Druids/Celts Attitudes Toward Homosexuality
Hey all! I am doing a Beauty and the Beast retelling, and my enchantress makes her spell gender-specific. As in, she says "you won't be free until you can love someone and she loves you back." (Yes, I am snatching the whole "lovey schmoopy' spell from Disney, a little bit, but that's where I got this whole idea. hopefully, in the grand scheme of things, the blatant Disneyfication will recede beneath the magnificence and tragedy of the rest of the story; but I digress).
At any rate. My current vague idea of a plot is that the story is set in Ireland, and the beast is (probably, depending on how much research I care to do) a Hiberno-Norman lord. He is cursed by an Irish person for some as-yet-to-be-determined evil deed, with a (possibly unintentionally) gender-specific curse.
What this preamable has led to is my question, finally. I am wondering about attitudes towards homosexuality in 12th century Ireland, preferably the attitudes of the Irish people, and not the Normans. To make things even more complicated, I am thinking of having the Beast transformed through druidic magic, so on top of 12th century Irish views on homosexuality, any ancient druidic views on homosexuality would help too.
I'm not sure if any of this will be directly important to the story in any way, but I'd like some background. Would the person doing the curse just automatically assume the beast would fall in love with a woman, and therefore not really notice when they said "she must fall in love with you too," or would they maybe sort of think that there was a chance he would fall for a guy?
If this is kind of weirdly muddled and unintelligible, maybe some context would help. I came up with this idea from listening to the Beauty and the Beast Broadway soundtrack, in which the enchantress's curse is "if he could learn to love another, and earn their love in return..." whereas in the movie it is "earn her love in return..." and I thought the discrepancy was interesting and showed how people sometimes don't think about the stereotypes inherent in what they're saying.
At any rate. Sorry for the long ramble. Hope someone can help me!
ETA: just because a couple people have commented that there were no druids around in the 12th century, I want to stress that I am not planning on having a real live druid show up. I'm just having someone use some druidic magic that has possibly been passed down through their family. So, no breach of history here. Sorry for the confusion.
At any rate. My current vague idea of a plot is that the story is set in Ireland, and the beast is (probably, depending on how much research I care to do) a Hiberno-Norman lord. He is cursed by an Irish person for some as-yet-to-be-determined evil deed, with a (possibly unintentionally) gender-specific curse.
What this preamable has led to is my question, finally. I am wondering about attitudes towards homosexuality in 12th century Ireland, preferably the attitudes of the Irish people, and not the Normans. To make things even more complicated, I am thinking of having the Beast transformed through druidic magic, so on top of 12th century Irish views on homosexuality, any ancient druidic views on homosexuality would help too.
I'm not sure if any of this will be directly important to the story in any way, but I'd like some background. Would the person doing the curse just automatically assume the beast would fall in love with a woman, and therefore not really notice when they said "she must fall in love with you too," or would they maybe sort of think that there was a chance he would fall for a guy?
If this is kind of weirdly muddled and unintelligible, maybe some context would help. I came up with this idea from listening to the Beauty and the Beast Broadway soundtrack, in which the enchantress's curse is "if he could learn to love another, and earn their love in return..." whereas in the movie it is "earn her love in return..." and I thought the discrepancy was interesting and showed how people sometimes don't think about the stereotypes inherent in what they're saying.
At any rate. Sorry for the long ramble. Hope someone can help me!
ETA: just because a couple people have commented that there were no druids around in the 12th century, I want to stress that I am not planning on having a real live druid show up. I'm just having someone use some druidic magic that has possibly been passed down through their family. So, no breach of history here. Sorry for the confusion.