trickster
Sign in to savethumb|The trickster figure Reynard the Fox as depicted in an 1869 children's book by [[Michel Rodange]] In mythology and the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and defy conventional behavior. Such a character may be a god, goddess, spirit, human or anthropomorphisation.
Article
11 sectionsContents
- Mythology
- Comparison with clown
- Native American tradition
- Coyote
- Oral stories
- Literature and popular culture
- Online and multimedia
- See also
- References
- Sources
- External links
thumb|The trickster figure Reynard the Fox as depicted in an 1869 children's book by [[Michel Rodange]] In mythology and the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and defy conventional behavior. Such a character may be a god, goddess, spirit, human or anthropomorphisation.
==Mythology== Tricksters, as archetypal characters, appear in the myths of many different cultures. Lewis Hyde describes the trickster as a "boundary-crosser". The trickster crosses and often breaks both physical and societal rules: Tricksters "violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis."