H. J. Ford

An amble

Take my hand and walk with me through Fairy Tale, down by the Sea of Stories. Look, a few of those stories rise up from the murky depths and wash ashore to our feet. Which ones are so chosen? Pick one up; I will tell you.

Ah, look, it’s “Cinderella.” Now, turn it over. What is there? “By Charles Perrault.” Why do we easily find this one, and not one of its hundreds of variants—really, hundreds—that remain in the depths out of sight?

In this world it’s the perfect ones that wash ashore—perfect because they are crafted. “The Sprig of Rosemary” I fished out of the murky waters. It is not perfect.

I see two blots on the story. In one of the inciting incidents, the heroine, determined to find out what lays in the box she has been warned not to open, finds that the key cannot work in the rust-stiffened lock. Undeterred, she breaks the lock. Inside she sees a snake’s skin. Immediately her world of wealth and her loving husband disappear.

I find this a striking, powerful image. The narrator then attempts to explain it all away. We are told that her husband, unknown to her, is a magician and wears the snake skin when he performs magic. All the internal evidence in the story is against this assertion. The lock is rusted, unused. When did he last perform magic? We already know that he is magical. He lives in an underground palace, for goodness sakes, but nowhere in the story does he perform magic. Rather, he falls under the magic spell of another character. Some magician!

Somewhere in the course of the telling someone felt the need to explain the inexplicable, thereby defusing the image’s power.

The second blot involves loss of consistency. When the heroine learns from the wind that her husband is to be married the next day, she pleads with the wind to delay the wedding for two or three days until she can travel to this distant kingdom. The wind agrees and rushes off to snatch the wedding dress away from the tailors and scatter its parts over the countryside. The King, furious, allows the tailors a few hours to come up with a new gown. Into this chaos arrives the heroine. What happened to the days of travel?

Perhaps the confused time lapse comes from a bad translation of the story out of Spanish, its original language. (Imagine “in the twinkling of an eye” being translated into another language as “He closed his eyes than opened them.”) Was Andrew Lang (the English collector of this tale) more of a folklorist than an author, reticent to make corrections? In any case, this tale bears few marks of skillful crafting.

May I craft this tale, make it perfect, throw it back into the surf, and see it if washes ashore somewhere else? Or has the time for crafting these tales passed? Are fairy tales the Latin of literature? Latin is the basis for the Romance languages, but is, itself, no longer spoken. Are the fairy tales a dead language, not longer allowed to evolve?

 H. J. Ford

Oh Nuts!

Nuts constitute one of my reasons for covering this tale. What is with full garments springing out of nuts?

In “The Sprig of Rosemary” the maiden uses the three nuts given to her by the sun, moon, and wind in her greatest moment of need. Each contains a marvelous article of clothing: a mantle, petticoats, and a gown, which the maiden ultimately uses to regain her husband.

The sun’s gift is described as being in a nut, the moon’s gift in an almond, and the wind’s in a walnut. Why the sun’s gift is not in a specific type of nut may have to do with the lack of crafting in this story as it appears in Andrew Lang’s “Pink Fairy Book.” I will ignore that problem, and focus in largely on the walnut.

Looking at this story, all we can see is that the walnut holds the most important article—the gown. Looking at this story’s variants and other stories in which nuts appear, casts a brighter light, and longer shadow, on the role of the walnut in these tales.

In Grimm’s “The Two King’s Children,” we revisit the three garments used by the heroine to reclaim her bridegroom in the context of a far more complex story than “The Sprig of Rosemary.” In this story all three garments are in walnut shells.

In another Grimm story, “All Fur,” the princess, running away to avoid a forced marriage to her father, takes with her a number of magical items, one being three gowns associated with the sun, moon, and stars, which she packs in a nut shell.

In “Romeo and Juilet,” Mercutio describes Queen Mab—the midwife of dreams—as driving a chariot made out of an empty Hazelnut shell.

In “The Magic Egg and Other Tales from Ukraine” by Barbara J. Suwyn, I found a version of “Pea-Roll-Along” in which the antagonist’s soul is hidden in a walnut on the world tree, and he cannot be destroyed until the nut is found.

Certain images in fairy tales resonant with the listener: Cinderella’s glass slipper, Sleeping Beauty’s spinning wheel, Rapunzel’s golden hair. To a lesser degree, the walnut (and to the extent it represents nuts in general) is one of those imagines. Why this is so may be a hard nut to crack.

Immediately, two possibilities jumped to my mind. First is the secretive nature of the nut, with the edible heart hidden away inside the shell. We discover its secret by breaking into the inner sanctum. However, the content is pretty predictable. Why would the expectations of our fancy jump from finding an edible nut to some other sort of gift?

My second notion involves the brain-like shape of the nut, particularly the English walnut. It does look rather like a brain sitting inside a brainpan. Certainly the peasants, who butchered mammals and used every part of the mammal short of the sound they made, would have recognized the similarity. However, this line of thought leads to zombies, who simply are not part of the European fairy tale tradition. I will go not farther down that path. Something at the end of it might attack me.

I abandon both of my notions (after some prowling on the internet) in preference to the walnut purse. These were little drawstring bags made from covered walnut shells given as gifts in the time of Elizabeth I. By the 18^th century, Limerick gloves, similar to kid gloves, being so sheer and delicate, were presented inside a walnut shell.  That the garments in our stories could also fit inside a walnut shell was a testament to the exquisite nature of these articles, and not so much a matter of magic. Well, good things come in small packages, do they not?

Your thoughts?

From the Hunt Museum collection, Limerick, Ireland.