Ogres Are Cool

The hyper-courtly​ Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote a verse satire in the mid-1530s that begins: ‘My mother’s maids, when they did sew and spin,/They sang sometime a song of the field mouse.’ Wyatt goes on to relate the song, which is pretty much the story of the town mouse and the country mouse as told by Horace in his Satires with some added shivers of late Henrician courtly horror. Did Wyatt’s mother’s maids read Horace? Were they reciting a folk tale they had received by oral transmission? Or (more probably) were the maids a fiction designed to mask a satire on what it was like to be a courtier in the later reign of Henry VIII – an experience which, for want of a better term, could be described as ‘grim’? This is an extreme version of a problem that arises with many ‘folk’ tales, and indeed with many stories which present themselves as anonymously authored, or which seek to be read just as stories, as enigmatic and unsituated things that get their readers’ minds racing with excitement and p ... Read full article.