In Snow White, the queen died by being made to dance in red-hot iron shoes. The original Grimm tales were bloodier affairs, the ‘ happily ever afters‘ we are all so used to did not feature heavily. Not ‘folk-law’ of the fairy-tale variety, but more of the darker roots that lay behind even the most sanitised modern versions of fairy tales, closer to the original brothers Grimm tales they collected from the backwoods of Germany in the. If ‘The Doom that came to Sarnath’ is Lovecraft doing myth, ‘the Cats of Ulthar’ is Lovecraft doing folk-law. Lovecraft was a lover of cats, and of all his stories, ‘The Cats of Ulthar’ was among his favourites. No one ever trained a cat to hunt along side them, or to guard their homes, and the chances of the cat fetching your newspaper is minimal. Unlike their canine equivalents, cats are more house guests than pets. Humanity has always had an odd cultural relationship with the feline. Bast, the Egyptian cat goddess may be the most well-known, but she is far from alone. Cats walk between worlds, the real and the mystical, the mortal and the spiritual, the land of the living and the land of the dead… Least ways this is a recurring theme through fiction and the mythologies of the ancient world.
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