Trick or Treat?

Comments on "Tall Tales"

What happens when one (or three) trickster(s) meet another? The three brothers are practiced liars. They tell their tales and use it to trick others. The community at large knows that they are liars but is unable to stop them. Along come the prince (charming, dont' you think?). He is the ultimate trickster. The three brothers tell their tales in attempt to trick the prince right out of his costly socks...and shoes...and robes. Each story is more fantastic than the last but the prince "did not doubt a word of it."
Perhaps this was an elaborate ruse by the prince to win the contest. Perhaps, as a trickster himself, he recognized the potential for it to be true. The trickster does not abide by the rules of conventions, the rules that bind "normal" people. The prince may honestly exhibit no doubt because it could be true. Isn't that where a lie becomes the most effective? where its shades are so close to the truth it is impossible to distinguish as a lie?
This is the method the prince uses in his tale. Perhaps it is true he seeks three runaway slaves. He does abide by all the rules the brothers have set and all the rules of the "normal" world. There is nothing fantastic about his story; it is deceptively believable.
Caught in a web of their own making, the brothers must bow to the superior trickster. In true trickster fashion, the prince, instead of enslaving them which is his right, he allows them to return to their village with the promise to cease their lying. I am reminded to the stealing to only return again motif in some trickster stories. It also reinforces the position of trickster as a (re)inforcer of moral codes. Perhaps the prince does not do it in the way Hynes would define it (the setting of a negative example to emphasize the right), but the effect is the same. The three brothers return to their community no longer disrupters of social standards.

posted by Charity @ 2:05 PM