I draw a lot of brightly colored monsters and make pins and stickers 🏳️‍🌈♿️ Etsy shop and commission info in my link


I’m putting this here because I just also want to put my folklore stuff here occasionally.


But at some point I heard a German song where black martins were associated with death. I tried to figure out why cuz that was not a bird I had seen referenced as death related before. I searched, mostly only found things in German, and found the source reference seeming to be Jacob Grimm saying Charos (Charon?) turned into a “black swallow” (schwarze Schwalbe) Which seemed weird considering Grimm mostly tried to put Christian values in stuff when he changed them and swallows are associated with holiness in Christian symbolism. Then I found Black martin is an old English term for swifts, which were originally usually called swallows or martins, which, fair. And they were called devil birds but still didn’t seem to explain being related to Charon or Hades. But apparently the English also called them shriek owls for some reason. Which I have to assume there was a series of mistranslations that led to Hades’ association with owls (night birds being common as death related birds) being translated as a swallow by Grimm and then written as a martin later on.


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