Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

Briar Rose - or 'Time Be Stopped'

2012-02-03T00:27:00.000-08:00

Schooldays. I’m about eight years old, I have my brown school reader in my hand, and I’m about to knock on the headmistress’s door. Everyone in the school has to go and read to her once a week - a solemn ceremony and not a bad one either: there’s something special about leaving the classroom while lessons are happening and making this solo pilgrimage across the quiet school hall. The door swings open and I see her room drenched in sunlight, her window opening on to a bright rose garden beyond, a garden perhaps for the teachers only, as I don’t remember ever setting foot there - a secret garden. I stand beside her desk and read aloud, and the story is Briar Rose. And somehow the feeling of her office - this sunlit, secluded, shut-away space - weaves into the story I’m reading, so that while the tall hedge of briars springs up around the castle, and everyone, even the doves on the roof and the flies on the wall, drop into their century of sleep, I feel as though it’s all happening right now, and the sleepy afternoon enfolds the school for a perfect enchanted moment, now and forever.

No one in the last Fairytale Reflections series chose Briar Rose - the Sleeping Beauty - as one of their favourites. It’s a tale which has become almost notorious as presenting an image of female passivity, the worst possible role model for a child to grow up with: a heroine who does nothing, initiates nothing, whose claim to fame is to sleep for a hundred years and be woken by the kiss of a prince she hasn’t even chosen (and that’s the mildest version): an object rather than a subject. It’s one of the most difficult fairystories to retell and still stick to the original. Disney fudged the issue of the hundred years sleep by simply doing away with it altogether and introducing a fire-breathing dragon instead. Robin McKinley’s wonderful ‘Spindle’s End’ also does away with the passive heroine, and achieves its success by departing from the fairytale in many ways. Her themes are friendship and self-discovery, and her heroine Rosie escapes the enspelled sleep which envelops the castle, and rides to defeat the sorceress who has caused it. Only Sheri S Tepper’s ‘Beauty’ (lent to me by Katherine Roberts - thankyou Kath!) really engages with the hundred-years sleep and makes a magnificent and intriguing mystery out of it.

But for me, the point of the story isn’t the heroine, whether you call her Briar Rose or Aurora or Rosie, it’s about the mythos - the idea of time stopping in its tracks for a hundred years. Not all stories are about people, even if they include people; not all stories are hero/heroine-centered. They can be about ideas, feelings, wonders - the white blink of lightning as the sky cracks and the eye of God looks through. For me this story is about the shiver you feel - which any child feels - when the storyteller says:

“The horses in the stable, the doves on the roof, the dogs in the kennel and the flies on the wall, all fell fast asleep. Even the fire ceased to burn. And a hedge of thorns sprang up around the palace and grew higher and higher, so that it was lost to sight.”

When you’re a child, time seems endless anyway. So long to wait till your birthday! So long to wait till Christmas! The holidays stretch for ever, and even a single day at school, six short hours or so, can be an eternity of happiness or unhappiness or boredom. And a hundred of anything is an enormous number. “What would you do if you had a hundred pounds?” we used to ask each other as children. To sleep for a hundred years! The story is a meditation on Time.

“Footfalls echo in the memory,” (says T S Eliot)

“Down the passage which we did not take,

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose garden.”

Four Quartets is a poem full of the imagery of houses which rise and fall and vanish, of rose gardens and fallen petals and lost children. As it, too, is a profound meditation upon Time, am I wrong to suspect that the story of Briar Rose, the Sleeping Beauty, was somewhere in the poet’s mind as he wrote?

“Ash on an old man’s sleeve

Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

Dust in the air suspended

Marks the place where a story ended.

Dust inbreathed was a house-

The wall, the wainscot and the mouse.”

What is Time? the poem asks. A cycle of recurring seasons? A river which sweeps us away? A train on a set of linear tracks, the present moment drumming ever onwards, leaving everything we have known unreachably behind? Or can Time somehow curl around us like an enclosed secret garden in which the essence of everything we’ve loved is still real, compressed like a bowl of rose leaves, immanent, half glimpsed?

In T.F. Powys’s little-known masterpiece ‘Mr Weston’s Good Wine’, God - in the shape of wine-salesman Mr Weston, accompanied by his assistant Michael, arrives at the village of Folly Down one bleak November day in a small Ford van. Mr Weston is here to offer the villagers his choice of wines, from the light wine of love to the dark wine of death. It’s a marvellous, tender story, both comic and sad: but the bit that remains in my memory is this passage near the middle of the book, when something very odd happens in Angel Inn, the village pub:

…Mr Thomas Bunce happened to look at the grandfather clock. He did so because the unnatural silence that came over the company - an angel is said to be walking near when such a silence occurs - had disclosed the astonishing fact that the clock was not ticking.

Mr Bunce was sure that the clock was wound. He knew that the heavy pendulum was in proper order, though no one nodded to it now; and yet the clock had stopped.

…No policeman, supposing that one of them had happened to call to see that the right and lawful hours were kept at Folly Down inn, could ever have found fault with that timepiece. The clock was truthful; it was even more honourable than that; it was always two minutes in advance of its prouder relation, that was set high above mankind, in the Shelton church tower.

Mr Bunce stared hard at the clock. He wished to be sure.
All was silent again.

“Time be stopped,” exclaimed Mr Bunce excitedly.
“And eternity have begun,” said Mr Grunter.

Of course the story of Briar Rose continues, with the prince’s arrival and the blossoming of the thorns into roses, and the kiss and the awakening, because time does move and so must narratives. But I don’t think that’s what the story is about. I’m sure the reason the story (otherwise so slight) has remained in existence for so long, is all to do with that hiatus in the middle, in which nothing happens except one long moment. Perhaps it celebrates the way life happens in the gaps between the lines, the space between the words, the silence in the imaginary rose garden. Perhaps it moves us in an almost Taoist sense to look, really look at the flies on the wall, the doves on the roof, the arrested gesture of the cook’s hand as she slaps the serving boy - and say to ourselves,

“This - this is life.”

Picture credits: Arthur Rackham, Sleeping Beauty. All the others are by Errol le Cain from 'Thorn Rose'

Folklore Snippets - “Light High, Light Low.”

2012-01-31T00:43:00.000-08:00

This is the first of an occasional series of 'Folklore Snippets' - little tales which pleased me and I hope will please you. In honour of the Nis, the good-hearted but hot-tempered and unpredictable little house spirit in my 'troll trilogy' West of the Moon, here is a traditional Danish tale about one.

"Light High, Light Low"

From "Scandinavian Folklore" ed. William Craigie 1896

In Tylstrup lies a farm which has a nisse on it. Two ploughmen served there, one of whom was very fond of the nisse, while the other found his greatest delight in annoying him. Once he took away his porridge from him. “You’ll pay for that,” said the nisse, and when the man woke next morning he found that the nisse had placed a harrow over the ridge of the barn, and then laid him upon the sharp spikes.

“You’ll pay for that yet,” thought the man. Some time passed and the other man asked the nisse to sew something for him. It was a bright moonlit night, so the nisse took needle and thread, seated himself on top of the haystack and began to sew. Just as he was hard at work, there came a shadow over the moon, at which the little fellow became impatient and cried. ‘Light! Light high!” The man who teased him, however, was standing down below with a flail in his hand, and when he heard the shout he brought this over the nisse’s legs. Nisse thought it was Our Lord who had thus punished him for his imperious shout, and said very humbly, “Light high, light low, light just as you please, Lord!”

Picture credit: wikipedia: A tomte/nisse by Carta Marina,1539

Baba Yaga - Wild Witch of the Writing Forest

2012-01-27T01:12:00.000-08:00

by Lucy Coats

Baba Yaga by mythic artist Rima Staines

The Bear Moon is risen, and here comes the Baba Yaga in her iron mortar, rowing and sweeping, rowing and sweeping, till all that is left behind her is cloud wrack and the crushed black velvet of a midnight sky.

That’s how my own Baba Yaga story will start—the one I plan to write some winter when the snow starts to fall.

I can no longer remember where my fascination with Baba Yaga began. It may have been Arthur Ransome and Old Peter’s Russian Tales who introduced me to her, but I think not. Having a set of Russian cousins probably meant that somewhere, somehow, I was first told of her via whispered under-bedclothes tales of the witch with iron teeth, who lived in a house with chicken legs behind a bonefence of bright-lit human skulls. What a fabulous story! I was immediately hooked for life.

For me, she is the ultimate über-witch; the one all other fairytales imitate and fail to surpass. She has, variously, black iron teeth, a skeleton-leg, a sharp, beaky nose with excellent smelling skills, poor eyesight, no talent whatsoever for fine cooking, warts (and what is a witch without warts?), wheezy breath à la Darth Vader and a temperament which swings in a moment from mildly benevolent to seriously inimical. Her mode of travel is to climb into a large iron mortar, and row herself about the sky with a pestle, sweeping out her tracks with a silver birch besom as she goes—so much cooler than a mere broomstick in my opinion.

(Here she is coming through the forest in a painting by Ivan Bilibin.)

Baba Yaga was not always a fairytale figure for children, I think. Her roots go right back to that most ancient of world mythological figures, the triple-aspected Great Goddess in her function as Crone. Some folklorists deny this, but for me it makes perfect sense. Having studied shamanism and matriarchal religions for many years, I see in Baba Yaga all the key elements which make up the dark side of the goddess-as-wisewoman as well as weaving links between her and the Moirae/Parcae, the Morrigan, and the Norns. I think it is telling that Baba Yaga is never the star in her own stories, but always appears in a major supporting rôle, a sort of dea ex machina whose actions or advice determine the future course of the hero or heroine’s life. To brave young men who know how to enter her dancing chicken-leg hut she usually (but not always) shows her more benevolent side, giving advice and shelter; but to equally brave young women she is invariably less kind, making them do many impossible tasks before she will help them.

The Baba Yaga fairytale-myth is endlessly changing (I am reliably informed that she has about 26 different names), depending on which area the story comes from—and there are many many versions of it, some of which feature Baba Yaga only in passing. Baba is an Indo-European word meaning, loosely, old woman, but it can also be linked to demons and weather conditions (in Poland, when there is rain and sun together, the children chant: ‘Rain is falling, sun is shining, Baba Yaga’s butter’s churning’). Yaga may come from an old Slavonic stem meaning evil, sickness or nightmare. I also find it fascinating when fairytale-myth and reality collide—it is entirely possible that the idea of Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken legs came from the Finnish nomadic-hunter tradition of cutting down two trees close together to a height of about ten feet, and building a hut on top to prevent access to food and stores by wild animals. The exposed roots of the dead trees would have looked like chicken feet.

Vassilisa arrives at Baba Yaga's hut - by Ivan Bilibin

The best-known Baba Yaga tale (and my own favourite) involves Vassilisa the Fair, and is a type of Cinderella story crossed with the classic maiden-on-a-quest fairytale. Re-reading it for this piece together with Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ classic psycho-commentary from Women Who Run With The Wolves reminded me what a revelation this kind of delving into the deeper meanings of fairytale was to me when I first came across it. As a child I knew the tale as an exciting adventure with all the elements I liked—a bit of sadness, a brave heroine (I always preferred heroines), baddies at home, a scary witch and a quest against all odds with a satisfyingly bloody ending. To discover, when I was older, that it is a story about the importance of listening to one’s intuition, about facing the dark side of one’s character, about growing up into a woman’s power, made me look anew at all fairytales and reinforced their importance for me, not just as fireside tales, but as key signposts for life itself.

In the case of Vassilisa, well, who would not wish to have a little doll in the pocket to take advice from? For me, intuition (the doll), is a big part of my writing armoury. The ‘doll place’ is where I go when I get stuck. “Sleep now, all will be well,” says the doll, when Baba Yaga gives Vassilisa the impossible task of sorting a million poppy seeds from a pile of dirt. Sometimes, when I get bogged down in a story, that’s just what it feels like—impossible to go on, impossible to sort out. But, as I have written elsewhere, I find that handing over to the intuition doll and going to sleep while she does the hard work is a marvellous solver of story problems.

Then there’s the wicked stepmother and sisters. They are the voices in my head—the ones that tell me I’m useless and not good enough; that I can’t do it, and I never will; that I should just give up now because really, who am I to dare...? For me, they are the true demons, not Baba Yaga at all. She’s the one who teaches hard but important lessons and gives the essential gift of the fire of confidence. She may make me work damned hard for it, and challenge me at every turn—but if I can use my brain, if I can listen to the doll, if I can complete Baba Yaga’s tasks, carry her reward of a fiery skull through the dark forest and burn up the sneering demons, then I will have a story to tell at the end of it all—and what a hell of a story it will be!

Lucy Coats has written over 25 titles for children, the latest of which are the 12 books of her Greek Beasts and Heroes series, published by Orion. She blogs on myth, folklore and all aspects of writing at Scribble City Central.

Besides the Greek Beasts, Lucy is the author of the splendidly titled ‘Hootcat Hill’, a vigorous fantasy for older children, set in an ever-so-slightly different version of modern Britain where children learn ‘Frankish’ at school instead of French, and look forward to university at Oxenfoord rather than Oxford. Here, in a little village called Wyrmesbury, young Linnet Perry discovers her true identity as the Maiden, one of the seven Guardians whose duty it is to quell the waking of the dreadful worldwyrm.

Childhood reading

2012-01-23T09:57:00.000-08:00

Like the smell of woodsmoke – which always takes me back to a narrow sun-striped Majorcan street lined with tall houses, silent in the afternoon heat, on a long-ago holiday when I was eight years old – certain books take me back to the particular place and time when I first read them.

“The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, for example. Here I am, about nine years old, curled up in a big bristly armchair which prickles my bare legs, reading and reading. I’m alone in the house because my younger brother’s in hospital with peritonitis and my parents are visiting him. (He swallowed a small cocktail sausage at a children’s party, and amazingly the cocktail stick went down too. He’ll come out of hospital in a week or so with a three inch scar – this was before the days of keyhole surgery.) Unaware of the danger he’s in, I am mildly bemused by the fuss and bother I sense in the house. My parents have bought me the ‘Dawn Treader’ paperback, the last of the Narnia books I haven’t read – I came to them out of sequence – to keep me quiet and console me for being left alone while they go visiting the hospital. Anyway, their ruse is working. I’m away on those brilliant seas, looking down through clear water at the purple-and-ivory-skinned sea people, shivering with pleasurable terror at the nightmarish island where dreams come true (“Dreams, do you understand? Not daydreams: dreams!”), tiptoeing with Lucy along the sunlit empty corridors of the magician’s house.

We had a lot of books at home and I was allowed to read more or less whatever I liked. I loved Shakespeare, I loved “Jane Eyre” (Oh, poor Jane, locked in the Red Room by horrid Mrs Reed!) Now I’m ten years old, I’ve just finished “Oliver Twist”, and I’m cowering in bed with the lights out, terrified by Bill Sykes’ vision of dead Nancy’s eyes. I expect to see them, eyes floating in the darkness, coming in from the landing through my half-open door, hovering over my pillow.

“The Hobbit”. I’m in bed with a sore throat: my mother works on the principle that if you’re too sick to go to school, you’re too sick to come downstairs. But I don’t mind: I can sit in bed reading library books, sucking blackcurrant throat pastilles and waiting for my mother to bring me dinner on a tray. I’m not reading “The Hobbit” because I like it; I’m reading it because I’ve run out of Enid Blytons, and I’m a child who will read the labels on sauce bottles if there’s nothing better to hand. I’ve just got to the chapter called ‘Riddles in the Dark’, where Bilbo the hobbit meets Gollum. And my dinner arrives: a plate of mutton, greens, mashed potato and a dark lake of gravy. I picture Gollum, pale as mashed potato, splashing in his dark underground lake. I am put off both my food and the book, and I’ve never really got around to liking “The Hobbit” since.

“The Tale of Mr Tod”. This takes me back a lot further. I’m six years old, sitting on a hard-wearing blue hall carpet, leaning against a polished cedarwood chest which my father brought back from Burma before I was born. Sunlight slants across the hall. My two dolls, the one with curly fair hair, the one with long brown hair, and my panda bear are lined up on the floor beside me. I am teaching school, and reading aloud to them this most exciting story, full of natural violence and terror. The bones outside the fox’s den. The baby rabbits, alive in the oven. The tension as Peter and Benjamin dig their way under the floor. The tremendous fight between Mr Tod and Tommy Brock the tramp-like badger who has gone to sleep in Mr Tod’s own bed – with his boots on! The Heath Robinson device by which Mr Tod tries to scare Mr Brock by dropping a flatiron on him – and then thinks he has killed him stone dead. The pictures; above all, the pictures: rusty reds and bracken browns and fern greens! I don’t know if my dolls are impressed, but I am thrilled. I relish the strength and darkness of the story.

“Jill’s Gymkhana” by Ruby Ferguson. (Remember those Green Knight books? And there were age-banded Red Knight and Black Knight books too, I seem to recall.) I’m twelve years old, pony mad, but also - unfortunately - terrified of riding. I go once a fortnight to a riding stables near Gloucester, and am white and sick with fear beforehand. Afterwards though, I come back home, curl up on my bed and read blissfully about girls who own their own ponies, who arrange shows and gymkhanas, who win rosettes…

Many of my most vivid experiences of reading are from childhood. And for me, that's what reading's all about: rapture, terror, immersion in another world. I'd love to think my own stories may sometimes lend a child the same quality of experience.

The Fisherman and His Wife

2012-01-20T00:37:00.000-08:00

by Mary Hoffman

I’m a great believer in the idea that everyone has their own personal myth or, if you like, fairy tale. It doesn’t mean it’s your favourite or that you particularly admire it. It’s more the case that it speaks to you, possibly uncomfortably, about an aspect of your own character or personality, so that you think perhaps the originator of the tale knows you, or someone very like you.

'The Fisherman and his Wife' Arthur Rackham

For me this story is The Fisherman and his Wife. I have re-told it myself, in The Macmillan Treasury of Nursery Stories, which I was invited to write for the new millennium. (This was a huge treat in itself, let alone getting a chance to re-tell my “signature tale”). I went back to the original in the Brothers Grimm but then, as with all the stories, allowed myself to expand and embroider it a bit.

This is the basic story:
A childless couple – a fisherman and his wife – were so poor they lived in a pigsty. Every day the man would try with his rod and line to catch a fish in the sea; if he succeeded, they had a fish supper, if not, they went to bed hungry.

From 'The Mammoth Book of Wonders'

One day he caught a flounder who begged to be thrown back, because he was a prince under an enchantment. In my version, the fisherman says, “I wouldn’t eat anything that talked anyway.” He goes home fishless but tells his wife about the adventure. She upbraids him for asking nothing in return for sparing the enchanted prince’s life. “Oh of course we have everything we could wish for, living in a pigsty!” she rants and sends him down to the seashore to ask for a cottage.

The magic flounder grants her wish and the fisherman’s wife is contented for a while but soon wants a castle and gets that too. There is a progression from real estate to personal glory for the wife, who becomes in turn King, Emperor and Pope. Every time the fisherman has to ask the flounder for something grander, he feels more wretched and the sea becomes stormier and of a more livid hue.

Finally, the wife demands control over the rising and setting of the sun and moon – to be, in fact, God.

‘There was a huge clap of thunder and then the storm stilled and the sea was like clear glass.

“Go back,” said the flounder, “and you will find her in the pigsty, as before.”

And there in the pigsty the fisherman and his wife are living to this day.’

'The Fisherman calls the Flounder' Arthur Rackham

So, ambition, greed and an inability to know when to stop on the part of the wife and a certain supine biddability on the part of the husband. How could this be my personal motif story?

It’s about living in the moment, appreciating what you’ve got and not wishing your life away. All of us who write are hungry for a certain amount of fame and fortune. We want people to buy and read our books in large numbers; we’d be happy to be offered film deals; if people recognised our names and said “I LOVE your books – I have all of them!”, we could cope.

It’s not really about material goods and power (although I, for one, would not turn down a villa in Tuscany); it’s more about validation, I think. We pour our creativity and imagination into creating new worlds for readers to inhabit. If we are lucky, a publisher likes what we do well enough to launch it on the world in the form of a printed book.

And what happens after that is subject to vagaries of the market and of Marketing, the trends making up the zeitgeist, the whims of fortune and the lucky spin of the wheel. So we tend to crave more and more. Yes we have a lovely review in the Times or the Guardian but what are the sales figures like? We get short-listed for a prize but don’t win it. We have a publishing advance we feel happy about until we hear someone else has one twice the size.

Worse still, a fellow-author, whose work we think secretly (or not so secretly) is inferior to our own, gets loaded with plaudits and has their books turned into hugely successful Hollywood films. We smile warmly like an Oscar nominated also-ran but really inside we are like the fisherman’s wife: we want more!

And we forget that there are literally thousands – possibly millions – of would-be writers who would kill for just one contract, or to be represented by an agent. That, for the long-term published writer is about cottage-level in terms of flounder gifts.

So I try to go back into that little cottage, which I made as cosy and desirable in my version as I could, with an orchard of fruit to turn into jam and a flower garden in front. (I wrote this round about the time we left London and bought our present barn-conversion in Oxfordshire. It’s bigger than a cottage but it does have roses round the door and a plum tree whose annual crop gets converted by a kind of alchemy into something you can spread on a crumpet).

Artist unknown

My lovely illustrator gave the couple’s cottage a thatched roof, which I wouldn’t touch myself, but I bestowed on them green and white crockery, of which I am inordinately fond, and a yard full of ducks and chickens, which I am not allowed.

Yes, a castle might be nice, but would I really want to choose all the curtain-poles and light-fittings for so many bedrooms? The fisherman, who is also me of course, feels very uncomfortable about the castle and all the servants and the four-poster bed.

I have several pacts with different friends about how we would not let success – I mean wild, ridiculous millionaire-style success – go to our heads and change how we behave to other people, especially other writers. We have seen it happen.

Not perhaps the desire to be Pope but a tendency to pontificate. Not a demand to stop the sun in the sky but perhaps a forgetting that we are poor creatures of dust, whose life on this earth is but a speck viewed in the context of eternity.

So that’s why The Fisherman and his Wife is my signature tale. It is a reminder to stop and enjoy the distance I have travelled from the scholarship girl who scribbled plays and stories in school exercise books, to bask in my cosy cottage stage of life and be excited by glimpses of distant castles but not to let ambition prevent me from living in the moment and taking a proper pride in my achievements without constantly hungering for more.

After all, in my line of work, next year could see one back in the metaphorical pigsty, even if one didn’t want to play God.*

*A little secret for non-writers: when you create worlds and people them with characters, you do have a certain Godlike power. Maybe that’s why most of us can stop short of going too far in our ambition. We have all we need in our heads and hearts and count ourselves kings of infinite space, even though we have had dreams – because we have had dreams.

Mary had her first book published in 1975, which would have provided her with a fish supper had she not already been a vegetarian. She and her husband have never lived in a pigsty, though it was a long time before they could afford carpets in the house they bought to raise their three daughters in.

She has now had over ninety books published, with more in the pipeline, including the successful but not quite castle-providing Stravaganza sequence for Bloomsbury, stand-alone historical novels like The Falconer’s Knot and Troubadour. She also writes picturebooks like Amazing Grace and its sequels, which are reputed to have sold over a million and a half copies, which you would have thought might be worth a turret or two.

She has never had a film deal or won a major prize but is not bitter.

A Tour Around the Library of Imaginary Books

2012-01-16T01:19:00.000-08:00

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (in case anyone here doesn’t already know), deep in the enclaves of Unseen University is the University Library, where the presence of so many books (not all of them magical) has warped space into a mysterious form called L-space (Library-space) expressed by the equation:

Books are entrances into other worlds: in UU Library this is not a metaphor. And, a consequence of the properties of L-space, the shelves of UU Library contain every book ever written, unwritten or yet to be written.


Librarian of the Discworld as he appears in The Discworld Companion, illustrated by Paul Kidby

I would like, then (if I have the Librarian’s permission), to take you on a small tour of a favourite section of mine: the section for Imaginary Books - that is, books which exist only within the covers of other books and are therefore fictional to the power two: fiction². I’ve delighted in many such titles over the years, so let’s tiptoe past the chained, uneasily-slumbering grimoires of UU Library’s extensive magical sections, and I’ll show you my favourites.

The first is ‘The Orange and the Apple’, which exists between the covers of Arthur C Clarke’s ‘A Fall of Moondust’, the story of a ‘moon-bus’ full of passengers which plunges into the deep soft dust of the Sea of Tranquillity following a moon-quake. During the desperate rescue operation which ensues, the trapped passengers organise an entertainment to keep their minds off claustrophobia and the fear of death. It may not be one of Clarke’s best known novels, but it contains some of his best character sketches, and is often very funny. The passengers take turns reading aloud the only two novels on board, Jack Schaefer’s classic western ‘Shane’ and a ‘new historical romance’ ‘The Orange and the Apple’, featuring an affair between Sir Isaac Newton and Nell Gwynne. Let me reach it down from the shelf for you: a cheap paperback with a lurid cover and a cracked spine…

The author certainly wasted no time. Within three pages, Sir Isaac Newton was explaining the law of gravitation to Mistress Gwynne, who had already hinted that she would like to do something in return.

…“Forsooth, Sir Isaac, you are indeed a man of great knowledge. Yet, methinks, there is much that a woman might teach you.”
“And what is that, my pretty maid?”
Mistress Nell blushed shyly.
“I fear,” she sighed, “that you have given your life to the things of the mind. You have forgotten, Sir Isaac, that the body, also, has much strange wisdom.”
“Call me ‘Ike’,” said the sage huskily, as his clumsy fingers tugged at the fastenings of her blouse.

Close beside this on the shelves is an array of titles from Douglas Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. There’s the Guide itself, of course, clearly an e-book on an e-reader:

…a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters.

That was written in the late 1970’s, so you can see the power of L-space right there. Perhaps the large friendly letters should be added to Kindles? Next to the Guide is an entire bookcase sagging under the weight of the many volumes of the Encyclopaedia Galactica. Oh, and here are a couple of paperbacks which look to have been much thumbed by the wizards of Unseen University - so long as they’re sure no other wizard is watching: Eccentrica Gallumbits’ ‘The Big Bang Theory, A Personal View’, and ‘Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Sex But Have Been Forced To Find Out’. Next on the shelf - in a far more pristine condition - is Oolon Colluphid’s galaxy-rattling series of popular theological texts: ‘Where God Went Wrong’, ‘Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes’, ‘Who Is This God Person Anyway?’ and ‘Well That About Wraps It Up For God’.

If you’re not interested in science, or philosophy, we can move on to the literary biographies. Here's one I’ve always wanted to read: ‘Pard-Spirit: A Study of Branwell Brontë’ by one Mr Mybug - nestling within the pages of Stella Gibbons’ ‘Cold Comfort Farm’. It’s a handsome looking hardback. I suspect he had to pay for its publication, but he made sure there was a large black and white photograph of himself on the back of the dust jacket.

‘It’s goin’ to be dam good,’ said Mr Mybug. ‘It’s a psychological study, of course, and I’ve got a lot of new matter, including three letters he wrote to an old aunt in Ireland, Mrs Prunty, during the period when he was working on Wuthering Heights.’ He glanced sharply at Flora to see if she would react.

‘It’s obvious that it’s his book and not Emily’s. No woman could have written that. It’s male stuff… Secretly, he worked twelve hours a day writing Shirley and Villette - and of course, Wuthering Heights. I’ve proved all this by evidence from the three letters to old Mrs Prunty. His letters to her are little masterpieces of repressed passion. They’re full of tender little questions… he asks her how is her rheumatism… has her cat, Toby, “recovered from the fever”… … how is Cousin Martha (and what a picture we get of Cousin Martha in those simple words, a raw Irish chit, high-cheekboned, with limp black hair and clear blood in her lips!) …’

Delicious! Then, sticking out quite a lot and leaning slantwise to fit the shelf, is a tall folio manuscript, bound in a red leather cover, written 'in a wandering hand' in spiky black ink with lots of curlicues. The catalogue label coming unstuck from the spine reads: 'Travel: Imaginary'. I pull it tenderly out. Odd though it seems, this may be the most valuable book in the entire section. 'The title page has many titles on it, crossed out one after another: so:

My Diary. My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again. And What Happened After. Adventures of Five Hobbits. The Tale of the Great Ring, complied by Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and those of his friends. What We Did in the War of the Ring.

Here Bilbo's hand ends, and Frodo has written:
THE DOWNFALL OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING'.

Bilbo and Frodo's own autobiographical account! I can see you'd love to stand here and leaf through it, but today I'm just showing you what's on the shelves, and we haven't time. You can come back by yourself another day.

So do you fancy Victorian poetry? Courtesy of A S Byatt’s ‘Possession’, allow me to pull out this stout green book, the ‘Collected Poems of Randolph Henry Ash’ including of course ‘The Garden of Proserpina’ and ‘Ask to Embla’ -

Or (my own preference), this slim volume in limp violet suede, with faded spine and curling corners, whose embossed gold title reads simply ‘The Fairy Melusine’ by Christabel LaMotte. As we pluck it from the shelf, out flutters a loose manuscript poem:

It came all so still
The little Thing -
And would not stay -
Our Questioning -
A heavy Breath -
One two and three -
And then the lapsed Eternity -
A Lapis Flesh
The Crimson - Gone -
It came as still
As any Stone -

Now - is there anything you'd like to see that I haven't shown you? It'll be here. Just let me know...

Picture credit: The Librarian, copyright Terry Pratchett and Paul Kidby
'Don't Panic': The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

'Silvertree and Goldentree' and the worldwide web of fairytales

2012-01-13T00:37:00.000-08:00

by Susan Price

Little Red Riding Hood by Walter Crane

As a child, I heard the usual fairy-stories – a 'Cinderella' derived from Perrault, 'Billy Goats Gruff', 'Little Red Riding Hood', and so on. I loved them. I loved their repetitions and rhythms– 'Oh, Grandmama, what big ears you have!”, and “Who's trit-trotting across MY bridge? - ' I loved their vivid, beautiful images – the little girl in the scarlet, hooded cloak walking through the dark forest, the glass slipper, the sky-high beanstalk... But I had no idea of their history, or their cultural resonance. I imagined that the version of the story that was read to me WAS the story, that there was no other way of telling it.

At the age of 10, the Greek Myths happened to me, and I was totally smitten. For a whole year I lived, in my imagination, in the Greek Myths, with flying horses and hydras, with awesome and unpredictable gods, dragons and golden apples. The next year, when I moved to Secondary School, I discovered the Norse Myths – and they, for me, blew the Greek Myths away. They felt like coming home: but a home that was no less fascinating, with ice giants, fire giants – in fact, ice and fire all the way through.

The Frost Giants Seize Freja by Arthur Rackham

After that, I read every collection of Myths and Legends I could find; and when I ran out of Myths, I read collections of fairy-stories and folktales: the Grimm Brothers, and Jacob's English Fairy Stories, and Asbjornsen and Moe's Norwegian Stories – and Russian, Irish, Scottish, French, Italian, Polish stories – I couldn't get enough of them. And, without knowing it, I was learning an enormous amount about story-telling – 'Billy Goats Gruff', for instance, is a master-class in narrative and suspense.

The more I read, the more something became obvious: – the stories weren't as individual, as distinct from each other – or from Myth – as I'd thought. The Scots story of Kate Crackernuts was strangely like Cinderella, though set in a more work-a-day world. Another Scots story, 'The Finger-lock' was Cinderella with a boy as the central character instead of a girl. No Fairy-Godmother – no pumpkin coach or glass slipper, but the essentials of the story remained. (There are, I later learned, over three hundred variations on the story usually known as 'Cinderella'.)

East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon by H J Ford

This Norwegian story, 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' was the myth of Psyche and Cupid in northern dress. The English stories, 'Tom-Tit-Tot,' and 'Stormy Weather' were variations of 'Rumpelstiltskin'. In 'Whuppity-Stoorie' the Rumpelstiltskin figure is female, and kindly – she saves the heroine from a life of drudgery in the end.

Tom Tit Tot by John Batten

Echoes were everywhere. In the Irish Legend of Deirdre, the heroine sees a calf killed in winter. Its red blood falls into the white snow, and a raven comes to eat it. Deirdre wishes for a husband, “with skin as white as this snow, lips and cheeks as red as this blood, and hair as black as the raven.” In 'Snow White,' collected hundreds of years later, the queen sits stitching her embroidery in its ebony frame beside a snowy window-ledge. She pricks her finger, and blood falls on the snow. She wishes for a child, “with skin as white as this snow, hair as black as this ebony, and lips and cheeks as red as this blood.”

In the story, 'The Soldier At Heaven's Gate,' a soldier slips into Heaven before his time, and climbs up into God's chair, from where he sees the whole world, and everything that's happening, just as God does. The soldier is overwhelmed by the world's sorrow, cruelty and pain: and the end of the story is tragic. I was reminded of how the god Frey, in Norse Myth, climbs into Odin's chair, and sees all of the nine worlds spread before him. He looks into Jotunheim, sees a beautiful giantess, and falls deeply in love... The consequences are also tragic, but on a more mythic scale, since this leads, in part, to the defeat of the gods at End of the World.

TheThree Heads in the Well by Arthur Rackham

The 'Three Heads In The Well' is another fairy-tale with mythic echoes. The well is under a great tree, and from the well's depths float up three wise heads, which speak to the heroine. In Norse Myth, there is a well between the roots of the great World Tree, and by the side of the well is the head of Mimir, which has wise words for those who question it. And Celtic Myth is full of magical, talking severed heads.

Nor are these connections limited to folk-lore and myth. The Danish legend of Amleth is Shakespeare's Hamlet; and King Lear is, in part, a Cinderella story.

I was puzzled by all these echoes and correspondences, in stories which were supposed to be widely separated geographically, and dated from a time before broadcasting and widespread literacy could send a story round the world in days, if not hours. That led me to reading books about folk-lore, rather than books of folk-lore. I learned that, of course, I wasn't the first to notice that fairy-stories seem to be made up of interchangeable, interlocking pieces, which can be taken apart and put back together in different patterns. The pieces have been given the name of 'motifs', and have been catalogued – 'The Forbidden Door', 'The Helpful Animal', 'The Cruel Stepmother', and so on. I was also fascinated to discover that the psychoanalyst, Jung, considered some of these motifs to be archetypes: an integral part of our psychology. The trackless forest, the wolves and 'the white bear of England's wood'; the depths of the well, the sorcerer – these appear in our dreams and shape our thinking. The ogres and dragons and man-eating witches of fairy-tales have a reality: small children know there is a monster lurking in the dark, waiting to eat them. Outside the cave, there was. One of the 'uses of fairy-tales' is in helping children to sleep. Telling them, 'Monsters don't exist,' won't help – they know it isn't true. Giving them a dragon-slayer is far more effective. These days, 'Dr Who' works a treat.

Three Heads in the Well by John Batten

However that may be, I have found fairy-stories endlessly compelling throughout my life. Indeed, I think I find them more compelling, now I'm in my fifties, than I did when I was five. Then they were a good yarn. Now I find that, like the dark well at the foot of the World Tree, they hold fathoms deep of a not always kindly wisdom.

I can't pinpoint exactly when I started to notice these strangely haunting echoes and connections between tales, but I know that one of the stories I read around that time was the Irish SILVERTREE AND GOLDENTREE, which I have retold here. I leave it to the reader to guess which better known fairy-story it echoes, but I will mention this: in Irish myth, a salmon lives in a pool in the Boyne, and eats the hazelnuts which fall into the water. Hazels were magical trees, and the magical nuts made the salmon wise. The young Fionn Mac Cumhaill was ordered by his master to catch the salmon, cook it and serve it to him.

Finn McCool eats the Salmon of Knowledge - by Kate Leiper

As Fionn cooked it, he burned his thumb, stuck it in his mouth, and so tasted the salmon's flesh first, and gained all its wisdom, including the ability to understand birds and animals – just as Siegfried, in Norse legend, cooked the dragon's heart for his master, burned his thumb, stuck it in his mouth, and understood what the birds in the tree overhead were saying...

Susan Price has been interested in myths and folklore since she was nine; and has been a professional writer since she was sixteen – and much of her writing is based on, or informed by, folklore, such as her ‘Ghost World’ series set in ‘a far-distant, Northern Czardom, where half the year is summer and light, and half the year is winter dark’ (‘The Ghost Drum’ won the 1987 Carnegie Medal) – or the two ‘Sterkarm’ books, in which an unscrupulous corporation develops a 'Time Tube' and penetrates the world of the border reivers of the 16th century. 'The Sterkarm Handshake’ won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize’ in 1998. She writes wonderful posts about history, fantasy and her own writing at 'A Nennius Blog'.

Picture credit

Finn McCool image used by kind permission of Kate Leiper http://www.kateleiper.co.uk/

The Value of Mythical Thinking

2012-01-09T01:58:00.000-08:00

Myths (so runs the myth) belong to past ages, when people were naïve enough to believe in them. Today, in scientific modern times, we’ve put away such childish things. So why bother with fantasy? Isn’t it just puerile escapism? Even children are expected to grow out of myths and fairytales, and surely any adult found reading or writing the stuff cannot expect to be taken seriously? Can fantasy really have anything meaningful to say?

These are interesting questions. As I try to answer them in what may seem a round-about way, I’ll begin with an even bigger question:

What makes us human?

The answers to this one keep being refined. A special creation in the image of God – for centuries a popular and satisfying answer? Difficult to sustain as it became clear that we’re only one twig on the great branching tree of evolution. Language? Perhaps, but the more we study other animals and birds, the more we realise many of them communicate in quite sophisticated ways. Toolmaking? Not that distinctive, as chimpanzees and a variety of other animals employ twigs and stones as tools. Art? It depends what you mean by ‘art’ – if you think of bower-birds designing pretty nests to attract their mates, it seems clear that some animals do have an aesthetic capacity. So are we different from other animals at all?

Common sense says yes – at the very least, we have taken all these capabilities incomparably further than other animals – but is that really the best we can do for a definition? What was the point at which our ancestors became recognisably ‘us’, and in what does that recognition rest?

Innovation is one answer – the development and bettering of tools. Homo habilis and homo heidelbergensis lived with one basic design of hand axe for about a million years. When, on the other hand, we see signs of people messing about and tinkering and trying out new ideas, we recognise ourselves.

Related to this is another answer: symbolic thinking. Maybe some of our closest relatives are partially capable of it – a chimpanzee can recognise a drawing or a photograph, which means nothing to a dog. But wild chimps don’t indulge in representational art. Sometime, somewhere, somebody realised that lines of ochre or charcoal drawn on stone or wood could stand for a horse or a deer or an aurochs. That in itself is an amazing leap of cognition. On top of that, however, there had to be some fascination in the discovery, some reason to keep on doing it – some inherent, achieved meaning that had nothing directly to do with physical survival. What? Why?

I think it may be because, somewhere along the line, human beings became sufficiently self-aware to be troubled by death. When you truly understand that one day, you’ll die, the whole mystery of existence comes crashing down on you like the sky falling. Why are we here? What was before us? Where did we come from and where will we go?

The ‘mystery of existence’ is an artefact. We choose to ask an answerless question, and that question is at the core of our humanity. The before-and-after of life is a great darkness, and we build bonfires to keep it out, and warm ourselves and comfort ourselves. The bonfire is the bonfire of mythical thinking, of culture, stories, songs, music, poetry, religion, art. We don’t need it for our physical selves: homo heidelbergensis got on perfectly well without it: we need it for humanity’s supreme invention, the soul.

Karen Armstrong claims that religion is an art, and I agree with her. In her book ‘A Short History of Myth’ she examines the modern expectation that all truths shall be factually based. This is what religious fundamentalists and scientists like Richard Dawkins have, oddly, in common. A religious fundamentalist refuses to accept the theory of evolution because it appears to him or her to disprove the truth of Genesis, when what Genesis actually offers is not a factual but an emotional truth: a way of accounting for the existence of the world and the place of people in it with all their griefs and joys and sorrows. It’s – in other words – a story, a fantasy, a myth. Its purpose is not to explain the world, like a scientist. Its purpose is to reconcile us with the world. Early people were not naïve. The truth that you get from a story is different from the truth of a proven scientific fact.

'A Short History of Myth' is one of a series of titles on myths published by Canongate, and I love the creative freedom they have extended to their authors. Among the others are Margaret Atwood's 'Penelopiad', the woman's take on the events of the Iliad and Odyssey; Jeanette Winterson's 'Weight', a reworking of the myth of Atlas who holds up the world, Philip Pullman's 'The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ', and - most recently - A.S Byatt's marvellous 'Ragnarok', her testament to the impact of the Norse myths when she first encountered them as 'the thin child in wartime'. That these are all personal approaches - blends of personal experience, personal understanding of science, philosophy, myth, religion and storytelling - is the whole point. This is the human way.

Any work of art is a symbolic act. Any work of fiction is per se, a fantasy. In the broadest sense, you can see this must be so. They are all make-belief. Tolstoy’s Prince André and Tolkien’s Aragorn are equal in their non-existence. Realism in fiction is an illusion – just as representational art is a sleight of hand (and of the mind) that tricks us into believing lines and splashes of colour are ‘really’ horses or people or landscapes.

The question shouldn’t be ‘Is it true?’, because no story provides truth in the narrow factual sense. The questions to ask about any work of art should be like these: ‘Does it move me? Does it express something I always felt but didn’t know how to say? Has it given me something I never even knew I needed?’ As Karen Armstrong says, “Any powerful work of art invades our being and changes it forever.” If that happens, you will know it. It makes no sense at all to ask, ‘Is it true?’

This is my credo: fantasy deserves to be taken seriously - read and written seriously - because there are things humanity needs to say that can only be said in symbols. Here’s the last verse of Bob Dylan’s song ‘The Gates of Eden’ (from ‘Bringing it All Back Home’):

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true:
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.

"Hansel and Gretel"

2012-01-06T00:44:00.000-08:00

The witch fattens Hansel while Gretel weeps.

By Adèle Geras

It’s about hunger. It’s about not being able to cope. It’s about mother love of a warped kind. It deals with contrasts. I love it almost more than any other fairy tale and I’ve never had to articulate why before now and hope I can come up with some good reasons alongside my gut reactions.

I’m an only child. When I was a girl, I wanted siblings more than anything else. I put brothers and sisters into my fiction whenever I can because their interaction fascinates me. In one book, The Girls in the Velvet Frame, I used a photograph of my mother and four of her sisters (she had five and four brothers as well!) as the springboard for the story. So that’s the first thing that makes me like the tale: whatever might happen to them, Hansel and Gretel are TOGETHER. They help one another. They share everything. It’s not clear who’s the elder. In the Humperdinck opera, it seems Gretel is the one who teaches but it’s traditionally Hansel who suggests leaving the trail of breadcrumbs and so forth.

The premise, of parents wanting to rid themselves of their children, is horrendous. But in the context of the Hundred Years’ War and starvation and deprivation in much of Europe, there must have been thousands of desperate families with too many mouths to feed. Infanticide becomes more common when things are tough but these parents don’t commit murder with their own hands. Rather, they try and lose their children in the forest and hope for the worst.

So that’s where we start: with every child’s worst fear. They dread, we all dread, abandonment and the disappearance of the familiar. Whenever we hear about lost children, whenever we think of someone forcibly separated from their parents, our hearts shrink in horror. It’s a fear we can easily imagine.

So: two children lost in the dark wood. Alone, but for the help of a magical white bird. Birds are everywhere: they eat the crumbs and wreck any chance of finding the way home, and it’s a bird who leads them to the magical house of the Witch.

This, the Gingerbread Cottage, the Sugar House, the House made all of sweets and goodies...is the standout image of the story and it’s immensely powerful. We know it’s a snare and a delusion and Hansel and Gretel do not. In a pantomime way we’re thinking, calling out: Don’t fall for it! It’s a trick. Leave it alone! But they do fall for it. We know that they ought to resist its blandishments but they’re hungry. They haven’t eaten for days. Icing sugar. Toffee. Marzipan. Sticks of barley sugar holding up the lintel. Chocolate windowsills...it’s completely blissful. Then, from a door which I always imagine made of slabs of iced fruit cake (why? Ask Sigmund Freud!) the Witch emerges.

She’s not often portrayed as a traditional black hat and broomstick regulation witch. In the opera, she’s sometimes a grotesquely blown-up and exaggerated cake shop lady: too bosomy, too rouged, too feminine altogether. And she loves, loves, loves children. She loves to eat them. It reminds me of the Maurice Sendak phrase from Where the Wild Things Are: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so.” Sendak has said that this was uttered by his aunts and uncles when they pinched his chubby childish cheek in an excessively affectionate way and I can vouch for that kind of language from my own experience. My aunts and uncles, (see above) did just that: they’d pinch my cheek gently and exclaim in Yiddish: A zissaleh! Which means: A sweet little thing!

There we have it. The children’s real father and their stepmother don’t love Hansel and Gretel quite enough to keep the family together. The bad mother, the Witch, loves them so much she wants to consume them. To this end, she locks Hansel up and we have cages, and bones, and fattening him up like a calf. And for an extra nasty twist, we have the Witch turning Gretel into her servant while she’s preparing to feast on Hansel.

The end of the story is gruesome. Gretel tricks the Witch, who is reduced to ashes in her own oven. It’s not exactly bland fare for children. Hansel and Gretel escape and with the help of the White Bird, find their way home. They are carrying the Witch’s treasure with them, which doubtless guarantees them a better welcome than the one they might have expected.

Forests, birds, a witch, a marvellous house made of everything delicious, white pebbles gleaming in the moonlight, a cage, a chicken’s thigh bone, a treasure chest filled with jewels....all these are powerful ingredients but what makes Hansel and Gretel greater than the sum of its parts it the love that sees the brother and sister through the terrible ordeals they have to endure. That abides and it’s stronger than any enchantment you can throw at it.

PS I’m adding a poem here which I wrote years ago. It’s the Witch speaking.....

INVITATION

This time, be careful.
They have removed all the stones
That you used last time.

I have ironed sheets
and put green pears to blacken
on the bottom shelf

of the oven. Come
alone or with another.
That doesn't matter.

My mouth is open,
all my loose teeth are sharpened
and the cake is baked.

Let's pipe the icing
into red blobs like bloodstains
and call them flowers.

Pull the shutters closed.
We'll lick and suck the white hours
until you ripen.

Follow the thin bird.
Stay in those flapping shadows
and you will be bones.

Copyright Adèle Geras

Adèle was born in Jerusalem in 1944 and has published more than 90 books for readers of all ages. Her Egerton Hall trilogy, collected as ‘Happy Ever After’ (Definitions) retells the fairytales of Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White setting them in an English boarding school in 1962. She has also published a collection of retellings, brilliantly illustrated by Louise Brierley, called ‘Beauty and the Beast and Other Stories’, but that, alas, is out of print.

Adèle has loved fairytales all her life, especially the Hans Andersen stories and the Coloured Fairy books by Andrew Lang. Her most recent books ‘Troy’, ‘Ithaka’ and ‘Dido’ (David Fickling Books) revisit the Odyssey and the Aeneid, but from the viewpoints of some of the common folk caught up and affected by these great dramas: servants in the palaces of Troy and Ithaka and Carthage. Ominous, understated, doomladen... Adèle can take an old story, tweak it, shake it inside out like a worn shirt, and – voilà – create a brand new garment. I love her books and perhaps especially her trilogy ‘Happy Ever After’ – a wonderfully fresh and unusual version of three classic fairytales, placed in a mid-twentieth century setting and seamlessly merging fantasy with realism.

Picture credits: 'The Witch Fattens Hansel' by Laura Barrett

'The witch greeting the children' by Arthur Rackham

New Year's Resolution

2012-01-04T03:28:00.000-08:00

Well, this is what my desk looks like this morning. Which is actually healthy and a good thing: it means I'm getting back to work, and am therefore surrounded by a clutter of files, notes, and piles of reference books. And I can't find a pen anywhere...

I'm happy, and very busy, because I'm writing a new book at last and I want to get it finished by the summer. This doesn't mean I won't be blogging, but it does mean I've got to be very organised about my time. And lurking here on the blog are all the fascinating 'Fairytale Reflections' written by generous and wonderful fantasy authors such as Juliet Marillier, Susan Price, Mary Hoffman and Megan Whalen Turner - to name but a few. And who has time to go back through the blog to find them? So, beginning this Friday, I'm going to re-run them. (And there may be a few surprises!) On top of that, I'll be writing fairly regular new posts whenever something springs to mind on fantasy, folklore, myth and children's literature. Oh, and today I'm over at The History Girls writing about historical research and the importance of world-building in all sorts of fiction.

New year's resolutions have a name for being broken, so I'm not making any, but what I wish for myself and to all of you this year is Resolution itself - determination to work and succeed -

'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'.

Happy 2012 !

Jason and the AgonyAunts - Eighth and Final Fit

2011-12-28T03:35:00.000-08:00

Previously: Apollo and the other Immortals have spotted Jason and Medea trespassing in the Sacred Grove with the Agony Aunts in hot pursuit. Now READ ON...

Jason and the AgonyAunts - Seventh Fit

2011-12-23T00:48:00.000-08:00

Caught in the very act by the immortal gods, with the AgonyAunts hot on their trail, what will happen to Jason and Medea now?

TO BE CONTINUED...

Jason and the AgonyAunts - Sixth Fit

2011-12-20T00:56:00.000-08:00

PREVIOUSLY: the Agony Aunts advised Jason that the lovely witch-princess Medea was willing to help him - but when they warned him against assuming she would betray her nation, Jason made the mistake of insulting them. How far WILL the infatuated Medea go? READ ON...

Will the path of true love ever run smooth? Can Princess Medea defy her father again? Or will Jason have to sneak back to Greece unfleeced and empty-handed?
TO BE CONTINUED...

Jason and the AgonyAunts - Fifth Fit

2011-12-16T01:41:00.000-08:00

PREVIOUSLY: Jason's voyage across the Aegean was made much more troublesome by the presence of the Agony Aunts, whose trenchant 'advice' caused him to lose at least two members of his crew. Will Flora, Agatha and Harriet do any better in the Land of the Golden Fleece? READ ON...

Will Jason capture the hand and heart of Princess Medea? Will he succeed in winning the Golden Fleece? Or will he simply be eaten by the dragon?

TO BE CONTINUED....

Jason and the AgonyAunts - Fourth Fit

2011-12-13T01:10:00.000-08:00

Previously: Jason was shocked to discover that his sponsor Hera had sent her erstwhile cronies, the three Agony Aunts, to join his expedition to find the Golden Fleece. What impact will the new arrivals have on him and his crew? READ ON...

A tricky voyage for the heroes, but worse is to come. What will happen when the Argo reaches Colchis? Will the Agony Aunts really come into their own - counselling Princess Medea?
TO BE CONTINUED...

Jason and the AgonyAunts - Third Fit

2011-12-09T00:32:00.000-08:00

Previously: Furious with Zeus for his continual casual adultery, Hera sent Hermes to the Land of the Hyberboreans to fetch her auld acquaintances the Agony Aunts.

NOW READ ON...

What effect will these Agony Aunts have on the Argo's hapless crew? How will a bunch of muscle-bound heroes cope with all this female advice? TO BE CONTINUED...

Jason and the AgonyAunts - Second Fit

2011-12-06T00:57:00.000-08:00

What will happen when the Agony Aunts join the Argo cruise? Will Hera and Hermes convince Jason to take them on board? TO BE CONTINUED...

Jason and the AgonyAunts - First Fit

2011-12-02T00:44:00.000-08:00

What will Hermes find in Hyperborea? Will he make front-page news? And what will happen when he meets The Agony Aunts?
TO BE CONTINUED....

The Agony Aunts are arriving!

2011-11-30T03:35:00.000-08:00

Harking back to my recent series on Mystical Voyages, you may remember that when my very own Argonautical hero, David, set off on his voyage across the Mediterranean in Tim Severin's good ship Argo, I sat at home like Penelope, having neither the requisite muscle power to row one of these huge oars - or indeed the equipage to use the toilet facilities. In a bit of genuine reconstructive archeology, the crew discovered the purpose of that mysterious little wooden nubble you can see half way down the ram. Apparently visible on some ancient paintings, it was incorporated in Argo's design, and turned out to be there to help you keep your footing while you do whatever you need to do directly into the sea.

Anyway, to keep myself busy and not too jealous, I whiled away some of my spare time writing and illustrating a Voyage story of my own: 'Jason and the AgonyAunts: a silly tale in eight fits', which I gave David when he got back and which I'm going to post on this blog over the next few weeks. (For anyone unfamiliar with it, an 'Agony Aunt' is the cheery British term for an advice columnist in a magazine or newspaper.)

I'm not a trained artist, as will become rapidly apparent! - but I can get the occasional likeness, and I had a lot of fun making this little book or booklet. More important though, I've finally got down to writing a new long fantasy. I know you'll all understand that I'll need to give most of my concentration and time over the next few months to that. I've don't want to stop blogging - and I won't! - but perhaps the Agony Aunts will amuse some of you as much as they did me, when they visited me for the first time rather more years ago than I care to count - and well before I was a published writer.

So please enjoy the Agony Aunts, whose story will be delivered in weekly installments beginning this very Friday and lasting into the New Year. I'll be popping in and out regularly, so please do leave comments, as I'd love to know what you think of Flora, Agatha and Harriet's adventures with Jason, Medea, Zeus and Hera.

Magick

2011-11-28T09:33:00.000-08:00

Magick happens.
Or at least I think it can.

Magick can happen when a bunch of friends get together to do something lovely for another friend. And that's what's happening here.

When I lived in the States, one of the most touching things from time to time would be a fundraising event, often very local, to help someone in need. Perhaps someone needed expensive medical treatment, uncovered by insurance. Once, my children came home to tell me a schoolfriend's house had burned down overnight and the family was living in a trailer - this, in winter, with temperatures way below zero. There can be all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it's not necessary to detail them, and this is one of those sometimes.

But right now I'd like to direct you all to a site dedicated to raising a bit of magick for a friend of mine, wonderful editor, writer and artist Terri Windling. I know that many of you lovely people who visit 'Steel Thistles' are interested in fantasy, folklore, and magic of all sorts. So please do go and visit this on-line auction, Magick4Terri, where you can bid for signed artwork, signed books and all sorts of other things by people like Holly Black, Brian and Wendy Froud, Elizabeth Hand, Cassandra Clare, Jane Yolen, Tamora Pierce and Charles Vess - to name but a few. What a wonderful Christmas present any of these could be!

My own contribution to the auction is pictured above, so if anyone fancies a signed set of the hardcover US edition of my Troll trilogy, that's there too.

IF there were dreams to sell,
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell;
Some a light sigh,
That shakes from Life’s fresh crown
Only a rose-leaf down.
If there were dreams to sell,
Merry and sad to tell,
And the crier rung the bell,
What would you buy?

Here there ARE dreams to sell! Do go and take a look, and I hope you get lucky and buy some...

Quotation from: 'Dream Pedlary' by Thomas Lovell Beddoes

A Blogging Award!

2011-11-27T04:24:00.000-08:00

It was a splendid surprise this morning to check the comments on my last post - not actually expecting to find any, since it ran to all of a meagre two sentences - and discover my fellow fantasy writer Katherine Roberts has presented me with a blogging award!

It seems Liebster is a German word meaning "dearest", and the award is given to up-and-coming bloggers with less than 200 followers (and Steel Thistles isn't there yet!). So many thanks to Katherine, whose own blog 'Reclusive Muse', besides being the only one on the internet run by a unicorn, is full of fascinating insights into fantasy fiction, e-publishing, and interviews with other writers - click on her 'Muse Mondays'.

According to Katherine, or possibly the unicorn, these are the things you should do if you receive the award:

1. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you .
2. Reveal your top 5 picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
3. Copy and paste the award on your blog (tick).
4. Hope that the people you’ve sent the award to forward it to their five favourite bloggers.

And this is the best part, because it gives me the chance to tell you about five utterly terrific blogs and urge you to flock to them. In no particular order...

First on the list is Susan Price's 'A Nennius Blog'. Nennius - as the Dark Age scholars amongst us will know - was a ninth century monk who wrote a 'History of Britain' full of wonderful scraps of legend, myth as well as bits of genuine history: as he says himself, 'I have made a little heap of all I've found'. At 'A Nennius Blog' you will find a similar fascinating miscellany of ghost stories, book recommendations and tales about writing, from Susan Price, one of Britain's best fantasy writers - as well as 'Blot', a cartoon cat and writer's muse of devilish insight and cunning.

Second is my other home 'The History Girls' - a daily blog for anyone who loves historical fiction, whether for adults or children, whether straight or with a fantasy twist.

Third is 'John Barleycorn Must Die' where you can follow the birth and gradual growth of a graphic novel - along with round-the-table interviews with artists such as Alan Lee and David Wyatt, plus discussions about magic, the Tarot, and the creative process. I'm amazed there aren't already 200 followers, but go and visit!

Fourth is Beneath the Bracken, an artist's blog: a blend of beautiful photographs and thoughtful, introspective commentary with themes of change, growth, and poetry.

Fifth is 'Fantastic Reads' - a blog about children's reading and literature with well-written and thoughtful recommendations. I should warn you that the current post includes a favourable mention of my own 'Troll' books, but that's honestly not why I'm putting it here.

So thanks again to Katherine and her unicorn - and I do hope you'll enjoy these links.

This morning...

2011-11-25T00:37:00.000-08:00

... I am to be found at Awfully Big Blog Reviews, talking about Franny Billingsley's wonderful wild and witchy 'Chime'. It blew me away, I tell you.

Heading off to London now, but back on Seven Thistles in a day or two: and the AgonyAunts are arriving next Friday...

"Midnight Blue"

2011-11-22T01:05:00.000-08:00

Today I'm celebrating the re-release, as an E-book, of a strange and wonderful YA novel: Pauline Fisk's ‘Midnight Blue', which won the Smarties Book Prize in 1990. It's the story of a young girl, Bonnie, who is about to begin a new life with her mother away from the influence of her controlling and malevolent grandmother. But the grandmother finds them and Bonnie runs away, finding refuge in a mid-city oasis, a walled garden in which a mysterious man called Michael is building a hot air balloon with the help of a strange shadowy boy. Michael’s aim is to fly to the land 'beyond the sky. Not ‘in outer space’ or ‘in another galaxy’, but beyond the sky… as though it were possible to peel away the edge of the blue and pass straight through.'

Bonnie and the shadow-boy fly without him, '... racing for the top of the sky. Its warmth welcomed them, turned the dark skin of the fiery balloon midnight blue... Then the smooth sky puckered into cloth-of-blue and drew aside for them, like curtains parting.' On 'the other side of the sky' Bonnie wakes in a farmhouse on Highholly Hill, a place of legends where Wild Edric and his fairy wife Godda are said to emerge from the caverns and ride by night. She is welcomed by a warm-hearted but strangely incurious family, whose daughter Arabella is Bonnie's living image: herself as she might have been in a different, secure life. But Bonnie struggles with jealousy and hatred. And then her grandmother reappears, a sinister, knowing figure with the power to suck away the essence of a person and leave a simulacrum behind...

If you want to see Highholly Hill, here it is, crowned with 'Wild Edric's Throne' - and it's also in the photo at the head of this blog! It is in fact the magnificent and brooding hill called Stiperstones, in Shropshire on the Welsh border, and I used it in my own book ‘Dark Angels’ and called it ‘Devil’s Edge.

All the things I love in a book are to be found in 'Midnight Blue' - mystery and magic, a strong sense of place, deep emotional feeling and beautiful writing. I highly recommend it, and I'm delighted to be able to welcome Pauline herself to the blog, as part of her 'Midnight Blue' tour.

Pauline, can you remember what impulse triggered the writing of this, your first book? What was the kernel, the seed of the idea that became Midnight Blue?

Writing a book has something of the snowball-making process about it. You start with a tiny handful of something scrunched up tight in your brain, then you roll it round and it starts to grow. You roll and roll and finally it becomes so big that it takes on a life of its own and starts rolling away from you. That’s when the writing has to begin.

The heart of my snowball came down to three things. Firstly, I’d long wanted to write a children’s novel featuring balloon-flight, maybe with sky-gypsies or something like that, but the paraphernalia of modern ballooning didn’t sit easily with what I envisaged. Secondly, when I came to live in Shropshire, I discovered a folklorist called Charlotte Burne whose ‘Shropshire Folk-lore’, published in the mid nineteenth century, included the story of a sleeping knight called Wild Edric. Thirdly, whilst our own house had builders in, my family and I were privileged to spend one autumn living in a remote hilltop farmhouse overlooking the Stiperstones and Wild Edric’s haunt, the Devil’s Chair. In the book it became Highholly House. I wanted to honour it as something magnificent which had stood through the centuries, enduring the elements and the passage of time. I was aware, when we moved out, that it would probably never be lived in again.

Many writers, wanting to send their characters into another world, would use some kind of magical talisman or spell. I’m fascinated by your use of the hot air balloon to send your character Bonnie away…it’s physical travel to a physical place, High Holly Hill - yet in some sense unreal too. Where did the image of the hot air balloon and the parting of the sky come from?

The idea of ballooning as a means of escape really came alive for me when I read Jim Woodman’s ‘Flight of Condor I’, describing how he and Julian Nott built, launched and flew a balloon over the desert at Nazca, Peru, powered only by smoke and flames. As soon as I read about their amazing dawn launch, I knew what shape I wanted my novel to take. Yes, a physical trip and, yes, to a physical place. But powered through the air by fire – how magical was that?

As to the sky parting – I suppose I’ve always seen the sky as a sort of stage putting on a show, so to imagine the blue as a set of curtains doesn’t seem that far fetched. There’s more to the sky than space, just as there’s more to life than science - and it’s this ‘more’ that’s always really interested me in my writing life. In ‘Flying for Frankie’ - which also features a balloon flight - my heroine says, ‘We peeled back the edges of our world and found out there was more.’ For her, the ‘more’ is understanding who she is and what her place is in the scheme of things. But for Bonnie, the heroine of ‘Midnight Blue’, ‘more’ is literally more. More Maybelle. More Michael. More Highholly House. More of herself. And more of the dreaded Grandbag too.

One of the things I love about this book is that you don’t seem to feel the need to provide rationales for everything. Much is left unexplained – yet it all feels natural, as if we understand the story on a deep, symbolic level. Did you write the book this way instinctively, or was it consciously planned?

This is something I feel so strongly about that it’s hard to know where to start - or how to keep it short. Yes, instinctively I shy away from explanations. Perhaps, even in struggling to answer you now, I’m doing that. But how many books have been ruined by explanations? Oh, those terrible last chapters where the pieces are put together and the ends are tied up and all the author’s hard work creating a believable alternate reality is suddenly undone!

After all, real life isn’t like that. It very often doesn’t have explanations - at least not ones that are handed on a plate. Especially for children – and it’s children I’m writing for – life just happens. It’s a mystery functioning on a level that goes deeper than mere words.

Take what happens to Bonnie when she arrives in Highholly House. From the adult perspective, the people who’ve taken her in should ask who she is, where she’s from and whom they can phone. But from Bonnie’s perspective, it might be unsettling that they don’t, but she accepts it. Things are happening all the time in her child’s life for which there are no words or explanations. That’s just life.

It would be nice to say that I’ve taken a stand here, refusing to bow to adult requirements for what a story should be. But to be honest it’s happened more naturally than that. I’ve simply put in what I felt Bonnie’s story needed, and left out what I felt might ruin it, hoping that, as she learns to see the world anew, my readers would go through that experience seeing with her eyes.

Bonnie runs away from herself as well as from an intolerable situation, and finds, at the farm on Highholly Hill, the ideal family she might have had in a parallel universe. But she doesn’t belong there. Would you say that Midnight Blue is very much a story about identity?

Who is Bonnie? Nobody knows, least of all herself. Who’s Arabella? She’s not the ‘Arabella-thing’ that steps out of the magic mirror. Who is the shadowboy? Only when he takes on flesh and blood, giving up his magic past, can he begin to feel. Yes, indeed, ‘Midnight Blue’ is a book about identity. What is it that makes us human? When characters in Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ are separated from their daemons, the most awful thing in the world becomes reality – they are no longer truly human. Again, in Ray Bradbury’s wonderful ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’, people stumble home from the fair stripped of their years, their memories and all their experiences. And similarly, in ‘Midnight Blue, when Jake and Arabella stumble into the magic mirror, they emerge with the shape of their humanity still intact, but devoid of life.

The truly terrible thing about Grandbag isn’t her possessiveness. It’s what she wants to possess. And what she wants is just that - life. She’s drained it out of grey, limp Doreen, moved onto Maybelle, tried with Bonnie and now she’s started on Bonnie’s friends on Highholly Hill. And, it’s in fighting for Highholly Hill, at the ultimate cost to herself, that Bonnie finds her place in the world and discovers who she really is.

Though ‘Midnight Blue’ is so mysterious and mystical, it feels real and grounded because of its strong sense of place. First the city which Bonnie flees, and then the dramatic landscape and legends of Shropshire, are essential ingredients of this book and many of your others since. What is it about the Shropshire hills that speaks to you?

Oh, there’s a question! In a sense I’m Bonnie, fleeing the city and finding another, better world among the Shropshire hills. I grew up in London. In fact the flats from which Bonnie flees were ones I used to pass sometimes on the bus. I never felt rooted there, though. Maybe it was because my mother came to England as a refugee from the Channel Islands, fleeing Hitler’s invasion during the Second World War, I don’t know. Certainly she did her best to fit in, but her sense of belonging somewhere else was always there, and perhaps it rubbed off on me.

But why Shropshire? The first time I visited the county, I was driving through on my way to North Wales. The mountains were beautiful, but the horizon enclosed me and made me feel claustrophobic, and the rolling, open greenness of the Shropshire hills felt so much more open and liberating.

I moved here to live in 1972 and have been here ever since. I suppose I was a rootless person looking for roots, and the roots came in family [husband, five children, a series of dogs], and the enjoyment of the Shropshire hills became part of our shared experience.

But it’s my own personal experience too. There’s a great joy that comes from being alone out in the hills. I love the sense of space. I love being able to walk and rarely cross a road or see a soul all day, or see a thing that isn’t beautiful or hear a sound that isn’t made by birds or wind or sheep. And I’ve done this so often that the land feels like my second skin. I know where the finches nest; where the white violets come up in spring; where I just might see otters if I’m lucky, or wild orchids. What speaks to me about the Shropshire hills? It’s the voice of home.

What, for you, is the purpose of fantasy fiction?

Purpose. Hmm. In order to attempt to answer this, I’m going to quote from another of my novels, ‘The Beast of Whixall Moss’. My hero has found, and lost, a fabuous six-headed beast, and he’s in mourning. Then one morning he wakes up and the garden is full of beasts, and they’re all fabulous and this is what he thinks: ‘This was what it meant to have vision. He knew at last. Not striving for things, hoping until hope had gone, as Mum had done, nor grasping for things in a frenzy of desire as he had done. But, amid the ordinary things of life, unasked for and unheralded, this act of sight.’

The key here, more even than those words ‘act of sight’, is the phrase ‘ordinary things of life’. I think that the purpose of fantasy isn’t so much to escape ordinary life as to shine light upon it. Being taken to the edge of human experience allows us to look both ways – out into the unknown and back into what we think we know all too well, but maybe don’t. Tolkien talks about the realm of fairy-story being ‘ wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow sharp as swords.’ But you could say the same things about the world we live in. It’s just that fantasy casts things in a heightened light.

It’s back to what I was saying earlier about the sky as a stage. Fantasy’s like a spotlight which illuminates life. It takes us out of ourselves and brings us back, changed yet scarcely knowing we’ve been away

Thankyou Pauline!

MIDNIGHT BLUE ASIN NO: B0062F6K10

PRICE: £2.99

BUY THIS BOOK

Or READ A FREE SAMPLE at the author's lovely new website

For a recent review of Midnight Blue, visit The Bookbag
Read Pauline's account of living in the ancient farmhouse on Stiperstones at Reclusive Muse
Discover how she came to be a writer at Book Angel Booktopia
Visit Authors Electric for an account of how Midnight Blue became an E-book

"Runelight"

2011-11-17T01:23:00.000-08:00

Well, here is the rather lovely cover of ‘Runelight’, the long-awaited sequel to Joanne Harris’s first Norse fantasy ‘Runemarks’. I’ve already written about that, but to remind you (and urge you to read the book if you haven’t already), here’s a link to the Fairytale Reflection Joanne wrote for this blog back in July, about her fascination with the story of the Pied Piper. As I said then,

"‘Runemarks’ is a wonderful concoction of Norse legend and fantasy. It grabbed me from the opening sentence: 'Seven o’clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again.' And soon after that, the brave and independent heroine Maddy Smith, born with a runemark (or ruinmark) on her hand, is off exploring the labryrinthine caverns under Red Horse Hill with a goblin guide, hunting for the mysterious ‘Whisperer’ at the instigation of her old and ambiguous mentor, One-Eye. A magnificent adventure follows."

And here is the Red Horse of Red Horse Hill on the cover above: and now, in ‘Runelight’, Maddy has a counterpart. Maggie Rede is her twin sister, though neither of them knows it. The child of a harsh upbringing, she patrols the catacombs of the city of World’s End, full of religious zeal for the Good Book and the Order. But she’s also romantic and untaught, and perhaps it’s not surprising when she falls in love with exactly the wrong person – mean-eyed Adam, possessed by the spirit of the sinister ‘Whisperer’.

It’s hard not to love Maggie: she’s so brave and gallant – and so deluded. And she and Maddy are on exactly opposite sides... For there’s a prophecy: Three Riders with swords of flame will come to purge the Worlds. It all rises to a nail-biting climax as Maddy, with the reluctant help of Loki, battles to save her long-lost sister and rebuild Asgard, citadel of the gods, in time to save the Nine Worlds from being engulfed by Chaos.

I was looking forward immensely to reading ‘Runelight’ and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a grand extravaganza of a book, and – at nearly 600 pages – one to really settle down with and take time over. Because Joanne Harris is known mainly for her adult books, I've noticed a certain amount of what seems to me unnecessary head-scratching about this one. Is it for children? Is it YA? Is it for adults? But books are 'for' anyone who can read and enjoy them. Changing mythologies for a moment, there’s a Greek story about a man called Procrustes, a bandit who forced his victims to fit an iron bed he had made, either by physically stretching them or by cutting off their arms and legs. Many a book is laid on the Procrustean beds of the kids/YA/adult categories. Some fit well, but there are others which are bigger. They spill over, and rather than complain about it, or squish them in or lop bits off, it’s better to remember that these categories are really arbitrary and no one can define them anyway. And so ‘Runelight’ is for any reader, young or old, who can cope with a complex, gradually unfolding story, drama, humour and pathos, a large cast of brilliant characters and a myriad witty allusions to Norse mythology.

Like the Norse myths themselves, as they've come down to us in the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, 'Runelight' is often very funny and irreverent, and whether you know the myths or not there is plenty to appreciate. I loved Joanne’s take on the awesome Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr, who acts as Maddy’s steed ‘Jorgi’ in horse shape: somnolent and slimy and continually snacking on seafood. And how come I never thought of Odin’s eight-legged horse horse Sleipnir as a spider before? And then there’s Sif of the Golden Hair (note those capitals) – a self-important beauty with a strong resemblance to a pig. And Loki, of course, Dog Star and Trickster, always out for himself yet somehow always managing to do the right thing. And last but not least, Odin – who can never be trusted at all, even when he’s clearly dead...

I can’t think of a nicer thing to do on a cold autumn or winter evening than to curl up in a big chair, turn on the lamp, and open this book to the first page:

Five past midnight in World’s End, three years after the End of the World, and, as usual, there was nothing to be seen or heard in the catacombs of the Universal City – except of course for the rats and (if you believed in them) the ghosts of the dead...

Runelight is published by Doubleday

Mystical Voyages (9) ...Or Were They Real?

2011-11-11T00:58:00.000-08:00

Argo's sail against the light

Well, what if they were real? What if some or any of the Mystical Voyages I've been talking about during this series actually happened? What if they weren't mystical at all, but physical voyages to real physical places? Perhaps Odysseus, Jason, Maeldune, Bran, and Brendan were real people whose adventures simply got added to over the centuries and millennia - as real as Arthur anyway, who scholars suspect did exist, even if he never had a Round Table, even if he isn't sleeping in some cave surrounded by knights and white horses, waiting in suspended animation for the day when he will arise to save Britain from its last peril.

It doesn't affect the magic of the legends to suppose that there may be a core of truth in some of them. In fact, it'd be odd if there wasn't, and reams of paper and pints of ink have been expended in attempts to trace the actual course of Ulysses or the Argo from port to port across the ancient Mediterranean world. And why not? Not only are Ithaka and Sandy Pylos and Troy, Cape Malea and Colchis real places: but there are intriguingly detailed descriptions like this:

There is a rocky island there in the middle channel
halfway between Ithaka and towering Samos
called Asteris, not large, but it has a double anchorage...

White-capped waves mean dangerous sailing

Sometimes, though, better than paper and ink is to get out there and do it yourself. So thought the explorer Tim Severin when, in May 1976, he set out from the west coast of Ireland in a boat named Brendan, stitched together from forty-nine ox hides, heading for the Faroes. Rowing and sailing, he and his crew got there in June and carried on, arriving in Iceland in July. The following summer, Severin and his crew set out again, sailing from Iceland to Newfoundland, which they reached less than two months later, thus proving - not the unprovable, that Saint Brendan had really sailed to the coast of North America - but that an early medieval Irish coracle was at least capable of making the voyage.

Perhaps when you've done one voyage like this, you ache to do it again: at any rate, like Thor Heyerdahl before him, Tim Severin has famously continued to recreate archaic voyages. His second expedition, in 1984, was in 'Argo', a reconstruction of a Mycenean galley, following as nearly as possible the course of Jason and the Argonauts across the Mediterranean and up the Bosphorus and on to Georgia, land of the Golden Fleece.

Argo's beaked prow

And here it gets personal, because in summer 1984 as the expedition was returning from Georgia via Istanbul, a sunburnt young man called David, who happened to be my boyfriend and who had decided that the way to relax after three years of studying physics at London's Imperial College would be to back-pack solo around Turkey, had a certain encounter in an Istanbul post-office. I'll let him take up the tale:

DAVID'S STORY

David does the dishes, Argo fashion

Three men with arms like legs approached me. "Are you English?" They'd observed me apparently cracking the code of the Turkish phone system - 5 minutes puzzling over a huge, flabby directory in a dingy Istanbul post office, 1984 - and getting as far as making a call (to the British Embassy, unsuccessful). I clued them in on how the phones worked. "But what's that?" said I, peering intently at their T-shirts, from which protruded their Olympic scale arms:

ΑΡΓΟΝΑΥΤΙΚΑ

At anchor

Now any self respecting physicist, but more especially a graduate of Patrick Moore's 'Observer's Book of Astronomy', c.1969 (alpha-this, gamma-that is conspicuous in the winter sky, etc), should be able to read alphabetical greek... "Argonautica... is that the Tim Severin expedition?" - the one I'd read about in my father's Telegraph supplement? I'd just sailed back from Trebizond on the regular ferry after back-packing around Turkey. They'd just rowed a thousand miles in the opposite direction from Volos (Iolcos) to Georgia; their tremendous callouses bore witness to that fact, and to pretty useless winds. But they'd reached Jason's destination and found that people still "pan for gold" using sheep fleeces there, in the mountain streams.

Rowing hard...

I enthused, madly, and was told Tim was planning to sail Αργο next year, this time following the homeward trek of Ulysses from Troy. Versus the geographically exact Apollonius who wrote down 'Jason', Homer gives few recognisable locations for the Odyssey (and so providing Tim with the rationale for another clue searching expedition) but all the book-men agreed that the land of the Lotus Eaters simply must have been Libya. That sounded exciting! so I managed to persuade Tim to take me on for that (middle) leg of the voyage. Unfortunately, Colonel Gaddafi wasn't in the mood even for a bunch of adventurers in a Mycenaean galley and Tim spent days away on a fruitless trip to various Libyan consulates in search of promised visas (and that was before the Reagan / Thatcher raid on Tripoli).

Old and new

But we did find plenty of traces of the legend around and along the Cretan coast, from the island whose earlier name was "Leather Bag", situated at the crossroads of the Aegean, to a very good candidate (with local backing) for the Cyclops cave, complete with British wartime ration tins in the back, dropped for the Resistance. One could imagine P.L. Fermor having been another visitor, once.

Viewed from the cliffs

And we did find out what a very difficult job it is sailing a square rigger with no keel and simple rig in a season with way too much wind: and it's pointless rowing with 30 degree roll - so our callouses were nothing much to show. No wonder it took him 9 years to get back. Our particular Argo is no more (a sad story) but I did hold one of her great, heavy oars again in a ship museum in Eyemouth of all places. And identifed the black ring where the lead counterweight was jammed on, perfectly positioned to thwack into the spine of the rower in front if you got your stroke wrong. A thousand miles of that? They must have been heroes.

Argo under full sail

Stuck at home like Penelope, I was extremely envious, of course. (I finally got the envy out of my system a few years ago learning to sail a reconstructed Viking age ship on a Danish fjord.) But there were no women on the voyage and in any case I obviously didn't have the Olympic-style muscles required for the job. So I whiled away some of the time by thinking up adventurous things I could do on my own, such as going up in a glider - I know - feeble by comparison - and some of the time composing and illustrating my own spoof Mystical Voyage, 'Jason and the AgonyAunts: a silly tale in eight fits', which I gave David when he got back and which I'm going to post on this blog over the next few weeks, beginning on November 25. (For the benefit of American readers, an 'Agony Aunt' is the cheery British term for an advice columnist in a magazine or newspaper.) It's just a bit of fun, but I enjoyed making it and I hope you'll enjoy reading it.

And David? Well, what do you think? Reader, I married him.

Picture credits: All photos by David Gahan, except for 'Argo under Full Sail' by Rick Williams: all photos copyright Tim Severin and used by kind permission of Tim Severin

Further reading: The Jason Voyage and The Ulysses Voyage by Tim Severin

"FORSAKEN"

2011-11-10T01:09:00.000-08:00

Mara's mother is missing, her little brother is sick, maybe dying, her father is grieving. It all seems hopeless - until Mara sets out on a life-or-death journey to bring her mother home.

Please excuse a quick interruption to service (Mystical Voyages will be back tomorrow) so that I can do a little dance and tell you that my mermaid book 'Forsaken' is published today by Franklin Watts/EDGE, along with three other titles by Ali Sparkes, Andy Briggs and Joe Craig in a series called Rivets.

All four in the series are short stories individually published, intended for readers of nine plus who aren't confident about tackling thicker volumes.

'Forsaken' is - along with most of my other books - based on folklore, on a tale which is most famously the inspiration for Matthew Arnold's beautiful 19th century poem 'The Forsaken Merman' - the story of a merman who marries a human woman, Margaret.

COME, dear children, let us away;
            Down and away below.
    Now my brothers call from the bay;
    Now the great winds shoreward blow;
    Now the salt tides seaward flow;
    Now the wild white horses play,
    Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
        Children dear, let us away.
            This way, this way!

The merman, who speaks the poem, has married a human woman, Margaret. They lived happily together under the sea till one day she heard church bells ringing in the world above, and felt a sudden longing to go and pray. The merman agreed to part with her for a short visit but once on land she never returned to the sea, leaving her husband and little mer-children desolate.

Come away, away, children.
    Come children, come down.
    The hoarse wind blows colder;
    Lights shine in the town.
    She will start from her slumber
    When gusts shake the door;
    She will hear the winds howling,
    Will hear the waves roar.
    We shall see, while above us
    The waves roar and whirl,
    A ceiling of amber,
    A pavement of pearl.
    Singing, 'Here came a mortal,
    But faithless was she:
    And alone dwell for ever
    The kings of the sea.'

I read this poem many times as a child and always loved its lilting, changing rhythms and the beauty of its descriptions, as well as feeling sorry for the poor, heartbroken merman. It's the opposite of the Selkie story which I use in 'West of the Moon': about the fisherman who takes a selkie bride, and the message of both tales seems to be about the attraction of the Other, as well as the difficulty of living with it. Of course the old belief about merfolk - as for all faerie folk - was that unlike human beings, they had no souls. Margaret fears she too will lose her immortal soul and her chance of heaven if she stays with the merman. This fear leads her to abandon her husband and children. And here is an eternal question, one still being asked and played out today in many a family: was she right to follow her beliefs? Or wrong to cause her family so much unhappiness?

In the original Danish ballad, which I think Arnold must have read, 'Agnete and the Merman', the woman lives eight years with the Merman under the sea until one day she 'hears the clocks of England chime' and asks permisson to go to church. She meets her mother at the church door. 'Where hast thou been?' 'I have been at the bottom of the sea, and have seven sons by the Merman'. The Merman comes to find her, but when he peeps into the church, all the little stone images turn their backs on him.

When I read this, a shiver ran down my spine and I knew I had to tell the story again - but this time I wondered, what would have happened if, instead of the merman, one of Margaret's own daughters came to find her...?

'Forsaken' is available from today as a 'proper' book and as an e-book on Amazon.

Mystical Voyages (8) Saint Brendan ...and Caspian again.

2011-11-04T01:25:00.000-07:00

As I said last week, for me, aged 10, the journey of King Caspian and his friends to the End of the World (in ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’) seemed completely original, but I now know that C.S. Lewis was borrowing from the traditional Old Irish voyage tales known as immrama. Most involve voyages towards the west, the traditional (European) direction for the Otherworld, where the sun sets into the sea. The immrama hark back to older pre-Christian Celtic voyage tales: but the briefest of readings will show that the stories of Bran or Maeldune are simple entertainment compared with the difficult and cryptic Welsh poem, ‘The Spoils of Annwfn’.

It's hard to disentangle cause and effect, belief and tradition. Why was it the practice of many an early Celtic monk to set sail for a remote island on which to live and meditate – like Saint Cuthbert on Inner Farne, who was observed by the community on Lindisfarne to pray all night standing in the sea? Was it only for the solitude and sense of being cut off from the world, or was there a half-hidden memory or tradition that the voyage itself was a holy act which would bring the traveller at last to set bodily foot upon the shore of another world? Alongside the fame of their monasteries, is there a second reason why Lindisfarne off the east coast of Britain, and Iona off the west, are both named ‘Holy Island’?

We’ll never know, any more than we’ll ever be able to answer the question I asked at the beginning of this series on Mystical Voyages, if prehistoric peoples who set out under sail or oar in the earliest times and colonised previously uninhabited lands all over the globe, may have done so partly out of a belief that they were voyaging to the land of spirits, gods, and their ancestors, the blessed dead.

‘... do you think,’ says Lucy in ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’, ‘Aslan’s country would be that sort of country – I mean, the sort you could ever sail to?’

Well, who knew? There was only one way to find out.

This Irish in particular, stationed as they are on the western verge of Northern Europe, were in a particularly good position to ask themselves the question, ‘What might be out there?’ One of the earliest parts of the British Isles to become Christian, Ireland was sending out missionaries to England and the continent by the 6th century AD: which is also the era of Saint Brendan.

Brendan, whose voyages are recorded in many manuscripts, sets off into the Atlantic Ocean in search of Paradise, the Land of the Blessed, after dreaming of ‘a beautiful island with angels serving upon it’. Later, hearing the account of a fellow monk, Mernoke, who claimed to have sailed to the Earthly Paradise, Brendan puts out in a curragh – a hide boat – with twelve companions in search of this country. He spends years wandering the Atlantic between island and island: the island of the ‘Comely Hound’ (a dog which leads them to a hall with a table spread with food); the Island of Sheep, ‘every sheep the size of an ox’; ‘The Paradise of Birds’, on which the angels who fell with Lucifer, but whose fault was small, live in the form of small birds all rejoicing and singing the matins and the verses of the psalms…

And I particularly like the amiable sea monster, ‘Jasconye the Fish’, whom the monks mistake for an island and who – after a startled first occasion when he swims off, bearing the fire the monks have lighted upon him still on his back – allows Brendan and his companions to celebrate Easter upon his back as an annual occurrence. Brendan seems to know all about this beast, explaining to his companions that Jasconye is for ever vainly trying to swallow his own tail. Is this an echo of the Northern Midgard Serpent, or simply a bit of early medieval natural science? Here he is anyway, on a map of 1621, obligingly stretched out between the east coast of Africa and 'the Fortunate Isles', with 'St Brendan's Isle' to the north.

There’s a clear sea like Maeldune’s, full of fishes which come to hear Mass:

So clear that they could see to the bottom, and it was all covered with a great heap of fishes. …And the fishes awoke and started up and came all around the ship in a heap, that they could hardly see the water for fishes. But when the mass was ended each one of them turned himself and swam away, and they saw them no more.

It’s lovely, I think, that all nature is included in this Celtic Christianity.

Like Maeldune and his friends, Brendan and his companions also venture close to what seems suspiciously like an erupting volcano:

There came a south wind that drove them on… and at the end of eight days they saw far away in the north a dark country full of stench and of smoke; and as the ship drew near it they heard great blowing and blasting of bellows, and a noise of blows and a noise like thunder, the way they were all afeared and blessed themselves. …And with that there came demons thick about them on every side, with tongs and with fiery hammers, and followed after them till it seemed all the sea to be one fire… and they saw a hill all on fire and like as if walled in with fire, and clouds upon it…

This has to be Iceland, surely? To Brendan of course, it’s the borders of hell, and therefore hardly surprising that their next encounter is with poor Judas Iscariot, marooned on a rock.

In the end, after forty days more sailing, and showers of hail, and fog, Brendan and his companions do reach the Land of Promise, the Blessed Land. Oddly enough, although they should be sailing west, the land they see is to the east. (Perhaps this is because east is the direction of Jerusalem: the Earthly Paradise is always located to the east in later medieval maps.) It is:

...clear and lightsome, and the trees full of fruit on every bough… and the air neither hot nor cold but always one way, and the delight that they found there could never be told. Then they came to a river that they could not cross but they could see beyond it the country that had no bounds to its beauty. Then there came to them a young man… and took [Brendan] by the hand and said to him…

‘Here is the country you have been in search of, but it is our Lord’s will you should go back again and make no delay… And this river you see here is the mering,’ he said, ‘that divides the worlds, for no man may come to the other side of it while he is in life; [and when he dies] it is then there will be leave to see this country towards the world’s end.’

Praising God and laden with fruit of the country, and precious, stones, Brendan returns to Ireland and dies, his whole mind set on the heaven he has already seen.

No wonder C.S. Lewis wrote ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’. Reading these old immrama, the writer in me longs to snatch up a pen and begin making one of my own. The Christianisation of the old myths in the Voyages of Maeldune and Brendan especially lent themselves to Lewis’s Christian fantasy where the Land of the Blessed, Aslan’s country, can just be glimpsed over the top of the stationary wave at the world’s edge. Lewis tells it in almost the same flat yet awed manner of the immrama – the voice of one simply reporting or recording genuine wonders.

Eastwards – beyond the sun – was a range of mountains. It was so high that either they never saw the top or they forgot it. None of them remembers seeing any sky in that direction. And the mountains must really have been outside the world. For any mountains even a quarter or a twentieth of that height ought to have had ice and snow on them. But these were warm and green and full of forests and waterfalls however high you looked. And suddenly there came a breeze from the east, tossing the top of the wave into foamy shapes and ruffling the smooth water all round them. …It brought a smell and a sound, a musical sound. Edmund and Eustace would never talk about it afterwards. Lucy could only say, ‘It would break your heart.’

‘Why,’ said I, ‘was it so sad?’

‘Sad! No,’ said Lucy.

NB: I am also to be found, this morning, over at The History Girls, talking about girls dressed as boys in historical fiction.

Picture credits:

Saint Brendan - image found at the blog Logismoi

Saint Brendan and Jasconye the fish - Honorius Philoponus, Nova typis transacta navigatio novi orbis Indiae Occidentalis, 1621

Mystical Voyages (7) Bran, Maeldune and ...Prince Caspian?

2011-10-28T01:01:00.000-07:00

‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ was the very last Narnia book which I came to. I’d read the series way out of sequence, beginning with ‘The Silver Chair’ and gobbling the others in random order one after another as they were given to me for birthday or Christmas presents, or borrowed from the library. So the day I was finally given ‘The Dawn Treader’ was a memorable one - and not only because my little brother was in hospital recovering from an emergency operation.

My parents knew that a present of the book I’d been longing for would keep me happily tucked up in an armchair for a couple of hours while they went visiting. (I can still almost feel the chair’s bristly upholstery against my bare legs as, quite unworried about my poor little brother, I curled up and began to read.)

‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ swept me away into an open-air world full of light. Light pervades the book: the light of sunrise over the sea, the sunlit quiet passages of the Magician’s House, sunbeams penetrating the green waters of the undersea world beneath the ship, the birds that come flying out of the rising sun to the table of the Three Sleepers, the almost painful light of the Silver Sea.

For me, aged 10, the Mystical Voyage of Caspian and his friends to the End of the World - island-hopping as usual - seemed completely original, but I now know that C.S. Lewis was borrowing from the traditional Old Irish voyage tales known as immrama, in which a hero or saint sets out for some kind of Otherworld, stopping at a number of fantastic or miraculous islands along the way. Written in the Christian era, they hark back to older pre-Christian Celtic voyage tales, and may also have been consciously influenced by the classical tales of the Odyssey and Argonautika.

In ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ the heroic mouse Reepicheep expects to find ‘Aslan’s own country’: and he does, in spite of Lucy’s question, ‘But do you think… Aslan’s country would be that sort of country – I mean, the sort you could ever sail to?’

The answer of the immrama would be: ‘Yes! Although you may not always get back.’

The Irish hero Bran’s Mystical Voyage begins when, after being lulled to sleep by the magical music of a silver branch with white apple-blossoms, he meets a woman who invites him to seek the wonders of the Emain Ablach or ‘Isle of Women’, where there is peace and plenty and no one is ever sick or dies. Bran sets out after her with twenty-seven companions and three curraghs – nine men in each boat. After sailing for two days he is encouraged by meeting Mannanan Mac Lir, god of the sea, driving his golden chariot over the sea, who tells Bran he should reach the Isle of Women by sunset. First however they come across an island on which everyone is laughing, and when Bran sends one of his men to investigate, he begins laughing too, and will not return to the boats. (Is this reminiscent of the Odyssey's Land of the Lotus Eaters?) They are forced to leave him there, and sail away.

Arriving at the Isle of Women, Bran’s boat is drawn into port by a ball of magical thread which the queen tosses to him. Each of the men is paired with a beautiful woman, Bran sharing the bed of the queen, and they remain there happily, unaware of how much time is passing in the real world, until Nechtan son of Collbran becomes homesick and Bran decides to return home. The queen warns against it, and especially against setting foot on land, but Bran insists – but when they sight Ireland, so many years have passed that Bran’s name is only an ancient legend, and when Nechtan leaps out of the curragh, he crumbles to dust. (Just the same fate befalls one of Oisin's companions in the legend of Oisin and the fairy woman Niamh.) At the sight, Bran and his companions sail away, never to be seen in Ireland again.

The hero Maeldune also discovers these same two islands which Bran found, but his is a longer voyage and a happier homecoming. Setting out to avenge the killing of his father Ailill, his journey is extended because he fails to follow the advice of a druid to take only seventeen men with him. His three foster brothers swim after the ship, and Maeldune picks them up – but one by one loses them as they visit or pass thirty or so marvellous islands and a variety of other wonders. At last Maeldune receives the advice of a hermit that he will only be able to return home safely once he has forgiven his father’s murderer. Maeldune does so and makes a safe landfall.

Along the way Maeldune and his companions see such wonders as the Isle of Ants ‘every one of them the size of a foal’; an Island of Birds; an island where demon riders run a giant horse race; an island of a miraculous apple tree whose fruit satisfy the whole crew for ‘forty nights’; an island where a mysterious beast turns itself around and around inside its skin (and hurls stones at the voyagers); an island of fiery pigs, an island of a little cat; a ‘four-fenced’ island divided into quarters for kings, queens, fighting men and young girls respectively; an island where giant smiths strike away on anvils and hurl a huge lump of red-hot iron after the boat (surely a volcanic eruption?) so that ‘the whole of the sea boiled up’.

The Very Clear Sea

They went on after that till they came to a sea that was like glass, and so clear it was that the gravel and the sand of the sea could be seen through it, and they saw no beasts or monsters at all among the rocks, but only the clean gravel and the grey sand. And through a great part of the day they were going over that sea, and it is very grand it was and beautiful.

Surely this influenced C.S. Lewis’s ‘Silver Sea’! ('How beautifully clear the water is' said Lucy to herself as she leaned over the port side early in the afternoon...'I must be seeing the bottom of the sea; fathoms and fathoms down.' Although Lewis soon fills his clear sea with the Sea People and their castle, as shown in this lovely illustration by Pauline Baynes.)

Maeldune soon comes across another marvel: one of my favourites:

The Silver-Meshed Net

They went on then till they found a great silver pillar; four sides it had, and the width of each of the sides was two strokes of an oar; and there was not one sod of earth about it, but only the endless ocean; and they could not see what way it was below, and they could not see what way the top of it was because of its height. There was a silver net from the top of it that spread out a long way on every side, and the curragh went under sail through a mesh of that net.

Diuran, one of Maeldune’s companions, strikes the net with his spear to obtain a piece:

“Do not destroy the net,” said Maeldune, “for we are looking at the work of great men.” “It is for the praise of God’s name I am doing it,” said Diuran, “The way my story will be better believed; and it is to the altar of Ardmacha I will give this mesh of the net if I get back to Ireland.” Two ounces and a half now was the weight when it was measured after in Ardmacha. They heard then a voice from the top of the pillar very loud and clear, but they did not know in what strange language it was speaking or what word it said.

I love the way these voyage tales don’t try to explain anything: they simply delight in the marvellous inventions (of the poet, or of God) and convey a sense of great wonder at the things men find when they set out upon the illimitable sea.

All quotatations are from Lady Gregory's translations of the voyages in her 'Book of Saints and Wonders'

Picture credits: cover and illustration from 'The Voyage of the Dawn Treader' by Pauline Baynes
Bran meets Manannan Mac Llyr : 'The Voyage of Bran': Tapestry by Terry the Weaver/Terry Dunn, 1996

Mystical Voyages (6) Arthur's Voyage to the Underworld

2011-10-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you don't tend to think of Arthur as a voyager? Bear with me, and I'll explain.

Some of the earliest mentions of Arthur come from ninth or tenth century Welsh literature – just glancing references, as if to someone already well-known. The earliest of all may be a couple of lines from the poem Y Gododdin, in which another warrior is compared with Arthur:

He fed black ravens on the ramparts of a fortress,
Though he was no Arthur.

This makes sense if the historical Arthur really was a fourth or fifth century British war leader fighting the Saxon invaders: his name perhaps a nickname or pseudonym: ‘the Bear’, suitable for a fighter who may have wished to maintain an air of terrifying mystery. Whoever the historical Arthur may have been, his name soon became associated with all kinds of older legends connected with supernatural figures from Celtic mythology, and such stories continued to be told about him in all parts of Celtic – that is British – Britain, and in Brittany, the region of France to which many British Celts migrated after the fall of Roman Britain.

Even in Sir Thomas Malory’s late 15th century ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’, with its many courtly French additions and sources, plenty of Welsh and Celtic personages and motifs remain: the most obvious is Merlin himself, and the Lady of the Lake who gives Arthur his sword Excalibur, and then there's Arthur’s shadowy relationship with his half-sisters, Morgause the mother of their son Mordred, and Morgan le Fay – Morgan the enchantress, whose name chimes with that of the Morrigan (‘great queen’ or ‘phantom queen’), the Irish Celtic goddess of battle and fertility. At any rate, Morgan is one of the queens who carry the wounded king away to the Isle of Avalon after the battle of Camlann.

And when they were at the water side, even fast by the bank hoved a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur.

…‘Comfort thyself,’ said the king, ‘…for in me is no trust for to trust in, for I will into the vale of Avilion to heal me of my grievous wound, and if thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul.’

But ever the queen and ladies shrieked, that it was pity to hear.

The shrieking and keening women, companions of a powerful sorceress, the ship that carries the heroic king away to the island of the dead, the island of apples – seems familiar, doesn’t it?

At any rate, there is an earlier – and highly cryptic – account of a voyage by Arthur to the Underworld. It’s the marvellous Welsh poem Prieddeu Annwfn, preserved in the single 14th century manuscript of The Book of Taliesin, but dated (cautiously) by internal linguistic evidence to around 900 AD. Here’s a link to the poem, with notes. It's an account of a raid led by Arthur, in his ship Prydwen, on Annwn, the Welsh underworld.

Annwn is described by a number of different epithets. No one has a clue if these are simply varying descriptions/manifestations of the same place, or intended for different locations which Arthur and his men encounter along their way. It may not matter much, but in the context of the Mystical Voyages I’ve been thinking about so far in this series, the latter fits in well with the island-hopping itinerary of heroes in ships gradually approaching their destination through a transformed and numinous sea-scape.

The poem tells how Arthur and his men travel to Caer Sidi, ‘The Mound Fortress’; Caer Pedryuan, ‘the Four-Peaked Fortress’ – also described as Ynis Pybyrdor, ‘isle of the strong door’. They travel to Caer Vedwit, ‘the Fortress of Mead-Drunkenness’, Caer Rigor, ‘Fortress of Hardness’, Caer Wydyr, ‘Glass Fortress’, Caer Golud, ‘Fortress in the Bowels [of the Earth?]’, Caer Vandwy, ‘Fortress of God’s Peak’, and Caer Ochren, ‘Enclosed Fortress’. Alan Garner used some of these names in his book Elidor, which references the poem in other ways.

The aim of the expedition was to bring back a cauldron from the lord of Annwn. We're not thinking blackened kitchen pots here: we're thinking inspirational, magical, perhaps sacred items like the 1st century BC Gundestrop cauldron, above. One of the many scenes on its sides depicts a pony-tailed warrior dipping a man into another such cauldron headfirst, probably to restore him to life:

In my personal favourite among Alan Garner's books, 'Elidor', the children bring four treasures out of the Mound of Vandwy. corresponding to the Four Treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan: a spear, a sword, a stone and a bowl: 'a cauldron, with pearls above the rim. And as she walked, light splashed and ran through her fingers like water'. Taken into the workaday world of 1960's Manchester, however, the objects change appearance, and Helen finds she is carrying only 'an old cracked cup, with a beaded pattern moulded on the rim.' Once these treasures have been buried in the garden for safekeeping, however, all kinds of strange disturbances begin to occur, culminating in the eruption of the unicorn Findhorn onto the city streets.

Here’s the second stanza of the Prieddeu Annwfn:

I am honoured in praise. Song was heard
In the Four-Peaked Fortress, four times revolving.
My poetry, from the cauldron it was uttered.
By the breath of nine maidens it was kindled.
The cauldron of the chief of Annwfn: what its fashion?
A dark ridge around its border, and pearls.
It does not boil the food of a coward...

And before the door of hell lamps burned.
And when we went with Arthur in his splendid labour,
Except seven, none rose up from Caer Vedwit.

Most of the eight stanzas end with a variation on the recurrent line: ‘Except seven, none returned’: by ordinary standards the expedition appears to have been disastrous, but this is no ordinary poem. Fateful and gloomy, mysterious as Arthur himself, all we can gather from it is some sense of a venture, by ship, by sea, into the Otherworld, and - perhaps – a description of a mound or island where a youth, Gweir, is imprisoned, lapped with a heavy blue-grey chain. Of a four-peaked fortress with a strong door, guarding a cauldron full of the magical life-giving mead of poetry, warmed by the breath of ‘nine maidens’. And of a fortress of glass with six thousand men lining the walls (‘it was difficult to speak with their sentinel’).

In the medieval story of Culhwch and Olwen in the Mabinogion, Arthur sails to Ireland in his ship Prydwen to steal the cauldron of Diwwnach Wyddel: not just any old cauldron either, for it’s also listed in ‘The Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain’ as the cauldron of Dyrnwich the Giant, which will not boil the food of a coward. Clearly the same cauldron as that which Arthur went to find in Annwn, and doubtless the same also as the Irish Cauldron of the Dagda, from which 'no man ever went away unsatisfied'.

How old is this legend of magical, life-giving cauldrons? As old as Medea's? Is hers' the ultimate origin of the witches' cauldron that we find in 'Macbeth'? Who knows? Lastly, also in the Mabinogion, the Welsh hero Bran is the keeper of yet another magical cauldron which restores the dead to life. And he too is the subject of a Mystical Voyage. More about him and some other Celtic voyagers next week!

Picture credits:
The Death of Arthur by James Archer, 1823-1902
The Death of Arthur by Katharine Cameron
The Gundestrop Cauldron
Detail from the Gundestrop Cauldron
Illustration by Charles Keeping from 'Elidor' by Alan Garner

Mystical Voyages (5) Jason and the Argonauts

2011-10-14T00:56:00.000-07:00

Although I said that the Odyssey was the grand-daddy of voyage stories, perhaps I was rash, for the story of Jason and the Argonauts is just as old and maybe even older. We know this because Homer clearly expected his audience would be familiar with it. In Book 12 of the Odyssey, when Circe is advising Odysseus and his men how to avoid the Clashing Rocks, she says:

…against them

crashes the heavy swell of dark-eyed Amphitrite…

That way the only sea-going ship to get through was the Argo,

who is in all men’s minds, on her way home from Aeetes;

and even she would have been driven on the great rocks that time,

but Hera saw her through, out of her great love for Jason.

But the only full remaining account of Jason’s adventures is the ‘Argonautika’ by Apollonius of Rhodes, written in the mid 3^rd century BC and clearly a ‘literary’ achievement, while the Odyssey, like the Iliad, dates from the late 8^th century BC - so I tend to think of Jason as coming later. (Add the fact that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey refer to events of the Bronze Age in the early 12^th century BC, and I don’t know about you, but I begin to feel giddy with all this gazing into the dark backward and abysm of time.)

I rather like the story that Apollonius wrote the first draft of the Argonautika as a very young man, and it got terrible reviews. Undeterred, he moved from Alexandria to Rhodes, rewrote the poem, and finally published it to great critical acclaim - a story which demonstrates the importance of resilience (and revision) for writers of all eras!

Anyway, as everyone knows, the Argo was built to carry Jason and his band of fifty heroes (including Hercules, Hylas, Orpheus, and the twins Castor and Pollux) all the way from Thessaly to Colchis, Georgia, in search of the Golden Fleece. Argo herself was a prophetic ship with her own voice, for a beam of the sacred oak of the oracle of Zeus at Dodona had been built into her.

Jason wept as he turned his eyes away from the land of his birth. But the rest struck the rough sea with their oars in time with Orpheus’ lyre, like young men bringing down their quick feet on the earth in unison with one another and the lyre, as they dance for Apollo round his altar at Pytho… On either side the dark salt water broke into foam, seething angrily in answer to the strong men’s strokes. The armour on the moving ship glittered in the sunshine like fire, and all the time she was followed by a long white wake which stood out like a path across a green plain.

Can’t you just smell the salt? I love this vigorous, stirring passage. It’s so clearly an account by someone who has often seen these very things.

As in all these mystical voyages, the Argo island-hops to her destination – reflecting the real-life practice of ancient ships which rarely spent long out of sight of land. The heroes head first for Lemnos in the Northern Aegean, where the women of the island have recently murdered all their menfolk and greet the Argonauts as useful breeding partners to repopulate the island. From thence the Argo passes the Hellespont and heads into the Sea of Marmara, making landfall at Cius in Bythynia (northwest Turkey) where Hercules’ companion, the youth Hylas, is drowned by a nymph as he goes to fetch water:

The naiad of the spring was just emerging as Hylas drew near. And there, with the full moon shining on him from a clear sky, she saw him in all his radiant beauty and alluring grace. Her heart was flooded by desire… Hylas now leant over to one side to dip his ewer in, and as soon as the water was gurgling loudly round the ringing bronze she threw her left arm round his neck in her eagerness to kiss his gentle lips. Then with her right hand she drew his elbow down and plunged him in midstream.

Terribly upset, Hercules abandons ship at this point and the Argo sails on without him. At the Bosphorus, the Argo encounters the Harpies and the Clashing Rocks till, finally arriving at Colchis, Jason wins the Golden Fleece with the aid of the witch princess Medea. Jason’s protectresses, the goddesses Hera and Athene, bribe little Eros to shoot one of his arrows at Medea, ensuring she falls in love with their protégé. In the charming passage where they beg Eros’ mother Aphrodite to assist them, she responds:

“He is far more likely to obey you than me. There is no reverence in him, but faced by you he might display some spark of decent feeling. He certainly pays no attention to me… I am so worn out by his naughtiness I have half a mind to break his bow and wicked arrows in his very sight, remembering how he threatened me with them in one of his moods. He said, ‘If you don’t keep your hands off me while I can still control my temper, you can blame yourself for the consequences."

Hera and Athene smiled at this and exchanged glances.

Transfixed by Eros’ arrow, Medea has no choice. She falls in love and shows Jason how to pass (and survive) the three tests set by her father King Aeetes: to harness bulls with bronze hooves, to plough the field of the war god Ares, and to sow the dragons’ teeth which turn into an army of warriors. Finally, as King Aeetes still refuses to part with the Fleece, Medea uses her herbal skills to put to sleep the dragon which guards the Fleece.

It seems likely the legend of the Fleece itself sprang from the ancient Georgian practice of using sheep fleeces submerged in running streams to collect particles of gold, and this may be reflected in a sentence from one of Pindar’s odes which describes ‘the fleece, glowing with matted skeins of gold’ (trans: Nigel Nicolson). But in the Argonautika it takes on a much more magical appearance:

Lord Jason held up the great fleece in his arms. The shimmering wool threw a fiery glow on his fair cheeks and forehead and he rejoiced in it, glad as a girl who catches on her silken gown the lovely light of the full moon as it climbs the sky and looks into her attic room. …The very ground before him as he walked was bright with gold.

Jason and Medea escape together on the Argo, and eventually return to Thessaly, avoiding the Sirens and helped through the Clashing Rocks by sea nymphs who:

… holding their skirts up over their white knees, began to run along on top of the reefs and breaking waves, following each other on either side of the ship. Argo, caught in the current, was tossed to right and left… but the Nereids, passing the ship from hand to hand and side to side, kept her scudding through the air on top of the waves. It was like the game which young girls play beside a sandy beach, when they roll their skirts up to their waists on either side and toss a ball round to each other, throwing it high in the air so that it never touches the ground.

Isn’t that lovely? Old as the story of Jason may be, this later telling of Apollonius often feels light, sophisticated and playful. But the voyage across the sea to Colchis, and the journey into the sacred, dragon-or-serpent-guarded grove has a resonance that has lasted down the ages. And Medea is Circe’s niece, a priestess of Hecate, goddess of childbirth, death, necromancy, doorways and crossroads, magic, torches and dogs. In keeping with this, Medea is an often ruthless figure of great power, who near the end of the Argonautika calls on the spirits of death, the hounds of Hades, to slay the bronze giant Talos. In other versions of her legend, she is the owner of a magical cauldron which can restore life to the dead (something which will turn up in Celtic mythology too: see next week's post). She poisons her rivals and murders her own children. The voyage of Jason to the land of the Golden Fleece and his meeting with Medea, giver of life and death, seems to suggest that his too is an Otherworld journey.

The quotation from the Odyssey in this post is from the translation by Richmond Lattimore, Harper Torchbooks, 1965

The quotations from the Argonautika are from the Penguin translation by E.V. Rieu

Picture credits: The Argo and Argonauts - red-figure Greek vase
Building of the Argo - William Russell Flint

Hylas and the Nymphs - John Waterhouse

Jason and the Golden Fleece - Apulian red-figure krater

Naiads Playing - Arnold Böcklin

Mystical Voyages (4) The Sirens

2011-10-10T01:06:00.000-07:00

The sirens were originally young girls, the friends of Persephone, who were changed into birds with girls' faces after she was abducted by Hades. Of course, this means they are the companions of the powerful goddess of death, and their irresistable song will take your spirit into the Otherworld (while your body lies lies rotting in their meadow full of bones).

So this quick post is another poem. This is one of mine: and it's the only poem I ever wrote which - rather than being consciously composed - seemed to come to me through the ether, as though I were listening to a very faint voice on a distant radio and trying to make out the words.

It's also from a long time ago, when I was having an internal discussion with myself about whether I should be writing fantasy... (Was fantasy 'serious'? Wasn't it rather frivolous - derivative - escapist? Was it something that leached energy from reality, rather than enhancing it? I wanted to write fantasy, but I worried about it.)

Then this poem arrived and informed me direct from the muse that it didn't matter whether I worried or not. I have no choice about it. I write what I am compelled to write, and there really is no escape...

If you try to jump ship, you merely drown.

Ulysses

'Come here, young man,' the siren sings
from her unfaithful rock.
The knowledgeable dreamer
closes his crew's ears to the ringing sound,

but, all the summer, hears across the water
the cheated music slide
after his ship: 'Come back...'
There is no escaping from the experience.

Presently he approaches the cave-riddled land
of Giant One-Eye,
whose log-wide gaze
the dreamer is, of course, clever enough to burn out

but cannot help his friends, being No Body.
They were dreams, anyway.
With inevitable luck,
the boulder smashing into the sea misses him -

and so it goes on. On Circe's smoke-wrapped island
he is protected
by a magic herb,
but is permanently changed, unlike his comrades:

she saved her subtler incantations for him.
And so, on waking -
having reached home safely -
he finds that he is still a prisoner,

and all his clever tricks of touching wood,
crossing his fingers, tongue in
cheek during promises,
never fooled or hindered anyone at all.

At home now in the factual world he finds
his dream unbreakable.
'Come here, young man. Come here,
sailor, bold sailor,' impossible voices call.

Mystical Voyages (3) The Old Ships

2011-10-07T00:56:00.000-07:00

A couple of quick ones this week. Two poems, in fact. Here's the first, and the second will be up just after the weekend.

I remember coming across this poem in a school anthology, and it's stayed with me ever since. You probably know it too, but it's well worth reading again. It references not only the tale of Odysseus, but a story about Dionysos, god of wine and ecstasy. Once, sitting on the seashore in the form of a beautiful youth, he was kidnapped by sailors who dragged him on board their ship, intending to sail away and sell him into slavery. This turned out to be an extremely bad move - never kidnap gods! - for as they raised the sail, Dionysos caused vines to spring up all over the ship, twining up the mast and tangling the oars so that they could not move. Then he turned himself into a fierce lion and killed everyone on board, except for the helmsman who had pleaded for him, and those terrified sailors who had jumped into the sea, whom he transformed into dolphins. The story is depicted above by the painter Exekias in black-figure on the interior of a kylix, a shallow two-handled bowl for drinking wine.

'The Old Ships' by James Elroy Flecker

I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep

Beyond the village which men still call Tyre,

With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep

For Famagusta and the hidden sun
That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire;
And all those ships were certainly so old -

Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,

Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,

The pirate Genoese

Hell-raked them till they rolled

Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.

But now through friendly seas they softly run,

Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green,

Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold.

But I have seen,

Pointing her shapely shadows from the dawn

And image tumbled on a rose-swept bay,

A drowsy ship of some yet older day;

And, wonder's breath indrawn,

Thought I - who knows - who knows - but in that same

(Fished up beyond Aeaea, patched up new -

Stern painted brighter blue -)

That talkative, bald-headed seaman came

(Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar)

From Troy's doom-crimson shore,

And with great lies about his wooden horse

Set the crew laughing, and forgot his course.

It was so old a ship - who knows, who knows?

- And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain

To see the mast burst open with a rose,

And the whole deck put on its leaves again.

Mystical Voyages (2) Odysseus

2011-09-30T00:09:00.000-07:00

'Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew…’

So speaks the aging Ulysses to his companions in Tennyson’s great poem. Unwilling ‘to rust unburnished’ and die by his own hearth, he sets out actively to seek the lands beyond the sunset, the home of the heroic dead.

But the voyages Odysseus makes in the Odyssey have already taken him alive into the Otherworld – to many a magical island ruled by nymphs and goddesses, and at last to the very shores of death. At the beginning of the Odyssey, the gods are discussing the latest news from Mycenae, where Orestes has just struck down Aegisthus, his father’s killer. Zeus complains that men blame the gods for their misfortunes, when in reality they bring troubles upon themselves. But Athene takes the opportunity to put in a plea for her own protégé Odysseus:

Aigisthus indeed has been struck down in a death well-merited.

…But the heart in me is torn for the sake of Odysseus,

unhappy man, who still, far from his friends, is suffering

griefs, on the sea-washed island, the navel of all the waters,

a wooded island, and there a goddess has made her dwelling-place.

This goddess is the nymph Calypso, who

…detains the grieving, unhappy

man, and ever with soft and flattering words she works to

charm him to forget Ithaka; and yet Odysseus

straining to get sight of the very smoke uprising

from his own country, longs to die.

Zeus agrees that it is indeed time to work on bringing the hero home.

The story of Odysseus is the grand-daddy of legendary voyage stories. Setting off from Troy with twelve ships, he and his men are driven by storms to the land of the Lotus Eaters (whose fruit causes memory-loss) and then the island of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who captures them for food ‘like killing puppies’ and from whom they escape after blinding him. Still grieving for their dead comrades, they make their next landfall at

…the Aiolian island where Aiolus

lived, Hippotas’ son, beloved by the immortal

gods, on a floating island, the whole enclosed by a rampart

of bronze…

Aiolus is in charge of the winds and gives Odysseus a leather bag holding all except the west wind – a gift which properly used should have carried the hero home. But while Odysseus sleeps his men open the bag, and all the winds burst out and drive them back on their course. Aiolus refuses to help them again, and, entering the harbour of the cannibal Laistrygonians, all Odysseus’ ships are destroyed except his own:

My ship and only mine, fled out from the overhanging

cliffs to the open water, but the others were all destroyed there.

We came to Aiaia, which is an island. There lived Circe

of the lovely hair, the dread goddess who talks with mortals.

Circe changes Odysseus’ remaining companions into swine, but, aided by Hermes who gives him the magical herb moly, Odysseus rescues them and becomes Circe’s lover. Finally, Circe advises them to sail to Hades, land of the dead, to consult the spirit of the seer Tiresias. Deeply shaken by this advice, Odysseus demands,

‘who will be our guide on that journey? No one

has ever yet in a black ship gone all the way to Hades.’

But the goddess tells him to raise sail and:

…let the blast of the North Wind carry you.

But when you have crossed with your ship the stream of Ocean, you will

find there a thickly wooded shore, and the groves of Persephone,

and tall black poplars growing, and fruit-perishing willows,

then beach your ship on the shore of the deep-eddying Ocean. And yourself
go forward into the mouldering home of Hades.

Odysseus meets many spirits of the dead here, including his own mother, whom he vainly attempts to embrace:

…three times

I started towards her, and my heart was urgent to hold her,

and three times she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow

or a dream, and the sorrow sharpened at the heart within me.

And Achilles, whom he tries to console with news of his earthly fame, only to receive the bitter reply:

I would rather follow the plough as thrall to another

man, one with no land allotted to him and not much to live on

than be king over all the perished dead.

This, from the Achilles of the Iliad who chose glory instead of length of days, shows how very different the mood of the Odyssey is from that of the Iliad…

Returning to Circe’s island, Odysseus and his men are given further advice about their homeward voyage. They skirt the island of the sweetly-singing Sirens who tempt sailors on to the rocks, and pass the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. Then the ship is wrecked (as punishment for hunting the cattle of the sun god Helios), and Odysseus is the only survivor. He is washed ashore on the island of the nymph Calypso, who keeps him as her lover for seven years until Zeus orders her to release him…

For me, one of the most fascinating things about the Odyssey is the prevalence of powerful women, beside whom Odysseus is simply a homeless wanderer. There are the nymphs Calypso and Circe, the female monsters Scylla and Charybdis, the goddesses Persephone and Athene, the Sirens, the princess Nausikaa who rescues Odysseus after his second shipwreck, and her mother Queen Arete whom Nausikaa advises Odysseus to approach first rather than her father King Alkinous. There is wise Penelope, Odysseus' wife: clearly queen in her own right since marriage to her will give one of the suitors kingship. There's even Odysseus' old nurse, who is the first person to recognise him on his return to Ithaka. And there's Odysseus’ longing to embrace his beloved mother in Hades. It’s so different from the warlike world of the Iliad in which women – Chryseis, Briseis, Andromache, Helen, Cassandra – are powerless victims. No wonder Robert Graves suggested in his novel ‘Homer’s Daughter’ that the Odyssey was written by a woman!

But most of all, the Odyssey sets the pattern for the Mystical Voyage, which takes the protagonist from one magical island to another, encountering mystery, danger and wonder. The island sealed with brazen walls, the island surrounded by whirlpools, the island of the winds, the dark shore of Death with its black poplars and whispering willows, all these will recur and echo down the centuries.

All quotations from the Odyssey in this post are from the translation by Richmond Lattimore, Harper Torchbooks, 1965

Picture Credits:

Odysseus and Calypso by Arnold Bocklin

The Island of the Dead by Arnold Bocklin

Mystical Voyages (1) Of Ships and Suns

2011-09-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

In all kinds of mythologies there are stories about sailing across the sea to a mystical land. Maybe peoples of all races and all times have this in their blood: anyone who’s ever stood at the seashore and seen the sun rising or setting over the ocean must have wondered, like my hero Peer Ulfsson in ‘West of the Moon’ what it would be like to find the lands beyond the sun:

He clambered across the cargo and up the curve of the ship into the stern, where he stood for a moment holding the tiller and gazing out westwards. The sun was low, laying a bright track over the water: a road studded with glittering cobblestones. It stung his heart and dazzled his eyes.

He felt a surge of longing. Life was a tangle that tied him to the shore. What would it be like to cut free, shake off the land, and go gliding away into the very heart of the sun?

That ships and suns go together can be seen from the Egyptian sun god Re with his two boats: the sun boat or Mandjet (Boat of Millions of Years) which carried him from east to west across the sky accompanied by various other deities and personifications, and the night boat, the Mesesket, on which the god travelled through the perilous underworld from west to east, to rise again in the morning.

How old is Re? Well, judging by the dates of temples dedicated to his worship, his cult rose to its zenith in the 5^th Dynasty, beginning approximately 2500 BCE. The dead were expected to spend eternity travelling with him across the sky. (Later his cult was superseded by the resurrection cult of Osiris.) The photo above this paragraph shows the full-size Egyptian ship known as the Khufu ship, 143 feet long and built of Lebanon cedar, which was sealed into a pit at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza: the remains of many other solar boats have been found in different locations in Egypt.

Rock engravings in Scandinavia, dated to the Bronze Age any time between 1500 and 400 BCE show the same correspondence between ships and suns. Here are some examples, reproduced in ‘The Chariot of the Sun and other Rites and Symbols of the Northern Bronze Age' by Peter Gelling and Hilda Ellis Davidson, showing ships embellished with sun discs and spirals.

But people have been heading out to sea for literally hundreds of thousands of years. Here’s a link to an article which seems to show that even before we were modern humans, hominids such as homo erectus ‘used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from Northern Africa to Europe’ – island-hopping as they went and leaving stone hand axes on Crete dating to at least 130,000 BCE. How amazing – how utterly mind-blowing is that? Modern humans crossed to Australia 60,000 years ago, and to North America earlier than 13,000 BCE.

Whatever drove them to make these discoveries? A nomadic hunter-gathering lifestyle is one thing: but setting off in a boat or on a raft on a one-way trip into an unknown ocean is quite another, especially with no population pressure pushing you on. I can’t help but wonder if there was there a religious, a mystical element to these early voyages of discovery. Maybe, standing on the sea shore, gazing at the sun rising or setting (depending which side of which continent they were), early peoples believed themselves to be embarking on journeys to follow the sun to the land of gods and the happy dead?

And those left behind, watching them depart, must have felt a huge sense of awe, wonder and mystery about what befell the seafarers. As it says in ‘Beowulf’, when the dead king Scyld Scefing is set adrift in his ship-funeral:

Then they set up / the standard of gold

High over head: / let the sea bear him:

Gave him to the flood / with sad hearts

And mourning minds. / Men cannot

Say for certain, / neither court-counsellors

Nor heroes under heaven, / who received that cargo.

Who received that cargo? By the time the Beowulf poem was written down, England was Christian. But the poem leaves us in doubt as to the eventual supernatural landfall of a pagan king: it was an age which could still hold Christian and pagan beliefs in relatively comfortable simultaneity – an age which, maybe, knew it didn’t have all the answers.

And people down the centuries have been buried in ships, like the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo ship, dating from the early 7^th century AD, and the Oseberg ship, circa 800 AD, which carried the bodies of two women, priestesses or queens, and the Gokstad ship, built of oak felled around 890 AD, sheltering the body of a man, perhaps a king. The 10^th century Muslim traveller Ibn Fadlan wrote an eyewitness account of a Viking ship-funeral in Russia: a chieftain interred in his ship along with many grave goods and sacrifices, including that of a slave girl who ‘saw’ into the land of the dead in a kind of drugged trance, after which she was strangled and stabbed and laid beside him to accompany him on his mystical voyage. According to Ibn Fadlan’s account, she had voluntarily offered herself as the sacrifice, and we needn’t be too sceptical. In all probability she utterly believed she would be accompanying her lord to the Otherworld. He was her passport to immortality.

So ships and suns and voyages into the west have been part of the human imagination for many thousands of years. After Re the sun god, there came Odysseus, Jason, Maelduine, Brendan, Oisin and many a nameless adventurer with them. There came the Christian hermits who sailed out to remote islets in the Atlantic, and the saints who founded monasteries on Holy Islands like Iona and Lindisfarne. And for the next few weeks, I’m off to explore some of these tales of mystical voyages.

So let’s set sail for the western isles, the land of the gods, the land of the dead, the land of the ever-young. Bid farewell to Middle-Earth. This way to Aeaea, Avalon, Tir na n’Og, Valinor, Eldamar, the Hesperides and Hy Brasil. Hush! Can you hear the seagulls crying?

Picture credits: Sunset over Roskilde fjord, Katherine Langrish 2005

The Khufu Ship

Ship and sun symbols: 'The Chariot of the Sun' by Peter Gelling & Hilda Ellis Davidson

AFTER - coming in 2012

2011-09-18T03:53:00.000-07:00

A little preview - a little taster -

The table of contents for the forthcoming Datlow and Windling YA dystopian anthology, 'AFTER' which will be published in the United States by Hyperion in 2012.

I'm so, so thrilled to be included in this company - just look at them! I can hardly wait to read the other stories.

Introduction
The Segment by Genevieve Valentine
After the Cure by Carrie Ryan
Valedictorian by N.K. Jemisin
Visiting Nelson by Katherine Langrish
All I Know of Freedom by Carol Emshwiller
The Other Elder by Beth Revis
The Great Game at the End of the World by Matthew Kressel
Reunion by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Faint Heart by Sarah Rees Brennan
Blood Drive by Jeffrey Ford
Reality Girl by Richard Bowes
Hw th’Irth Wint Wrong by Hapless Joey @ homeskool.guv by Gregory Maguire
Rust With Wings by Steven Gould
The Easthound by Nalo Hopkinson
Gray by Jane Yolen
Before by Carolyn Dunn
Fake Plastic Trees by Caitlin R. Kiernan
You Won’t Feel a Thing by Garth Nix
The Marker by Cecil Castellucci

'Bloodstone' by Gillian Philip

2011-09-16T01:16:00.000-07:00

Gillian Philip’s first YA fantasy, ‘Firebrand’, was one of the best books I read last year. I talked about it in my introduction to Gillian's Fairytale Reflection on Tam Lin. Set in the 16^th century at a time of witch hunts and burnings, it followed the fortunes of Seth MacGregor, feral prince of the Sithe, the Scots faeries, charismatic and difficult. The Sithe are ruled by a cruel and devious queen, Kate NicNiven. There’s a protecting Veil between the land of the Sithe and the mortal world, and Kate wants to tear it away. To do so, she invokes the help of some hauntingly unpleasant creatures called the Lammyr – stretching the loyalty of Seth and his beloved brother Conan almost to breaking point. The book is dramatic, beautifully written, and rooted in the folk and faerie lore of Scotland.

Now here at last is the sequel (second in a series of four): ‘Bloodstone’. And - surprising, yet the traditional penalty for those who spend time in Elfland – we find four hundred years have passed. It was a brave move to place Seth and Conan in the 21st century, and it works. Banished from their faerie homeland until they can find the mysterious Bloodstone, they have had to endure long centuries beyond the Veil – parted, except for the occasional illicit foray, from all they hold dear. On one such brief mission, the death of a comrade leaves Seth and Conan guardians of his baby daughter Finn, who is brought up in the human world unaware of her Sithe blood. Then Seth embarks on an ill-fated romance with a mortal woman, earning deep resentment from her young son, Jed. And Kate is still scheming, and the Bloodstone is about to return…

“Bloodstone” is a complex, dramatic and rewarding book – always vivid and fast-moving, but with a lot going on. Rather like her hero Seth, Gillian Philip expects readers to keep up. If your attention does stray, it’s possible to get a little lost, but hey – it’s nice not to be treated like an imbecile. It's also very nice to read a book about faeries in which the plot is not focussed on a romance between impossibly gorgeous doomed teenage lovers.

Four hundred years of exile have taken their toll on the characters. Still sexy and sarcastic, Seth - dressed in jeans and T-shirt, mouth full of modern slang - has become harder, more difficult, more self-torturing. Responsible Conan is loving and honourable, but also weary and explosive. Young Finn is angry too, and so is Jed – and as they all take it out on one another by turns, there are sometimes possibly a few too many warring temperaments. Nevertheless the story swept me along like a river in spate. The first person narration is brilliantly characterised: as here in Seth’s description of young Finn:

“A surly little thing with pale protuberant eyes, she reminded me of a deep-water fish. The older she grew, the more I tended to think of a Moray eel, lurking in darkness, shy and alone, hiding lethal teeth. And let me tell you, you haven’t felt native hatred till you’ve seen it in the eyes of a six-year-old.”

There are all sorts of mysteries lurking in the shadows. I love the savage waterhorses which Conan and Seth both ride, and I love the Selkyr, the seal people, sinister and beautiful and wholly Other. This passage on an abandoned moonlit beach had shivers running down my spine:

The black-bellied waves were fringed with phosphorescence, and against their light was a figure: too tall, too lanky to be Leonora, hunched into a long coat with an upturned collar. The coat that was no coat moved and glistened like a wet pelt. The creature wearing it turned, and I sucked in a cold salty breath.

And it just gets better. I’m looking forward very much to the next in the series. And in one of the best compliments I’ve ever been paid, Gillian has used a verse from my poem ‘Janet Speaks’ as the epigraph to the book:

Oh Queen of Fays -

If I had known of this day's deed -

I would have let your knight, Tam Lin

Ride down to Hell on his milk-white steed.

(You can find the whole poem on the new page in the tabs - and next week I'm beginning a new series.)

Black Swans

2011-09-09T02:05:00.000-07:00

Every now and then you come across a book that’s just different. It might be a one-off by an author who puts everything she or he has to say into a single creative burst – or it may be something that stands out from a writer’s other work like a black swan in a white flock. Especially in the latter case, such books often don’t get the attention they deserve. Perhaps they simply puzzle the author’s faithful followers. They can’t be categorized. They come out of nowhere and don’t seem to lead anywhere. The easiest thing to do is – not to talk about them.

But they tend to be memorable.

Here are three examples, all fantasies, all written by highly talented and in some cases famous children’s writers – and none of them, I suggest, as well known as they deserve to be.

A Dark Horn Blowing by Dahlov Ipcar (Macdonald 1978)

I hope and believe that some of you will have read this book (because so far in my life I have met only one other person who has). It’s based on an old ballad called The Queen of Elfan’s Nourrice, in which a mortal woman, stolen to be nurse to the Queen of Elfland’s son, laments for her own child from whom she was taken when he was only four nights old:

I heard a cow low, a bonnie cow low

An’ a cow low down in yon fauld;

Lang, lang will my young son greet

Or his mither take him frae cauld…

Ipcar’s book opens with the sound:

I heard a cow lowing, lowing low on the lea – a mournful sound, full of calling. It called me as I stood there at the window listening in the warm twilight of October.

Eben said, “Come to bed, Wife.”

But the enchantment is already working. As her husband falls asleep, Nora steals out into the night, leaving her four day old son wailing in the cradle, down through the wet fields to the shore.

A cow’s lowing is a sad sound – I had always thought so – but this was more than that. There were words crying in the sound. Almost a song:

Come Nora!

You must come!

You must come with me!

You must come nurse the Erl Prince

In a kingdom low by the sea.

…It was a small man with a horn, standing by a long black boat there at the edge of the tide. But I never knew when it was that I first saw him, or when he first spoke. The cow’s lowing became the dark horn blowing, and then it was too late…

Full, full of enchantment, this tale – told by various voices – follows the path of Nora, trapped in the Erl Queen’s kingdom, her husband Eben who believes she has drowned, her son Owen, raised by the only woman his father can find to feed him – the witch Bab Magga, and Eelie, the Erl-Prince himself.

Dahlov Ipcar the author, who was born in 1917, is an artist who has written and illustrated many other books for children. She currently lives in Maine and is still painting. You can see examples of her work at her website here. I don’t believe her other three YA novels are in print, but I would love to read them.

Second of my three examples is Seaward by Susan Cooper (Bodley Head 1983, Puffin 1985)

Though Susan Cooper is best known for ‘The Dark Is Rising’ sequence of YA novels, in my opinion ‘Seaward’ outshines them all. It’s simply one of the strangest, most haunting fantasies I’ve ever read.

After his mother is killed, a boy called Westerly goes travelling seawards through a mysterious world to find his father - while Cally is a girl whose parents, one after the other, have left her, heading west to the sea themselves in a car driven by a mysterious woman with silver hair. And then Cally begins to hear singing in the empty house… ‘rhythmic waves of melody repeated again and again.’ The voice sounds like her mother’s, but no one else can hear it.

Cally washed, pulled on a shirt and some jeans, went back into her parents’ room – and then all at once the singing was back… changed… to a pattern of hammer-blows, beating at her ears. Cally wheeled about, her hands up in defence, terrified.

“Ma! Ma!”

It was instinctive, a cry for help. Where are you? I need you, I don’t know what to do, where have you gone? Ma, Dad, I can’t do without you, you’ve always been here, come back, come back…

On this note of unbearable grief, Cally is propelled, like Alice, through the cheval glass in her mother’s room and into the same world where Westerly is… a world where god-like figures play chess with mortals, where the bones of dead fish call out ‘in a thin high scream shrilling like a cicada’ to warn of danger, a world where Cally and Westerly are befriended by a creature like a silver mosquito three feet high, or pursued by The People who come to life when the sun touches them but change to stone at night:

All round the house, out at the edge of the trees, the massive stone figures had been standing in a silent ominous line. Now the sun was going down, and the shadow of the trees had overtaken them – and where they had stood was a long unbroken barrier of rock.

After many strange adventures, Cally and Westerly follow a path beside a small river leading towards the sea, and the path merges with a stone paved road:

And the road was filled with people, walking. …There was no sound but the song of the birds and the slow-speaking river, and not one of the figures walking down the road spoke to any other…

Finally, at the sea, under the eternal sweeping beam of a lighthouse, Cally and Westerly come to their journey’s end. It's a moving and wonderful exploration of life, death and grief.

Third on my list is Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Stones Are Hatching (Oxford 1999). McCaughrean is one of Britain’s most original YA writers: she never repeats herself; but I still think this book stands out from the rest of her work. It’s just… peculiar… in the most inventive and satisfying way. Perhaps there are echoes of Alan Garner – or even more, of William Mayne – but it’s another black swan, all right. Set in rural England during World War I, while the guns thump and crump just across the Channel in France, young Phelim wakes up one morning to discover that his world is turning upside down. The stove has been pushed against the door - ‘the whole massive, five-door, cast-iron range’ – the kitchen is full of glashans: ‘stark naked men and women about as tall as his waist, shaggy and matted with filth’ – there’s a Black Dog outside, ravening and raging, and the domovoy or house spirit he never knew existed shoves him outside with the information that he – Phelim – is the Jack o’Green who must defeat the Stoor Worm.

It takes Phelim a long time to believe this. Almost too long. Not until he’s almost mown down by corn wives:

Phelim swung his sickle. The wheat hissed, the bearded ears fell against his face making him close his eyes. Then the curve of the blade clanged against something hollow and metallic and black.

A woman’s rib cage.

No white-clothed beauty this. At close quarters, he could see the rust-red eyes, the adze-shaped chin, the nose as curved as a bill-hook. Her long black skirt was pale with dust, but not the shiny black of her iron upper body. Her long, flue-black, iron breasts had blunted countless sickle blades as she stood amid the wheat, waiting for her victims to blunder into her. She held a long-handled scythe, but she and her sisters had not come to harvest wheat.

Only the reapers.

And with Alexia the young Witch, Mad Sweeney the Fool, and the ever-cheery Obby Oss, Phelim reluctantly sets out to deal with the Worm which the guns of France are gradually awakening from its age-old sleep.

What perhaps all these books have in common is an almost hallucinatory quality, a vision of the world as an unsettling, startling, ever-changing place full of unexpected grotesqueries, dangers and beauties. Do read them. They will enrich your life.

“Only those few black swans I must except, who behold death without dread, and the grave without fear, and embrace both as necessary guides to endless glory…”

Sir Walter Raleigh

Fairytale Reflections - "Happily Ever After"

2011-09-01T23:59:00.000-07:00

Oral storytelling necessitates a framework. Anyone who’s tried singing or storytelling or in any way performing, for that’s what it is, in a crowded space, knows that you have to call for attention before you can begin. That’s why Shakespeare’s plays often begin with a prologue – a man standing on the stage to deliver a speech about the background to the drama, or a couple of minor characters loudly joking and quarrelling, or a shipwreck with lots of dramatic sound effects – something that won’t matter if you miss half of it, something to shut the audience up and make them settle down and pay attention.

A song will begin with a chord or a run of notes upon the harp or guitar, and the beginning of a story is signalled by a stock phrase: ‘Once upon a time’. It’s a device to arrest the listener, and to locate the story, placing it in a mythic but relevant past. ‘Il etait une fois’, or ‘Es war einmal…’or ‘It wasn’t in my time, or in your time, but once upon a time, and a very good time it was…’

The device is common to so many languages, I think people must have been beginning stories in this way since paleolithic times. I'm told classical Arabic stories begin: There was, oh, what there was or what there wasn’t, in the oldest of days and ages and times…’ North American Mi’kmaq stories begin, ‘Long ago, in the time of the Old Ones…’ Czech and Hungarian stories begin, ‘Once there was, once there wasn’t…’

And this sort of opening phrase sends a subtle but distinct message to listeners. It says: ‘Pay attention!’; but it also says: ‘Though this is going to be amusing or stirring or exciting, it’s probably not true.’ It says, ‘This is a story. Sit back and listen.’

And so the room hushes, the people attend, the storyteller spins her tale. There’s a real physical element to listening to a story. It’s like going on a roller coaster. It’s not like reading, where everything happens at exactly your own pace, and you can glance ahead, or turn back to check on something, or put the whole book down for ten minutes to make a cup of coffee. Listening to a story, you are in the power of the storyteller. You must keep still and listen carefully not to miss a word. You watch her face as she frowns or smiles. The flash of her eyes, her gesturing hands. You don’t know what is coming next, or even how long the story is going to be. For she on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise. Everything is a surprise.

Some stories are very short. Some are very long. Some divide into almost separate segments, picaresque narratives in which one thing follows upon another with the most tenuous of links. The princess and the prince are married, they become king and queen. The audience draws breath - but that’s not the end. The storyteller is still speaking. The king goes to war, leaving the young queen in the care of his old mother. But the old woman hates her, and so, when the queen gives birth to her first child, the old woman orders it to be killed and the blood smeared over the queen’s clothes so that everyone will think she has killed her own child…

No, it’s not the end yet.

And so, when the end does come, it is often signalled with another stock phrase, to show that the show is over. Puck delivers the epilogue; Rosalind steps out of the framework of the play to flirt with the audience about their beards. Fairytales conclude with the words ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ – or sometimes, ‘they all lived happily till they died’ – or even, ‘if they haven’t died yet, they are living there still’…

It’s getting more conscious and ironic, isn’t it?

Fairytales, contrary to what people suppose, are not naïve. Their very existence floats in the relationship between narrator and audience. Indeed it is naïve to imagine that ‘happy ever after’ – much derided as a banal or smug or thoughtless conclusion – was ever intended as much more than the signal that the story is over. The bite of narrative has been chewed and swallowed: the show is done. The listeners can get on with drinking beer, eating, bargaining, gossiping, telling rude jokes, or heading off outside for a piss, or trudging home to their own difficult wife, husband or parent. Beginnings are important, endings less so, because the stock phrases that signal the end of a fairytale do not call for attention, but dismiss it. They don’t place the story in the mythic past, they undermine it. ‘If they haven’t died yet, they are living there still’ (but how likely is that?). And so fairytale endings are far more varied than beginnings: in fact they can be purposely surreal and disconnected.

‘They found the ford, I the stepping stones. They were drowned, and I came safe.’

‘This is a true story. They are all lies but this one.’

‘There runs a little mouse. Anyone who catches it can make himself a fine fur cap!’

‘Snip, snap, snout – this is the end of the adventure.’

‘And when the wedding was over, they sent me home in little paper shoes over a causeway covered in broken glass’.

Dear readers – here is the end of the Fairytale Reflections series.

Unless I change my mind.

Picture credit: Fairy by Arthur Rackham

She may actually be Iris with her rainbow scarf.

She hasn't much to do with the post, but I like her.

Fairytale Reflections (32) Penny Dolan

2011-08-26T00:34:00.000-07:00

My friend Penny Dolan and I have much in common. Not only is she a Yorkshire lass like me, she’s a storyteller as well as a children’s writer, and we share a delight in that feistiest of fairytale heroines, the beautiful and dauntless Lady Mary from ‘Mr Fox’. We’re also both members of ‘The History Girls’, a new blog devoted to the discussion of historical fiction. On top of that, the tale she has chosen for this week's Fairytale Reflection has a physical marker which can be found no more than a handful of miles from where I live.

Penny is the author of many picture books and fairytale retellings for younger children, as well as longer books for junior readers. Notable among these is ‘The Third Elephant’, a lovely tale of a small wooden elephant who longs to see more of the world than his dusty mantelpiece:

When night came, the small elephant looked at the empty pool of moonlight. He thought about what the mouse had told him: wish for what you want, wish for what you dream about. ‘I wish’, he thought, as hard as he could, ‘I wish I could see the white palace again.’

His wish begins to come true when the house is demolished. In the classic tradition of change coming to discarded toys, the little elephant is thrown out of the window and falls into the hands of a young girl, Sara, who is on her way to play the flute in a concert. The little elephant calms her nerves, so when her older sister Nita becomes panicky about a cycling trip to India, Sara pops the little elephant into Nita’s bag – and the adventures begin in earnest: plenty of them! ‘Charming’ is an adjective which can sometimes be suspected of carrying the subtext ‘trivial’, but this is a book which is both truly charming and seriously involved with the fears and uncertainties of childhood.

As, in many ways, is Penny’s latest novel, ‘A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E.’ I absolutely loved this book – so much so that I just have to show you the cover of the paperback, with a magical illustration by David Wyatt. Here you can see the hero, Mouse, balancing above the skyline of Victorian London, on his journey to rediscover his lost foster-mother and find out the secret of his birth.

Mouse is a modest, thoughtful, but adventurous boy who, like his little namesake, has a talent for scurrying up walls and climbing along beams, which stands him in good stead when he finds temporary haven and work behind the scenes in the Albion Theatre, run by the charismatic actor-director Hugo Adnam.

A couple of years ago when my daughter was studying aspects of the Victorian theatre at university, I took some sneaky peeks at some of her books, but Penny has really brought the dry bones to life for me. I’m particularly struck by the two little girls Mouse meets on the street after midnight:

Well after midnight, shrill, childish voices woke me. Two small girls appeared around the corner. Rough wool shawls were gathered over their trailing gauzy skirts. Giggling and singing, the little girls danced over cracks in the pavement and hopped along the kerb, their legs thin as those of foals on a farm. Tinsel strands sparkled in their hair, and their cheeks were smeared with paint.

Who are they? Child actors who’ve been playing fairies in the latest theatrical extravaganza, working till all hours, and in danger as they head home on the late-night streets of the city.

Penny describes ‘A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E’ as ‘a historical fairy tale’, which sums it up excellently. It’s beautifully written, carefully researched, and there is indeed a happy ending: although it is nuanced, thoughtful and by no means inevitable. The book is also full of allusions to Victorian fiction, plays, and old legends about larger-than-life wanderers on the old roads of England - including this one, which is very old indeed.

Wayland's Smithy: a tangle of tales...

Wayland's Smithy

All that was needed, so people said, was a single coin placed on a stone beside your tethered horse. Have faith, leave the horse there all night and when you came back next morning, your steed would be newly shod and the coin gone.

Though the nights of magical shoeing are surely long past, the ancient burial mound known as Wayland’s Smithy is still there on the shoulder of chalk downland, and the place with its tangled tale, haunts me.

I first saw the Smithy on a day so wet that froglets skittered from the path into overfull ditches and milky water ran down the cracks in the chalky clay.

The rain gods had only paused. By the time we had reached the crest of the ridge, a downpour had began. Thunder rolled around the hills and as we approached Wayland’s Smithy, the huge, dark clouds above were lit with streaks of lightning.

The long barrow lies off the track. We pushed through wet bushes and came to it, covered in grass and surrounded by grove of trees. Several ancient stones formed the gateway.

With the storm raging, the moment felt as if the past was only a shadow away. It was impossible not to think of the many feet that had passed along the Ridgeway and made the path, with or without horses to be shod. Did they all wonder at the mysterious mound or the strange white horse spread across the hillside nearby? Did they seek shelter in the small wood?

However, the helpful smith of the legend does not match entirely happily with the Norse version of Wayland the Smith.

Wayland, or Volund, had been apprenticed to the dwarves of the Icelandic Mountains, He was one of the three sons of Wade, the king of the Finns. Out hunting, the brothers found three beautiful swan maidens, seized their feathered robes, and made them their wives. When the three sisters discovered their hidden feathers again, they flew away to freedom.

The two older brothers went searching for their wives, but the desolate Wayland stayed working at his smithy, sure that his beloved wife would return for the golden ring he was keeping for her and all the other treasures he was creating.

Soon rich men grew greedy for Wayland’s skills, King Niduth of Sweden more than any. Wayland was lured to his castle, crippled, imprisoned on an island and made to forge endless objects for the king. So dazzling were the treasures and so great the family’s pride that they forgot to be wary of their prisoner.

The two princes visited Wayland, who treated them kindly until they mocked him. Enraged, he beheaded them both and fashioned a set of dreadful gifts for the royal parents. The princely skulls became golden goblets, the eyes glittering gems from their eyes, and their pearly white teeth made a necklace for the queen their mother.

Meanwhile, the princess, jealous of her brothers, visited Wayland, bringing a golden ring for him to mend. Recognising the stolen ring as that made for his lost wife, he cruelly seduced the princess, leaving her with child. Having sent her and the horrific treasures back to the palace, Wayland strapped on a pair of mechanical wings, rose into the sky and flew away.

It is not quite clear how this tale links up to the burial mound, although the ancient site may have been given its new identity by Anglo Saxon invaders.

Certainly the tale travelled and adapted. One version claims that Wayland’s wings brought him to the mound, and that the Norse hero Sigurd brought his horse there to be shod. Some say that explains the white horse set in the chalk, who leaves the hillside once every hundred years and gallops across the sky to the smithy to be shod.

To me, this tale is loaded with contrasting images – the stolen skins of the swans, the broken wedding ring, the patient and desolate waiting, the greed of the powerful, the Samson-like captivity, the image of those awful golden chalices, and thee Daedulus-like wings – and they all make the tale of Wayland unforgettable. One cannot love or admire him, yet there is something enigmatic about his tale and about the unbound rage that creates such dreadful treasures.

The crippled smith’s name is mentioned in Beowulf, in the poem Volundarkvitha (part of the poetic Edda) as well as in Chaucer’s writings, in Kipling’s 'Puck of Pooks Hill', and in 'Kenilworth'. He is said to be a fore-runner of St Clement, patron saint of blacksmiths and both have feast days in November.

Why does the Wayland story matter to my writing? When I wrote my novel 'A Boy Called Mouse', I came to a section where my Mouse needed to have a place where he could rage and let out all the anger he felt. The pattern of his world had shifted dreadfully and he needed time in the wilderness to move out from his terrible grief, and renew his hope for his quest.

The image of that ancient site came into my head and the long path running alongside, and the wild storm overhead. So I created a “tramping man”, a character called Wayland. He is not a man who would put out my young hero’s eyes, but a wise kindly figure who makes Mouse to walk and walk and keep on walking along the high ridge of ground while a storm rages around them, almost Lear-like. Wayland. This agonising march moves Mouse out of his despair and sets him free for his future. The tales don’t fit easily together but for me, something matched.


'Weland forges the Sword' - by H R Millar, from 'Puck of Pook's Hill'

Fairytale Reflections (31) Candy Gourlay

2011-08-19T00:57:00.000-07:00

Candy Gourlay was a young journalist writing for the opposition during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. After the revolution that toppled Marcos, she moved to London with her English husband and, as she says, 'attended to dictators of the nappy-clad variety before trying my hand at children's fiction.'

Her debut novel, 'Tall Story', published in 2010, is the story of two children. Andi lives in London, and she has two big wishes. Mum and Dad simply don't realise how important it is - but Andi is desperate to play on the basketball team of her new school. She may be small, but she's good and she knows it. But guess what? They only take boys.

Andi's other big wish is that her sixteen year old half-brother, Bernardo Hipolito, could come and live with them. Although she can hardly remember him, she would love to be his little sister - if only the Foreign Office would grant him a visa. And finally, after years of waiting, this wish comes true. As Bernardo's plane arrives from the Philippines, Andi hopes he'll turn out to be tall and just as mad as she is about basketball. And Bernardo turns out to be tall, all right. But he's not just tall ... he's a GIANT.

Candy's story isn't only a tender and touching tale of clashing expectations and cultural differences. Woven into the narrative are many of the folktales and fairytales of the Philippines. Brought up by his uncle and aunt in the tiny mountain village of San Andres, Bernardo is named after a local folklore hero, the giant Bernardo Carpio, who was big enough to plough fields with his comb and carve mountains with his fingers. One day, when an earthquake split the land open, Bernardo Carpio jumped into the fissure and braced his arms to prevent the two walls of rock from colliding. The earth swallowed him, but the village was saved.

That was long ago, but in this earthquake-prone area, earth tremors are a continuous hazard, and the village of San Andres gets into the World Records Website as 'the Land of Rock and Roll' with seismographs registering hundreds of tremors a day.

Superstition and fear rule the village in the person of Mad Nena, the village witch and her daughter Gabriela. It's the sort of place where, though people may be kind, they are also ignorant. And they are poor: and medicine is expensive. A case of rabies is treated with charms, and young Bernardo is allowed to grow taller and taller without ever being taken to a doctor: because

... imagine what a big deal it was when people discovered a boy amongst them named Bernardo who was shooting up like a giant bamboo.

And imagine what they thought when, as the boy grew, the rock and roll dwindled to a full stop.

And then imagine how they would feel if they knew their saviour was about to leave them to their fate.

Tall Story has been shortlisted for eleven children’s book prizes including the Waterstone’s, the Branford Boase and the Blue Peter prize. It won the Crystal Kite Children’s Book Prize for Europe. Her next book, 'Shine', will be published in 2012...

Now I'm a big fan of oral storytelling as well as the written down variety. So here is Candy, a woman of many talents, with some tantalizing glimpses of stories from the land of her birth - and one in particular:

The Legend of the Pineapple

Are there such things as fairy tales in the Philippines where I grew up?

By Sophie Anderson (Wikimedia Commons)

If a fairy tale requires a fairy, then no - we don't have wand-wielding, tutu-wearing creatures in our woods (I would say rain forests, except most of those have been chopped down).

What's in a fairy tale? Magic, certainly. An evil power perhaps - wicked stepsisters, witches, magic foul versus heroine fair. A resolution that involves come-uppance? Happily ever afters?

I thought the best way to reflect on this subject was to do my own re-telling of a Filipino sort of fairy tale ... so here is my video re-telling of The Legend of the Pineapple, an old Filipino story.

I made the video with the help of my young neighbours, Christiane and Jacob (Jacob very kindly agreed to be the voice of a little girl as long as I used his drawing of a jet plane - watch out for it!):

The Legend of the Pineapple from Candy Gourlay on Vimeo.

I grew up listening to stories like these told by my parents usually during the frequent evening power cuts that plagued my childhood in Manila. We would light candles and katol (an incense like mosquito repellent) and sit around the dining table telling stories until the power cuts were over.

The stories were always about everyday things - the turtle, that mountain we always drove past, that plant with leaves that folded when touched ... but unlike the happily ever afters of Western fairy tales, the endings always had a sadness to them.

A man turned arrogant and overbearing by his rapid success, turns into the shamefully slow turtle. (The Legend of the Turtle)

Maria Makiling (Photo: Life Expressions blog)

A young woman, abandoned by her lover, falls into an eternal sleep - and will forevermore be a mountain. (The Legend of Maria Makiling)

Makahiya plant (Sensitive Plant)

A painfully shy child trying to overcome her shyness ventures out only to be crushed by cruel strangers. She turns into the makahiya, a grass-like creeper whose leaves shrink away and fold when touched. (The Legend of the Makahiya)

Yes, there is magic but there is a helplessness in the face of greater, unstoppable powers in these stories. And inevitably it's not good magic, but bad.

The Philippines is a country always on alert for disaster - year after year, typhoons sweep in without fail, floods ruin crops, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes ... living with constant catastrophe has invested the culture with a diffidence - bahala na ("Let it be" or "God wills it") is a common expression. Catholicism (we are the only Catholic country in Asia) exacerbates this fatalism.

Here's a video reflection I made about the 2009 deluge in the Philippines: (you don't have to watch the whole thing)

(With thanks to Geraldine McCaughrean who wrote Not the End of the World)

The odd thing is when I was a child, I don't think I regarded these magical stories as fairy tales. With disaster so much a part of the fabric of life, they just seemed too real to be fairy stories.

I found my old school primer the other day from when I was seven years old.

The Cathedral Reader series, with Ann, David, little Timmy and their fluffy pets who lived on clean roads with white picket fences

Now I didn't question the provenance of these stories or the other stories I read in books - the ones about Cinderellas, witches, evil stepmothers and the like.

There wasn't a lot of publishing (and very few books for children) in the Philippines at the time. Most books were imported from America and Britain.

Six year old me.

The world of reading, for me, was about somewhere else. In those books, nowhere looked like home, and nobody looked like me - not even in one of my favourite picture books, The Five Chinese Brothers!

Most of my reading came from bound collections like these, courtesy of door-to-door salesmen selling encyclopedias and other bound collections that we paid for by installment. I've kept the old collection that I read as a child and dip into them to this day.

It was all fantasy. Everything I read was a fairy tale.

It was only when I came to live here in Europe that I discovered there really were castles and hundred acre woods and foxes and kings and twisty-turny cobbled alleys and Black Forests. It takes a big leap for me to think that those fairy tales I read as a child were based on real places and possibly real people.

Huh. So those storytellers of long ago were writing about themselves.

And perhaps their readers were thinking: these stories are too close to the bone to be fairy tales.

Fairytale Reflections (30) Fiona Dunbar

2011-08-12T04:21:00.000-07:00

So you're looking for an author who writes adventure stories – and I mean adventures – with brilliant main characters who more often than not just happen to be female? You are looking for Fiona Dunbar. There is no earthly reason (other than adult-generated prejudice) why boys as well as girls shouldn’t enjoy her books. Her writing fizzes with energy and ideas and fun: she blithely ignores boundaries between genres, and I’m particularly addicted to her ‘Silk Sisters’ trilogy, beginning with ‘Pink Chameleon’, set a decade or two into the future, a wildly funny yet thought-provoking mixture of science fiction and – believe it or not – fashion. (Just how far can genome research and nano-technology take us? What if you really ARE what you wear?)

Or there’s her Lulu Baker books which combine fairytales, skulduggery and cookery… or ‘Toonhead’, in which ten year old Pablo (so named by fond arty parents who hope for a budding Picasso) discovers he can predict the future through the cartoons he draws – a skill which gets him kidnapped…or her most recent title, ‘Divine Freaks’, featuring the irrepressible Kitty Slade, whose talent for seeing ghosts (inherited from her mother) soon leads her into no end of trouble involving a dodgy landlord who wants to evict her family, a scalpel-wielding ghost in the school biology lab, a back-street taxidermist, shrunken heads, and a fraudulent antiques business.

One of the things I like most about Fiona’s books is that her heroines – or the occasional hero – don’t exist in a vacuum. Family is important. The Silk Sisters are desperate to find their missing parents, and the bond between responsible elder sister Rory and her strong-willed little sister Elsie is both funny and touching. In ‘Divine Freaks’, Kitty can rely on her brother and sister for backup, while her Greek grandmother Maro is a reassuring if eccentric presence. This helps steady the reader’s nerves through some of the more exciting passages… as here, when Kitty and her brother and sister secretly enter the taxidermist’s house:

Those knives for slicing open a man’s skull, those needles for sewing up the lips. Just what kind of skins had we seen? And now I thought about the large pots in the kitchen, large enough to contain a whole head…

I steadied myself on the stack of tea chests. “What is Eaton involved with?”

“Does this mean he’s killing people?” asked Flossie…

Sam’s white face was now glistening with sweat. “Wait… not so fast! There has to be some rational explanation for all this.”

There was a click. Followed by a humming sound. We all jumped. Then I realised it was coming from a small fridge in the corner that none of us had noticed before.

We all stared at it. “OK,” I said. “Who’s brave enough to look in there?”

Oh, and before I forget, the ghosts are real ghosts, the magic is real magic. Fantasy meets adventure meets horror meets science fiction. What’s not to like? If you have a ten-to-fourteen year old in your life, get them one of these books immediately! Meanwhile, here is Fiona to talk about one of the old favourites -

CINDERELLA

Hands up who thinks Cinderella is a rather nauseating goody-two-shoes. Just in case there’s any uncertainty, I’m talking about the Cinderella who not only puts up with systematic abuse from her stepfamily without ever standing up for herself, but endures it all with a sweet smile. The one who never once talks to her father about this abuse, and who actually helps her sisters get themselves all tarted up in their finery, while she is dressed in rags. That Cinderella. Oh, you too? Uh-huh.

It’s all Charles Perrault’s fault. Well, not entirely. But only in his version does Cinderella not even ask to go to the ball. Only in his version – and any others based on it – does Cinderella match her two stepsisters up with members of the Prince’s court. A triple wedding takes place, and the sisters and their consolation prize husbands get to have their own quarters at the royal palace.

Now, I’m all for forgiveness, and I can’t say I prefer the comeuppance the sisters get in Aschenputtel, the Grimm brothers’ version – the pecking out of their eyes. But even so, that Perrault ending always bothered me as a child. So the mean, selfish people get to have a happy-ever-after as well, do they? So being nice and good: we needn’t bother with that, then? Waste of time, is it? Of course I’m being facetious, but let’s face it, children are naturally selfish creatures, and altruism is learned. And frankly, if we imagine Cinderella, the Sequel, it’s hard to picture those two suddenly being transformed into gracious human beings. A more likely scenario would contain enough tragic horrors to fill a tabloid newspaper for years: infidelity (their husbands were picked for them! They never actually fancied them), alcoholism (drowning their sorrows, being confronted daily with the awful reality that they will always be the supporting cast, never the stars), vindictive behaviour (unending efforts to drag Cinderella down to their level), assorted other addictions (shopping, gambling, drugs, dieting, cosmetic surgery…)

Ah yes, the cosmetic surgery. That’s another thing that features in Grimm, but not in Perrault. That cutting-off of bits of the feet, in an effort to squish them into that tiny slipper. It is a wonderfully gruesome image, with the blood oozing out (again, it is only in Perrault that the slipper is made of that transparent and incidentally impossibly brittle material, glass). Although Perrault’s tale pre-dates Grimm by over a hundred years, both were drawing on a traditional tale thousands of years old, and I suspect that the prevalent European versions would have been along the lines described by the Grimms.

Eastern versions are less brutal than that of the Grimm brothers. Interestingly, the Chinese version, Ye Xian (AD 850) does not contain any kind of foot mutilation – interesting, of course, because you would think it might, given the appalling Chinese tradition of foot binding. Although this practice seems not to have been introduced until about a hundred years later (during the Southern Tang dynasty, AD 935-975), the idea that tiny feet were considered desirable in a woman was clearly already prevalent. Yet there is no cutting-off of toes here.

This brings me to the second element that bothered me as a child: how the hell Cinderella could be the only one in the entire kingdom with a foot small enough to fit into it.

I mean, come on! Most western females are somewhere between a size 4 and a 7. Some take a size 3; there was a time long ago, when I could just fit into a size 2 ½, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. What size was she, for heaven’s sake?

The Chinese version has a way round this plot issue which makes a lot of sense to me: the slipper is magical. It knows who it belongs to, and can change its size every time anyone other than Ye Xian tries it on, so that it is always just too small. And it makes sense that the slipper is magical, because it was supplied by the magical fish that fulfils the role played by the Fairy Godmother in the Perrault version. Sometimes the introduction of magic can seem like a cop-out: not in this case. I think there is a greater internal logic to it.

The reason I chose Cinderella for my fairytale reflection is that my Lulu Baker trilogy, about a girl with a magic recipe book, has been described as a kind of modern Cinderella story. There are some very obvious reasons for this: Lulu is the only child of a widower, and her nemesis is the new love of his life, Varaminta le Bone – whom he is all set to marry. Varaminta is a glamorous forty-something ex-model with a ghastly son called Torquil. Both Varaminta and Torquil are charm itself around Lulu’s Dad, but vicious towards Lulu whenever he’s not around. Which reminds me: I haven’t even had a bitch about Cinderella’s dad yet! Must put that right.

What about the dad, eh?

That spineless wimp who just lets those domineering females rule the roost, either unaware of how they’re treating Cinderella, or worse, noticing it but failing to do anything about it. What a waste of space! Admittedly, the dad in my Lulu Baker books is completely blind to Varaminta’s faults, but I do explain his lack of involvement by making him extremely busy and away on business a lot of the time. I hope he comes across as reasonably sympathetic.

As well as the obvious parallels though, I discovered other similarities while researching this piece that I didn’t expect to find. For example, in the Basile version, Cenerentola (1634), there is a magical date tree; Cenerentola nurtures this tree, placing it in a golden bucket, hoeing the earth around it with a golden hoe, and wiping its leaves with a silken napkin. She is rewarded for her efforts when it grows prodigiously, and a fairy appears – the fairy godmother figure. This is similar to the way in which a magical bird emerges from the hazel tree in the Grimm brothers’ Aschenputtel. In the second and third of my Lulu Baker books, Lulu grows some of the magical ingredients for her recipes in her own garden.

Cassandra, a kind of real-life fairy godmother, does not emerge from a plant, however; she is the one who supplies the ingredients, and the seeds for the ones that Lulu must grow. Lulu even has to fertilize one of them with her own tears (which she finds a considerable challenge, even with the help of onions). I based this element on the ancient Sumerian story of Inanna, but Aschenputtel also fertilizes her hazel tree with her tears.

It could also be argued that the Grimm brothers’ heroine is a bit more proactive than Perrault’s. Early on in the Aschenputtel story, we have the following scene:

It happened that the father was once going to the fair, and he asked his two step-daughters what he should bring back for them. ‘Beautiful dresses,’ said one, ‘pearls and jewels,’ said the second. ‘And you, Cinderella [Aschenputtel],’ said he, ‘what will you have?’ ‘Father, break off for me the first branch which knocks against your hat on your way home.’

This is interesting, because there are two possibilities as to why she has chosen this. The obvious reason is that she simply wants something to plant at her mother’s grave – which is what she does. This is where she weeps tears of grief onto the plant. So, yet another demonstration of her simple, virtuous nature: nothing more. Or is it? What if she knew that by tending the sapling lovingly, she would ultimately reap far greater rewards than the vulgar finery demanded by her greedy stepsisters? After all, she does go on to ask the tree outright for riches:

“Shiver and quiver, little tree,
Silver and gold throw down over me.”

Seems to me she had an inkling the hazel would have supernatural properties. Hey, good for her. She shows a bit more character than Perrault’s Cinderella, who would never presume to ask for anything – heaven forfend! Aschenputtel also asks help from the pigeons and the turtle doves in picking out the lentils her stepmother has thrown into the hearth. So I prefer to interpret her action as proactive, not only outwitting her stepsisters, but also demonstrating that slow, dedicated work might just be a better approach to life than stamping your foot and demanding things very loudly.

But there are probably as many differences as there are similarities between Cinderella and my Lulu Baker. For instance:

- Unlike Cinderella, Lulu isn’t perfect. She blunders into things, makes mistakes. And if she’s the victim of injustice, she sure as hell makes a noise about it! Meek she is not.
- Unlike Cinderella, Lulu is not beautiful. This is absolutely central to the story. Nor is she especially bothered about how she looks. She’s a bit lazy in that department, because her head is usually somewhere else. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty… the list of fairytale heroines whose physical beauty is a metaphor for their inner virtue – yawn – is endless. But where are the merely OK-looking ones? The ones whose best qualities lie in other areas – like being, say, fun to be around. A good laugh. Someone you might actually want as a friend. Hard to find, right?
- Unlike the Cinderella story, which is primarily about sibling rivalry, the main enemy in the Lulu stories is the stepmother figure. This is mostly because Lulu is younger than Cinderella: life is not yet about competing with contemporaries for romantic attention. True, she has a new stepbrother to contend with, but while he may be deeply unpleasant, he is not a direct competitor the way that Cinderella’s stepsisters are.
- Unlike the Cinderella story, it is the stepmother figure that gets her comeuppance – logical, since she is the main enemy. Even in the Grimm version, it is only the stepsisters that have their eyes pecked out; their mother escapes this fate. And after all, where marrying off daughters is a means of survival, or a dowry has to be provided, being a stepmother must be a most unenviable situation, laden with moral complexity. For most modern-day western stepmums, this is not the case. Varaminta, therefore, embodies all the characteristics of the stepsisters, as well as those of their mother.

All right, enough about ‘my’ Cinderella. Possibly you know of other modern Cinderellas – perhaps ones that are simpler tellings based on tradition that have altered the story according to the dominant philosophy of our time. Because let’s face it, Christanity, which provides the moral code for both Grimm and Perrault, arguably holds less sway today than it did then. Ye Xian’s story is influenced by religion of its time and place, as is the earliest known version of the Cinderella story, Rhodopis (Strabo, 1st century BC – though also mentioned by Herodotus five centuries earlier). I hate to say it, but perhaps what we have today is a sort of Christianity Lite. Or rather, Abrahamic-Religion-Lite. The Ten Commandments are good, they are right, but we’re not really bothered about taking the Lord’s name in vain, and can we please not have to stay in on the Sabbath as we’d rather go shopping. Also, loving our enemies is a bit hard. Thanks.

Depressing, isn’t it? But don’t get me started. Anyway I can’t assume the moral high ground here: if I adhered wholeheartedly to the Christian ideal, I would love and revere the character of Perrault’s Cinderella, and I don’t.

So: who would you pick as a Cinderella for our times, and why?

Picture credits:
Cinderella and her Godmother: silhouette by Arthur Rackham
Trying on the Shoe by Aubrey Beardsley
Aschenputtel by Alexander Zick (1845 - 1907) Wikimedia Commons
Cinderella: The Glass Slipper by Kay Nielsen

And the winners are...

2011-08-12T04:14:00.000-07:00

Thanks to all of you who visited the trailer and left comments! The winners of the three signed copies of Dark Angels are:

Teleri
Anonymous (Barbara M)
Swan Artworks

If you'd like to email me ( I'm changing the @ sign here to deter spam, but you can replace it) katherinelangrishATgooglemail.com - with your addresses, I'll send out the copies asap.

The Dark Angels Book Trailer Giveaway!

2011-08-12T01:03:00.000-07:00

The countdown has started! In just about three hours, at 12 noon UK time, we'll be finding out who has won three signed copies of 'Dark Angels'! All you have to do, if you haven't already, is watch the Dark Angels trailer and comment either on Youtube, or here on the blog - and in three hours time I'll be announcing the winners. There's also a competition for another three copies on twitter: visit me at http://twitter.com/#!/KathLangrish and retweet my competition tweets.

Here's the trailer again:

With all your help, it's been viewed over 470 times this week, and I have to admit I'd love to get it up to 500... And Fairytale Reflections will be back this afternoon, after the winners are announced, so please come back and visit then, too!

Dark Angels - Competition and Book Trailer

2011-08-05T01:19:00.000-07:00

Please excuse my excitement. (And the interruption to Fairytale Reflections, which will be back next week.)

The fact is I’m jumping up and down, because my home-made booktrailer for my fourth book, ‘Dark Angels’ (US title ‘The Shadow Hunt’) went up on Youtube yesterday. To celebrate, I’m launching a COMPETITION to win three signed copies of ‘Dark Angels’. All you have to do to enter, is view the trailer and leave a comment about it either on Youtube or here on the blog. Look out also for a parallel competition on twitter. Both will run until next Friday, August 12^th, when there’ll be a draw for the winners.

The book is set on and around the sinister, atmospheric Shropshire hill which in real life is called ‘Stiperstones’(and is pictured at the top of my blog). In my book I renamed it ‘Devil’s Edge.’ The real hill has a formation of rocks on the crest known as The Devil’s Chair: the legend goes that the Devil comes to sit in it when the mist descends on the hill (so you’d better beware); and if anyone else sits in it, an immediate thunderstorm will break out. I took the liberty of changing this slightly:

Wolf took another glance at the ridge. Up on the very top, he had heard there was a road. A road leading nowhere, a road no one used. For if anyone was so bold as to walk along it, especially at night, he’d hear the clamour of hounds and the blowing of horns, the cracking of whips and the rumbling of a cart. And out of the dark would burst the Devil’s own dog pack, dashing beside a black wagon drawn by goats with fiery eyes, crammed full of screaming souls bound for the pits of hell.

So off I went to Shropshire with a notebook and camera. We stayed, in case anyone is interested, in the quaint little market town of Bishop’s Castle, and we tramped over Stiperstones in rain, in mist, and in sweeping wind. We visited a wolf sanctuary set in a narrow little valley – it began to snow as we descended the steep track, and I’ll never forget the snow falling precipitously past the dark serried ranks of fir trees, and the wolves howling in the winter landscape. We climbed the grassy mound which is all that’s left of the 11th century Montgomery stronghold of Hen Domen – the motte and bailey castle replaced by the stone fortress at Montgomery. Neither were right for the filming: in the end we chose the oldest parts of nearby Stokesay Castle.

And on a later trip, courtesy of a Shropshire mining and caving club, we crawled into the tight dark passages of an abandoned Roman copper mine, which became the entrance to elfland in my book. It was very narrow and low: we went in on hands and knees: at one point you had to lie down. I’m not good in narrow spaces, so this shows what I will do in the interests of research. I wanted the underground sequences in my book to be truly authentic: I wanted the reader to feel as pinched and constrained as I was. The cave is called Ogof Llanymynech and may go as far back as the Bronze Age. A hoard of Roman coins was found there in 1965. (I love the sense of deep time in the British landscape.)

So the landscape of my story is a patchwork of real locations pieced together, recognisable as the Welsh Marches, but renamed and reshaped so that I had the freedom of fiction as well as – I hope – a sense of real history and place.

Writing the script for the trailer was almost like composing a poem: distilling the essence of a 65,000 word book into 100 words. In fact the whole process was very like making poetry, trying to combine evocative words, imagery and sound. Anyway, here you can see all the elements I wove together in the book. The stark skyline of ‘Devil’s Edge’, the rough moorland, the lonely castle, the claustrophobic darkness of the mine. Listen carefully and you may even hear wolves.

My thanks to Richard Hughes of the band We Are Goose, who composed and performed the haunting music, and edited and assembled the film.

Fairytale Reflections (29) Sally Prue

2011-07-29T01:38:00.000-07:00

When Sally Prue’s first novel, ‘Cold Tom’ won the Branford Boase Award and the Smarties Prize Silver Award in 2002, it was clear that a wonderful new writer of folklore-based fantasy had arrived. ‘Cold Tom’ taps into many legends and ballads about the fairies - the Tribe, which lives on the common. They are cold-hearted, dangerous, feral hunters, pitiless to those who, like Cold Tom himself, are different. And they see humans as demons: ugly lumpen beings, hopelessly tied and enslaved to one another by a tangle of emotional bonds like vines.

It’s a powerful and startling image, and one of those moments only fantasy provides: when we step right out of the human world and see it from outside, like seeing the Earth from space. Cold Tom is only half elfin. His fangs aren’t growing, the Tribe rejects him, and the only place to run is the city of the demons. How on earth can he adjust to humanity and the ties that bind us?

Sally’s writing reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones who wrote books of otherworldly beauty – I’m thinking of ‘Power of Three’ and ‘The Spellcoats’ – as well as more homely and amusing stories for younger readers, such as the Chrestomanci books. ‘Cold Tom’ and its recent sequel (or more accurately prequel) ‘Ice Maiden’ are YA reads: chilling, haunting, sharp-edged. Here young half-German Franz, who has fallen into a pit on the common while chasing the elfin Edrin, finds a heap of elfin bones, and prods the skull:

This time there was no doubt: the white bone moved. More than that, it gave way, swiftly, bewilderingly, and before he could stop it his finger had gone right through the bone into the brain cavity.

He snatched his hand back in horror, but somehow, horribly, the whole skull came with it. Panicking, he tried to bat the thing off with his other hand, but those fingers sank into the stickily melting bone of the skull, too.

And suddenly Franz’s head was full of savage laughter, and glowing eyes, and dangerous darkness.

And singing.

Sally is also the author of a trilogy of books for younger, ‘middle grade’ readers: the Truth Sayer Trilogy. As Sally comments on her website: “You know how people are always going into a different world and then discovering that everyone speaks English? Well, what if they don’t?”

I love this. Young Nian is taken away from his family by the Tarhun, warrior priests, to be trained as a seer and Truth Speaker at the House of Truth on the Holy Mountain. Nian may have great powers, but he misses his family and finds the stern House little better than a prison. So he tries to escape. This sounds like the stuff of many other fantasy novels, but Sally’s sense of humour and strong characterisation distinguish Nian’s erratic career across the universes, landing in our own world – Earth – in the bedroom of a very ordinary boy called Jacob. Neither can understand a word the other says, and comic mayhem follows. In a way, it’s the same theme as the Cold Tom books: looking at our world from outside, seeing ourselves as others see us. The trilogy also encompasses a variety of thought-provoking ideas about the nature of time and space, and besides the comedy, there are some tremendous moments of imagination and terror: as in the second book of the trilogy, the March of the Owlmen, when the knife-sharp, two-dimensional Owlmen come slicing into the world.

So welcome to Sally Prue, who is going to talk about searching for fairyland and finding it (maybe) closer than you expected: in the mirror, out in the yard, around the back of the supermarket carpark. For as Franz thinks to himself at the beginning of ‘Ice Maiden’ – ‘This wasn’t a folk tale, this was 1939. There were no elves or fairies here, any more than there were wolves. It was impossible, completely impossible, there could be any kind of creature anywhere near him… And at this same moment something hit him violently in the back.’

THE ENCHANTED MIRROR

We didn’t lack books in my childhood home. I mean, we had a Bible, a Be-Ro cookery book, David Copperfield, Shakespeare, and, oddly, the collected poems of Walter de la Mare.

Mind you, of these only the cookery book was ever actually opened.

But we had a large blue set of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedias, too. I think they must have been my father’s. They were from the 1930s and extremely dull. Occasionally, though, the pages of dense text and murky photographs of the Queen Mary’s turbines were enlivened by brief re-tellings of classic tales.

Now, I must be honest here. As a child I had no taste. What I wanted from a story was, first of all a HAPPY ENDING, and secondly REALLY NICE CLOTHES. Ideally that meant princesses, but even a goose girl would do as long as her rags were elegantly tattered and her apron strings were blown into delectable volutes.

I very happily read all Arthur Mee had to say about Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and The Ugly Duckling (a great favourite: I was the only girl in my class without fair hair and so I was constantly cast as the witch in our singing games. But oh, I thought, perhaps one day...).

Those were important stories. They introduced me to beauty in art. They taught me that the values of my family were not the values of the whole world. They taught me to hope.

For the time being, though, I was young, and therefore enslaved and helpless. To make matters worse the land of the princesses was plainly very far away. I knew of no real-life princesses except Princess Anne, and she seldom appeared swathed in acres of bouncing chiffon, which was surely the entire point of being a princess.

(Actually, Princess Anne never appeared in acres of bouncing chiffon. I just couldn’t begin to understand it. Reefer jackets?)

Now, unfortunately, Arthur Mee’s stories were not very many, and not very long, and I soon began to suffer from serious princess-starvation. Looking back, I can see that in the man’s world of the 1930s Arthur Mee had been generous to include any princesses at all. They were probably as unappealing to him as the Queen Mary’s innards were to me. But there it was: all too soon a thoroughly satisfactory story like Snow White would be followed by something about Camelot or Olympus which were dull dull dull, with few happy endings and fewer princesses, and those there were dressed in either their nighties (Olympus) or their dressing gowns (Camelot).

I realise that so far I have proved myself to have been the dullest, least numinous sort of child (so lacking in genius that I was quite unable to make anything at all of David Copperfield, Shakespeare, or Walter de la Mare) but I’m sorry to say that things are about to get even worse, because for my seventh Christmas my Cousin Ann bought me a copy of Chimney Corner Stories by Enid Blyton.

Now, I don’t think there are any princesses at all in Chimney Corner Stories, and Enid Blyton isn’t really interested in clothes, either: there’s one really shocking tale about a doll who cuts up her lace coat to make some curtains for a dolls house, an act of madness of which the author seems, astonishingly, to approve.

Still, Enid Blyton’s stories are solidly constructed and I found them extremely satisfying. By far the most marvellous thing of all, though, was that in several of the stories the elves come out of fairyland into our own world. One elf gives wishes to ordinary children (and I was, as we have seen, a very ordinary child) and another (actually I think it might have been a goblin) is banished from fairyland for wickedly stealing hairs from caterpillars to make paint brushes.

Now that was truly astonishing, because it meant that fairyland couldn’t far away at all. Those elves and gnomes were coming and going from fairyland to my world just as easily as I left home to go to school.

Think of that! Snow White’s country was clearly a long way away (and once upon a time, as well) but these gnomes were emerging from their fairyland straight into contemporary England – a rather smug version of contemporary England which included servants and ponies, true, but recognisable for all that.

Not only that, but when I looked at the fairies’ clothes (always the clothes!) I saw that some of them were wearing bellbine hats. Now, bellbine grows along municipal chain-link fencing everywhere in England. Why, bellbine even grew through the hedge between my house and the plastic bag factory!

And if there were bellbine flowers, then perhaps...well, even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (as I learned from the children’s TV programme Blue Peter) had believed there might be fairies at the bottom of the garden.

I searched and searched among the bellbine, and occasionally I saw something, or just missed seeing something, or heard a mysterious rustling, which might have been a fairy. It was enough to keep my new hopes alive.

When I got to the junior school I had access to more books, and my horizons widened accordingly. I learned about the wardrobe, of course (my parents’ wardrobe contained not one single fur coat and perhaps that was why it proved a continuing disappointment) and later, I suppose by this time at secondary school, I learned about Herne the Hunter in Windsor Great Park, and the god (or goddess) Sul who lives in the hot spring at Bath.

I learned about a very local haunting, Harcourt’s Chariot, which rattles precipitously down the Back Hollow from Ashridge to Aldbury.

I learned about the Romans’ lares and penates which guard boundaries and households. I found out about the green men who have been hiding in the foliage around us for so long that no-one knows any longer where they came from or why they are watching us.

This intrusion of otherworldly beings into my own England was startlingly different from the stories of Camelot and Olympus, and different from the stories of the princesses, too. Herne and Harcourt and the green men were here, now, close as breathing, casting shadows on my back. Mount Olympus might be a real place, but it was far beyond my reach (I’m sorry to say that the furthest we’d ever gone on a family holiday was Lyme Regis).

In any case, to visit the Olympians you needed Hermes’ wings, or Iris’s rainbow: there was no way, even in my wildest fantasies, I was going to find Apollo mooching about round the back of a plastic bag factory. (I admit that nymphs seemed to get about a bit, but nymphs were like Star Trek security men: shallow in character and soon dead.)

I was realistic enough to know, anyway, that even if I could get to Olympus or glum Camelot then none of those grand people – Lancelot or Zeus or Morgan Le Fay or Hera – was going to be the slightest bit interested in me. (If Adele Geras’s marvellous stories of the Greek gods had been available I might have felt differently about this, but, alas, they were yet to be written.)

So that left me with Herne the Hunter and various ghosts, pixies and green men – none of them, frankly, either snoggable or the sort of people you could take home to meet your parents. My interest in fairyland wobbled.

But then one day a boyfriend said do you like folk music? and put on a record. It was a song about a real place, Carterhaugh, where it is so easy to pass from England to fairyland that the tale begins with a warning:

Oh I forbid you, maidens a’

That wear gowd in your hair,

To come or gae by Carterhaugh

For young Tam-lin is there.

Tam-lin. And suddenly there it was, opening before me: a handsome prince grown close and dangerous, stepping out of the pages of a book and onto the real earth of my own country.

Janet has kilted her green kirtle

A little aboon her knee...

And she’s awa to Carterhaugh

As fast as she can hie.

And who, frankly, can blame her?

Oh yes, and suddenly the roots of fairyland were growing out and penetrating into real life again, into my life, for Janet is no beflounced princess, but a woman of warm blood and hot desire who knows what she wants and is prepared to fight to get it.

Yes. I discovered I was now old enough to journey far – and fight for what I wanted, too.

Fairyland had grown, just as I had, and yet again, like an enchanted mirror, it was showing me not my own reflection but my heart’s desire. Over the years it had presented to me visions of beauty, hope, escape, romance, and in the end courage.

And I’ll tell you something. That boyfriend never got away.

Picture credits:
Sally Prue
Tam Lin copyright Dan Dutton
Princess Anne in The Courier
The Convulvulous Fairy by Cicely Mary Barker

Fairytale Reflections (28) Lily Hyde

2011-07-21T23:59:00.000-07:00

Lily and I haven’t actually met yet, although I hope one day we will. It'd be tricky to arrange right now, as she’s been on the road for over a year. She’s travelled through Russia, the Ukraine and the Crimea: I think she was in China when we first began to talk online; and she’s currently in Tibet. I’d come across her marvellous travel blog 'This Trolleybus is Going East', but hadn’t got around to reading her books, although they sounded right up my street. We discovered we had a number of favourite books in common – Ann Lawrence's ‘The Hawk of May’ for one – and this is always a good omen. So I felt eager to read one of her own books even before she sent me this irresistable email:

I have to tell you this – I’m in Tagong, which is a tiny town high in the grasslands on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, full of monasteries and prayer flags and yaks and swaggering cowboys holding hands, wearing Stetsons, and with silver and coral rings in their black plaits… and in the hostel where I’m staying I found a copy of ‘Troll Fell’!

I thought you’d like to know how far your words have travelled (further away from the sea than the Vikings ever got?)

Well of course I was thrilled and delighted. 'Go, little book...' (And it made me wonder what might be the record for the furthest-flung sighting of an author’s book? I intend to claim the title until someone can trump this!)

Lily’s first book, ‘Riding Icarus’, is the enchanting story of Masha, who lives with her grandmother in an abandoned trolley-bus (called Icarus), ‘on the very edge of Kiev, by the Dnieper River. With no overhead electric wires to fix onto, the two long springy rods attached to the roof waved in the air like antennae, forever searching for a new source of power on which to drive away.’

Masha’s father went away to Kamchatka four years ago, and then Igor, her mother’s ‘friend’, appears:

Igor, who told Masha to call him uncle even though he wasn’t, and who had found Mama a job abroad where she could earn lots of money. So Mama had gone to Turkey, leaving Masha with Granny.

But the money doesn’t come, and Mama doesn’t come back, and Masha and Granny have nowhere to live except the trolleybus. Then, on the night of Masha’s tenth birthday, there is a terrific thunderstorm

[A] huge roar came… it was the thunder; it was the pain of broken bones; it went on for ever. She could see her grandmother shouting at her, but she could hear nothing. …Granny seized her arm and began pulling her towards the doorway.

Masha pulled the other way. Granny must be mad, taking her outside! She’d be blinded, …deafened, trampled by the huge paws of the storm. They struggled in the open doorway, yelling at each other and hearing nothing, while the world went once more dazzlingly white.

Then Icarus moved. A sudden, violent lurch forward. Granny tumbled off the step outside, and Masha fell inside. And Icarus, antennae suddenly straining onto an invisible, humming wire, drove away into the storm.

The story, while rooted firmly in modern Kiev, develops into a tale of magical midsummer wishes, your heart’s desire, dancing Cossacks, mystical tigers, the power of love and friendship, and an exceedingly nasty and all-too-believable villain. Lily Hyde writes with a sure but delicate touch, and the serious theme of people-trafficking is clearly hinted at without ever becoming too heavy for younger readers. I'm looking forward very much to reading her second novel, 'Dreamland'.

There can be something oddly meaningful about finding homeless English books abroad (I found my precious copy of Thomas Keightley's Fairy Mythology at a church book sale in Fontainebleau, and it provided the material I needed to write my first book, 'Troll Blood') and it looks as though Lily has good luck this way too. Which is why her Fairytale Reflection is not about a Russian or Chinese or Tibetan tale, but a Welsh one:

The Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach

For nearly a year now I’ve been on the road. I’ve spent most of my adult life in other countries than the one I was born in. I’ve been reading and writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember.

Sometimes I blame fairytales for my longing to travel and encounter unknown people and places. Many fairytales involve journeys: across mountains of glass, forests of thorns, the seven miles of steel thistles of this blog’s title. And of course the tales themselves travel; versions of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ appearing in Scandinavia, Japan…

Even more stories involve a meeting between the ordinary and the unknown; indeed, isn’t that where their name comes from – fairy or faerie, that other realm that is so like our own but so utterly different. Some of my most-loved fairytales, the ones that have worked their way into my life and writing, are about encountering the new and strange, and falling hopelessly in love with it.

I don’t know where I first read or heard ‘The Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach’. It seems I’ve always known the story. But I came across it again on a neglected bookshelf in Kiev, in a book of folk tales from the British Isles bizarrely published – transcribed regional accents and all – in the Soviet Union.

I seized on this book like a piece of home. I was sharing my life with a man from a different country, a stranger in his strange land. Sometimes I felt like I was living in a fairytale. I felt like the lady of Llyn y Fan Fach.

In this Welsh tale, a shepherd by the lake in the Black Mountains sees a beautiful woman appear on the water, and falls in love. He woos her with his lunch, bread his mother baked, and finally wins her on the third try with bread that is neither over- nor under-cooked. The lady – fairy or goddess or just a stranger from a strange land, we are never told – agrees to live with the man until he strike her ‘Tri ergyd diachos’ – three causeless blows.

What happens next is a paradigm of a marriage.

The first time, they are late for a christening and the lady says she will fetch the horse to ride there if her husband brings her gloves. But when he comes back with the gloves she hasn’t brought the horse, and he strikes her.

The second time, the shepherd strikes her at a wedding after she starts weeping loudly “because these people are entering into trouble”.

The third time she begins to laugh uncontrollably at a funeral, because, she says, death puts people out of their pain. And he strikes her.

‘She then went out of the house saying, “The last blow has been struck, our marriage contract is broken and at an end. Farewell!”’

For me this story is about the encounter with the unknown, its fascination and its incommensurability. Maybe the lady knows the marriage will end in unhappiness – usually in fairytales when someone is told not to do something or else, you know they’re going to do it. But she marries the shepherd anyway. Maybe she is as charmed by his difference as he is enchanted by hers; the story doesn’t tell.

Yet the lady’s differences from her husband are not really between fairy and mortal. They’re the yawning gaps in understanding between two people.

The first time is a classic scene of family frayed tempers. The annoyed husband strikes her gently enough (it’s always emphasised that his blows are gentle) because she broke a promise and lied to him, however frivolously; suddenly she is not what she seems.

The second time, he must be baffled and embarrassed by her strange behaviour at the wedding – and maybe wondering what she is trying to say about their marriage.

The third time, at a funeral, he is surely shocked by the apparent heartlessness and bad manners of this person he can’t understand.

How can you ever causelessly strike the one you love? But the moment comes, the gap opening at your feet as you realise this person you love and think you know is a stranger; a liar, a laugher at funerals and a weeper at weddings, someone you simply do not know. You teeter on the brink of the pit; that’s when you lash out.
There is a lovely, wise, updated Joan Aiken version of the Welsh story, called ‘The People in the Castle’. The anti-social village doctor falls in love with the lady’s silence and mystery, and is disappointed when after moving in with him she turns out to be a sociable, movie-loving chatterbox. It’s as if he’s married a swan, only to find out she is just a girl in a feather dress.

That brings me to those stories in which people marry beings who are literally not what they seem: the white bear who is actually a prince; the frog who is Vassilisa the wise and clever under a spell – stories that retell ‘Cupid and Psyche’.

Very often it’s glimpsing this truth sooner than they should, through curiosity, impatience or embarrassment (everyone thinks I’m married to a frog/a bear/something I can’t even see – the humiliation!), that parts couples and sends the heroines or heroes off on their travels across glass mountains and forest of thorns to bring their beloved, in his or her true form, back home.

Those are the optimistic stories.

The pessimistic version is that harsh lesson in not knowing and curiosity, ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’, in which the wife discovers her husband is hiding the dead bodies of his previous wives. A more mixed (and gender-reversed) Russian version tells of Queen Marya Morieva and her husband Ivan, who however much he loves her can’t resist opening the forbidden cellar door. Out comes Koschei Deathless to chop Ivan into pieces (“Let him chop!” says Ivan recklessly, “for if I can’t live with you, Marya Morieva, I would rather not live at all.”)

“If you had only waited and not peeked,” reproach these secretive lovers who are not what they seem. “If you had only listened to me and not opened the door.” A trust has been broken, and hardship and separation ensues.

In many stories, the love, courage and ingenuity of the heroes or heroines ensures reunion, and a traditional Happy Ever After. Through these journeys to find their lovers (or more rarely siblings or parents), people discover themselves; no longer passive partners being married off or carried off, but actively seeking happiness.

Other stories suggest that the whole of another person is, in the end, impossible to grasp. And if we can’t accept the ultimate unknowability of the one we love, then we are destined to live forever apart. Like the Gaelic seal bride, who always finds her seal skin however the husband hides it, and goes back to her unknowable life in the sea. Like the Japanese Sea King’s daughter in the tale ‘The Sea King and The Tide Jewels’, who leaves forever when her husband discovers her true, truly other form is that of a dragon.

Joan Aiken takes pity on her Welsh doctor, and has the mysterious lady return to him one night. The Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach never comes back. She does show herself to her sons though and teaches them medicine, thus rooting the tale in historical reality since these sons established a line of famous Welsh physicians that continued till the 18th century.

I won’t tell you the end of my own story with a beloved from a different land. But it’s only in writing this reflection that I’ve realised one of my novels, a sequel to Riding Icarus, tells just this kind of fairytale journey.

The heroine, Masha, runs away from her mother, who is traumatised from an unwilling journey into the realities of trafficking, and sets off on her own journey across Siberia to Kamchatka and her absent father. There Masha meets a rat who is really a boy; she discovers her father is not what he seems – or what she wants him to be. In the end she realises the purpose of her journey wasn’t what she thought at all; really it is the true form of her mother she was trying to find and to rescue all the time. Her mother as a complicated, vulnerable person in her own right; someone Masha has to get to know just as in turn her mother has to get to know her, while both accepting there are things they will never truly understand about each other.

My editors thought the ending of this book wasn’t Happy Ever After enough for its intended young adult audience.

But where is the real fairytale, the happy magic, in a story like ‘The Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach?’

Maybe in this: we can never truly know, but despite and because and anyway, how much we can love…