gave the following explanation.

 Transcript

PA: What is, C47?

Informant: Uh, it was a term that was developed back in the day. On equipment lists of stuff, it was listed under C47, so they called them C47s.

Me: And what is it that you’re holding?

Informant: A wooden clothes-pin.

Analysis and Background

There are several variations on the story my informant told about the term “C47” for a clothes pin. Generally the story involves an official equipment order form, as my informant described, on which the order code for clothes pins was C47. Another version of the story I’ve heard plays on the common stereotype of frugal movie studio executives, and tells that when executives saw equipment listed on order forms that they could not divine the purpose of, they would deny the order. So when reporting equipment orders to the executives, DPs would list C47 instead of clothes pins because the number made the item look like important equipment.

Clothes pins are an item found on film sets that it may be hard to think of a purpose for, but they are in fact very helpful. Wooden clothes pins are what the lighting crew use to clip colored filters (called gels) onto lights to give the light a particular hue.

Film sets are full of strange terms for common objects. The legend about C47s justifies the terms with a simple explanation that basically amounts to: that’s just what we call them. More important than the story about the origin of the term however is the use of the story. The story is never told to a seasoned crew member on a set, it is always brought up in the context of explaining the term to a newcomer, like the freshman production assistant in this instance. Learning terms like C47 and the stories behind them is part of the process of learning set protocol. Once you know the terms, you become an accepted part of the crew, and often this basic knowledge allows a crew member to move up from production assistant to grip (crew member in the lighting department), and beyond in climbing the ladder of crew positions.