Tuesday, October the 26th, 2004

back to: title, date or indexes

hear this 

Witless Fabiola

Witless Fabiola is one of the archetypes in the complex mythology of the Tundists. Of the many stories about her, perhaps the most important is the legend in which she is sent out west on a Tundist quest to find a hornets' nest but becomes distressed and sits down to rest, and while she rests she has a dream about a giant bream swimming in a stream lit by a moonbeam the colour of cream. In other tales, Witless Fabiola does deeds of derring-do, fights phantom crustacea in the tide pools of Tantarabim, wraps herself in flags, and—in an apocryphal story—turns into a zombie goddess who causes thunderstorms and blizzards and other meteorological phenomena.

Witless Fabiola is usually depicted holding a trident in her left hand and some birdseed in her right, wearing a cape spun of crocus stalks, her left foot trampling on the neck of a subjugated cormorant. Sometimes she is given a human head, with a mop of frazzled black hair not unlike, say, Robert Smith's of The Cure. In other images, inspired by the breakaway Pseudotundist sect, her head is that of a merganser duck or booby.

Tundist scholar Ernesto Hudihudimojo has compiled an anthology of legends about Witless Fabiola, none of which is longer than a couple of hundred words, and all of which peter out quite irritatingly. The reader is desperate to know more, but Dr Hudihudimojo points to the authenticity of his retellings, and argues that one of the crucial features of Tundist myth is the eschewing of “closure”.

We asked the publishers for permission to reprint some of these stories, but they just grunted at our representative and sent her packing, pursued by fractious toddlers armed with pebbles.