this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
6 points (87.5% liked)
Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (LotR), etc.
1219 readers
33 users here now
For all things Tolkien, Lord of The Rings (LotR), and The Hobbit across all media. Speak friend and enter.
Rules:
- No abusive language
- No buying, selling or advertising
- Be civil
- No politics
- No discussions about race
- No bots
- No memes or AI-generated content
- Don't criticize others for their opinions
- If you found the image on the web, it is encouraged to put the direct link to the image in the ‘Link’ field when creating a post, instead of uploading the image to Lemmy. Direct links usually end in .jpg, .png, etc.
- No unrelated posts
- No spoilers in title, mark spoilers
- Let people like what they like
- Follow all Lemmy.world rules
Please report any rule violations.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So what exactly is a corrigan? All I'm getting from google is that it's Irish lol.
That's a great question, and one I should have probably anticipated, so apologies! In the book, the editor (Verlyn Flieger) gives the context there. I don't have the book in front of me right now, so I'll have to paraphrase, but if I'm appealing to brevity of words: it's a witch.
More specifically, it's a fey creature that usually lives in a magical part of the woods and lures men to her. Her intent varies, it's usually one of either a) trying to get the man to leave a recently-wedded wife in order to marry the corrigan, or b) trying to get a recently-married man to promise a future child or children. She can shape-change from an ugly form into a more beautiful one to help trick her victim.
I read the first example as the corrigan attempting to get the wife to leave the husband for her, but I probably shouldn't have expected lesbianism in any Tolkien text.
Just had a chance to open the book back up, and from the note on the text by Christopher Tolkien, corrigan is a Breton word for fairy. From the introduction by Verlyn Flieger, she expands a bit more to say: