fairy tales

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

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 Anonymous

Revenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About That Dwarf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Lorenz Frølich

A Popularity Contest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts?

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

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  Warwick Goble

A Kiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 John Batten

Wellspring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wash me, and comb me,

And lay me down softly.

And lay me on a bank to dry,

That I may look pretty,

When somebody passes by.”

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

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

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

Walter Crane

Iron Heinrich

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If thou wilt my sweetheart be,

Clear, clear water I’ll give to thee;

But if my love thou wilt not be,

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

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

That evening the frog comes at her door.

“Open thy door, open thy door,

Princess, youngest princess!

Hast thou forgotten what thou didst say

When I sat by the well this very day,

That thou wouldst my sweetheart be,

If clear, clear water I gave to thee?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stories keep changing, as stories will do.

It happens by chance; it happens on cue.

Somebody changed it; had to, you see.

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

Your thoughts?

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

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 Edmund Dulac

Miss Cox’s Garden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Elenore Abbot

Three Dresses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds like dating to me.

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

 

 Cypripedium reginae The Botanical Magazine, 1793
Tokens and Keys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts?

Aside

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

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Image Walter Crane

Before Sunrise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why at night?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image Kay Nielsen

The Plot Never Thickens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Image

John D. Batten

Secret Names

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts?

 

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

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

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 John Constable   The Mill

A little rain must fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Leonardo da Vinci  Study of Hands

Musings on violence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

  Carl Larsson “Brtia as Iduna”

Apple of my eye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: Dec 2011 Sprig of Rosemary – Part One

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William_Gorman_Wills-Ophelia_and_Laertes William Gorman Wills – Ophelia & Laertes

A story in Shadows 

            I walked into Wegmans one post-Halloween day to find Christmas attributes accumulated near the entrance (never mind Thanksgiving). Some of these items were little, live Christmas trees. Bonsai Christmas trees? No. Conically trimmed rosemary bushes. Talk about smelling good. I bought one, nursing it through the winter, and planting it in the spring. By summer I owned a dry, dead twig. It still smelled good.

            Although it proved an arboreal failure, I have ever since equated rosemary with Christmas.  To me, “The Sprig of Rosemary” is appropriate for my December entry.

            The tale is little known, included in Andrew Lang’s “The Pink Fairy Book”, and first appearing in “Cuentos Populars Catalans” by Dr. D. Francisco de S. Maspons y Labros. In the story, a maiden uproots a rosemary plant, evoking a handsome lord and revealing his underground palace. (Shades of Janet evoking Tam Lim in that old Scottish ballad.) It doesn’t take long for them to fall in love and get married. Upon receiving the keys to the palace, as its mistress, she is instructed to never open a particular small chest. (Shades of Pandora’s box from Greek myth.)

            Unavoidably, she opens the chest to find inside a snake’s skin. Immediately all disappears, leaving her standing in a meadow. (Shades of Lucius Apuleius’ “Cupid and Psyche.”) Breaking off a sprig of another rosemary bush, she becomes determined to find her husband.

            Before questing, she tarries at a house built of straw, becoming a servant to the mistress. The mistress gives her the advice to seek out the sun, moon, and wind, who travel far, see much, and may know where to find her husband. (Shades of the Russian epic, “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign,” in which Igor’s wife, Yaroslavna, calls upon the sun, the wind and the River Dneiper. Or Grimm’s “Seven Ravens,” although the sun and moon are pretty nasty.)

            The sun, moon, and wind cannot help her, but each gives her a nut to be opened in her greatest time of need. The wind, however, does her one better, going out to seek news of her husband and finding him, but bears the sad news that her lord, under a spell, is to be married the next day to an ugly princesses.

            Cracking open the nuts, out springs a mantle, petticoats, and a gown. (Shades of Grimm’s “All Fur”.) These she exchanges with the ugly princess for a visit with the bridegroom, her husband. Only after he smells her sprig of rosemary does he recognize her and declare her his wife, whom he loves. (Shades of the end of Grimm’s “Sweetheart Roland. Actually, the whole story bears shades of the Norwegian fairy tale, “Soria Moria Castle,” made famous by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, and appearing in translation in Lang’s “The Red Fairy Book.”)

            Between this story, the song refrain “parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme”, and Ophelia’s mention of rosemary in her decent into madness in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” the herb has its own special place in the arts. In the art of herbology, the association of rosemary with memory goes back to the ancient Greeks

            The tale appeals to me because of its surreal nature: underground castles, the maiden seeking out celestial beings, magnificent clothes sprung from nuts. This is a dream world in which we follow the heroine through her travail. I fear I will wake up and forget the dream, forget the maiden as did her husband when their castle disappeared. Did the castle disappear or was it forgotten? May this herb preserve my memory. As Ophelia says, “There’s Rosemary, that’s for Remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.”

Fairy Tale of the Month: Dec 2011 Sprig of Rosemary – Part Two

 H. J. Ford

An amble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Dec 2011 Sprig of Rosemary – Part Three

 H. J. Ford

Oh Nuts!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts?


From the Hunt Museum collection, Limerick, Ireland.

 

 PS. While we old hippies think of “parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme” as one of the lyrics in Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair,” the source is much older. Check out “The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume 1” by Francis James Child, ballad #2 “The Elfin knight” version G. While this five volume work is highly scholastic, there is here a wealth of folkloric themes.

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: 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: Jan 2011 The Goose Girl – Part One

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 Arthur Rackham

Growing Up

Good triumphs over evil. The fairy tales without this message are few. Many heroes and heroines achieve a new status because of their pure and simple, even excruciating, goodness. The Goose Girl falls into that category. What stands out in our tale is her fall from status because of her flaws, and those who try to aid her to become a whole person.

The Goose Girl, as a young princess, receives from her mother, the elderly queen, all the material aid that can be offered for the princess’ journey: a dowry (wealth), a serving maid (assistance), a horse (transportation), and most precious of all, a handkerchief with the three drops of blood – protection.

OK, the maid wasn’t of much assistance. Getting decent help remains a perennial problem. In our story she embodies evil.

The princess, in her state of immaturity, does not know how to deal with the usurping maid, who refuses to serve, then denies the princess the golden drinking cup. The princess, lowered to the state of an animal, drinks from the stream on all fours. When the princess, through carelessness, loses the handkerchief—her protection—she loses all of her possessions in a moment, including her clothing—her identity.  Given the apparent age of this tale we may be witnessing the original identity theft.

The elderly queen could give her daughter things, but not inner strength. This, the Goose Girl needed to develop herself, which she does under distress. With the last of her world wealth, a coin, she pays the hacker to hang the horse’s head in the dark gateway of the city. With this odd gesture the Goose Girl, for the first time in the tale, has acted, rather than been acted upon.

She is bullied by another usurper, Conrad the goose boy, who wants to steal her golden locks.  She draws upon her innate magical powers to raise a wind to carry off Conrad hat. This starts a series of events that restores the Goose Girl to her rightful status. It is the old king who recognizes her true nature after she has matured, and begun to assert herself.

Although the Goose Girl has to learn to grow up on her own, she has the aid, or at least the attempted aid, of her elders. Note the odd construction of this story. The elderly queen’s husband has died many years ago. That is an unnecessary detail, having nothing to do with the situation in progress. In the second half of the story we meet the old king. His son is not referred to as the prince, but rather as the young king. Two kings? Note also, there is no mention of a queen.

At one end of the story we have a widowed queen holding forth material possessions to her daughter, and an old king (no queen) providing spiritual recognition of who the Goose Girl has become at the other, with the heroine traveling between the two. The moon and the sun? Ying verse Yang? Might Siddhartha have traveled the same road?

Fairy Tale of the Month: Jan. 2011 The Goose Girl – Part Two

Severed Heads

The casual reader of fairy tales may be struck by their imaginative nature: enchanted sleeping women, a child playing with a golden ball (think about that for a moment, it’s not going to bounce), someone wearing glass slippers, and, of course, talking beasts. In theGoose Girl, her horse, Falada is no generic talking animal, rather he is a severed head who talks to her.

From where comes such a grotesque thought? Is the head there for shock value? Had some storyteller, in the forgotten past, gone a little too far with the imagination thing when it came to Falada?

Have you heard of the Mari Lywd? That horse’s skull annually paraded around on a stick in Wales? This old (as in pagan) New Year’s tradition involved a group of men and boys meandering from house to house in mummer’s fashion, one of their number being the Mari Lywd.  Covered in a white shroud, he held the stick with the skull attached above his head, usually with the jaw bone spring operated to bite people. A “sergeant” accompanied the Mari Lywd, along with other Punch and Judy like characters, and at each house they would sing a song, then address the occupants of the home in rhyme, not unlike Falada when he spoke to the Goose Girl.

Incidentally, the Mari Lywd and company, though begging for food and drink, were quick to insult those inside if the occupants did not bring forth the expected treats. In this scenario the occupants felt obliged to return the insults, also in rhyme. It was considered bad form for the Mari Lywd to break down the door, however…

Have you come across, “The Three Heads of the Well”? This is a tale I know from Joseph Jacobs’, “English Fairy Tales”. In this, a young princess is pushed out into the wide world by an evil step-mother queen, then through acts of kindness, she is given a wand and instructions to approach a magical well. Up from the well’s depths floats three golden heads, whom she takes from the water and grooms. The salient point for me is that the heads talk to the princess in rhyme.

Did you know that the ancient Celts had a propensity for heads? During battle they hung the heads of their enemies around their horse’s neck. Important heads would be preserved, sometimes decorated with gold.

Forgive me as I get carried away with these tenuous links that I have been boldly making, and point your attention to the similarity between “The Three Heads of the Well” and “The Princess and the Frog”. One has a golden ball falling into a well, and the other has three golden heads bobbing to the surface. Not the same thing… but… sort of… similar?

Returning to my severed heads theme, I will let you look into “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and the legend of St. Denis yourself. Suffice it to say—more heads.

Had some storyteller, in the forgotten past, gone a little too far with the imagination thing when it came to Falada? I say no. The talking heads were ready and waiting to speak to us. Why make this stuff up?

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Jan. 2011 The Goose Girl – Part Three

 Arthur Rackham

Royalty and Magic

Implicit in The Goose Girl is the idea that royalty have magical powers. We usually think of magic as the province of witches and warlocks, but that royalty posses it as well gives fairy tale listeners no pause. Let me argue it should. In what other literature are kings, queens, princes and princesses given supernatural powers? None come to my mind.

The Goose Girl provides us with three drops of on a handkerchief that cry out, “If your mother only knew it would break her heart in two.” There is a talking horse, whom we don’t hear until its severed head hangs in the dark gateway of the city. It also recites, “If your mother only knew it would break her heart in two.” The princess/goose girl harries her companion, Conrad, by raising a wind to blow his hat away. Toward the end of the tale she uses the talismanic power of iron to protect her when she crawls into a stove to confess her woes. (Oddly similar to a catholic confessional, with the King listening at the stove pipe.) And all this without a witch in sight.

Why did fairy tale tellers and listeners of these tales grace royalty with these powers? It has to do with assumptions.

Consider the time of the Goose Girl’s origins. A variant can be traced back to the Carolingian myth (9th century) of Bertha, the betrothed wife of Pepin, who is supplanted by her waiting-maid. The assumption at that time, among the peasantry, who gave these fairy tales life, was that royalty were born superior. Not lucky to be born that way, but ordained, by God, to be that way. The distinction between god, religion, and magic among the illiterate peasantry could have used some refinement. Remember the services were conducted in Latin, and meant to awe, not instruct.

There is a vein of wishful thinking expressed in some fairy tales with the motif of the commoner who gets to marry a princess and become a king. Two examples: “The Queen Bee”, and “The White Snake”. In both tales the hero does not set out to achieve that goal, and does not succeed on his own merit. He becomes a king through the aid of magical (note magical) helpers who reward him for excruciating goodness.

That royalty are not super-human is (historically) a new thought for us. It is not until the “Age of Reason” that chinks appear in the royal amour. The French Revolution can be seen as the water shed between absolute monarchy and constitutional rule. Still, it would take most of the 19th century for the assumption to be that we are who we are because of our socio-economic condition, and not the condition of our birth. Previously, royalty were born to be above commoners, their rule ordained by God. Why shouldn’t they be able to raise a meager wind to blow away a commoner’s hat?

Your thoughts?