fairy tales

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? 

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Dec. 2010 Rapunzel – Part One

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 Kay Nielsen

Beneath the surface.

In many versions of Rapunzel our heroine is taken by the witch and locked up in a tower, a description that circumvents an important element. In the Grimm version Dame Gothel promises to care for the unborn Rapunzel as if she were her own. Rapunzel grows up to be the loveliest child on earth. At the age of twelve, let me repeat this, at the age of twelve, Dame Gothel locks her in a tower. In psychological terms, our story is about the often repeated struggle between an emerging youth and their protective guardian.

We can re-cast this story from Dame Gothel’s point of view, though, in story terms, it is not a satisfying tale. Dame Gothel discovers someone has stolen produce from her garden. The next night the brazen thief returns to do more damage. Upon capture he reveals he has a wife driven by cravings. Conjecturing that this man of questionable moral value, and his addiction driven wife may not make ideal parents, Dame Gothel shows a kind of mercy by proposing trade of produce in exchange for a child. The man agrees and it is not recorded that his wife protested. All goes apparent well for the first eleven years as Rapunzel grows to be a beautiful child.

Historically, the onset of puberty has affected parental blood pressure. Dame Gothel attempts to shelter Rapunzel from the world and all its ills, resulting in Rapunzel betraying the witch. Dame Gothel flies into a regrettable rage at her daughter’s guilt ridden Freudian slip. Rapunzel thoughtlessly compared Dame Gothel’s weight with the Prince’s.  As in many family conflicts it does not end well. Dame Gothel sends Rapunzel away and washes her hands of the affair.

Let me support my three-little-pigs-from-the-wolf’s-point-of-view approach with internal evidence. These Grimm stories were clear on one of their moral messages. Evil must be punished. In Hansel and Gretal the witch must be shoved into the oven and burnt alive for the story to work. Dame Gothel receives no such punishment, because she has done no evil. Her punishments are harsh, but harsh is no problem for the Grimms. They were German.

If this story ended here it would be a cautionary tale. What follows is a period of growth and maturity as both the prince and Rapunzel learn to take care of themselves through travail, she raising infants in poverty and he wandering in blindness. Not until then can they come together and have a successful relationship do we come to a satisfying ending. This ending carries a life lesson with it; stage directions for the acts pre-adolescents will soon play out.

What of Dame Gothel. I have called her a witch. The Grimms referred to her as an ‘enchantress’. The name Dame Gothel is generic in German for ‘godmother’. Rapunzel, the character and the story, come to a happy end. Not so Dame Gothel. For fourteen years she shepherd her daughter, to be overthrown by a youth. Might this not be a story of loss?

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: Dec 2010 Rapunzel – Part Two

 Walter Crane

Rapunzel the plant

Rampion, a salad green craved by Rapunzel’s mother that led to the inciting incident of our tale, is little known to modern audiences. It is a bitter green with edible roots popular at the time of the Grimms, but now fallen out of favor in an age dominated by high fructose corn syrup.

The Rampion is key toward understanding this tale. An alternate name for Rampion is Rapunzel. The 19th century listener would have gotten the pun. The Rampion plant puts out a stalk (tower), which, because the Rampion is self-fertilizing, may split, causing tendrils (hair) to curl down toward its base.

I am not going to take up space here to substantiate this next claim, but will leave it to your imagination how many times modern re-tellers of this tale have edited out the unfamiliar Rampion, and replaced it with a common head of lettuce, which begs the question, “How many times has this sort of thing happen?”, which I am also not going to delve into, largely because I really don’t want to speculate on what has been lost, and, besides, this sentence has gone on far too long.

Another, somewhat unsettling, comparison can be made between Rapunzel and the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary appears as a character in a number of the Grimm tales such as “the Virgin Mary’s Child” and “The Blessed Virgin’s Little Glass”. In the Rapunzel tale, given the Rampion connection, she appears again, indirectly.

The Virgin Mary is engaged to Joseph, but before the marriage can be concluded she is with child through the agency of the Holy Spirit. In our tale, the prince vowed to marry Rapunzel, but before they are wed she bares two children, a boy and a girl, through, by implication, self-fertilization—without sin. Both women bore their children in poor and dire circumstances. What this parallel achieves is harder to define, other than to put Rapunzel in favorable company.

What is easier to see is that this story is about procreation/propagation and seasonal repetition. Rapunzel’s mother is looking from a high small window into a walled garden. Rapunzel’s father has to climb up the high garden wall to get the Rampion (Rapunzel). Rapunzel finds herself standing at a small window looking out. The Prince has to climb a high wall to get his Rapunzel. Near the start of the story is the birth of Rapunzel. Near the end of the story is the birth of Rapunzel’s children. When I tell this tale I stress the passing cycles of the year.

The Grimm Brothers ultimately missed these points, or were willing to abandon them for modesty’s sake. The Grimms issued numerous editions of their fairy tale collection, and with each one they dropped questionable elements. After the first edition they changed Rapunzel complaining that her clothing were getting tight with remarking how Dame Gothel was harder to pull up than the prince. By the last edition the birth of Rapunzel’s children is gone. Rampion would have been next.

Fairy Tale of the Month: Dec 2010 Rapunzel – Part Three

 Arthur Rackham

A tangled Story.

Rapunzel is on our minds this month, given Disney’s release of “Tangled”. Let me push beyond the mandatory cry of “They changed it!” and answer, “Of course they did.”

Here is one of the surprising features of fairy tales; they change. They always have. As they move through time and space they fit themselves into the surroundings they occupy.

Example: In the Grimm version of “Queen of the Tinkers” the princess, who refuses to marry the suitors her father suggests, is obliged to marry the King of the Tinkers, and does not get to be married to a real king until she relents in her haughty ways. To bend to social norms was the proper role for early 19th century women in the Austrian Empire.

In the contemporary Irish version, the princess doesn’t get to be married to a real king until she refuses to give up her Tinker King. In both cases the Tinker King is a real king, the reveal not coming until the end after the princess’s rightful nature is established. The story fits itself into its surroundings by adapting to that culture’s norms.

Let’s review Rapunzel as she travels through time and space from the 19th century Austrian Empire to the 21st century United States. In Grimm’s version, Rapunzel acts at the behest of Dame Gothel, and then of the prince. For her deceit, secretly preferring the prince over Dame Gothel and planning an escape, she is banished to a desert land where she conceives two children, and raises them in hardship and poverty.  She is not released until the blinded prince discovers her. His blindness cured by her tears, he then brings her out of her travail. This Rapunzel can not act directly for her own benefit.

Disney’s Rapunzel is trapped, but seizes an opportunity when it presents itself, and exercises much more control than her historic counterpart. Try to imagine Grimm’s Rapunzel clunking her uninvited guest on the head with a frying pan (the ‘frying pan’ motif also a modern add-on to the story). In short, she is a plucky female.  Our Disney’s Rapunzel is a more acceptable role model for current audiences than Grimm’s, despite her bent toward violence.

“Hold on.” You should say. “Disney is a big strong corporation, but does that give them the right to screw up a story?” The simple answer is “Yep.” In Grimm’s time it was the Roman Catholic Church that got to put a Christian gloss on this story (the earlier French version was much bawdier). In our time it’s a corporation that gets to tweak it.

Here’s my theory. The entity that gets to call the shots is the entity than can come to a consensus within itself.

In Grimm’s time that was the Roman Catholic Church. They had the coherent message. In our time there are many churches, with many messages, and despite the National Council of Churches (have you heard of them?) they do not have one voice. Our national government—well, the word coherent does not apply.  However, a corporation, or more correctly the corporate mind set, has the capacity to come to a consensus, assemble a message, and the wherewithal to get it out. I believe they call it branding. 

My personal turmoil with the above theory is that my right brain wants to rip out my tongue for having said it.

Your thought?