Thanks, Den. I love it when one of these things sparks a personal experience. To me this brings the vagueness of the folk-past into reality.

GUEST,Texas Guest - Nice take. Where's it from?

GUEST,Owlkat - Although I aggressively agree with all you've said, (and especially that you've come to expand, not criticize) I am generally unimpressed with the "facts."   At least, I'm much more concerned with the "Truth" of folklore than I am with the "Facts" of written history. You note: interpretations of past events can be as interesting and thought provoking as the actual facts. That's very good - puts it in perspective.

Problem is that as a long-time trivialist (no way can I think myself a scholar or historian) I've come to have more and more contempt for written history and any Officially Accepted documents or books. I've seen far too much slanting of "facts" in, eg, school-board-accepted Florida textbooks, sent back to be re-written for religious and political reasons...Popular history written & sold for the shock value like tabloid newspapers...Scholarly texts, valid enough in the writer's own field but plagiarizing guesses and errors of other tomes for the rest of the tome...Old wives tales simply carried forward from scholar to scholar as material "everyone knows"...Utterly phony claims by scholars to have researched primary and source material...Conscious Big Lies to fulfill some secret political agenda...Unconscious Big Lies simply because the writer was a bad enough scholar that s/he selectively selected the material to report.

I'm glad you take the stance of critical analysis and sympathize that you (are forced, I guess) to take the stance that anything you write will be controversial. I suppose that (wildly guess that) you've hit many brick walls that people prefer facts and interpretations that are emotionally satisfying, not those proven or rigorously logically surmised.

Good luck ter yiz.

For now, I'll take the folklore - I can depend on that.