iamamiwhoami: Huldra + Mandragora
I have to thank ReMyky22 for the heads up on an iamamiwhoami Twitter account this morning. You can find it over at twitter.com/iamitsme, where the user has protected his or her tweets.
Still, according to ReMyky22, it’s mostly just been stills from the video releases. As you’ll see if you visit the Twitter account, the name given is “Huldra Mandragora” and, as ReMyky22 points out, Huldra seems an apt description of the creature in the video.
AP pulled this description of the Huldra, which has its origins in Scandinavian folklore:
… a stunningly beautiful, sometimes naked woman with long hair; though from behind she is hollow like an old tree trunk, and has an animal’s tail. In Norway, she has a cow’s tail, and in Sweden she may have that of a cow or a fox. Further in the north of Sweden, the tail can be entirely omitted in favor of her hollow or bark-covered back …
And he concurs with ReMyky22 in that this description seems pretty accurate.
Here’s the problem I’m looking at, though – what the hell does a mythical Norse creature have to do with the Mandragora, especially since Mandragora Officinarum is native to southern Europe? So much for my geographic argument in yesterday’s iamamiwhoami post.
In fact, the farther you dig into the mythology behind Huldra and Mandragora, the less clear things become. The ties just don’t seem to be there … but let’s go back to The Round Table’s first iamamiwhoami post. As I wrote then, “In addition to designating certain, mischievous demons, Mandragora is also a genus of plant – historically linked to fertility, which would explain all the “foetus, natal, nourish, etc.” keywords on the iamamiwhoami videos.”
At the time, this didn’t seem like a huge deal, but fit with the animal totem theory I was working on and the whole idea of an artist launch. But Huldra + Mandragora? Lo que?
Try this one on – from Monsterpedia, Huldra is derived from the Norwegian root for “covered” or “secret.” Let’s go back to Mandragora, which we’ll assume stands for “birth.”
Huldra Mandragora = Secret Birth?
This doesn’t really go too far in telling us who this artist is, though I think ReMyky22 might be right in guessing Scandinavian origins. However, if this is the significance of these two elements, then it allows us to stop trying to figure out how they relate to each other and concentrate on other aspects of the videos.
i.e. figuring out what the hell Vanuatu has to do with anything …
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