Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

My current username is a combination of the two meanings:
"Storm" and "Siren".
Shakespeare was the original inspiration for my username, however I love Folklore and Fairy Tales. I wanted to used them both.

Urban Dictionary Status

[tem-pist]
–noun
1.
a violent windstorm, especially one with rain, hail, or snow.
2.
a violent commotion, disturbance, or tumult.
3.
a comedy (1611) by Shakespeare.

Origin:
1200–50; Middle English tempeste < Old French < Vulgar Latin *tempesta, for Latin tempestās season, weather, storm, equivalent to tempes-

Lorelay or Lorelei
According to German myth the rock Loreley over the Rhine by St. Goar inhabited a beautiful virgin named Loreley. The river by the rock was very narrow, and hence it was a dangerous place for ships to sale. Myth tells us Loreley endangered shippers by singing, because they would look up and subsequently sale their ships onto the rocks. After the death of a nobleman’s son, soldiers were sent to take Loreley. She saw them and called upon the river to aid her. Consequently, the rocks flooded and Loreley was carried away overseas, never to be seen again.

The name Lorelei caught my attention because of our fellow Gatherite, Flit.

Lorelei is now part of the established German Folklore, though she only came into being as a result of a Klemens Brentano, who wrote about her in "Lore Lay" in 1800. After that a 19th century Romantic poet, Heinrich Heine, composed a poem about Lorelei after reading Brentano's work.

Lorelei can be described as a water fairy, a water sprite or water spirit. A Rhine Maiden. Stunningly beautiful and sitting atop "The Rock of the Loreley" near St. Goarshausen, a small town by the Rhine River in Germany, she combs her beautiful golden hair and sings out to despairing sailors traveling the Rhine so that they may follow her seductive song into more dangerous and rocky areas closer to the Rhine shore and drown. Supposedly many a sailor has succumbed to the whims of Lorelei, who in her grief at having lost the love of her life to the Rhine River, sings out to other sailors so that they may also be drawn to their own deaths.

Lorelei is the German counterpart to the Sirens in Greek mythology. Even so, she creates a vivid and emotional story. River cruises along the Rhine River take one right past the rocks Lorelei calls home.

Here is the poem Heinrich Heine wrote describing Lorelei:

Combingher hair with a golden
Comb in her rocky bower
She sings the tune of an olden
Song that has magical power

The boatman has heard; it has bound him
In throes of a strange, wild love;
Blind to the reefs that surround him,
He sees but the vision above.

And lo, hungry waters are springing?
Boat and boatman are gone?
Then silence. And this, with hersinging,
The Loreley has done.