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Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2015 The Three Rowan Trees – Part One

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Three Soldiers Hans Sebald Beham2Hans Sebald Beham

A Trio

I sit on the window seat of the bay window in my study, watching the day disappearing over the magic forest in the near distance. I don’t usually sit here, but I have the windows open allowing the soft evening air to wash over me as I smoke a bowl of Dark Dwarf.

My thoughts—drifting away with the smoke—swirl about the three soldiers of The Devil and His Grandmother. While I can’t call the three soldiers a motif, the trio shows up in more than one Grimm story. To my thoughts comes The Three Army Surgeons, The Long Nose, and The Crows—although in this last one the three are not companionable. Outside of Grimm I can think of The Three Soldiers in Jacobs’ Europa’s Fairy Book, and the well-known Stone Soup.

I am sure with a quick search I can find another. Stephen Badman’s Odds and Sods sits atop a pile of books near me. I grab it and page through. Sure enough, I find The Three Rowan Trees.

Three soldiers are dismissed from service with little to show for their time. They agree to travel together and stumble across an empty castle in which all their needs are mysteriously met. That evening, to the soldier named Hans, comes a snake that crawls into his bed and turns into a princess.

She explains to Hans that she and her sisters are the three rowan trees growing in the garden. If Hans and his companions will bear being whipped all night long for three nights starting at Midsummer’s Night, the spell will be broken. Hans agrees to try.

In the morning he visits the rowan trees and is given three magical gifts: a purse that never empties, a cloak that will take him anywhere, and a bag that contains an army.

Immediately forgetting his promise, he and his companions travel to London via the cloak and Hans pursues the hand of the daughter of the King of England. She cheats him out of the magical gifts and abandons him. He is close to suicide when he comes across a tree of golden apples that cause a horn to grow out of one’s forehead, and a golden pear tree that removes it. Tricking the king, queen, and princess into eating the apples, they are beholden to him to have the horns removed. Thus he regains the magical gifts.

He uses the bag containing the army to release his companions who have gotten themselves into trouble, and returns to the castle by Midsummer’s Night. By keeping himself and his companions drunk for the next three days and nights, they survive the whippings and break the spell. Each marries a princess and Hans becomes king.

What is it about a trio of soldiers gallivanting around the countryside that engages the listener? Hans is the protagonist, but the other two companions are not completely necessary for the story. A teller could easily edit them out. Yet time and again a trio like this appears to populate a ribald tale.

I hear Thalia padding down the hall. For the moment, this puts an end to my reflections.

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2015 The Three Rowan Trees – Part Two

Three Little Pigs jacobsJohn D. Batten

Threesome

After reading to Thalia, I return to my window seat and my pipe. The gentle evening air comes from the direction of the magic forest carrying with it the touch of enchantment. It has a hold on me and my wandering thoughts.

Oddly, Thalia asked me to read The Long Nose to her. It is a variant of The Three Rowan Trees; at least the element of a fruit tree causing disfigurement and another to cure it is in both, along with the soldier trio. While these two stories bear a resemblance to Jacobs’ The Three Soldiers, there is no one tale type that can be attached to the appearance of three soldiers.

Nor are these soldiers the only trio in the tales. From The Three Little Pigs to The Three Feathers we have other examples. I discern patterns with these threesomes, whether they be pigs, brothers, or comrades.

In the case of the pigs, the first and second were failures, while the third succeeded. When the trio is made up of brothers there is a hierarchy of age with the youngest appearing to be the least promising. In truth, the elder two have their shortcomings, while the youngest has what it takes to overcome hardships.

The pattern for the comrades is a little different. In the soldier stories the comrades are of equal status. Even in The Three Soldiers, where a sergeant, a corporal, and a private travel together, the sergeant never pulls rank on the other two. All decisions are made upon agreement.

I peer at the magic forest’s silhouetted tree line. Have I thought this through or is there another aspect?

In all three examples (pigs, brothers, and comrades) the lesser two members of the triad are a counterpoint to the nature of the third, who has become the protagonist. Hans, of The Three Rowan Trees, is an opportunist. It is Hans who suggests they all stick together. It is he who chooses the road they travel. Hans converses with the snake and a rowan tree. Hans pursues the princess in London. His companions almost wordlessly go along with him. The most they do is spend all their money and get into trouble, relying on Hans to get them out of their predicament. The companion’s lack of activity contrasts with Hans’ constant motion.

Watching my pipe smoke drifting along on the night air, my thoughts drift toward one more aspect.

The three soldiers offer up the chance for roguery. Hans’ conduct is not exactly exemplary. He clearly “slept” with a princess, and after receiving magical gifts from her, pursues yet another princess. Later, he uses trickery to get back the gifts he carelessly gave away. When he returns to the rowan trees (and just in the nick of time) to do the right thing, he does it by getting his comrades so drunk they don’t know they are being mysteriously whipped all night long.

These are antics the decent youngest brother could never get away with, behavior not even appropriate for pigs. But soldiers—well, we give them license for our own entertainment

Fairy Tale of the Month: June 2015 The Three Rowan Trees – Part Three

Magic Cloak BattenJohn D. Batten

Gifts

“There is a fairy in my bookstore!” Melissa’s eyes are wide with concern. She didn’t even say hello when I entered the shop. She fairly slammed her book down.

“Yes, I know. So sorry. Thalia was careless.”

“Thalia?”

“Yes, it was her fairy.”

Her expression softens. “Well then, I haven’t gone crazy. I’ve told three of my friends. Two of them suggested therapy, and the third an exterminator.”

“Exterminator. Oh dear no. Fairies are rather rare and need to be cherished.”

“There really is a fairy in my bookstore?” Melissa’s alarm is slipping toward wonderment.

“She has black, static-filled hair?” I prompt.

Melissa moves her hands about her head in imitation of the fairy’s floating locks.

“Consider her a magical gift,” I say.

“You mean like a purse that never empties, or a cloak of invisibility?”

“Rather like. Yes,” I say.

Actually, not, as I think about it. The magical gifts are inanimate objects imbued with magic. The fairy is alive and entirely a creature of the fey.

And where do the magical gifts come from? Who made them? In The Three Rowan Treesthe gifts of the magic purse, cloak, and bag are given by the enchanted rowan tree. Do the gifts fall from the branches like fruit? We are not told.

Sometimes in the fairy tales, the gifts are not objects, but rather attributes or events. A heroine may be given the gift of flowers falling from her lips when she speaks; she may grow more beautiful every day; or her destiny maybe to marry a prince. These are blessings granted at the moment of their uttering. But we get the sense that the magical objects preexist their being granted to the hero or heroine.

I suspect they preexist because they represent our wishful thinking for things such as wealth (the purse,) freedom (the cloak,) and power (the bag.) The cloak can give its owner the freedom to travel. Sometimes this ability to travel is represented, appropriately, by a hat. The cloak can also be one of invisibility (security). Another common gift is a glass vial, allowing the holder to become a great doctor (health.)

The gifts of attributes and events are more a reflection of the hero or heroine’s worthiness. These are more often conferred upon women, and not always to their benefit. Sleeping Beauty was one such recipient.

“What do you feed fairies?” Melissa jolts me away from my still-wandering thoughts.

“I don’t know. I never had to.” I think for a moment. “We always have milk out for Johannes. Maybe they are like house brownies and go after milk.”

Melissa’s brow knits.

“Listen,” I continue, “I have come for a purpose. I want to order a copy of The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales. These are the tales uncovered by Erika Eichenseer. The translation is by Maria Tatar, by the way.”

“Really.” Melissa grabs a pen and paper.

We return to our everyday world of mundane concerns, but our fairy, out of sight, flutters about the edges of our normality, and perhaps nibbles on it.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2015 The Devil and His Grandmother – Part One

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Devil Grandmother H J FordH J Ford

A Dragon

“Melissa stole my fairy.” Thalia enters my study in her pajamas, dragging Teddy behind her.

“She wouldn’t.”

“She did!”

I consider. “You took the fairy to the bookstore?”

“She crawled into my pocket.”

“She is a bookish fairy. I fear you tempted her fey nature to indulge herself. She probably thinks she is in Nirvana.”

Thalia and Teddy settle in beside me on the comfy chair. “Nearwana?”

“The best of all possible places.”

“Oh. Yeah. Melissa’s is pretty cool.”

“I am sure the fairy will come out every time you are there.”

“Maybe.” Thalia pouts.

“Well, tonight I have a story with a dragon in it.”

“Really?” she brightens.

I read her Grimms’ The Devil and His Grandmother.

Three soldiers desert by hiding in a wheat field, expecting the encampment to move on in the morning, leaving them behind. The army doesn’t move. By the second day the deserters are desperate.

“What’s a desserter?”

I note Thalia’s arms are crossed. “One who likes ice cream and does not want to fight in a war.”

A dragon, who proves to be the Devil, descends from the sky to ask them what they are doing. He then promises them if they will serve him for seven years he will get them out of their predicament. The soldiers readily agree. The dragon goes on to offer them an extravagant life for seven years at the end of which their souls belong to him unless they can guess his riddles. He gives them a small whip, which when they snap, sends gold coins dancing through the air.

“Can the Devil be a dragon?” Thalia’s brow knits.

“In this story he can.”

The seven years pass quickly—as time does when one is having fun—and two of the soldiers fall into depression as their end nears. The third of their number remains hopeful, and on the advice of an old woman, who comes wandering down the road, he visits the Devil’s grandmother to plead his case.

“The Devil has a grandmother?” Her brow knits again.

“Apparently. Did you ever notice that “Devil” is evil with a ‘D’?”

“Cool.”

The Devil’s grandmother takes a liking to this optimist and hides him in her cellar when the dragon comes home for supper. She engages her grandson in a conversation about the riddles for the next day. The devil is preparing a feast in hell for the three soldiers. To avoid the feast, they must guess that the roast will be a dead monkey floating in the North Sea, their spoon will be the rib bone of a whale, and their wine glass a hollow horse’s hoof.

Armed with the answers, the soldier returns to his companions. The next day the dragon is cheated out of his victims and loses his power over them. He flies off leaving them behind, along with the small whip that keeps them in luxury for the rest of their lives.

“I like the money whip. I don’t like the dead monkey,” she muses.

“Both are striking images.”

“I still want my fairy back.”

“I’m afraid that’s the fairy’s choice.”

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2015 The Devil and His Grandmother – Part Two

Devil Grandmother John WaterhouseJohn Waterhouse

A Visit

“Hello, my nixie,” I call, as I settle myself on a rock above the water’s edge of the magic forest’s pond. Slowly she comes from below. I see her high cheekbones and the arc of her brow before she breaks the water’s surface.

“Hello, my human.”

I toss her an unshelled peanut from my paper bag, which she breaks between her long, pale greenish fingers to get the kernel inside.

“Can you tell me,” I ask, as I toss her another, “can the Devil be a dragon and have a grandmother?”

“No, I can’t.” She raises her hand for another peanut.

“Why won’t you tell me?” I withhold the nut.

“Because he is not of my pantheon. I know little of him.”

I relent and throw her the treat. “Sorry, I assumed all the (here I almost say ‘evil creatures’) adversaries of humans knew each other.”

“Adversaries? You and I are not adversaries. I am of the merfolk. We often have love for humans.”

“Whom you seduce, and sometimes drown,” I add.

“Drown if they deserve it, but that does not make us adversaries.”

“What can you tell me of the Devil?”

“He is a fallen angel, along with his other demons. Their conflict is with their god. I see where you mortals get trapped in the center.”

The nixie and I have fallen into a rhythm of tossing and catching peanuts as we talk.

“Now that you mention different pantheons, it occurs to me, I don’t recall any stories with merfolk and demons together in the same tale.”

“I wouldn’t keep company with them.” The nixie frowns.

“Nor do you merfolk look for souls to steal. You might steal the whole body, but you are not after the soul.”

“Steal?”

“Possess.” I correct. “Do you have a soul?”

“Of course not. Why would we immortals want souls, ours or anyone else’s, unless we have a heaven or hell to populate?”

I see a pattern I had not seen before. “You merfolk often look for human lovers. The Devil is looking for souls. Witches are looking to harm humans by death or enchantment.”

I absently shell a peanut and pop it into my mouth.

“Hey!” The nixie glares.

“Oh, sorry. Now elves are a little more complicated. They can be helpers or tricksters. Giants and trolls are simply problems.”

“Stepmothers?” the nixie puts in.

“Now there is an adversary,” I agree, “at least in fairy tales.”

I continue pitching her peanuts while I think.

“Wait a moment. Pantheons you say. What about the Roman pantheon? Fauns, satyrs, nymphs? The Romans conquered most of Europe and moved well into the Isles, but they left not a single dryad behind in the tales. Why is that?”

“Fauns, satyrs, and nymphs did not arise here. We did—the nixies, elves, dwarves, and giants. The mystic realms of this land belong to us.”

My hand rustles inside an empty paper bag. I look to find the peanuts are gone. I hear a splash and my nixie is gone as well.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: May 2015 The Devil and His Grandmother – Part Three

Devil Grandmother Rackham Arthur Rackham

A Dragon’s Grandmother

“Tell me, can the Devil be a dragon and have a grandmother?”

Augustus eyes me suspiciously, then relaxes. “Ah, you are talking about The Devil and His Grandmother.” Augustus is easily the sharpest person I know; at least among fairy-tale aficionados like myself. As always, we inhabit his comfy chairs, surrounded by tobacco smoke.

“It is a rather unGrimm-like story; there is more of the tavern than the nursery in it.”

“True, Thalia was a little uneasy about parts. She didn’t like the dead monkey.”

“Yes, the dead monkey floating in the North Sea. What an image. I suspect that is the invention of a particular storyteller. Monkeys are not native to northern climes. By asking the poor soldiers to guess that it might be their roast, the Devil set up an impossible task. Storywise, the teller presents an informed, sophisticated device within the riddle. That speaks to a modern addition to the motif of the three questions. When did the monkey come into the folk consciousness? I think that might date this version for us.”

I take a pipe cleaner from Augustus’ supply on his side table and pull the stem from my bowl. “She also likes the money whip.”

“That is new for me too. Usually gold coins drop from mouths, are found under pillows in the morning, or come out of an endless bag of riches.”

“I keep thinking of The Devil and the Three Golden Hairs.” I reassemble my pipe.

“Well of course you do; it follows the same pattern of the grandmother helping the protagonist find out the questions.”

I relight my tobacco. “So what is with the Devil’s grandmother? He is a fallen angel, an immortal. He should not have a family linage.”

“There is a tendency for folklore to demote deities and heroes to folksy figures. Fionn mac Cumhaill, of the Irish tales, is an example. He was the leader of the Fianna warriors, and king of Tara. The latter-day tales about him—now called MacCool—cast him as a dumb giant dependent on the good advices of his wife.”

Augustus blows a few playful smoke rings, then continues.

“In the case of the Devil, the fallen-angel aspect is not frequently taught from the pulpit, and largely ignored by the folk. They did not discuss how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. The Devil to them had always been the Devil and nothing more. Jesus had a mother; why couldn’t the Devil have a grandmother?”

“What catches me,” I say, “is that we don’t hear of the Devil’s wife, mother, father, sisters, or brothers, only the grandmother.”

Augustus smiles. “Old women have a special status in these tales. There are two old women in the tales. One is a helper (as in our story), and the other is a witch. They are never the protagonist. Never is a story about a witch or a wise woman of the wood. These women always serve the story, for good or for ill, but never is the story about them.”

“And the Devil as a dragon?”

Augustus shifts uneasily in his comfy chair. “Having just said the folk didn’t connect with the fallen-angel thing, the Devil does appear as a great red dragon in the Book of Revelation in a battle where he is cast down to earth. That is perhaps the source for this image. I’ll suppose the storyteller picked and chose from the Bible what he liked and left the rest, but then, don’t we all.”

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2015 The Golden Children – Part One

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golden children gruellefisherman John Gruelle

Upstream

The rhythm of rowing puts me in a state of contentment. The weather stays mild and clear, letting the sun shine on the ripples that Duckworth and I make as we take our exercise on this leg of the Thames known as the Isis.

“Look, there,” Duckworth points. I see a flash of intense orange below the surface.

“What was it?” I look to Duckworth.

“A goldfish, well, carp really. I’ve read about it and have been looking for one. People who don’t want their pet goldfish anymore let them go into the Thames. That’s illegal. Some have been arrested. Invasive species and all that. This is the first time I have seen one. A big problem in some places.”

He gives me a challenging, sideways smile. “Got any fairy tales on goldfish?”

I think for a few. “Ah, yes, I do.”

Duckworth rolls his eyes. “I should know better.”

“It’s a Grimm, The Golden Children.” I give him the synopsis as we stroke our way up stream.

A fisherman catches a golden fish, who promises wealth if the man lets him go, but there is a condition. The fisherman must tell no one how he got his riches. His wife, unrelenting in her curiosity, gets her husband to tell her, and their fortune instantly disappears.

The fisherman returns to fishing only to catch the golden fish again. The same conditions are set, he returns home, and the same thing happens as before. The wife declares, “I’d rather live in poverty than not know who’s giving us all that wealth. After all, I want to keep my peace of mind.”

When the fisherman catches the golden fish for the third time, the fish concedes he is meant to be caught and instructs the man to cut him up into six pieces, feed two to his wife, two to his mare, and plant the remaining two.

The wife gives birth to two golden boys, the mare two golden colts, and two golden lilies spring from the ground.

When the boys come of age, they ride off on their golden horses. At an inn, on the first night, they are laughed at for being golden. Disheartened, one brother returns home, but the other ventures on. He takes the guise of a vagabond by covering himself and his horse with bear skins.

Soon after, he meets and falls in love with a maiden, who, unaccountably, falls in love with him. They are married on the spot, even before her father gets home. He is enraged and threats to kill the vagabond. Peeking into their marriage room, he sees his son-in-law is golden, and changes his attitude.

That night, however, the golden youth dreams of hunting a magnificent stag. In the morning, against his wife’s fears for his safety, he insists upon going hunting.

He spots the stag and the chase is on. By evening he loses sight of the beast, and finds himself in front of the cottage of a witch. When he threatens her annoying, yapping, little dog, she turns him into a stone.

Back home, one of the golden lilies wilts. The other golden youth comes to his rescue, forcing the witch to restore his form, after which one returns to his bride and the other returns home.

“What?” says Duckworth. “That’s it? What a horrible tale.”

“It’s not so bad,” I defend (weakly).

“Yes it is. Why, there’s no moral, no lesson learned.” Duckworth puts up his oars and folds his arms.

“Should there be? Must there be?” My oars hover in the air.

“Yes!” says Duckworth.

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2015 The Golden Children – Part Two

Golden Children flyingfishNomenclator Aquatilium Animantium

Moral Reflections

I am bothered by Duckworth’s assertion that fairy tales ought to have a moral. I need to contemplate the problem he has posed for me. There are two places in which I can let my thoughts wander, my study, and the Magic Forest.

I have chosen the trail that leads to the Glass Mountain. I should fear the Magic Forest more than I do, but it seems to me to be safe if one does not get off the path. As to the Glass Mountain, it is a destination for the purpose of having one. I don’t intend to attempt a climb.

At the edge of the forest I light my pipe, then enter among the ancient trees.

Why does Duckworth assume a fairy tale should instruct? Aesop’s fables, which contain fairy-tale elements, are designed to inform. The Victorian literary fairy-tale authors, such as Hans Christian Andersen, were conscious of moral content. Many of the old fairy tales have a moral to them.

Certainly they do.

Do they?

I am so distracted that my pipe has gone out from my neglect to puff on it. I halt my progress, tamp down the tobacco again, and strike a match.

In the old fairy tales (not necessarily in the literary ones) the forces of good almost always triumph over those of evil, which is a fine thing, but is not the same as having a moral message. Morals have to do with the conduct of the characters, the rightfulness or wrongfulness, of their actions.

Certainly there are moral acts performed in these stories. In The Golden Children, the wife prefers their poverty over not knowing what bargain gave them their wealth. She values her peace of mind. That constitutes good moral conduct. The second golden youth puts himself in danger by confronting the witch to restore his brother’s humanity; also a moral act. But these events occur as incidental to the storyline, not at the story’s heart, allowing Duckworth to overlook them when he said the story had no moral, no lesson learned.

Scanning other fairy tales, I note similar quirks. Snow White makes a series of bad choices—nothing moral going on there. Gretel shoves an old lady into an oven—not proper conduct. Cinderella has supernatural aid—might that be an unfair advantage? Rapunzel has illegitimate children—well . . .

My path ends at the foot of the Glass Mountain. I look up at its imposing, glittering bulk, its sheer, smooth sides reaching toward the sky. Then I look straight ahead at the polished glass outcroppings in front of me.

There, distorted, fractured, reflected multiple times, I see images of myself. I also see the answer to my musings.

The fairy tales show us ourselves, distorted, fractured, reflected multiple times in the storyline. We see our hopes, disappointments, wishes, and fears. We witness our better nature and our reprehensible acts spread among the different characters. A moral act here and there is bound to come up. The tales are not about morals; they are about us—we multifaceted, complex, hard-to-comprehend beings.

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: April 2015 The Golden Children – Part Three

Golden Children two men

Something Borrowed

“You recall The Two Brothers don’t you?” Augustus waves his pipe in my direction.

“Yes—yes, of course, that’s where I heard some of this story before.” Why didn’t I remember?

Ensconced in his hospitality room, replete with comfy chairs, we test his experimental variation of “Elven Gold.” Our pipe smoke has laden the air. He increased the amount of Latakia I think.

Augustus blows a smoke ring and smiles. “Both stories have two brothers. Gold plays a part in each. One of the brothers gets married. When that brother chases a stag and encounters a witch, the other brother must come to save him.”

“Aren’t we talking about motifs?”

“Motifs? I can’t imagine that word being in an old storyteller’s vocabulary. To state it kindly, he ‘borrowed’ from other stories. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that a skilled storyteller had an endless supply of story-pieces, borrowed and stolen by ear.

“I get the sense that my storyteller took a little from one story and a little from another, then put a twist on it to make it his own. I see an old teller, sitting by the hearth of the inn, pulling the story-pieces out of his mental swag bag, but assembling the story he tells differently every time. One evening someone writes down what they heard, and creates the version that comes down to us.

“The notable difference between Two Brothers and The Golden Children is that in the former the brothers find gold coins under their pillows every morning. In the latter the brothers are gold.

“Oddly, in both cases the significance of the gold fades by the end of the story and the brotherly rescue becomes the point.

Actually, The Golden Children is filled with oddity. The marriage before the father gets home, and the thought of murder was interesting. The golden horses didn’t play much of a role for being golden and all that. Then we have the secret identity thing going on.”

“Yes, the bearskin,” I put in. “Why does that mean the youth will be taken as a vagabond? Does this relate to the Grimms’ Bearskin?”

“And the chase of the stag.” Augustus is waving his pipe again. “That comes right out of the beginning of The Six Swans.”

“Now that you point to it,” I say as I feel the Latakia going to my head, “The Golden Childrendoes feel like parts of other stories strung together. It starts out sounding like The Fisherman and His Wife, then slips into Two Brothers with a dash of Bearskin thrown in.”

Augustus nods his agreement. “What my teller hit upon—and a bold move on his part—was to make the brothers of gold, as well as their horses, and the lilies. Maybe it is my ignorance, but I think my storyteller came up with the golden children on his own.

“My fascination with these transcribed fairy tales is to hear the voice of a teller rise above the editing of literary collectors to come through to my ears. For that moment, I am sitting by the inn hearth listening to him.”

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: March 2015 Three Feathers – Part One

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Three Feathers kingR. Emmett Owen

A Note

I stand across the street from the bookshop, reading the now familiar words painted on the plate-glass window, “Serious Books, New and Used, Melissa Serious, Proprietor.” In my pocket is a note from Ms. Serious delivered to me by Thalia, who spends her entire book allowance at Melissa’s. When the traffic ebbs, I cross over.

“Ah, I knew Thalia would not fail me.” Melissa raises her eyes from her book and smiles at me.

“Well, you are one of her favorite people. Of course she’d give me the message.”

“And what are you reading to her these days?”

“Three Feathers—last night.”

“Three Feathers? It’s been a long time since I read Grimm cover to cover. I don’t recall that one.”

I happily relate it to her.

In Three Feathers, a king contemplates which one of his three sons should inherit his kingdom. He proposes that whichever of the three can bring him the finest carpet will succeed him. He casts three feathers into the air. The eldest son follows his feather to the west, the middle brother follows his to the east. The feather intended for the youngest brother, Simpleton, immediately settles to the ground, followed by heartless derision from his brothers.

Sitting on the rock upon which the feather has fallen, intending to have a good cry, he discovers under it a trapdoor and steps leading downward. In an underground chamber he finds a large toad surrounded by little toads. When Simpleton tells the toads of his plight, he is given a beautiful carpet.

Meantime, his brothers take the easy way out and bring back the first carpet they can find. When they see Simpleton’s carpet, they protest that their youngest brother cannot possibly be king and demand another contest.

The king obliges and sets them the task to find the most beautiful ring. He casts the three feathers that float and fall as they did before. Simpleton returns to the underground chamber where the toads lives. The brothers go no farther than they possibly need to, returning with old wagon rings. The contest ends like the first.

Again, the elder two brothers protest and the king now calls for them to go out and return with the most beautiful woman. The three feathers are cast.

This time the large toad gives Simpleton a hollowed-out turnip to which are harnessed six mice. Simpleton picks out one of the little toads and puts it into the hollow turnip. In an instant the tiny conveyance transforms into a carriage pulled by six horses and carrying a beautiful woman.

The brothers, having learned nothing, return with pretty peasant girls.

Again, there really is no contest, but still the brothers protest, issuing a challenge that the kingdom should go to the brother whose woman can jump through the hoop hanging from the hall ceiling. The elder two think Simpleton’s woman is far too delicate for the task. Instead, the peasant girls injure themselves in the attempt, and the enchanted woman springs through with grace. The protests come to an end.

I see Melissa’s green eyes smoldering and wonder what terrible thing I’ve said.

“I don’t like,” she intones with emphasis, “women having to jump through hoops at the male’s pleasure.”

“Oh, I’m sure they didn’t have circus animals doing such tricks then.” I am not really sure.

“It’s worse than that. A friend of mine, a dog-show enthusiast, told me that in medieval times kings would have the dogs of peasants jump through small hoops. If the dog was too large, it meant the dog could be used for hunting, or in the king’s mind poaching, and he had the beast maimed.”

“Oh.” I am embarrassed. I didn’t see that implication.

Fairy Tale of the Month: March 2015 Three Feathers – Part Two

Three Feathers Rackham Arthur Rackham

A Must-Buy

“Oh,” Melissa says, “about the note . . .” She turns in her swivel chair to a pile of books with paper tabs sticking out from between their pages with various messages written to herself. The paper tab in the book she hands me has “For Thalia’s G-dad” written on it.

“I know you will buy this volume.” Melissa is one tough saleslady.

I look at the book’s title and I know she is right.

“When did this come out?” I am delighted.

“In October.”

I am holding The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition, translated by Jack Zipes.

“Zipes, of course. This is wonderful.” I turn immediately to Three Feathers and read. I am stunned.

I can’t help noticing Melissa’s smile at the shock that must be registered on my face.

“He changed it,” I blurt.

“He, who?” Melissa is enjoying my befuddlement.

“Wilhelm. Jacob left Wilhelm to handle the fairy-tale project while he worked on a German dictionary and other things. The Tales went through seven editions and I read that changes were made from the first in 1812—this edition,” I tap the book in my hand, “and the last in 1857, but good heavens.

“’Listen, in the original the tasks were to find the finest linen, then the finest carpet, and finally the most beautiful woman. That’s not that big a change. However, in this version the two elder brothers make an honest effort to find the best, but cannot compete against magical help.

“Next, the time Simpleton spends underground is different than time passing above ground. He goes down the stairs, gets the linen, and climbs back up the stairs. Meanwhile, his brothers have been traveling far and wide in their search, and are just now returning.

“Here’s the real kicker, there is no toad in the original. In his first visit, Simpleton finds a maiden in the subterranean chamber sitting at a flax wheel. She gives him the finest linen ever seen. On the second visit she is at a loom making an enchanting carpet for him.

“On the third visit she tells him to travel farther into the subterranean world to find the most beautiful woman. Here is where this version gets really strange. In another room, flickering with light from gold and gems, sits an ugly frog. Not a toad, a frog.”

“I know the difference,” says Melissa.

“The frog says, ‘Embrace me, and immerse yourself!’ She says this twice before the reluctant Simpleton picks her up, takes her back to the upper world, and jumps into a pond. The moment they hit the water she transforms, in his arms, into the most beautiful woman.

“Oh, I love that.” Melissa claps her hands.

“Yes, this version is so much better. Why did he change it? I am going to talk to Wilhelm about this.”

Melissa laughs at what she takes to be my little joke. Actually, it’s a slip of the tongue. I hand her my credit card.

Fairy Tale of the Month: March 2015 Three Feathers – Part Three

Three Feathers Goble Warwick Goble

So Why?

Back in my study, in the company of a glass of wine, I am reading my new book looking for clues as to why Wilhelm made the changes that he did to the Three Feathers. I know the Grimms started out (and remained) loyal to the idea of the German nationalistic spirit being embedded in the language, leading the brothers to study philology and mythology instead of the law, their original academic intent.

Yet—from what I am reading now and what I have read before—I gather that they shifted their focus to include practical concerns.

Their first collection of fairy tales, appearing in two volumes published in 1812 and 1815, was met with lackluster interest. By the second edition in 1819, Wilhelm caught onto the notion of making the work presentable to children. The scholarly notes went away (published separately) along with mothers who killed their children. Stepmothers now killed the children. Christian motifs replaced some of the pagan motifs, but thankfully not all. In 1825 the Grimms published a small edition of fifty stories intended for middle-class families with children, a rising segment of the population who might—and did—purchase the book.

I can well imagine the dilemma as they attempted to reconcile the idea of the tales as a nationally unifying heritage with the actual tastes and mores of broad swaths of the German population of the day.

Using this knowledge I conjecture why Wilhelm made those particular changes to the Three Feathers. I reach for my glass and take another sip. Wilhelm is standing by the fireplace glazing into the flames.

Dropping the linen and substituting a ring as one of the tasks is minor. A ring is more interesting than a piece of linen. However, in both versions I find the request for a carpet rather odd. Unless it flies, a carpet is uninteresting. Rings and beautiful women have ambiance. In the Grimms’ notes they cite a variant in which the king requests a dog small enough to jump through his wedding ring. That stopped me in light of Melissa’s comment about dogs, kings, and hoops. There may be a cultural reference in the story, now lost on us.

More notable is the change in the elder brothers’ nature. In the original version they diligently pursue the king’s requests, but lose out to Simpleton’s magical helpers. I assume that did not appeal to the current work ethic of their audience. Wilhelm denigrated the elder two brothers to justify the younger’s success. Now that the two lazy brothers spend little time on their tasks, a time difference between the upper and lower realms no longer makes sense; Wilhelm sacrificed it.

I glance up at him. He is watching me and nods, reading my thoughts.

Curiously, Wilhelm replaced the maiden and frog with toads. I’ll admit, the toad version is tidier. The Simpleton comes to the same place three times for the toad to grant his wishes. In the 1812 version, on the third visit he travels deeper into the subterranean world to encounter something uncanny.

I wonder if Wilhelm feared his Protestant readers might view the scene of Simpleton jumping into a pond with the frog for the sake of transformation as a mockery of the Christian baptism, and opted for the obviously more fanciful—and literary—version in which common creatures and objects turn into the glamourous in the blink of an eye.

I look up, Wilhelm has vanished.

The wine has made me sleepy and I put down the book. Like the wine, this English translation of the Grimms’ first book is a thing to savor.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: February 2015 Foundling – Part One

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John B. Gruelle

Not Quite

Teddy, Thalia, and I are all secure in the comfy chair; the light from the fireplace sends flickering shadows onto the blanket covering our legs. In our erratic progression through Grimms’ collection of over two hundred fairy tales, we have landed upon Foundling.

A forester, out hunting, hears the sound of a child crying. After a puzzling search, he finds the child in the top boughs of a tree. The story tells us that a hawk stole the child from the lap of his sleeping mother and left him on a tree top. The forester rescues the little lad and decides to raise him with his own daughter, Lena. Because he found the child, the forester names him Foundling.

As the two children grow, they become exceedingly fond of each other. If they are not together they soon become sad. One day Lena sees the old cook, Sanna, carrying a great number of water buckets into the kitchen. She asks Sanna why she does so, and Sanna, after making Lena promise to tell no one, confides that she intends to cook Foundling in the morning after the forester goes out hunting.

Early the next morning Lena tells Foundling, “If you won’t forsake me, I won’t forsake you.” To which Foundling replies, “Never ever.” That becomes a refrain throughout the rest of the story. Breaking her promise to Sanna, Lena tells Foundling of his plight, and they run off together.

When Sanna finds that both children are gone, she sends three servants to bring them back. Lena sees them from afar. She tells Foundling to turn himself into a rose tree; she becomes a rosebud upon that tree. When the servants come to where the children were, but cannot find them, they return to the cook, telling her that all they found was a rose tree.

Enraged, the cook sends the servants back to cut down the rose tree and bring her the rosebud. Again, Lena sees them coming, and this time the servants find a church—Foundling—and inside nothing but a chandelier—Lena.

Thwarted again, the cook accompanies the three servants to accomplish the task. Lena tells Foundling to turn into a pond; she turns into a duck swimming on the pond.  Seeing this, the cook kneels down and begins to drink up the pond. Quickly, Lena grabs the cook’s head in her beak and pulls her underwater, drowning the old woman. It is in this last moment that the story reveals the cook as a witch.

Lena and Foundling return home.

“Teddy and I don’t like that story.” Thalia is pouting.

“Why? What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s dumb. Read the next one.”

“The next one is King Thrushbeard. We’ve read that already.”

“Goody. Read it again.”

And so I do.

I find “dumb” an insufficient analysis. The tale has the basic fairy-tale components: a beginning, middle, and end (This is not to be taken for granted.); a protagonist (two actually); a villain; lots of magic; and a happy ending.

And yet, Thalia is right. There is something about this tale that does not quite satisfy.

Fairy Tale of the Month: February 2015 Foundling – Part Two

foundling H J FordH J Ford

Evil for Evil’s Sake

“Foundling. Foundling.” Augustus’ eyebrows knit. He rises from the overstuffed chair and stands before his bookshelves, which are lined with notebooks.

I had gotten here just as he closed the shop for the day, and we tucked ourselves away in his study for a visit. Augustus pulls a notebook from a shelf, peruses it, replaces it, and picks another. I know he is a self-taught scholar, and claims to have come up with a tale-classification system simpler and more scientific that Aarne-Thompson’s. He explained it to me once until I became completely befuddled.

“Ah, here, yes. I recall it now.” He sits down with a binder in his lap. “I have it in my notes as ‘a failed tale.’ ”

“How unkind,” I say.

“I am afraid this tale suffers from Wilhelmitis.

“Pardon? I think you are coining a word.”

Augustus smiles. “I have two arguments to justify that statement. Starting with a minor point, Lena promises the cook she would not tell anyone of what was about to be said. Lena breaks that promise by warning Foundling of his impending doom.

“That’s excusable in the real world, but in the fairy-tale realm that cannot be done without dire consequences. Promises, however ill-advised in their making, are binding. For Lena there are no consequences. That is a clear violation of fairy-tale law.

“More pertinent to my argument, the Grimms’ stories’ popularity and longevity have to do with the literary polish the brothers—particularly Wilhelm—worked upon them. However, there were casualties and this tale is one of them.”

Augustus pages through his notes before continuing. “Because they wanted to appeal to a middle class audience—and note this was an evolving middle class caught between the minions of the old Holy Roman Empire and the rabble of the German nationalistic movements—Wilhelm quickly made changes to the stories to satisfy their tastes.

“In the original 1812 version, the foundling is a girl baby whom the forester names Birdie. Putting myself in Wilhelm’s shoes, I think he made the change from a female foundling to a male foundling simply to conform to the popularity of the fond-brother-and-sister theme

“A bigger problem for Wilhelm was that in at least one version of the collected tales the villain was not the cook, but the forester’s wife, who wanted to cook the intruding foundling.

“The motive for the wife’s action is easy to imagine; that she would confide in her own daughter makes more sense than the cook confiding in Lena, but Wilhelm faced having the daughter kill her own mother to save the foundling. He apparently didn’t think that would fly with his audience. The usual solution of substituting an evil stepmother now gets complicated with a new wife, stepdaughter, and adopted daughter. Wilhelm solves the problem by turning the wife into an old cook.”

“Ah,” I say, “but she is a villain with no motive. That is what Thalia sensed. The cook is evil for no reason. Now that is unsettling.”

Your thoughts?

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: February 2015 Foundling – Part Three

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite Ida Rentoul Outhwaite

Holding Magic

Our resident fairy is curled up and sleeping on Thalia’s copy of Grimm, which lies open to the Foundling; her black hair, filled with static electricity floats about her, moving and swirling with her breathing. I sit as close as I dare, contemplating the delicacy of her fey nature. Her beauty is that she is not common.

My “failed fairy tale” as Augustus calls it, has plenty of fairy-like magic in it. In the Foundlingthe children turn themselves into a rose tree, a rosebud, a church, a chandelier, a pond, and a duck. Not too shabby, but they have broken with acceptable decorum.

Mistakenly, some who imbibe story liquor allow that anything can happen in a fairy tale. Well, they are drunk. Fairy tales, in their own way, are stodgy teetotalers, walking a straight line of convention. The faux pas that the Foundling commits is granting commoners (Lena and Foundling) the power to transform themselves into other shapes, that is to say, possess magic.

No one has written the etiquette book for fairy tales but, if someone had, it would clearly state that commoners are not inherently magical. Magic is in the hands of witches, wizards (who rarely appear in the Grimm canon), fey beings, and royalty. This breakdown of who has magic fascinates me.

That fey beings, such as fairies, dwarves, and demons, have magic is a given. They are a class of beings all unto themselves.

Witches, however, are human. With a few exceptions, they are old, ugly, and poor. More accurately, they appear to be poor. Witches may have amassed wealth in the cellars and tunnels under their humble abodes. Still, even a gingerbread house does not rise to the level of a castle. In the Celtic tradition it is the henwife, poorest of the poor, who practices the uncanny arts.

At the other end of the medieval economic spectrum, royalty, by birth apparently, also hold magic. In the Goose Girl the elderly queen gives her daughter a protective token (three drops of blood on a handkerchief) and the talking horse, Falada. The young princess talks to the beheaded horse and raises winds to blow off the cap of an annoying little boy. The tale feels no need to explain these things. That the queen and the princess possess magic is as much a given as the fey beings having these skills.

The only magic commoners should have are those mysterious items given to them by magical helpers (old women in the wood, or little old men the protagonists chance to meet).

Quietly I tamp and light my pipe. The fairy opens one eye, but then slips off to sleep again. I am pleased she is not disturbed by my presence.

Magic is not common. It exists at the far ends of fairy-tale society, among poor old women, those privileged by birth, and the fey. Magic for the commoners should be doled out sparingly, a cloak of invisibility here, a magic sack there, and no more than three wishes at a time.

Watching the sleeping fairy, I resist the urge to pick her up and hold her in my hand. After all, she is magic and I a commoner.

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Fairy Tale of the Month: January 2015 The Nixie in the Pond – Part One

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nixieofthemillpondH. J. Ford

The Water’s Edge

“I didn’t know you liked fairy tales.” I address Thalia’s cat, Johannes, who sits on the study table, my copy of Jack Zipes’s translation of Grimm lying open in front of him.

“I never said I didn’t,” he answers coldly, inserting a deft claw between the pages, turning a leaf, and pinning the opposite page with his other claw. This explains why my books are not always where I leave them. They often end up on the floor.

Looking over his head, I see he is reading The Nixie in the Pond. In this tale a miller is approached by a nixie—a mermaid-like creature. He bargains for wealth in exchange for what is being born at that moment in the mill. He thinks it to be a dog or a cat, unaware that his wife is birthing a boy in the mill as they speak.

The miller cheats the nixie by keeping the lad away from the pond. The youth grows up, becomes a huntsman, and marries. One day, while hunting, he washes blood from his hands at the mill pond and is seized by the nixie.

His wife, discovering his plight, circles the mill pond, calling his name until she collapses and is taken by a dream. In the dream she climbs a mountain until she reaches a hut at the door of which an old woman beckons to her.

Upon waking, the young woman indeed climbs the mountain and meets the old woman who beckoned to her in the dream. The old woman gives the younger a golden comb with the instructions to comb her hair, in the moonlight, by the mill pond, then set the comb down by the water’s edge. When she does these things, the water rises up and takes the comb in exchange for a glimpse of her husband’s face.

Again, the woman dreams of climbing the mountain and, again, she actually does. The old woman gives her a golden flute to play by the mill pond. In exchange, the wife sees more of her husband.

Again the dream and the visit; this time the young woman returns with a golden spinning wheel. For it, the husband is fully revealed and escapes from the nixie. Together they flee, with the water rising quickly behind them. Fearful of drowning, the younger woman cries out to the older. She is transformed into a toad, and he into a frog. In these forms they survive the flood, but are separated. Returning to their human shape, each finds themself in a foreign land.

Lost and no longer together, they each become shepherds in order to make a living. For many years they drive their flocks from pasture to pasture, gradually moving closer together. When they again meet they do not recognize each other, but take comfort in each other’s company.

One evening the man plays a tune on his flute, the same that she played at the edge of the mill pond. She cries and tells her story. The veil falls from their eyes and they are reunited. And, ah yes, they live happily ever after.

“What do you think?” I ask Johannes.

“My fur bristled when she dunked him into the mill pond.”

“As well it might,” I say.

“And given the chance, I’d have scratched her eyes out.”

“You’re not a forgiving cat, Johannes.”

“Cats never forgive.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Johannes curls up and goes to sleep.

Fairy Tale of the Month: January 2015 The Nixie in the Pond – Part Two

Nixie A. L. BowleyA. L. Bowley

The Pond

While contemplating The Nixie in the Pond, I decide to go to the authority on the topic. I do this despite the cold weather and the lateness of the day. In addition, it always feels a bit warmer in winter and cooler in summer in the magic forest than elsewhere. I grab a paper bag of unshelled peanuts and head out.

My destination is fairly deep into the forest, but I know it is safe, even under the moonlight, as long as I stay on the path. At the path’s end is the pond. It’s never frozen over. I am sure that has something to do with her. I sit on my rock at the top of the bank to wait.

Immediately she appears, posing on her rock at the pond’s edge, water flowing from her hair and arms as though she were a trickling fountain.

“Hello, my human.”

“Hello, my nixie.” We have never exchanged names. I doubt it is safe to do so. I shell a peanut and toss it to her. She catches it in her thin, pale-green hand and pops it into her mouth, rolling her eyes in ecstasy.

“I want to ask you about the miller’s son you abducted.”

“Which miller’s son? There are many.”

“The one who eluded you long enough to become a huntsman and to marry.”

“Oh, the one that got away. She did it with help you know.”

“Yes, I know. Why did you show her the huntsman, her husband?”

“I carved the golden comb, flute, and spinning wheel. We nixies make exchanges for the things we want. I knew what she wanted. Yet, I gave her only the sight of him. I did not intend to exchange all of him for the spinning wheel. He belongs to me. My fault was being too patient in collecting my due. He tasted being his own man. Willfully he abandoned me and prompted my anger.”

I can see that anger in her eyes and I throw more peanuts to placate her.

“They were husband and wife,” I reason.

“That is of no concern to me.” She is looking at a peanut kernel between her fingers.

“You nearly destroyed them, and set them each on a long, lonely journey. Was that not a bit harsh?”

The nixie looks at me with deviltry in her eye. “My human, I am immortal. You are mortal. Mortals live with their past in their thoughts. Our past is immense; we cannot keep it in mind. We live only in the present. Therefore, we love, we hate, we anger completely, untampered by what came before.”

As I shell more peanuts, I am thinking there is a bigger question, but I cannot wrap my mind around it.

“I see,” she says, “questions floating about in that human brain of yours. I will give you all the answers to your unasked questions.”

I am stunned by the offering. She sees into my soul. I am as transparent as glass. The enormity of this opportunity seizes me.

“I am interested. You are right, I am full of questions. Your offering of answers trembles my heart. You will do this for me in exchange for …? No, I am not going to ask!” Images of Thalia flicker in my mind. “Here.” I toss my nixie the bag of peanuts and make an escape.

Your thoughts?

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: January 2015 The Nixie in the Pond – Part Three

nixie ‘LITTLE SEAMAID’ Louis RheadLouis Rhead

By the Hearth

Back in my study, after checking in on Thalia sleeping peacefully, I light a fire in the hearth to soothe my shivering. Or am I trembling after my encounter with the nixie? I should know better than to underestimate anything fay, be it a tale or the real thing.

I settle into my comfy chair and let my thoughts wander back to The Nixie in the Pond. If Augustus were here, I think he’d agree that one of the striking features of this tale is the wife’s dreams.

There is something shamanistic about the wife dreaming three times and actualizing the dreams by climbing the mountain to see the old woman who beckoned to her. At this point in the story there are three realms: the nixie’s world under the water, the wife’s world on land, and the old woman’s world atop a mountain accessed by dreams.

When the husband escapes from the nixie, he and his wife are reunited briefly, but their world shifts; they are transformed into separate creatures—a frog and a toad—and swept away, each taken to a different land unknown to them. Now there are two realms, both alien.

Unaccountably, they become (transform into) shepherds, and slowly, unconsciously, drift back toward each other until they once again occupy the same realm. Yet, they do not recognize one another. It is not until they know each other’s story that their reunion takes place both physically and spiritually.

It is tempting to put this tale into Freudian terms. The three realms could be the Id (nixie), ego (wife), and superego (old woman). The two realms could stand for the disintegration of the personality (bi-polar, schizophrenia), and the one realm to represent the reintegration, the healing, of the personality. Many fairy tales fit neatly into the Freudian mold as Bruno Bettelheim famously noted.

With the fire tongs I work the unburnt ends of logs in toward the glowing embers.

I could view the tale in Campbellian terms (I looked that word up; it really does exist.), which is the “hero’s journey.” When the miller bargains with the nixie, I see that as the “call to adventure.” When the huntsman washes the blood from his hands and is snatched by the nixie, he enters the “belly of the whale.” The old woman whom the wife encounters is the “supernatural aid.”  Escaping from the nixie only bring them more hardship, casting them upon the “road of trial.” At the end of the tale the husband and wife are reunited, which is of course the “ultimate boon.

I could invent another scenario about how the story reflects on the trials of a mundane world’s marriage, but I need to stop somewhere.

The tension that pervades this tale is that of the tentativeness of our existence, an element which underlies most good fairy tales. I sympathize with both the husband’s and the wife’s travail. It’s the story’s pattern that leaves me with a sense of satisfaction. Events come full circle. And of course, there is a happy ending.

I notice my shivering has stopped and I drift off to sleep lounging before the fireplace.

Your thoughts?

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: December 2014 The Winter Rose – Part One

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Winter Rose ford_beauty H J Ford

A Ceremony

Christmas Eve in my study has a form that must be followed. Thalia, although of tender years, insists on decorum. Traditions survive because of children.

We start with my reading The Night Before Christmas to her and Teddy, all of us squeezed between the arms of the comfy chair by the hearth. Over the hearth fire is a three-legged cast-iron pot containing mulled cider warming up to be ladled out into cups; the convenience of a microwave is not to be considered.

I recently found out there is a controversy surrounding C. C. Moore’s rendition of the poem, but that sort of thing cannot be mentioned now. The poem—tonight—is sacred.

Following that, it is my choice what to read. Grimm has nothing about Christmas in their canon. A winter-themed story that I have not already read to her and Teddy proves hard to come by, but I manage. I peruse my copy of Jack Zipe’s translation of Grimm, finding what I want in the third story from the last. The Winter Rose.

It is a Beauty and the Beast variant, complete with a traveling merchant, three daughters, and three requests, the youngest asking for a rose. As it is winter, the merchant cannot find a rose. On his return trip home, he comes across a garden, half in winter, half in summer.  The summer half has roses in bloom. The merchant picks a rose and returns to the road. A black beast chases after him, demanding with a threat that his rose be returned.

The merchant ends up keeping the rose, thinking he has outwitted the beast, but the beast forcefully seizes his youngest daughter and take her to his castle.

There the violence ends. The beast dotes on the girl until she becomes fond of him. After a time, she wishes news of her family. The beast shows her a mirror in which she can see what is happening at home. Her father lies on his deathbed.

At this point in the story, we stop to serve ourselves some cider. Thalia provides a doll’s teacup for Teddy’s cider, but I am sure he is going to spill it.

The daughter pleads with the beast to let her visit home and he relents, allowing her a week but no more. During her visit the father dies. In her grief, she overstays her time. Upon return to the beast’s castle, she finds he has disappeared. Winter dominates the garden. There she finds a heap of rotting cabbages, under which she uncovers the beast, who appears to be dead.

She pours a bucket of water over the beast to revive him. Up rises a handsome prince, the garden returns to summer, and they marry.

“I like the garden,” says Thalia, finishing her cider.

I like the garden too.

She toddles off to bed, dragging Teddy behind her. I clean up the cups and the spill.

Has anyone explored the role of gardens and cabbages in fairy tales? That does sound like a pedantic inquiry, even to me. But I am conscious that while popular fiction dwells on the unusual, exotic, and exciting, my genre pulls from the mundane. Popular fiction plucks low-hanging fruit, fairy tales look at the root.

Fairy Tale of the Month: December 2014 The Winter Rose – Part Two

Winter Rose boyle_beauty Eleanor Vere Boyle

Boxing Day

It’s Boxing Day and I visit Augustus, bearing the gift of a quality fountain pen, knowing his abhorrence for other ink devices. The shop isn’t open, but Augustus lives above his store, and his friends know the shop door is unlocked on this day after Christmas. As I enter, I am delighted to see Duckworth already there, the two of them surrounded by a haze of pipe smoke.

As I enter into this fraternal matrix, Duckworth asks me, “What have you been spouting at your granddaughter these days?”

“Spouting, spouting,” I object. “This is Christmas; I am sharing.”

Duckworth’s waves his hand in a gesture of acquiescence.

“The Winter Rose,” I supply.

“Winter Rose,” Augustus echoes. “Ah, yes, The Summer and Winter Garden.”

“Pardon?”

Behind Augustus’ eyes I know his encyclopedic mind is sorting through the data. “The story appeared in the 1812 edition as The Summer and Winter Garden, but was soon replaced by The Singing Springing Lark, the first version appearing in the notes, until it reappeared, as I recall, in the last edition as The Winter Rose.”

Duckworth looks mildly amused. “How many editions were there?”

“Seven,” I say, taking out my pipe.

“For a children’s book, really?”

Augustus smiles. “They initially produced the work for an intellectual, nationalistic Germanic audience. As it gathered a popular following, they kept re-editing it to suit bourgeois tastes.”

I settle into one of the comfy chairs and tamp my pipe. “It seems to me—with The Winter Rose being an example—there are at least as many gardens in fairy tales as spinning wheels.”

Augustus nods. “Part of that is the extensive number of these Beauty and the Beast variants littering the fairy-tale field, the better number of them having a rose plucked from a garden. However, beyond these variants and still staying within Grimms’ collection there is Rapunzel, The Lettuce Donkey, and The Hare’s Bride, in which the garden plays a large role, and the garden is mentioned in passing in such stories as The Fisherman and his Wife and The Pink Flower.”

Duckworth clicked the stem of his pipe on his teeth. “Spinning wheels and gardens are ordinary things. Why are they of any interest?”

“Exactly because they are ordinary.” Augustus relights his pipe. “Fairy tales move from the everyday to the extraordinary, suggesting to us that the common can be imbued with meaning we did not notice before.”

“I am taken by the image of a garden half in summer and half in winter.” I look to Augustus for his thoughts. “I didn’t realize the first incarnation used that image in its title.”

“The tale is not that well known.” Augustus’ eyes are not focused. This is good. He is formulating, not recounting. “But anyone who has read it is struck by the garden in two seasons. What is it? Ying and yang? Folk recognition of duality? The cycle of life and death?”

“All of the above, I’d guess.” Duckworth puffs contentedly. He’s smoking “Elfish Gold” I realize.

“I’ll concur,” I say. “Pre-Freudian listeners were not schooled to analyze the hidden meanings of images. They felt the images, emotionally, as I am sure modern listeners still do—initially—before their brains take over.”

“I like that,” says Duckworth. “You suggest moderns try to think their way out of a fairy tale.”

Augustus looks dubious.

Fairy Tale of the Month: December 2014 The Winter Rose – Part Three

Winter Rose goble beauty Warwick Goble

A Rose

The smell of burning logs on the hearth sets me at ease. The glow from the fireplace illuminates my corner of the study. A Chromebook glows over my fingers, a Christmas present from my daughter. I like that they call it a “book.” That gives me permission to have it in my lap.

My favorite computer game is treasure hunting across the web, searching for tidbits on a topic. My topic tonight is “roses.”

I tip-tap in “roses in fairy tales.” Below the offers to buy roses in fairy tales from various proprietors, Grimm stories with the word “rose” appear, Snow White and Rose Red, Briar Rose, and The Rose. I follow the link to The Rose. It’s an odd little, grim Grimm tale about a youngest son encountering a child in the wood, who gives him a rosebud, saying he will visit again when the rose blooms. The next day the rose blooms, and the mother finds her youngest son dead.

The Winter Rose does not appear in the listings.

Typing in “roses symbolism” brings a wealth of information. Starting with the Wikipedia entry, and linking through the other offerings, a consensus emerges. The rose, as a symbol, pervades Western culture.

The entries like to start with the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and their goddesses’ connection with the rose. I ran across two references to the Roman practice of hanging a rose on the door or from the ceiling of a room where matters of secret are to be discussed. Hence the term “sub rosa,” that is to say, “under the rose.”

The name Rosicrucian has something of the same origin, in that the rose lies at the heart of their symbol, the Rose Cross.

Another fun item: the rose holds the honored position of being the national flower of England. That came about with Henry VII, who introduced the heraldic Tudor Rose, which is composed of the red rose of the House of Lancaster and the white rose of the House of York. Henry ended the fifteenth-century civil war—later branded the War of the Roses—between the two houses by defeating Richard III in battle (A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!) and marrying into the House of York.

Continuing my search, I find a lot about the rose representing the Virgin Mary and other sainted women, the rose garden symbolizing Paradise, and the rosary connection to our flower. When I consider the rose appeared in the Old Testament largely metaphorically and not symbolically, and does not appear in the New Testament (according to my source), I jump to the assumption that the rose in Christianity is a medieval invention.

My “Ah ha!” moment comes when the internet provides a link to Tam Lin. Tam Lin, of course, that quintessential Scottish ballad.

She had not pulled a double rose,

A rose but only two,

Till up then started young Tam Lin,

Saying “Lady, pull thou no more.”

 

“Why pullest thou the rose, Janet,

And why breakest thou the wand?

Or why comest thou to Carterhaugh

Withoutten my command?”

 

I had not seen Tam Lin in the usual list of Beauty and the Beast variants, probably because it is a ballad. The ballad dates to at least as early as 1549. Given its age, I wonder if it might not be the inspiration for that plucking-of-the-rose motif.

I look up at the hearth. For a moment I see a rose in the flames, its solid red petals and verdant green leaves in contrast to the orange and yellow flames. It quickly turns to ash.

Your thoughts?

 

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2014 Earl of Mar’s Daughter – Part One

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Earl mars rackhamArthur Rackham

Birds of a Feather

Duckworth and I have taken advantage of a mild fall day to go rowing on the Isis. There are others on the river, teams of scullers, who slide past us with coordinated strokes, not ceding a look as two fellows sitting side by side in a rowboat, each flounder with an oar.

“What Grimm story are you obsessing over currently?” Duckworth has made an assumption.

“I am not obsessing over Grimm, at present. Thalia rarely lets me read her anything other, but I need to expand my horizons.”

“Therefore . . .” inquires Duckworth.

“I am reading Joseph Jacobs, and obsessing over “Earl of Mar’s Daughter.”

The daughter of the Earl of Mar could often be seen playing in the castle garden, and was given to sitting and listening to the birds. One day she entices a dove to settle on her shoulder. It stays with her and that evening turns into the handsome young prince Florentine. After they marry in secret, he remains her pet dove by day and her husband at night.

As their seven sons are born, the dove whisks them away, taking them to his mother, the queen, who had put the curse of transformation upon him when he would not do as she wished. The Earl of Mar, unconscious of his daughter’s true status, intends to marry her to a nobleman. The daughter declares she wishes not to marry and will be content with the company of her dove. The Earl declares he will wring the bird’s neck.

Escaping, Florentine flies over the sea to return to his mother, leaving his wife to be remarried the next day. His mother, with instructions from her mentor, the Spae Wife of Ostree, aids her son. At his request, she turns him into a goshawk, his seven sons into swans, and her dancers and pipers, who have come to celebrate the prince’s return, into herons.

This entourage returns to the Earl of Mar’s estate in time to settle on a tree along the path from the castle to the church before the wedding party arrives. At the approach of the Earl, the bridegroom, their guests, and—at the end—the melancholy bride, the birds attack. The herons scatter the guests; the goshawk, with a cord in its beak, binds the bridegroom to a tree, while the swans carry off their mother.

Upon the dove/goshawk/prince’s return to his mother’s castle with his wife, the queen removes the spell she put upon her son, and all live “ever after” as you might guess.

Another scull of athletic young men pace by us without any recognition that our rowboat is a fellow craft upon the shared waters.

Duckworth’s brow creases from mild curiosity.

“What’s with the queen cursing her son?”

“Yes, an odd element. I felt there must be a backstory of which the tale told me nothing except by inference. That didn’t turn out to be the case. I checked Jacobs’ source, which was Allingham, whose source was Buchan, and I even checked out Child.”

“Who are they?”

“Oh, sorry, nineteenth-century collectors and editors of English and Scottish ballads.”

“Ballads? I thought we were talking about fairy tales.”

“Yes, well, it turns out Jacobs was fond of taking ballads and turning them into fairy tales, and then taking some liberties with them. The ballad of Earl Mar’s Daughter says nothing of the queen cursing her son, but rather she turned him into a bird so that he could more easily seduce young women. I have no idea where Jacobs got the Spae Wife of Ostree; that’s not there either. I think he made it up to fool me.”

“I am sure he had you in mind,” says Duckworth.

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2014 Earl of Mar’s Daughter – Part Two

Earl mars battenJohn batten

A Marriageable Age

I wonder at my split personality concerning books. I delight in exploring the web, searching for out-of-print titles of folk and fairy tales that I can download to my Kindle for free. Then I go looking for hardbound copies of the same to weigh down my shelves, first editions if I can find them.

Now that I have befriended Melissa, she may facilitate my bad habits. She claims she can find anything with a cover.

“Good morning,” she says, looking up from her laptop. Swiveling in her chair, she runs her finger up and down a stack of books on her desk, pulling one out. “English Fairy Tales, by Joseph Jacobs, first edition. This one’s a little battered, which only means I got it for an excellent price.”

“Wonderful.” I hand her my card. “Still, don’t tell me how much, I don’t want to become self-conscious.”

As she rings up the sale, I peruse my purchase.

“In this work, Melissa, is a tale called Earl Mar’s Daughter that starts with the heroine playing in the garden, but when her dove turns into a young prince, BAM! she’s married. It’s the same pattern as the Frog Prince. There the heroine is playing with a golden ball, then the frog turns into a prince, and BAM! she’s married.

“When I stop to think on it, how is it acceptable that little girls are suddenly wives?”

Melissa smiles at me. “I’ve noticed that too. I propose there is an historical reason and a psychological reason.”

I settle onto a reading stool near the counter to listen.

“Historically, the average life span in earlier centuries was substantial shorter than ours. Everyone knows that, but when you look at it closely, things get a little weird. For example, during the early 1600s in England, life expectancy was about thirty-five. But that was an average, skewed largely because two-thirds of the children died before the age of four. If you got to your early twenties, chances were you would live to be seventy.

“Marriageable age started at puberty from the time of the Romans till the start of the nineteenth century. For girls that is about twelve years, only halfway to the magic age of twenty-something. After a girl’s early twenties she was an old maid. The pressure was for them to marry in their teens.”

I begin to visualize Melissa as a walking encyclopedia. She might be worse than Augustus.

“And psychologically?” I ask.

Melissa’s smile broadens. “Little girls love to fantasize about marriage. They are quick to play ‘house’ at an early age. It’s their way of being like grown-ups, similar to little boys pretending at being soldiers.  I personally object to both role models, but there it is.

“I think the old storytellers were happy to appeal to the little girls in their audience by allowing the heroines of those listeners’ same age to become wives of princes. Always princes, mind you, never tailors or soldiers. That would never do.

“I will put my money on my latter notion as the dominant influence.”

I think she is right, but then I tend to think women are always right. That’s been my experience. And it’s kept me out of a lot of arguments.

Fairy Tale of the Month: November 2014 Earl of Mar’s Daughter – Part Three

Earl mars batten2John Batten

Another Visit

The cold, cloudy November weather returned this morning, but in Miss Cox’s garden the temperature is milder than outside the garden gate. The sun peeks out from behind the clouds, which it did not on my walk over here. Nonetheless, the cozy on the teapot waiting for us on the wrought-iron table is a necessity against the chill. Fortunately, Mr. Jacobsarrives promptly and the tea I pour for us sends steam rising into the air.

Because he compiled English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales I think of him as a quintessential Englishman. In truth, though he spent his adulthood in England, his birth took place in Australia and his death in America. His broad popularity came from his folklorist achievements, but those in learned circles saw him as the Jewish scholar and author.

“Well, my friend,” Joseph starts our conversation, “to what inquiry do I owe this pleasant visit?”

“An inquiry and a request.  My inquiry is about Earl of Mar’s Daughter and the motif of the bird/husband. In my readings I’ve not run into a bird/lover before. The seven sons being turned into seven swans brings to mind Grimm’s The Seven Swans. Stories of husbands who are animals by day and men by night abound. But the bird/husband is new to me.”

“Oh, it is not unique,” Jacobs returns. “Forgetting Leda and the Swan from the ancient Greek and The Destruction of da Derga’s Fort of Celtic legend—which aren’t fairy tales—we still have from France a twelfth-century story/poem by Marie de France called Yonec and a seventeenth-century tale called The Blue Bird by Madame d’Aulnoy, both with humans turned bird/husbands.

The Danes’ Green Knight”  fits our motif. Evald Kristensen collected that one. I believe ’you’ve met Evald.”

“Yes, he’s visited this garden.” I still remember the Akvavit we drank.

“The Italians can boast The Canary Prince collected in the nineteenth century. I suspect some Italian version of this story had an influence on our tale, given that the prince’s name is Florentine and he flies home to his mother over the sea. All the way to Italy perhaps?”

“I am pleased to meet a man who feels free to conjecture as wildly as I do,” I respond.

“What may be unique,” there is doubt in Joseph’s voice, “is the element of the swans abducting their mother, the bride. It’s got a Scottish ring to it. That bit of the story I haven’t found anywhere else, but maybe I haven’t looked hard enough.

“And now, what is your request?” Joseph takes another sip of tea.

“Being a fan of yours, I ask you to sign my copy of your book.” I proffer the volume Melissa found for me.

“With pleasure.” He signs the title page with a flourish, then inspects my book’s condition.

“A bit worn isn’t it?”

“I like to think of a worn book as well used and well loved.” I take it from his hands. “You ought to see my granddaughter’s copy of Grimm.”

We clink our tea cups—the contents quickly going cold—in a salute to battered books everywhere.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2014 Mother Holle -Part One

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mother-holle-1 Walter Crane

Rowing

Duckworth and I are bent upon rowing up the Isis. It’s been a while since we’ve had our fair-weather outing, he being up to Liverpool on business. To break the tedium of our effort, he asks a question.

“What’s your latest fairy-tale inquiry?”

“I’ve not thought of my interest as an ‘inquiry,’ but it’s Mother Holle.”

“Yes, and?”

He knows me. I give him the synopsis.

The less-favored daughter of an old wife jumps into a well after a reel of linen thread she has dropped, knowing the punishment if she does not retrieve it. The maid wakes up in a flowered meadow. In this underworld she wanders until she comes to a bake oven from which loaves of bread call out to her, “Oh, take us out! Take us out! Or we shall burn.” This she does and travels on.

She comes across an apple tree that cries, “Shake me. Shake me. My apples are all ripe!” The girl shakes the tree and piles the apples neatly.

Next she comes to a cottage where there stands an old woman with large teeth. This scares her, but the woman speaks kindly and the maid accepts the offer of being housekeeper. The old woman has a special request that the mattress be shaken until the feathers fly, “Then it will snow on earth, for I am Mother Holle.”

The maid performs her duties faithfully. Although well treated, well fed, and a thousand times better off than before, after a time she becomes homesick.

“I’m pleased that you want to return home,” says Mother Holle, opening a door. As the girl passes through she is showered with gold coins that stick to her and is given back the reel of thread. When the door closes, she finds herself back home.

The old wife sends her other daughter to throw her reel of thread down the well and follow it. In the underworld, she does not help the bread or the tree when they speak to her. She works well for Mother Holle for only a day, then slacks off.  Mother Holle dismisses the lazy girl, who returns covered in pitch after passing through the magic door. She wears the pitch for the rest of her life.

“Well,” says Duckworth, “I see why you like it.”

“Your reasoning?” I inquire.

“First, there is Mother Holle. I remember my great-grandmother saying, ‘Mother Holle is making her bed,’ every time it started to snow. I thought her addled, and she was, but now I realize that remark must have come from somewhere.

“Then there is the good sister/bad sister. I think I’ve heard before.”

“Certainly you have,” I say.

“And of course the world at the bottom of the well. That is right up your alley.”

I nod in agreement. “Overall, there is nothing really remarkable about the tale. The good sister/bad sister is a well-worn motif. The well is more common to these stories than the spinning wheel. Mother Holle is, I suspect, a watered-down deity. It’s all three crammed into one short story that entertains me.”

“Watered-down deity,” Duckworth chortles. “In this context that’s almost a pun,” and looks at me suspiciously.

“Oh dear, no. I didn’t mean it that way.”

We row on in silence.

Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2014 Mother Holle – Part Two

Mother Holle 5Hermann Vogel

The Bookshop

Thalia turns the doorknob of Serious Books. Melissa left a message on the answering machine telling me that my copy of Hunt’s translation of Grimm had come in.

“Melissa, this is my granddaughter, Thalia.”

I see them regard each other as they lightly touch hands. It strikes me they are of the same ilk, if decades apart.

“Pleased,” says Melissa.

“Thalia, find yourself a book.” I gesture toward the shelves. She wanders off with a mission.

Melissa hands me Hunt’s book. Before I can turn to the story that the Grimms numbered 24, she asks “What is you latest inquiry?”

Am I that transparent? I think, but say, “Mother Holle.”

“I don’t recall that one, although my father read all of Grimm to me.”

“It has to do with a beautiful sister and an ugly sister, and falling into a well.”

“The two-sisters thing I recognize and I love worlds at the bottom of wells.”

“What is your take on such matters?” I ask, looking around to see what has become of Thalia.

“I…,” she considers her words, “personalize the stories, more than any other literature; I put myself into a fairy tale. For me, the two sisters are two aspects of myself, my better half and my selfish half.”

“Is that the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, whispering in your ears?”

“Not exactly. The angel and devil speak of good and evil, giving it a religious cast. My thoughts don’t go there, though I see why others might. My struggles belong to me. I’m self-contained. I fight with myself on my terms, with no interference of another’s theology.

“For me, these sisters are cautionary voices, reminding me that my selfish side will ultimately bring me to harm.”

I glance around once again, trying to spot Thalia.

Melissa smiles. “She’s in the third aisle, sitting on the floor.”

“You can see her?”

“No, but I sense she is there.”

I walk by the aisles to check. The woman is psychic. Thalia sits cross-legged perusing a hardbound.

Returning to the counter, I find Melissa’s pretty brows knit in contemplation.

“Wells,” she says. “Every well in every story is the same well for me. It’s not a wishing well, but the well that I remember from an uncle’s farm.  It had a stone rim with the water near to the surface, and a pivot boom that lowered a bucket into it. I doubt it had much depth, but my mother would not let me go near it, sure that I would drown. This meant, to me, it was bottomless. The allure of danger and mystery beckoned to me then and in my memory still does.”

“Mine is a treacle well,” I muse.

Melissa’s green eyes glow. “How much of our attraction to fairy tales is about our childhood fears and fascinations? Unresolved moments we experienced without the vocabulary to express ourselves? Fairy tales have a language that pulls at me rather than explains to me, evoking lost thoughts from a time past.”

Thalia comes to the counter, gently but firmly placing her purchase on the glass casing.

“Alice in Wonderland,” Melissa intones. “I knew you’d find that book.”

Your thoughts?

 Fairy Tale of the Month: September 2014 Mother Holle – Part Three

Mother Holle Adolf Münzer Adolf Münzer

Slipping Away

An unanticipated boon in owning a copy of Margaret Hunt’s translation of Children’s and Household Tales is that it has attracted our resident fairy. I thought the little creature had bonded with Thalia’s edition of Grimm, but apparently as long as the book is old the fairy will read it.

I’d left the tome open to Mother Holle on the table and when I looked up from my terminal there she hovered over the book, her gossamer wings and floating black hair in a static-charged display. I know better than to try to talk to her. I turn my attention back to my terminal.

The internet tells me Mother Holle or Hulda appears in Norse mythology as Hel, queen of the underworld and is likely of pre-Indo-European Neolithic origins. In early Germanic folklore Holle, a Sky Goddess, ruled the weather: sunshine, snow, and rain. The most tantalizing association is with Perchta, who dwells at the bottom of a well and taught man the craft of making linen from flax. She is also known as the Dark Grandmother, to whom go children who die in infancy.

No one less than Jacob Grimm, in his more scholastic works, wrote about Perchta/Hulda in her two forms, Schönperchten (the beautiful) and Schiachperchten (the ugly). I must suspect the forms are reflected in the beautiful sister and the ugly sister of the Mother Hollestory.

Just as interesting, I’ve run across a reference to Perchta wandering the countryside between Christmas and Epiphany, entering into homes, knowing which children had been good and which had not. The good received the gift of a sliver coin and the others had their bellies slit open, their stomachs and guts removed, to be replaced with straw and pebbles. Oh, for a simple lump of coal!

When trying to grasp the stories of the gods and goddesses of any mythology as they have come down to us, we cannot think of them as consistent, thought-out works of literature. In my youth, I pored over the mythologies of the Greeks, Romans, Norse, and Celts trying to understand their message. The more I read, the less sense they made to me. I wanted their storylines to conform to a story arc, a familiar device, on a par with modern novels. The myths resisted.

Now that I am old, baffled, and confused, the myths are more amenable to me. My model is to see myths (legends and fairy tales as well) as shards of glass from a broken mirror reflecting their images upon each other in a confusion of light and wisdom, over which history has cast the pall of Christianity, dimming their brilliance, giving us shadowy figures such as Mother Holle, once a sky goddess, now thrown to the bottom of a well.

I look up from my terminal. The fairy is gone. I can almost doubt my senses that she was ever there, like details of a dream slipping away upon waking. My fairy, the gods, and goddesses are so ephemeral.

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2014 The Two Brothers – Part One

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Two Brothers Kay Neilsen Kay Nielsen

A Tale of Tails

“Here is a story you might enjoy,” I address Johannes. He sits at “his” spot on the window seat, decidedly not looking at me.  I encourage a response. “It has lots of talking animals.”

“So?”

Silence follows. His tail twitches. “Any cats?”

“Ahhh—a lion.”

“A close relative, evolutionary-wise. I’ll listen.”

I read to him Grimms’ TheTwo Brothers.

There are two brothers, one rich and one poor. The poor brother captures a golden bird, which the rich brother buys from him, knowing its magical property of granting gold coins. However, it is the poor brother’s twin sons who accidently acquire the gift. Jealous, the rich brother advises the poor brother that his sons are in league with the devil and must be driven out.

Abandoned, the youths are taken in by a huntsman, who apprentices them in his trade. Eventually, as huntsmen, they venture into the world.

When they are about to shoot a hare, the creature pleads for it life promising them two of its offspring. The two bunnies are so cute, the huntsmen do not have the heart to kill them. The same thing happens with a fox, a wolf, a bear, and a lion.

Johannes purrs with satisfaction at the mention of the lion.

The brothers part ways, leaving a knife, given to them by the master huntsman, stuck into a tree, knowing that if one side or the other rusts, then that brother is in danger.

The story follows one of them and his half of the animal entourage. They come to a kingdom ravaged by a dragon that yearly demands a virgin as sacrifice. The last virgin left is the king’s own daughter.

Johannes grins. “I bet they marry young in that town.”

I ignore him.

On the hill where the princess is to be given over to the dragon, stands a church. In the church the huntsman finds three goblets of wine, and written instructions on where to find and use the sword to defeat the dragon. When the princess arrives, he secures her in the church. He and his animal companions face and defeat the seven-headed dragon. The huntsman cuts out the tongues and wraps them in the kerchief of the princess. Exhausted by battle, they all fall asleep.

A marshal, left behind to observe the proceedings, sneaks up, cuts off the huntsman’s head, terrorizes and carries off the princess, then declares to the king that he defeated the dragon.

The resourceful animals restore their master with a magic plant. Knowing nothing of the marshal, the huntsman assumes the princess betrayed him, and it is some time before he learns of the marshal’s treachery.

On the day of the wedding between the princess and the marshal, the huntsman returns to make his claim. The marshal has the seven dragon heads, but the huntsman has their tongues and the princess’s kerchief.

After the marriage, he is out hunting, when he is waylaid by a witch and turned into stone. His twin brother chances to check the knife and finds one side is rusted. He follows his brother’s path and is mistaken for him when he gets to the kingdom. He keeps the secret, hoping it will help in his search. That evening, retiring to bed with his brother’s wife, he lays his sword between them.

The next day he goes hunting and comes across the witch, but is not fooled by her. He forces her to restore his brother. However, the revived brother, upon hearing the other brother spent a night with his wife, without a thought, cuts off his head. Regretting his action, he allows the animals to heal the wounds with the same magical plant used on him.

Upon his returning to the castle that evening, his wife asks him why he laid a sword between them the night before. The husband now truly understands the faithfulness of his brother.

“Well, what do you think of that?” I ask.

Johannes has nodded off. Well, it is a long tale.

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2014 The Two Brothers – Part Two

Gemini

Why Two?

I lounge in the comfort of Augustus’ testing room, a space replete with properly-made comfy chairs. Augustus’ newest blend is made of two different types of Cavendish, a mixture he calls Gemini.

“You read The Two Brothers you say.” Augustus tamps his pipe and relights. “What did Thalia think of it?”

“Actually, I read it to her cat.”

Augustus smiles at my silliness. “And what did her cat think of it?”

“He fell asleep.”

“His loss. That story is a personal favorite.” Augustus settles into his overstuffed chair. “There is an oddity about it that I can’t quite put my finger on.”

“Something about the two brothers theme?” I suggest.

“Exactly. There are multiple sets of brothers: the rich brother and the poor brother, the twin brothers, then the animal sibling pairs of rabbits, foxes, wolves, bears and lions. That’s seven sets of brothers, if you’ll accept my assumption that the animals are all males. The story does not tell us that, but terms like lioness or vixen are not used.

“Which,” he contemplates, “makes the only females in the story a princess and a witch. Women are not fairly represented in this tale, but it is interesting that one is symbolic of good and the other of evil.”

Both our pipes have gone out, and the conversation ceases as we re-tamp. Augustus picks up his thread of thought as we settle in again.

“This is a story for and about men. ‘Brothers’—especially in its broader sense—is a term that resonates with us. Somehow, the incompatible notions of ‘camaraderie’ and ‘independence’ merge. The two brothers are devoted to each other, and yet part ways to pursue independent lives, leaving the knife stuck in the tree trunk to remain as their unbroken connection.

“The sibling animals are something of a masculine comic relief. After the battle with the seven-headed dragon, the huntsman needs to rest, and instructs the lion to stand guard. The lion, having done his part in the battle, also takes a nap, telling the bear to wake him up if something happens. The onus is passed from predator to predator to fall upon the rabbit, who is at the bottom of the food chain.

“When the marshal cuts off the huntsman’s head, the blame passes, in the same manner, onto the trembling shoulders of the rabbit. If that is not male thinking, then I don’t know my own sex.”

I chuckle, but look at my pipe, which has gone out again.

“Then,” pontificates Augustus, “there is the twin thing. Mark Twain identified our twin fascination, and used it in The Prince and the Pauper, as well as in Pudd’nhead Wilson.

“As a plot device, it is necessary in this fairy tale that the brothers are identical, but their identicalness is taken a step farther by their having the same set of animal companions. I am not sure what to make of that.”

“Did you look at the Grimms’ notes on TheTwo Brothers?” I ask.

“Yes, they are fairly extensive. What caught my attention is the number of variants they cite in which the twins have unusual births, sometime immaculate.  Hmmm. My pipe’s gone out too. I must have used too much rum extract as casing.”

That’s what I like about this blend! I think to myself.

“I suspect,” says Augustus, cleaning out his pipe, “the Grimms were fond of this tale too. They were, after all, brothers.”

Your thoughts?

Fairy Tale of the Month: August 2014 The Two Brothers – Part Three

Sigmunds Schwert (1889) by Johannes GehrtsSigmunds Schwert by Johannes Gehrts

Something Borrowed

The mantel clock in my study strikes twelve as I light my second bowl of Gemini. Beside me is a large box of wooden matches, and in my lap is Johannes, a surprising turn of fortune. I must allow myself to feel honored.

My mind wanders to the sky as I look out the bay windows, searching for the Gemini constellation, its two primary stars being Castor and Pollux, the twin huntsmen of Greek mythology.

Zeus put them into the constellation when Castor died and Pollux wished to share his own immortality with his mortal twin. Relationships in Greek mythology can get confusing. The ancient sources are not consistent about the births of these twins. Some have them both as mortal born, others as both divine. In the most popular version Castor is the son of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, and Leda, who is seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan, giving birth to Pollux at the same time as her mortal son.  I ran across a reference to a runaway version in which the twins are born from eggs along with their twin sisters, Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Many of the fairy-tale storylines come out of Greek mythology. Cupid and Psyche have been reworked and reformulated any number of times, Beauty and the Beast, and A Sprig of Rosemary, being two examples that jump to my mind.

But storytellers have been democratic in their theft. Any mythology is fair game.  In theVölsunga saga, the hero Sigurðr falls in love with the shieldmaiden Brynhildr, but ends up marrying Gudrun, daughter of the sorceress Grimhild. Grimhild’s son, Gunnar, wishes to marry Brynhild, but cannot penetrate the ring of fire that surrounds her castle. It is Sigurðr, in the form of Gunnar, who accomplishes the task to claim Brynhildr for Gunnar. Sigurðr spends three nights in the castle with Brynhildr, but lays his sword between them. Sigurðr soon returns to his true form, and Brynhildr marries Gunnar.

It doesn’t turn out well when Brynhildr finds out the truth. In a love/hate rage, she tells Gunnar that Sigurðr did sleep with her. Gunnar causes Sigurðr’s death and Brynhildr throws herself on the hero’s funeral pyre.

Theft is not the only way to cobble together a story. Another method is intrusion, of which Christian thought is expert. The Grimms were Calvinists, and Wilhelm, in his revisions, would quickly replace pagan practices with Christian-themed devices. Angels appeared in later editions of the Grimm stories where mystical wisemen and wisewomen previously had a place.

However, in The Two Brothers, I sense the Christian intrusion comes from a more Catholic source. When the huntsman goes to the dragon’s mountain to save the princess, what should be there but a church. I know in my soul, some religious storyteller put that church on the dragon’s mountain.

There are three goblets on the altar, presumably filled with wine, and a note that says whoever drinks from the goblets will be the strongest man on earth, able to wield the sword buried under the threshold of the church.

Wilhelm, romantic that he was, intruded with divine beings. Here are the accouterments of ceremony. The goblets on the altar suggest the Communion wine, but three of them in connection with a sword? I suspect Catholic trappings are covering a pagan ritual.

Frankly, if I were to quaff three goblets of wine, I’d be feeling pretty invincible myself. I am thinking about some wine, but I have this cat in my lap. I would need to disturb Johannes to get a glass. Instead, I will content myself with tamping and relighting my pipe.

Your thoughts?