Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Solar Eclipse

In the real world, a total solar eclipse is super cool. It is basically when the moon passes between the sun and the Earth causing a momentary blackout in the middle of the day. As cool as it looks and sounds, that's really about it. It's rarity is what draws people to it, Let's be honest: If this happened every single day, nobody would bother looking up and burning their eyes out trying to see it.

The rarity is actually one of the reasons that the solar eclipse is important to our tales. Look at it from a tribal standpoint. You are doing your best trying to serve the gods as well as you can. One day, you make a little mistake and hope that the gods didn't notice. Enter then the solar eclipse. The sun gets blotted out for 2 and a half minutes. It's night time in the middle of the day. Obviously the gods were paying attention that day and have decided to take the sun away as punishment. Probably a good time to panic.

Indeed, we did not always understand what the solar eclipse was. That can have a major effect on ancient tales. My very first memory in life was a partial eclipse. At the time, I thought my mother had the power to turn the sun off at will. You can imagine how impressed I was.

Often fairy tales pitch the blotting out of the sun as an extremely bad omen. It can even be a clear and present danger. We all know how the dark creatures of the world like to roam around at night. What if it was eternally night? Those horrible things would suddenly have free reign to murder us, and the world would be a far gloomier place to live.

So does that mean that our solar eclipses are a bad sign? No, not really. At the very least, it does not seem to be much more than a simple rare solar event at the moment. Perhaps, there was more significance to it at an earlier time. Sometimes, fairy tales are true. Either way, there is clearly a fascination with the solar eclipse due to its strangeness and rarity. And we shall always have the inclination to imagine bad things when it makes a rare appearance within our skies.

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