Author: cjkiernan

cjkiernan https://chaztales.wordpress.com Storyteller Charles Kiernan, now retired from gainful employment, performs at theatres, listening clubs, schools, libraries, and arts festivals. He is also coordinator for the Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild, Pennsylvania State Representative for the National Youth Storytelling Showcase, Pennsylvania State Liaison for the National Storytelling Network and recipient of the 2008 Individual Artist Award from the Bethlehem Fine Arts Commission. He has, of late, been fobbing himself off as Mark Twain with some success. Twain is wont to ramble on about his boyhood memories, the newspaper publishing business, life on the Mississippi and frogs. Mostly, though, he likes to talk about the river. Charles also performs Americana stories, collectively labeled the "Lost Dollar" stories. This is a collection of Appalachian tales whose wisdom and humor is woven into the life of a little village stuck way back in the hills. The village is named “Lost Dollar” after the original settler’s mishap that caused him to stay there. The main industries seem to be the growing of apples and the catching of catfish. Just ask about Uncle Willard's Catfish! Departing from this continent, he also specializes in Brothers Grimm and other fairy tales. Be warned, however, he does tell them in their original spirit, under the belief that the "grimness" of Grimm serves a purpose, and should not be removed. In addition, Charles is a writer, best known for his blog “Fairy Tale of the Month” (https://chaztales.wordpress.com). His middle grade novel, Ailuros, resides with his agent, looking for a publishing home. Two other middle grade novels are in progress.

Fairy Tale of the Month: October 2012 The Queen Bee – Part One

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Of Little Consequence

Thalia had me read The Queen Bee three times before she would climb from my lap and amble off to bed, clutching her battered book and dragging her teddy bear.

In The Queen Bee the two eldest sons of a king have wandered off, ending up as wastrels. Their younger, simpleton brother goes out, finds them, and they travel on together. The youngest brother forbids the two eldest from harming ants, ducks, and bees for their pleasure.

They come to a castle, the stable for which houses stone horses in its stalls. They explore the castle, finding it empty except for a mute gray dwarf. The dwarf shows them hospitality for the evening and, in the morning, presents to the eldest brother three tablets that describe three tasks to be performed. The eldest takes up the challenge, the first task of which is to find a thousand pearls scattered in the forest. He fails and is turned into stone. The second brother suffers the same fate.

The third brother is helped by the creatures he spared. The ants gather the pearls, the ducks retrieve a key from the bottom of a lake, and a queen bee picks out the youngest sister from three sleeping princesses.

The spell is broken; the castle and its inhabitants return to life. Of course the youngest brother marries the youngest princess, they become king and queen, and the eldest two brothers are married off to the eldest two princesses.

“Again,” Thalia had said, upon returning to my study from her bedroom.

“I’ve read it three times.”

“I’m worried about the horses.”

“Oh! That part. I think I forgot to read that.” I reopened the book. “And when all the castle people returned to being themselves, including the stable boy, the horses nickered loudly for their grain. They hadn’t been fed in a long, long time.”

Satisfied, Thalia took back her book and, once again, toddled off with her teddy in tow.

Really, what about those stone horses?

It is one of the few descriptive details that the Grimms included in The Queen Bee, and certainly the most striking. What popped into my mind were the horses of the Wild Hunt in Tamlin:

O first let pass the black, lady,

And syne let pass the brown,

But quickly run to the milk-white steed,

Pu ye his rider down.

But certainly the horses of the Wild Hunt are not the stone horses.

Then there are the white horses with red ears seen by Childe Roland when he entered the fairy world and was obliged to cut off the head of the horse herder. These are not the stone horses either.

That the stone horses have a history, I have little doubt. Perhaps some teller, somewhere, at some time, could have made them up out of his or her imagination, but I am going to guess not.

My sense is that the old tellers were not out to surprise their listeners with something unusual and novel, but rather to present their audience with something familiar in new clothes. Often we find pieces of myth reflected in a fairy tale (A Sprig of Rosemary/Cupid and Psyche). Or a common spinning wheel becomes a device of magic (Sleeping Beauty).

One of the common crimes committed by modern-day storytellers and others who render these old tales for present consumption is to edit out elements no longer understood. How many twenty-first century children know about the duck in Hansel and Gretel, much less the cat and the pigeon on the roof?

I cannot say I know the significance of the stone horses, but when I tell that tale, or read it to Thalia, I leave in these immobile equine. Am I better off for facing my ignorance and passing it along, than to suppress those elements that cause us to wonder and question?

Fairy Tale of the Month: October 2012 The Queen Bee – Part Two

 Walter Crane

 

Perchance to Dream

The realm of the fairy tale and that place we go to when we dream may well be the same terrain. Those lands both share the feature of being surreal, always holding forth something inexplicable and unexplained to be treated as common fare within the illusion. The motif of the three sleeping princesses in The Queen Bee is one of those unexplained givens that populate the fairy tale.

In the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales we can find other sleeping princesses in the stories of Little Briar Rose, Snow White, and The Glass Coffin. The notion of the sleeping princess appears to be a borrowing from Germanic mythology. The Grimms boldly state in their notes that Briar Rose is the sleeping Brunhild of the Vőlsunga saga. There are various stories about the love between Brunhild and Sigurd, but common to them is Brunhild’s sleep within a ring of fire. Brunhild, one of the Valkyrie, offended Odin, who turned her into a mortal woman to be claimed by any man who could breach the magical flames. Only Sigurd had the strength and bravery to do so. Here was far too great an image to be left in the land of mythology. Storytellers quickly carried it off to the fairy-tale realm. (Content warning: this saga of love is mythological and therefore the romance ends badly, unlike fairy tales that, more than usually, end happily ever after, one of the defining differences between myths and fairy tales, as noted by Bruno Bettelheim.)

If I consider dreams and fairy tales as sharing the same ground, then how shall I view the three sleeping princesses, Briar Rose, or Snow White as they sleep within a dream?

The sleepers within the dream fall into a similar pattern. They are usually princesses for whom betrothal to a prince awaits them upon awakening. This sleep is not the property of commoners, although, in the case of the Grimms’ Little Briar Rose, everyone in the castle falls asleep, from the king to the kitchen boy; their sleep is conditional upon the princess’s sleep. In The Queen Bee it is implied that outside of the princesses all others are turned to stone, except their father, who is the gray dwarf. The Grimms’ Glass Coffin has a variation on the pattern in that the maiden is a daughter of a wealthy count, and the hero a tailor who rises in station with this marriage.

The sleeping-princess theme was popular with the Grimm brothers, but Giambattista Basile’sSun, Moon, and Talia and Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, are both examples of sleeping princesses that predate the Grimms’ works.

Despite slight differences in the common theme, the tales feature the same progression from sleep, to awakening, then to marriage.

The subliminal fascination of the above stories is the magical nature of the repose of girls transforming into women. In what realms did they wander while we saw them as unsurpassed beauties in a death-like slumber?

 

Fairy Tales of the Month: October 2012 The Queen Bee – Part Three

 Walter Crane

Grateful Animals

There is an October rose in Miss Cox’s garden, one solitary bloom that has not given up on summer although the calendar marches toward winter. Today it was visited by one lone bee. A worker bee of course, but it turned my mind again to The Queen Bee.

I have found the queen bee in a second Grimm tale, The Two Travelers, and in another German tale, Rosemaiden (found in The  Seven Swabians and Other German Folktales.) In these tales she did heavy duty, making a castle of flowers in one story and a miniature castle of bee’s wax in the other, in each case fulfilling a young hero’s task. In The Queen Bee she needed only pick out the youngest of the identical three sisters. In all cases she was most helpful, taking her place among “The Grateful Animals,” which is Aarne-Thompson tale type 554.

These creatures are among the supernatural helpers so prolific in fairy tales. The grateful animals typically appear in sets of three who repay the hero for a kindness shown to them. In our fairy tale of the month they are ants, ducks, and bees, perhaps representing earth (ants), water (ducks), and air (bees). In The Two Travelers the supernatural helpers are a foal, a stork, a duck, and the queen bee (one more helper than the usual pattern allows).

Interestingly, in Rosemaiden the queen bee helps the hero at the beginning of the story entirely out of kindness. Later a raven, a fox, and a fish help the hero, as promised for having saved them in their moment of need.

Often there is only one helpful animal, as in Puss in Boots, where a young man’s inheritance from his father is a cat. The cat speaks to the lad, asking for a pair of boots and a bag, and goes about turning virtually nothing into great wealth for his master. The detail I find most interesting in Puss in Boots is the pair of boots that gives the cat almost human status, allowing him to be presentable to a king.

Another example of a sole animal helper is The Golden Bird. In this tale a fox inexhaustibly aids a foolish young man to win a princess. For his reward he asks the young man to slay him. Reluctantly the youth does, transforming the fox back into his human form, he having been a victim of enchantment. Along this line I could also cite The Frog King, in which the helpful but also annoying frog is actually an enchanted king.

All of these types of helpful and/or grateful animals are largely a European thing. Many other cultures are far less inclined toward talking animals. An animal talking to other animals is fine, but an animal talking to humans can be uncomfortable for non-Europeans. This kind of communication elevates them to human status, much like putting boots on a cat. Talking animals that are actually enchanted humans might be more acceptable, but, generally, talking animals are viewed as unnatural and offensive. At one time Alice in Wonderland was banned in China, largely because Alice conferred with dodos, mice, and mockturtles.

Curious to some other cultures is our willingness to elevate creatures to human status when we are as likely to eat, hunt, swat, or step upon them. What does that say about us?

The lone bee that flew about the October rose has come to settle on the sleeve of my coat. I wait for it to say something profound.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2012 The Blue Light – Part One

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 Anonymous

Revenge

Evenings will often find me in my study. My routine, before I settle into work, is to take down one of the glass canisters of tobacco from the mantle and stuff my pipe. My choice is either Leprechaun Gold, Old Rinkrank, or Black Dwarf. I then light the bowl with my blue light. Actually, with The Blue Light, a gift from Wilhelm.

This story, if a bit like The Three Dogs, or Lars My Lad, or The Iron Man in some of its motifs, has its own distinct elements, not the least being unapologetic revenge.

Our story starts with the scarred and crippled soldier turned out of the king’s army without even the traditional loaf of bread. Near collapse, he begs food and shelter from a witch. She makes him work for his lodgings, one of his tasks being to reclaim her Blue Light from the bottom of a dry well. We are given no description of the Blue Light other than it never goes out.

The witch and the soldier disagree, and our protagonist ends up at the bottom of the dry well, albeit with the Blue Light. When using it to light his pipe it produces a magical black dwarf, who does the soldier’s bidding. Escape is first on the soldier’s mind, quickly followed by revenge on the witch. After consigning her to the gallows, he turns his thoughts to the king.

Having purloined the witch’s gold and established himself comfortably at an inn, the soldier has the black dwarf bring the king’s daughter to him at night to be his serving maid. The abuse of his daughter does not go unnoticed by the king, who succeeds in capturing the culprit despite the black dwarf’s efforts to protect his master from the consequences of such a less-than-admirable trick.

Imprisoned, separated from his Blue Light, the soldier’s last resource is one ducat. This is all he needs to bribe an old comrade of his to retrieve his pipe, tobacco, and Blue Light from the inn. After the king’s judges condemned the soldier to death for his high jinx, he asks to be allowed to have one last pipe. As the smoke rises, the black dwarf appears with a cudgel. In the 1815 version of the story, the black dwarf beats the judges to death, but by 1857 Wilhelm has softened this to simply beating them to the ground. In both versions, the king pleads for leniency and surrenders his kingdom and his daughter to the soldier.

The revenge element is clear and needs no further comment from me. What is not so clear, although it is the central element, is the nature of the Blue Light. I have not encountered a blue light in any other story, yet Aarne-Thompson type 562 is titled “Spirit in the Blue Light.” Heidi Anne Heiner (Sur La Lune) suggests it is a will-of-the-wisp, but I cannot agree. The will-of-the-wisp is seen by, or serves as a guide to, travelers. The Blue Light has more in common with Aladdin’s lamp.

Now and again, an element appears in these fairy tales that (pardon the pun) drops out of the blue. They seem to have no connections, no predecessors, no point. The Blue Light is one of these. The nature of the Blue Light remains at the bottom of the dry well. I have spoken of wells before, and they hold their secrets.

The Blue Light Wilhelm gave me came without the black dwarf. I wonder what he did with the dwarf. Imagine what a research assistant he’d make.

Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2012 The Blue Light – Part Two

About That Dwarf

I have a special affinity for the black dwarf who appears in The Blue Light, I being a Kiernan. That connection is not immediately obvious; it has to do with the meaning behind the name.

As a youth, I looked up the meaning of my surname, part of my adolescent search for identity. The result left me without further insight, there being some ambiguity. Kiernan is an alternate spelling for two Irish names. One is Tighearnaigh, also spelled Tierney, O’Tierney, MacTiernan, MacKiernan, and McKernon. It means “lord or master.” The other is Ciarán, anglicised as Ceiran, Kieran, Kieren, Kieron, or Kiernan, meaning “one of the little dark people.”

The first meaning sounded good to the adolescent me, the other would haunt me the rest of my life. That is the meaning that calls out to me, putting its claim on my soul.

When we think of Ireland we think of the Celtic people, but they came late to the party, waiting until the Iron Age. Before them came the Fomorians, Nemedians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha Dé Danann, and Milesians, if The Book of Invasions is to be trusted. They came as one Bronze Age immigration after another.

My fancy is struck by the Fir Bolg, described as a short, dark-skinned people. I can imagine them (my adopted ancient ancestors) roaming through a still-forested Ireland in a time before any Irishman forged an iron axe or farmed a potato. Across the water came the Tuatha Dé Danann, a tall, lighter-skinned people, who defeated the Fir Bolg, enslaving them or pushing them to the fringes of the land. As the Fir Bolg declined, were absorbed, and disappeared, they remained in the Tuatha Dé Danann memory as hidden, malignant beings, whose religion became dark magic, which they practiced by the light of the moon, populating the nightmares of Tuatha Dé Danann children.

History is repetitive and vengeful. On the sea’s horizon appeared the Milesians, a dark-skinned people from Iberia (Spain). After the Battle of Mag Tuired, the Tuatha Dé Danann withdrew to the fringes. Did they find there the remnants of the Fir Bolg? Did they come face to face with the demons of their dream world?

As the Tuatha Dé Danann disappeared, another world arose to absorb them: the fairy land—a time and place different from Ireland, yet forever tethered to it, the original moorings never lost.

Then arrived the Celts. They came bearing weapons and tools of iron, driving all other cultures before them into the fairy world as their chariots rolled across the land. Perhaps it is not by chance that iron is a talisman against fairy magic. The Celts were the last of the warrior cultures of Ireland. Christianity defeated them with a gentle hand.

Are all the characters of the fairy tales, my black dwarf included, remembrances of otherwise forgotten people? Kings and queens, princes and princesses, millers and farmers, sons and daughters, who once walked this earth, but through no fault of their own are now consigned to the fairy world, often losing their names, and sometimes their shape, becoming elves and dwarves.

These stories may not spring so much from the ingenuity of imagination as from the ageless yet half-forgotten memories of our kind.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2012 The Blue Light – Part Three

Lorenz Frølich

A Popularity Contest

As I sit in my overstuffed chair gazing through smoke drifting up from my bowl of Black Dwarf, and through the bay windows out onto the countryside beyond, I consider why The Blue Light is not more popular.

No one read The Blue Light to me during my childhood. I found it while paging through the table of contents while looking for something else. I see in this story a lot that should carry popular appeal.

Item one: Our protagonist is an underdog. I can’t speak for all audiences, but most hearts will go out to the underdog; certainly mine does. The poor soldier, disabled in service to the king is dismissed by the king because the soldier is no longer serviceable.

“You can go home,” says the monarch. “I don’t need you anymore, and you won’t get any pay because I pay wages only to those who can serve me.”

This fall from grace through no fault of his own, is similar to Cinderella’s loss of status when her father remarries and she is demoted to a scullery maid.

Item two: The soldier has his run-in with a witch, but keeps his wits about him. Although trapped, he escapes and brings about the witch’s demise. I see shades of Hansel and Gretelwhen Gretel keeps her wits about her and defeats the witch. We are always pleased to join in on a round of “Ding dong, the witch is dead.”

Item three: The humble soldier succeeds in outsmarting his supposed superiors. When they think they have the advantage, the soldier becomes a trickster and turns it around. Isn’t this in the same mode as Puss in Boots, who outwits giants and kings?

Item four: “From rags to riches” seldom fails to appeal to us. Our protagonist moves from being a soldier to the status of a king. (Now there’s veteran’s benefits for you.) Again I can evoke comparisons to Cinderella and Puss in Boots.

Why does this resourceful old fellow–down on his luck, but not down and out–not appeal to us? The answer you probably already share with me. We don’t like him.

When the story starts, the soldier has our sympathy. The king’s unfair treatment and the witch’s deceit lead the soldier to think his life is over. When the black dwarf appears, the soldier’s first thought is escape. After that it is all about revenge. We could forgive him for having the witch hung; evil should be punished. But when he takes out his grievance toward the king on the king’s daughter, he crosses the line of civility.

Even when the judges exceed justice, condemning him to death, and the soldier reverses the punishment, it is tit-for-tat. Wilhelm tried to soften the blow (literally) by having the dwarf beat the judges to the ground as opposed to killing them as in the earlier version, but it is too late. The soldier is morally no better than his victims.

A popular hero or heroine must be pure in heart, noble in spirit, and forgiving in nature. Any punishment dealt out to the evil ones needs to be done by other hands or by fate. The hero/heroine’s name cannot be sullied by retribution.

The Blue Light, in attitude, does reflect the real world and how people often do react to travail. But we do not read fairy tales for real-world reflections. That is the role of mainstream fiction. Fairy tales should take us to a different conclusion, getting there by different rules, followed by characters of a nature different from our own. The real world has no right intruding into fairyland.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2012 The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich – Part One

4 Comments

  Warwick Goble

A Kiss

I had been lounging in my study long enough for my evening cup of Lapsang Souchong to grow cold, when my granddaughter, Thalia, wandered in, the edges of her flannel nightgown dragging on the floor, and her battered copy of Favorite Grimm Tales in her hand.

“Read?” she said, with a hint of demand in her voice. I happily obliged. As she settled contentedly in my lap, I opened her book to the first story, “The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich.” After the first few sentences I remembered the story, although I recalled the title as “The Princess and the Frog.”

The story unfolded again, just as it did for me so many years ago. The princess cries by the well into which her golden ball has fallen. Up rises the frog to bargain with the helpless girl. For promises of kindness he dives down into the depths of the well to recover the ball. Thoughtlessly, the princess runs back to the castle, leaving the frog to his well.

I felt, again her agony and embarrassment when the frog intruded upon the castle, demanding entry. Her father, the king, with moral authority, made her fulfill her promises. The frog wheedled his way into eating off of her plate, drinking from her cup, and then to sleeping in her bedroom.

“She picked up the frog with two fingers,” I read to Thalia, “carried him to her room, and climbed into bed, but instead of laying him next to her, she threw him bang! against the wall. ‘Now you will leave me in peace, you ugly frog!’ ”

What! Where’s the kiss? I turned quickly to the title page. The words “Fractured Fairy Tales” did not appear anywhere. Surely this was a jest.

“Read!” This time Thalia was clearly demanding. I finished the story with an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction (And where did this Heinrich guy—faithful servant to the frog, who wore iron bands around his heart—come from?)

Unperturbed by this miscarriage of justice, Thalia gave me a kiss goodnight and swished her flannel way out of my study. I grabbed my Jack Zipes’ translation of the tales and turned to its first story. There to my disappointment stood the wall and no kiss.

After an evening of research (I didn’t get to bed until 3:00 a.m.—thanks Thalia), I uncovered the following facts.

The kiss appears in none of the older variants. When it first appears is not clear, but Maria Tatar implies that it is of American origin.

There are Scottish tales of this motif. “The Queen Who Sought a Drink from a Certain Well,” “The Paddo,” and “The Well of the World’s End.” The common element in these three is that the frog requests to have his head chopped off before transforming into a prince.

Another wonderful variant, from Germany, is “The Enchanted Frog,” which is also a variant of the “Beauty and the Beast” story. The merchant father with three daughters, whose youngest wishes only for a rose, picks a rose from a beast’s garden. The beast is an enormous frog, who demands the young daughter as payment. This Beauty is not as noble as other Beauties, and when the enormous frog’s servants come for her, they drag her kicking and screaming from under her bed where she tries to hide. The frog’s song lulls her and she allows him into her bed.

It is not until the English version of this story, taken from Grimm but altered by Edgar Taylor, that we have a kinder and gentler ending. It is not uncommon for twentieth century versions of fairy tales to have the violence edited out. Taylor’s book appeared in 1823, not ten years after the Grimms’ publication.

I went to sleep that night, to dreams fill with amphibious images, and awoke in the morning with this conviction. All these antique variants, reaching back to the Middle Ages, devoid of the kiss, have no standing with me. They are simply un-American.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2012 The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich -Part Two

 John Batten

Wellspring

I am sitting by a well. This might be in Wales. It could be in Scotland. I am not waiting for a frog to rise up from its depths. It’s not that sort of well. It’s a spring really. There is a stone wall built around it, but the water bubbles to the surface; I can see the bottom.

From where I sit meadowland slopes gently upward. By the well grows an ancient thorn tree covered in bits of rag tied to every branch. I know the meaning of these strips of cloth. They were left by visitors who came to partake of the healing powers of these waters. The rags are offerings, tokens, talismans, left behind as a plea to, and in honor of the spirit of the well. Rags hung in trees, or bent pins thrown into the water, serve to heal aches, sores, and malaise. The practice comes out of pagan beliefs, but most healing wells have been assigned a Christian saint and continue on with their healing nature.

The wells in fairy tales are of a different order. Fairy-tale wells are deeper.

There is a healing well in one of the Grimm stories, “The Water of Life,” in which the three sons of the king seek the well of the Water of Life to heal their father. The eldest sons fail in what the youngest achieves, finding the well in a mysterious castle with the aid of a magical helper. There are no bits of rag around this well.

In “The Queen Who Sought a Drink from a Certain Well,” the daughters are sent out, one by one, to the True Well to bring back healing water for their mother. The well’s guardian, the frog, wants them to marry him in return for the water, to which only the youngest agrees, then tries to avoid the bargain. The matter is settled when she cuts off his head and he transforms into a prince.

I am sure there are other stories with healing wells to be found, but more frequent are young ladies sent off on the impossible task of getting water in a sieve. “Well of the World’s End,” “The Maiden and the Frog,” and “The Horned Women” being three of these. The traditional solution to the problem of carrying water in a sieve is to stop the holes with mud and moss, an unusually practical answer in a world of magic.

Other more ominous wells include the one into which two children fell and were snatched up by a nixie. Then there is the dry well of a witch who abandons a poor solider there when he does not cooperate in retrieving her blue light. In one version of Tamlane, Burd Janet casts her lover, who is in the shape of a flaming sword, into a well, thus breaking the spell put upon him.

Only in our tale of “The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich,” does the golden ball appear, a mere toy, even if made of precious metal, which falls into a well. No sieve, no healing water, no high stakes. That this child, playing with a toy, is a day away from becoming a bride makes this story almost unsettling.

A glimmer of this golden ball appears in “The Three Heads of the Well.” As the maiden sits by the well three golden heads rise to the surface singing,

“Wash me, and comb me,

And lay me down softly.

And lay me on a bank to dry,

That I may look pretty,

When somebody passes by.”

She takes them into her lap, combs their hair with a silver comb, and lays them on a primrose bank. For these courtesies they grant her three boons.

I hope for a little luck myself. I cast a copper coin into the well and make my wish. It is the wish I always make, but one day it may come true.

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2012 The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich – Part Three

Walter Crane

Iron Heinrich

Who is Heinrich, or more to the point, from whence does Heinrich come into the story, “The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich”?

The title would cast him as a central figure in the story, but this is not the case. After the princess has thrown the frog up against the wall, the creature transforms into a prince, who explains to her that in the morning he will take her away to his kingdom. At sunrise a team of eight white horses decorated with ostrich plumes and gold chains arrives drawing a coach. Riding on the back is Iron Heinrich, the young king’s faithful servant, who, we are told, when the prince was turned into a frog had three iron bands wrapped around his heart to keep it from falling apart with grief.

As they drive off to the prince’s castle, three times the prince hears a noise that causes him to think the carriage is breaking, and three times Heinrich tells him it is the bands of iron snapping as his heart swells with joy.

This add-on to the end of the tale has a pleasant ring, but hardly warrants being part of the title. Heinrich is an incidental character, having nothing to do with the inciting incident, the arc of the story, or its climax. Nor does Iron Heinrich appear in any of the other versions.

From whence does Iron Heinrich come? Out of Wilhelm’s head, and proudly he made it part of the title.

In the Grimms’ notes on this story, they cite a variation. A king, who is ill, asks his three daughters for a drink from his well. The eldest draws a glass, but finds it cloudy. A frog hops up, reciting,

“If thou wilt my sweetheart be,

Clear, clear water I’ll give to thee;

But if my love thou wilt not be,

I’ll make it as muddy as muddy can be.”

The two eldest sisters will not consent to the amorous frog, but the youngest does.

That evening the frog comes at her door.

“Open thy door, open thy door,

Princess, youngest princess!

Hast thou forgotten what thou didst say

When I sat by the well this very day,

That thou wouldst my sweetheart be,

If clear, clear water I gave to thee?”

She keeps her promise and on the morning of the third night the spell over the frog is broken.

The Grimms’ notes then refer to a third version in which the prince departs, leaving with his betrothed a handkerchief with his name written in red. If the name turns black, he is either dead or unfaithful.

When the name turns black, she and her sisters disguise themselves as soldiers and join his army. They end up riding behind the prince’s coach when he is about to marry a false bride. The prince hears a noise and declares there is a problem with the carriage. The true bride tells him it is the sound of her heartstrings breaking. On the third sound he finally recognizes her despite her disguise and marries his true bride.

Wilhelm may have gotten the character of Heinrich from the sixteenth century writer, Georg Rollenhagen and his Old German Household Tales. The Grimms’ notes are cryptic and confusing on this point. I can’t find an English translation of Rollenhagen’s work, but the tale appears to be about a war between the frog and mouse kingdoms.

Do my suspicions about Wilhelm messing with the story matter? Not much. Perhaps I am on the trail of one of the changes made to this story, but what about the kiss? Who changed that?

The Grimms liked to put snatches of rhyme into their stories. Let me put one into my blog.

“Stories keep changing, as stories will do.

It happens by chance; it happens on cue.

Somebody changed it; had to, you see.

It might have been Wilhelm; it could be me.”

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2012 Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree – Part One

7 Comments

John D. Batten

Tale Type 709

It is a little cold of Aarne and Thompson to have assigned numbers to fairy tales. I suppose they did it in the spirit of Aristotle, to organize the chaos of those things that have evolved without rules. “Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree” stood in line and received its number, but I see the story as standing alone, having come down a very different and longer path than her fellow 709ers.

The tale starts with a king, his queen, and their beautiful daughter. We are immediately alerted there is something different about this story by the names of the queen and her daughter: Silver-Tree and Gold-Tree (or Craobh-airgid and Craobh-oir in the Gaelic).

“On a certain day of the day” the queen, Silver-Tree, and her daughter, Gold-Tree, visit a glen in which is a well, in which is a trout, who, like the mirror in Grimm’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” informs the queen that Gold-Tree is more fair than she. The queen, enraged, takes to her sickbed, telling the king she will not be cured until she eats the heart and liver of their daughter.

The king (nameless as unusual) proves to be a real guy and comes up with a simple plan he thinks his wife won’t figure out. He sends Gold-Tree off to marry the son of a distant king, and gives his wife the heart and liver of a goat.

I mentioned above that the women visited the trout’s glen “on a certain day of the days.” The queen’s visits to the trout are always a year apart. This does suggest something ceremonial. Combine that with the women’s names, which we might guess have symbolic meaning, and the specter of something half-forgotten shimmers on the path behind this story.

The trout, whom the queen addresses as “Troutie, bonny little fellow,” tells her Gold-Tree yet lives. The queen goes to her husband, the king, saying she wishes to visit Gold-Tree, not having seen her for a long time. (It’s only been a year.) The king, having no suspicions (like I said, a real guy), puts a longship in order for her, and the queen personally takes the helm.

When the queen arrives, the prince is out hunting, and the servants lock Gold-Tree up in her room for protection. However, Gold-Tree relents at the entreaties of her mother, and sticks her little finger out of the keyhole for her mother to kiss. It is, instead, met with a poison “stab,” some sort of splinter apparently.

The prince keeps the body of Gold-Tree locked in a room; given that her beauty does not fade, he cannot bring himself to bury her.

The story goes on to state, “In the course of time he married again … .” This is a little confusing. Within the context of this tale less than a year lapses before Silver-Tree’s next visit to the trout, only to find that Gold-Tree still lives, and she returns to Gold-Tree. The reason Gold-Tree still lives is that the prince’s second wife (unnamed) discovers her and removes the stab, bring Gold-Tree back to life.

When Silver-Tree returns, the prince (guess what) is out hunting. Gold-Tree, as before, is helpless in avoiding her mother, and it is the second wife who tricks Silver-Tree into swallowing her own poison.

In the end, the princes and both his wives live together “pleased and peaceful.”

Tale type 709, “Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree,” standing in line with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?” Aarne and Thompson had their reasons, but I’ll take Gold-Tree’s hand anytime and go stand somewhere else.

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2012 Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree – Part Two

John D.  Batten

Back to the Garden

I found myself sitting in Miss Cox’s garden again. I didn’t remember how I got there, but it is such a pleasant place. I heard the garden gate open and hoped for a moment Miss Cox would come to join me. Instead Alfred Nutt stood at the gate, gently closing it behind him. I recognized him from his photograph in the Folklore Society journal’s remembrance of him after his demise.

He walked straight up to my bench and looked down on me gravely. “I can hear your thoughts on this matter.”

“You mean on Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree?”

“I refer to your wild speculation on their having symbolic meaning.” He sat down beside me and continued. “Have you looked at the variants?”

“Yes. ‘Snow White’ of course, but also ‘The Young Slave,’ ‘Maria, the Wicked Stepmother, and the Seven Robbers,’ and ‘The Crystal Casket.’ ”

Alfred sniffed. “I refer to ‘The Lai of Eliduc,’ ‘Ille et Galeron,’ and the birth of Aed Slane in ‘The Four Masters.’ “

“Oh.”

“In none of these, your list or mine, are there any names remotely similar to Gold-Tree or Silver-Tree. In the ‘Lai of Eliduc’, our hero, Eliduc, a worthy knight, is obliged to venture off to serve an English king, leaving his dearly beloved wife, Guildeluec, in Breton. Eliduc quickly rises in the ranks of his new lord, and is soon in the company of the king’s daughter, Guilliadun.

“Their attraction to each other is unavoidable and fatal. It culminates with Eliduc abducting Guilliadun and attempting to sail back to Breton. A violent storm impedes their passage. Eliduc’s squire declares this to be God’s wrath for Eliduc’s infidelity. Upon hearing this, Guilliadun falls into a deathlike swoon from which she does not arise. Elliduc partly solves his problem by throwing the squire overboard and steering the boat to safety.

“He places Guilliadun’s lifeless, yet still beautiful, body in a chapel, where he visits her daily. Guildeluec, noting her husband’s daily absence and great sadness, discovers the chapel and with the aid of magic restores Guilliadun to life, being more concerned with Eliduc’s happiness than her own. She takes the veil and, in time, Guilliadun and Eliduc follow her in the service of God.”

Alfred paused a moment to collect his thoughts.

“The heroines in ‘Ille et Galeron’, they being Galeron and Ganor, both love Ille,” he continued, “but Galeron steps aside for Ganor and Ille’s happiness. Concerning the birth of Aed Slane, the wives of King Diarmaid, Mairend and Mugain, are not so cooperative.”

I stopped Alfred there. “Guildeluec/Guilliadun, Galeron/Ganor, Mairend/Mugain, Gold-Tree/Silver-Tree…”

“No, no … ” Alfred threw his hands in the air. “You are making suppositions!”

“But I see a pattern. There is a similarity in the names within each pair.”

“That is not enough.” I could see in Alfred’s eyes his struggle with patience.

“If,” he began again, “if you are looking for Gold-Tree/Silver-Tree connections you would do better to search Scandinavian tales. There is one called ‘The Castle by the Silver Wood,’ in which there are trees of both gold and silver color. Evald Tang Kristensen collected a story called ‘Twelve Black Men and Twelve Pairs of Shoes,’ in which appear a grove of silver trees and a grove of gold trees. You will recognize from the title alone its link to ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses,’ but that was of French origin and they threw in a grove of diamonds. The French would, you know.”

Alfred rose abruptly and scowled down at me. “As a folklorist and a celtologist, let me give you a piece of advice.”

“Yes?”

“Keep your thoughts to yourself.” Alfred Nutt turned and let himself out at the gate.

Really, I thought him rather rude.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2012 Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree – Part Three

Polygamy—really?

After my conversation with Mr. Nutt, I felt embarrassed into doing more research. I found an article by him in The Folk-lore, vol 3, 1892. “Lai of Eliduc and the Märchen of Little Snow-White.”

Deep into the article he states, “With regard to the evidence for polygamy among the early Gaels I will cite but one instance … .” That got my attention. He went on to write about the birth of Aed Slane as told in the “Four Masters,” a medieval collection of Irish Annals.

King Diarmaid came to a great gathering of the Gaels, bringing with him his wives Mairend the Bald and Mugain of Munster. Mugain, being jealous of Mairend, contrives a plan to—in public—knock off Mairend’s crown, which she used to hide her baldness. As the crown leaves her head, Mairend cries out, “God and St. Ciaran be my help!” In the next moment she is possessed of long, wavy, golden locks of hair.

Turning on her rival, she curses Mugain, who becomes barren. Mugain now fears Diarmaid will put her aside because she is barren, while—here is the kicker—all of his other wives—note the plural—are fruitful. Desperate, she prays to St. Finden.

Her return to childbearing is a little rough. She first gives birth to a lamb, then a silver trout (There is Troutie again.), and finally Aed Slane, who becomes high king of Ireland.

We must keep in mind Ireland had its own brand of Christianity long before St. Patrick arrived to start bringing them in line with Roman Catholicism, and it would be centuries before the process was complete. Nonetheless, having polygamous relationships and entreaties to the saints coexisting within the same narrative feels a bit exotic.

Alfred Nutt felt that the “Lai of Eliduc” and “Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree” drew from a common source. The Lai, written down and probably Christianized by Marie de France in the 12th century, was a medieval romance. Apparently, she, or perhaps her source, solved the polygamy problem by having the first wife decide to become a nun. In fact, Eliduc founds an abbey for her. Layering it on, the tale has Eliduc, later in life, also found a church, and dedicate himself to God, while Guilliadun joins Guildeleuc in the abbey, the three of them exhorting each other to the love of God.

What I found of particular interest is the survival of the polygamy part of the Gold-Tree/Silver-Tree tale. With the writing down of the Eliduc story by Marie de France, a Christian sentiment has crept into a much older story. Nutt claims, from the internal evidence, the story must date at least to 1056 AD, and probably is much older. As is natural, the Lai has taken on the values of the time and place in which it exists. This is how stories change and evolve.

“Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree” on the other hand, was collected not back in the 12th century, but around 1888 by Kenneth Macleod, the polygamy element very much intact.

What happened to stories adapting to their new environment? What happened to stories passing along the values of that society? Is this throwback a racial memory of a practice now gone by a thousand years?

I am sure Alfred will think I make too much of this, but I will state nonetheless, “How curious.”

Your thoughts?

PS. My thanks to Stephen Badman for pointing out the gold tree/silver tree motifs in the Danish tales.

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2012 Snow White – Part One

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 Charles Folkard

What Tales Tell

Many a fairy tale can be found between the hard bindings of forgotten books, collections made over the past four centuries to keep those tales from disappearing entirely. Still, they lurk in the darkness of a closed book, rarely seeing light spilling across the open page.

They are the lucky ones.

The popular tales suffer a worse fate. Stories like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” have been rewritten by Disney, dissected by Bruno Bettelheim, paired with The Three Stooges (Yes, Snow White and the Three Stooges, 20th Century Fox, 1961), and recently recast by Universal, until the popular culture would hardly recognize the Grimm version.

The story starts with one of my favorite motifs, the wish for a child or lover who embodies the colors white, red, and black. Black enters the picture in various ways, sometimes as a crow, but in our story as the black ebony frame of the window, through which Snow White’s mother-to-be peers at drops of her own blood on the snow below. In this motif the red and white are, invariably, blood on the snow.

When the wished-for child is born, the mother dies. A year later the king remarries (and exits from the story as fathers are wont to do in Grimm tales). At the tender age of seven, Snow White is declared to be “a thousand times more fair” than her stepmother by the latter’s own magic mirror. The stepmother/queen’s all-consuming vanity leads her to instruct her huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and kill her, returning with the girl’s lungs and liver for the queen to consume.

The huntsman takes pity on Snow White and allows her to flee, assuming she will be killed by forest beasts, but at least not by his hand. He returns to the queen with the lungs and liver of a boar and exits the story, I will guess, through the same door as the king. Snow White ends up in the home of the seven dwarves, entering their abode through a process strikingly similar to that of Goldilocks’ entrance into the home of the three bears, but with more agreeable results.

As the dwarves warn their new housekeeper, it isn’t long before the queen’s mirror is telling her where to find Snow White: in the home of the seven dwarves, which is, interestingly, over seven mountains.

Three times the queen, in disguise, attempts to kill Snow White: with staylaces drawn so tight as to take the breath away, a poisoned comb put into the hair, and, finally, a poisoned apple.

The dwarves thwart the first two attempts, but are at a loss to find the piece of apple in Snow White’s throat. When her beauty does not fade, they cannot bring themselves to bury her, but put her in a glass coffin over which one of them always stands guard. The glass coffin eventually is given as a gift to an admiring and romantic prince, who with a—no, not a kiss. It’s his bumbling servants, who nearly drop the glass coffin, but succeed in jolting the piece of apple from Snow White’s throat. She revives and is happily married to the prince. The stepmother/queen reluctantly comes to the wedding, where she in forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she drops down dead.

You know, all in all, the Disney version is a lot kinder and gentler. Universal’s rather graphic take is closer in spirit, if not in word, to the Grimms’. What might that say about Germany in 1815, America in 1937, and again in 2012? (I’ll skip 1961.)

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2012 Snow White – Part Two

 Kay Nielsen

A Late-Night Snack

I am standing in front of my refrigerator, a box of Wheat Thins in hand, eyeing the plastic container of liver patè. I hold the door open, transfixed, my stomach growling, my thoughts leaping to the image of the evil queen thinking she is eating the lungs and liver of the innocent Snow White.

The Grimms never shied away from violence in their tales (much to the consternation of modern-day parents), particularly when it came as retribution for evil acts. Corporal punishment remained an acceptable norm well into the nineteenth century, fading as a practice in western society through the twentieth century. That the Grimms had their villains physically punished should not surprise us.

But cannibalism? The Grimms addressed a bourgeois audience. Certainly cannibalism did not enter into their day-to-day reality. I will guess the Queen’s request for Snow White’s lungs and liver came across as shocking to the Grimms’ first readers as it does today.

Fairy tales use cannibalism to exaggerate the evilness of the villain—no, I must correct myself, exaggerate the evilness of the villainess. In the tales, that crime is always committed by a woman.

In “Hansel and Gretel” a witch craves to eat Hansel. Looking farther afield, Baba Yaga is known to have an appetite for little children. (This cannibalism is not just a Grimm thing.) In “The Juniper Tree” the wife disguises her stepson’s murder by feeding the body to her husband.

In a variant on the cannibal theme, the heroine is falsely accused of eating her children. This comes up in “The Virgin Mary’s Child.” To punish a young queen for not confessing her sins, the Virgin takes away the queen’s children, after which the palace gossips accuse the queen of eating her offspring. Another example occurs in “The Six Swans” when the silent heroine’s children are stolen by the mother-in-law, who smears the girl’s lips with blood while she sleeps.

Never is the hero accused of eating his children, or consuming anyone else.

“Blue Beard” (Grimm) and “Mr. Fox” (English) get very close to, but are not accused of, eating their brides. All the remains appear to be in the forbidden room as keepsakes, hardly less abominable than the eating of human flesh, but, nevertheless, remains of the crime of murder.

There are other characters in fairy tales that like to feast on humans: wolves, giants, ogres, and trolls; but, to be cannibal, one must eat one’s own species.

I finally close the refrigerator door, now with the liver patè container in my hand. I read the ingredients; whose liver is this?

That the tales purport cannibalism to be a female trait casts an ominous shadow on the story landscape. What is being said? Why is this most monstrous act reserved for woman? I haven’t a clue, but I have lost my taste for patè. I think I’ll just eat one of those apples I bought at the farmers’ market from that old hag.

Then again, maybe I won’t.

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2012 Snow White – Part Three

 Walter Crane

In the Mind’s Eye

Fairy tales deal in images. More precisely they get the listener to create their own images. The tales give us the barest, sketchiest outline of the setting and characters: once upon a time there lived a poor fisherman, or there lived a king with a lovely daughter. The listener fills in with their fisherman (does he carry a net or a fishing pole?) or their idea of a lovely daughter (raven black hair or hair of spun gold?).

On occasion the tales will give us something more complete, Snow White and her dwarves being one of these. We know from her mother’s wishes, she has hair black as ebony, skin white as snow, and lips as red as blood. Around her gather seven ugly, bearded, kindly dwarves. The contrast between her and her companions is so engaging it fires the imagination.

It fired the imaginations of the Disney animators and writers, who, perhaps to our disadvantage, supplied us with all the details of that image, including the dwarves’ names (Sneezy, Sleepy, Dopey, Doc, Happy, Bashful, and Grumpy, just to review), supplanting anything we might have come up with.

This image of Snow White and the dwarves has become so familiar that we tend to forget one of its non-traits. The seven dwarves do not constitute a motif.

There is no mention of dwarves in the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves variants (Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 709) listed on D. L. Ashiman’s very useful site.

One of the variants on Ashiman’s list is “Maria, the Wicked Stepmother, and the Seven Robbers” (Italy). Maria, in Hansel and Gretel fashion, avoids her stepmother’s first attempt to abandon her in the forest, but ends up in the home of seven robbers after the second try. Like the dwarves, the seven robbers assist the poor girl, but the stepmother is not done with her, and Maria turns up in a coffin to be found by a king.

In another Italian variant on Ashiman’s list, “The Crystal Casket,” our heroine, Ermellina, falls from grace in a manner similar to Grimm’s “Three Forest Gnomes” until rescued by an eagle who deposits her among helpful fairies (number of which is not given.) Despite the fairies’ warnings, the stepmother has her way, and as the title suggests, Ermellina is confined to the ubiquitous coffin until rescued.

“The Young Slave” (Italy again, via Giambattista Basile) has a strange variation on the Sleeping Beauty motif at the start of the tale, but has no collection of benevolent helpers anywhere in sight.

I want to say the seven dwarves appear to be unique, and exist nowhere else in the story realm. Alas, it is not true. Ashiman, at the bottom of his list, gives us a link to “The Death of the Seven Dwarves” (Switzerland). In this tale a pretty peasant girl, seeking shelter for the night, comes to the home of seven dwarves, who live on the edge of the Black Forest. They grant her entree, but, when an old woman shows up requesting the same, the girl answers the door explaining that the seven dwarves have only seven beds and there is no room for more sleepers. The old woman does the math and accuses her of being a slut. Enraged, the old woman returns that night with two men who break down the door, murder the dwarves, and burn down their house. What happens to the pretty peasant girl is not stated.

I didn’t start to write this blog post to malign the Swiss, but perhaps they had better stick to watches, cheese, and neutrality, and leave fairy tales to abler hands.

Your thoughts?

PS. Ashiman also listed “Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree” (Scotland) as a variant. It differs substantially from the other variants (no coffin), and is worthy of my time and its own blog post.

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2012 Cinderella – Part One

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 Edmund Dulac

Miss Cox’s Garden

As soon as I started my research for this month’s blog, I came across Cinderella, Three Hundred and Forty-five Variants, by Marian Roalfe Cox (1893). Miss Cox, a self-educated, reclusive folklorist, pioneered studies in folklore morphology (the study of folklore and fairy tale structure), easily outclassing her fellow folklorists in this approach in both volume and content. She is really little known, although other scholars have drawn on her research, including Alan Dundes in his Cinderella, A Casebook.

The introduction to Miss Cox’s book was written by the highly respected Andrew Lang. I believe it is the oddest introduction I have ever encountered. It is seventeen pages long: for the first four pages, he all but dismisses the work at hand, then spends the next thirteen pages ranting about what Joseph Jacobs and Emmanuel Cosquin said about his theories at the latest Folklore Congress in 1891.

For us folk and fairy tale addicts who have not joined FFTA (Folk and Fairy Tales Anonymous) and who are subject to bouts of deja vu, it is people like Marian Roalfe Cox, and her fellow proponents of morphology (Vladimir Propp, Antti Aarne, and Stith Thompson et al), who have come to our rescue to say, “No, you are not crazy, you have read this before. They are called variants and here are the patterns they fall into.” (The above mentioned heroes also share in common names that are nearly impossible to remember how to spell.)

In the case of Cinderella, Miss Cox identifies three patterns. The “Ill-Treated Heroine” is the one with the shoe. In this motif the heroine, once of a higher station, has fallen to servant status. With the aid of a helper—mother’s spirit or fairy godmother—she becomes, for a short time, presentable for a ball or to attend church. She returns to her state of poverty, but not before leaving behind a token that her future husband uses to reclaim her. At the end of the story, if this is a Charles Perrault tale, the heroine’s tormentors share in her good luck, but are now beholden to her. If this is the Brothers Grimm, their eyes are plucked out.

In the second variant, the “Catskins-like” versions, the heroine has fallen from grace when she flees from the designs put upon her by her father, designs often of sexual intent. In the actual Catskins story, she disguises herself by blackening her skin and wearing a robe of animal skins. She brings with her three magnificent gowns, used to make herself presentable to royalty. She appears alternately as a mysterious noble woman and as a maid cleaning up the ashes in the kitchen, until discovered and married to the king.

The “Cap O’ Rushes” (King Lear) pattern is very similar, except that the heroine has been cast out for saying she loves her father as meat loves salt, her father not thinking that sufficient praise. After his daughter’s travail and rise, he is invited to attend the royal wedding, the identity of the bride unknown to him. The heroine arranges to have the wedding feast served unseasoned. In the middle of the meal, the father bursts out crying, confessing his error in judgment. The daughter reveals herself and all ends happily.

Keeping those story patterns in mind, we approach the tales prepared to recognize and draw comfort, rather than confusion, from their sameness. Others have done the hard work of classifying the tales. I like to think of Miss Cox tending her formal Victorian flower garden, her zinnias all in a row, as we bees flitter from bloom to bloom drawing what nectar we will.

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2012 Cinderella – Part Two

 Elenore Abbot

Three Dresses

The three hundred and forty-five Cinderella-like stories that Marian Cox identifies as being related draw some of their similarity from a pool of images: a maiden disguised, working in the kitchen, peeking into the great hall, losing a shoe in her retreat.

One of the images common to this group of stories is the wearing of three dresses. In “Cinderella,” both Perrault’s and the Grimms’ versions, the heroine, on three successive evenings, is dressed in gowns of precious materials, each dress grander than the one she wore the night before. Although her stepsisters are at the ball, they do not recognize her. Perrault makes a point of this by having Cinderella sit with these women and share oranges and citrons with them without their recognizing her.

In “Catskins” the heroine blackens her skin, which is more convincing to us as a disguise, but in “Cap O’ Rushes” she wears a dress and a headpiece made of reeds to cover her real dress and her hair, unafraid that her natural beauty will show through and give her away. Even when she is the center of attention at her wedding, her father still does not recognize her until she reveals herself.

Does this suggest that clothes have transformative properties? The special clothing of the maidens has better than usual origins.

In “A Sprig of Rosemary,” a tale I blogged about earlier, the heroine is given three articles of clothing stored inside nut shells (for the purpose of trading rather than to wear herself). She receives a mantle from the sun, a petticoat from the moon, and a gown from the stars.

Let’s take a closer look at “Catskins.” Besides her animal-skin robe that she hides behind, she had her father acquire for her three gowns: one as golden as the sun, another as silver as the moon, and the third as sparkling as the stars.

This sort of thing keeps happening in many of the variants, and the celestial connection between the clothes and their luminary counterparts is pretty clear.

We can even measure the degree of magical powers in the gowns from story to story. Catskins got her gowns from her father. Not too magical. She has to go to the elaborate length of blackening her skin, then cleaning herself before going to the ball, in order not to be recognized. Cinderella’s gowns are completely magical, and she boldly sits with her stepsisters unconcerned, apparently understanding her transformation.

I am going to avoid the temptation to say that these women are defined by their clothes (also turning a deaf ear to Mark Twain’s comment that clothing makes the man; naked people have little or no influence in society). I’ll suggest these magical gowns are transforming the maidens into beings beyond their former selves. Are they, perhaps, changing from maidens into adult women?

The change is not sudden; it comes and goes three times, each event progressively grander in some way. The maidens are rather coy, not giving themselves away too quickly. With the celestial bodies’ influences, maybe there are stars in their eyes. Notice the pattern of ups and downs, from being perfect in appearance and the center of attention to returning to the kitchen, back to drudgery and sitting among the ashes.

Sounds like dating to me.

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2012 Cinderella – Part Three

 

 Cypripedium reginae The Botanical Magazine, 1793
Tokens and Keys

I am strolling through Miss Cox’s flower garden and cannot help but notice her row of lady slippers just beyond the fairy ring in the lawn. Cinderella’s glass slipper comes to my mind. The glass slipper, as far as I know, was Charles Perrault’s invention, though there have been many a lost shoe before it, but nothing quite so exotic.

Footwear is well represented in folklore, fairy tales, and other stories: “The Red Shoes,” “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” and “Puss in Boots,” to list a few. But this is not what I am thinking about.

I am now looking at her roses. They come up so often in fairy tales as tokens of love. Perrault’s glass slipper is a token. So are the other shoes and slippers in the other Cinderella tales, but a glass slipper, a fanciful item, best exemplifies its token nature.

The glass slipper represents Cinderella in her transformed state, even as she slips back to her lower status. The slipper embodies all the glamour of Cinderella at the ball. I use the word “glamour” in its broadest sense: as a spectacle and as a spell. (Glamour: Enchantment; a supposed influence of a charm on the eye, causing it to see objects under an unreal semblance; hence, anything that obscures or deceives vision, physical or mental; fascination; charm; witchery…Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia.) The prince claims this token, a small remembrance of the beauty that has slipped away. There is something satisfying about the slipper remaining after all else has lost its glamour.

In “Catskins” and “Cap O’ Rushes” the token is usually a ring that is the heroine’s or has been given to her by her beloved. The ring comes back to the suitor in his food, often a bowl of soup or gruel (gruel, if he is lovesick and pining away). While the ring/food connection is vague, the heroine is invariably in the kitchen as some sort of wench, giving her the opportunity to give these little gifts.

Now I’m sitting on a stone bench under an arbor of wisteria. Before me stands a stone table. Upon the table lies a leather-bound book complete with leather strap and a lock. I reach into my pocket for the key.

All the tokens I’ve thought about are also keys, used to unlock the mysterious identity of the beauty who fled the dance before it ended. The reason for her flight may not be clear. Perrault’s Cinderella must leave by midnight before the glamour ends. The other variants usually do not have that limitation. Although we are not told, we sense it is the heroines’ timidity, or uncertainty, that drives them back into hiding.

Without the token, without the key, the prince or the king would not have the means to reveal the heroine’s identity and declare their marriage. She does not quite have the strength, or confidence, or magic to break the pattern she has fallen into. The token is the key to her happiness.

I reach out, take the leather book in hand, and turn the key in its lock. Out fly pixies, like a swarm of bees that scatter themselves though the garden, hiding in moments under the lady slippers, the zinnias, the roses, even the tiny bluebells. I needn’t count the pixies. I trust there are three hundred and forty-five of them.

Your thoughts?

Aside

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2012 Rumpelstiltskin – Part One

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Image Walter Crane

Before Sunrise

I became uncomfortable the other evening, just after Wilhelm left my study, when I realized magic works best at night. I would like to think better of magic, seeing it happen in the full light of day. And it can happen that way, but magic prefers the night or at least the darkness of a dungeon, a cave, or the bottom of a well.

With that thought rolling around in my head, I found myself thumbing through Household Tales, when my eyes fell upon that strange name, “Rumpelstiltskin.”

In the Grimms’ version of this tale, the poor miller’s daughter is put in harm’s way—again as the motif will have it—by her father. This time he brags to the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The next day the girl is locked up by the king to perform this task before the morrow or die. Her life is at risk, not that of her false-worded father, who, having done his damage, exits the story.

Imprisoned in a room filled with straw and a spinning wheel, the girl, naturally, sits down to cry, when through the locked door comes a “manikin.” We are left to decide if this is a dwarf, imp, or elf. It offers to do the spinning for a price. The pattern is set for three nights running, the price escalating from a necklace, to a ring, then to her firstborn. The reward also moves from not being killed to marrying the king.

When payment comes due, the manikin reappears to collect the now queen’s firstborn son. Dickering ensues and, unaccountably, the manikin offers to relent if she can guess his name during the course of three days.

Before the third day ends, the queen’s servant, burdened with the task of collecting names, returns with the odd story of a little man dancing around a fire, reciting:

“To-day I bake, to-morrow brew,
The next I’ll have the young Queen’s child.
Ha! Glad am I that no one knew
That Rumpelstiltskin I am styled.”

The game is over, the queen has won, and Rumpelstiltskin, in a rage, tears himself in two, another of the Grimms’ messy endings.

Although the story does not say so, all of Rumpelstiltskin’s visits appear to occur in the evening. The story certainly states he worked all night spinning straw into gold. This story serves as a typical example of magic happening at night. One might also recall the night shift of the shoemaker’s elves, Cinderella’s magic evening out, the prince of “Kate Crackernut” forced by fairies to dance every night to the point of exhaustion.

Why at night?

Let us step back for a moment and view all of the fairy-tale landscape. Like churches sitting close to every village, magic appears in every fairy tale. If there is no magic, there is no fairy tale; a folk tale, perhaps, but not a fairy tale.

What kind of magic? Usually black magic. White magic is the stuff of charms and wearing of garlic to ward off evil—invoking, asking magic. Black magic, for good or ill, is used to spin straw into gold—evoking, commanding magic.

Now let us ask, why, historically, have we told stories of black magic to children? My answer is that it has nothing to do with the amusement of children. It has to do with the culture (church-dominated) wanting to diminish the reputation of black magic, along with its pagan associations. If relegated to children’s stories, it is no longer a thing to be taken seriously.

The process of diminishing through storytelling happened to Fionn mac Cumhaill, the larger-than-life pre-Christian Irish hero, who became reduced through Christian tellers to a bumbling giant given to sucking his thumb.

Fairy tales are a safe place for the culture to store magic. Still, it is not reputable and needs to be put, within the stories, in its proper place—in the dark, out of sight.

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2012 Rumpelstiltskin – Part Two

Image Kay Nielsen

The Plot Never Thickens

Fairy tales share common features with other written works of popular literature. Typically a good story has a beginning, middle, and end. There is a protagonist, hopefully a character with whom we can identify. Most popular fiction stories have a villain or something villainous. Other typical elements are the call to adventure, refusal of the call, crossing the threshold, road of trials, etc. (Go Google the hero’s journey and Joseph Campbell.)

There is one element in fairy tales that is not typically shared with other forms of popular fiction, not even fantasy. Fairy tales have holes in their plots you can fly a dragon through.

It is not uncommon for writers to take fairy tales as inspiration for novels, particularly young adult fantasy, Beauty, by Robin McKinley, being an example. One of the first tasks these writers face is the need to repair the plot so that it can sustain a work of novel length and complexity.

In “Rumpelstiltskin” let’s consider the scene between the manikin and the queen, when he comes to claim the child. I think we can safely assume he does not have a driving desire to take on responsibilities as a single parent. The closest we come to his intent is his statement: “…something living is more important to me than all the treasures in the world.” We are not told what he will do with the child, but we can guess it is nefarious.

What is his motive for inventing the guessing game? There is nothing in it to profit him. It delays by three days his acquisition of the child. Is there pity in his heart? That would be out of character. Perhaps he is playing with the queen, but, plotwise, that is weak motivation. I’d call it, in a novel, bad writing.

Let’s extrapolate a bit beyond the story’s actual plot. What happens, after the demise of Rumpelstiltskin, when the king says, “Dear, can you spin a little more gold?”

Actually, I’ve thought of a clever way around that dilemma for the queen. She would look at the king in feigned surprise and say, “My dear, only maidens can spin straw into gold. You and I have a son. He is your treasure.”

However, my self-proclaimed cleverness comes to nothing for solving this problem in our fairy tale. I am answering a question that doesn’t exist.

Here is my point. We don’t expect fairy tales to have good plots. We don’t ask them to have good plots. We may not want them to have good plots.

Fairy tales are “What if” stories, with tunnel vision, involving magic. What if you were asked—no, commanded—to spin straw into gold? That it cannot be done does not enter into consideration. All impossible tasks are accomplished in this genre. All sorts of conveniences are laid in the path of the protagonist. That servant of the queen just happened to hear the manikin singing his name as he danced around his fire.

“And they lived happily ever after.” Isn’t that a huge cliché to stick at the end of the plot? Yet it’s one that we expect to hear, and crave to hear, in our fairy tales.

We don’t want a reality check screwing up our fairy tales. Notice how the Grimms almost never put their stories in a given time or place. The only exception that comes to my mind is “The Bremen Town Musicians,” and those “musicians” never get to Bremen Town.

I believe the magic in fairy tales does not come from the turning of straw into gold, but rather being freed from the shackles of solid plot and believable motivations.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2012 Rumpelstiltskin – Part Three

Image

John D. Batten

Secret Names

One needs to be careful when dealing with names that may evoke dark spirits. Craving to know the meaning behind a particularly mysterious name, I drew a white chalk circle on the floor around myself. Within its protection I cast the runes until they spelled out “Rumpelstiltskin.” (Well, actually, I tapped them out on the laptop.)

As I hoped, my command was answered by that benevolent spirit, Wiki, who, in a shimmering voice like warm vapors, patiently explained to this mere mortal the following:

“The name Rumpelstilzchen in German means literally “little rattle stilt.” (A stilt is a post or pole which provides support for a structure.) A rumpelstilt or rumpelstilz was the name of a type of goblin, also called a pophart or poppart that makes noises by rattling posts and rapping on planks. …. The ending “-chen” is a German diminutive and designates something as “little” or “dear,” depending on context.”

The meaning behind a name is interesting, but its power resides in the name itself. In evocative magic, if one knows the name of a demon, one can summon it and have it do one’s bidding. This is never a safe thing to do. Demons are dangerous, tricky beings. Any sorcerer who knows his craft will do his summoning standing within the protective confines of a pentacle (a five- pointed star within a circle drawn on the ground.)

In a number of cultures, individuals have a name by which they are known, but also have a secret true name, often given to them at puberty. To know that name is to have the power to cast charms over that person.

The contest between the queen and Rumpelstiltskin fell within the circle of a power struggle. The condition of the queen gaining control had always been there; the manikin simply made a game of it, never thinking she would find out his name through his own careless act of uttering it aloud. Then, rather than be controlled by the queen, he destroyed himself.

I sat in my chalk circle contemplating the nature of secret names long after the spirit of Wiki had faded. Did I have a secret name and not know it? Could some other entity discover it and henceforth control me?

No. We live in a modern civilized society, no longer given to superstitious constructions of reality that dictate the need for secret names to protect us from evil spirits or to control those same spirits. We have no need for secret names.

Then the full horror came to me. I have many secret names! My Social Security number, my PIN number, my Visa card number, and my computer password (letters and numbers), any of which can be discovered. My chalk circle is dust; it cannot protect me. With that many secret names, is it only time until one of them is revealed? Shall I tear myself in two and join Rumpelstiltskin?

I then understood how this tale relates to the modern world. Though written so long ago, it calls forth our present. “Rumpelstilskin” is the origin story of Identity Theft.

Your thoughts?

 

PS. While researching I found the Grimms’ oral collected version had Rumpelstiltskin traveling about riding in a cooking ladle, an image the Grimms edited out of their printed version. I am going to have to talk to Wilhelm about that the next time I see him.

Fairy Tale of the Month: March 2012 The Turnip Princess – Part One

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 Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin “Turnip Cleaner”
Of Turnips and Princesses

            The fairy tale world is all aflutter with the news coming to us via The Guardian (UK) that five hundred fairy tales have awakened from a one hundred and fifty year slumber in their castle surrounded by a thorn thicket.

OK, they were in thirty some boxes collecting dust in a municipal archive in Regensburg, Germany. The prince who slashed his way through the thorn thicket … ahem, the researcher who slashed her way through the thorn thicket was the scholar Erika Eichenseer. That happened around 2008. In 2010 she published a book, Prinz Roßwifl, (in German) with selections from this archive, a work apparently now out of print. We (English speakers) belatedly heard about it because of the Guardian article that has a link to one of the tales, “The Turnip Princess,” translated into English.

In this raw and disjointed tale, a lost prince takes shelter in a cave, where he is entrapped by a witch. With the witch are a bear and a dog. The dog disappears entirely from the tale, but the bear is central. He tells the prince to pull a rusty nail from the cave wall to break the spell over the bear and then to place the nail under a turnip, thereby finding a bride.

Alas, a monster (whom we never hear of again either after its first appearance) frightens the prince out of the turnip field. The nail is lost and the prince falls into a deep, long slumber. Upon awakening, the prince seeks the nail, eventually finding it one morning in the shell of a turnip he had pierced with a blackthorn branch the evening before. He sees, imprinted on the inside of the turnip shell, the shape of a beautiful girl.

Returning to the cave, he reinserts the nail into the wall, evoking the witch and the bear. The witch turns out to be the beautiful girl from the turnip and the bear the prince’s father. The nail disappears in a burst of flame.

OK, then. Who collected this one? Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (this link is in German. If you are using Google Cromo it will offer to translate).  And who was he? An avid collector of Bavarian folk tales, legends, traditions, and customs. The Grimms had high regard for Von Schönwerth. Jacob reportedly told King Maximilian II of Bavaria that only Von Schönwerth could replace him and his brother given Von Schönwerth’s accuracy, thoroughness, and sensitivity. This was not a recommendation, but rather an observation. The King knew Von Schönwerth very well. Von Schönwerth had been his private secretary before the King’s accession, then his cabinet chief, and later a councilor in the Financial Ministry. Cushy jobs apparently, allowing Von Schönwerth to wander around the countryside collecting thirty boxes worth of notes on peasant life. He put some of it into three volumes called Aus der Oberpfalz — Sitten und Sagen (available as a free Kindle book on Amazon). It slipped quickly into obscurity despite the Grimms’ enthusiasm for his work.

If the fairy dust raised by all the recent fuss made about these tales has settled on you, as it has on me, you will want to know more. Maria Tatar has something to say about it in her blog on the New Yorker site and Jack Zipes has weighed in from Sussex. Both of these are informative reads.

Fairy Tale of the Month: March 2012 The Turnip Princess – Part Two


Wilhelm Grimm

In the Spirit of Wilhelm

More than once, the term “raw” has been used in describing the tales thatFranz Xaver von Schönwerth collected. “The Turnip Princess” is a good example.

This tale seems raw because it does not adhere to literary rules. The events in the story do not segue neatly, nor logically, from one to the other. Unnecessary and confusing details appear while other details go missing, creating a plotline that feels disjointed and surreal. Had Von Schönwerth’s informant been relating a dream, I would not be surprised.

Perhaps our view of this tale as “raw” comes from our expectations. There are familiar literary forms we want all stories to follow. At the very least, we want the storyline to make sense. That doesn’t seem too much to ask, but is it a requirement for nonliterary tellers and listeners? Might they be as comfortable with “dream logic,” having dreamt, but never having read a book?

Be that as it may, we literates do have our requirements. Wilhelm agrees with me. He is here in my study as I take my first stabs at making sense of “The Turnip Princess.”

Taking my pen in hand, I suggest, “Once upon a time …?” Wilhelm, pacing back and forth in front of the bay window, makes a noncommittal gesture.

“Once there was a prince,” I propose. Wilhelm raises his forefinger in the air approvingly.

“Right then,” I say. “The prince is lost, but why? The story gives no reason. Is he out hunting and became separated from his party?” Wilhelm looks thoughtfully out the bay window. I continue. “Is he on some sort of quest… Ahh, I’ve got it!”

Wilhelm looks at me quizzically, as I continue triumphantly. “At the end of the story it seems that the bear has changed, unaccountably, into the prince’s father. Why not have the prince on a quest to find his father, who has disappeared many years ago. That lends the story a traditional circular structure. The prince starts out to find his father—the king—and in the end not only finds his father but his bride as well through his persistence.” Wilhelm silently applauds.

“Good then. When he wakes up in the cave there is a witch, a bear, and a dog, but the dog has no role in the story.” Wilhelm draws his finger across his neck.

“Right,” I say. “We kill the dog. The reader will never know.” By Wilhelm, I think to myself, This is beginning to shape up!

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: March 2012 The Turnip Princess – Part Three


Avenue of Chestnut Trees

The Language Divide

I feel that Jack Zipes, well known among folklore scholars, has the advantage of a panoramic view of the fairy-tale forest. He leaves me disgruntled with my realization I’ve been staring at a fairy tree.

In his note on the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy site, Professor Zipes presents me with a laundry list of other early collectors, whom he prefers over Von Schönwerth, a list of names that rings not a single bell in my head. These authors are German and French, and their works written in those languages. I am one of those wimpy Americans who hasn’t bothered to learn another language. Well, a lot of us aren’t near any borders and have been told that English is a universal language. Why make the effort?

Not knowing other languages, I find myself in a deep, dark forest and a little depressed to discover I cannot comprehend its myriad paths. But I do have a candle and there is a signpost with many arrows. How many miles to Babylon?

To guide me through tales from other languages there are good translations of the Brothers Grimm, Jack Zipes’ being one of them. Charles Perrault’s versions of many fairy tales that he wrote for the French court are well covered in translation. Then there is the Decameron of Boccaccio for tales from Italy. (Actually, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Old English sounds rather foreign to most of us.) Celtic and Gaelic stories are easily available via Joseph Jacobs, Jeremiah Curtain, Thomas Croker, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Lady Wilde, Sir George Douglas and others.

Andrew Lang’s colored fairy books contain a wide range of tales from all over the world. Sir Richard Burton’s (not the actor) One Thousand and One Nights is a classic of Arabian tales not to be overlooked. Far less known, but a favorite of mine, is R. M. Dawkins’ Modern Greek Folktales and More Greek Folktales. Dawkins’ works are examples of books out of print, but not in the public domain, which makes them expensive and hard to find.

Public domain books are another matter. We used to depend on Dover Publications for these titles, but no longer. Dover puts out a number of fairy tale collections in trade-paper format. However, if you make the techno-leap to electronic books there are numerous titles of all genres for free, including many cultural folklore collections. The big three for free books in the public domain are Amazon, Google Books and The Gutenberg Project. These free books come in many different formats that may or may not work on your devices. There are conversion programs out there, such as Calibre, that are free. Kindle will read PDFs, but the type is small and cannot take advantage of most of Kindle’s features. Calibre can convert PDFs to MOBIs (a Kindle-readable format), but I have had variable success. Free is not necessarily easy.

With all these translations, we must stay conscious of “fakelore,” against which Eliot Singer has warned us. A certain amount of cultural bias cannot help but creep into translations. In a conversation with Native American storyteller Dovie Thomason, I asked about nonnative Americans telling those stories that do not “belong” to them. She replied, “If I were to tell a Polish tale, it would have a Lakota spin on it.”

I am sure I have missed some authors/collectors worthy of mention, but having written the above, I think I see some light filtering through the dark canopy of the fairy-tale forest above my head.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: Feb. 2012 The Maiden Without Hands – Part One

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 John Constable   The Mill

A little rain must fall

            I am walking down a muddy path. I have been avoiding it for at least a year. Turn from it, though I have, the path remains and will not disappear until I have walked it. It’s the same path taken by “The Maiden Without Hands” so long ago. Who put us on this path? Wilhelm Grimm.

            The bones of “The Maiden Without Hands” are these: A miller, unwittingly, makes a pact with the devil to give him what stands behind the mill in exchange for wealth. The miller thinks it is the old apple tree, but the devil is thinking of the miller’s daughter, who at the time of their pact is cleaning the yard around the apple tree.

            To thwart the devil, the maiden cleanses herself and stands in a circle drawn on the ground. Furious, the devil demands that the miller not allow his daughter to wash. On the second day she has washed her hands with her tears. The devil demands the miller cut off her hands, which he does out of fear of the devil. Tears, again, are sufficient to clean the stumps of her arms, and the devil departs.

            The maiden leaves her father, wandering out into the greater world, where she is helped by an angel to find food—a pear from a tree in the king’s garden. There the king discovers her and they are soon married

            She bears him a son while the king is in a distant land, and the exchange of letters between the king’s mother and the king are intercepted by the devil. This ends with the king’s mother thinking her son wants the queen and the child killed. Instead she allows them to escape. The angel reappears and gives them shelter.

            Upon return, the king discovers the mistakes and goes off on a penitential search for seven years, declaring he will not eat or drink until he finds his queen. God preserves him and he comes eventually to the angel’s shelter, where the queen and his son, Sorrowful, await him. 

            Now comes a sharp turn in the muddy path I wander down. The above description is of the 1857 version of this Grimm tale. Their own 1812 version is quite different. It starts out the same, but in the 1812 version there is no angel. The maiden comes to the king’s garden, bangs her body against an apple tree to knock down fruit and eats it off the ground. Captured by the guards, she is thrown into prison, but the king’s son suggests she be employed to feed the chickens. (How she does this without hands is not explained.) The prince is, of course, in love with her and talks the king into letting him marry her.

            From here the versions are similar, with the devil intercepting letters, but the king’s mother is absent from the 1812 version, and the queen and her son are simply banished. She is now helped by an old man and her hands restored by wrapping her arms around a tree three times, rather than being re-grown in the presence of the angel. Her husband, when he realizes what has happened, goes off with a servant to find her. The old man has sheltered the queen and her son in a house no one can enter until they ask three times “for God’s sake”. This is the only Christian reference in the 1812 version. After the king, queen, and their son are reunited and they return to their kingdom, the house of the old man vanishes.

Jack Zipes, in “The Brothers Grimm, From Enchanted Forest to the Modern World,” attributes the changes to Wilhelm, and I’ll assume with Jacob’s consent. But why the changes?

Because the Grimms were bourgeois. That term carries a negative feel in modern-day parlance, but back in their day the Grimms struggled for the ascendancy of the bourgeois. And they had an agenda. They were in the forefront of rising German nationalism against the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire. The bourgeoisie composed the rising middle class, democratic in leaning. The Grimms had to flee at times to avoid being arrested for their stand against monarchy. 

The Grimms wrote and re-wrote the fairy tales to reflect the values of their radical audience and not the minds of earlier serfs and peasants. Between the 1812 and 1857 editions the revolutions of 1848 swept through Europe, carrying the Grimms in their wake. I will forgive Wilhelm for mudding the path. A lot of rain fell in his day.

Fairy Tale of the Month: Feb. 2012 The Maiden Without Hands – Part Two

 Leonardo da Vinci  Study of Hands

Musings on violence

What attracts my attention to “The Maiden Without Hands” is its title. The faint-hearted know better than to read such a story, but curiosity draws in the rest of us.

The faint-hearted prove correct in their suspicions, for we meet with wantonness brutality at the start of the story. But the actual violence ends there. Threatened violence occurs when the devil’s altered letters call for the queen and son’s destruction, but they are allowed to escape unharmed.

We, the reader, understand that the violence is not gratuitous. It has meaning. We read on, wanting to discover at least a hint of that meaning. We sense that the violence is code for something worse. In our case, the violence of amputation is a replacement for incest between father and daughter.

To prove this assertion I could safely stand on the shoulders of a number of scholars, Jack Zipes and Alan Dundes to name two. Or I could site the variants of this story that depict the incestuous elements more obviously. Instead I am going to look only at the internal evidence that the abuse heaped upon the maiden is code for incest.

When reading fairy tales, particularly Grimm, the first clue that we are dealing with code is when the story does not quite make sense. The father, after making a bad pact with the devil, is accused by his wife of betraying their daughter. The miller’s wife now disappears from the story. She is not there in a supportive role at the daughter’s time of need. Neither is the father supportive. If we see through the code, that makes sense, because the father is the problem.

After the maiden has gone through her ordeal with the devil, the father offers to provide for her material comfort. Hardly in any shape to take care of herself, she decides to leave home. On the face of the story and logically, this is a really bad idea. Looking again, deciphering the code, the maiden has to leave home to get away from her father’s abuse. Although she escapes, she leaves as a damaged person, handless, helpless, her healing still to take place.

In considering this “replacement code,” two points jump to mind. First, isincest less obnoxious than chopping off the maiden’s hands? Apparently so, at least in the Grimm’s time and in the Victorian mindset, vestiges of which still survive in American culture. This mindset holds what I consider to be an odd acceptance of blatant violence while blanching at sexual content. For example, commercial television will air scenes of death by horrific violence as long as none of the perpetrators or victims says the “F word.”

The second point, and more on topic than my first, concerns replacements and the psyche of the child who hears them used in stories. Bruno Bettelheim explains this notion with the example of the evil stepmother as a stand-in for the real mother, allowing a child to vent and defuse subliminal anger toward their own mother by directing it against the one-step-removed mother of the story.

There were far fewer stepmothers in fairy tales before the Grimms than afterwards; the Grimms all but invented character and situation replacement. They quickly saw its value in disguising harsh topics from children and making the story compatible with bourgeois sensibilities.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Feb. 2012 The Maiden Without Hands – Part Three

  Carl Larsson “Brtia as Iduna”

Apple of my eye.

In “The Maiden Without Hands” there is an old apple tree growing behind the mill. If there is a fruit in a Grimm story it is an apple—OK, sometimes a pear. I don’t recall a peach anywhere (that’s French). Forget the apricot. Oranges, kumquats—nada.

Given that apples grow about everywhere and are easy to preserve, their favored status is no surprise. If not the first fruit to be cultivated by us, it is among the earliest. Genus-wise, the apple is in the rose family, which I find rather charming. Its medical properties are established in the popular culture. I grew up on “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

What I find the most fun about this compact, solid, shiny bit of fruit is all the symbolic baggage it has picked up during its travels through time and place.

The ancient Greeks certainly took to the apple. The goddess Eris, when not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, shows up anyway to cause trouble. (That scenario sounds familiar.) Into the midst of the wedding party she throws the apple of discord. It’s a clever design. She has written on it “for the most beautiful one.” Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each assume that title is theirs. Hence the discord.

What better way to solve such a dispute than to bring in a mortal? They appoint Paris of Troy to be their victim—I mean judge. Well, these contacts between mortals and immortals rarely go well, and when Aphrodite bribes Paris with the most beautiful mortal woman, Helen, the specter of war between Troy and Sparta is not far behind. However, it made for a heck of a good story.

Christianity has its take on the apple, as it appears in the Garden of Eden, though technically it really doesn’t. The Bible speaks of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life. Genesis never mentions an apple and scholars differ regarding which fruit is meant. However, returning to the Greeks, Hercules had the task of getting the three apples from the garden of the Hesperides, the three daughters of Atlas. These apples grow on the Tree of Life. For the newly Christianized pagans it might have been easy to conflate the Garden of Hesperides and the Garden of Eden’s fruit.

Moving up into the cold lands, the apple comes up again in the VÖlsunga saga.The goddess Frigg, wife of Odin, sends King Rerir an apple for his wife to eat and become pregnant. The apple is delivered to the king by a giantess in the form of a crow, who drops the apple in his lap.

That image of the crow dropping the apple in a lap is similar to a scene in the Grimms’ tale “The White Snake” when the hero is seeking an apple from the Tree of Life, which is given to him by three ravens whose lives he had saved. To say the Grimms were well versed in these mythic images would be an understatement given Jacob’s exhaustive work, Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology). Whether the Grimms improved that particular scene or if the stolen images were already there, hardly matters. As soon as a story evokes the apple, all of its symbolic baggage is available to be plundered.

My above ramblings are a mere sampling of the near countless mythic, legendary, and story references to apples. By the way, the sound track you hear in the background (you hear it don’t you?) is the William Tell Overture. I thought it appropriate. (Well, it’s been running through my head.)

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: Jan. 2012 East of the Sun And West of the Moon – Part One

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 Kay Nielsen

Marriage and parentheticals

A rather disproportionate number of fairy tales end in marriage. (Divorce never comes up.) On occasion “false brides” are cast aside (or worse), and mothers die to be replaced by stepmothers. (Are there ever any stepfathers in these tales?) But the marriage that dominates fairy tales is one that ends in bliss.

My wife points out that these fairy-tale marriages are usually between someone poor and someone rich. That, she claims, is why they are called fairy tales.  (She married someone poor who stayed that way.)

Why the consuming interest in marriage? Why is it the focus of such popular tales as “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”?

Our fairy tale of the month falls into the same category as “Sprig of Rosemary” and “Beauty and the Beast.”  (In the Aarne-Thompson fairy tale index this is type 425A, the search for the lost husband.) I mention two examples above, but could entirely fill this blog post with the titles of others. They all harken back to “Cupid and Psyche.”

(We think of “Cupid and Psyche” as one of the Greek myths. Actually, it is a good canidate for the first literary fairy tale, written by Lucius Apuleius in the second century AD, told in the context of another story.)

The events of “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” are typical of the pattern of the Animal Bridegrooms. In this pattern, the father gives/surrrenders/loses the youngest/only daughter. (In our story a white bear promises her father riches.) The girl goes willingly (an important character attribute). She is well treated (our heroine rings a bell to get all her wants) and is surrounded by wealth. She need only adhere to one promise (the white bear tells her not to listen to her mother’s advice), which is invariable broken. (I am not sure not listening to your mother is a good message.) The bridegroom (under some sort of enchantment) is whisked away to marry someone else (a troll with a nose three yards long in our tale). The abandoned bride must now go through an ordeal to reclaim her husband (what I called in an eariler post “the marriage test”). (The best known of these animal bridegrooms is the beast in “Beauty and the Beast”, although it does not exactly follow the usual pattern.) (Probably because it’s very literary and introspective.) (And French.)

I return to my question: why the interest in marriage? Or, am I asking the wrong question? Are these tales about marriage? I am going to suggest that these marriages are being used as a device (the McGuffin if you will) for illustrating a different dilemma. I am thinking of loss and recovery.

A much more common experience than having to find a husband who has suffered magical memory loss (the cause of distracted husbands has nothing to do with magic, as my wife will tell you), is the experience, or better yet, feeling, of something being lost: a long-ago friend, an irreplaceable book you once had, a time and place gone by. Tales like “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” hold out the hope (even if in vain) we too can recover what is lost: hold again in our hands the hand of another, feel the weight and open up the pages of that book, or grasp that feeling we once felt in that almost forgotten place.

Fairy Tale of the Month: Jan. 2012 East of the Sun And West of the Moon – Part Two

 Kay Nielsen

 So Who…?

            There exists a thoughtless habit, to which we may easily fall victim: The assumption. I call it thoughtless because if we thought about if for a moment we would see the error. 

            How many of us assume Elvis Presley wrote “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog”? How many of us have heard of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who actually wrote it, or “Big Mama” Thornton, who first recorded it? 

            How many of us thought Kay Nielsen wrote and illustrated “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”? I for one.

            Illustrate it, he did. Kay Nielsen, born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1886, of theatrical parents, studied art in Paris from 1904 to 1911. A good part of his career he spent designing and painting stage scenery. In 1914 he produced twenty-five color plates and twenty-one monotones for “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”, generally recognized as his most popular accomplishment and  one of the great gift books of the early twentieth century.

I quote here from Wikipedia: “Gift books, literary annuals or a keepsake, were 19th century books, often lavishly decorated, which collected essays, short fiction, and poetry. They were primarily published in the autumn, in time for the holiday season and were intended to be given away rather than read by the purchaser.” 

Classed along side of Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham, Nielsen’s rise to fame was cut short by the advent of World War I, during which the gift book industry devolved, never to recover. While Dulac and Rackham were the kings of the gift book illustrators, Nielsen was only the heir apparent. 

1936 found Nielsen working for Walt Disney. The mark he left behind can be seen in the sequences “Ave Maria” and “Night on Bald Mountain” in “Fantasia”, one of Disney’s early feature-length animated films. The film did not do too well when first released in 1940, partly because of the outbreak of World War II. Nielsen left Disney in 1941. 

By the end of World War II, art nouveau had run its course, and Nielsen’s style was no longer in demand. He and his wife took up chicken farming, unsuccessfully. He died in poverty in 1957. It would be another twenty years before his work would again be recognized for its worth.

For me, Nielsen’s illustrations told me the story, but, in truth, “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” was collected by Peter Christen AsbjØrnsen (1812-1885) and JØrgen Engebretsen Moe (1813-1882). Professionally, AsbjØrnsen was a zoologist, and Moe a theologian, but they both held a lifelong abiding interest in Nordic folklore.  They were, as well as boyhood friends, Norway’s “Brothers Grimm”. Unlike the Grimms, they both actually wandered out into the hinterlands and collected stories from the folk. 

The names Peter Christen AsbjØrnsen and JØrgen Engebretsen Moe do not trip off the tongue like the Three Billy Goats Gruff tripping over the bridge. How many times have we read and listen to that folktale without an acknowledgement of AsbjØrnsen and Moe? 

The companion of false attribution is no attribution. With no attribution given, we assume “it has always been there”.  These foktales have “always been there” through the efforts of the Brothers Grimm, AsbjØrnsen and Moe, Joseph Jacobs, Andrew Lang, Jeremiah Curtain, Thomas Crofton Croker, W.B. Yeats, Lady Wilde, Sir George Douglas, R. M. Dawkins… I could fill up another blog entry with names. There is a legion of writers and illustrators who have helped to keep these stories alive in words and images. They have my undying gratitude, even if I conflate, confuse and forget who they are.  

Fairy Tale of the Month: Jan. 2012 East of the Sun And West of the Moon – Part Three

 Kay Nielsen

Loose Ends

Unlike other literature, the fairy tale is allowed to be downright sloppy in matters of internal logic and in character development and motivation. And no one cares.

I’ll take the bear in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” to task. Don’t worry; I’ll keep my distance. Is he a bear, a man or a troll? Clearly, he appears to be a bear as the story starts, but we quickly learn the white bear can throw off his bear shape at night and take on the shape of a man.

Against the bear’s warnings, the heroine lights a candle and looks upon a prince lying in their bed. The logic of the story starts to unwind with this scene. How does a sleeping prince look different than a run-of-the-mill handsome man? We are not told how she knows him to be a prince.

Further, upon waking, the prince declares she has ruined their happiness. He has been under an enchantment put on him by his stepmother, and now he must return to her and marry a long-nosed princess.

Let’s look at this from the stepmother’s point of view. One day she says to her stepson, “Look, I’m going to change you into a bear by day and a man by night. If you can get someone to sleep with you for a year and not look on your man-shape, I’ll let you go. Otherwise, you must come back here and marry Long Nose.” Why would she say that? What is her motive for this strange arrangement? Why not say, “Marry Long Nose or I’ll change you into a newt.”

Toward the end of the tale we learn that the stepmother and the long-nosed princess are trolls. If the prince’s stepmother is a troll, was his father a troll? Everyone else in the castle east of the sun and west of the moon, outside of captive Christians, are trolls. If he, too, is a troll, then the heroine’s mother’s fear has come true.

Here is the important point: It doesn’t matter. Nothing I have stated above matters to the fairy tale. And more, everything I have written these past months doesn’t matter to the fairy tale. I am holding up the wrong measure. Willingly and knowingly I have done so and will continue to do so from time to time, but to the fairy tale itself…

Although we have what are called literary fairy tales, these tales are not literature in my view. The literary writer spends 80,000—90,000—100,000 words to get the reader to see, hear and feel what the author wants the reader to sense and understand. Characters need to be developed: have names, have clear motives, and follow long, logical, exciting, interesting progressions. The reader is allowed into the heads of the characters and experiences the progressions with them.

Fairy tales are short, compact, and sketchy on details. We never get inside the hero or heroine’s head; we may not even know their names. We see them on the surface. Motivations and logic are optional.

If we are to measure the fairy tale as an artistic form—not that it cares—we would do better to use the terms we use to describe paintings. What are the images? What does it say to us? What is the atmosphere of the work? What memories does it evoke? What is the impression it leaves behind?

For me, a fairy tale is more like a still life than a novel.

Your thoughts?