When the Hurly-Burly's Done

So: witches! I feel like a lot of witches in middle-grade stories tend to be basically humans with magical powers. Sometimes the story is told from the perspective of the witch (like "Kiki's Delivery Service"); sometimes the witch is a kindly figure who helps out the protagonists (Morgan Le Fay in the "Magic Treehouse" series - possibly she's a sorceress, but I'm not sure there's a difference for this purpose). If the witch is the villain, she's more likely to be non-human, but she's still got pretty understandable, human motivations: take over the kingdom, get revenge for something, etc. There are a lot of good stories there!

But what I don't feel like I see enough of is incomprehensible witches. Witches that are like some kind of weird, mysterious force of nature, doing things for their own reasons that aren't necessarily explained to the audience. Like in "Macbeth" - why are the witches wandering about on the heath yelling prophecies at people? We don't know! They are extremely weird and creepy! I like them.

So the Mushroom witches in this chapter are definitely closer to the Macbeth side of things. My interpretation of Nouns is that there's a spectrum from "basically human-like" (Duck) through "they don't act like humans would, but you can communicate with them" (Hairspray) to "you cannot figure them out at all" (Mushroom witches).

Having characters speak in rhyme is one way to underscore their weirdness. The first rhyme in this chapter is in ballad metre, which is probably the most common way that people write rhymes in English. The second is what's called a double-dactyl, which has some fairly strict rules:

1. It consists of two four-line stanzas, each stanza having three lines in dactylic dimeter and a fourth line made of a dactyl and a spondee.
2. The first line must be nonsense words.
3. The second line must be a person's name.
4. The fourth line must rhyme with the eighth.
5. One line (most often the sixth, but can be the fifth or seventh) must be a single six-syllable word.

So, for instance, this.

Or, one of my favourite double-dactyls:

Webbily wobbily,
Timothy Berners-Lee's
Hypertext network per-
turbs me a jot.
With its prolixity,
Decasyllabically,
ww
w.

I fully plan to use a different verse form every time the witches talk. Next up is probably a limerick.

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