What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

I’m only a fraction of the way into Novum’s new video about Midsommar, and it turns out that, for all its inaccuracies, Ari Aster still did an INSANE amount of research into Swedish and Norse mythology and fairy tales.

Case in point: this famous picture that’s on Dani’s wall.

A lot of fans took a liking to the picture, and many will say it foreshadows what happens to Christian in the end. But they don’t know exactly why. It’s worth noting that Ari Aster himself said that there was one thing he found in his research that convinced him that this was the right way to take out Christian:





Well, it’s part of a fairy tale called Oskuldens vandring. The plot involves a young princess going out into the forest for the first time in her life. She ends up losing everything (an obvious metaphor for a loss of innocence) as she annoys most of the forest’s animal inhabitants. I’ll spare you the details, but here’s two of them: 1) one of the first things she loses is her gown. She sheds it herself because it’s too damn hot. 2) closer to the middle of the story, she encounters a bear, in the scene portrayed in the painting. What’s she doing? She’s comforting the bear. Why? Because it’s so hot and it can’t take its skin off to cool down like she did her gown.

The impressive thing: this particular fairy tale is obscure, and as you can guess from my use of the original Swedish in the title, it was never given a proper translation into English. And it doesn’t seem like the volume it was originally a part of was ever properly digitized. The only copies Novum could find for sale cost (if XE is any indication) over $400 and were in fragile condition. It took finding a reseller willing to take photos of every page and email them to him to find it out.

And with all this in mind, I can only assume that this ultra-obscure fairy tale was what inspired Ari Aster.