The Great and Powerful A to Z Challenge Theme Reveal!

This is my 6th year participating in the A to Z Blogging Challenge, and my 3rd year co-hosting it. It has been tons of fun every time, and I am looking forward to what 2017 will bring to the A to Z community!

It has become a tradition over the years for participants to announce their themes for the Challenge at the end of March. That day is today! I once again have a theme - and yes, it is once again storytelling-related.

*Drumroll*

My theme for the 2017 A to Z Blogging Challenge is

WTF - Weird Things in Folktales

Vegetable lambs. They are a thing.
(Check out this artist)

I got the basic idea from browsing through the Thompson Motif Index. For those of you not folkloristically inclined: The Index is a list of motifs that have been sorted and numbered by American folklorist Stith Thompson, and first published in 1955. Folktale motifs are smaller building blocks you can find in traditional tales, myths, and legends around the world; you will find such things in the book as "A1010 - Deluge" (collecting all the myths that involve a flood), or "D1065.1 - Magic boots." The numbers help folklorists find all the stories that have that same element in them, compare them to each other, and see the larger patterns in world folklore. For practicing storytellers such as myself, the Motif-index is a godsend, helping us locate stories about specific things.

Since the motifs in the book are categorized in groups from A to Z, I thought the Challenge would be the perfect excuse to browse through them, and pick out some of the most unexpected ones. Because while it is not exactly surprising to find things like "A101.1 - Supreme god as creator," one tends to run into completely out-of-the blue things as well, such as "F521.3.3.2. - Person with golden anus", or "A1319.3 - Why ear wax is inside the ear."

Our ancestors told tales about the weirdest things.

Each day of the challenge, I'll pick a motif from the Index, and bring you a folktale or myth that contains it. 
The motifs usually make a whole lot more sense in context. A descriptions that makes you go "whut now?" might be a completely common occurrence in folktales, that Thompson somehow managed to make sound strange when taken out of its element. My point, therefore, is twofold: One, to place some of the Motif Index into context, and two, to show off the stunning, amazing, endless richness of folk imagination that is rarely explored these days.

There will be...
... Poisonous eyebrows
... Assassin mice
... Thieving butterflies
... Women snacking on human nails
... lobsters mistaken for Norwegians
... Kings getting a Darwin Award for burning to death in an alcohol bath...

... and many other fascinating tidbits from around the world.

See you in April!

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Don't forget to check out the other blogs participating in the Challenge! People will be posting the links to their Theme Reveal posts in the Comments section of today's post on the main blog.

My previous Challenge themes:

2016 - Representation and Diversity in Storytelling

2015 - Epics from A to Z

2014 - Tales with Colors

2013 - Weird Princesses

2012 - First year, no theme