larryhammer | Yuletide Letter 2023

(Context: Yuletide is an annual fanfiction gift exchange for fandoms with relatively few fics, notable for its large number of participants and the high average quality of stories. I’m attempting to participate once more, focusing once again on public domain poetry fandoms.)

Dear Yulemouse,

Thank you for offering to write in at least one of these fandoms. You are totally awesome for doing this. I can only hope you enjoy writing about it as much as I will reading it—for certainly, squees will ring off the mountains and echo down the canyons when it arrives given, yanno, it’s in a fandom I want yet find so rarely.

The best way to please me is to have fun. Wit, sex, dramatic irony, and cracktasticly silly rom-com are all possibilities, but go with whatever floats your boats. Gen, het, slash (including femslash), multi, and poly are all great, as clean or smutty as you want (so yes, Yuleporn and Three Turtle Doves both fine). As a partial guide to the sort of things I like, my stories from past Yuletides are as good as anything. Turn-offs (Do Not Want!) are humiliation-based humor, sadism, explicit torture, and A/B/O (plus one specific to a canon, detailed below). Find something and make it your own, the thing you love writing, and it’s easy odds I’ll like it.

And to make it explicit: poetry (aka Yulepoem) is gleefully accepted—I mean, these fandoms are all poems—but not in the least required. Also, again to be explicit, I welcome treats, which get double the thanks for going above and beyond.

The rest of this is basically expansion on my Optional Details Are Optional, with notes on resources.

Hymn to Hermes - Homer

What this is: A 580-line poem, relating the Greek god Hermes’s first day after birth, in which he kills a tortoise and invents the lyre using its shell, sings a bawdy song about his own conception, steals Apollo’s sacred cattle, almost gets away with it through trickery, and then when he gets caught scrapes out of trouble by trading that lyre to Apollo. Even by the standards of the Greek gods, he was a precocious trickster.

A clever one, though in the true tradition of tricksters he’s only almost as clever as he thinks he is.

Prompts: Available characters are the tortoise, one of Apollo’s cows, the old man warned by Hermes not to tell Apollo he saw the cows, and Apollo himself: all victims, in one way or another, of Hermes’s trickery. Feel free to use any or all of them—but that said, it strikes me that an exploration of how all his victims are similar and different is a perfect topic for fic.

I suppose I should be explicit about this, though: Canonically Hermes is one day old, yet acting like a fully functional deity. In practice, he’s a sexual god—his most common representation was ithyphallic, not to mention that bawdy song. It’s not clear whether “underage sex” applies in this instance, but if you want to explore how Hermes screws as well as screws over any of these, feel free.

Resources: It’s a classic of Greek mythology and available All Over. The Loeb Classical Library (1914) prose translation by Hugh Evelyn-White, available at both Perseus and Theoi, is as good a place as any to start. Project Gutenberg has Andrew Lang’s prose translation of all the Homeric hymns, though note that it’s Very Victorian. If you prefer verse translations of poetry, Christopher Kelk has a recent one online.

The Odyssey - Homer

What this is: An epic, one of the two foundational epics of western culture.

Prompts: What would delight me most is domestic fluff after Odysseus’s return to Penelope, either during the last four books or post-canon.

Feel free to twist this. For example, Odysseus is expecting (or hoping for) a nice domestic fluff scene but Penelope (quite understandably) Has Issues. (Entirely canonical, that—see the bed scene.) Or Penelope wants domestic fluff but Odysseus remains restless (shades of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”), or maybe paranoid about further challengers. Or thanks to court politics, they have to play out their reconnection in public, with them using words and private references taken one way by their audience and another by themselves. And to be explicit, explicit sex counts as fluff, as far as I’m concerned.

Feel free, also, to AU this—it could be another fruitful source of tension. For ex, they both want domesticity but they’re in a Space Opera AU and Penelope has to call battle stations. Or it’s a Coffee Shop AU but they’ve still got relationship tensions to work through against the backdrop of the cozy setting. You get the idea.

Resources: There’s tons of translations and you probably already have a favorite. I’m partial to Robert Fagels, but I haven’t read Emily Wilson’s yet. The PD ones available online are a mixed bag, but several are quite readable—maybe try Perseus’s. There’s also tons of commentaries, if that’ll help spark ideas.

木蘭辭 | Mùlán Shī | Ballad of Mulan

(Yes, I know, 辭 is Cí, but that’s the official AO3 fandom tag; in the defense of their tag-wranglers, this is also known as 木蘭詩, Mùlán Shī, but the discrepancy is … annoying.)

What this is: A 62-line ballad about a young woman of the Northern Wei Dynasty who, when her aging father is drafted, secretly takes his place and serves honorably for twelve years until her discharge. Upon returning home (bringing honor to her family), she resumes women’s clothing and makeup, to the surprise of her former comrades.

So, yes, we have a woman warrior, from a patriarchal society no less, and who isn’t punished for it. And if you want evidence of how striking this was, see the first poem of this post—it was a breath of fresh air, the freedom Mulan had, to a woman of the Tang Dynasty.

I’m also fascinated by how the story has been increasingly elaborated over ~1500 years, each addition bringing in concerns of its era. Take this Tang Dynasty retelling. Not to mention the two rather different Disney movies, a generation apart. Tons of info about this is available here.

Prompts: The four members of Mulan’s family are available. What happened to Mulan’s family, the ones left behind? What were the repercussions? How did they each feel about her disappearance? her reappearance? her survival? Use any or all of them.

Feel free, also, to explore how the story has changed (folk process in action!), as linked above.

Resources: If you can hack the Classical Chinese, here’s one text of the original. If you prefer English, there’s my own translation, a translation by

Esmenet, Wikisource’s translation, and others in many anthologies of traditional Chinese poetry.

A Lyke-Wake Dirge (Traditional Song)

What this is: An English folksong (Roud #8194) of 36 (or alternate version 44) lines, half of them refrains, to be sung at a wake over the body of the deceased (the lyke, cognate of lich), telling the recently departed what to expect on their journey to Purgatory, based on how well they treated others during their life.

I love the incantory spell it weaves, when read aloud (with all the refrains). I also love its basic and humane morality. Haunting me throughout is that the soul can presumably hear these instructions, and thus is still departing.

Prompts: I’ve requested Worldbuilding. One aspect that could be explored is cross-referencing imagery from traditional ballads such as “Thomas the Rhymer.” Not to mention, where else in medieval lore does the Bridge of Dread appear? Just how close to Catholic doctrine is this, anyway?

There’s many other avenues to explore. I mentioned the incantory effect—can the text be used in a spell? Can the text be translated to other religious traditions? Can you make an AU?

Go wild.

Resources: Wikipedia has the full text of the best-known version (modernized from the oldest known text), including stanzas from an alternate version that fill a rather apparent lacuna, plus links to resources. This page and this comment have discussions of sources and recordings, while this post dives deep into the background and meaning of the text. (If you’re curious, here’s sheet music to one possible original tune.) Most books of English ballads also have it.

The Waste Land - T. S. Eliot

What this is: A 434-line poem, central to the Modernist Movement, about the spiritual wasteland of Europe following the horrors of World War I. A story can be teased out of the “fragments shored against [the] ruins,” to use its own phrase, much of it revolving around the barrenness of modern life and questioning the possibility (evoked by imagery of the Fisher King of Arthurian Legend) of renewal. Because it’s told in fragments and allusions, expect a lot of confusion—thus my linking a couple commentaries below.

Even if you don’t know what’s going on, the language is so vivid and evocative. I mean, heck, I just used one of its better-known quotes. If you can tease out the framework and symbolism, there’s a lot going on, with figures morphing and merging into each other.

Prompts: I’ve requested Worldbuilding. There is so much that could be filled in here. Take, for example, Mr. Eugenides and Phlebas, who are at the very least symbolically related and possibly are two identities of the same person—if they are one person, how does this work? What’s the relationship between the two seers, Madame Sosostris and Tireseas? Lil and the typist? The narrator of part V (aka the Fisher King) and the author? Just how many people are actually present?

In another direction, did the thunder really bring the rains of renewal or is the speaker still waiting? What would renewal actually look like? What does being a Fisher King actually look like, in day-to-day experience?

Or is everything just a show put on for the reader, ala Dark Lord of Dirkholm? What happens back-stage?

So many questions.

OTOH, I’d also be fine with a cozy Coffee Shop AU. That’d be fun. It’d totally count as Worldbuilding, with enough correspondences.

DNW: Rape/non-con. Not even by divine figures. Ew.

Resources: It’s PD so it’s all over: WikiSource, Project Gutenberg, Poetry Foundation, etc. There’s also many annotated versions (this is, after all, a central text of modernism), such as this one and, again, the Poetry Foundation’s.