Long ago I was often inspired to do crazy research on passing thoughts and ideas. Smelling Books and Chromolithography and the mystery of Henri and Anita LeRoy, on why certain books smell the way they do and who was really the artist behind common chromolithography prints, respectively, are past products of my ardent desires to answer a question. It’s been a long time since I’ve given myself time to fall down that rabbit hole, but I am feeling the inclination once again. I have a list of curiosities I wanted to return to. Melusine is on that list. For better, or worse, I’ve only geared up to capsule research. The ridiculously extensive posts may still come.
The story of Melusine is a fairy tale legend wherein a fairy queen and the king of Scotland had a daughter. Melusine angered her fairy queen mother by imprisoning her father and was cursed to turn into a half-snake beast on Saturdays. Her beast form is often depicted as a two tailed mermaid or something more akin to a naga, a creature from Hindu mythology that has the bottom half of a cobra.
I could not find any more food to feed my passing thought that Melusine is a rogue Naga Kanya, if the Naga Kanya are in fact an entire race of fairy creatures instead of one. I did find that several pinterest boards have noticed the similarity in the two tailed stone depictions of Melusine and those of the fertility goddess Sheela Na Gig. These similarities intrigue me. While poking around in the easily locate-able online sources, I did find that stories of a half serpent, half beautiful woman can be found across Albania, Germany, and France.
In the most well known story from France, Melusine married a nobleman and brought agricultural advances and fortune to the people over which he ruled. But, curiosity became too much for her husband, leading him to break the promise he made to leave her in seclusion on Saturdays. He spied on her, witnessing her changed form. Upon learning of this, Melusine sprouted wings and flew away, never to return (British Library – European Studies Blog).
Most interesting is how, before her husband’s transgression and her disappearance, Melusine bore several sons, making her a founding mother of European nobility. This fairy lineage would eventually be referred to as dragon blood, referencing Melusine’s final winged form. Of course, her split serpent tales has become familiar to many of us as an image of the commercial depiction of Starbuck (Ancient Origins).
Any discussion on the origin of the giallo, whether the discussion is concerned with the literature or the film phenomenon, will most likely begin with an explanation that the giallo took its name from the yellow book covers used by Mondadori to color code their mystery novel publications (Pieri, 2011; Koven, 2006; Needham, 2002). Eventually, giallo became a term used for any type of detective fiction, story with a mystery element, or intrigue. Mikel Koven would coin it a “metonym for the entire mystery genre (2006 p2-3).” Initially, between WWI and WWII, the stories were imported from the UK, America, and France. The foreignness helped to distance the stories of crime and murder from Italian readers while also becoming so attractive an element that Italian authors began to adopt anglicized pseudonyms to put their locally produced work on even footing with the popular imports (Pierri, 2011; Needham, 2002). Italian writers of the giallo faced another hurdle in competing with the foreign imports in the strict oversight and censorship in the Fascist regime pre WWII for their production of what was considered low brow literature. This label of ‘low brow’ followed the giallo from literature to film when the movies rose as a genre in the 60s and 70s, sometimes considered a component of a larger movement in Italian Fantasy Cinema that included horror (Palmerini & Mistretta, 1996). The giallo in film has been popularly defined by its characteristics, by time period, and by driving personalities. It has been said to be an “auteurist domain,” defined by the directorial names that made the most memorable examples of the genre; defined by Argento (Heller-Nicholas, 2012; Palmerini & Mistretts, 1996). However, similar to the debate over the rigid, proscribed, and repetitive structure of crime fiction literature giving way, through that very repetition, to a dynamic and flexible reimagining of the genre (Maher & Pezzotti, 2017), the cinematic giallo has also been described as having “an inherently ambivalent form (Koven, 2010 p144)”. Despite the giallo’s formulaic narratives and repetitious plot elements, the genre can seem even less definable in film than in literature, and may represent a cultural exchange that only adds to its fluidity and timelessness (Heller-Nicholas, 2012). As Gary Needham thoroughly points out:
I thought that I was a fan of Mark Twain’s work, though I would usually specify that I enjoyed his essays and sketches more than the novels he is typically known for. I have to admit, I am not a very good fan, perhaps of anything, because it never occurred to me to find out any more. I never knew that while working as a typesetting apprentice on his older brother’s newspaper he began penning humorous stories under pseudonyms, or that he would continue this pseudonymous writing on other papers. I knew that Mark Twain was a pseudonym, but I never knew that it was simply a later and greater pseudonym that followed: W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Rambler, grumbler, Peter Pencilcase’s Son, John Snooks, and Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, and A Dog-Be-Deviled Citizen… A curious and, perhaps tenacious, view through 
on my dining room wall. I had inherited it from my grandmother. I remember sleeplessly looking up at it on the wall of her den during ‘nap time.’ A notation on the bottom says it was copyright in 1900 by Jos. Hoover & Sons. The signature reads ‘LeRoy’ with a circular flourish around it.
My last mention of the Internet Archive’s 
