The Princess as Role Model

A guest post by Gwyneth Jones

I’ve always been attracted to fairytales. I knew I was a storyteller long before I knew I’d be a writer: I took on my father’s mantle, and told epic bedtime stories to my brother and sister, at an early age, and my father’s stories (also epic, endless episodes from the same saga, about the same characters) were all based on a traditional tale, the one about a girl who finds out that she once had seven brothers, who were banished and turned into crows when she was born. It has many variants, but from internal evidence the original must be the Moroccan one, The Girl Who Banished Seven. Naturally, she sets off to find them and rescue them from the enchantment. That’s typical of a fairytale princess (she’s one of those who becomes a princess by marriage, but it’s all the same to me). They do the right thing. They stand up to evil step-mothers, and no task is impossible...

As a child I was small, podgy, clumsy and, worst of all, I was obviously going to pass that dreaded public exam called “The 11 Plus” and go to Grammar School. I felt for the princesses in the fairy tales. First they tell you you’ve been awarded fairy gifts (which you never asked for) and then wham, you’re plunged into bizarre vindictive hardship. Your mother dies, you end up sleeping in the ashes, washing bloody linen in a cave, knitting nettle shirts on a bonfire, wearing out your iron boots over razor sharp glass mountains. But I admired them too, and found them a tremendous comfort. They were so tough, so resourceful, and so decent. When everyone (not least the other little girls I knew) was telling me you are second-rate, they made me proud to be a girl. As I nursed my little bullied self home from school, by the most unobtrusive route, I thought about Cinderella. Elle s’estoit bien, says Perrault, and I wanted to be that person. To behave well, to stand up and be proud. (I knew it worked, too. The best way to frustrate a bully is to stay cheerful; be nice. It drives them absolutely nuts.)

When I was a child I responded to the bizarre adventures, the cheerful feats of endurance, the unstoppable can-do attitude of those privileged, yet beleaguered, young women. As I grew up the stories grew with me. I realised that the princess complex is a trap, it’s pure social propaganda. But I still loved the princesses, and the princes themselves, and honoured their traditions when I started writing my own fantasy stories, published, long afterwards, as Seven Tales And A Fable. I honoured the stories and I still do. I saw that they were more than lessons in docility, more than comforting, greedy daydreams. They were beautiful, ancient vessels, full of buried treasure. It was a very old, profound and lovely princess-story, re-written as a fantasy novel by a modern writer —'Till We Have Faces', C.S. Lewis— that inspired me to write 'Snakehead', my own re-imagining of the story of Perseus and Andromeda.

Perseus and Andromeda - a wall painting from Pompei.  The dignified classical take.

'Till We Have Faces' is based on Eros and Psyche, one of the greatest of the Greek myths, and yet the story is familiar from many fairy tales. A princess finds her prince and loses him. She fights her way back to his side by overcoming the fiendish magical  challenges devised by a spiteful royal mother-in-law—

Seven long years I served for thee
The glassy hill I clamb for thee
The bluidy shirt I wrang for thee
Wilt thou not wake and turn to me?

(The Black Bull Of  Norroway)

Perseus and Andromeda is another myth, perhaps the greatest of them all, with instant popular appeal. The hero-tale of Perseus fits in anywhere! There’s this kid, you see, brought up by his single mother, goes to High School or whatever, and then one day some supernatural beings come along. They tell him his father was a Greek God, they give him a magic sword and flying sandals, they send him off to kill a terrifying monster. He’s tall, strong and handsome! He has superpowers! He’s a teen with a mission! Oh, hey, and there’s a flying horse—

Unexpectedly, things get even better if you’re looking to write a novel rather than a comic book. The story of Perseus has complexity, it has texture. There’s the grim soap-opera of his parentage —why Danae of the shower of gold was locked up; how Zeus, the ruthless, randy chief of the Olympians, just couldn’t resist a challenge; how  Perseus’s charming grandfather put both mother and child in a box and had them thrown into the sea. There’s the unconventional little family group on the island of Seriphos: Danae and her son, washed up on the shore, living under the protection of Dictys the fisherman. Whose brother is the island’s tyrant king. 

Imagine this boy, knowing he’s different, but with nothing to show for it, no rank, no riches. Imagine him finding out that his biological father (he’s not impressed by divine status, of course; he’s family himself) is a ruthless Mr Big who raped his mother. He knows he’s been protected at least once from certain death. He must be wondering, as he grows up, what his selfish brute of a Divine Father saved him for.  Nothing good, you can bet...  And then there’s Dictys. Imagine the boy’s relationship with the fisherman, who has brought him up, and never (not in any of the accounts) put a disrespectful move on Danae. He’s been a true father. Dictys seems to be a man of peace, since he’s able to live and let live, with his wicked brother on the throne. How is his adopted son really going to feel, when the Messenger of the Gods, and the Goddess Athini waylay him on the road, and tell him he has to chop off the Gorgon’s Head? This Gorgon who was once a woman, too  beautiful for her own good, like Danae. Who was turned into a monster, to punish her for having been raped...

So it goes on, a wonderful story: the work of many hands, over thousands of years, and yet still alive, still growing, still inviting new storytellers to weave new patterns into the web. There’s only one weak point, and that’s the traditional centrepiece, where our hero finds his true princess, and has to win her by beating a string of awful vindictive challenges, thrown down by the malign Gods—

It’s weak because it doesn’t happen.

Andromeda and Perseus - by Ingres.  The prurient neoclassical take.

Andromeda isn’t a character. She’s not even as much of a character as the prince in 'The Black Bull Of Norroway'. She’s a name, and a predicament. Perseus doesn’t struggle to win her. He just passes by, on the way home from his questing work, swinging the Gorgon’s Head by the hair (not very safe! But that’s how it looks in all the pictures), and picks up a half-naked princess; like a pizza or a sandwich.

In my opinion, this just won't do!

Perseus and Andromeda - by Burne-Jones.  The OTT macho Pre-Raphaelite take.

In 'Till We Have Faces' C.S. Lewis keeps his distance from the two principals who represent, without much disguise, the human soul and the God of Love. His characters are the lesser figures. His protagonist is one of Psyche’s jealous sisters —a woman who barely exists in the original narrative. In 'Snakehead', I took the liberty of inventing the character of Andromeda, a weaver and a scholar (her name means Ruler of Men, or else Thinker) and switched things around so that she and Perseus have some previous history, before Andromeda is chained to the rock; before Perseus wanders along to slay the dragon. It just makes more sense, if Perseus knows he’s coming to the rescue of a princess; if he intends to claim her hand in marriage. It makes more sense to me personally, too. A generation ago, great writers and editors like Jane Yolen, Ellen Datlow reclaimed the traditional heritage: dismissing soft-focus, Disneyfied Snow White and Cinderella, rediscovering grim truths and quick-witted, resourceful heroines. That’s fine, that’s excellent work. But what I’ve wanted to do is to reclaim the relationships. To bring the prince and the princess together, instead of sending them off on segregated initiation trials. To let them meet as human beings, as friends, and fight side by side.

The story on record says Andromeda had to be sacrificed to punish her mother, queen Cassiopeia —who had boasted that her daughter was more lovely than a sea-nymph, and thus offended Poseidon, the God of Ocean and of Earthquakes. I don’t believe it. Child sacrifice was absolutely rife, around the shores of the Ancient Mediterranean. (Take a closer look at your Old Testament if you don’t believe me). I’ll bet you anything it wasn’t a one-off occasion. I bet there was a lottery, and the children of the rich were usually spared, but then the queen’s political opponents decided Andromeda’s number was up. A powerful woman like Cassiopeia could have been an annoying relic of the old ways, in the days of the original story —when the Mediterranean World was leaving female-ordered civilisation behind, and patriarchal tribal rule was taking over.What would a princess do, if she found out she’d been drafted? Run for it, of course. And then what would she do, if she was a real princess; and knew some other poor girl would have to die in her place? She’d run back, of course. No matter who tried to stop her, no matter if she’d fallen in love.

Leaving Perseus with his repellent, murderous quest: a terrible choice, and just the inklings of a desperate plan—

The story of Perseus and Andromeda is the story of the founders of Homer’s Mycenae: well built Mycenae, rich in gold... way back in the Bronze Age. And from Mycenae, the baton was handed on to Athens, the cradle of western civilisation; making them a fairly significant couple, in the scheme of human history. (And by the way, Perseus and Andromeda did live happily ever after, which makes them unique among pairs of lovers featured in the Greek Myths) But is that all? The deeper I looked into the history of the Medusa, terrible to look upon, snake-haired monster - and into the history of the mighty Goddess Athini, whose name means Mind, the more they seemed to reflect each other. As if Medusa and Mind were the two faces of one truth—

Did I catch a glimpse of the original, brilliant storyteller, telling me something timeless and profound? About that mysterious birthright gift, first freely given and then painfully earned, that lies at the heart of fairy tale? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. I’m just a storyteller, seeing pictures in the fire. Pictures that, now as then, sometimes seem playful, sometimes serious, and sometimes seem to tell me eternal things.


Gwyneth Jones is a brilliant writer of adult science fiction. ‘Bold As Love’ which won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2002, is the first of a series of five books about a near-future Britain where society is in meltdown. There’s a violent environmental movement, an Islamist uprising in the north, a subtle but nasty dose of black magic and a complex relationship between the main characters – three charismatic, damaged and idealistic young rock stars who become the country’s reluctant saviours and leaders of a new government, the 'Rock and Roll Reich'.  The books are rich in romance, horror, and a deeply felt version of British landscape, history and myth.  

Under the name Ann Halam, Gwyneth has also written YA fantasy, science fiction and horror.  I’ve talked on this blog about ‘King Death’s Garden’, a ghost story which is funny as well as very frightening. Siberia’ is a haunting, beautiful book about a girl who journeys across a frozen  repressive land carrying a ‘nut’ full of mysterious secret seeds. And  Snakehead’ is an absolutely womderful retelling of the legend of Perseus and Andromeda.

Picture credits:

Princess on Rock with Dragon: Arthur Rackham, Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. 1909 
Perseus and Andromeda: a wall painting from Pompei, The National Museum of Naples.
Perseus and Andromeda: by Ingres 
Perseus and Andromeda by Edward Burne-Jones

Gramarye

I am delighted to be in the new issue of GRAMARYE, the journal of the Sussex Folklore Centre and as usual an unmissable read for folk lore and fairy tale enthusiasts.This issue contains three marvellous articles on Arthur Rackham - whose self portrait adorns the cover.  In 'A Walk Through Rackham Land,' Steven O'Brien takes us on a ramble through the deep history of the artist's beloved Sussex countryside.  William Wootten tells how Rackham's silhouettes inspired his own verse narrative of The Sleeping Beauty, and Simon Poë interestingly compares Rackham's illustrations to 'Puck of Pook's Hill' with those of H.R. Millar. Catriona McAra contributes an article on fairy references in the work of the  surrealist Leonora Carrington, while in 'Herne, the Windsor Bogey', Simon Young takes us into Windsor Great Park on a search for the controversial history of the great oak-tree of Herne the Hunter. 'The Signing Wife' is an original translation by Simon Hughes of a thought-provoking Norwegian folktale collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen. Finally, Diane Purkiss adds a touching and lyrical account of her childhood love for Andersen's story 'The Snow Queen'.

My own contribution is an analysis of the Grimms' fairytale  'MAID MALEEN':

Here's a little taster:

Maid Maleen (Kinder- und Hausmärchen, tale 198) isn’t particularly popular as fairy tales go. It was first published as Jungfer Maleen by Karl Müllenhoff in a collection called Sagen, Märchen und Lieder der Herzoghümer Schleswig, Holstein und Lauenburg (1845), from whence the Grimms borrowed it for the 1850 edition of their Kinder- und Hausmarchen. I don’t know whether Müllenhoff wrote it down verbatim from some oral source: he may have touched it up, but the Grimms made several slight but significant changes to his version, transforming it into a fairy story that delves unusually deeply into the trauma caused by abandonment and suffering.  ...

Why do I love this story so much?  Isn’t it just another tale of a passive princess sitting in a tower? In fact there aren’t so very many stories of princesses shut up in towers, and those that do exist are less like the stereotype than you might suppose. As Maid Maleen does, heroines quite often rescue themselves. Even in the case of Rapunzel (KHM 12) the prince not only fails to rescue Rapunzel, but wanders blind in the desert until he is saved by her. In Old Rinkrank (KHM 196), a princess trapped in a glass mountain ultimately tricks her captor, and engineers her own escape. [...] These tales are listed in the Aarne-Thompson folk-tale index as tale type 870: The Entombed Princess or The Princess Confined in the Mound – though this description, as Torborg Lundell has pointed out, is hardly adequate. Instancing The Finn King’s Daughter, another tale in which an imprisoned heroine digs herself out from underground and rescues her lover from the false bride, Lundell writes:

Consistent with the Aarne and Thompson downplay of female activity, this folktale type, with its aggressive and capable female protagonist, has been labelled ‘The princess confined in the mound’ (type 870), which implies a passivity hardly representative of the thrust of the tale. ‘The princess escaping from the mound’ would fit better...

GRAMARYE issue 12 can be ordered for £5.00 from the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy by following this link:  http://www.sussexfolktalecentre.org/journal/

Water Spirits

Water. You can touch it, but you can’t hold it.  It runs between your fingers.  It flows away in streams, in rivers, talking to itself.  ‘Still glides the stream, and shall forever glide.’ In both its transience and its endurance it’s a metaphor for time. Rivers change every moment, but they are old – in some cases literally older than the hills. They were flowing before we were born; they will still be flowing long after we are gone.

Water reflects things – trees, the sky – but upside down, distorted and fluid.  Peer over the brink and your own face peeks up at you: like yet unlike, pale and transparent.  That image could be another you, living in another world.  Maybe in the Other World; after all, you can’t breathe water. So who is that? 

Modern mirrors show perfect reflections. Each one of us knows what we look like (or believe we do: mirrors still pull that sly trick of showing us ourselves in reverse.) But for most of history and prehistory mirrors were rare or non-existent. People saw one another’s faces but not their own. Only the reflecting surface of still water could offer the chance, but how could you be sure that the face looking up was truly yours?  Maybe it was an ancestor’s face, or a spirit’s. Maybe it had a message to give you. (But better not bend too close.)

A clear puddle after rain is a window into the ground. You can look down vertically into a deep underworld.  A far, bright sky flashes below the upside-down trees. Could it be the world of the dead, who are buried in the ground? In the spring or early summer of the year 2049 BCE (it makes me shiver to write that, but we know the precise date from tree-ring dating), at least fifty people with bronze axes gathered on a salt marsh to construct a wooden circle with an upside-down oak stump planted at its centre, roots in the air, crown in the ground. This was the circle now called Seahenge, and surely the inverted tree was intended to grow in the Other World - a real and solid version of the ghostly reflections of trees which can be seen in any pool.

Reflections in water show us three worlds, the sky above us, the surface which is touchable and level with the world we walk upon, and the strange depths beneath. If you plunge a straight stick or rod into water, it appears broken, but you can draw it out again unharmed. We know it's because of the refraction of light; but the effect must have seemed mystical and magical to people down the ages.  Is that what prompted the custom of ritual damage to swords and spears - bending, snapping and breaking them - before they were offered to the underwater world?  As if the water itself was showing what needed to be done?  In her book The Gods of the Celts Dr Miranda Green tells of two Iron Age sacred lakes into which important people threw important offerings: Llyn Fawr in South Glamorgan and Llyn Cerrig Bach on Anglesey.

Llyn Fawr is the earlier, the date of deposition of the objects lying around 600BC. Here a hoard was found in a peat-deposit that had once been a natural lake; find include two sheet-bronze cauldrons… socketed axes and sickles. The material [at Llyn Cerrig] ranges in date from the second century BC to the first century AD. The finds come from the edge of a bog at the foot of an eleven foot high sheer rock cliff which provided a good vantage point for throwing offerings. In the Iron Age the lake would have extended to [the foot of the cliff] and the uncorroded condition of the metalwork shows that it sank immediately into the water. The offerings are of a military/aristocratic nature: weapons, slave chains, chariots and harness fittings.

King Arthur’s sword Excalibur comes from under the water.   

They rode till they came to a lake, that was a fair water and broad, and in the midst of the lake Arthur was ware of an arm clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword in that hand.

Merlin and Arthur are advised by a ‘damosel’ (the Lady of the Lake) to row a boat towards the arm:

And when they came to the sword that the hand held, Sir Arthur took it up by the handles… and the arm and the hand went under the water.

At the very end of the Morte D’Arthur, at Arthur’s command Sir Bedivere manages (on the third attempt) to hurl Excalibur into the lake again:

And he threw the sword as far into the water as he might; and there came an arm and a hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.  So Sir Bedivere came again to the king and told him what he saw.

“Alas”, said the king, “help me hence, for I dread me I have tarried over-long.”

Only now may Arthur depart for the Isle of Avalon in a barge full of queens and ladies clad in black.  So the sword which conferred upon Arthur a kind of supernaturally-awarded status must be relinquished, returned to its mysterious Otherworldly keeper, before he can commence his journey to the land of death and rebirth in the watery Somerset fens. I wonder if some of those Celtic offerings were also funeral rites?

Water is necessary to life.  It has many practical uses. You  can drink water, wash in it, cook with it, irrigate your fields. It turns your mill wheel to grind your corn, but it can also drown you or your children, or rise up in floods and sweep your house away.  Homely, treacherous, necessary, strange, elemental: no wonder that we populated it with spirits. Goddesses like Sabrina of the Severn, or Sulis of the hot springs in Bath – loreleis, ondines, naiads, nixies – sly, beautiful, impulsive but cold-hearted nymphs whose white arms pull you down to drown.  

Then again, rivers can be gods, such as Father Tiber or TS Eliot’s ‘strong brown god’, the Thames. Or Stevie Smith’s ‘River God’:

I may be smelly and I may be old,

Rough in my pebbles, reedy in my pools,

But where my fish float by I bless their swimming

And I like the people to bathe in me, especially women.

But I can drown the fools

Who bathe too close to the weir, contrary to rules.

And they take a long time drowning

As I throw them up now and then in the spirit of clowning.

Hi yi, yippety-yap, merrily I flow,

Oh I may be an old foul river but I have plenty of go…

Male, female or animal, water spirits are dangerous and tricksy. Scottish kelpies or waterhorses used to linger by the banks of lochs in the gloaming, tempting people to climb upon their backs - upon which they would gallop into the water. The 19^th century folklorist William Craigie tells how, in Scandinavia:

The river-horse (bäck-hästen) is very malicious, for not content with leading folk astray and then laughing at them, when he has landed them in thickets and bogs, he, being Necken himself, alters his shape now to one thing and now to another, although he commonly appears as a light-grey horse.

It is certain that the river-horse still exists, for it is no more than a few years back that a man in Fiborna district, who owned a light-grey horse, was coming home late one night and saw, as he thought, the horse standing beside Väla brook. He thought it strange that his man had not taken in Grey-coat, and proceeded to do so himself, but just as he was about to lay hold of it it went off like an arrow and laughed loudly. The man turned his coat so as not to go astray, for he knew now who the horse was.

In Kristianstad there was a well, from which all the girls took drinking water, and where a number of the boys always gathered as well.  One evening the river-horse was standing there, and the boys, thinking it was just an old horse, seated themselves on its back, one after the other, till there was a whole row of them, but the smallest one hung on by the horse’s tail.  When he saw how long it was he cried, “Oh, in Jesus’ name!” whereupon the horse threw all the others into the water. 

Even today people throw coins into fountains and wishing wells – ‘for luck’. In my novel Dark Angels, the 12^th century castle La Motte Rouge has a well haunted by a mournful White Lady. I revisited her, and her friend the hearth-hob, in a story called By Fynnon Ddu which I wrote for the Sussex Folklore Centre’s journal Gramarye (Summer 2014, Issue 5): you can read the whole story here. I wanted to contrast the transience of humanity with the deep time in which such creatures live. In this story, the castle is just being built, yet both the hob and the water spirit are already ancient. Here’s an extract.

The hob hugged his tattered rabbitskin around him and peered into the well. It was a long, narrow pool, lined with leaning mossy stones. At one end a spring bubbled up under a rough rocky arch and trickled out at the other into a little deep-cut brook, and the dark water was full of weeds, cress and frogspawn. A small frog plopped into the pool and pushed through the skin of the water in a series of fluid kicks. The hob stiffened all over like a hunting cat. He shot out a hairy arm.

There was a swirl and a heave in the depths. The spring gushed up in a burst of fierce bubbles. The frog vanished in a fog of sediment.

“What did you do that for?” yelped the hob.

A face looked up through the brown water-glass, framed in drifting clouds of hair which spread away in filmy tendrils. The eyes were great dark blurs, the pale-lipped smile both shy and wild.

“You doesn’t even eat,” the hob groused on. “You doesn’t know what ‘tis to have an empty belly.”

The water spirit slipped upwards. Her head emerged from the water, glistening. In air and daylight she was difficult to see: a slanting glimmer, like a risen reflection. She propped narrow elbows on the brink and offered him a handful of cress.

“Lenten fare. That an’t going to put hairs on me chest,” said the hob sulkily, but he stuffed it into his mouth and chewed.

A bout of hammering battered the air. The water spirit flinched, and the hob nodded at her. “Yus. Men. They’m back again at last.”

She pushed her dripping hair back behind one ear and spoke in a voice soft as a dove cooing in a sleepy noon. “Who?”

The hob snorted, spraying out bits of green. “Who cares who?  S’long as they has fires, and a roof overhead, and stew in the pot –”

“Is it the Cornovii?”

“You allus asks me that.” The hob glanced at her with wry affection and shook his head. “They’m long gone,” he said gently. “They don’t come back. Times change and so do men.”

“Was it such a long time?” She was teasing a water-beetle with a tassel of her hair. “I liked the Cornovii. They used to bring me toys.”

“Toys?”

“Things to play with.”  She looked up at him through half-shut eyes. “Knives and spearheads, brooches and jewels. Girls and boys. I’ve kept them all.”

“Down at the bottom there? How deep do it go?” Hackles bristling, but fascinated, the hob craned his neck and tried to peer past his own scrawny reflection.

“Come and see.” She reached out her hands with an innocent smile, but he drew hastily back.   

 

 

 

In Frederick de la Motte Fouqué’s ‘Undine’ (1807), a knight marries Undine, a river spirit, and swears eternal faithfulness to her.  However his previous mistress, Bertalda, sows suspicion of Undine in his mind and he comes to regard her unbreakable bond with the waterspirits – especially her terrifying uncle Kuhlborn, the mountain torrent – with fear and disgust.  He repudiates his union with Undine and prepares to marry Bertalda instead.  In a spine-tingling climax, the castle well bubbles uncontrollably up to release the veiled figure of the Undine, who walks slowly through the castle to the knight’s chamber. In my 1888 translation:

The knight had dismissed his attendants and stood in mournful thought, half-undressed before a great mirror, a torch burnt dimly beside him.  Just then a light, light finger knocked at the door; Undine had often so knocked in loving sportiveness.

            “It is but fancy,” he said to himself; “I must to the wedding chamber.”

            “Yes, thou must, but to a cold one!” he heard a weeping voice say.  And then he saw in the mirror how the door opened slowly, slowly, and the white wanderer entered, and gently closed the door behind her.

            “They have opened the well,” she said softly, “And now I am here and thou must die.”

Ignore the force of water at your peril. 

Picture credits:

Nokke (Water spirit) by Theodor Kittelsen

Reflection - Katherine Langrish, personal photo

Seahenge: Norfolk Museum

Sir Bedivere by Aubrey Beardsley University of Rochester

Hylas and the Nymphs by Frederick Waterhouse (detail) 

Nokke as White Horse by Theodor Kittelsen

Undine by Arthur Rackham

The Shipwrecked Man of the Sea by Arthur Rackham