Fairy Tale of the Month: January 2014 The Golden Bird – Part One

January 26, 2014cjkiernan 4 Comments

Walter Crane

Golden

Thalia and her Teddy sit on my lap, she carefully paging through the familiar, battered copy of Grimms’. Her finger rises into the air and lands on a picture of a young prince riding on the tail of a fox. I turn the pages back to the beginning of the tale as Thalia nestles into the crook of my arm, and I read The Golden Bird.

The king, upset that golden apples from his tree in the pleasure garden are being stolen, one by one, each night, sets his sons to guard the tree. The eldest son stands guard the first night, the middle son the second, but it is the youngest on the third night who sees a golden bird take an apple.

The king sends out his eldest, into the wide world, to capture the golden bird. He is met by a fox, who advises him not to spend the night at the brightly-lit inn he will encounter, but rather stay at the dismal one across the street. The eldest is attracted to the merry sounds coming out of the better inn, and does not heed the fox.

The middle son soon joins his brother, also dismissing the fox’s counsel. The youngest prince is more attentive and spends the night in the dismal inn.

The fox joins him the next morning, carrying the prince on his tail to the castle of the Golden Bird. At the castle, all are asleep. The fox warns against using the golden cage at hand, but the prince, thinking so glorious a bird should not be in a wooden cage, puts the Golden Bird in the golden cage. The bird squawks, awakening the castle, leading to the prince’s capture and the condemnation of death.

However, the king of this castle gives the prince the opportunity to save himself and get the Golden Bird as a reward, if he will bring to the king the Golden Horse. Again the fox helps the prince, warning him against putting a golden saddle on the Golden Horse. The prince manages to awaken this castle too, and is condemned to death. Unless…

The king of the Golden Horse wants the princess of the Golden Castle. Ever faithful, if scolding, the fox helps. When the hapless prince is condemned to death for the third time, he still has a chance to win the princess if he can remove a mountain in eight days. He digs for a week with little result. The fox appears and sends him off to bed. The next morning the mountain is gone.

The prince, finally attuned to listening to the fox’s instructions, is able to trick everyone on his return trip, and ends up with the princess, the Golden Horse, and the Golden Bird. Plus, he rescues his brothers from being hanged. His brothers repay him by throwing him down a well, about which the fox had warned the young prince.

The two brothers return home in glory with their bounty as the fox helps the young prince out of the well. In disguise, the prince sneaks into the castle, and all is soon revealed, with the two brothers finally put to their proper deaths.

The fox reappears, asking the prince to shoot him, and cut off his head and paws. Reluctantly, the prince does so, and the fox is transformed into the brother of the princess of the Golden Castle. All live happily ever after.

Thalia shifts in my arms uneasily. “I’m going to ask mommy for a sister. I don’t like brothers.”

I am sure she is right.

Fairy Tale of the Month: January 2014 The Golden Bird – Part Two

Joseph sold by his Brethren, Gustave Doré

Brothers

I know the clock on my mantle is chiming midnight, but I am standing in a Gothic cathedral. I am not sure to what age I have been transported, now or then. What I see are moonbeams struggling to illuminate a lead-glass window. Such stained-glass windows are and were great storytellers for the illiterate.

In the center of the tall, narrow, pointed arched window, the mosaic of colored glass depicts Cain about to kill Abel. A cloud covers the moon and the image fades.

In The Golden Bird two wayward brothers dispose of their younger brother by throwing him down a well, raising to my mind’s eye the form of the biblical Joseph. He, too, was cast into a well by his jealous brothers before being sold into slavery.

Tellers knew this biblical tale, if only from seeing it pictured in glass, but other models may have served as an inspiration. The histories of the royal families of Europe are filled with the deaths of heirs and possible heirs at the hands of family members in ongoing power struggles.

But not all the brotherly relationships in fairy tales end in dire ways. In The Queen Bee the younger brother releases his two brothers from servitude when they tarry at an inn too long and beyond their means. His siblings misbehave even further, but never turn on him, and are rewarded with princesses as brides in the end.

Nonetheless, a pattern emerges from stories that have three brothers in them. The younger brother is named Simpleton, or is thought little of by his family, or is laughed at by his older brothers. Tasks to be performed are attempted first by the eldest, then by the second eldest, and at last by the third, who succeeds through kindness and/or generosity, with magical gifts, or by promises fulfilled by those he helped. If all the brothers succeed in some way, then the youngest clearly succeeds the most.

With humor, let me note the above applies when there are three brothers. If the story has two brothers, then one of them must save the other, unless one is rich and the other is poor, in which case their fortunes are reversed. If there are six, seven, or twelve brothers, likely they are turned into swans or ravens. Are these numbers significant?

Not really. Although there are patterns, we should not look too closely at these patterns to find meaning. We need to step back and look at the whole of these stories. We see stories with our mind’s eye, but need to filter them though our hearts.

The moonlight has returned, and again I see Cain creeping up behind Abel, a crime forever about to be committed, set in glass. Not only crime but also harassment, defamation, and deception directed against our brothers has been widely committed since that original act, boding ill for the future. Born to see ourselves as the center of our universe, we slowly learn to reckon where we are in the greater context. A task taken on by the fairy-tale genre is to help us visualize how our selfish acts affect all of us, no matter the number of brothers involved. And to see redemption when the hero sets self aside.

Cain looms over me as I light a candle and say a prayer for my brothers’ safety.

Fairy Tale of the Month: January 2014 The Golden Bird – Part Three

From The History of Little Goody Two Shoes

Honor

“Well, what sort of unhealthy literature are you reading to Thalia these days?” There is a devilish glint in Duckworth’s eyes and I know I am being baited, but I take it gladly.

“Unhealthy? How can you cast a fairy tale as unhealthy?”

Duckworth and I are usually rowing partners out on the Isis, but the weather is too cold, and we have opted for a continuous ramble around the quad.

“Well, let’s take for example what you are reading to The Girl right now.”

I relate to him the bones of The Golden Bird. I see Duckworth scowl with a touch of animation at certain points.

“How can a boy ride on a fox’s tail?”

“Duckworth, it’s a fairy tale. No pun intended.

“Well, what about his inability to follow the fox’s directions? There is hardly anything admirable in that. Aren’t fairy tales supposed to instruct?”

“Fairy tales can and do instruct, but that is not their sole purpose. However, for our argument, I will say, yes, they do instruct, but not by Goody Two Shoes examples of good behavior that the listener is expected to admire.”

“Who from a State of Rags and Care,” Duckworth recited,

“And having Shoes but half a Pair;

Their Fortune and their Fame would fix,

And gallop in a Coach and Six.

You know, The History of Little Goody Two Shoes is the only kid’s book my mother ever read to me.

“There’s your problem.”

“What problem?” Duckworth smiled, then points. “Let’s sit awhile on the bench over there.”

We cut across the quad and commandeered a wooden bench.

“You know,” I say, “we walked by a sign that read, ‘Do not walk on the grass.’”

“I saw it,” Duckworth looks heavenward, “and enjoyed getting away with it. Neither you, your prince, nor I can follow instructions.” He waves his index finger dramatically, “Is this story then teaching defiance of authority?”

“You overstate,” I answer. “My take: The story speaks of honoring and dishonoring.”

Duckworth sits back, folds his hands, and is content to listen.

“Notice when the prince listens to the fox and when he does not. When the fox tells him to stay in the dismal inn, the prince does. There is no honor involved.

“The fox tells him not to use the golden cage or the golden saddle, and not to let the princess say goodbye to her parents. In the prince’s mind to leave the Golden Bird in the wooden cage is to dishonor the bird. To put the wooden saddle on the Golden Horse is to dishonor the horse. Not to let the princess say goodbye to her parents is to dishonor the girl. He can’t do it.

“On his return trip he allows himself to trick those who dishonored him through manipulation under threat of death.

“Nor can he dishonor his brothers by allowing them to be hanged, and this, again, to his disadvantage.

“In the end, he reluctantly kills the fox, torn between honoring his helper’s request, and honoring his helper’s life. The prince is not being stupid when he can’t follow the fox’s advice, he is following his code of honor.

“And please note, no judgment is made about the nature of honor. The story simply illustrates honor’s pitfalls and triumphs.”

Duckworth applauds, “Ably defended.”

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: December 2013 The Snow Queen – Part One

December 30, 2013cjkiernan 3 Comments

Milo Winter

A Study in Snow

I am certain Thalia will grow to be a scholar. At her tender age, she has begun to do research. Her mother is planning to take her to see Disney’s Frozen, an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. Therefore, Thalia set down her Grimm and picked up Andersen for me to read to her.

The Snow Queen is long and tough going. Andersen broke it down into seven “stories”—chapters in a way. Thalia and I read the tale over three nights. Twice I carry her off to bed. Tonight she pilots herself and her teddy from my study with the declaration, “I like the devil’s mirror best.”

The first story tells us of the devil’s mirror, which has the power to make good things look small and insignificant, while bad things look large and important. Thoroughly entertained by the mirror’s effect on humans, some demons try to carry the mirror to heaven to confound the angels. It slips from their grasp, shattering into millions and millions of slivers that lodge themselves into the eyes and hearts of people, distorting their vision of the world.

In the second story, we are introduced to Kai and Gerda, two poor, neighbor children who share the shelter of a rooftop garden and each other’s companionship.

The boy, Kai, gets slivers of the devil’s mirror in his eyes and heart, and is easily abducted by the Snow Queen, who whisks him off to her castle. There he remains, cold, alone, and oblivious to his former life.

In story three, hearing the rumor that Kai drowned in the river, Gerda gives the river her red shoes in return for Kai. She ends up being swept way and into the company of a benevolent witch. Gerda stays in a flower garden where it is always spring, but the witch takes away all memory of Kai. The flowers, in an odd aside, tell Gerda their stories. Finally, a rose reminds her of Kai, roses having been in their rooftop garden. She is off again on her search, the roses assuring her Kai is not among the dead. At this point Thalia falls asleep.

On evening two and story four, a crow tells Gerda he thinks he knows Kai, but the lad turns out to be a prince. The prince and his princess help Gerda by giving her a golden coach in which to travel. It is immediately set upon by robbers (story five), who kill the coachman and the footmen. The old robber woman wants to eat Gerda, but the robber daughter claims Gerda as her playmate. After hearing Gerda’s story the robber girl arranges Gerda’s escape, giving her a reindeer who knows where the Snow Queen’s castle stands. Despite all the action, Thalia nods off.

Story six involves a few minor encounters, followed by Gerda’a arrival at the castle (story seven). There Gerda finds Kai and washes away the glass slivers with her tears. Reunited, Gerda and Kai dance about as ice shards spell out the word “Eternity.”

Returning through warming lands they get home during summer to find they are a grown man and woman. The story concludes with two phrases, one from the Bible, “Except ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of God,” and the other, words of the old song:

Roses bloom and cease to be,

But we shall the Christ-child see.

Thinking it is my time to do research, I leave the study to use my daughter’s computer as she puts Thalia to bed. Watching the trailer for Frozen, I keep in mind the themes of the fragility of memory, abiding friendship, and trust in God’s goodness that run through Andersen’s story.

I find the parallels between Frozen and The Snow Queen to be the following:

There is a reindeer.

Fairy Tale of the Month: December 2013 The Snow Queen – Part Two

Honor Appleton

Death by Definition

It is fair to say Frozen draws its inspiration from The Snow Queen, if only at the start of the movie project. Walt Disney himself considered animating Andersen’s story back in the 1940s. The project was picked up, rewritten, and dropped a few times before coming to fruition.

Both the Andersen story and the Disney production are considered to be fairy tales, but are they? What is a fairy tale?

Often the fairy tale is seen as a subcategory of folktales, its identifying element being magic. Whether I accept fairy tales as a subcategory or not, in either case the tale should not have a known author.

Stories that fulfill the above definition are solidly fairy tales, but these restrictions eliminate the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales. With a little historical investigation I find, in many cases, the Grimm stories were inspired by older fairy tales, but rewritten, sometimes changing substantially between editions, to appeal to their contemporary audience. Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose is of the same ilk, rewritten for his audience, the French court of the1690s. This is to say, both these works are authored.

But have not all storytellers put their marks on the stories they told, creating for us the variants to be collected by folklorists? Is the only difference that they did not write their versions down and put their names on them?

Obviously, I need to expand my definition to include the works of Perrault and
Grimm, or I would look silly and out of step with literate society. I need only qualify and label such works as literary fairy tales.

When I come to Hans Christian Andersen, I hesitate. Are his works literary fairy tales? His stories, too, are inspired by fairy tales, but he takes them far beyond their usual form. He gives voice to inanimate objects such as tin soldiers and fir trees, he will start stories with dialog, and at times not include magic as an element.

If I accept Andersen as a writer of fairy tales (and I must or suffer well-deserved stares of incredulity), I feel obliged to create a subcategory to my subcategory. Grimm and Perrault drew from a reservoir of tales; Andersen included into the flow his own imagination. I will call his works überliterary fairy tales.

Not all of Andersen’s stories begin with “Once upon a time” or “Once there was.” Many are contemporary in setting. For us that was a long time ago, but not when they were written. Can there be modern fairy tales, a twenty-first century fairy tale?

I need to accept that a fairy tale can still be written. As proof, sitting on the table in my study is a copy of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales,edited by Kate Bernheimer. Disney’s Frozen is further proof.

I can solve my dilemma by creating a new sub-sub-subcategory. I now witness the neo-überliterary fairy tale.

What comes to my mind is the Ukrainian folktale The Mitten. A boy loses his mitten on the coldest day of the year. A mouse takes up residence along with every other animal that comes down the trail. By the end, the mouse, a frog, an owl, a rabbit, a fox, a wolf, and a boar have squeezed themselves into the warm mitten that creaks, groans, and stretches, with its seams popping. Over the rise comes a bear.

My attempt at a definition for my beloved fairy tales now lies in pieces as the mitten did in the snow.

Fairy Tale of the Month: December 2013 The Snow Queen – Part Three

A Garden Encounter

I have to confess, my meeting with Hans Christian Andersen in Miss Cox’s garden did not live up to my hopes.

In the bitter cold I nearly froze to death, as I waited on the bench. Finally, his tall, awkward form loomed in the arch of the garden entrance. He greeted me in Danish, then in German, and then, I think, in Italian. Andersen enjoyed traveling. In his amiable wanderings, he covered most of Europe. He also visited England where his fairy tales were more popular than in his native Denmark, despite the tales being badly translated. I knew he was a friend of Charles Dickens, so imagine my embarrassment when I realized he spoke not a word of English. I, who rarely venture ten miles from home, speak no other language.

There we sat on the bench, a world apart. I am sure he felt out of place, yet, that is the story of his life.

The son of a cobbler and a washerwoman, he entertained notions of being an actor, a dancer, or a singer. He hung around the theater in his hometown of Odense. Outwardly inept and inwardly confident, he cut a strange figure. He possessed an adequate singing voice, which became the calling card that got him into the houses of the local upper class as part of the entertainment for dinners. He liked what he saw.

At fourteen he departed for Copenhagen to join the Royal Theater. They told him to get a job. Even after his voice changed, ending his singing career, he persisted in acting and dancing, for which he had no aptitude yet for which he maintained a continued desire.

Still trying to find a place in the theater, he turned his hand to playwriting. Two plays were quickly rejected by the Royal Theater, although Jonas Collin, the financial director, saw a spark in the young Andersen that suffered from a lack of formal education.

Collin arranged for Andersen to enter grammar school. The seventeen-year-old Hans sat in a class of eleven-year-olds, becoming a natural lightning rod for his schoolmaster’s animosity, who heavy-handedly forbad his older student from such upper-class pretensions as creative writing. Andersen suffered four years of this treatment, falling into depression.

Years later, in the 1840s, after achieving literary and financial success, he still did not find his place in society. Moving among the upper class and even royalty, he remained in the minds of his new acquaintances the son of a cobbler—an oddity. Even his benefactor and adopted family, the Collins, addressed him formally, never intimately.

Andersen did not help matters. He persisted in falling romantically, sometime publicly, in love with unattainable women and men, notably the famed singer Jenny Lind and well-known dancer Harald Scharff.

Andersen found his place in establishing a body of writing that appealed to children and adults and that has neither clumsy moralism, nor needless florid description, as writing meant for children tended toward in that period (and beyond). His tales resounded with human experience, drawn from his own internal and external struggles, cast in the form of little mermaids, tin soldiers, and match girls. The stories were a mix of heartfelt emotion and social commentary. There really had been nothing like it before. He influenced future writers such as Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne.

But for the moment, Andersen and I sat staring at each other. He put up a finger, the internationally-recognized sign for “wait,” took out a piece of paper and scissors from his inside coat pocket, and, folding the paper in half, skillfully and quickly cut away until he depicted two swans facing each other. He handed it to me as if that had been the purpose of his coming, then hastily escaped the confines of the garden.

I will treasure the paper cutting.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2013 Hansel and Gretel – Part One

November 29, 2013cjkiernan 4 Comments

Kay Neilsen

A Tale Not Told

I watch Thalia dragging Teddy behind her through the archway of my study door, opening it wide enough to slip out, leaving it ajar.

She almost chose to have me read Hansel and Gretel, but another story attracted her attention. However, it won’t be long before she will want me to read it. I dread the day.

I remember my mother reading me that story. I think it may have been out of a Golden Book. Rather clumsy, solid-color illustrations appear before my mind’s eye. The theme of child abandonment bothered me deeply, ingrained itself into my psyche, and bothers me still. I don’t want to pass that burden along to my granddaughter.

I decide I’d best prepare myself for this eventuality by reading the original version, but what I read is not quite the story I remember.

Facing starvation, Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother browbeats their father into agreeing to the scheme of abandoning the children in the forest. Overhearing them, Hansel devises a plan to drop white pebbles along the way in order to guide him and his sister back home.

The parents’ second attempt succeeds when Hansel is not able to collect pebbles, and, instead, relies on a trail of bread crumbs, which is eaten by birds.

In both cases, when Hansel drops his pebbles or crumbs, he turns his back to his parents, and the father asks him what he is doing. Hansel replies he is looking back at his cat sitting on the peak of the roof, or in the second case at his pigeon sitting there. Both times the stepmother answers that it is the sun shining off of the chimney. I don’t remember that at all in my mother’s reading.

Led by a white bird, the children end up being captured while eating the witch’s edible house (gingerbread is not mentioned). Gretel becomes the witch’s serving girl and Hansel is fattened for a feast.

The day Hansel is to be eaten, the witch tells Gretel to stick her head in the oven to see if it is hot enough. Gretel plays the simpleton, tricking the witch into poking her head into the oven. A quick shove and a slam of the iron door does in the witch.

Hansel and Gretel find treasure in the witch’s house; then they escape, aided by a duck that carries them across a lake to safety and home. Frankly, I don’t remember the duck, the white bird, nor the pigeon; or the cat, for that matter.

Upon returning home, they find their father happy to have them back, and their stepmother deceased.

The bird motif has caught my attention. Is this a reflection of a bird cult among the peasantry from whom the Grimms collected this story? Birds flit throughout this tale. I feel a long, sleepless night of research stretching out before me. I know this is true when I look up from my reading to see Wilhelm sitting by my fireside, staring pensively into the flames.

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2013 Hansel and Gretel – Part Two

Walter Crane

Misled

I look up at the clock ticking away on the mantle over the fireplace. I am not surprised at the late hour. The embers that Wilhelm has been studying all evening have died out, as has my pet theory of the evening, the one about the peasant bird cult. I should have known better. I am not going to tell Augustus of my fluttering after a notion, only to have my wings clipped. He’d smirk at me knowingly. I blame Wilhelm.

It is not clear where the Grimms got Hansel and Gretel. In their notes they say “from different stories current in Hesse.” Some feel Wilhelm heard it from Dortchen Wild, whom he later married.

Looking at three variants of this story, Finette Cendron (also a Cinderella variant), Hop-o’-My-Thumb, and Nennillo and Nennella, there are no birds other than the consumers of edible trails, be the trails of bread crumbs or peas. Even worse for my theory, in Finette Cendron a jackass eats the trail of bran strewn by the heroine.

There are other differences. Ogres take the role of the child-eating cannibal, except inNennillo and Nennella, where there is no cannibalism. No witches make an appearance in any of these stories. Only Nennillo and Nennella has a stepmother and a brother and sister.Finette Cendron has three sisters, and Hop-o’-My-Thumb has seven brothers. The only common element is the abandonment of the children.

Then I stumble across a comparison of the 1812 and 1857 versions that the Grimms published of Hansel and Gretel. Absent from the 1812 work is the white bird that led them to the witch’s house, and the duck that helped them across the lake.

Another change between the original and the later improvement is the substitution of the stepmother for the real mother, who insists on abandoning Hansel and Gretel in the 1812 tale.

The images of the cat and then the pigeon on the peak of the roof, and the sun shining off of the chimney (think about that for a moment), I suspect are all rather romantic
Wilhelm additions.

This is Wilhelm’s story.

Wilhelm and Jacob, being the two eldest children in the family, felt most keenly their father’s death. They idolized him. Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, a jurist, kept his family well provided, but with his death they fell into immediate poverty.

Although no longer of proper social standing, which disqualified them from full admission, they were allowed to study law at the University of Marburg. They did not get the usual stipend given to wealthier students, and were excluded from student activities and the university’s social life.

As professors at the University of Göttingen, they had to flee for their safety when they ended up on the wrong side, politically, of the Hanoverian King, Ernest Augustus I.

They were abandoned at every turn by their society, dominated by the heartless aristocracy of the Holy Roman Empire. In my Bettelheimish interpretation of Wilhelm, the stepmother represents the society that cast him out. Hansel and Gretel’s father stands in for his own father. An unusual forgiveness is extended to this woodcutter. Complicit in the crime, he should be punished. Instead, he is reconciled with his children and shares in the wealth they bring home.

In later years, after the brothers were published, they finally felt accepted by their peers. Is Wilhelm, through this tale, bringing his father back to life and sharing with him the brothers’ good fortune?

I will not scold Wilhelm for misleading me, but let him brood quietly in my study.

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2013 Hansel and Gretel – Part Three

Arthur Rackham

Fears

I must consider that I am irresponsible. I will read Hansel and Gretel to Thalia when she asks for it. And I will do it in full knowledge of the effect it had, and still has, on me. Why will I do this?

Putting aside that my granddaughter has me wrapped around her little finger, I am an adult, and yet I lack the authority to deny a fairy tale. Who am I to question the voices of storytellers who carried this story and its ilk down many a century?

Uncomfortable subject matter is not uncommon in the fairy tale. Besides child abandonment, I can easily find tales dealing with incest, murder, and other cruelty. (I can come up with a longer list of woeful deeds, but I will let these three stand in for all the others.)

Are these not the things from which I want to shelter Thalia? That is what I think I want, but that is not what I do.

Media, if squeamish about incest, revels in murder and mayhem. It has made an industry out of these, starting with the nightly news, going on to video games and horror movies. I do little to protect Thalia from such entertainments, and, if I did, it would be seen as child abuse. I would lock her in a tower to keep out the world.

If I could keep her away from such knowledge, would that be profitable? Only if she could live in a world without misdeeds. To deny to Thalia that such things exist would be to lie to her.

Reality will intrude, even into my study. Certainly Thalia has seen television, video games, and movies. She has seen images of terrible events. What storytelling provides is the opening for her to imagine these terrible events for herself, to participate in the creation of the horrid images. The pictures come to her, not from a screen ready-made, but from within, of her own making. Therein lays the power and danger of storytelling.

Do I refuse to read certain stories to Thalia? I would be growing forbidden fruits for my little Eve to pick. Can I tell her it is only a story, and these things will never happen to her? Certainly not.

The misdeeds are out there. The fairy tales about those misdeeds are out there, and there for a purpose. The tales give Thalia the material to form images over which she has some control. The ready-made images of other media are someone else’s creation thrown at her. I am not belittling these other art forms; many are worthy of Thalia’s viewing, but they are not her own.

When my mother read that story to me, I created the story’s images, but I don’t think they created in me a new fear, one I had not known before. It gave to me a name for a formless, haunting fear, which for whatever reason, already existed within me. Actually, it gave me two names: Hansel and Gretel.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: October 2013 The Raven – Part One

October 29, 2013cjkiernan 4 Comments

Florence Lundborg

Just Another Glass Mountain

As it is an unusually cold October night, I build up the logs in the fireplace, before Thaila, Teddy, and I settle into the comfy chair. We have a comforter over our legs, which comes up to Teddy’s chin. Thalia has squeezed Teddy between us; from there he stares out, button-eyed. She peruses the table of contents of our book and stabs her finger at the page.

“The Raven,” she says.

“Number 93,” I announce and turn to it.

The queen’s infant daughter is giving her mother no peace until the queen exclaims she wishes the child were a raven and would fly away. I remember my beleaguered daughter, Thalia’s mother, during Thalia’s infancy, and empathize with the queen. Thalia was fortunate, but the infant in the story turns into a raven and flies from her mother’s arms.

Sometime later a man in a forest hears the raven call to him. The bird wishes him to break her spell, which he can do if he will go to a certain cottage, not eat or drink the food offered to him by the old woman who lives there, then stand on a pile of tanbark in the garden at two o’clock in the afternoon.

“What’s tanbark?” Thalia’s eyes narrow.

“It is used for making leather.”

“What’s it doing in the garden?”

“I have no idea.”

The princess, apparently now in human form, will pass by in a carriage for three consecutive days. If the man can refrain from falling asleep on any one of them, she will be rescued, but she despairs he will be able to do so. He assures her he will, but, of course, the old woman coerces him into taking a sip of wine, causing him to fall asleep. Three times the princess tries to rouse him, and on the third leaves him a loaf of bread, a piece of meat, and a bottle of wine, which are inexhaustible. As a token, she puts a ring on his finger, then leaves a letter telling him he can still rescue her if he comes to the golden castle at Mount Stromberg.

He wanders for a long time looking for the golden castle, eventually seeking the aid of a giant, whom he convinces not to eat him with the aid of the inexhaustible feast. After sating his appetite, the giant gets out his maps. When he cannot find Stromberg, he suggests they wait for his brother. The brother, after a long search, finds Stromberg on one of his maps, only to discover it is thousands of miles away. The giant offers to take the man most of the way there, but must return to nurse their child.

“What?”

“That is what it says, ‘…I must return home and nurse our child.’”

“Can guys do that?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

The man comes to Mount Stromberg to find it is a glass mountain, atop of which sits the golden castle. He can see the princess in her carriage drive by above him, but cannot reach her. He builds a hut at the foot of the mountain and waits.

After a year his chance comes when robbers outside his hut are arguing over who should get the magical devices they have stolen: a stick that can open any door, a cloak of invisibility, and a horse that can climb anything, even the glass mountain. He tricks the robbers, takes the stick, cloak, and horse, then drives the scoundrels off.

The man now has what he needs to enter the castle, where, wearing the cloak of invisibility, he drops the ring into the princess’s wine glass. The man does not reveal himself right away, but goes back outside and mounts his horse before taking off the cloak. The princess finds him there and promises they will wed the next day.

“There are some improbabilities in there,” I say to Thalia.

“I like it.”

I do too, but I am not sure why a story that does not quite hang together should appeal to me.

Fairy Tale of the Month: October 2013 The Raven – Part Two

Fiction

My thoughts are aflutter, my questions for Augustus not flying in formation. Therefore, I am grateful when he, helping other customers and not looking at me, gestures with a finger. The gesture means, “I’ll meet you in the back room when I can. Sample my new mixture in the canister on the table. I bet you have another dilly of a question.”

All in a gesture. This gives me time to sort out my musings.

I am into my second bowl of tobacco from the canister on the table labeled “Tom Tildrum”—with a light enough hint of vanilla to be delightful—when Augustus comes in, carrying his black cat in his arms. They install themselves in the other overstuffed chair.

“I can tell by the knit of your brow you are puzzled.” Augustus reaches for his pipe.

“Yes. Thalia and I read The Raven last night. She likes it. I cannot say I dislike it, but it bothers me.”

“Why so?”

“No single thing, rather a number of little things. I am sure I am going to sound petty, but take the raven talking to the man. That is the last point in the story—and we are still in the beginning—that we see her in her raven form. From that encounter on he is supposed to rescue her from what? From the golden castle? He doesn’t. And how did she get there? Why does becoming a raven put her on the glass mountain in a golden castle?

“Then there is that giant nursing his child. What is that about? I will suppose originally there was a giant and his wife, but Wilhelm changed the story to two giant brothers and forgot to edit that part out.”

“One might suppose that,” Augustus strokes his cat, which looks at me accusingly, “but the story appeared in their first edition. I can’t imagine the error stood through the next six editions. They were German after all.”

“Then my case is stronger that the story is not coherent. And another thing, the man lives at the foot of the glass mountain for a year, seeing the princess drive by above him every day, but she never sees him. When he gets to the top of the mountain, he drops the ring in her cup and plays hide and seek. For what purpose?”

Augustus shakes his head slowly. “I am disappointed in you. Haven’t you figured out by now that fairy tales are not fiction?”

“What?”

“Mark Twain observed that fiction needs to make sense. Real life is not so encumbered. A detective story, although clues are hidden, needs to make sense in the end. Romance novels, which wallow in lavish and gritty details that culminate in a kiss, need to follow a known pattern.

“Fairy tales, like our own lives, are rich in the ‘the unlooked-for.’ Children, such as Thalia, understand fairy tales because, in their young lives, things happen to them without the benefit of experience. Children just assume events are connected. They accept the unlooked-for.

“This acceptance of the unlooked-for is schooled out of us as we grow older and are taught the value of logic. We vainly apply logic to our life experience to make sense of it, but must end up seeking our childhood acceptance of the unfathomable. That is why you read the fairy tales.”

His cat closed its eyes and released me from its judgment.

Fairy Tale of the Month: October 2013 The Raven – Part Three

Fragile Humanity

I should have gone to bed long ago, but some evenings and their accompanying thoughts render me sleepless. The pipe in my hand, filled with “Tom Tildrurm,” smolders as I stand by my bay window, watching the moon move westward over the enchanted forest.

The thought that has kept me awake is the human fascination with our animal side. In The Raven an incautious word from her mother transforms the infant into a raven. Beauty and the Beast may pose the classic dilemma between our human and animal natures. East of the Sun, West of the Moon may be the second-best-known in that motif of the human bride and animal husband.

Humans trapped inside of animal bodies are common fare. In the Flounder and the Fisherman the flounder is an enchanted prince. In both the Six Swans and Seven Ravens a sister sacrifices herself to save her enchanted brothers. The Frog King presents us with a pushy reptile with an agenda to reclaim his human form. The Golden Bird has a fox that helps the hero and asks for the reward of having his head and paws chopped off, resulting in a return to his princely form.

Another class of human/animal characters is the selkie of Celtic lore, seals that can shed their skins and appear as human. Celtic mermaids are not far behind, being able to give up their fins for legs. Outside of the fairy tale, in less friendly territory, are the werewolves.

Moving on to mythology, many Egyptian gods were represented as having animal heads: Horus with his hawk head, Thoth with his Ibis head, and the frightening crocodile-headed god Sobek.

Interestingly, in the Greek pantheon the animal natures are in the bodies, not the heads. Fauns, centaurs, harpies, all had human facial features.

Christianity is not quite devoid of human/animal connections. In the art of stained glass windows, the four apostles have their nonhuman counterparts: Matthew/angel, Mark/lion, Luke/ox, and John/eagle. I will not leave out the Lamb of God.

This list could be extended, but what does it say about real or imagined connections to the animal world? It speaks to our fear of animals. Imagine being face to face with a crocodile-headed god. Zeus might be more congenial. Certainly a werewolf in the vicinity is a cause for worry. Selkies and mermaids prompt in us unsettled feelings.

As the moon touches the tops of the trees of the forest and I relight my pipe, my thoughts center on the fairy-tale animal transitions, which are different from the mythological divine/animal awe-inspiring presence, or the selkies and mermaids parading as humans, but are akin to the werewolves losing themselves to their animal side.

Fairy tales like The Raven—and there are many of them—revolve around a prince or princess who has been cursed and lost their human form. They struggle to overcome the spell. The fairy tale acknowledges that what underlies our fear of animals is the sense that our humanity can easily slip away. A few incautious words, or mean-spirited rhetoric can cast a spell. Once cursed, the fairy tale warns us, it is hard to reclaim our fragile humanity.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2013 The Princess Who Became a Man – Part One

September 29, 2013cjkiernan 2 Comments

Guilty Pleasure

We all have our guilty pleasure. It is not enough that I have a library outfitted with dark oak shelves and wainscoting, a bay window that looks across a pasture to an enchanted forest, and a comfy chair in the corner near the fireplace, the mantle of which is lined with tobacco canisters.

I look up and down the hallway before closing the door, then go to my desk, pull open the lower drawer and reach for my guilty pleasure. Then I settle in to my comfy chair and flick the toggle. My Kindle comes to life.

Thalia, who hugs her book of Grimm tales, would be scandalized if she knew I had a Kindle. I rationalize that it is easy to hold, the type can be made larger for tired old eyes, and turning the page is done with a twitch of the thumb. I know it is not a real book, but I fancy I am reading the spirit of a book. Besides, this is where my copy of Odds and Sods resides, a ribald read if ever there was one.

I am rereading one of the tales from this English translation of Danish folk stories, The Princess Who Became a Man.

A king has lost his wife and cannot find another suitable until he realizes his daughter looks exactly like her. Appalled by her father’s demand that she marry him, she runs away, but is pursued by the king’s two bloodhounds. The princess cuts off her breasts and throws them to the dogs. The hounds eat the breasts and return to their master.

Staunching her wounds with moss, she finds shelter in the cottage of an old man. He takes care of her and, when she is well, he teaches her how to hunt. There comes a day when the old man suggests she leave the safety of the woods and seek the job of a gamekeeper at a royal palace not far away. If ever she is in trouble, she is to think of him.

Dressed in men’s clothing, she is soon not only the gamekeeper, but a dear friend of the princess. They wish to marry and it is granted. But on the wedding night, the Red Knight—stock villain of the Danish tales—hides himself under the bed and learns their secret. The Red Knight reveals the secret to the king, who declares a mandatory day of bathing in the river.

Everyone assembles on the river bank, but before the gamekeeper is forced to disrobe, she thinks of the old man, and a stag leaps into the river. The gamekeeper pursues the stag and, when out of sight of the bathers, the animal transforms into the old man, who changes the gamekeeper into a real man with the promise of claiming the couple’s firstborn.

When the child is born, the gamekeeper takes him to the old man, and watches in horror as he chops up the child with an ax, declaring that the pain the gamekeeper feels is like the pain he, the old man, felt at the time the gamekeeper was a princess, when her father demanded to marry her and when she cut off her breasts.

Then the old man takes the dead child away and returns with a covered dish for the gamekeeper’s wife. When the gamekeeper gets home and his wife lifts the lid, there is the child, whole and well.

I am as perplexed by the tale as I was the first time I read it, but now there is a note to the tale I know was not there before.

“Meet me in Miss Cox’s garden at noon. Stephen.” And the Kindle turns itself off.

Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2013 The Princess Who Became a Man – Part Two

More Akvavit

Sitting down on the wrought-iron bench in the garden, I see before me familiar tulip glasses filled, I am sure, with Rǿd Aalborg Akvavit. Miss Cox provided this treat the time I met Evald Tang Kristensen. The drinks are appropriate for my meeting with Stephen Badman, Kristensen’s present-day translator.

Stephen appears at the gate, leaning heavily on a cane. Before needing a cane he got around a fair bit, teaching English in Denmark and Papua New Guinea. His acting credentials came to the fore when he co-founded Gwent Theatre and directed the Gwent Young People’s Theatre in Abergavenny, Wales. Stephen looks dubiously at the two glasses of Akvavit as he stands over them.

“I lost my legs on that stuff one time, you know, and I hardly have legs to stand on now.”

Nonetheless, he sits and we knock back the two shots.

“What can you tell me about The Princess Who Became a Man?” I am anxious to know.

“Not as much as you would like. Kristensen collected it from an old woman, likely a widow, named Ane Kristine Olesdatter.

“Incest taboo aside (and I’ve yet to resolve who the `old man` is) the princess divests herself of her femininity/womanhood by removing her breasts; she is trained in a very masculine trade (gamekeeper), against all custom is allowed to marry the princess, and only then confesses her sex, by which time love has conquered all.

“The treachery of the Red Knight is a give; his betrayal is necessary for the final trial and test of faith—rather like Judas, without his intervention there would be no death and resurrection.

“The chopping of the first born as a test of one’s faith is a common motif (shades of Abraham) and once passed, there is reward. Be true to oneself at all times and you will be rewarded—a Christian message? The more you suffer, the greater the reward? Is there a Sapphic element to the story? Is this a plea for tolerance?

“The story is a minefield of possibilities. People take from it what they will. Although not religious myself, I tend to think that there is a Christian message hidden deep within the symbolism, But there again ….”

“What of the old man?” I press him. “He is ever-present in the story. I have begun to think of him as the protagonist’s super-ego. Not that Ane Olesdatter knew anything about Freud and his theories, but might she have thought of the old man as a personification of moral thinking?”

“I always come back to the chopping of the child.” Stephen rests his chin on the top of his cane. “On the first cut, the old man talks of his pain when her father desired to take her to wife; his desires are against the natural order. The sin is against both man and God; he takes away the girl’s innocence.

“The second cut, the removal of her breasts, which are fed to the dogs, compounds the first `sin.’ The old man was pained that she needed to mutilate herself before the hunt is called off and she is abandoned by her father. The pain the old man feels is as much about the king’s failure as about the dreadful solution she finds to her problem. She is tested to the limit and passes.

“The third cut (all good things come in threes) is all about the fulfillment of her promise to the old man; however painful her part of the bargain, she sees it through. The story is about balance; like Job the girl is rewarded. She gets to marry a princess and in the fullness of time will become the tried and tested king.

“As to who the old man is—The Righter of Wrongs, The Shield against the Storm, the protagonist’s Super-ego; I don’t know—there’s a bit of the Old and New Testament about him. He certainly gives us food for thought and discussion.”

Our eyes fall on the tulip glasses at the same time. They have refilled themselves. Stephen and I exchange glances and raised eyebrows, but pass on the delights in front of us. We do want to be able to walk out of the garden.

Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2013 The Princess Who Became a Man – Part Three

Théodore Rousseau

Changes

The enchanted forest has a reputation for being a quiet place, unnaturally quiet. I enjoy my walks there, although I never go too far into its darkness. I do not enter armed with a sword and shield, filled with courage as might a knight, but rather with my hat, cane, and pipe; my pipe filled with tobacco and my mind filled with thoughts. On my walk this evening The Princess Who Became a Man rolls around in my head.

Pieces of the story are familiar to me. As shocking as the king wanting to marry his daughter will always be, it is not new to this tale. Catskins, as an example, comes to my mind.

Magical helpers—in this case the old man—have a well-defined place in the fairy-tale cycles. The little old man or woman by the side of the road, or in the wood, who asks the young man to share some of their food, then rewards the generous with a cloak of invisibility, or a money purse that never empties, or a table cloth that presents a feast. These trinkets are usually reserved for male heroes. Often the magical helper would give female heroines shelter.

The Red Knight is familiar to Danish audiences, and here serves his usual purpose of sowing discord.

Familiar too is the giving up of the first born. Famously, Rumplestiltskin serves as an example.

Within that familiar frame are elements I have not encountered in fairy tales before until I came to The Princess Who Became a Man. I refer to, of course, the heroine becoming a hero. I know of no other variants of this motif.

Appalled by her father’s advances, she throws away her sex, feeding it to the dogs, in an effort to preserve her being.

With the help of the old man, she takes her first superficial steps toward assuming a new sex. Leaving the safety of the woods and the old man’s home, she relaunches into the world where she finds true love—for a person, who returns the love to her as a person, regardless of sex.

Their little utopia is immediately threatened by a malignant force. Before she, as the gamekeeper, must stand naked, with all her shortcomings, the magical helper intercedes, completing the last step to her becoming male, but he exacts a price.

A magical helper exacting a price is highly unusual, but is a device in this story as a setup for the last ordeal. The heroine, now a hero, must relive the horrors experienced through a ritualistic slaying of his offspring. Not until then can wholeness be achieved.

Questions of sexuality threaten to define this story, but as I wander through the enchanted forest, its odd atmosphere clarifies my thoughts, as it always does.

This is more than a story about a question of gender. The story uses that question to illustrate an overarching theme. The importance here is that the travail encompasses a painful transition. As Stephen suggested, it comes back to the dismemberment of the child. Had the story ended with the heroine completing her transition into a man, it would not have finished delivering its larger message. By reenacting the story through cutting the child in two—in graphic and immediate terms—we see clearly that a painful ordeal is nothing less than a death and rebirth.

The sun is setting and the enchanted forest grows dark. I best be out of this bower before I lose my way. I should not dwell here too long, not let the forest claim me, but allow me to return to the comforts of my home.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2013 Maid Maleen – Part One

August 29, 2013cjkiernan 1 Comment

The Tower

“Seven years?” Thalia’s eyes fill with wonderment and concern. “She lived in a place like this for seven years?”

“Yes,” I say, “but without doors or windows. No light.”

Thalia and I stand in the Tower of London, Beauchamp Tower, precisely. It was the best I could do on the short notice given to me after we read Maid Maleen and she wanted to see a prison tower.

Princess Maleen refused to marry her father’s choice for a husband, she being in love with another suitor. Angered, the king walls up his daughter, with a serving maid, in a stone tower, declaring she will stay there for seven years to break her spirit.

Maleen and the maid lament for seven years, but at the end no one comes to release them. With a butter knife they gouge out the mortar between the stones. After three days they free themselves to find the kingdom burnt and ruined, with no one about.

Surviving on nettles, they travel to another kingdom to find work as kitchen wenches. The prince of this kingdom is none other than her former suitor. Thinking that Princess Maleen must be dead, he has consented to his father’s choice for a bride, an ugly, unreasonable woman. Maleen becomes the ugly bride’s maid.

The ugly bride, aware of her ugliness, does not want to show herself to the court. She substitutes her maid as a stand-in for the marriage ceremony, unbeknownst to anyone else.

On the way to the church, Maleen utters three rhymes. The first is to some nettles by the road:

Oh, nettle-plant,

Little nettle-plant,

What dost thou here alone?

I have known the time

When I ate thee unboiled,

When I ate thee unroasted.

The second rhyme is spoken to a footbridge:

Foot-bridge, do not break,

I am not the true bride.

Then finally, she speaks to the church door:

Church-door, break not,

I am not the true bride.

These the prince overhears. He has become alarmed at her resemblance to his Princess Maleen. At the church door he puts a necklace about her throat before going in to be wed.

That evening the ugly bride takes up her role again, wearing a veil. The prince now asks her the meaning of the rhyme she spoke to the nettles. The ugly bride declares:

I must go out unto my maid,

Who keeps my thoughts for me.

This happens three times for all three rhymes. Then the prince wants to know why she is not wearing the necklace he gave her. Furious, the ugly brides goes off to have her maid killed. Maleen’s screams as she is being taken away bring the prince to her rescue.

Maleen now tells him the truth that he has indeed married his true bride.

The story ends with yet another rhyme, spoken by children who pass the tower in which she spent seven years:

Kling, klang, gloria.

Who sits within this tower?

A King’s daughter, she sits within,

A sight of her I cannot win,

The wall it will not break,

The stone cannot be pierced.

Little Hans, with your coat so gay,

Follow me, follow me, fast as you may.

Augustus and I have talked about rhymes in fairy tales. We suspect some of these tales came out of ballads. Broadsides—single sheets of inexpensive paper printed on one side, often with a ballad—were among the most common forms of printed material between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. How often did storytellers adapt these to oral stories, retaining scraps of the original song?

I realize Thalia and I have been staring at prison walls and bars for some time, a rather bleak sight.

“There are other things to explore here at the Tower. Would you like to see the Crown Jewels?”

“No. I want to see the ravens.”

“Of course you do. I think they are this way.”

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2013 Maid Maleen – Part Two

Arthur Rackham

Of Maids and Years

The two story elements in Maid Maleen that capture my interest are the seven years of isolation from which Maleen emerges to find her father’s kingdom destroyed, and the enigmatic maid, who bears with Maleen her laments. These appear to be two separate story elements, sharing in common the same story space. Yet one senses an interweaving that creates the mood of the tale.

I am stuck first by the seven years. Seven, in the realm of numbers, has a vaunted place. Let’s start with the seven days of the week, contemplate the seven deadly sins, and remember the biblical seven years of feast and seven years of famine.

The Seven Years’ War comes to my mind as well, a candidate for the first true world war. Starting around 1756, cascading battles drew in the European countries with colonial ambitions. The Seven Years’ War was made manifest in America as the French and Indian War. Conflicts also erupted in West Africa, India, and the Philippines.

On the European continent military sieges and the arson of cities became the hallmark of that period’s conflicts. Such a scene, after her seven years in the tower, greeted Maid Maleen.

The story appeared in the Grimm edition of Children’s and Household Tales in 1850. They found it in Sagen, Marchen und Lieder der Herzogthumer Schleswig, Holstein und Lauenberg, edited by Karl Mullenhoff, published in 1845. That is less than a hundred years after the Seven Years’ War, almost within living memory.

On an entirely different level, the image of the tower and its inhabitants wrapped in darkness can be taken metaphorically as a cocoon, and Maleen’s breaking out of it as the emergence of a chrysalis. Into this transformation enters the role of the maid.

The word “maid” carries the meaning of both a young unmarried girl and a serving woman. The word in the Grimm story is “Jungfrau,” which carries the same connotation as does its English counterpart. Neither language has a comparable male version of the word.

Towers can have all sorts of meaning. In this tale, that there are no doors or windows, and yet Maleen and her maid break through, brings to mind a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

A butterfly does not burst forth from its captivity, but rather the chrysalis is still in a fragile state, its transformation not complete. Maleen is in a fragile state, no longer a person of position. I cannot help noting, at least in the Grimm version, it is the maid who first steps out of the tower.

Maleen and the maid travel on together and enter the service of another king. At this point in the story the maid disappears and Maleen becomes the maid.

Are we loosing track of a character, or is something else happening? Has Maleen, subliminally, transformed into/merged with the maid? Is she embracing her lower status to complete her transformation—which, ironically, allows her to return to royal status and reunite with her first suitor.

The seven years in the tower and the presence of the maid are instrumental to the feel of this story. Some of its variants have a princess and her maid trapped underground for a long time. Similar, but that image does not evoke a chrysalis or a nod to the Seven Years’ War.

Fairy Tales of the Month: August 2013 Maid Maleen – Part Three

As You Like It

Augustus and I sit in his comfy chairs sampling a new tobacco mixture, True Bride. I’ve finished explaining my thoughts on Maid Maleen, and wait for his appraisal. Augustus, for his part, has remained silent too long.

“I am not buying the Seven Years’ War part,” he finally says.

“Oh? I thought that was clever of me.”

“You’re conjecturing, snatching things out of the air. As for the cocoon and chrysalis, that’s your romanticism showing through a thin argument.”

“Well then,” I puff. “How do you see Maid Maleen?”

Augustus considers while I pack another bowl of True Bride. “Not bad by the way. I can taste the Cavendish, but what is the other flavor?”

Augustus is still considering.

“Shakespeare won’t get out of my head,” he sighs. “You know:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

“Perhaps my brain is trying to suggest Maleen has spent, not seven years but all her seven ages—her life—in the tower. Her world, in the meantime, disappears.

“I am not thinking so much on the lines of this being a transformation story, but rather a reincarnation story. Maleen enters the tower as a princess. When she is reborn from the tower she is born a maid. Her karma draws her back to the prince to fulfill what she failed in her previous life.”

I stare at Augustus. “That’s wilder conjecture than mine.”

“Yes, rather,” Augustus smiles. “I think I was being too hard on you. I’m not coming up with anything coherent myself. But this is what I love about the fairy tales.”

“What’s that?” I relight my pipe.

“We get to author our own meanings because there are no story authors to tell us otherwise. With authored works, be it novels, plays, or poetry, we readers and listeners are, more often than not, voyeurs to another’s personal creation. With the folk tale, and its subgenre the fairy tale, we deal in common property, created for us by us, yet no one owns these tales. The tales live as an ongoing project, changing, evolving, becoming variants, and being transmitted into the future by us through collections, recordings and tellings.”

“Then,” I conclude, “neither of us may have the final word.”

“Quite so.” Augustus reaches for his cold pipe.

“What is the other ingredient?”

“Fairy dust.”

I wonder if he is kidding.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2013 The Riddle – Part One

July 29, 2013cjkiernan Leave a comment

Arthur Rackham

A Merry Jaunt

The river Isis flows toward us as Duckworth and I row close to the riverbank to avoid the current, making our way upstream. Our destination? A particular meadow with some ancient beech trees, for a picnic. Thalia sits in the bow, glowing, equipped with a parasol to protect her and the picnic basket from the summer sun.

“Are you familiar with The Riddle?” I ask Duckworth as we labor.

“What riddle?”

“The Riddle.”

“You mean, then, the riddle of the Sphinx.”

“No, no, the Grimm story, The Riddle.”

“Oh. No, not at all.”

“Thalia and I read it last night.” I tell him the bones of the story to pass the time as we rhythmically dip our oars in the water.

A prince and his servant take shelter one night in the house of a witch. In the morning, as they saddle up to leave, the witch offers them a parting drink. Warned against her evil nature, the prince departs, but the servant is not as quick. The drink offered is so foul with poison the glass shatters, spilling onto the servant’s horse, killing it instantly.

The servant runs off to the prince to tell him what happened, and they return for the saddle and bridle. A raven has already begun to eat the horse. The servant kills the raven to serve as their evening meal.

The end of the day finds them in a den of thieves, who plan to kill and rob the travelers, but not until the would-be culprits have had their supper, which includes the purloined raven. Unbeknownst to everyone, the raven is infected with the poison that killed the horse. The twelve robbers meet their sorry end.

The prince’s next dilemma is to fall in love with the princess who will marry no man but the one who can pose a riddle she cannot guess (mandatory beheading included). The prince offers, “Who killed none and yet killed twelve.”

Knowing she has met her match, that evening she sends her maid, then her chambermaid, then goes herself, to see if she can get the prince to talk in his sleep. In each case the women escape, slipping out of their robes to do so. However, the princess escapes with the answer.

The next morning she declares she knows the answer, but the prince proves he gave her the answer by producing the three robes snatched from her and her servants in his bedchamber. The princess’ robe is taken, and embroidered with gold and silver to serve as her wedding mantle.

“A catchy ending,” said Duckworth, “if you will excuse the pun.”

Thalia groaned.

“I take it,” he continued, “the raven is the answer, the twelve being the robbers who died from eating it.”

“Quite right.” I ported my oars as we reached the meadow.

“It does remind me of another riddle.” Duckworth leapt to the bank and pulled us up onto the river pebbles. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

I’ll have to think about that one awhile.

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2013 The Riddle – Part Two

H J Ford

More to the Story

If I ran across a fairy tale without a variant, I’d doubt its credentials. As yet, that has not happened. For The Riddle I know of two. I find these variants particularly interesting. Neither of them ends where The Riddle ends. They go on to more adventure, or to make a point.

In The Ridere of Riddles, the Scottish form of the story, the travelers are half-brother princes fleeing the mother of the youngest, she trying to poison the eldest son. The numbers are different: two poisoned horses, twelve dead ravens, twenty-four robbers eat poison raven pie, and the riddle is consequently longer. Twelve maidens try to seduce the answer out of the brothers, but are themselves seduced by the younger.

In this tale, the eldest marries the princess, and the younger returns home. Time passes. The eldest achieves fame by defeating three giants and earns the name “Hero of the White Shield.” The younger, not knowing him by that title, challenges the “Hero of the White Shield” as a point of honor. After fighting for two days, the realization comes that they are of the same blood, and a happy reunion follows. Then as the younger leaves, he sees twelve striking lads, all half-brothers, playing at “shinny.”

When the younger joins in the game, he finds he has fathered the lads by the twelve maidens he seduced earlier in the story. He collects them all and returns home, now with multiple wives and sons. (Revisit Silver Tree and Gold Tree concerning multiple wives in Scottish tales.)

The second variant, my favorite of the two, is The Boy in White Silk, a Danish tale. The protagonist, a simple farm boy named Hans, sets out on his life journey. In his first act, he pays the unsettled debts of a deceased man, allowing the corpse a decent burial. Immediately afterward, a boy dressed in white silk joins him, leading Hans into bizarre adventures with a dead horse, dead ravens, and dead robbers to the poor farm boy’s increasing distress. Nonetheless, they agree to share their fortune equally.

Further adventures lengthen the riddle even beyond the Scottish version. By a similar process as in the other stories, Hans marries the princess and gets half the kingdom. The boy in white silk shares in the good fortune.

One day the boy decides to go away and wants his half of the fortune, which includes half of Hans’ five offspring. Five being an odd number, the boy cuts one of the children in half. Hans is in despair. The boy relents and puts the child back together, returning it to life. Hans is ecstatic.

The boy in white silk reveals himself to be an angel sent to reward Hans for paying the corpse’s debt. As despairing as Hans was, so was the corpse. As happy as Hans now is, so is the corpse for having a proper burial. The angel disappears, never to be seen again.

The Riddle was included in the Grimms’ second edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1819. John Francis Campbell published The Ridere of Riddles, collected from a fisherman near Inverary in 1859, in his Popular Tales of the West Highlands. The Boy in White Silk, collected by Evald Tang Kristensen, appeared in the volumes he issued between 1881 and 1887.

The dates suggest that the Grimm version is the earliest, and the later versions, with their accretions, were developed by later storytellers. The Ridere of Riddles added to the end of the story; The Boy in White Silk to the beginning, the middle and the end.

These expanding stories—living, growing entities—evolved. Being put into a fixed form, as the Grimms did when they published The Riddle, does not halt their evolution. Stories will continue to grow as long as storytellers (of all kinds) keep tinkering with the tales. Without their help, there would be no variants, no other versions.

Your thoughts?

P.S. An English translation of The Boy in White Silk will soon be available in e-book format, entitled Odds and Sods – Stories Taken from the Collections of Evald Tang Kristensen, by Stephen Badman. Other Danish tale collections already available from Stephen are Tales from Denmark, More Tales from Denmark, The Ghost on Horseback, Three Pieces of Good Advice, and The Soldier and Mr Scratch.

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2013 – Part Three

H J Ford
Riddled

The almost suffocating aromas of rich tobacco, emitted from their canisters in Augustus’ shop, welcome me, along with the tinkle of the bell above the door.

“Let me guess,” says Augustus in his solemn way. “Elvish Gold.”

“No, Augustus, today I am thinking of Raven Black.”

Augustus raises an eyebrow. “That’s unusual for you; it is heavy on the Perique. Have you ever tried it?”

“No.” That signals our retreat to the back of the shop to sit in his comfy chairs and test a bowl of Raven Black.

“I’’ve read and been contemplating The Riddle,” I confess, by way of explanation.

“Ah,” he frowns. “Not my favorite Grimm story.”

“Your objection?”

“Not a true riddle.”

“The difference being…?” I query.

“There are two types of riddles: enigmas and conundra. To solve an enigma requires careful thinking, the putting aside of assumptions, and some ingenuity.

“For example: ‘Poor people have it. Rich people need it. If you eat it you will die.’

“Or: ‘What word becomes shorter when you add to letters to it?’

“Or: ‘What is so delicate that saying its name breaks it?’

“You see what I mean.”

“Yes,” I say cautiously.

“The conundrum is basically a pun, ‘the lowest form of humor,’ as Samuel Johnson said, ‘unless,’ as Doug Larson, the newspaper man, extended, ‘you thought of it yourself.’

“In that spirit, let’s try: ‘What is black and white and red all over?’

“Then there is: ‘What kind of tree can you hold in your hand?’ ”

I groan slightly as I remember that one.

“Or: ‘What does a pampered cow give?’ ”

I roll my eyes, partly from the pun and partly from the effect of the Perique. “I follow your meaning.”

“Well,” Augustus continues, “the riddle of The Riddle is neither of these. It is what we call a ‘neck riddle,’ one impossible to answer by anyone other than the one posing it in order to save their neck. The best known example being Bilbo Baggins’ ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ which he knew wasn’t a riddle, but it did save him from Gollum.”

I think about this as the Raven Black makes my head swirl. For a moment I spy ravens fluttering up around me.

“By the way,” I remember, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

My friend smiles “Lewis Carroll didn’t intend for there to be an answer, but when pressed he suggested the raven and the writing desk can both produce flat notes, but I prefer the answer, ‘Poe wrote on both.’ ”

Your thoughts?

P.S. I won’t leave you hanging. Enigmas 1: Nothing 2: Short 3: Silence. Conundra 1: A newspaper (red/read) 2: Palm tree 3: Spoiled milk (sorry).

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2013 Six Swans – Part One

June 30, 2013cjkiernan 5 Comments

Kay Nielsen

Not Quite Right

Thalia, Teddy, and I sit side by side squeezed between the arms of a comfy chair. She has labeled this arrangement as snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug (followed by a giggle). Otherwise, we fly aloft with The Six Swans this evening.

A king, lost in a forest and entrapped by a witch, must vow to marry her daughter. His other option—starvation. The king fears his witch/queen will do harm to his children by his first marriage, and hides them away in a castle found only by a magic ball of thread that rolls out in front, leading the way to the hiding place.

Secrets cannot be kept from a witch for long. She turns the king’s six sons into swans, unaware that there is a daughter. The swans fly off, leaving their sister to wander through the forest seeking them.

After some travail, she finds a cottage in which are six beds.

“Wait,” Thalia scowls, “I think we read this.”

“No, but you are probably thinking of The Seven Ravens or maybe The Twelve Brothers.”

“Oh, yeah, OK, go on.”

In fly six swans who blow the feathers off each other. Before her stand her six brothers, but only long enough to tell her this is the house of robbers; they cannot stay; to break the spell she must spend the next six years neither speaking nor laughing, and must make six shirts for them out of starworts. They turn back into swans and fly off.

“What’s a starwort?”

“A white flower, kind of like an aster.

“OK.”

Having walked so far that she is now in an unfamiliar kingdom, the sister finds her home safely up a tree, and starts her six-year ordeal. All goes well until the king of that country’s hunting party finds her. She tries to bribe them by throwing down her necklace, girdle, garters, and finally her dress, but it is to no avail. The king claims her in marriage.

The king’s mother disapproves of her son’s choice of a bride, and spirits off the girl’s three children-one by one as they are born-claiming the girl has eaten them. All the while, the girl says nothing in her defense and weaves flowers into shirts. The king’s mother prevails, and the girl is sentenced to be burnt at the stake.

I can tell Thalia is not worried; she’s heard this ending before in The Seven Ravens.

As the flames rise, the six swans appear. She throws onto their backs the shirts made of flowers and they transform back into her brothers, who save her from the flames. Unfortunately, the youngest brother, whose shirt still missed one sleeve, had a swan’s wing for the rest of his life.

“Oh!” That bit of imperfect ending surprises Thalia.

Now the sister could speak and defend herself. The children whom the mother-in-law had hidden away are brought back, and the old woman takes the sister’s place at the stake.

Evil is punished and everyone else lives happily ever after.

“But what about the little brother? He’s still got a wing.” Thalia is back to scowling.

That bothers me too.

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2013 Six Swans – Part Two

Walter Crane

Surreal

In The Six Swans two incidents occur, both of which do nothing to forward the story. In the first of these we see the sister entering a cottage in the wood in which stand six beds. Soon her swan brothers enter, transforming for a short time into their human shape. They tell her she cannot stay in the cottage because it belongs to robbers, who will kill her if they find her. Then the brothers turn back into swans, flying out of the window, never resting on the beds.

In The Seven Ravens the brothers are lords of the Glass Mountain, where they reside. InThe Twelve Brothers the cottage is simply where they live, their unfortunate transformation taking place later on in the story. These abodes are well integrated into their stories. In The Six Swans the brothers intrude into a robbers’ den for a few minutes, then leave again?

The second gaffe comes near the end of the story, where the sister does not have quite enough time to finish the sixth shirt, and the left sleeve remains undone. We are told the youngest brother retains a swan’s wing in place of his left arm. Nothing more is made of this detail.

The editor in me wants to eliminate these clumsy elements from the story, improving it for literary consumption. The listener in me cries out, “Why are they there?”

Let me argue that these two elements—the cottage with six beds, and the youngest brother with a swan’s wing—are there because of fairy tales’ propensity for dream imagery, or more to the point, the unsophisticated, unschooled storyteller’s reliance on their own dreams to pattern their stories. They show the image through the lens of the surreal.

Because of the spell upon them, the six brothers are in an unnatural state, never truly themselves, robbed of their rest. As in the idiom of dreams we are shown six beds in a robbers’ den that the brothers approach, regain their human form only to lose it again, and never find comfort, never stay home.

The surreal lens also shows us the brother left with a swan’s wing. Like dreams, the source of the image may not be apparent, not quite a metaphor. Interpretation is left to the listener.

As I look through the surreal lens at the brother with the swan’s wing, some obvious questions cycle through my thoughts.

Is the younger brother being punished? For what fault?

Is this a failing of the sister? Did she not quite fulfill the ordeal?

Is evil being allowed one little triumph?

My questions reflect moral values. The Grimms dealt with moral values, but these surreal moments—which the Grimms did not edit out for whatever reason—do not concern themselves with morals. These images are observations. I can safely throw out my questions posed above and look elsewhere.

What I see through the surreal lens is this observation—one rare in the fairy tales’ and-everyone-lived-happily-ever-after world: The six brothers had been enchanted. They regained their human form, but a vestige of enchantment remained, embodied in the younger brother. Imagine yourself transformed into a swan, a creature alien to your true self, yet one that flew through the air, glided on the lake’s surface. Regaining your human form, does life go back to normal? These stories never end with “And then they forgot.”

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2013 Six Swans – Part Three

Arthur Rackham

Birds of a Feather

At the lower end of Miss Cox’s garden is a pond with a resident swan, a cob I believe, who hasn’t taken a mate. A particularly solitary creature, even for a swan, he eyes me suspiciously if I wander on a garden path too near his domain. I am content to sit on the bench and view him from afar.

At the high end of the garden is a hazel tree, a favorite roost for ravens. I can make out four of them from where I sit. I am hoping for seven.

I hear the garden gate squeaking on its rusty hinges. Coming toward me is Reverend Edward Allsworthy Armstrong. I cannot be mistaken; he looks very much like the picture in his obituary: bald, bespectacled, yet with noble features, and wearing a ecclesiastical collar, denoting for him the Church of England.

We shake hands, and I point out the swan and the ravens. He take delight in them, heartfelt ornithologist that he is. Then I get to my question.

“I cannot help but notice that in fairy tales there exists a fascination for swans and ravens, one of them white and the other black, resting at either end of the color spectrum. Perhaps they represent good and evil. But I cannot imagine that the swan/raven presence is the exclusive property of fairy tales.”

“Oh, hardly!” the Reverend resets his glasses on his nose. “Swans and ravens populate legend and mythology as well. Zeus had his fondness for swans. He took the shape of a swan once for his nefarious purposes. At times, swans drew the chariot of Apollo.

“As an Ulsterman by birth, I assure you, ravens and swans figure into Celtic lore. The Irish hero Cú Chúlainin captured and killed swans, which got him into a bit of trouble. His father, Lug, was the raven god. The war-goddess Badb Catha, “Raven of Battle,” appeared to Cú Chúlainin. In Cú Chúlainin’s last and fatal battle, a raven came to rest on his shoulder.

“Swans and ravens appear elsewhere in Celtic lore, but let us not forget the wren.”

I should have guessed he’d come to this. I know the Reverend from his work Folklore of Birds, but he wrote the book on wrens, The Wren.

“Consider,” the Reverend forged ahead, “the Wren Hunt, which takes place in Celtic lands on Saint Stephen’s Day, a little before Christmas. Boys go out and beat the bushes until they capture/stun/kill a wren. Declared to be “The King,” the poor creature is then carried about ceremoniously from house to house, accompanied by youthful mummers—all boys—with an expectation for treats. In the end, the wren is buried outside of a cemetery, interred with a penny.

“But to return to swans and ravens, in Scotland they remember Cailleach, the hag who feasted on the bodies of men. She often appeared as a raven. The Welsh hero’s name, Bran, means “Raven,’ and his sister, Branwen, is the White Raven. There is more than one swan-maiden story throughout the Celtic world.”

I stop him here with my next question. “What is the significance of the swans and ravens in these stories?”

“They are simply a part of the wonder embodied in all these tales, legends, and myths.” He thinks a moment longer, then says. “Our life is impoverished if we do not cherish and cultivate the gift with which, as children, we were endowed—the gift of wonder—infinitely valuable in itself, but also to be cherished because it is the foundation of worship. The appreciation of nature leads to wonder, and wonder to worship.”

Your thoughts?

PS. The better part of the above paragraph is a quote I found in Armstrong’s obituary by W. H. Thorpe as it appeared in Ibis, Volume 121, Issue 3.

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2013 Brother and Sister – Part One

May 27, 2013cjkiernan 2 Comments

Kay Neilsen

A Viewpoint

Although I count myself a fan of the Grimms, with certain tales I am left unsatisfied. My criticism may sound odd because I am dealing with the magical world of fairy tales, where anything can happen, yet some of the stories feel nonetheless contrived. (This is not a problem exclusive to the Grimms, but for my immediate purposes let me pick on them.)

Grimms’ Brother and Sister is one of these less-than-satisfying tales. The construction of the story is partly to blame. As events flow along I sense the narrator saying, “Oh, by the way…” and filling in information pulled out of his hat.

The story starts with a lengthy declaration by the brother to his sister that their life is unbearable under the blows dealt to them by their stepmother, and they would be better off “in the wide world.” They travel into the forest, spending the night in a hollow log.

Oh, by the way, the stepmother is a witch, and when she sees the children are gone, she follows, putting a curse on all the springs in the forest. Upon waking, the brother is possessed by thirst and leads them toward the sound of a spring. The sister hears the spring say whoever drinks of it will turn into a tiger. She dissuades her brother from drinking. The next spring threatened to turn him into a wolf, and the third spring into a deer. Overcome by thirst, the brother drinks from the third spring, becoming a fawn.

The sister weaves a rope out of rushes and uses her golden garter as a collar. Why the stepmother, who hates the children, allows her to wear gold goes without explanation. They find an unoccupied cottage and move in. All is well for some time until the king and his men appear in the forest to hunt. The fawn, hearing the hunting horns, cannot be satisfied until he joins the hunt. For three days the king chases him, and by the third day they discover the cottage and the sister. Immediately the king proposes marriage

When the stepmother/witch hears of the children’s good fortune, she makes her plans to end it.

Oh, by the way, the stepmother/witch has an ugly daughter with only one eye. On the day of the sister/queen giving birth to her son, the witch and daughter, changing their appearance to be that of servants, take the queen to her bath, overheat the water and lock her in to suffocate.

The witch casts a glamour over her daughter, giving her the appearance of the queen, but there is nothing she can do about the missing eye, a defect that they need to keep hidden from the king.

However, the real queen’s ghost reappears nightly to nurse the child and pet the fawn. When the king discovers this, he breaks the spell, returning his true queen to life, consigning the ugly daughter to be torn apart by wild beasts, and the witch to be burnt. After the witch is reduced to ashes, the brother returns to his human form.

Amateur that I am, I defer to my betters on matters of perspective. I know no one better than my good friend Augustus. Armed with encyclopedic knowledge and undeniable artistic taste, Augustus is my mentor when I wander into the fairy realm. I will go see him. Besides, I need tobacco.

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2013 Brother and Sister – Part Two

Arthur Rackham

A Pipeful

The bell above the door triggers a familiar ring as I enter Augustus’ store. He already stands behind the counter, expecting me. Oak, glass, the street noise silenced when I close the door, heavy odors that baffle my senses; this is Augustus’ Tobacco Shop.

We enter into our ritual greetings. “Good day,” he says.

“Good day to you. What do you suggest for today’s purchase?”

“That, of course, depends on what you are reading.”

“Grimms’ Brother and Sister.”

A frown clouds his demeanor for a moment. “We can do better.”

Augustus walks down the row of glass canisters. He passes by Elfish Gold, Leprechaun Gold, Old Rinkrank, Cobbler’s Delight, and Black Dwarf. He pauses at Evening Star, but settles on Pleiades’ Pleasure. He puts some in a silver bowl, sniffs it, and adds a little dark, shriveled Perique. He and I take to the overstuffed chairs at the back of the store; fill, tamp, and light our pipes.

“Are you familiar,” Augustus asks, “with Dawkins’ The Little Boy and His Elder Sister, from his work Modern Greek Folktales? Pleiad, our heroine, has lost her mother, the queen. The new queen, having no love for Pleiad, convinces her husband that they should sell his daughter. She is locked in a room and fed nuts, figs, and sweets to fatten her up a little.

“The new queen’s son, Star of Dawn, who is fond of Pleiad, discovers his mother’s ill intent. Following the advice of a wise woman, when his mother brings Pleiad out to braid ribbons into her hair before selling her, he steals the ribbons and the comb, as if in playful jest. Pleiad, knowing her stepbrother’s plan, chases after him. When out of sight of their mother, they flee in earnest.”

Augustus pauses to relight his pipe.

“The mother soon understands the ruse and chases after them. As she is about to catch them, Star of Dawn throws down the ribbons, which turn into a wide plain, the mother at the far end. When she catches up to them again, he throws down the comb, which turns into a dense forest. Still she gains on the children. Star of Dawn throws down the small bag of salt given to him by the wise woman. It turns into a sea that the mother cannot cross.

“Now exhausted, Star of Dawn craves water and is about to drink some that has settled into the hoof print of a calf. Pleiad stops him, saying, if he drinks, he will turn into a calf. They come across the hoof print of a lamb. Again Star of Dawn is warned, but he gives in to thirst.

“Star of Dawn, now a lamb, and Pleiad travel all day until they come to the fountain of the king. There, after quenching their thirst, Pleiad climbs into a cypress tree growing over the fountain, while the lamb grazes.”

Tobacco smoke surrounds us, swirling, creating our story space.

“The king’s men come to water their horses, but the horses will not drink, seeing Pleiad’s reflection. The king himself comes and pleads with her to come down, but she will not. They all leave, but the king sends back his son, an old woman, and a pig. The old women sits under the tree, trying to knead her dough on an overturned trough with the pig stealing bits of it. Pleiad climbs down to rescue the old woman from her foolishness; the prince seizes Pleiad, and rides off to make her his bride. At her pleading, the lamb is brought into the castle garden.

“Pleiad is hated by her mother-in-law, who pushes her into the garden fountain and orders the lamb prepared for the evening meal. Pleiad prays to God to release her from the fountain, but she is too late to prevent the blade from being drawn across her lamb’s throat.

“After her husband and in-laws feast upon the lamb, Pleiad gathers his bones and plants them in the garden. In the morning there stands an orange tree bearing one orange. The branches move about preventing anyone from picking it except Pleiad. When she grasps the fruit the branch rises, sending her and the orange into the sky where she becomes part of the constellation Pleiades and he the Star of Dawn.”

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2013 Brother and Sister – Part Three

H.J. Ford

Escape

“Have you ever considered the role of slavery in fairy tales?”

Augustus shatters my image of Pleiad being propelled into the heavens.

“Pardon? Where did that question come from?”

The smoke has cleared. Augustus smiles, recognizing he has set me off center.

“Pleiad was being sold into slavery. That brought the topic to mind.”

“I see.”

“Aesop was a slave. Many assume he authored the stories, but might he have been drawing from a tradition? Might he have been transmitting tales, creating his own variants?”

“Possibly.” I feel Augustus entering speculative territory—his favorite place.

“Countless times poor souls have been enslaved, taken from their homes with the clothing on their backs and whatever they carried in their heads. How many of those were taken to distant lands, ending up tending the children of their masters, drawing on their stories to entertain the little ones?

“Look to the Uncle Remus tales taken down by Joel Chandler Harris. In Africa the rabbit is the trickster, come to America as Brer Rabbit, inspiring the Warner Brothers’ entourage to come up with Bugs Bunny. Oh, the studio never acknowledged Brer Rabbit as Bugs Bunny’s predecessor, but I’ll bet my best meerschaum on it.

“Present day, we don’t think of England as a source of slaves, but before the Norman invasion, Irish raiders regularly plundered the British Isles capturing its inhabitants to sell into slavery; Saint Patrick as a youth being one of the unfortunates, by the way. Later it was the Vikings, and after them the Barbary Pirates. Those pirates did not just pick on England, but Ireland, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain as well, taking their booty to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. No wonder Scheherazade had a thousand and one stories.”

“But,” I get a word in, “slavery is not the only means of story migration.”

“Certainly not. The Jack tales came to America carried by the English and Scottish; mind you though, some of them were indentured servants. But, let me argue, willing immigrants tend to embrace their new home, leaving behind associations with their old home. Slaves will hang onto their former culture, making what adaptations and disguises they must to placate their masters.

“I suspect that The Little Boy and His Elder Sister drew from Greek mythology, but could not Pleiad’s plight appeal to, or be created by, a slave? The disguise of making Pleiad a princess, instead of a commoner, does not fit well to my mind. I imagine a slave teller using this disguise to imply the story is not about her people, but about another class. However, when does a princess get sold into slavery with the argument that the king and queen can’t afford to keep her. Later on in the story, Pleiad is afraid to come down out of the tree even after the king pleads with her and makes promises. Of what is she afraid? She is a princess being offered shelter by another member of royalty. Unless in the undisguised version she is not a princess, but a runaway slave. In the end, she is captured and carried off by the king’s son, or is she being recaptured?”

“Augustus,” I say, “you’re going a bit too far on shreds of evidence. You would have Hansel and Gretel in enslavement next.” I see him consider this. “No, no, that story is about childhood fears of abandonment.”

“That’s what Bettelheim would have you think.”

I sigh and relight my pipe. The bell above the door rings and Augustus is up to please another customer.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2013 The Elves – Part One

April 29, 2013cjkiernan 1 Comment

Walter Crane

Little Folk

On our wanderings through fairyland, Thalia and I chanced upon the Grimm story called The Elves, which is composed of three stories grouped together under one title.

Our “wandering” takes place in my study, on a comfy chair, Thalia and Teddy at rest on my lap. Thalia does squirm a bit. Teddy, unblinking, stares at whatever it is at which Teddy stares.

I recognized the first story right off. In other collections it bears the name The Elves and the Shoemaker. Two elves, inexplicably, attach themselves to the household of a shoemaker when he has reached the bottom of his fortune. At night, out of sight of the human couple, from cut-out material left for them, they sew and nail shoes together with such skill that the shoemaker soon prospers.

One evening, not long before Christmas, the couple determines to discover who has been aiding them. They stay up that night, and see the naked little elves, who come into the shop, quickly perform their task, and leave.

To reward the elves, the shoemaker and his wife make two suits of clothing—complete with shoes—and hide themselves again. The elves put on the outfits, dance about, and disappear never to be seen again. (Wilhelm couldn’t leave it there and tacked on that the shoemaker continued to prosper.)

The second tale, shorter than the first, deals with a young servant girl who receives a written invitation from the elves to stand as godmother at the christening of one of their children. Uncertain about what to do, she accepts the advice of her employers that it is best not to refuse the request of the little folk.

Three elves appear and conduct her into a hollow mountain. Inside the mountain, the mother of the child lies on an ebony bed with pearl finials. The child’s cradle is of ivory and its bath of gold. The elves, so pleased with the girl, beg her to stay and celebrate with them. They do all they can to please her. But, finally, when she returns home with pockets full of gold, she finds that not three days but seven years have passed, the family she served no longer alive.

Thalia looked at me with concern over this turn of events in the story. Still, we wandered on.

The third tale, even shorter than the previous, starts with the elves stealing an infant, leaving behind a changeling with a fat head and glaring eyes. The mother’s neighbor counsels her to boil water in an eggshell, causing the changeling to laugh, thereby losing its power. She does that and the changeling declares:

I am as old

as the westernwald

And in all my life I’ve never seen

Eggshells cooked as these have been.

As he laughs, elves rush in, carry him off, leaving behind her true child.

Thalia, completely distraught over this story, insisted I reread the first tale before she and Teddy would take to their beds. I had to agree.

But now I am alone in my study, with a pipe of Elfish Gold, and reconsidering the tales. In tale one, we find beneficial elves. In tale two, Christian elves? And with tale three, maleficent elves. What did Wilhelm want us to think about these beings when he collected three of their stories under one heading?

Fairy Tales of the Month: April 2013 The Elves – Part Two

Detail of “The legend of St. Stephen” by Martino di Bartolomeo

Fairy Musings

While sitting in my study contemplating, the following thought comes into my mind. The Grimms called their collected stories Children’s and Household Tales. Our recasting the title in English as The Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales falls short of representing the collection’s content. The Elves, The Gifts of the Little People, The Water Nixie, and The Nixie in the Pond pretty much constitute the work’s fairy population. Would not the title The Grimm Brother’s Shoemaker and Tailor Tales be a small improvement? The thought leaves as quickly as it came.

I fill another pipe with Elfish Gold, tamp it down, and reach for my copy of The Fairy Tradition in Britain. Other works of Lewis Spence make scholars squirm, but I find this volume encyclopedic and useful. I had not gotten through Chapter One, “The Fairies of England,” before it became evident that, while the Grimms called the little beings who aided the shoemaker “elves,” they were clearly brownies.

The brownies of England and Scotland attach themselves to a household, doing domestic and farm chores religiously, if out of sight of the family. However, they are easily offended, and not above playing tricks on their hosts, taking their revenge on the unsuspecting. All that the brownies require is a bowl of milk left out nightly where they can find it, almost by accident. A taboo stands in place about giving anything directly to a brownie. In some stories that Spence relates, families, with good intent, reward their brownies for their labors with new clothing, a gift the brownie may or may not accept, but, in any case, the brownie will certainly disappear never to be seen again.

The tale in which the serving maid stands as godmother, I find suspicious, causing me to puff on my pipe harder than necessary. Fairies are of pagan origin. According to some, they are sprung from hell, being fallen angels. Why on earth—or under the earth—would elves hold a Christian baptism?

In the variants of this story, a woman is often requested for an elven birth as a midwife or a nurse, which makes more sense to me. Yet, in the Aarne-Thompson tale-type index, number 476 carries the label, “A midwife (godmother or nurse) for the elves.” With no further research, I will assume there are more than the few tales I ran across in which the elves are in want of a godmother, implying they practice Christianity.

With some stories in the Grimm collection, Wilhelm put a Christian gloss over obvious pagan elements. He followed a Christian habit of co-opting pagan notions and celebrations. Both Christmas and Easter have pagan roots, and retain such elements as trees, elves, eggs, and rabbits. It comes as no surprise that storytellers, over time, have inserted their own moral values into the tales they told, although not always with a good fit.

My pipe goes out and grows cold when I turn to the internet to sort out the changeling story. The changeling motif always struck me as a fairy-tale invention. To my discomfort I find instead that from medieval times to the nineteenth century the belief in infants, children, and even adults being supplanted by a changeling remained current. D. L. Ashliman, on his website, has written a summary of changeling history. Here I find no one less than Martin Luther weighing in on the subject. It gives me pause. He felt, because changelings were demon born, they could be destroyed without remorse. Infants and children who suffered from physical and mental abnormalities were likely to be thought of as changelings.

Remembering Thalia’s child-intuitive discomfort with this story, I, too, go back and reread the more reassuring The Elves and the Shoemaker before going to bed.

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2013 The Elves – Part Three

Illustrator not known, 1920.

Fairy Advice

The elves and brownies confusion is not Wilhelm’s fault. The word he used to describe the little fellows was Heinzelmännchen. The English translators used the word Elves. Sorting out the fairy world is a perplexing matter.

One of the first attempts at classifying the fairies can be found in a legend from the Western Isles of Scotland, which made divisions of the fallen angels when they were cast out of heaven. Some fell to earth to become the fairies proper, others fell into the sea to become the Blue Men, and the Nimble Men remained in the sky. The latter appear as the Merry Dancers, or the Northern Lights.

When you encounter a fairy—which is likely at some time in your life given the troops of fairies lurking about, if underrepresented in Grimm—the problem of identification will surely arise. This fairy of yours, is it a portune, brownie, boggart, pixie, spriggan, knocker, lubber-fiend, leprechaun (they are shoemakers), hobthrust, pech, banshee (hopefully not). glaistig, bean-nighe, gruagach, buckie, uruisg, puca, bwca (not a typo), caointeach, loireag, brollachan, sluagh, or glashtyn? Maybe your fairy is of the Benedith y Manau, Tylwyth Teg, Cochion, Coblynau, Fenodyree, Tuatha di Danann … . I haven’t gotten off the British Isles with this list.

Many of the above mentioned are closely related, or it simply matters in what region you are standing to determine what name to give them.

The one thing about fairies we can count on to be consistent is that humans need to beware; human and fairy relations consist of interactions fraught with tension. Stories of the human-fairy relationship go beyond the simple folktale, surfacing in legend as well. I am thinking of Oisīn, the Irish warrior-poet, and his marriage to Niam of the Golden Hair, daughter of the king of the Lands of Youth.

Oisīn, his father Finn, and their company ride out to hunt. The fairest of women approaches them, dressed as a queen, upon a white horse. With words and song she cast a spell on them, taking the willing Oisīn from his company.

But three weeks in the Land of Youth, with all its fairy comforts, cannot quell Oisīn’s desire to be with his kin. Niam allows a visit, giving him her white horse, but warns him against setting his foot on earth, or he will never return to her.

His three weeks in the Land of Youth made for three centuries in Ireland. His people had passed into legend, as well as himself. While leaning down from his saddle to perform an act of kindness, the girth breaks; Oisīn falls to the ground. The fairy horse vanishes and an ancient man lies on the earth.

He is carried to Saint Patrick, whose scribe writes down Oisīn’s story before the Fianna warrior dies.

Be it folktales or legends, the fairies hold a special, if dangerous, place in our thinking. Wilhelm’s choices for the three tales bound together were wise ones. They show the benevolent side of fairies; their odd, friendly disregard for their human companion’s wellbeing; and their selfish deceit toward mankind.

To be honest, these good, bad, and questionable traits are not unique to brownies, elves, and other fairies. These are human traits as well. I wonder if the fairies do not represent all of our wishes, concerns, and fears projected onto these little folk. It would explain the fairies’ vast numbers.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month

Reflections and Delusions

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Fairy Tale of the Month: January 2014 The Golden Bird – Part One

Fairy Tale of the Month: January 2014 The Golden Bird – Part Two

Fairy Tale of the Month: January 2014 The Golden Bird – Part Three

Fairy Tale of the Month: December 2013 The Snow Queen – Part One

Fairy Tale of the Month: December 2013 The Snow Queen – Part Two

Fairy Tale of the Month: December 2013 The Snow Queen – Part Three

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2013 Hansel and Gretel – Part One

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2013 Hansel and Gretel – Part Two

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2013 Hansel and Gretel – Part Three

Fairy Tale of the Month: October 2013 The Raven – Part One

Fairy Tale of the Month: October 2013 The Raven – Part Two

Fairy Tale of the Month: October 2013 The Raven – Part Three

Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2013 The Princess Who Became a Man – Part One

Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2013 The Princess Who Became a Man – Part Two

Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2013 The Princess Who Became a Man – Part Three

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2013 Maid Maleen – Part One

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2013 Maid Maleen – Part Two

Fairy Tales of the Month: August 2013 Maid Maleen – Part Three

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2013 The Riddle – Part One

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2013 The Riddle – Part Two

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2013 – Part Three

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2013 Six Swans – Part One

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2013 Six Swans – Part Two

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2013 Six Swans – Part Three

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2013 Brother and Sister – Part One

Kay Neilsen

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2013 Brother and Sister – Part Two

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2013 Brother and Sister – Part Three

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2013 The Elves – Part One

Fairy Tales of the Month: April 2013 The Elves – Part Two

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2013 The Elves – Part Three