More severed heads and wells

My last post, "A severed head underwater," documented a sync between an Arthurian legend I had just read about, in which a severed head is dropped down a well, and a similar scene I had recently read in a just-published Portuguese novel.

This evening I was poking around a bit on Mormon YouTube and ran across this comment referencing the 1838 massacre of Mormons at Hawn's Mill:

I am a descendant of a man killed at Hawn's Mill. He is buried in the well. His son survived by hiding under a wagon.

It's not a severed head, but wells are sufficiently unusual places of burial that it still counts as a fairly strong sync.

The title of my last post reminded me that Iris Murdoch had written a novel called A Severed Head, but I couldn't remember anything about it. Even reading the plot summary on Wikipedia didn't jog my memory.

Then I remembered another of her titles which specifically references an Arthurian legend about decapitation: The Green Knight. This one is much more memorable. Even though I've only read it once, 23 years ago (a year before the entirely forgotten A Severed Head), I found that I could remember the opening lines verbatim. I typed the following from memory, then looked it up, and didn't have to change anything but the punctuation.

'Once upon a time there were three little girls --'

'Oh look what he’s doing now!'

'And their names were --'

'Come here, come here.'

'And they lived at the bottom of a well.'

This novel came to mind because of the Arthurian decapitation connection, and the opening references (quoting Lewis Carroll's Dormouse) people "at the bottom of a well."

The Dormouse quotation is interspersed with lines spoken by another character, addressed to a dog -- specifically, to a collie. The most famous collie, Lassie, is best known for the non-existent storyline in which Timmy falls down a well.

(A minor ancillary sync is that this morning I helped a preschooler read a book in which a girl says to a dog, "Come here, Pat, come here!")