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: December 2012 Vasilisa the Beautiful – Part One

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bilibinbabawhite Ivan Bilibin

Edge of the Forest

The forest before me is dark, darker than the twilight surrounding me. Really, it is too cold to be out here, but I have on my heavy fur coat and there is the warmth of the pipe I am smoking.

Vasilisa the Beautiful entered this forest, not of her own will, but not without good advice.

Although the daughter of a well-to-do merchant, she became the victim of a stepmother with two preferred daughters. A small wooden doll, given to Vasilisa by her mother, as she lay on her deathbed, protects the girl from harm. Vasilisa, heeding her mother’s instructions, feeds the doll food and drink, reciting, “There, my little doll, take it. Eat a little, and drink a little, and listen to my grief.” The doll’s eyes shine; it comes to life, eats, drinks, then gives Vasilisa advice and aid.

The stepmother’s cruelty finds its greatest expression when Vasilisa is sent to the home of the witch Baba Yaga for light when their own home falls into darkness. On her way to Baba Yaga’s  hut, she sees a man all in white on a white horse and a man all in red on a red horse. Standing before Baba Yaga’s home, she sees a man all in black on a black horse. Baba Yaga comes on a great wind, riding a mortar propelled by rowing the pestle.

Baba Yaga takes Vasilisa within the fence of human bones lined with skulls, to her hut, which moves around on chicken legs. Baba Yaga gives the girl impossible tasks to perform the next day—or be eaten for supper. With the aid of the wooden doll, the tasks are accomplished for two days.

The witch then encourages the girl to ask questions. Vasilisa asks about the three riders. Baba Yaga replies they are her servants, the day, the sun, and the night, but had Vasilisa asked about things inside of the hut she would have eaten her.

Baba Yaga then asked a question of her own. How was it that the girl could complete the tasks given her? Afraid to tell the witch about the wooden doll, she replies, “The blessing of my dead mother helps me.”

Not being fond of blessed children, Baba Yaga kicks the girl out, throwing a skull with flaming eyes after her as payment for her work. Carrying the skull at the end of a stick to light her way, she returns home. Upon entering the house the skull’s eyes burn brighter, incinerating the step-relatives.

The story does not end here. Vasilisa moves in with a kindly old woman, and takes to weaving flax into linen with such craft that the fine linen eventually attracts the attention of the tsar, who, upon meeting Vasilisa the Beautiful, marries her.

Vasilisa entered the forest and returned with power and wisdom she did not have before. Baba Yaga’s home is not merely the hut of a witch. Its boney fence, the profusion of skulls, and its resident’s desire to eat children, all speak of a realm of the dead. Yet, from there Baba Yaga flies forth daily with her mortar and pestle, along with the white rider and the red rider. In the evening she returns with the black rider, suggesting there are cosmic forces at work.

To such places we vicariously follow our heroes and heroines. We crept along with the old soldier as he stole behind the twelve dancing princesses into the underworld with groves of silver, gold, and diamond trees. Likewise, we traveled with the rosemary maiden when she sought out the sun, moon, and wind to help her reclaim her husband.  Did we not trail after the youngest daughter as she rode on the back of the white bear slouching its way toward a great mountain?

I stand at the edge of the forest as the last of the day’s light fades, and startle the night with my match as I relight my pipe, then turn my back to the wood and my eyes toward home. I will not enter the forest. I might not return. I suspect only children have the courage, born of naivety and lack of cynicism, to enter.

 

Fairy Tales of the Month: December 2012 Vasilisa the Beautiful – Part Two

bilibinbabayaga Ivan Bilibin

Visit With a Friend

When I got to Miss Cox’s garden, my friend Alexander Afanasyev, all bundled up in a coat, scarf, and cap, sat on the wrought iron bench waiting for me. Over time I have come to realize that all of the 19th century folklorists are comfortable in Miss Cox’s garden, despite the weather. They will always agree to meet me here.

I feel sorry for Alexander. He died at age 45 (1871). Tuberculosis, he told me. I knew things had gone badly for him toward the end. He kept himself alive by selling off his library. Tsarist Russia was never kind to commoners, especially those with socialist leanings.  Alex fell afoul of its authoritarian censors more than once.

His claim to fame remains his eight volumes of Russian folktales, plus other volumes, one meant for children and another not meant for children that was published anonymously in Switzerland.

“Alex,” I said. “What can you tell me of Baba Yaga?”

“Ah, she is either the witch of all witches or not a witch at all. The ‘Baba’ part of her name means ‘grandmother’ or ‘old woman.’ The ’Yaga’ part, I believe, is connected with the Sanskrit word for ‘snake.’ Another good translation might be the word ‘horror.’ Besides being unusually ugly, she is known for eating children.”

“She appears in a number of stories, not just Vasilisa the Beautiful. Common to these stories is her flying in a steel mortar, navigating with the pestle, and covering her tracks with a broom. A fence of human bones surrounds Baba Yaga’s hut, with skulls on top of the pickets. At night the eye sockets glow, giving off an eerie light. In some stories there is room on the fence for one more skull. The gate has a lock made of jaw bones that opens and closes with a spell.

“The hut stands on chicken legs, the door turned away from visitors. One needs to get it to turn around by saying, ‘Little house, little house, Stand the way thy mother placed thee, Turn thy back to the forest and thy face to me!’ Inside the hut are disembodied hands that do the witch’s bidding. Baba Yaga always eats a supper large enough for a crowd, then falls asleep stretched out over her stove.”

I am listening to Alex, but also distracted by a firebird strutting around the garden like a peacock. It has come over to us and is pecking at Alex’s shoe.

“I did,” he continues, “collect one version in which there are three Baba Yaga sisters, all named Baba Yaga. What do you make of that?” Alex lifts an eyebrow.

I consider for a moment. “Brings to my mind the White Goddess, whom Robert Graves called the threefold muse.”

“Very good,” Alex nods at me.  “I concur. The pantheon of nature gods and goddesses are numerous with triads. As I said, Baba Yaga may not be a witch at all, but rather a reflection of an earlier mother goddess or goddesses.”

I return his nod, and reply to his point. “The day, sun, and night are at her service.”

“Exactly!”

The firebird startles and flaps away, losing a tail feather in its flight. I pick it up to admire it; an exquisite feather. I think I’ll give it to Thalia.

Fairy Tales of the Month: December 2012 Vasilisa the Beautiful – Part Three

bilibinbabalightIvan Bilibin

In Exchange

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, lays out the hero’s journey, the various stages the hero or heroine is likely to enter upon. In one stage the protagonist crosses the threshold into adventure after being called to do so. Or the protagonist may refuse the call initially, and later will labor through an ordeal to achieve the reward. Not every story will have every stage Campbell writes about. However, few fairy-tales do not have the meeting with the mentor. In Vladimir Propp’s list of fairy tale character roles the mentor is the magical helper and/or donor (of magical devices).

This mentor/donor/helper appears in many forms. In Snow White the seven dwarves fill this role, in Cinderella the fairy godmother,or in The Golden Bird the fox. The old woman in the wood helps the old soldier in The Twelve Dancing Princesses. The heroine in Sprig of Rosemary is helped by entities no less than the sun, moon, and wind.

In our story, Vasilisa the Beautiful, the helper is a wooden doll given to the heroine by her mother. Vasilisa gives the doll food and drink in exchange for advice and help.  The story makes it clear; Vasilisa would not survive without the doll.

Stepping back and taking a look at all of these magical helpers, putting aside that they are an expected part of the fairy-tale genre, let us ask, Why are they there? If we say they function to help the protagonist, then we need ask, Why do our heroes and heroines need help? As story structure goes, are not the magical helpers a cheat, a convenient answer to the way out of trouble? Why do we, the readers/listeners, want there to be magical helpers?

Perhaps the magical helpers are there because they carry a message that bears repeating. In our story, when Vasilisa faces her first hardship, the story does not say, “But Vasilisa had a magic wooden doll to give her advice.” Vasilisa was not born with the wooden doll in her pocket; she acquired it from her mother. The doll served as an extension of the mother’s wish to protect her daughter.

Further, there is an exchange. For the doll’s advice and aid, Vasilisa gives the doll food and drink. Food and drink in exchange for magical help is ever so prominent in these tales. When the heroine in The Three Forest Gnomes shares her meager crust of bread, she finds the strawberries she is seeking and departs with three other boons.

In The White Snake the hero receives help from magical creatures in exchange for having helped them. The old woman in the wood did not walk up to the soldier and tap him on the shoulder, saying, “Here, take this cloak of invisibility; you’re going to need it.” An exchange takes place between them before that happens.

We—living in a society—do not exist in a vacuum. We are constantly in a state of exchange with each other. Sometimes we exchange coins for an apple. Sometimes we exchange greetings over the phone. We might exchange a kiss, but we are always in a state of exchange.

The best exchanges are those that occur when we are helping each other. There is the message that bears repeating. That is the message we need to remember and, perhaps in those helpful moments, there is some magic.

Your Thoughts?

PS. Let me make a personal note. For me, the wooden doll is the creepiest magical helper. Dwarves, fairies, animals, old women—fine. A wooden doll that comes to life, eats, drinks, talks, works, then returns to its dormant state? Sounds like voodoo to me.

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2012 The Bremen Town Musicians – Part One

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Arthur Rackman

Arthur Rackham

A Humorous Tale

The Grimm brothers’ collection of fairy tales is known for carrying a message, a moral (though rarely as well spelled out as in the Aesop fables’ instructive tag lines): Good triumphs over evil, faithfulness will be rewarded, and patience is a virtue.

But not always. In fact a goodly number of the tales are quite humorous and unconcerned with passing on cultural values. The Bremen Town Musicians may be the most popular of these lighthearted stories.

A donkey, dog, cat, and rooster have all been turned out by their masters for being too old to be of service. The animals quickly agree to the donkey’s notion that they become town musicians for Bremen.

As night falls, they come across a den of robbers who are feasting. The animals decide to sing for their supper. The donkey puts his hooves on the window sill, the dog jumps on his back, the cat onto the dog’s back, and the rooster flies up on top, forming the enduring image of the story.

They bray, howl, caterwaul, and crow, then accidentally crash through the window. The robbers flee in terror and the minstrels settle onto the meal. Afterwards, the four friends retire for the night, the cat by the hearth, the dog by the door, the donkey by the dung heap, and the rooster in the rafters.

One robber is sent back by their captain to see if it is safe to return. He is scratched by the cat, bit by the dog, and kicked by the donkey; all the while the rooster is cock-a-doodle-dooing. To his companions the poor robber testifies he was clawed by a witch, knifed by a man, beaten by a monster with a club, and over them all a judge called, “Bring me the rascal!”

The robbers left. The animals stayed.

The tale ends with the nonsense tag line, “And the last person who told this tale has still got warm lips.” The Grimms seldom used nonsense tags. Of the two hundred and fifty tales, eight of them have these tag lines. Unexpectedly, Hansel and Gretel is one, otherwise filled with menacing images it ends, “My tale is done. See the mouse run. Catch it, whoever can, and then you can make a great big cap out of its fur.”

There are some followers of fairy tales who would give significance to the master/slave relationship between the animals and their owners. Some have taken the four creatures in turn and looked at the attributes these animals represent in other fairy tales. The egalitarian order of the animals’ band has been contrasted to the hierarchical arrangement of the robbers. But I hold to a simpler analysis.

It’s a silly story.

The Grimms had their agenda. When they put together their collection they wanted to capture the voice and mind-set of the German folk. Whether they got close to that is another question, considering the historic ebb and flow of Germanic and French speakers through the region. A number of the Grimms’ friends and neighbors, from some of whom they collected stories, were French Huguenot.

Nonetheless, the Bremen Town Musicians serve their place in the collection as an example of German folk humor, and, I believe, nothing more.

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2012 The Bremen Town Musicians – Part Two

Watler Crane

Music to My Ears

I spent more time in the market square today than I should have. I wasted a good bit of it standing with a small crowd listening to the hurdy-gurdy player. I know this is not fine music, but the mind-numbing drone has its hypnotic charm. I left a coin in the musician’s hat. I wonder if Wilhelm would have done the same.

If one only looks at The Bremen Town Musicians, where the animals simply assume they can be musicians with no effort on their part, one might conclude the Grimms thought little of itinerant musicians. If one broadens the scope and considers The Marvelous Minstrel, The Jew in the Thorn Bush, and Hans My Hedgehog, the conclusion might be that… the Grimms thought little of itinerant musicians.

In The Marvelous Minstrel the musician attracts unwanted company when he plays his fiddle. In turn a wolf, a fox, and a rabbit show up, each animal wishing to learn to play the fiddle. The minstrel gets rid of them by agreeing to teach them, if the beasts will do exactly what he asks. In this way he entraps them, heartlessly leaving them to die.

Seeking revenge, the animals escape and pursue the scoundrel, but by then he has befriended a wood cutter, who defends the minstrel from the wronged creatures. The Grimms did not attempt to put a moral on this tale.

Reading The Jew in the Thorn Bush, one would think political correctness was not going to happen for another two hundred years. The musician in this story, who starts out looking like a nice young man, shoots the bird the Jew is admiring, sends the Jew into the thicket to retrieve the bird, then plays his magic fiddle, which forces the Jew to dance in the thorns. Despite this insult and in a turnaround of justice, the Jew is eventually hung. The Grimms apparently thought less of Jews than of itinerant musicians.

Hans My Hedgehog casts its musician in strange style. The hero, who is half man/half hedgehog, sits atop a rooster, playing his bagpipes while tending to his pigs and donkeys in the forest. The beautiful music of the bagpipes is heard by kings who are lost in the forest, and of whom Hans My Hedgehog takes advantage. When our hero finally sheds his beastly form he sheds the bagpipes as well. (The story ends with a nonsense tag, by the way: “My tale is done, and away it has run to little August’s house.”)

The Grimms, of course, did not write these stories, but they did some heavy editing and put their spin—and prejudice—upon them.

The Grimms were Reformed Calvinists. John Calvin considered music to be worldly and limited its role in the church to the unaccompanied singing of the Psalms. In contrast, Martin Luther, who loved music, allowed all sorts of instrumentation as long as it served the greater glory of God. The Lutherans’ propensity to play fast and loose with music in their sanctuary caused their Calvinist neighbors to judge their religious sincerity with suspicion and to view their fellow Protestants as strangers.

The Grimms, having grown up with the notion that music quickly slips into the profane, naturally handled the musicians in the tales in an appropriate manner: at arm’s length.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2012 The Bremen Town Musicals – Part Three

Walter Crdane

Walter Crane

Off With Their Heads

In 1266 at Fontenay-aux-Roses, a suburb of Paris, a pig was tried in a court of law, found guilty, and executed. Arguably, that was the first time an animal appeared as a defendant in a European court, but it was not the last time. Periodically other pigs as well as cattle and horses stood trial for murder or criminal damage.

I have been discussing this anomaly with my cat, albeit a one-sided conversation. While she did not acknowledge the validity of my point, or even condescend to answer a direct question, she was listening. Her stare remained steady.

My point was that human relationships with our fellow animals are fraught with illogic. For example, the very same animal that we routinely butcher and make into bacon, we have also put on trial for murder.

When I read The Bremen Town Musicians it crossed my mind that this might be the only story in the Grimms’ collection where the animals have deceived and gotten the better of humans. An hour or two of paging through the collection proved the opposite. I discovered half a dozen tales where domestic and wild creatures won out over us humans.

Of these half dozen stories I found The Dog and The Sparrow most interesting. A wagoner deliberately runs over and kills an old dog. The dog’s friend and protector, a sparrow, vows revenge, but the wagoner only taunts the bird.

The sparrow pecks out the bungs of the wine barrels, the wagoner’s freight. As the man inspects the damage, the sparrow pecks out the eyes of his horses. The wagoner flails at the sparrow with an axe, repeatedly missing the bird and killing his horses.

Abandoning his wagon, empty barrels, and dead horses, the man walks home to see the sparrow and a thousand of its relatives descending upon and devouring his wheat crop. When the sparrow gets into his house, the wagoner grabs the axe again, chopping up all of his possessions in pursuit of the bird. His wife, also axe in hand, fares worse, accidentally chopping off her husband’s head as the sparrow flies up and away.

In this tale an animal makes a moral judgment on a human, and is his jury and executioner. Surprisingly, I don’t find myself uncomfortable with the story. Justice does prevail. Evil is punished as it should be. However, the wagoner—we—have been judged by a bird!

I tried to explain to my cat that, when we look at the contradictory relationship we hold toward each other, the nonsense is easy to find.

Many humans, with no compunction, eat ham, bacon, veal, and steak, but we involuntarily recoil at the thought of eating our pets. (Other cultures have other reservations about what animals can or cannot be eaten, but the quandary is similar.)

Theologically speaking, animals do not have souls, but there are businesses available that provide the benefit of a proper burial for our nonhuman loved ones.

We call people we don’t like “asses.” Yet it was an ass that carried Jesus into Jerusalem and an ass that brought Mary to Bethlehem. Should we not honor the ass for that burden? And, in fact, almost every creche includes a donkey.

Perhaps, I told my cat, I made too much of this bit of illogic. We humans abound in illogical pursuits. For example, we make up, remember, and pass along fairy tales, which feed no one and bring little monetary profit, yet some of us persist.

My cat jumped to my lap, sniffed and rubbed her nose to mine, then abruptly leapt away. I think she was trying to console me.

Your thoughts?

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

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  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

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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?