Fairy Tale of the Month: Nov. 2011 The Juniper Tree – Part One

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 Warwick Goble

Slippery Slopes

When I first climbed the glass mountain of fairy tales my foot slipped on the revelation that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had not gone out to the villages and fields of Germany with pen and paper to sit at the feet of indigenous folk tellers, transcribing the words that came directly from the fount of provincial wisdom. They collected many of their fairy tales from family, friends and acquaintances, who were well educated and even members of the aristocracy. Significant exceptions were Dorothea Viehmann, a fruit seller, and Johann Friedrich Krause, an old soldier who traded stories with the Grimms for old clothes.  “Field work” was not in Jacob and Wilhelm’s vocabulary, linguists though they were.

Later, I tumbled down the glass mountain while struggling with “The Juniper Tree,” that grim Grimm story of familial decapitation, cannibalism, and murder. Echoing through the story we hear the curse of the House of Atreus, members of that family serving human flesh at banquets more than once. In the form of a goldsmith losing a shoe, we hear the echo of Jason losing his sandal before his search for the Golden Fleece. These are motifs traveling down through the course of time from ancient Greece. The story itself testifies the events might be two thousand years old.

Oh, wait… How does the narrator of this story know its two thousand years old? There is nothing in the story to date it. That’s when my foot slipped.

“The Juniper Tree,” as well as “The Flounder and the Fisherman” were given to the Grimms by Philipp Otto Runge, considered one of the great German Romantic painters. He inserted those echoes of Greek mythology. Nicely done, but this version of the story springs from a classically trained mind. Is it truly a fairy tale? If fairy tales are a sub-genre of folk tales, should they not come from the folk, from the peasants, from the unschooled, from the—stupid? There went the other foot.

Let me start the climb all over again. I recently fell into a conversation with a woman who told me of her grandmother, the neighborhood storyteller. On summer evenings her grandmother would tell the collected children stories. There was one special favorite, a rather long story, that the children insisted she tell a couple of times each summer. The granddaughter, as a grown woman, realized she had been listening to “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

The flow between literary work and folk work is long standing. Runge was hardly the first, or last, to take folk work and elevate it to higher standards. The Grimm brothers did the same to other stories. Then there is Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen. Educated treatments constitute a large part of the fairy tale development in our culture.

Every storyteller has their vision of the tale they tell; they see the story. Every listener has their vision of the story, but will see something different than the teller. The teller was once the listener. We are hearing an educated listener’s vision of the tale when we encounter Runge and the Grimms, and, for that matter, the later collectors like Joseph Jacobs and Andrew Lang. They wrote down what they saw in their vision of the story. Although they worked in a folk form, were they any less fairy tale tellers than their unlettered fellows?

Fairy Tale of the Month: Nov. 2011 The Juniper Tree – Part Two

The Flavor of Juniper

We have Philipp Otto Runge to thank for “The Juniper Tree.” At the age of twenty-two, he started his study of painting at the Copenhagen Academy. At the age of thirty-three he died. In those few years he established himself as a major German Romantic painter. Though deeply Christian, he studied the seventeenth century mystic Jakob Boehme. He also befriended Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. In 1808 he published “The Fisherman and His Wife” and “The Juniper Tree,” which the Grimms later included in their book. In the matter of writing style, the Grimms were influence by Runge.

Runge took “The Juniper Tree” from a local tale, that location being Hamburg, where he and his family resided. The difference between the story Runge heard and the story Runge wrote down is hard to say. Let me pour myself a glass of gin and tell you what I hear in Runge’s story.

The merchant’s pious wife stands under the juniper tree in the cold of winter, peeling an apple. Cutting her finger, she sees two drops of blood fall to the snow. Blood on the snow forms, for me, one of the more compelling motifs in folklore. It comes up in the Irish legend of Deirdre and in Grimm’s Snow White. Deirdre sees a black crow eating its prey in the snow. Snow White’s mother pricks her finger while sewing at a window for the light. She sees her own drops of blood in the snow through the black wooden frame of the window.

The significant difference between these two treatments of this motif and “The Juniper Tree” treatment is the absence of the color black in the latter. Red, white and black are the colors of the alchemist, the magical philosopher. Red and white, alone, are the colors of hell. The animals of the fairy world—the underworld—are white with red ears. This description includes the hounds of hell.

When the good woman sees the blood in the snow, she wishes for a child as red as blood and as white as snow. As she says this, her mood suddenly changes from sadness to joyfulness, and she has hope this wish will come true.

Runge follows the changes of the season, and the merchant’s wife’s emotional changes, through nine months. Over the months she moves from joy to sadness. In the seventh month she gorges herself on the ripe juniper berries and becomes ill. In the eighth month she makes her husband promise he will bury her beneath the juniper tree. In the ninth month she gives birth and dies, leaving behind her husband and a child as red as blood and as white as snow.

I feel Runge is suggesting that the child is demonically conceived. The merchant’s wife, at first joyful, comes to realize the child will be unnatural and tries to abort the fetus with the juniper berries. The pharmacological effects of juniper berries are largely beneficial, but the berries can be used to stimulate the uterus so as to bring on an abortion.

Failing in her attempt to destroy the child, she relents, accepting her own death. When the child is born, her maternal instincts return, and she looks lovingly upon the child before she dies. The stage is set for the second attempt to destroy this child and for his eventual resurrection.

I’d say more, but the gin has gone to my head, so I will end my speculations here.

Fairy Tale of the Month: Nov. 2011 The Juniper Tree – Part Three

 Louis Rhead

A Few Branches

After recovering from my imbibing with the berry, I began ruminating about that juniper tree. I’d be happy to have someone correct me, but I believe this is the only fairy tale with a juniper tree.

There are many varieties of juniper and they grow in all climates that can grow anything.  Many of these varieties are of remarkably twisted shape. Some types are used as bonsai trees. For being a common sight and yet of notable appearance, they haven’t caught the fancy of storytellers outside of Runge.

Some presentations of this tale it speak of an almond tree, due to the name’s translation from Low German. As storyteller Richard Martin explained it to me, the Low German title is “Von Dem Machandelboom.” In modern German, the almond tree is “mandelbaum”, and the juniper tree is “wacholderbaum”.

In another version of the story it is a rose-tree (The Rose-tree, England), and in yet another, a birch tree (The Magic Birch Tree, Russia). In “The Crow’s Nest” (Hungary) and “The Little Boy and the Wicked Stepmother” (Romania) the bones are put into a hollow tree.  In “The Girl and the Boy” (Austria), “The Satin Frock” (England), and “The Milk-White Doo” (Scotland) trees do not play a role at all. The above mentioned stories can be found at  D. L. Ashliman’s  most useful site. (Also check out his main page.)

If standing alone in the fairy tale forest, the juniper tree still fulfils its role as a magical tree that houses a female spirit. In the case of the juniper—not in  Runge’s version, but traditionally—her name is Frau Wachholder, and she can be invoked to recover stolen property.

The purpose of magical trees in fairy tales is not to recover stolen property, but to render aid and bestow gifts. Staying with Grimm, a good example is their “Cinderella” in which the heroine asks her father for a twig that brushes against his hat, rather than an expensive gift, as do her stepsisters. He returns with a hazel twig, which she plants on her mother’s grave and waters with her tears. The twig grows into a tree in which perches a white bird that gives the daughter whatever she wishes.

In our story, it is the hero, in the shape of a bird, who collects the gifts to bestow upon his family, not all the gifts being beneficial. The bird’s first journey it to the goldsmith, upon whom Runge overlays an image of the Greek hero Jason.

The second journey is to the shoemaker, where he gets a pair of red shoes. Runge predates Hans Christian Andersen by a number of decades, so he is not referring to Andersen’s “The Red Shoes”. I am sure Runge is citing something, but I don’t know what.

Then the bird flies off to acquire a millstone from the twenty millers. The millstone and millers appear in every version of this tale that involves gifts, but only Runge has twenty millers. What jumps to my mind is the conical of twenty bishops, who meet to decide on matters of the church.

In the versions where gifts are given—that is, the ones most similar to “The Juniper Tree”—the bird sings a morbid song that the listeners think is beautiful, and all these versions include the millstone that kills the wicked wife. However, in none of the versions, with or without gifts, is the child restored to life except in Runge’s story.

One more striking feature of Runge’s treatment: when the son is resurrected, he, his father, and sister go back inside the house to eat. The hero’s mother consumed the juniper berries; his sister wanted an apple; his father ate all the stew; and after his sister puts the bones under the juniper tree she returns to the house to eat. When the bird returns to his father’s house with the gifts, the family is sitting at the table in the parlor. I am going to assume they are at least snacking on something.

That is what I see in Runge’s “The Juniper Tree.” I haven’t decided what it all means to me, but therein lies the fun and further exploration of fairy tale.

Your thoughts?

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Oct. 2011 The Horned Women – Part One

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 John D.  Batten

Dark Reflections

The medieval rituals of witches, as they have been recorded and passed down to us, are imitative of their Christian counterparts. One description of a witches’ coven is twelve women and a devil, a dark reflection of Jesus and his twelve apostles.

In “The Horned Women” we clearly have a witches’ coven. One Samhain evening, twelve witches (in one variant thirteen witches) make visitation on a hapless, good woman to occupy her home, where they go about the mundane tasks of carding, spinning and weaving wool. Having invaded the mistress’s home, they make the demand that she bake them a cake, and get the water needed from the spring with a sieve. After sending her off, the witches finish the cake with blood drawn from her family, putting it on the hearth to bake.

The spirit of the spring takes pity on the woman and instructs her in how to fool the witches into quitting her house, and then in how to bar them from entry. Water used to wash her children’s feet is poured over the threshold; the cake broken and placed in the mouths of her family; the cloth that the witches are weaving is placed half in and half out of a locked chest; and a crossbeam set against the door jambs. In this way she defeats the witches who, when they soon return, cannot reenter.

I can’t argue that there are strong correlations between the events in this story and Christian church rituals, but there are allusions that suggest such links.

Foot washing has ancient origins and carries on to the present. In the Christian tradition, it is a show of humility, practiced both by Roman Catholics and some Protestant sects. Christ famously washed the feet of his twelve apostles. In our story the mistress uses the water brought from the spring to wash the feet of her children (innocents) and pours it over the threshold as a talisman against the return of the twelve women.

The Eucharist speaks of the bread and wine of communion as the body and blood of Christ.  In “The Horned Women” the cake the witches bake conflates these two elements. The cake is broken and placed in the mouths of the mistress’s family members, restoring them to life.

The cloth that the witches were weaving the mistress puts into a chest, half in and half out, locking the lid on it. Perhaps this is only me, but my mind jumps to the Shroud of Turin, probably the most famous of the Christian relics, which is said to have covered Christ when he was laid in the tomb and yet, according to Christian belief, not consigned to the tomb.  The cloth that the witches made feels like the opposite of the Shroud. The Shroud of Turin is white and served a sacred purpose. In my imagination, the witches’ cloth is black and being made for some unnamed, nefarious use, in mockery of the Shroud.

I have gone too far in my assertions to stand on solid academic ground. Like the mistress’s sieve, they don’t hold water. However, in the untrained minds of the Irish peasants who listened to this story, I cannot help but wonder if they didn’t make the same loose associations that I have allowed myself. The distinction between the symbolic gestures of Christian ceremony and the shamanistic magic of peasant superstition might not have been too clear for the first listeners who gathered around the peat fire while their shanachie told “The Horned Women.”

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Oct. 2011 The Horned Women – Part Two

 John D.  Batten

Impossible tasks and spirit helpers

One of the mainstays of folk tales and fairy tales is the impossible task. Sometimes the task is the central thrust of the story, other times simply an obstacle as part of the storyline. In “The Horned Women” the impossible task is manifest in two ways: as an immediate problem and as a broader dilemma, both answered by the spirit of the spring.

Before I get started on the tasks, let me take a drink at the spring. In Celtic times numerous springs and wells throughout the British Isles and Ireland were held to have healing properties, be it for ears, eyes, nose and throat; or twisted limbs; or skin affliction. To assure a cure one needed only leave behind an offering to the resident spirit: a crutch no longer needed, a coin thrown into the water, a nail hammered into a sacred tree, or a rag tied to a bush. These springs and wells also could serve as an entry place to the fairy world.

As Celtic pagans converted to Christianity the spirits departed; springs and wells were assigned to saints, the water flowing from where the saint thrust his staff into the ground, or from the spot were a martyred saint fell. As Protestantism rose, the popularity of saints diminished in many areas and along with them the reputation of their springs and wells.  Be that as it may, a spring refreshes, even one dispirited. I take a drink and move along.

Carrying water in a sieve, as was required of the mistress in “The Horned Women,” I see as the classical impossible task. Shakespeare refers to it in “Much Ado About Nothing”, when Leonato says to Antonio, “I pray thee, cease thy counsel, which falls into mine ears as profitless as water in a sieve.”  There also is a Buddhist story of a master and a student contemplating the implications of water in a sieve. What our mistress held in her hand is a universal conundrum.

The spirit of the spring tells her to line the bottom of the sieve with yellow clay and moss, allowing the sieve to hold water. The solution is simple and uninteresting. Storywise, I find it a cheat, and, in the world of fairy tales and folklore, the usual, boring answer to the mistress’s problem. But, immediately, the spirit of the spring adds, “Return, and when thou comes to the north angle of the house, cry aloud three times and say, ‘The mountain of the Fenian women and the sky over it is all on fire.’” Here the spirit begins to address the mistress’s broader dilemma.

With these words in our thoughts, we enter into a complex world of images and inferences. Holding water in a sieve is the entry point into a world of subtle and layered strata of magic. Although arcane and inexplicable, the advice the spring gives the mistress guides her through impending missteps, coaching her to drive out beings that would use her for their own diabolical ends.

Within this dark tale of evil manipulation emerges a heroine, who throws off the usurpers, over comes the impossible task by adhering to mystical injunction, and reclaims her rightful place. Might we take some encouragement from such a cautionary tale, each finding our own spring and our own life-giving sources, as we face those who would usurp our energies for themselves?

Fairy Tale of the Month: Oct. 2011 The Horned Women – Part Three

 The Many Horns

The most striking feature of “The Horned Women” is, of course, the horns. I don’t recall encountering horned witches in folklore before this tale. Horns are usually reserved to accentuate masculine prowess, but this does not appear to be the case. As to the symbolism, meaning, purpose and origin of the witches’ horns—I haven’t a clue.

The first reference I know of to this tale appears in John O’Donovan, The Tribes and Territories of Ancient Ossory, (Dublin, 1853).The version in this work pre-dates 1851, collected by James Fogarty from the peasants of Ivewrk. This suggests the story is of folk origins and not from a literary tradition where we could expect fanciful elements to creep into the storyline.

There is a recognizable pattern. The first witch identifies herself as “the witch with one horn”. The second witch has two horns, the third has three, and so on, up to a witch with twelve or thirteen horns depending on the version.  Nothing in the story indicates that the horns create any kind of ranking among the witches; the one with the most horns is not spoken of as their leader. There seems to be no functional purpose for the horns growing on their heads.

Medusa comes to my mind, because of the similarity of the image, but those are snakes coming out of her head. There are plenty of horned gods, but no horned goddesses.

Cuckoldry can involve horns, but they are placed on the heads of the deluded husbands.  A devil, who has horns as a mark of his virility, is a member of the witches’ coven.However, I am not sensing any sexual allusions to the witches’ horns. Nor are the witches of an animal nature. They are doing the women’s work of carding, spinning and weaving wool, which comes from sheep, and the rams have horns, but I see no reason to make connections between witches and rams.

Enough. I feel I have adequately demonstrated my cluelessness. (I don’t think that is a word, but it is my condition.) Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: Sept 2011 Twelve Dancing Princesses – Part One

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 Anne Anderson

 A Comparison

The first word a baby folklorist learns is “version.” If there isn’t more than one version of a folktale then it probably isn’t a folktale. “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” has a comfortable number of variants, dispersed from Russia, across Europe, to Scotland.

Also, like all true folktales, “The Twelve” does change color like a chameleon as it scampers from the forests of one ethnic area to another. I’m going to follow this critter as it makes it way from Germany to Ireland and France.

In the German flora the tale takes on the title, “The Worn-out Dancing Shoes,” appearing in the Grimms’ collection. The protagonist is an old soldier, who is aided by a magical helper, the iconic Old-woman-in-the-wood, who gives him good advice and a cloak of invisibility. Thus armed, he presents himself to the king in an attempt to find out how the king’s daughters dance their shoes to pieces while asleep in their beds. The reward is to marry one of the princesses. Failure at the task means death.

The old woman had advised him not to drink the drugged wine offered by the heartless princesses, a drink that led to the deaths of the other suitors. The old soldier pretended to drink the wine, and, feigning sleep, observes the princesses descending into the underworld. Donning the magic cloak, he follows them through groves of silver trees, golden trees and diamond trees to a lake where twelve princes wait to row them across to an island castle to dance away the night. For three nights the soldier follows, watches, and collects tokens to prove his story. Upon his revealing the truth to the king, the spell is broken; the princes who waylaid the princesses are punished for the same number of days they danced with their partners; and, interestingly, referring to his own age, The soldier marries the eldest daughter, even though he followed the youngest during his invisibility.

With a clap of my hands, the chameleon darts off into the Scottish foliage. Here the story is called “Katie Crackernut,” as collected by Andrew Lang. In this version, the same story motif as the Grimm version is identifiable, only turned upside down. The protagonist is a princess fleeing her parents’ home with her stepsister in tow, the latter of whom has acquired a sheep’s head in lieu of her own, through the machinations of the protagonist’s own mother. Seeking shelter in another castle, Katie finds there a dying prince, one of the two sons of the king and queen. Inexplicably, anyone who watches over the prince at night disappears.

The king offers a peck of silver to anyone who will stay with the prince. Katie volunteers and at midnight the prince rises and rides off. Katie gets on behind him, collecting nuts from trees as they pass by. At a green hill, they enter the fairy world, where Katie hides and watches the fairies dance the prince into exhaustion until dawn.

For the second night Katie demands a peck of gold to watch over the prince. That night she learns that a wand a baby fairy is carrying about can be used to cure her stepsister. She lures the baby fairy with the nuts and gets the wand.

Now Katie asks to marry the prince, if she will stay a third night. During that night’s dancing she overhears that the birdie the baby is carrying around can be used to cure the prince. The fairy kid never stood a chance. Katie plucks and cooks the birdie, which the prince greatly desires to eat. On the third bite the spell is broken. The prince and Katie are married in a double wedding, along with the prince’s spare brother and the stepsister.

Another clap of my hands and off goes the chameleon to France. I am using Andrew Lang’s translation, which is called “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Now the protagonist is a young gardener, who brings bouquets of flowers to the princesses, falling in love with the youngest. His magical helper appears as the lady in the golden dress, who gives him two laurel bushes that can grant him wishes.

He first wishes for invisibility, allowing him to overhear the princesses, learn their secret, and follow them to the underworld dance. He reveals to the youngest that he knows their secret. The sisters decide to enchant him with a wine philtre, as they did the fifty princes who came to solve the riddle and instead became their dance partners.

Although he knows all this, he goes to the laurels and wishes for princely clothing to attend the dance. Offered the wine potion, he is about to drink, when the youngest stops him, declaring her love for him. He tosses the potion aside and drops to his knees, proposing marriage. The other dance partners do the same, the spell now broken. Before the dance castle collapses, they have to get themselves and the extra princes back across the lake, not bothering to beg the question who were the original dance partners that started the whole thing off? It gets terrible messy and illogical, but then it’s French.

My chameleon is looking at me with his rotating eyes. I’m rolling my eyes too. These tales are all the same story, but then they are not.

In the Grimm version the old soldier is rather calculating; comes out on top, besting the cold-hearted princesses; and takes the hand of the eldest princess, the very same who offered him the drugged wine. I wish him luck.

The Scottish version brings to the fore the strong, resourceful Gaelic woman, who needs no magical helpers, and solves everyone’s dilemmas by keeping her head (unlike her stepsister) in the face of magic and fairies.

The French version—romantic through and through, if not very tidy.

Hey, what happened to my chameleon? Did he disappear or just…

Fairy Tale of the Month: Sept 2011 Twelve Dancing Princesses – Part Two

 Kay Nielsen

The Dance

In fairy tales, dancing ranges from Cinderella acquiring magnificent gowns to attend the royal ball and win the heart of the prince, to Snow White’s stepmother/witch-queen forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she falls down dead. Other examples of dance in fairy tales include the seven kids dancing around their mother goat after the wolf has drowned, and Rumpelstilskin dancing around his fire when he inadvertently reveals his name.

Dancing, as recreation, is a common activity, if maligned by Christian Fundamentalists. That it enters into fairy tales is unavoidable given the number of tales that end with a wedding. But when we come to “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” and its variants, such as “Katie Crackernut,” the dance takes on another level of significance.

“The Twelve” and its variants share some common features:
1. The number three plays its strong, traditional role. The protagonist follows the dancers for three nights. In most versions three groves of trees appear. In some versions there are three princesses.
2. The dance takes place at night.
3. Always, if the dancers are female, there are shoes involved. (There is a correlation between women and shoes. In one of the variants the protagonist is an apprentice cobbler. Only in “Katie Crackernut,” where the dancer is male, does the story not talk about his shoes.)
4. The most striking parallel, the element that pulls us into the story, is that the dance takes place in the underworld.

That the dance may have dire consequences is clearest in “Katie Crackernut.” The fairies are dancing the prince to exhaustion, toward his death, under the green hill. In a Portuguese version, three sisters are dancing in hell every night. In a witches’ coven they dance with the devil, and let’s keep in mind a witches’ coven is made up of twelve women (twelve witches and the devil, making thirteen, thought to be a parody of Jesus and the twelve apostles). In the most familiar story line of “The Twelve,” the princesses come to no harm; it is the suitors who pay the price by beheading, disappearing or becoming enchanted themselves. Hmmm. Perhaps the Southern Baptists are right about what dancing can lead to.

The element common to all these tales that I have not yet mentioned is the spell. In every case the dancers are under a spell. In every case the spell is broken by the hero. Who cast the spell? Why was it cast? When was it cast? The tales will not tell us. The tales do not know. In “Katie Crackernut” we are left to assume that the fairies have waylaid a hapless being, ensnared by them for their own entertainment, as they are wont to do. But with the twelve princesses, I have the sense the spell, the dance, has been going on forever. Regardless of the story’s end, for me, they are still dancing, under us, in a castle filled with light and music, not thinking, as they dance, of consequences.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Sept 2011 Twelve Dancing Princesses – Part Three

 Kay Nielsen

Tension

One of my “hats” is that of an unpublished young adult fantasy writer. My critique groups tell me my story lacks tension. They inform me that genre readers (fantasy, mystery, crime) expect tension—that ever since the rise of melodrama as a story structure, the public has valued escalating tension. I observe that, with the advent of movies, devices such as car chases and cliff-hangers generate enough tension to attract viewers like crows around shiny objects. The action/adventure genre verges on needing plot and storyline only to string together the action.

The attention now paid to escalating tension postdates the development of fairy tales. When last did you come across one with a cliff-hanger? OK, Disney inserted a few in the reworking of those classics, but those are modern adaptations (violations?).

Does that mean there is no tension in those tales? I am going to argue in the next couple of paragraphs that there is tension, but, like many elements in fairy tales, it is subliminal and coded. The tension in fairy tales is created quietly and subtly through the story’s progression.

In “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” after entering the underground, the old soldier follows the princesses as they progress through three groves. The first is a grove of trees with silver leaves and branches. The soldier breaks off a twig as a token, causing an unnaturally loud noise, which alarms the youngest princess; but the impatient eldest sister explains away the disturbance. They proceed into a second grove, this with trees made of gold—another token, another noise, another excuse. The third grove is of diamonds, and the pattern is repeated.

On first reading, that there might be tension here never crossed by mind. I suspected that silver, gold, and diamonds held some arcane, mystical, symbolic meaning, understood in olden days by the listener. Today, if I were to say “Moe, Larry and Curly,” you would think “Three Stooges.” Back then, if I were to say “silver, gold and diamonds,” they would think—what?

I went looking for the “what.” I didn’t find it. Yes, all the precious metals have been assigned symbolic meanings and curative powers, etc. But none formed a triad of cabalistic or alchemistic significance. What I found was another story: “The Three Kingdoms—The Copper, The Silver, and The Golden.” This long Russian tale, collected by Jeremiah Curtain, throws in a diamond castle near the end for good measure. The progress of the hero starts at the Copper Castle, traveling to the next more valuable castle, all guarded by serpents, until he reaches the diamond castle, guarded by six-headed serpents, where the climax of the story occurs. That there might be tension here still did not occur to me. It is still, in my mind, all about the precious metals.

However, Jeremiah Curtain also wrote “Myths and Folktales of Ireland,” in which he collected “The Shee an Gannon and the Gruagach Gaire.” In part of that tale, the young Shee an Gannon battles three giants in turn. He throws down the stone wall surrounding the first giant’s apple trees and helps himself. The first giant comes crashing through the woods and a terrible struggle follows. Shee an Gannon is victorious, and the next day throws down the wall of the second, larger, giant brother, followed by an even more desperate fight. Shee an Gannon’s victory over the third and largest giant is a near thing, but he has now proven himself, and the story moves on to the next scene. There are no copper, silver, gold or diamond anythings in this tale, but the progression through larger and stronger is not unlike the progression toward more valuable and precious.

It’s not the underlying symbolism, but rather the increase in value, or the increase in size, or the increase in violence that is the device. These are the markers that inform the listener that the tension in the story is rising. These are not the same markers as in melodrama, where the rise in tension is blatantly described. The fairy tales use the progression of story elements to suggest tension.

As the old soldier passes through the groves, he is getting deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the underground world, drawing closer to the heart of the story, the castle of dancing and its music. His progress is a cue to the listeners to co-create the story’s tension for themselves.

Your thoughts?

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2011 Seven Kids – Part One

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 Karl Fahringer 

Wolf at the door.

            I keep getting emails from the Natural Resources Defense Council asking me to throw money to the wolves. I get these emails because of the art (almost science) of those who specialize in targeting susceptible audiences who wish to entertain the idea of parting with their money for worthy causes. These entrepreneurs are heir to the thoughts of that great promoter of performing artists, P.T. Barnum, to whom is attributed the phrase, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

            In present-day American society we are ambivalent toward wolves. They are both a threat to livestock and on the endangered species list. City dwellers feel soft hearted toward these creatures, seeing them as distant echoes of an America passing, already lost to the urban landscape. Those living close to the wolves’ natural habitat may well feel differently about them.

             When it comes to the fairy-tale treatment of wolves, as in “The Wolf and the Seven Kids,” I am not sure we are talking about wolves at all. I think we are talking about the embodiment of evil.

            I am not talking about fairy tale’s anthropomorphizing  of animals. We dress animals up in hats and coats. We have them build and live in houses. All very enchanting and entertaining, but not what I am talking about.

            I’m talking about the nature of fairy tale wolves. Actual wolves are scary animals. If you or I were to meet a pack of wolves, while we are alone, in a forest, at night, they would not consider our donations to the NRDC. However, notice the plural. There are no packs of wolves in fairy tales.

            The fairy-tale wolf is much more synonymous with the devil than he is with his fellow creatures in the wild. As listeners, we are never allowed to feel sympathy for the wolf (setting aside some clever modern-day spoofs to the contrary). Ultimately the wolf is punished for his deeds. In the case of “The Wolf and the Seven Kids,” the mother goat cuts open the wolf’s stomach as he sleeps, releasing her children and replacing them with stones. When the wolf goes to the well to drink he topples in and drowns. The seven kids and their mother dance around the well in joy. This is the proper course of punishment in fairy tales.

            In grander tales such as “The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” the embodiment of evil is represented by Sauron and Emperor Palpatine. Like the wolf, they represent all that is unwholesome. Unlike the wolf, they are supported by a host of minions, some as powerful as Saruman and Darth Vader. When the hero or heroes destroy these representations of evil the minions disperse, and wholesomeness is restored. While the fairy-tale wolf does not have his minions, I am suggesting they too would disperse if he did.

            I am left to wonder, if the fairy-tale wolf has lost his status as an individual member of a pack, to be put forth as the sole embodiment of evil, do not these tales misrepresent evil?

            When Americans’ symbols of evil, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, were destroyed, what happened to their minions? Did a period of peace and contentment follow?

            Do fairy tales offer up a false hope? Do they mislead us in the nature of evil by putting evil into one solitary body? Or, are fairy tales responding, as best they can, to our inability to comprehend evil as complicated and diverse?

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2011 Seven Kids – Part Two

 Adrian Ludwig Richter

About those Animals

I settled down in my study to write this blog not knowing what I wanted to write about. Our cat passed through the room wearing a vest and breeches, breeches. He produced a pocket watch, checked the time, then with a snap of its lid, hurried out, slamming the door behind him. I wish he wouldn’t do that. Slam the door I mean.

 
We love giving our pets human attributes. How necessary are those dog sweaters, really? How many times have we photographed dogs wearing glasses? How many dogs know how to shake hands?

Cats will not put up with much of these activities. We have a photo of one of our cats in a baby carriage, dressed in doll clothes. As a result, the cat shunned our daughter ever after.
The delight we take in these doubtful costumed antics gets transferred to, and expanded in, fairy tales. Looking at “The Wolf and the Seven Kids,” Old Mother Goat lives in a house furnished with table, bed, oven, cupboard, washbasin, and clock case (largely ineffectual hiding places for her kids). The wolf converses with a shopkeeper, a baker, and a miller (whom the wolf threatens). During the course of action Old Mother Goat cuts open the sleeping wolf’s stomach, then deftly sews him back up again, seemingly without benefit of opposable thumbs.

 
In another set of fairy tales we don’t dress up our animal characters and we return them to their habitats, but give them magical powers. My favorite among these is Falada, the talking horse in “The Goose Girl”. Another example is the Flounder in “The Flounder and the Fisherman.” A good half of these magical helpers turn out to be humans under enchantment.

 
Do we do this to our animal friends for sheer entertainment, or are there other, deeper reasons?

 
There is a different feel about our anthropomorphizing when we get to the half-humans—mermaids, Centaurs, pans—who populate a mythical world. Stories about them embody a haunting uneasiness. Particularly the mermaid in folklore has a seductress nature. Marriages between them and humans are usually ill fated, as are the unions between selkies and men.  Selkies are a somewhat different category, being seals in the water and humans on land, not being half-human on the upper half and animal on the lower half, but rather shedding their animal skins. In all cases, these relationships left us with a sense of the uncanny.

 
If we reverse the order of upper half human and lower half animal we are plunged back further in time to the Egyptian pantheon, that house the likes of Horus, Sobek, and Sekhmet, who bear the heads of a falcon, a crocodile, and a lioness respectively. These are gods and goddesses, idols of worship, more than the playthings of our idle imaginations. It is they who act out the Egyptian cosmology in time to the rise and fall of the Nile.  Can we draw a line between Anubis, the jackel-headed god of the underworld and the big bad wolf?

 
I sense an undercurrent of suspicion that we fear we are not as high above our animal companions in the hierarchy of existence as would please us.
Our cat came back into the study mumbling under his breath, grabbed my copy of Grimm, and left again. I wish he wouldn’t do that. Mumble I mean. I don’t know what he said.

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2011 Seven Kids – Part Three

 Otto Ubbelohde

An upset stomach

“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”
“I have butterflies in my stomach,”
“I can’t stomach that.”
The stomach comes in for its fair share of inclusions in adages and expressions. Holidays mean special foods for our stomachs, from turkey and hot dogs to cookies and candy. Entire industries are dedicated to the condition and shape of our stomachs. For as much concern as we have with our stomachs, it plays but a small, although specific, role in fairy tales.

 
Only two tummy-mofits (Am I coining a term?) come to mind and one of them isn’t strictly a stomach. I will first deal with (to get it out of the way) the gizzard.

 
With due respect, it is a magical gizzard. The two best loved gizzards belong to Drakestail of the story “Drakestail” and the little red Hungarian rooster of “The Turkish Sultan.” Both gizzards have the ability to hold objects far beyond expectations. Drakestail’s contains a fox, a ladder, a river, and a wasp nest. The Little Rooster holds a well of water, a bee’s nest, and, in the end, all of the Sultan’s treasure.

 
The stomach that interests me most is the wolf’s. (There is a Norwegian troll stomach of some merit, but that is a tale I have not explored.) In “The Wolf and the Seven Kids,” after a third attempt at deception the wolf succeeds in eating six of the seven kids, but with such haste and greed that he swallows them whole. The seventh kid leads Old Mother Goat to where the wolf is sleeping off his meal. Seeing movement in his stomach, she gets scissors, needle, and thread, cuts open the wolf’s stomach, and lets out her kids who gather stones to replace themselves, after which the wolf is sewn up again.  Upon waking, in some discomfort, the wolf goes to the well for a drink. As he leans down the stones roll forward tipping him into the well to drown.

 
I’ll compare the above tale with another tale. This tale is Greek, and I’ll suppose older, but I cannot be certain about the age of any tale and its origins. The parents of the Greek pantheon were the Titan, Cronus, and his sister/wife Rhea. It was prophesized that Cronus would be overthrown by one of his children, just as he had overthrown his father. Cronus attempted to get around the prophesy by eating his children. Rhea didn’t like that much, and when she gave birth to Zeus, she substituted a stone statue for the child, which Cronus swallowed instead.

 
In some versions of this tale Zeus is raised by the goat Amalthea. When Zeus grows up he overthrows Cronus as predicted, by cutting open Cronus’s stomach, thereby releasing his siblings. Oh, by the way, Cronus had seven children. Well, okay, Chiron was a centaur born of the nymph Philyra, and not one of the gods, but, hey, close enough for fairy tales.

 
I leave you to draw the parallels.

 

Your thoughts?

 

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2011 King Thrushbeard – Part One

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 Arthur Rackham

The Marriage Test

 

            In “King Thrushbeard” we find an elaborate expression of that old and venerable fairy tale tradition, the marriage test. In the usual form of the marriage test, the hero or heroine goes through a series of trials in order to claim (or in some cases reclaim) their spouse.

 

            I am not sure if the “marriage test” is an accepted term in folklore studies. Let me give two examples of what I mean.

 

            In “The White Snake” our hero is given the tasks of retrieving a ring thrown into the sea, gathering ten bags of millet seed scattered across the ground at night, and seeking an apple from the Tree of Life as preconditions before he is allowed to marry the princess. Such tasks are never achieved without magical helpers, in this case creatures our hero had saved, and who now return the favor.

 

            In “Sweetheart Roland” it is the heroine who, with her lover, goes through a series of escapes from her evil witch-stepmother, only to have Roland enchanted away by another woman. In the end the heroine reclaims him with her song. These tasks are not stated as preconditions before marriage, but the heroine must pass through the trials before the marriage can take place.

 

            The interesting feature in “King Thrushbeard” is that the princess is unaware that she is in the midst of a marriage test. She believes her husband is a beggar, to whom she is given without benefit of any celebration. She has no goal in sight, only sincere remorse for her actions, which becomes her redemption, leading to the celebration of her union with King Thrushbeard.

 

            The marriage test expresses itself in many different ways in the fairy tale oeuvre. (The French never did learn how to spell, but remember this word the next time you play Scrabble.) Whatever form it takes, it is easily recognizable: the tale ends in a marriage, a fantasy reflection of what in our world is called…the…a

 

            Wait a minute. There is no marriage test on this side of the veil, or anything like it. There are marriage licenses, but any dummy can get one of those. There are marriage-for-dummies books for the dummies that get marriage licenses, but there isn’t a mandatory aptitude test for marriage or a competency test (that’s a thought though). 

 

            Let’s look back at the time from which these fairy tales emerged. Commonly, marriages were arranged; there were financial considerations, dowries to be collected, family ties to bind. But no marriage test.

 

            What purpose does the marriage test motif serve? We can easily find reasons for the marriage test to be in a story. The marriage test drives the plot of the tales in which it appears. It creates the tension and conflict within the story, and what is a story without conflict? There is the “true love conquers all” message, which is the satisfying ending to the tale.

 

            But when I look beyond reason, what enchants me is that in the fairy tale culture there exists a way of thinking about, a way of dealing with, a way of approaching the state of matrimony that has no parallel in our culture.

 

            Where does it come from?

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2011 King Thrushbeard – Part Two

 Walter Crane

Commoners

In “King Thrushbeard” I can’t help noticing an undercurrent that I have not noticed in other fairy tales—the helplessness of royalty outside their realm.

The princess in King Thrushbeard raises the act of insulting her suitors to an art form. Her natural talents end there. The King condemns her to the status of a commoner by turning her over to a beggar for her refusal to marry a worthy husband. Her further disappointments come along quickly when she finds her new dwelling dismal and devoid of servants.

Her beggar-husband soon finds she cannot cook, weave or spin. Her attempts to sell his earthenware in the marketplace come to calamity, and she ends up as a kitchen maid in the castle, working for scraps of food. The commoner-husband calls her “a bad bargain” to her face.

A commoner is calling someone of royal birth a bad bargain? Let’s ignore the plot; let’s ignore that the beggar is really a king and the set-up is a lesson for the princess. The central focus of the story is the princess’s descent in status. That is what is expected to be compelling to the listener. We, a modern audience, feel sympathy for her plight. But how does this story fall on a commoner’s ears in a world where royalty matters?  Does this tale become social commentary? Veiled social commentary, but a critique none the less?

What was the emotional context of commoners and royalty at the time these fairy tales were current? There haven’t been royal families that mattered in Western culture for a century, and they were tending to get shot and bombed by the rebellious/anarchistic rabble toward the end. We would have to go to the Middle East to find people whose lives are at least partly defined by the presence of a royal family.

But when these tales were current, kings, queens, princesses and princes strode through many of the stories like actors and actress on stage usually cast in sympathetic light. A queen might be evil, resulting from her dabbling in witchcraft. Sibling rivalry may raise its head. But neither of these faults is inherent in blue blood.

Usually, a prince will venture forth to fulfill a challenge or request by the king. A princess may fall from high status, but will regain it through cleverness, honesty, or sometimes magic. A queen will protect her children against unusual odds.

Then there is the commoner who marries into royalty after accomplishing impossible tasks with the aid of magical helpers. Let me speculate that this theme has to do with the fanciful wish of commoners to be royal.

We are still fascinated with royalty. Even Americans, who rebelled against the Crown, tarred and feather loyalists, can think of few things more exciting than a royal wedding.

Where is “King Thrushbeard” coming from that it criticizes the princess, if ever so gently? I find it an anomaly in the fairy tale lexicon. I, for one, don’t know what to make of it.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: July 2011 King Thrushbeard – Part Three

 Margaret Evans Price

In a Different Light

“King Thrushbeard”, like a lot of Grimm, is politically incorrect. In the course of depicting an ancient male-dominated world, the early tale tellers would have been perplexed, even aghast, at the feminism of the future. They didn’t know to give a passing nod to the modern feminist movement.

The gist of Thrushbeard is that a royal princess does not get to marry the king until she is humbled. At the start, her father wishes her to marry, but she belittles and insults all the suitors, including the one she nicknames “Thrushbeard”. Furious, her father pledges her to the next beggar who walks through the gates, and she is sent off with a beggar/fiddler. Now, living as a commoner, she has no skills and descends in status. When thoroughly humbled and full of remorse, it is revealed that her fiddler husband is actually King Thrushbeard in disguise, and she is restored to her former position by his hand.

Understandably, feminists gag on such tripe and look warily on anyone reading such demeaning-to-women works. The last time I read “King Thrushbeard” I did so at night, under the covers with a flashlight.

However, my flashlight was made by Anima & Animus Inc. a Division of Jung Industries. It shed a different light.

To oversimplify the Anima/Animus concept, it is the woman in every man, and the man in every woman. (May Jung forgive me.)

The princess, in her rejection of the suitors, is aggressive, controlling and confrontational. She clearly displays her animus in the form of negative masculine attributes. Outside of her beauty, she lacks anything feminine.

In King Thrushbeard, disguised as a beggar, we see his masculine side as cold, uncaring, and logical, applying his princess/wife unsuccessfully to various forms of manual labor, until she devolves to a mere kitchen wench. At the end of the tale, he reveals his true nature and purpose during the wedding feast. In this, he is tender, patient and forgiving. We see his anima.

Interestingly, the princess does not recognize the beggar as King Thrushbeard, even though the king has remarkable physical features. As the beggar, he hides his anima; all she sees is his male side. She sees only half a person. That is the real disguise.

Not until they both inhabit the feminine realm can there be a marriage. While her animus dominates, while she demeans all suitors, she remains unattainable. Fairy tales are generally supportive of feminine attributes in both the hero and the heroine. Usually, act of kindness, thoughtfulness and honesty win the day, rather than do-or-die heroics. What fairy tale ends with “To the victor belong the spoils!”? King Thrushbeard wins his wife by subtlety and not by the sword.

Your thoughts?

  1. After a little more research, I found Marie-Louise Von Franz, a Jungian who wrote a lot about the psychology behind fairy tales, wrote about King Thrushbeard in terms of the anima and animus. Just when I thought I’d come up with a pretty good idea… Well, as that old Egyptian saying goes, “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2011 The Three Little Men in the Wood – Part One

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 Edmund Dulac

Water

One of the charms of fairy tales is their reminder of pagan thought. These reminders are vital if fairies, ogres and genies are to survive into the modern day. If we forget them, they will disappear. What then would become of the gnome that haunts my study?

I know he’s there. Usually in the vicinity of my copy of Jack Zipes’s “The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm”, wherever it may be setting. He pops out of sight the moment I look up. I can almost believe he is not real.

Pagan allusions in fairy tales often refer to earth, wind, fire and water, as well as the sun, moon and stars. As Maria Tater says in “The Annotated Brothers Grimm”, “These cosmic forces are central to the fate of the hero, and they often shape the course of events in ways that escape our attention.” The cosmic force in “The Three Little Men in the Wood” is water.

The tale starts with the future stepmother promising that the heroine will bathe in milk and drink wine while the stepsister will bathe in water and drink water; a situation that is soon reversed. Presently, water is poured into a boot to test the fates. The boot, despite a tiny hole in the sole, holds water.

Three times the stepmother tries to destroy the poor heroine. First she is driven out into the snow to search for strawberries, then forced out onto the frozen river to chop a hole in the ice and wash yarn, and finally flung from the castle window to fall into the river and drown.

In spirit form the girl returns to the castle as a duck swimming up the gutter drain. The villainous women meet their end inside a barrel rolled into the river. It is not unusual in these tales, so filled with paganism, to end the story with a Christian gloss; in this story, a baptism.

Water is generally taken as a symbol for the source of life, fertility, and the feminine aspect. Given the preponderance of water images, I might feel safe calling this a female-centric story.

Forgive me now, as I jump off the deep end. Water or no water, It’s a male-controlled story. There is hardly a Grimm story that is not.

At the heart of this story, two female aspects battle for dominance. One of them, the heroine, always supplicant, has the support of the male aspect. The male characters in the story are enablers, or at worst, they take sides. Her father, although he makes a bad choice then disappears, (common fare in fairy tales) sets in motion the events that lead to her success. The three little men heap good fortune upon her and heap curses upon her stepsister. The King rescues her, and performs the acts to return her to life. The stepmother and daughter have no such support. What does the heroine bear for all this effort? A son.

In the Greek pantheon the goddesses had power and a role to play, for good or for ill.  In Irish legend, the competition between queen Medb and her husband Ailill led to the deaths of Ireland’s greatest heroes of the Ulster Cycle. By the time the monotheistic religions replace the pagan religions, God is male in aspect; there are no goddesses. Although pagan thought is reflected in fairy tales, the former higher status of the feminine is not to be found. Fairy tale women may be put on a pedestal, but it is the fairy tale men who put them there.

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2011 The Three Little Men in the Wood – Part Two

 John B. Gruelle

Strange Details

I enjoy telling “The Three Little Men in the Wood” partly because bobbing around within the tale are a number of peculiar events. Leaving one’s fate to a leaky boot is one. Washing yarn in a frozen river is another. Sent to find strawberries in the snow? Simply impossible.

The event that caught me was the drowned heroine’s transformation into a duck, instead of descending into death. I hadn’t come across this idea before. The word “motif” floated to the surface. I dove in, to search it out.

A good reason to join the National Storytelling Network is to have access to the Greenwood Folklore & Folklife database. I floated my mouse over to “Advance Search”, entering the word “duck” as keyword. I paddled by the North American Indian duck dance (may have to get back to that one) and let the list divert me to “A Guide to Folktales in the English Language” by  D. L. Ashliman, landing upon his summary of “The Black and the White Bride”, also in Grimm. A list of related stories followed the article, with “The White Duck” (Russian) and “The Bushy Bride” (Norwegian) among them.

Let me here confess the spotty nature of my research. I haven’t read Grimm cover to cover, therefore, had not read “The Black and the White Bride”. Nor have I read Andrew Lang’s colored Fairy Books cover to cover, nor Francis Child’s five volumes of English and Scottish ballads, etc, etc. I dive in at random or to find a particular tale; then come back up for air.

While submerged in the Greenwood database, I saw a reference to the white duck in “Hansel and Gretel”. Never gasp under water. I came to the surface sputtering. One strange detail gained clarity.

In “The Three Little Men in the Wood” and similar variants, the young queen, after being drowned, returns as a duck in an attempt to care for her child. In “Hansel and Gretel”, the children are trying to find their way home after their ordeal, and are aided by a white duck that carries them across the lake that bars the way. Who is that duck other than the spiritual remains of their mother?

Everyone knows the story of “Hansel and Gretel”, but unless they read the Grimm version they will not know about the white duck. The grocery store versions of “Hansel and Gretel” routinely edit out the duck.

Let us admit, a duck can not carry a child across a lake. Unless there is something particularly charming about the image, there is no reason to keep it in the story. The spiritual mother helping her children on the last leg of their journey is lost.

Why?

We, as a society, don’t understand the language of fairy tales. We understand body language. We understand the language of our politicians, and how to read between their lines. We understand the language of sit-coms, and recognize the one-liner, knowing why it is there. We don’t understand the language of fairy tales, and why nonsense and impossibilities are not nonsensical nor impossible.

  1. Be kind to your web footed friends, for a duck may be somebody’s mother.

 

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2011 The Three Little Men in the Wood – Part Three

Colored Memory

“The Three Little Men in the Wood” contains a number of abiding images, the gentlest of them being the strawberries in the snow. This story, along with its Slovakian companion, “Strawberries in Winter”, are Cinderella variants, although I don’t know of any other Cinderella stories involving strawberries.

As an impossible task, it comes up in a number of stories, especially the farther north we search. The Norse goddess Frigga uses strawberries in which to hide the souls of dead infants, smuggling them into the afterlife. Connections were made in medieval times between this member of the rose family (really not a fruit) and the Virgin Mary, even though the strawberry is not mentioned in the Bible.

As an image, the contrast of a lush, red strawberry, a favorite spring treat, hidden under the cold, white, relentless snow of winter, evokes an immediate sense of magic and delight for most readers.

Not for me.

I am stopped by a color scheme that conceals its true nature. In Grimm’s ghastly tale “The Juniper Tree”, the childless wife, while standing under a juniper tree peeling an apple, cuts her finger. Drops of her blood fall onto the snow. Not being able to take her eyes from the sight, she declares, “Oh, if only I had a child as red as blood and as white as snow.” The granting of her wish leads to attempted abortion, decapitation, cannibalism and death by crushing.

My personal feeling about the pairing of red and white goes deeper. I grew up in an old, stone, Pennsylvania farmhouse. The thick stone walls allowed for an inner and outer door with room to stand between the two. The two doors and space cut down on drafts and conserved heat during the winter. The modern adaptation is an inner door with glass panes and an outer storm door.

Sometime after my mother’s death, I had a dream. I am standing in that space between the two doors. On the inside is my mother calmly talking to me. Outside, racing across the field, is a pack of white dogs with red ears. I know, as one knows things in dreams, they are coming for my mother. I am struggling to keep both doors shut, which, for reasons I can’t understand, proves difficult. As the dogs near, I manage to hold both closed, trapping myself in a sort of limbo.

Years later, when I became interested in folklore and mythology, I sat one evening on my living room couch reading Robert Graves’ “Three White Goddess”. He talked about the hounds of hell—white dogs with red ears. Since then I have often encountered white creatures with red ears from beyond the veil in Irish and English legends, but I know I had not run across them before that night.

Where does foreknowledge come from? Is racial memory coloring our storytelling? For me, red and white have diabolical undertones, even if they rest on innocent strawberries and the clean, cold snow.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2011 The Laidly Worm – Part One

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Ain’t Nothing Like The Web

 

 Knowing the backstory to a tale informs a teller. I won’t say it is important, but it adds depth to the telling. In “The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh” there is a reference to Rowan wood. I know this is one of the trees sacred in Celtic traditions, but I decided I wanted to know more about it. My search almost immediately led me down another path.

 

 First stop: Wikipedia. Burnt into my brain synapses that fire up when I begin researching are the admonishments of high school teachers berating us if our term papers looked like they came straight from the World Book Encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the new WBE. In my opinion Wiki is one of the most reliable resources on the Web. I have yet to find erroneous information. It is a great place to start, with lots of links off onto related topics.

 

Returning to my Google list (yes, Google) created by entering “Rowan Tree”, I click on the next promising entry. Halfway down the page I glide upon:

 

“Laidley Wood”

 

        The spells were vain
         The hag returned
         To the Queen in a sorrowful mood
         Crying that witches have no power
         Where there is Rowan tree wood.

Traditional Celtic ballad


Oh?  I had already searched on the phrase “Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh.” Google offered up various copies of Joseph Jacob’s version, and related versions. I search again.  No ballads.

 

I cut and paste “Where there is Rowan tree wood” into the search box, with interesting results. 
 

One leads me to “Thiselton-Dyer, T. F.  The Folk-Lore of Plants.1889” available in full, searchable text at Project Gutenberg. Using the search function on the word “Rowan”, the word is found, but not my bit of verse. Huh?

 

Never give up. This is an adage that can yield results and waste immense amounts of time. After doing both, I find the verse by searching on the word “queen”. In Thiselton-Dyer the word “Rowan”, in the quoted verse, was spelled “Row’n” (damn poetic license). Thiselton-Dyer’s citation leads me to my next search: “Northumberland garland; or, Newcastle nightingale, Songs collected by Joseph Ritson 1793”.

 

In FARNE Archive Search I find the image of the first page of the text to the ballad, an item reproduced by kind permission of Newcastle University. ONE PAGE! Only the first three verses. It does offer up the information that the song is about 500 years old, made by the old mountain-bard, Duncan Frasier, living on Cheviot, A.D. 1270 and first printed from an ancient manuscript by the Rev. Robert Lambe, Vicar of Norham. Amazon will sell me the book, but I want the ballad NOW. Neither Gutenberg, Google Books nor Archive.org has it for me to read on-line. It’s now getting late. Jolene has gone off to bed.

 

There must be a way. More googling leads me to “Sylvan sketches; or, A companion to the parks and the shrobbery: with illustrations from the works of the poets, by Elizabeth Kent, 1831”. She writes about “Evelyn”, who’s quote she copied containing the same verses I have been tracking. In Kent’s work Evelyn says this, Evelyn says that. Whose Evelyn? I finally find Kent writing “…in Evelyn’s Sylva….”

Two new key words. They bring me to the Wiki entry for John Evelyn, author of “Sylva, or A Discourse on Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions”. And Gutenberg has got it. Volume one. Not volume two. Guess where the reference to the verses occurs. No one has volume two. 

A similar problem occurs with “The Local Historian’s Table Book of Remarkable Occurrences, Historical Facts, Traditions, Legendary and Descriptive Ballads, &c., &c., Connected with the Counties of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland and Durham. Legendary Division. Vol. 1. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, M.A. Richardson, 1842.” Volume one ended without the poetry referred to

in the table of contents.

 

As the sum crests the horizon, I blunder into http://www.england-in-particular.info/landlines/l-worm.html. There it is, the whole ballad, with the interesting comment: “It is the earliest recorded version of the story I’ve come across. As you’ll see from Richardson’s note at the end, he thought (and I think) that the ballad was actually written by the Rev. Lambe.”

I start to read the poem, with glee. Wait, this sounds familiar. I read this before. Yeah, in Child’s Ballads….

Going back to Joseph Jacob’s notes I see that he refers to Rev. Lambe as the source, as well as a reference to Child. I’d simply forgotten.

 

For all my research I accomplished little. There was one bright spot, and here it is:

           

ROWAN JELLY

900g (2lb) Rowan Berries
900g (2lb) Crab Apples
1.8lt (3 pints) Water
Sugar

Pick over the rowan berries, removing any stalks; wash if necessary, drying well.
Wash the whole crab apples, removing any bruised parts.
Place the fruit and just enough water to cover into a heavy-bottomed saucepan.
Bring to the boil and simmer covered for 20 – 25 minutes, until tender.
Strain through a jelly bag or muslin cloth; allow about 4 hours for this; do not squeeze as this will cause the jelly to become cloudy.
Measure the volume of the liquid; add 450g (1lb) of sugar for each pint (600ml) of liquid.
Place the sugar in an ovenproof bowl and put it in the centre of a pre-heated oven for 10 – 15 minutes.
Place the juice back into a heavy-bottomed saucepan, add the sugar, stirring until fully dissolved.
Bring to the boil and cook rapidly for 10 – 15 minutes until the setting point is reached.
Skim the surface if necessary; allow to cool slightly then pot.

Makes: 3 – 4lb

 

Now, if I can only find a Rowan tree.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2011 The Laidly Worm – Part Two

Verse 

          I weird ye to be a Laidly Worm,
          And borrowed shall ye never be,
          Until Childe Wynd, the King’s own son
          Come to the Heugh and thrice kiss thee;
          Until the world comes to an end,
          Borrowed shall ye never be.

Thus the witch queen cursed Margaret in “The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh”. Joseph Jacobs, who collected this story in his 1890 “English Fairy Tales”, was fond of putting snatches of poetry in his presentation of these stories. The Grimms also included verse in their collected tales:

            Nibble, nibble, I hear a mouse.
            Who’s that nibbling at my house?

Need I cite the story? Many of these little poems are comfortably familiar to us. Look on your bookshelf for your fairy tale collections. Is Mother Goose among them?

            How many miles to Babylon?
            Three score and ten.
            Can I get there by candle light?
            Yes, there and back again.
            If your heels are nimble and light,
            You will get there by candle light.

Look farther down the shelf, past all of Andrew Lang’s colored fairy books, to the five volumes of “The English and Scottish Popular Ballads”, by Francis James Child, commonly known as the Child Ballads. There, under the pseudonym of “Kemp Owyne” is the “Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh”, part of the entry for Child Ballad #34.

I like reading Child’s ballads. It is a scholarly work. He collected the lyrics, but none of the music. Therefore, they read like poetry. These five volumes, written between 1882 and 1894, cite works that are far older. Sitting in my study, reading these works, I feel that I am time traveling, hearing words spoken by bards out of a misty past. Forgive my delusion, dear reader.

What is it about poetry in these Euro-centric tales that is so appealing? In our minds the bardic tradition starts with Homer’s “Iliad” and his “Odyssey”. I’ll bet a nickel he was pulling from an earlier tradition.

Traditional English verse is often written in iambic pentameter, five beats of unstressed, then stressed syllables. Think da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM. The stuff of Shakespeare.

“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” … da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM. Sounds like a heart beat, doesn’t it?

The rhythm is at the heart of our attraction to poetry. When I tell these fairy tales, I try, as my poor talents will allow, to get these rhythms of poetry into the prose of my telling. What can be closer to the intent of our storytelling than our heartbeats?

The blood of fairy tales are the words. The pulse of the rhythm is its voice.

 

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2011 The Laidly Worm – Part Three

 H J Ford

A flight of dragons

The world of fantasy is populated with dragons. In that world you can’t throw a paperback book without hitting a dragon. Dragons are the stuff of mythology and legend. There is the dragon Nidhogg gnawing on the roots of Yggdrasi, the world tree; Siegfried bathed in the blood of Fafnir; St George battling his dragon. Ah, yes, the stuff of mythology and legend.

Not of fairy tales.

Does Rapunzel have a dragon in it? Snow White? Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty? Ah, Sleeping Beauty. I remember the dragon in Sleeping Beauty. The witch transforms herself into a dragon and… Gee, I can’t find that in Perrault’s  version. Did Disney just…?

For the purpose of this blog I will define Fairy Tales as those Euro-centric tales passed along orally, and collected over the centuries by literate persons who found value in them.

In one of Karen Chace’s highly useful blogs, she directs our attention to dragon resources. I will use one of the sources she sites, “The Serene Dragon”, as example. There are 544 dragons listed by country. Inspecting this list, I found a handful of that fall into the fairy tale realm, one of them being “The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh.”

In Grimm I found no dragons out of the more than two hundred stories they collected. Let’s broaden our scope to other mythical creatures. The Unicorn. Their absence in Grimm is as complete as the dragon’s. Harpies? Forget it.

Why? Why the dearth of mythical beasts in fairy tales? There are plenty of common beasts. Many of them are enchanted flounders, frogs and foxes, almost exclusively princes.

I think the operative word in the paragraph above is “common”. Myths deal with the antics of the gods and goddess. Legends deal with the trials and onuses   of heroes. Fairy tales deal with weird people carrying bundles of sticks.

At the top of the fairy tale pyramid is royalty. The king or queen is rarely  the hero or heroine of the story, but rather their progeny—a step down. These children usually fall to an underdog status before rising again.

After royalty, we move on the merchants, peasants, soldiers, and fisherman. Clearly we are dealing with the common. Here is my, too deep into my head, explanation. Fairy tales are Christian.

Myths and many of the legends are pre-Christian. Christian legends are patterned on the legends that came before them. We, as a society, don’t consider that there are any Christian myths. (Notice how I side-step a huge argument.) The fairy tales came out of a Christian sensibility.

This is not to say the tales origins and motifs are not pre-Christian. This is not to say that pagan notions are not being preserved in these stories. I will say a Christian gloss has been put upon the tales by tellers from generations forgotten, who heard the stories that came down the Silk Road from Asia, from the mouths of sailors who plied the Mediterranean sea from North Africa, while traveling with armies crusading in the Middle East. These tellers chose the story elements that appealed to them, to their simpler tastes, editing out the fabulous pagan beasts. Jesus, after all, was a simple carpenter.

Your thoughts?

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2011 The Snow Maiden – Part One

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Only a Myth

The Snow Maiden, daughter of Grandfather Frost and Spring Beauty, is clearly one of the progeny of myth. Although know best as a literary tale, the Snow Maiden shows mythological origins. In Russia she accompanies Grandfather Frost on his rounds during Christmas to deliver gift to good children.

What is myth? I won’t attempt to answer that.

What scares me off from the attempt are questions like: Where does myth leave off and legend begin? Are myths only other culture’s creation stories? Is Superman truly a myth? I am not smart enough or foolish enough to proffer an answer. There are plenty of smart and silly definitions already out there. Go google them.

However, I am incautious enough to expose my thoughts on the role of myth.

The role of myth was best explained to me by storyteller Dan Keding. I am going to tell you what I recall him telling me; it was years ago, but the essence has stuck with me. I hope my memory has not mangled too badly what he said.

Imagine story as a series of concentric circles. The inner circle is labeled family stories: all those wonderful family-centric (not important to anyone else) stories told around the table at Thanksgiving. These are delicate, true stories, too quickly lost as generations pass away.

In the next circle are the community stories: anecdotes, jokes, gossip, and urban legends. We may hear these stories over beer at the bar. They pop up in our emails. They possess an annoying durability.

The next circle encompasses the fairy tales and folk tales: the traditional province of the storyteller, a circle dear to my heart. These are the tales most people relate to when the word “story” comes up. These may be stories of our culture or the culture of others. From this point on our circle of stories come from the past.

Beyond that is the circle of legend: historical tales that have been aided and improved by the imagination. Here lay the romances of King Arthur, the Irish tales of the Fianna, and the German hero Siegfried.

Far on the outer edge is the circle of myth: the creation tales, stories of the gods and their misdeeds, and trickster tales. Pantheons of gods, grist for the mills of poets and composers. From this circle the Snow Maiden was kidnapped and turned into an opera.

Now imagine a bowl filled with the liquid of myth. On its surface floats the thin oil slick of concentric circles I described with myth peeping up around the edges.

This final image that Dan created for me is the point. Myth under lays all story. Without myth we would not know how to construct a story. Even family stories create a sort of mythology. Storytellers like to say our brains are hard-wired for story. The mythic structure is the hard-wire.

Did the events in these myths really happen? Yes, over and over again. Are they happening? Yes. Will they happen in the future? For our sakes, I certainly hope so.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2011 The Snow Maiden – Part Two

 Edmund Dulac

Cold Hearted

The power of the Snow Maiden story lies in Snegurochka’s destructive love. The Snow Maiden is the daughter of Grandfather Frost and Spring Beauty, manifested in this world when an old couple forms her out of snow.

The Snow Maiden’s desire is for human contact. She is at first satisfied by being a daughter to the old couple who wished her into this world. The Snow Maiden, whom the old couple calls Snegurochka, is soon propelled out into the great world. Snegurochka is embraced in friendship by Kupava, a friendship that leads to Kupava’s self-destruction when her lover, Mizgir, falls for the cold hearted Snegurochka. Snegurochka’s destruction comes when the shepherd boy Lel’s music softens her heart and she vanishes into mist.

Encounters like this, liaisons between lovers from either side of the veil, never end well. My thoughts leap to the story of the love between Oisin, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill and Niamh of the Golden Hair. Oisin follows Niamh to Tir na Nog, the fairy world. Oisin lives there in bliss for three years until seized by a desire to visit his homeland. Niamh warns him not to dismount from his stead and touch the ground. Oisin does not realize that three hundred years have passed in our worlds. When he accidentally falls from his horse he turns to dust, as he should, being three hundred years old.

Well, what could we expect, he was a poet.

There are many tales, legends, and myths about romances between our world and the other worlds. Visit the Greek and Roman mythology—Zeus and his many mortal liaisons. Why do we and the ‘other’ fair so badly if we chance to fall in love?

I’ve toyed with the notion that the Snow Maiden, and similar tales, tell us to ‘stick to our own kind’, but that sounds too prosaic and cautionary. I prefer to think the Snow Maiden reflects the difference between our world and the others. The others are fragile. We are brutal.

Snegurochka, declared guiltless by Tsar Berendei, survives only as long as her heart does not warm to affection in this world. Oisin returns to this world, carrying affection from beyond the veil, and turns to dust because of his love for both.

Places like Tir na Nog are our fantasy lands. Youths like the Snow Maiden are our imaginary people. These other worlds and other beings are made from the fragile fabric of our illusions, formed from our wishful thinking. Ever so delicate, they are crumbled by the harsh light of reality. Keep them in the half light of dream land. Don’t let them slip off seeking love in the real world. Like the Snow Maiden, they may turn to mist.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2011 The Snow Maiden – Part Three

 Kay Nielsen

All in a name

Russia culture provides us a fine example of a literary tale in the Snow Maiden. Although it has traditional, even mythological, origins, when I google this title the opera by Rimsky-Korsakov is at the top of my screen (thank you Wikipedia).  After a few more clicks I came up with a story version attributed to Aleksandr Ostrovsky, who wrote the play that Rimsky-Korsakov based his opera upon. A “folk” version is no where to be found.

The Snow Maiden has the two common markers of a literary tale, markers not shared with fairy tales:

  1. Everyone has a name.
  2. It ends in tragedy.

Seldom are there more than two given names in the fairy tales. Hansel and Gretel have a father, identified as a woodcutter, and a step-mother, identified as evil. They meet a witch, who bears the moniker “the witch”.

In Ostrosky’s version the weight of names tilt to the other side of the scale, Snegurochka, Kupava, Mizgir, Lel, and Tsar Berendei, all of whom I struggle to vocalize. Only the old woodsman and his wife do not have names. (Old woodsmen and their wives never have names, right up there with the old women gathering sticks.)

To the same degree that fairy tales lack names, they lack the element of tragedy. Grimm’s “The Companionship of the Cat and the Mouse” ends sadly, and predictable. The “Death of the Hen”, which ends with all members of the funeral party drowning, does not rise to the level tragedy. (Could none of them swim?) Neither of these inspires heart-felt sympathy nor evokes romantic longing. Fairy Tales’ usual fare is “happily ever after”.

But what, at the emotional level, is the difference between the fairy tale and the literary tale?

When the fairy tale uses position as the identifier (the king, the witch, and the woodcutter) the characters becomes emblematic of their station in the world. They are there in the story to instruct us.  We become students, observers, and view the characters from a distance to see what practical and moral lessons the story intends to pass on to us. That mice should not take up abode with cats can have broader implications. Concerning the death of a chicken, although the tale is darkly humorous, it is instructive to us to see a moment of greed leading to unintended consequences. (Also, we should all learn to swim.)

However, when we know the character’s names, as we do in the literary tale, we get pulled in to their conflicts and stand with them.  We are no longer objective. Names are subjective. Names are powerful.  In some cultures to know someone’s true name is to have power over them. We will never know the true name of God, nor should we; God is there to instruct us.

Knowing their names, even one as unpronounceable as Snegurochka, demands that we feel with them,  that we absorb  their tale, and that we become alive in their story,  in their tragedy.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: March 2011 The Flounder & The Fisherman – Part One

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 Walter Crane

Around and around we go…

 

A notable feature in many a fairy tale is the repetitive structure of the plot. A common motif is the three brothers, the eldest two striking out to achieve a task and failing, followed by the third and youngest brother who succeeds.

 

Or our hero has three tasks to perform, and is aided by three sets of creatures encountered earlier in the story. Three is a popular round of repetition.

 

In “The Flounder and the Fisherman” the repetition goes further. Isabelle first wants a cottage to live in, then a castle, If there is a castle there ought to be a king. Why not an emperor?  Why not be pope?  Why not be like God? Her poor fisherman-husband goes back to the sea six times. Lots of repetition. Why aren’t we bored to tears by the same thing (almost) happening over and over and over?

 

I’ll make some observations. I recall our daughter, when very young, had a favorite cartoon video that she listened to daily, if my memory serves, until she could recite the dialog along with the characters. The parental experience of favorite items being rerun, rehashed, redone ad nauseam may be too familiar. Is repetition a kid thing? Does the repetition and predictability give them comfort?

 

What of music and its use of recurrence. Classical music often takes a theme to which it returns, develops, moves on, and returns again. Popular music has its refrain that we wait for and are satisfied to listen to again. “Happy Birthday” for crying out loud. How many times can we sing that? Insist on singing it, even badly. Does the repetition and predictability give adults comfort?

 

Which bring me to rituals, those events we crave to repeat over and over. Family holiday rituals are legion and legend. How many firework displays can you watch? How much cranberry relish can you eat? How many times will we listen to the inaccuracies of a prognosticating groundhog?

 

Returning to “The Flounder and the Fisherman”, let me suggest the success of its repetition comes from incremental variation. Every time the fisherman returns to the sea, Isabelle’s demands are larger, the sea more severe, the flounder more angry. The tension increases with each visitation. The repetition allows us to see the familiar in a new light, showing an evolving aspect.

 

Nothing stays the same. Even a song’s refrain, repeated exactly, comes along further into the song. The story and images have changed since the last time we hear the chorus only seconds before.  As we read that bedtime story to our child, again, we know the day will come when she will no longer have interest in the tale.

 

I think of repetition as an old friend I meet every day on a park bench, who gets older and older, and friendlier and friendlier. He looks like a constant in an otherwise fleeting world.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Mar 2011 Flounder & Fisherman – Part Two

  Kay Nielsen

Long Streak of Blood

In the beginning of Grimm’s “Flounder and the Fisherman” the fisherman has caught a huge flounder with his fishing pole and hook. The flounder pleads for its life, which the soft-hearted fisherman readily grants. When the flounder is released he sinks to the bottom of the sea, leaving behind a long streak of blood.

What a wonderful, enduring image. It contains, I believe, a very subtle allusion to the blood that Jesus shed during the crucifixion. There is in this image true romance. Not the torrid lusting of Harlequin romances, but the noble spirit of the early 19th century writers. Whenever I tell this tale, I edit out that streak of blood. Why?

That streak of blood is the Grimms intruding on the story. I can’t verify my statement with academic research, but I “hear” the Grimms adding this image for their own satisfaction.

Don’t think for a moment I am about to pick on the Grimms. All the folk tale collectors have put their mark on the material they’ve collected. How could they not? They were, although with pen in hand, storytellers.

There are storytelling traditions in the world where the story is related word-for-word as it was heard. This is not the European tradition, where every teller has their artistry, and a need to decorate. I am guessing this process accounts in part for the—sometimes wildly—different versions of the same story.

The reader of these collected tales can sometimes tell when the collector has altered the story for the sake of readability. Orally transmitted stories have a cadence and structure that do not translate well to the page. Without the animated presence of the teller, the words lay lifeless on the paper.

Should these “additions” be edited out when we can spot them? What of “additions” we can’t spot, those that were added to the oral tradition during their oral transmission? Should we at least make the attempt to return to the original form of the story? How can we tell when we have reached its original form? Can you tell I am leading you down an endless path with no destination?

The stories are what they are when we encounter them. They bear the marks of their history. We may put our marks upon them wittingly or unwittingly.

My argument does not support striking out the Grimm’s “addition” of the streak of blood. Why do I drop what I identify as a Grimm intrusion?

Why? Because I didn’t think of it first.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Mar 2011 Flounder & Fisherman – Part Three

 Kay Nielsen

The Enchanted

Princesses sleep, princes are enchanted. We rarely have sleeping queens and enchanted kings. These states are usually reserved for the young. This makes a certain amount of sense, psychologically. The young are in transition, moving from one state to another, moving from childhood (being asleep, being enchanted) to a state of adulthood (becoming their true selves). There is travail involved. Someone has to get to the princess to give her the awakening kiss or token. The prince labors to nullify the curse laid upon him.

Examples abound of this common motif of young royalty under a curse: Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, the Princess and the Frog, The Flounder and the Fisherman – no wait. What about that flounder?

In the beginning of “The Flounder and the Fisherman” the fisherman catches a huge flounder, who speaks to him telling the fisherman that he is an enchanted prince. By the end of the story the flounder is still an enchanted prince. The spell is not broken.

In my mental magical pond a frog has broken to the surface and croaks, “Why?”

My intuition tells me the flounder represents the unconscious. The fisherman exists at the conscious level. He lives in the world of air. The flounder lives at the unconscious level, in the world of water, beneath the surface.

But do we stand upon our rock and call out, asking favors of our unconscious? Is the unconscious at our beck and call?

The frog in my mental pond makes a big splash, disturbing my thoughts. It pokes it head out again and croaks, “Bruno, Bruno.”

Now I remember. Bruno Bettelheim. In his book, “The Uses of Enchantment” he discusses this fairy tale. Bettelheim’s observations are filtered through a Freudian lens. They both go on about the Oedipal myth as it can be used, metaphorically, to understand child/parent relationships. Why didn’t Freud use “The Flounder and the Fisherman” (as Bettelheim did) to explain the id—ego—super-ego concept?

Isabelle, the fisherman’s wife, is the id, the primal satisfaction of desire.  The flounder, our enchanted prince, is the super-ego, the holder of higher thoughts and ideals. The fisherman is the ego, the poor sap, who shuffles between the id and the super-ego, trying to communicate between the two. It is not the flounder who is the unconscious, but rather the entire tale rises up from beneath the surface.

Had Freud used this tale by way of explanation, we would never have, erroneously, come up with the term “egotistical” when we really meant “idtistical”. The relationships would have been clear.

My magical pond frog is staring at me with its big yellow eyes, but not croaking anything at me. I think I got this one right.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: Feb. 2011 The White Snake – Part One

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 Walter Crane

The Unacceptable.

 

Many of the Grimm fairy tales are not told in the form in which they were collected. Many Grimm fairy tales are not told at all because of their content. I am talking about their violence. Harsh punishment for evil doers is integral to these tales, reflecting the strict moral mindset of the time when the Grimms wrote these stories down.

Matters become worse as innocent characters meet their demise. In The White Snake, when the hero sees the three baby ravens pushed from their nest before they can fend for themselves, he kills his horse and feeds the carcass to the ravens.

 

Modern American audiences find this totally inappropriate. We do not kill, or harm, companion animals. Only beings of the lowest caliber (typically little boys) would consider such a crime.

 

When I tell this tale, I interject the horse turning to the hero and saying, “Kill me and feed me to the ravens. Neither you nor I will regret this.” My listeners find this, if mysterious, acceptable. Listeners two hundred years ago needed no such tampering. Perhaps they understood something we have forgotten. What might that be?

 

I have diverted attention away from, what appears to the modern listener as, an inexplicable act. In the hero’s other two encounters, he wades into the mire to save three fish. He gets his feet wet.  He spares the ants by directing his horse around their colony; a most minor inconvenience. For the ravens he sacrifices his horse. From here on he walks. 

 

I consciously used the word ‘sacrifice’ in the sentence above. The ravens are sacred. This is what we, the modern listener, do not know. Ravens are the familiars of the shaman, who, in the form of birds, transported into other levels of existence to bring back cures for the aliments of their patients. Only the ravens can transcend our world, traveling to the garden of the tree of life, and bring back its fruit.

 

That one part of the White Snake speaks to the incredible age of this tale, or at least the motif therein. I have violated the story when I have the horse speak, giving the hero permission to act. In the Grimm version the hero knows who the ravens are and that he needs to make a sacrifice. In my version the hero, like us, has forgotten how to honor the ancient beliefs. I mask the shaman who have done so much for us in the past, deleting our racial memory of them.

 

I could defend my version, arguing as I did in my blog on Rapunzel (Dec. 2010 below) that the cultures that receive these fairy tales change them to fit their particular mores. I can not tell this worthy story unless I change it. As I change it a voice rises up to object.

 

Herein lays the schizophrenia of this fairy tale teller. Picture if you will, the practical-me, holding my new version close to my breast as the purist-me wags its finger saying “Shame on you.” 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Feb 2011 The White Snake – Part Two

 Walter Crane

Three.

The white snake embodies the traditional storytelling’s ‘three’.  Three appears in not merely the nursery tales—The Three Little Pig, Three Billy Goats Gruff, Goldilocks and the Three Bears—but prominently in the more complex tales.

In our tale the hero aides three fishes and three ravens. He also aids the ants, making three sets of creatures, who in turn help him with three tasks. During his last task he passes through three kingdoms before the three ravens end his search.

Other common numbers in fairy tales are six, seven, nine and twelve, seven being the only number not a multiple of three. What’s with the ‘three’?

The trinity jumps to mind, and so too the three White Goddess; Maiden, Mother, Crone; and the three witches in Macbeth. The religions before the monotheistic ones took over usually had three main deities and groupings of three (three Fates, three Graces, three Gorgons and the three Furies). In our culture the number three has deep mystical and religious overtones.

The fairy tales ignore this. The Three Little Pigs does not have hidden Masonic implications.

If we think in dimensional terms, existence starts with the third. The first dimension is a line; the second a plane. Without depth—the third dimension—they exist theoretically for the purposes of geometry (a form of secondary educational torture akin to algebra).

The fairy tales could care less.

Could it be that three is the number that represents to us all of existence? Three exists not just in religion and dimensions. It is pervasive. Our brains can remember three unrelated item; beyond that we need a written list. An appetizer, main course and dessert comprise a meal. Three notes make up a musical chord. Does three appear in the fairy tales because we equate three with our very existence?

Nah.

Then why does the number three keep coming up?

It is because three is useful, familiar and enough. Plays typically have three acts; stories a beginning, middle and end. A very useful pattern. Being useful, the pattern gets used over and over again. We come to expect thing to come in threes. If in my opening sentence to this paragraph I had come up with four or five reasons for the number three that would have been too much. Three is enough.

Your thoughts?

  1. Looking through that dinosaur called the Thesaurus, I couldn’t help noticing that an overwhelming number of the words related to ‘three’ start with the letter ‘T’. Curious. The wonderful exception was “runcible”, a nonsense word coined by Edward Lear, now referring to a spork-like silver spoon, although Lear also wrote about a runcible hat and runcible cat.

 

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Feb 2011 The White Snake – Part Three

 Walter Crane

When animals could talk…

As a young servant samples the king’s secret delicacy, a white snake, he acquires the intriguing ability to understand the language of animals. Talking animals have charmed listeners and readers from time out of mind, as far back as Eve bantering with the serpent in the garden. What do we want to hear from them? In the folk and fairy tale genre, I identify three types of talking animal stories.

Type One: Animals talking to animals; the most common of talking animal stories.

Type Two: Animals talking to humans. This gets a little more complicated. As likely as not, we encounter an enchanted prince turned bestial, giving the creature the inherited ability to speak. The remaining talking animals appear clearly magical. I find that interesting in light of cultures that do not have stories of animals talking to humans. That would raise the animals to the human level, a notion offensive to their way of thinking. In our culture we grant these creatures exemptions due to special circumstance.

Type Three: As in the White Snake, a human is given to understanding animal speech, but does not talk to the animals. (Doctor Dolittle not withstanding, not being a folk or fairy tale.) Overhearing the animals lends a voyeuristic quality to this talent.

Given these three types we can expect three modes of animal talk. With Type One, what we hear from the animals propels and serves the storyline. In these stories we project upon the animals what we feel their personalities ought to be. Foxes are clever, bears are dense, and birds are chipper if a bit flighty.

The Type Two talking animals come to us from the “other”. Not being

common animals, they do not speak of common animal concerns. They focus on magical missions: to regain their human form, grant wishes to the hero, act as guides.

Only with Type Three do we have a chance to listen to the animals speak for themselves. What do we find?  If the White Snake is typical they are asking us for favors.

What do we want to hear from them? The answers to the universe. What is love. What is our future. Animals are God’s creatures that have not fallen from grace. Certainly they have wisdom outside of our own.

Alas, talking animal stories are the creations of storytellers, who have no more insight than the human mind will allow. They can make these animals open their mouth and have words come out, but the words will be about us. We are, after all, only human.

Your thoughts?

  1. White snake is hard to come by. I haven’t found it in Wegmans. If you are interested in overhearing the chatter of birds, this recipe from Iceland might be helpful.

“Take the tongue of a hawk and put it in honey for two days and three nights; place it then under your own tongue and you will understand the language of birds. It must not however be carried elsewhere than under the tongue for the hawk is a poisonous bird.” I cannot, however, recommend the above, not having personally tried it.