A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth And Folk Tales In Fiction - O Is For Ordinary People

 If you have read your share of fairy tales, you’ll know that there are many working class heroes/heroines who have adventures. Usually, it’s the youngest son of a miller or farmer who inherits the least amount, with his older brothers getting all the useful stuff, and has to go off to seek his fortune. By the end of the story he has won the hand of the king’s daughter and half the kingdom. Or the youngest daughter finds herself having to achieve a task or a set of tasks before being allowed to live happily with her new husband, the King.

Mind you, in “Puss In Boots”, the youngest son has to leave all the work to the cat left to him, not being too bright himself. Aladdin is not a nice person - a lazy good-for-nothing boy - but he has a genie to help him. 

But there are others who do seem to have a brain, and use it. There is the fisherman who talks the angry genie back into the bottle. Sinbad, a merchant, survives seven voyages in which he is the lone survivor of the ship, yet somehow ends up returning home richer than before. 

The original Star Wars trilogy, which quite deliberately uses “The Hero’s Journey” trope, is also a fairy tale. Luke Skywalker is the farm boy who very quickly becomes a Jedi Knight and moves in exalted company. He doesn’t marry the princess, of course, because she is his sister, but she does marry a smuggler with a lower class background, so somebody who would count as the miller’s youngest son gets to marry the princess. 

And Luke and Leia have a father whose background is as lower class as you can get. Anakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader is the son of a slave woman(who swears she has no idea how she got pregnant and you believe her!). Their mother, Padme Amidala, when we first meet her, is a Queen, though an elected one, then a Senator. So, Anakin won the princess, right? And Leia is raised as a princess, Luke with his grandmother’s humble farm family. 

I found it intriguing, when I watched the TV series Obi Wan, that the hermit and former Jedi Knight Obi Wan Kenobi has a day job working in a factory, something the films never suggested, but hey, even he has to pay the bills, doesn’t he? That desert doesn’t offer much in the way of food and other supplies. 

Rey, an orphaned girl who has brought herself up on a desert planet not unlike Luke’s Tatooine, scavenging salvageable stuff for a living, turns out to be the evil Emperor’s granddaughter, which is another trope, ie the long lost heir to the throne or at least a member of the nobility is living as an ordinary person, used in old films and novels. 

In the Discworld novels we have Captain Carrot, who would be the King of Ankh-Morpork if they still had one, and he is exactly the kind of person who would be perfect for the job. Everyone likes him, he cares about people, he is able to handle any problem. But he is a policeman. It’s all he wants to do. He clearly knows, but never so much as mentions that he is the long-lost heir, though plenty of others do.

In Discworld books set in the tiny kingdom of Lancre, the King is a former jester. He marries a witch, Magrat Garlick, the youngest of a trio who first appear together in Wyrd Sisters, which sends up a certain Shakespeare play. Pretty much everyone in Lancre is an ordinary person, though it’s full of magic. Witches are village wise-women whose job is to look after the sick, deliver babies and such.

Unlike them, wizards working at the Unseen University are encouraged not to practise their art, because a very long time ago wizards who did started a horrific war. Instead they spend their days avoiding the students and eating huge meals. The thing is, you don’t have to be an aristocrat to get into Unseen University. And most aren’t. 

In Lord Of The Rings, the leading characters are mostly aristocratic or at least, in Bilbo and Frodo’s cases, the village squire. But Sam Gamgee, Frodo’s faithful servant, as ordinary as you can ask, ends up inheriting the manor, Bag End. He becomes Mayor of the Shire seven times. One daughter becomes a lady in waiting to Queen Arwen, then wife of a man with a title. Another marries the son of Peregrine Took(Pippin), Thain of the Shire. Sam is a gardener and fixes the land’s destruction after the Scouring of the Shire, planting and using soil from the home of the elves, the forest of Lothlorien. And because he was, if briefly, a Ringbearer, he is allowed to go to the Undying Lands where all the gods and Elves have gone. 

Definitely a case of upward mobility!